Some old fossils have just been discovered...

Just a bit of fun....
Some friends of ours, Biscuithead & the Biscuit Badgers have just released their latest video on the interweb ahead of their promotional launch....

It is a very well worked cartoon film with a touch of the Terry Gilliams about it...
and their musical style has close links to those of Neil Innes and Viv Stannishall and the Bonzos.

The link under the picture will take you to their Home page and the video.

Dinosaurs by Biscuithead & the Biscuit Badgers

The lead singer Dean is a quiet, unassuming allotmenteer with a very eclectic plot...
in fact, on the page that the link takes you to...
as well as the video of Dinosaurs...
there are the tracks of their second album "The Greatest Show on Toast" available to listen and/or buy.

Listen to "The Allotment Gavotte"... dedicated to our annual allotment show.

And on their first album, "Interspecies Disco" [listenable tracks are found on the CDs page] is a treatise on the treatment of "Flea Beetles"...

But let him loose on stage.... that's a different story....

Dean... the musical magician!

if you get a chance to see them live, please do!

Comparaison d'outils préhistoire et aujourd'hui

Apologies for such a long time between posts this year, but we've been very tied up with other things,  like Aigronne Valley Wildlife, however...

We spent a fascinating evening a long year ago at Le Panier d'Alice in La Celle Guenand, at a réunion organised by the Association Nomade "Le Champ des Livres". The president of the Friends of the Grand Pressigny Château Museum, Mr. Michel Geslin, brought a sample of his personal collection of prehistoric stone tools, many of them collected by his grandfather, along with a box of modern tools and devices, and he invited those present to match the old with the new. It has led us to become Amis de la Museé ourselves.

M.Geslin is holding a 'chunk' of fossil wood that someone brought along.

One thing we found astonishing was the sophistication and degree of specialisation among the stone tools. A burin, or point for reaming bone or leather, was carefully faceted, with the result that the point was strengthened, thus prolonging the life of the tool. The modern equivalent was a steel point which a panelbeater would use to make hand-built bodywork (for example, for a Morgan sports car). The modern tool and the old were exactly the same, except for the material from which they were made.

The coffee grinder and the mill wheel dressing hammer are 'together'...
from time to time the quern and its tool needed to be re-dressed...
the tool for that is under the coffee grinder handle.

The hammer here is similar to the first post on this blog... the similarity of these tools is wonderful.

The missing picture... the 'lighter' is the best in my opinion!

In the first picture... the stone sphere, smooth and polished, was used for grinding grain, and another stone sphere, with a knobbly surface, was used to roughen the surface of the millstones and the grinder once they became too smooth.

We all also had the opportunity to bring along our own "finds".
One of our flakes proved to be a waste fragment from the production of a Grand Pressigny "livre de beurre".
Our "Swiss army flint" was indeed a multi-use tool with different man-made edges and notches and we had found an arrowhead. Not one of the beautiful classic "arrow pointer" shape, but an arrowhead just the same. More about these in following posts...



Mr. Geslin holds these and other talks quite regularly, so if you see one advertised, we recommend a visit.

Apprentice to craftsman

Like most people in Touraine, we have ready access to fresh walnuts. Ours mostly end up in cakes, both sweet and savoury, though some growers have the patience to crack walnuts by hand in order to take the meats to a traditional huilerie such as Lepine, and return with their own freshly-pressed walnut oil. Because our nutcracker is still in a box somewhere, we had only a mole wrench to crack the walnuts - not a particularly successful tool! I remember as a child using a piece of pressed steel with a point that you inserted in the tiny slot in the base of the nut, and twisted, rather like opening an oyster. This tool was supposedly just the thing for walnuts, but I had no success with it!

When we saw James Gassiot's hand-turned wooden nut crackers, they had to be right - locally made (in le Grand Pressigny) from carefully selected pieces of timber with glorious patterning in the grain. Elm wood is strongly featured, along with yew and fruit woods. The casse-noix is in two parts - a bowl rather like a candle-holder for the shells, and a wooden hammer. The nut fits upright in a little cup and you smite it smartly with the hammer. If you catch it correctly, you chip pieces off both halves of the shell, and you can pull the entire nut meat out undamaged. You can crack hazel nuts in the same way. Bits of shell fly across the room, but it's much more fun than the mole wrench!

M Gassiot demonstrates the casse-noix. The book to his right is his autobiograpy.

A selection of nut crackers and mortars

M. Gassiot takes his portable lathe on its trailer to Marchés Gourmands so that he can create these utensils in front of your eyes. The pictures were taken at the Christmas Market at La Celle Guénand, where he set out his stall in one of the huge cellars of the castle.

Turning a "casse-noix"

On his retirement as compagnon charpentier in 2002, M. Gassiot wrote the story of his life's work as "Apprenti, Ouvrier, Artisan". The son of a master carpenter, he never considered another career, having, as he says, "fallen in at an early age", like Asterix in the magic potion. He started his training at the age of 14 at a wage of 6 Francs a month. A charpentier is a roofer and constructs the skeleton of large wooden buildings. The book is full of pictures of semi-clad buildings where he was involved in re-roofing (including the church in Le Grand Pressigny). There are also pictures of the more modern single-spanned buildings constructed using vast laminated beams. The earliest picture, taken in 1960, shows the proud newly-qualified 18-year-old James with his father and another master craftsman, holding a model roof, and standing in front of a lovely 2CV. Several of the later photos feature a white 2CV van! He started making the nut crackers in 2000, and his description in the book reveals the love that goes into them. Ever innovative, he is the inventor of a rolling seat on rails, made from an old garden chair and the wheels from some roller skates, for picking saffron...

This is Pauline's entry on De la Bonne Bouffe but I felt it belonged here too!

Soapwort

When travelling through rural France - or indeed rural Britain - at this time of year, you may see patches of pale lilac - pink flowers, looking rather like a phlox. The most common English name for this is Soapwort, although there are many other names - see the RHS website for a selection. In French it is called savonaire or savonnière. Its proper name is saponaria officinalis.



So why should this plant appear in Touraine Flint? The clue is in the name officinalis, which indicates that this is a medicinal herb. All parts of the plant contain saponin - soap - and it is a very effective cleaning agent. When Tim worked in forestry in the early 70s, a patch grew at the exit from the estate where he was felling trees, and he and his co-workers used a leaf or two to clean their hands before departing. The highest concentration of saponin is in the fleshy roots. At large doses soapwort is mildly poisonous, but it has been used for the treatment of skin diseases, gout, rheumatism and as a laxative and an expectorant.

Soapwort is propagated by root cuttings, taken from its underground rhizomes, or from its seeds, but it does not seem to spread in the natural environment. It is certainly a European native and some claim it was brought to the UK by monks. Whether or not this is true, soapwort is often found near habitation, and we have our own patch at La Forge.



There is another patch further along the road, several patches by the bridge, several more near the now isolated farm of Gatault, and more at the entrance to Le Grand Pressigny near the lavoir. These patches are a strong indicator that there was a building close by where someone needed soap - a home, perhaps, or in the preparation of fabrics from raw wool, hence the alternative name Fuller's herb. These buildings were made of wattle and daub, i.e. mud and sticks, and have now completely vanished, with not even a few lumps and bumps, and only the soapwort patch to show where they where. The forge will have had workers, as will the Favier mill near the bridge, and Gatault (formerly a mill) was probably a hamlet like Favier at some time. The town of Savonnières, now part of the Tours conurbation, may have got its name from the use of this herb.

More about Jim the Champignon Champion

On Thursday we visited the mushroom caves of Champion Mushrooms at Loches.... now MPC [Mushroom Production Caves] where they are developing an organic mushroom business in the former production caves of Paris White mushrooms.

While the rain and wind walloped the walnut trees on the hillside, underground all was still. A hundred years ago, things would have been very different. "Le Champion" employed as many as 300 people, and were the first to apply scientific techniques to mushroom production. They perfected a strain of the white Paris mushroom that became a worldwide standard, and researched optimal growing conditions so that for the first time mushrooms could be grown on an industrial scale. They sold fresh mushrooms, but also supported a massive canning operation in Bordeaux, and produced packs of spawn for other growers.

Charles Gillard - Founder of "Le Champion" - in 1900

The temperature in the caves varies by only a couple of degrees, and the Japanese mushrooms now installed there grow without heating, but we saw a huge pit where the coal-fired boiler serving the Paris mushrooms once stood. There was underground stabling for horses, to draw the carts which took the mushrooms down to the railway station. There were dog kennels and even a bread oven. Phillipe Gillard, Jim's business partner, is the great-grandson of the founder of "Le Champion" and drives around the caves in a battered 2CV. Unfortunately we were unable to meet him today, but we look forward to learning more about the history of his family business.

"Your Subterranean Tour Taxi!"

In the meantime we have some of the history that was displayed in an earlier museum that was set up some years ago, as well as some shots of the new style of mushroom growing.
Mushroom growing was only comercialized on the Touraine region in 1854 when Charles Gillard [above] started growing mushrooms in the caves left behind by the quarrymen who supplied the stone to build Loches. There are [as mentioned] 30 hectares of caves on this site... hence the 2CV [and, one hopes, expert knowledge of the way around]

A potted history of mushroom cultivation in Touraine by Paul Gillard

This developed into a business that not only supplied mushrooms to markets but, quite rapidly, began to develope the growing mediums and cultures for successful crops. The poster below shows the growth of the canned mushrooms produced by Gillard and Co from 1902 to 1909. They were marketed as "Royal Champignon".

Growth from just under 500,000 to almost 4 million cans in seven years.

And these are the canners at work.

By the early 1990s they were growing and supplying medium for over a dozen different types of fungi including:

Shiitaké, Paris White, Shaggy Ink-cap [Coprinus comatus], different strains of Oyster Mushrooms [Pleurotus species] and Enokitaké. Some of these are pictured below with onginal pickers baskets.

A cornucopia of fungi

There has even been a Shiitaké beer brewed for a restaurant in Belgium.... apparently it tasted good. But this bottle was empty and I've only got the drinkers word for that.... but he likes a good beer!