Brive-le-Gaillarde: the good life deep in rural France

Finally I get to taste a nun's fart.
This is not the result of some sort of bizarre sound of music fixation, but an encounter with an elusive French sweetmeat, pets de nonne _ squashball-sized spheres of choux pastry designed to melt in the mouth with an explosion of airy sweetness.
I'd long heard about this mystical dessert, but Chez Francis in the rustic town of Brive-le-Gaillarde was the first restaurant I'd found that served them up -- accompanied by a glass of vin paille _ a sweet wine given its apricot hues and sugary intensity by leaving the grapes to dry for months on beds of straw.

Francis is just about the perfect small town bistro, on the edge of the perfect French small town that itself is surrounded by a patch of rolling pasture land _ the Correze, a green and rugged land that produces legendary veal, formidable rugby players and archetypal Frenchmen as Georges Brassans and Jacques Chirac.
Brive is centered on the 12th-century St-Martins church, a towering pile of gothic and Romanesque that forms a hub for the web of narrow lanes forming the old town. Solid bourgeois facades of powder gray stone contain little stores selling jars of rillettes and fois gras, homemade chocolate, herby liquors or home-crafted, walnut handled pocket knifes.

The rural lifestyle of the region is captured in "La terre qui demeure" and other novels by local writer Claude Michelet.
We hit town on a sweltering July weekend. Built in a depression among the grassy hills, Brive traps the sunshine and thermometers were souring towards 40C. Fortunately we found refuge at Chez Francis just as a thunderstorm rolled down the Avenue de Paris battering shutters, bending plane trees and sending torrents cascading down the mansarded slate roofs.
Francis is a welcoming place, cool and cozy with great local food, arty bric-a-brac decor, a bunch of literary connections and bubbly blond hostess keen to chat about the famous Parisians who make this a de riguer dining spot when attending the Brive book fair and cover the walls in gushing graffiti to mark their appreciation.
The chef himself escaped from the capital 20 years ago to open the bistrot and bring a touch of big city sophistication to a menu thoroughly rooted in regional tradition.
He serves crispy flat bread and the first glass of vin paille while we check the menu.
There's a starter selection which turns out to be a fabulous little tour around the midi and beyond: a bloc of buttery fois gras, red-pepper-rich gaspacho with forcaccia, a chartrelle salad, a mi-cuit of salmon, aubergine tempura and barbagiuan _ the stuffed ravioli of Monaco (courtesy of the sous-chef's recent stage on the Cote d'Azur).
Right back to the Correzian heart of things for the main course _ veau de lait with gros frittes and giroles. Touch-tender baby veal with fat, salty chips and sauteed wild mushrooms - gorgeous. Then a slice of fourme de Valciviene _ a Stilton-like blue cheese _ produced up the road. All this accompanied by a happy red wine from the nearby Perigord _ Domaine de la Valette.
To end up along come those ecclesiastical trumps to round of a classic meal.
They are kid friendly too, producing a fine menu d'enfant featuring a big bowl of chilled gaspacho, a steak-frite of junior size but grown up quality and cherry clafotis.
Brive's cooks don't have to look far for their ingredients. The town has two great food markets.
Overlooked by the cheap and cheerful, Hotel Chapon Fin, the little open air farmers' market in the Place de Lattre de Tassigny has a great selection of fruit and veg - peaches, pears, golden Limousin apples, fresh walnuts and wild mushrooms but is just an aperitif to the vast covered halls of the Marche Georges Brassens _ once immortalized by the acerbic songwriter.
Row upon row of stalls groaning under strings of garlic, gleaming salad greens, bunches of sunflowers, jars of honey, pungent rocamadour goats cheese, crates of apricot and melon. Venture a little deeper into the maze of goodies and there cages of ducklings rabbits and pigeons, jars of foie gras and slabs of confit de canard.
Strangely enough for a town hundreds of kilometres from the sea, there's a lighthouse overlooking the market bustle, actually it's a water tower disguised as a lighthouse for reasons nobody was able to explain.
No sea, but when the sun really begins to bake, the people of Brive can head out to the Lac de Causse, just 10 kilometers away which boasts freshwater beaches for swimming and watersports.
The hills around Brive are dotted with picturesque stone villages like Turenne, Curemonte and Saint-Robert which are members of the exclusive "plus beaux villages de France" association.
Built on a ridge Curemont has not less than three castles and a 12th century church; Turenne, clustered on a hillside beneath the ruins of its fortress was an independent state until Louis XV brought in into the French kingdom in 1738; the stone manor houses of Saint-Robert were built around a Bendictine monestry.
Collonges-la-Rouge stands out thanks to the vivid red stone used to build it in the Middle Ages. Tracing its history back to the 8th century, Collonges cobbled streets have been largely untouched since a 19th century outbreak of phylloxera devastated its thriving vinyards and forced almost half the population to emigrate. The gothic church of Saint-Pierre has an ornately carved doorway arch, there are renaiseance noble houses, an ancient covered market and a museum housed in a 16th century home decorated with a carving of a mysterious mermaid.
In days gone by Collonges lived on sales of geese and walnuts, now on summer days it's a bit overwhelmed by tourists winding round the alleys and filling the cafe terraces and there's a fair ammount of tacky souveniers for sale among the bottles of nut licqour and foie gras on offer in the village's low-walled boutiques. It can be bit of a relief to head down the hillside back to Brive's unpretentious charms.
Correze's eastern neighbour is the is the département of Dordogne, or Dordogneshire, as it's become known for the hundreds of British immigrants who have flocked there attracted by the landscape of riverside villages and storybook castles as well as the renowned cuisine.
If you want a castle of your own without paying a king's ransom the Château de la Fleunie, in Condat-sur-Vézère, has rooms starting from €65 in a Templers' fortress built between the 12th and 15th centuries. Here you can live out your lord-of-the-manor fantasy surrounded by over 100 hectares of meadow and parkland, with its own flock of deer. The best rooms are in the four massive turrets with walls built to withstand a siege, oak-beamed ceillings and antique furniture drapped with flowered tapestries. For all its fairy tale ambiance, the hotel has all mod cons. There's a gym in the dungeons, saunas and bar beside the pool were you can sip cocktails overlooking the Vézère valley. Not surprising the food's great too.

Wiesbaden _ Wine on the Rhine with musical cheese

You can't help but admire a city that boasts the world's largest cuckoo clock as one of its major tourist attractions.
This is Wiesbaden, where in 1946 when the old Rhineland spa town was rebuilding itself after allied bombing, a certain Emil Kronberger decided to decorate a whole facade of his corner souvenir shop with this monument to kitsch, complete with outsized oak leaves, giant antlers and frescoes of slaughtered game.
The store is self is filled with a bric-a-brac of enamel Christmas decorations, smaller cuckoo clocks and baleful military nutcrackers representing mustachioed guardsmen in splendid Napoleonic uniforms.

Wiesbaden is the capital of Hesse. It sits on the north bank of the Rhine, just across the river from Mainz and downstream of the Main from Frankfurt. Although once the site of a Roman fort, it is essentially a 19th century city, build up in the glory days when Europe's great and good flocked here to take the waters and play the fashionable gaming tables.

The social heart of the city is the Kurhaus, a massive stone building in the ostentatious neoclassical style favored by Kaiser Wilhelm II which houses the casino which inspired Dostoyevski's short novel "The Gambler." The interior displays a lighter touch, with light streaming in from domed central foyer and great stain-glassed arches displaying the imperial black eagle and the three gold lilies' of the city's coat of arms.
Twin rows of white washed colonnades run out on either side of "bowling green" lawns in front of the Kurhaus. One is now filled with one-armed-bandits and bland meeting rooms, the other houses chic shops and backs on to the Hessisches Staatstheater, another Wilhelmine pile which rivals the Kurhaus for fin-de-siecle grandeur.

The chic shoppers of the Kolonnaden are captured in another literary great _ Thomas Mann's "Confessions of Felix Krull."
Two of the city's finest restaurants face each other across the bowling green. The Ente in the fancy Nassauer Hof hotel flaunts a Michelin star and Kafler's niched in a wing of the Kurhaus is a cheerful bistro in dark wood and leather with walls lined with a thousand black-and-white photos of passing stars.
All this pomp is separated from the old town by the elegant Wilhelmstrasse, lined with designer boutiques and jewelers, it's known locally as the "rue." The Altstadt is bit of a misnomer _ although the narrow streets may follow a jumbled medieval plan, most of the houses are of 19th-century vintage. The oldest building in the city is the 17th century Altes Rathaus, but even that was partly rebuild in 1829.

Other points of interest are the towering red brick Marktkirche build over the arches of the underground market, the sprawling new Rathaus and the sober Stadtschloss, one a royal abode, now home to the Hessian parliament.
For foodhounds, the old town's main interest is in the scattering of wienstubbe tucked away in the allies. Wiesbaden is most definitely a wine, rather than a beer town. The Rieslings grown on the slopes of the Rheingau overlooking the river are reputed to be among the best in the world. The crisp fresh wines are quaffed from elegant brown-stemmed goblets.
Weinhaus Koegler in Grabenstrasse, is one of the best. Homely wooden benches, linen napkins, sepia prints of venerable burghers looking down from the walls. It was the definition of gemuetliche.
Our bustling blonde hostess produced a couple of bottles of "dusty dry" Hochheimer Reichesthal Riesling 2005, and we set out to take on a couple of Hessian starters. First came Handkaese-mit-musick _ little blocs of hard young cheese soused in vinegar for a week in little Rhenish pots and spread on cumin-flavored bread with a sprinkling of raw, white onion. Why mit musick? Because it's supposed to make you fart.
This was followed by spundekaese, a paprika-favoured cream cheese delicious on warm from the oven flat brown bread.
Main causes were robustly typical. Thick steaks with roast potatoes, ribs with sauerkraut, schnitzel. I took leberknoddle - liver dumplings plump and moist served on a bed of perfectly prepared kraut.
To follow up, we were served chocolates with a nectar _ Riesling eiswein Bodenheimer Leidlecke _ made from grapes left on the vine until the frosts arrive to produce a sultana sweet dessert wine. Naturally, that had to be followed by a chilled glass of schnapps _ a marc from the same Riesling grapes.
In need of some purification after all that. Wiesbaden's other magic liquid is on hand, the hot, mineral-rich waters that bubble up from the ground below are what made the city what it is. You can take a range of cures at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Theme - built in 1913 and recently restored to their romano-oriental glory. Saunas, steambaths, massages, its open from 10 to 10, longer on Saturdays. Prudish Anglo-Saxons beware, the management warns that "nude bathing is preferred."
For those in a rush or afraid to bare all, you can get a taste of the waters in the Kochbrunnen, a near scalding spring open to all just of the Taunusstrasse, which is another chic avenue where the heavy gothic and classical revival architecture so prevalent elsewhere in the city is enlivened by a selections of more delicate jugendstil facades.
Turn into Roederstrasse and there's Bobbeschaenkelche, reputedly the town's oldest restaurant and another that oozes old Rhineland charm. Snug alcoves, upholstered benches, wood paneling and faded etchings of Hessian infantry. This time we were trying the local reds made with spaetsburgunder grapes _ known as pinot noir in their native Burgundy from where they were supposedly brought to the banks of the Rhine by Cistercian monks 800 years ago.
To be honest I find those northern reds a tad on the light side for my tastes, but they went down well enough with another plate of spundekaese - perked up with onion and more pepper this time, but unfortunately without the fresh-baked bread. The main event was tafelspitz - a thick slab of boiled beef served with an unctuous, cold, green herb sauce _ a Frankfurter specialty _ and boiled, parsley sprinkled spuds.
Other local specials included mustardy meatballs, steak tartare and the usual array of steaks and schnitzels.
The place is also renowned for having Kulmbacher bier _ a legendary Bavarian brew _ on tap. And of course an array of local schnaps was brought out to finish off - spirits of pear and raspberry and a smooth, copper hued distillation of the ubiquitous Riesling.

Wiesbaden's charm is not all olde worlde or belle époque. The city promotes itself as a premier shopping center from the department stores of the Kirchgasse to the frontline vitrines around the Wilhelmstrasse and the funky boutiques in the Altstadt.
Cafe Maldaner is the place to go for kafe und kuchen beneath the chandeliers and among furriered old ladies taking on seemingly invincible wedges of cheese cake or chocolate gâteaux with their whipped cream topped coffees.
The younger crowd hangs out in the Havana Cafe across from city hall to sip on mojitos or foaming glasses of Radeberger beer from Dresden.
I stayed in the Hotel Oranien, an elegant four star dating from the 1870's on the edge of the old town with doubles from 104 euros including a fine buffet breakfast. My room was spacious, the bathroom was stocked with Bulgari toiletries and there is a cozy bar for night caps.