Champêtre is an Invitation to Snoop around Chez Nous!
Chez Nous means "My Place" in France and it's where I call home.
Champêtre is my invitation to discover French country life. Like any good field guide, I hope to make it easily accessible so you can browse through a dozen categories, from Cooking to Gardening to Road Trips. Illustrated with my own photographs and favorite French paintings, consider Champêtre a French field guide or companion to living the life you want wherever you find France.
As I defined these first categories for Champêtre, Chez Nous became a catchphrase for many things—the familiar name of a local village café, the larger identity of your place in the world, where you’re from, and how you identify culturally—or just the place you call home. Example: any invitation to come for “apéros chez nous” (drinks and nibbles, aka apéritifs) means come to my place. My actual home. Camont. But it can also mean my town, my country, and my place in the world. So welcome to Chez Nous!
Chez Nous— My Place in France
My place in France is not the gilded mirror, baroque-tinted France of Versailles, or the well-dressed Paris boulevards and chic cafés. It’s not the flowy-gowned, dreamy insouciance of a Provençal summer evening sipping expensive rosé wine. There is not a chateau in sight.
My France has garden dirt under its short, unvarnished nails and is dripping with mid-morning rain from bringing in the still-damp laundry.
My France has a well-scrubbed kitchen table, old tile floors polished with duck fat from a thousand pots of confit de canard, and a length of steel butchers’ hooks that hold the everyday tools of whisks, graters, sieves, and cleavers.
My France is where food is grown for the whole country. The Lot-et-Garonne is one of the top four agricultural departments in France. It also leads the nation in food diversity and organic production. It’s an excellent place for a cook to live.
My France is what my French neighbors often refer to as La France Profonde—that deep part of France where things change slowly, if at all, and the old ways are valued for more than just nostalgia.
My France is a snapshot of country life as rustic and pastoral as a 19th-century painting, complete with dancing hares, rickety ladder, and a grapevine garland.
Chez Nous- My place in France
Yes, there are charming medieval villages, old chateaux, crumbling abbeys, and modern towns like everywhere in France. Still, most tourists seem to bypass them for the more famous destinations- Paris, of course, the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, Provence, and the Cote d’Azur. Like all the wine growing areas-- Burgundy, Champagne, Cote de Rhone, Bordeaux attracts the tasters and bon vivants. But what about the in-between areas? They are less traveled and less spoken for. A bit out of the way, or too much on the way, so overlooked between TGV- fast train stations. This is where the heartbeat of France lives. And this is where I call home.
When planning a visit or a move to France, which seems like a more doable option nowadays, I suggest you think outside that tourist-level box. Where do you live at home? Big city, small town, condominium or apartment, suburb or countryside? Consider that a starting point. Although I had lived in many locations before I landed in France, I recognized something here that attracted me tout de suite—open space and quiet.
There is a lot of working farmland around the small but vibrant city of Agen, where I live. Agen (population around 40,000) is anchored to the countryside like most of France's hub network for bureaucratic management—departments, cantons, prefectures, communes, and big box stores. But drive no more than 15 minutes from the center of Agen’s downtown shopping district, and you are right in the middle of the tractor-driven apple harvest, bright sunflower fields, or giant greenhouses producing tomatoes and peppers.
My France is also a patchwork of small family farms and tiny stone villages linked by canals, rivers, walking paths, bike trails, and small country lanes. On the larger scale, the Garonne River, the A62 autoroute, the fast TGV train line, and the slower Canal de Deux Mers dissect from west to east, ultimately linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. I generally consider anything south of that Garonne River’s meandering blue line and all the way to the Pyrenees and the Basque countries as Chez Nous—the very southwest of the Southwest.
Chez Nous- the Champêtre Cottage.
Look at this favorite painting above, which hangs near my desk. I found it in a Brocante/Antiquities shop in a small village near here. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the naive subject, the overall colors, and the painting style. Only after hanging it on the wall for a while did I start to see the many ‘mystical’ details: the pair of dancing hares on the right, the owl in the tree on the left, the lilies and ladder, the grape garland and white doves, and all the celestial activity from crescent moon and rainbow to shooting stars. To say it grew on me is understating my love for this image. As I begin the new Champêtre project, I’ve adopted this 19th-century tableau as a logo representing the mystical, magical way I perceive my real house here at Camont.
So when I invite you more intimately to chez nous, I invite you to this one-acre, overgrown canalside remnant of an 18th-century farm with pigeonnier, piggery, and barn now transformed into my five-bedroom home and creative residency, The Relais de Camont. This is where I define where I live and the place I call home.
Coming Next every Friday at Champêtre:
Ma Cuisine- my favorite recipes and kitchen tips, of course!
The Table at Camont- conversations with food & friends
French Market Etiquette- shopping as an art form.
Classic French cookbooks- favorites from my Kitchen stair bookshelf
Want to read more about my life before Champêtre and how I became the cook I am today? Read Finding France: A Memoir in Small Bites here in the archives for paid subscribers: Finding France Memoir. Paid subscribers can access all archives, recipes, memoirs, and free ebooks as offered.
For more photographs of Champêtre images, follow me on Instagram @katehill.france
For more information about writing and creative programs at Relais de Camont
I love this, discovering a little more about my own neighborhood… and I’d love to see more of your painting!
It thrills my soul to know places like this still exist.