A GREAT HOSPITALITY

a feast in Arthez en Béarn with Bertrand Broussé

This is a tribute to the hosts of Compostella pilgrims, owners or managers of hostels that contribute to an essential part of the Compostella experience. After hours of walking, usually between five and eight hours everyday, time in the hostel is the time to literally recharge batteries, freshen-up, clean and socialize before and during dinner.
Pilgrims do stay in different type of accommodations. Depending on their budget they can afford a proper hotel, but this is probably rarely the case because it is vital to swap information with other travellers, tips about how to deal with painful feet and legs, discuss this and that with other pilgrims who stay mostly in communal accommodations run by either private individuals, the Church or village associations. I thoroughly enjoyed the homely welcome we have received in some of those places, where guests shared their knowledge of the region, opened their homes, their love for local food, in essence let us get a breath of the substance of the area through which we were walking.
These hosts were the catalysts for the friendliness of those nights in the perfect French tradition of aperitif and then 3 courses dinner. Pilgrims shall not face starvation because they need to feed their bodies for the following day.
Red wine is also part of the experience. It warms up the spirit of those interested!
Asking our hosts why they were opening their houses to pilgrims, some would say that it had become a tradition in their family. For instance Simone Barneix is running with her brother a revamped version of the activity of hosting performed by her parents who started this 25 years ago in their farm, just outside Aroué, called Bohoteguia farm. She recalled that her parents used to host up to 14 pilgrims at a time in their house which had only one toilet and one bathroom, which meant that people had to get properly organized for everyone to get a chance to use them in a timely manner. After her father past away, her mother decided to continue hosting pilgrims. Simone and her brother also felt they had to continue after their mother died and had decided to improve the way they received pilgrims. They invested and constructed a brand new building with a structure optimized for efficiency. The idea crossed my mind that they must have gained the idea of streamlining activities from their cattle-rearing business. The kitchen was next to the dining room. The dining room next to a large room with showers, toilets and washing basins. From this central washing lobby one could access to the bedrooms and dormitories, which opened on the outdoor terrace running around the whole building. Outside, next to the cupboard designed for walking shoes, a mission statement was pasted on the wall, reading something like "you are not simply our customers, you are our welcomed guests". She offered pilgrims a complimentary washing and drying of clothes. An aperitif was organized at 6.30pm for everyone to mingle and get to know each other better. The dinner was plentiful, so were the drinks. Simone and her sister-in-law were serving everyone with good-humour. Simone explained that she enjoyed welcoming pilgrims, it was like travelling without moving. She still dreamt of walking to Santiago, but that would probably have to be planned in several chunks over the next few years. We took photographs as we parted, as a way to say goodbye to a family members we might never see again.

The idea of travelling without moving recurred in the words of the baker of Arthez-en-Béarn, Bertrand Broussé, who runs in parallel his bakery and a hostel for pilgrims called gîte Broussé. He doesn't have time to travel nor perhaps the taste for physical exertion, but he likes meeting different people every night and hosting them over a very nice dinner in an old house full of atmosphere with a large open fireplace made of stone and a long wooden dinner table. He served dinner in his white partly unbuttoned baker cloth. His face was beaming with the love for good food which he had prepared for pilgrims together with very decent wines. In the morning, one has to go to the bakery for breakfast. We had a peep on the way at the snow-capped Pyrénées.
We were introduced in two occasions to the recipes of local dishes.
First we tasted garbure, a soup typical of Béarn, in Navarrenx. Régis, who runs the relais du Jacquet and cooked garbure for us that night, said that soup is quasi mandatory to start any dinner in South of France and it is, as well, a pilgrim favorite to regain strength after a long day.

Garbure contains any sorts of meat and vegetables. The principle is simple: put in the water the meat of your choice to make a broth and then add vegetables progressively based on the time it takes to cook them. Usually start adding potatoes and carrots, then other vegetables. Herbs like thyme, laurel and spices like cloves should be added too. Some of the vegetables however are not suitable for the soup or should be cooked separately and added towards the end, right before serving. Tomatoes will make the soup turn sour after a few hours. One also has to be careful with green beans. For the ignorants, garbure could be mistaken with a pot-au-feu, but in fact it is different, warned Régis, because the garbure can accommodate all sorts of vegetables and various types of meat (I thought the same of the pot-au-feu!). There is a guild for garbure masters and a sign for affiliates is usually visible on the facade of their restaurant. The king of garbure is allegedly in Arzacq-Arraziguet, but as we arrived there the weather in the afternoon was just not right for exploring the town.

Régis is a very curious and charming host. His house, in center of the old Navarrenx, is furnished in a way that brings the past into the present. It is a two storey town house. As we entered the building, all doors and windows were opened, making sure fresh air was in abundant supply and that wearing a sweater wasn't out of place. We had a large room on the first floor which was actually a studio, with a double bed, a fireplace and a round dinning table with a few chairs and a coach-bed, a creaking wooden floor and a small kitchen. I remember a description from Simone de Beauvoir, in her memoirs, of one of the furnished studio she occupied in Paris during World War II or perhaps the one at the beginning of "An American in Paris", the movie, where the main character lived in a tiny room where the bed could be lifted with a rope to the ceiling to make space for a foldable table during daytime. This kind of city atmosphere from the early twentieth century resonated in Regis's house. He had a collection of paintings on his walls from a late painter from Navarrenx. Régis is very knowledgeable about the history of Navarrenx and France by extension. I had a feeling he belonged to a family long-established in Navarrenx. We had agreed to have breakfast at 7.15am the next morning and we were sitting the dinning room waiting for Régis who came rushing a few minutes late, partly dressed holding his pair of shoes in one hand and a shirt in the other, apologising for the delay. He returned a few more minutes later, fully dressed, busy preparing coffee and setting up the breakfast table. I smiled internally at his refreshing appearance. An hour later, as we came to say goodbye, fresh green asparagus had been delivered in anticipation of the evening dinner. One I would have been glad to partake in. But our plans were different since we were on our way to Arthez-en-Béarn.

A table for eight people had been prepared for dinner next to the open fireplace in the kitchen of family Pérarnaud, retired farmers in Uzan. They used to rear cows for meat. They also had other animals like ducks, chicken... and also grew a bit of cereals. For a good number of years they have been receiving pilgrims on the Camino de Compostella in a house turned into a place called gîte Boué. White wine was served for aperitif when Mister Perarnaud arrived with a bottle from the cellar. He and is wife were recollecting that twenty years ago pilgrims were not as numerous as they are now. It seems that the Camino has become fashionable of late. As expected, soup, butternut soup, was the first dish to be served. Mrs Pérarnaud then served her own pork confit, similar to duck confit but this time with pork meat and fat. It was a very old recipe which is now out of fashion because it takes time and the need to preserve meat is no longer that important since the advent of freezers. Pork confit is made with pork loin, meat that is usually roasted. A pork loin weighs between 10 to 12 kg. For the recipe the loin should be cut in pieces of around 1kg each and immersed into salt for 36 hours so that the meat absorbs as much as it need for preservation. Then, the salt should be washed and pieces of garlic inserted in the meat before frying it for about 60 to 75 minutes in pork fat. After that the piece should be immersed in fat in a large earthen pot and could be kept for six to eight months in a cool place like a cellar. The result was a deliciously soft and lightly salted meat. We continued talking local food. Ms Pérarnaud explained how she would force-feed ducks with ample supply of maize to fatten their liver. It takes between 12 days for the Mulard duck and 3 weeks for the Muscovy duck to get them ready for foie gras. She said the ducks don't suffer when they get force-fed by an experienced hand, however they don't really like it (who would?). Her husband added that it was not a job for the faint-hearted and was of the view that industrial force-feeding wasn't that gentle for the ducks at all. We talked about the cattle rearing activity, an everyday duty. He remembered the days when several farms had their own cattle in the village. In the evening when every cattle was going home, they would sometimes have to face each other which could get a little rowdy if two animals met that didn't like each other. They could fight with their horns. Nowadays, there is not much cattle left in the village. Days have moved to industrial production. Asked if he was missing his cattle, he said that there was a time for everything. It was a lot of work, so in the end it had rather been a relief after they had gone. In 25 years they travelled only two weeks for holidays.

1/ a feast in Arthez en Béarn with Bertrand Broussé

2/ Regis in his dinning room

3/ a studio of the past at the Relais Jacquet in Navarrenx

Régis in his dining-room in Navarrenx

a studio of the past at the Relais Jacquet in Navarrenx