One More Croissant for the Road. Felicity Cloake
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Название: One More Croissant for the Road
Автор: Felicity Cloake
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780008304942
isbn:
Paris, of course, like any cosmopolitan capital city, is a place where you can eat yourself around the globe, but my ambitions are more modest. I’m hoping, as a crescendo of my trip, to achieve croissant nirvana in the city of light. Certainly, I’ll have eaten enough of the things by then to judge what’s good and what’s not – I’m intending to put away at least one a day, barring any more interesting offers.
PAUSE-CAFÉ – The Croissant Rating System
Pay attention, because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of this. I started rating croissants on the coast-to-coast trip of 2017, for no better reason than they’re reliably found throughout France, I enjoy over-thinking food and most importantly I like them. The perfect croissant is, of course, entirely a matter of taste – professional pâtissières put a lot of store by the lamination of the dough, or how skilfully the pastry and butter have been folded together to create hundreds of distinct layers: according to one equation I find online, the average croissant has 649. Me, I’m less concerned with looks; some of the most disappointing pastries I’ve eaten in London are the ones flaunting their perfect strata of dough all over social media, but which turn out to have very little in the way of flavour. What I look for in a good croissant is:
1 butteriness (no margarine-based croissants for me)
2 a good balance of caramelised sweetness and bready savoury notes
3 a crisp base
4 a slightly damp middle – squidgy but not doughy
In the text that follows, all scores are out of 10: 1–4 denotes a poor croissant not even worth finishing (a croissant contains about 260kcal); 5–7 as a mediocre-to-decent example not worth complaining about and 8+ as a good croissant worth repeating immediately if time permits.
It’s a satisfyingly neat loop around the country, but one, I note, that covers an awful lot of ground. A cursory google turns up the terrifying fact that France is the largest country in Western Europe, a whopping 27 times the size of Wales. Distances are vast – it looks like it might take me at least three days to cycle across Brittany alone.
Unfortunately, I have a day job as a weekly columnist, and a mortgage to pay, to say nothing of a terrier with a truly prodigious appetite; I can’t afford to dawdle around this place like a tourist – I need to be a Tourist. So like the boys in Lycra,† I’ll need the odd lift. Until quite recently I’d assumed the Tour de France actually rode around France, but they don’t; they get on team coaches and doze their way to the next starting line. Me, I’m going to let the train take the strain.
To add to the fun, I’ve hit a summer of rail strikes: two days out of every seven are to be given over to industrial action in a dispute over President Macron’s attempts to open the passenger network up to competition. On the plus side, the dates have been announced in advance. On the minus side, the actual services affected won’t be decided until the night before, which makes the whole thing a bit of a Russian roulette.
PAUSE-CAFÉ – Cycle Touring: A Bluffer’s Guide
If the reactions of my friends and family are anything to go by, anyone who hasn’t ridden a bike since childhood finds the idea of weeks doing nothing but this a bit daunting. In fact, as I always breezily explain, cycling is much easier than running, especially when your feet are actually stuck to the bike. Once you’ve got going, momentum will keep your legs spinning round with surprisingly little effort on your part, and on good roads with a forgiving gradient, you can cover a decent distance without much expertise: it’s not for nothing that 100 miles is said to be the cycling equivalent of running a marathon, though having done both (preens), I can confirm a marathon is a lot more unpleasant.
Cyclists tend to measure distances in kilometres rather than miles, just like they tend to drink espressos rather than tea, and call their silly hats casquettes rather than caps. It’s Rule 24 in the Velominati handbook (the Velominati being a half-jokey online cult to the two-wheeled god) and one of the few that I obey, mostly because 50km sounds a lot more impressive than 31 miles (though they’re also right that all shorts should be black – ‘wet, dirty white Lycra is basically transparent; enough said on that matter’).
I’ve found that, when riding all day, it’s reasonable to cover between 70 and 150km depending on the terrain, weather and how much of interest is along the way, with an average speed of about 15km/h. That said, not everyone falls easily into sitting in the saddle for six hours on the trot, so 50–70km feels like a more manageable distance with company desirous of a nice holiday rather than a wholesale reconfiguration of their nether regions.
My recommendation for anyone thinking of embarking on anything similar for the first time is to make sure you have a bike that’s both light and sturdy: dedicated touring bikes will never be as featherlight as racers, but you can stick a rack on most things, and if you’re staying on tarmac, a robust road bike has always been my choice.
Other things you’ll need, apart from all the obvious stuff you’d take on holiday if you had to carry it round with you:
Panniers and rack. A bar or frame bag is also useful for your wallet, etc., though I like to keep my phone attached to my handlebars to help with navigation/show those all-important Instagram alerts on the go.
Basic toolkit: inner tube, patches, pump, multitool, tyre levers, chain lube. France in particular is well supplied with bike shops; if you’re going somewhere that isn’t, you might want to consider spare brake pads, etc.
Padded shorts and gloves: trust me, you won’t regret these if you’re doing more than a day in the saddle.
Decent lights – naive urban cyclists (me) may be startled at how dark it is on country roads.
Water bottles – I took two and ran out several times. Get big ones.
Chunky but not too heavy bike lock.
Portable phone charger – or actual maps, given that’s mostly what you’ll be using it for.
Tent, sleeping bag, rollmat (only if planning to camp, obviously).
Wet wipes. They hide a multitude of bike-oil-based sins.
Trains or not, it’s still a daunting prospect as I gaze at the little map, stuck with flags like a ham studded with cloves. Yet just the names involved make my heart leap, bringing back happy memories of summers past and journeys taken, squashed sandwiches scoffed on ski lifts and arguments in the hot, sticky back seat of a Vauxhall Cavalier.
These places might sound familiar, but I know they’ll look different from a bike. A cyclist’s pace is swift enough to make satisfying progress, yet slow enough to enjoy it, to notice the landscape changing before and, of course, under the tyres – it’s hard to get a sense of the terrain when it’s flashing past you in the car, or on the train, but when you’re forced to really feel it in your legs, it’s hard to ignore. Places seem to stamp themselves on your consciousness with startling firmness, as Graham Robb writes in his book The СКАЧАТЬ