enter the Becassine …

Three in the morning. Woken by rumpus under the bed. Half involves the cat who is stout and generally walks quietly and with care. The other half is giving as good as it gets but is something unguessable. Clearly not a vole, a mouse, a rat,  none of the usual suspects. Light on, cat backs off, thing buzzes up to the top of the bookcase and perches. A  bird, but unlike any the cat s brought in before. Elegant like a line drawing, cantilevered on high angled legs, sweet curve of body  rhymed with long long tapering bill. For want of a better idea it was stowed for safety with the canary. Here it is the morning after . .. a Snipe, a Becassine. A bird from a mediaeval tapestry. We walked it down to the brook at the bottom of the road and released it with a prayer that the Sunday hunters won t have it. The thought occurs that our room, open to the garden, is filled every night by a Noah’s ark of local animals that mill around amicably till dawn when they go their separate ways. The Becassine’s bad luck that it met the cat on the way out.

patrimoine weekend near Tea Together

Weekend of the Patrimoine. The recently moved-into house of the Tea Together youth is up the road from the Abbaye of Dommartin, on the edge of their village at Tortefontaine. Always a lift of the spirits to pass the mighty stone gateway which has kept its twin overflowing cornucopias of fruit as topping on each side of the entrance. Even from the road, it’s clear that wars and revolutions have reduced what was a powerful self-contained world to shattered pieces.  Today, though, that glimpse of what still lies beyond widens to become une vue totale. We get to walk in under the arch and around the demesne. Eighteenth century farm buildings, including the brasserie, the forge, the woodcutter’s hall, the pigeonnier – the dignified ruins of another grand stone gateway at the far end of the demesne – but the surprise is the wildly romantic grandiose ruins of the original eleventh century church, the shattered columns marking out a ground plan as large as a cathedral, the flint and stone walls reaching for the sky, all swagged with curtains of fern and ivy. Between the two stone portals, small groups of locals promenading under the old apple trees and discussing with lively interest the freshly revealed demesne.

Tea Together – Friday 17th September Of Ships & Planes

Magalie with Nick and Eli swopping shipping tales.

Today,  Magalie of SDV‘s Le Havre office came to call. SDV is the freight company that gets palets of Tea Together jams to the States, to Singapore and all points between. Her inside view of what is going out, what coming in, what going up and what going down, makes her an effective barometer of the economic climate seen from the workface. It’s Magalie who tells us that four thousand containers of French wine sail to Japan every week, that every port in China has a different Export speciality – textile, white goods, toys, and so on around the coast – and that the incoming ships are unloaded by teams working three hours per shift, the pressure and the danger of the job being intense. They’re talking in the upstairs library where the walls are covered with photos of the Caudron brothers, the daring pioneers of flight who had their School of Aviation on the coast at Le Crotoy, not thirty minutes from St Remy au Bois. Go to the little Tourist Information office in Rue, between us and the coast, for a knock-out spread of images of the men and women who gave up their sensible lives on the local farms or in the textile mills to hurl themselves into the air alongside the Caudrons. The men slouch their flying jackets, their ear-flapped helmets, the cigs hung just so on the lower lips. The gels ooze a stylish, jaunty confidence. The most extraordinary one among them was surely Bessy Coleman, child of a dirt poor cotton picking family in the American South who made her way via Chicago and Jazz Age Paris to learn to fly with the Caudrons on the Baie de Somme.

Tea Together Thursday 16th. September

Caterpillar slaughter. Every morning, in the sprouting broccoli and curly kale. My eyes have developed laser vision seeking the perfectly camouflaged hordes that lie doggo right on the central spine of each leaf, a perfectly parallel dash of green on green. A fierce attachment to the young plants having raised them from seed, nursed them as seedlings, planted out, potted on, justifies the hard rain that now falls on the plump baby caterpillars every morning. Pity though that the caterpillars demonstrate an equally fierce attachment to young brassicas. Seek ‘em out, pick ‘em off, and  …the season started by gently tipping them over the hedge towards the ditch, and then, rage getting the upper hand, tossing them into the compost and now, merciless, into the jar of dying wasps.

 

 

Determined I am that we get to harvest fresh greens come next March-April and these two are not favoured by local veg growers, whose belief in turnips and leeks is unshakeable.

Tea Together – Monday 13th September

 

Grey light, wind rocked trees, poplars opposite bowing and scraping in the gusts – the year tipping into Autumn. One of the grand classics of Paris hotels that is part of the Dorchester family orders up boxes of the jam we have made for the pre-opening of the UK’s Coworth Park, hotel with polo ponies attached. The plan is to give them as presents to their staff to mark the Coworth opening. Tea Together signs up for our second Garden Weekend in Belgium. We are regulars at the magical Journees de Plantes at the Abbaye of Aywiers, near Waterloo. A week later, for the first time, we shall be with our jams at the Park of Beervelde, where the theme for this Autumn is the Mulberry Tree. As we have promised ourselves a Mulberry for the back field, seems like a good omen.

With all that, it’s a glum kind of day and the arrival of Helmut, patron of the Petit Manoir at Gouy St Andre, the next village to St Remy, brightens us up. Helmut is, always,bright, wears red, and this time around, is bringing a box of his home-grown veg. His chambres d’hote are unlike any others, having about them a style and a verve that comes from the design sense of Jennifer and the dash of Helmut.

Surprise visit from Helmut and his veg

Then a call from our partner in Manhattan to say that one of the iconic hotels of NYC is in contact, with fond memories of Tea Together samples. Could be good.

Tea Together Diary starts here Sunday 12th. September

The morning after the day before – which was the Street Party in Hampstead of Gail’s Bakery. They take our jams, we do their annual bunfest. A lot more people than the year before arriving with lists of the Tea Together jams they or their spouse need refreshed. Home past midnight and next morning, off to one of the last Brocantes of the season. Haul – two vintage coffee grinders for friend Phil, the best sound recordist Nick ever had when he was cameraman. A child’s felt coat, Austrian, beautiful applique, destined to be savaged for felt discs for the 1926 Citroen being restored. And three heavy heavy silver-plated hall marked dishes for the house. Still no Toulouse Lautrec drawing which graces the home of a couple a village away, pulled out of a folder of nothing much that was lying on a pavement in a Bethune brocante. Afternoon, de-stoning beautiful greeny-gold tiny greengages delivered Friday from our Paris organic distributor. Plenty of work but plenty of scent and taste and, Monday, Jocelyn made them into a jam that has managed to trap all the qualities listed above. Colour intact. Evening, the Tea Together Youth move into the fermette in Tortefontaine, village a bike ride from St Remy.
Suddenly we are sitting down to meals with four people round the table instead of the ten or twelve that had become normal. Strange. Dogs in mourning. Sofa destroyed. Spot the sad dog…..

Sad dog in wrecked cushion

Christmas Eve at Tea Together. Tilly Gifford goes gathering mistletoe with Louis from New Zealand and terrier Amy. Round here, it’s a steal. On most horizons the light burns through huge clumps of the stuff tumbling in torrents down from the ancient cider apple trees and poplars. Back in the days when Tea Together was young and all, when every rope thrown our way was worth the clutching, the owner of one of London’s best loved delis paid us a visit. Gazing across the landscape that circles the farm, he opined that we should dump the jam and embrace the mistletoe.

But by that time, we were already deeply, truly fascinated by the business of turning fruit into fruit by a different name. Happy we are that, here at St Remy au Bois, mistletoe is still just for Christmas.

Tilly & Louie

Paris Tuesday with Tea Together

To Paris, with samples of Tea Together Winter jams for Rose Bakery and for the yet-to-be-opened Raffles, location Etoile, designer Philippe Starck,  jams – Pear with Cardamom, Wild Sloe, Quince Jelly.

Lunch with friends at La Coupole, always magnificently theatrical, Parisian waiters doing their thing, and their clients, ditto. Next to our table, a blue-jeaned and beautiful young woman dining – alone. Briskly ordered up oysters and a glass of red wine. They arrived. glistening on their bed of ice. She gazed, called back her waiter, and asked to be presented to the three different oyster varieties posed on the platter. Oysters named, they were polished off in short order and  she swung out  into the Parisian afternoon. We had fallen quiet over our frites. Impressive.

On to the Musee du Quai Branly, first visit to the ethnological museum of Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Lapped in its half-light and tanned hides, ravished by textiles and carvings that whispered of meanings on the edge of our understanding, crouching to passage down into a leather lined cave where in the half light our shaman spoke to us .. on film, still weirdly present .. was a big experience.

Nightfall at the Palais du Tokyo for the presentation of the photographs Herbert Ponting took of Scott’ s doomed expedition to the South Pole. Icy clear, dazzlingly composed and detailed images, from the hugger mugger of man and dog and pony in the hold of their ship to frail figures in the white vastness of ice caves and glaciers.

11th. November Armistice Day at St Remy au Bois

Tea Together’s fermette is bounded, on one side, by the main street of the village.  A minute’s walk up the road is the corner where you take a right to the little church. It’s marked by the St Remy au Bois War Memorial, the site of the annual gathering to remember – the handful of young men from the village, the woman whose name joins theirs on the role call, carved into the stone – she was killed by an Allied bomb while  buying butter – and all the others slaughtered on the nearby battlefields. The Mayor intones the names and after each one,  a senior inhabitant responds with Mort Pour La France. A message issued by the State and sent round to every Mairie in France is then read out, always  firmly non-military in tone.  And then, taking up the invitation to share a Vin D’Honneur, the school room doors are flung open and the petillant vin blanc offered around, along with the  langues de chat biscuits. Once upon a time, this was a village with three cafe-bars. Tractors and television did for them, and these days formal occasions are a way to refresh contacts between villagers. As for the horrors of War, there is little chance that those will be forgotten yet awhile. The detail of life under an Occupation lives on everywhere, still, both in family memories and in the practical realities of the present.

Agnes Emery

Agnes Emery, interior designer extraordinaire, made a two day trip to Tea Together . When she got home, she sent through this souvenir of her visit.

She came with a purpose – to select the flavours of jam and marmalade to go in her two stores, in Brussels and Antwerp.

The Tea Together farm and the Tea Together shop in New Jersey both work around the designs of Agnes, her tiles and her paints and her furniture.

So we are delighted that our products will be offered chez Emery & CIe. It s a new departure, for all of us, and we re talking of creating a range of jellies that will be designed in collaboration with Agnes and bear the Emery & Cie label.