Passadoc Gazette - No 168

Happy birthday to Passadoc
who makes daily appointments to all the inhabitants
cities and villages of France and overseas!

The weekly 168

Eight years ago...

Eight years ago, day to day, Passadoc was born!

Some 2650 days of life and thousands of publications, hundreds of quizzes, dozens, dozens and dozens of messages and comments... whole photo albums and piles of memories. Listen!

To drive away the miasms of the days of confinement of sad memory, Francis had the idea of a virtual aperitif. It's March 14, 2020: Aperitif number one!

The Echoes of the Week
The new fountain
Socca
But what is this weird object?
At the corner of the fire
Shepherds

The new fountain

We've been talking about it for so long that we didn't believe it anymore... Yet one day the works began and when everything was finished, M. the Curé, M. the Mayor and all the musicians of the band found themselves at the foot of Marianne's statue for the inauguration of the « La Fontaine Nouvelle » Hey!

A series of postcards were published which the Roquebrunois enjoyed sending to the cousins of Paris, to those of Nîmes. What a pride!

The tree that shades for years is still there. In this winter morning, the place is empty and « the fountain of the square speaks by itself« .

[Citation: My father's Glory – Marcel Pagnol] – Photo André Abbe.

But the tree that was believed to be eternal was infested with a lignivorous fungus that left no chance of survival to the plane tree. On February 3, 2017, pruners and loggers began at the « peel » ...

Jean-Pierre Serra Remember:
When you shoot a tree, it's a part of us going!

As far as I am concerned, this one, like all the others, is an integral part of my life in this village where I was born and where I still live today...

He gave me his shadow in my childhood, sheltered our ball parts like our first kisses on this concrete bench that he covered with his foliage, seen in and out so many times in this town hall where I spent 31 years of my life...

He offered his generous shadow to generations of married and married families patiently waiting for the beginning of the ceremonies ...

How many memories have gone away forever!

Socca

What a beautiful old postcard! Everything is there: the saleswoman with her socca dish, the young boy in beret, the Promenade des Anglais and its palm trees...

We take advantage of it to drag you the recipe* Socca:

In a salad bowl, put the water (500 ml) and dry the chickpea flour (200 g); salt, pepper and add two tablespoons of olive oil and mix vigorously to obtain the right consistency.

Heat olive oil in a large pan (crepear type or paella pan)

Put the dough on. Remove when the look is golden.

In Nice, we have fun with soccer... In Pont-Aven, we enjoy the kouing-amann... To each his choking Christian!

*Thanks to Josyane Boselli for her recipe.

[« Christian suffocation » was there only to smile; a smile that was not everyone's taste.]

Claude Boyer
And in Toulon it's « cade »... It is often misconceived that the Toulouse cade is only a variant of niçoise soccer. Yet his origin, as old as his Nice cousin, was born in Marseilles before migrating to Toulon.

Frédéric Mistral says that at the end of the 19th century, in the streets of Marseilles, genoese street vendors shouting "Tourta tota cada" (hot turn); They would have given the name "cade" to this Marseille crepe.

The difference between the two cousins is that the cade offers a crispy top and a softer bottom, similar to the texture of a flan... But we are not going to get into a debate. « chocolate bread – chocolate » Hey! It is clear that both recipes come from our transalpine friends.

As for saying that socca or cade are stifling-Christians, there I'm insurgent!

Denis Harvier
Socca choking-Christian? The person who decreed it didn't have to taste it often and not the best. During my studies, it was my lunch three times a week and cheaper than a ticket to the university restaurant around the 60s/65s.

But what is this weird object?

There were some deliberately crazy answers!

Jeanne Monin
– Fly Tape (1200 BC)
– Gong dating from the invasion of the Barbarians.

Alain Cathala
– Billig (for Breton crepes).

Momo dela Etdici
– Adapter for induction plate.

And of course several good answers!

Claude Boyer
– Je no longer know the name of this tool but it was used in olive oil mills to recover oil that floats on water.

Monique Gastinel
– Isn't that the sheet, to take over the first oil of first pressure?

Giselle Penat-Lorde
– I have already seen such items in oil mills – and also at the ATP Museum in Draguignan. There's a saucepan called « the breakage » And I think that flat plate is « the sheet » ? Uses used to recover the remaining oil on water.

It is actually a leaf to pick oil after the olives pass under the press.
At the time there was no centrifuge, the properties of the elements were used,
that oil floats on water. – (Photo of the Coudoux Mill)

At the corner of the fire

YearDr. Abbe :

It was once people who warmed up by burning wood in their fireplace and I was part of it. I even thought I was an ecologist because wood is a renewable energy.

I hear it's become harmful because of the microparticles.

I was happy by the fire... And I carried all over in winter the smell of wood fire with me.

Not so long ago, I visited the Cognacq-Jay Museum, housed in a private hotel in the Marais district of Paris (3rd), a high place of painting, furniture and art objects of the 18th century French, one does not make more chic in Paris.

A guard in uniform who was supposed to be Caribbean or Guyanese addressed me, saying:

– You wear the smell of wood fire, you remind me of my youth, it makes me happy.

She had a nose. She was not mocking but rather nostalgic, moved anyway. I told him that I was actually warming up in the woods in my old house and that my clothes were getting the smell of smoke.

This discrepancy between the words exchanged cordially and the place was much appreciated. We were her and I between a Louis XV armchair and a painting by Fragonard, the great fatsois who had climbed to Paris. In the time of Fragonard, all the inhabitants of the Marais warmed up in wood and the insert did not exist!

Some people will think "Abbe galège", but not that it's experience!

Giselle Penat-Lorde
The fireplace fire this « magic that transforms ordinary »...

And I've missed this magic a lot for a few years, just like the smell elsewhere.

These are a thousand childhood memories, homework at the corner of the fire, readings without forgetting grills on fire...

Wood crates prepared in advance: carefully selected logs, small wood, pine apples, leaves of Var Morning Sometimes, a whole ritual...

To succeed in starting the fire, while at the beginning, one gets angry. Know how to power, handle the bellows. Understanding mechanisms, air circulation, an art.

Little cracks, natural heat, a cat on her knees rumbling... And you feel transported in another time, another time, another place...

There's this trembling light, so beautiful. And the smell of country, that we take over our clothes happily. At bedtime, lights out, the fire slowly dying, recalls somewhere the orange brightness of the sunset.

A lot of nostalgia for the fire ...

And that sentence, out of winter season: It's not very hot, is it, if we make a small outbreak?

And that was, yes, like savoring a small happiness of everyday life with soothing virtues, a blinding parenthesis after a day of hard work. The heat released by a fireplace fire has this power to relax, wrap, anaesthetize, reassure us.

It's a huge bubble of well-being... It's dreaming for hours, an open book to give yourself good conscience but the mind elsewhere carried by the imagination. It is to taste the time that passes ... You look at the fire as you look at the sea, there is this same depressing perpetual movement.

So many friendly, intimate and reassuring moments spent around our big fireplace to remake the world!

In the morning, it was necessary to clean, remove the ashes, recycled in the garden and in the fields, but it was always with joy thinking about the evening, never really a chore...

Shepherds

– What a beautiful life!

Because we have in mind the texts of Daudet, Giono, Mistral... The image of the shepherd who – his sheep parked – sleeps his nose in the stars, we envy them a little those men who walk in the sun, rhythmizing their steps on those of the beasts.
They don't know the office schedules, the reports to give, or the hacking races to catch the bus before he leaves the stop...

– That's what we should have chosen!

André Abbe Says the reality:
They take care of their animals 365 days a year... Julien Raynaud is – among them – the one I most often told you about. His working life lasted seventy years. He never took « True » Vacation. He told me several times about his visit to the Salon de l'Agriculture, porte de Versailles, but his escapades were rare.

Jean-Philippe Tinois
I think there were fewer questions in his day, when Mr. Brun (Francis) told me about his life course there was much more room for action, the opportunity of the moment the event was coming and that it had to be managed rather than the reflection. But... There is much to discuss about the toxicity or providence of leisure.

Cited in The Gazette :
André Abbe
François Abbe
Claude Boyer
Alain Cathala
Momo dela Etdici
Monique Gastinel
Denis Harvier
Jeanne Monin
Giselle Penat-Lorde
Jean-Pierre Serra
Jean-Philippe Tinois
Editor in Chief
Jeanne Monin