Walnut dinner, continued

The Soirée Énoisage we recently attended was another of the events arranged by our commune. It's been an annual event for years, held in another village in Mazerolles, but apparently this is only the third year it's been held in Mazerolles itself. We've intended to go before, but didn't get organized enough to get reserved. It was a fun event, so we'll probably attend again.

For the picking itself, we brought our own nutpicks, the small metal sticks with curved ends for picking the shell bits out of the nutmeat. Ed and Kaye have what appear to be the same sets from their parents, each with a nutcracker and a number of picks. The French folk used pocket knives and such, and couldn't figure out our gadgets at all. Kaye's neighbor thought it might be useful for eating snails!

Wine began to flow even while there were still nuts on the tables, and after we got all those walnuts picked, we were served a simple meal. As the tables were cleared and the floor swept under our feet, jugs of kir were brought around as our aperitif. Then we had onion soup ... yes, proper French onion soup. There were bowls of crispy bits of bread to put in the bottom of our empty bowls. Then the soup came around. And there there were bowls of  grated cheese for topping the soup. No floating rafts of cheesy toast here. As we've seen (and tried) before, when people were through with their soup, they poured a bit of red wine in the bowl and slurped it dry. We've learned not to fill up on soup, since that's just the start of the meal.

Then came the main course, which was white beans and fat, cracklings. Meaty bits were far and few between; mostly it was just chunks of fat. Not very appealing to us, but the beans were quite good. Bowls of freshly gathered dandelion (pissenlit) greens were passed around to be added to the beans as you like. This was quite good actually, the strong taste of the greens cuts through the fatty taste of the beans.

Then the cheese course, served very family style, with the wheels of camembert, already cut, plopped down  amid each group of eight people. Finally, a slice of an apple tart for dessert. These looked like they might have been home-made, but they could also have come from a local boulanger. At any rate they tasted quite good, and weren't too sweet.

We're looking forward to our bottle of walnut oil!