7000 people, from all over France, are wheeling in on a road that seems it will never end. Hairpin bends above sickening drops into gloomy valleys of Europe’s abandoned heart. Here, France’s past – hundreds of years of very basic agriculture when most of the population were broken peasants – is not forgotten under hypermarches selling a hundred types of yoghurt. Stone terraces under roots of chestnuts, like Mayan temples, store the memory of the Cévenoles who bartered an unfathomable amount of energy, broken nails and bloodied hands to produce chestnuts, goats and oaks.
Finally, when the night has closed in and you’ve given up the will to live, you arrive in Florac. On a blue day you can’t get higher. On a bad day it’ll make you sink lower than hell. Vultures wheel above high moorland plateau that drop off like the end of the earth. Florac is in the river’s cut-gorge throat. Houses grim with granite had to house Louis XIV’ Dragonnades who terrorised Huguenots to surrender their faith and their lives. But now Protestant gravestones sit proud in the lawns of the houses of the living.
Cars bulge with pumpkins and stock cubes. It is a pilgrimage. Devotion to the simple – pure – uncomplicated – primary – non-mercantile things of the past.
Soup.
Yes. Soup. 7000 hipsters, villagers, hippies, Cévenoles, grandmothers, hill-dwellers, uncles, children are arriving for soup. For two days, anyone who wants to can cook a soup for anyone else. All is free. You don’t know what you’ll get. It’s about putting your faith in the human race and hoping that some madman is not going to poison you and that, what’s more, it’ll be tasty.
The organisers provide thirty wood-burning stoves in the street to cook on. The soup-makers pay for their ingredients. They cook free of charge for the others. The festival-goers don’t pay anything except for a clay bowl, each bowl individually made by a local potter (it’s his lucky day). Part of that money goes to funding the festival.
Like so many events in France, it’s done with an almost religious dedication to doing something which is not about money and has no obvious utility. And always that feeling that, because of the lack of any visible rule-makers in fluorescent jackets and because of the French rebel spirit and their dedication to joie de vivre, that we are all just teetering on the brink of chaos.
**
Which is where we come in. We are a minority of three. Anglophones.
Phil, a Guardian journalist who specialises in stories about the hunters of serial cat killers.
Jon, a red-bearded English teacher who moved to the south of France for birds of both kinds.
Me, who thought it would be funny that three anglophones cook the worst version of an English soup for 7000 famished French.
I took inspiration from Alexis Soyer, a Frenchman who – after being a chef for the French prime minister and inventing fish and chips – set up some of the first soup kitchens in Ireland during the famine. Then he sailed to Crimea at his own expense with Florence Nightingale, so horrified he was at the idea that the British troops were starving and cooked for them free of charge. Apparently all his clothes were cut on the diagonal, so he looked permanently slanted. He was described by a friend as ‘the most ridiculous man, but quite perfect in his way’.
The only English soup we find which appeals is peas and ham. But Jon and Phil have both tackled the English dream and bought houses in the south of France so they’re skint and don’t want to fork out for a hock. Phil suggests Turkish lentil soup.We’re letting ourselves in for trouble. Nothing with a sniff of colonialism goes down well here.
I have somehow persuaded them to get dressed up. We change in the Tourist Office carpark which is filling up with people whose accommodation for the night will be their car. In the morning air, the smell of sauteed onions and butter and woodsmoke float on the fog droplets.
Phil, who is now dressed as the Queen of England, is head chef. Jon and I are his lackeys, dressed as king’s guards, complete with helmets made of fake bear skin and Heineken boxes. We approach the village centre, lugging cauldrons, kgs of red lentils, and Phil’s stock of Corsican beer.
We arrive in the village esplanade. Wood-fired stoves have been set up and are burning brightly. They are stoked by a volunteer, a Viking-hippy type, with big blonde beard and blonde pony-tail, hessian shirt and bare feet on autumn leaves, who seems to have been born and destined only for this role.
As an anglophone in France, there are so many moments when you have a vertiginous stomach-drop moment of realising how out of your depth and ill-prepared you really are.
We gradually realise that:
All of the stoves are already taken by French people taking their soup seriously and growl like rabid dogs when we approach.
We will need an electricity point to blend the kilograms of lentils, but there are none.
Phil’s forgotten the chopping boards and Jon has forgotten the table.
Phil’s got the recipe on his phone but the internet doesn’t reach here.
He’s also got a sprained ankle.
In desperation, we’ve got to start somewhere, which is to cut vegetables on the ground. Every time the Queen bends over the velvet skirt rides down and reveals her plumber’s crack to the world.
Nor Phil or Jon handle stress well and tempers start to fray.
“Jon, look on your phone and convert 17 cups of lentils to grams” the Queen screams.
Predictably, Jon’s phone is not working either. We slip into a vortex of kilograms of uncooked lentils and onions strewn on the pavement.
The Queen cracks open a Corsican beer with trembling hands. Phil has already told me how he was once so stressed cooking for a dinner party that he drank too much and the guests had to finish the cooking. We can’t lose him halfway through. I try to finish his beers when he’s not looking.
Through exquisite charm and diplomacy I manage to procure a stove, and Jon’s ex-girlfriend brings a table.
Water has to be fetched from a village spring at the end of the road.
The afternoon is grinding on and the crowd is growing as are the people who have prepared their jars of soups at home who are looking for stoves to heat them.
We’ve got quite a crowd gaping at the Queen’s butt crack as she grates carrots and scolds her face on lentil steam.
Phil’s chosen a recipe that seems to have one potato and one carrot. It should be easy. But our table is encumbered by a litter of empty Corsican beer bottles and stock cubes that look like they should be banned by the Geneva Convention. Jumbo Halal written in Arabic. But they were cheap.
The one thing going smoothly is our Viking angel who glides in every half an hour to stoke the stove.
Eventually, the lentils are cooked.
I find a caravan with useful things for soup-makers, including electricity. It is being manned by a punk who is blind-drunk but helpful.
The problem is it’s a long way from where we’ve cooked.
Carrying a cauldron of searing hot lentils through a thronging crowd of rabid children, dreaming hippies and drooling French – while wearing a sagging bearskin hat – is a feat I leave to Jon.
As we stagger past, families turn and look. I salute and bellow in English and the children shrink in horror behind their mothers.
The blind-drunk punk obligingly plugs in our mixer with one hand as he pours soup over people’s feet with the other. He looks at our costumes.
“Have the Prussians won the war yet?”
We manage to make it back to the stove without grievously scalding a child.
The Queen adds the final flourish to the soup: a mixture of butter, chilli sauce, mint and cumin.
With a speed which is quite the opposite of any movement you see in any place doing bureaucracy in France, a 50 person queue forms in front of the Queen.
The French love to eat. But they also love it when things are free.
There is nothing to make a cold sweat break out quite like having a hundred French eyes watching and waiting to eat what you’ve cooked.
Jon slinks away behind a tree.
I stand to attention by my Queen as she drunkenly ladles scalding soup down the sides of bowls and over children’s hands.
I salute each person with a hearty ‘hello’. Surprisingly they’re loving the English. Until a man who speaks only ‘Cevenole’ comes along and gives a linguistic history lesson dating back to the 9th century.
We’re all trembling. What if our soup’s bad?
But it’s worse than that. It’s so good that they’re coming back for more.
Quite beyond the realms of belief, we have become the victims of our own success. Apparently word is passing around to go and taste the English / Prussian / Turkish soup.
But Phil miscalculated the quantities and far too soon there’s nothing left.
They skulk and linger and snip and slope around us like hyenas.
“ Excusez-moi, will you be making more?”
We look around at a sea of expectant French faces.
Could a more glorious moment be had by three anglophones?
A brief pause and then we redo it,
doubling the volumes,
gathering water from the fountain,
scattering children left and right,
talking about stock cube brands with the drunk punk.
This time we’re nonchalantly confident.
But now we have to almost physically fend off the French as they realise the soup is ready.
The Queen and Jon desist.
I serve a hundred people while they stand and watch with a beer.
Sweat pours off and I develop ladle elbow.
The punters show disappointed faces when I don’t give enough – ‘don’t play Oliver Twist with me you hippy bo-bo bastard’.
I can’t scrape anymore out of the pot, but they’re coming in and cleaning it out with their fingers.
We leave them to it and sink back like shell-shocked soldiers. Now it’s our turn to taste.
Nearby there’s a group of 15 people from Marseille dressed as Smurfs serving a blue soup topped with aerated blue cheese. Another group is dressed as giant teeth and making the crowd do a tug of war using a giant piece of mouth floss. Another group hoists people up on ropes to eat their soup on a platform in a tree. There’s chestnut soup and there’s offal soup and there’s butternut soup and there’s some very good soups and the toilets attest to the fact that there’s a few very bad.
We roam the back alleys like jackals. As the night draws on the only thing that seems to be on the menu is onion soup.
In France, onion soup is traditional at weddings. At the end of the night, when the bride and groom sneek off to be alone, the guests hunt them down and foist on them an onion soup served in a chamber pot. It’s also know as the ‘soup of drunkards’ because it (apparently) has a magic power : it neutralises the smell of alcohol.
Down one side street, there’s a group of youth, also blind drunk, serving onion soup to the sound of hard techno. Down another alley, there’s a group of fifty year olds sitting in their garage, also blind drunk, serving onion soup to the sound of the most nostalgic music you can find in a country which has made itself an indisputable champion of the genre.
Either way it would seem in both cases you’re taking your life in your hands daring to eat their soup, but we hold out our bowls and sing along.
The evening ends with thousands of people head-banging to hard rock in the village square with soup bowls around their necks and spatters down their fronts, warm, under the stars.