Facelift

After a long delay, during which time, with the shutters closed, we were (and still are) in complete darkness in the house, the builders have finally started the décroûtage, or removal of the old stucco from the exterior of the building. Using hammer drills and mallets and chisels, they prise off chunks of fatigued plaster, which then fall noisily either onto the scaffolding, or, more alarmingly, directly into the street. It's all a bit casual, and not entirely risk free. As you can imagine, this being the south of France, nobody is wearing a helmet or toe-tector boots.

Interesting, though, to see what the house is made of: essentially the walls are an amalgam of sea sand, rubble and ancient pottery. This seems to be the usual mix in old Antibes. Still, this pudding recipe has withstood persistent artillery bombardment in 1746-7 (Austro-Sardinians from the land, British from the sea) during the war of Austrian Succession, various earthquakes, and the dynamiting of the port, only a few metres away, by the retreating German army in 1944.

Estimates of the age of the house are hard to come by. We are definitely there in the Napoleon cadastre (land ownership map) of 1814, and seem to be in military maps going back to the 1740s, possibly even earlier. The house does not appear on plans from the seventeenth century, but these are pretty vague. There is a tantalising possibility of its presence in a pen and ink map from sometime in the sixteenth century, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, with galleys and galleons moored a few yards away in the harbour. What I do know, however, is that it is built on the site of a Roman garum or muria factory, whose settling tanks for brine run into the square opposite our house. Indeed, I have a fleeting suspicion that a large basin in the ground floor, mentioned by the builders as a nuisance, may not be the fishing-net proofing tank they think it is, but rather a convenient re-use of something older.

Antibes fish sauce is mentioned by Pliny the Elder (who at one point describes it as sanies, 'pus' or 'decomposing matter') but more positively by Martial in one of his epigrams of the Xenia, which were charming, witty little labels attached to presents.

XIII (103) Amphora muriae

Antipolitani, fateor, sum filia thynni:
Essem si scombri, non tibi missa forem.

A jar of fish sauce

I am, I admit, the daughter of a tuna from Antibes
Had I been a mackerel's, I wouldn't have been sent to you.

Despite Pliny's objections, and another, distinctly 'blue' reference to fish sauce in Martial (a girl who has consumed six helpings of garum is likely to 'deflate' her lover), this sauce was highly prized, far afield, so much so that an amphora bearing an advert for 'excellent Antibes liquamen' is to be found in the British Museum.

The stinky stuff, in a bowdlerised form, is still available today, in the form of pissala, the fishy goo which is combined with onions on the local variant of pizza, pissaladière. You can buy it, in none too sanitary conditions, from the yard of the ship's carpenter just before the Quai des Miliardaires.