Soul providers
Michael McMahon
The Benedictines are named after St Benedict, the Bridgettines are named after St Bridget, and the Chocolatines are named — by me, anyway — after an exquisite confection shaped like a champagne cork. The French use the word to describe a pain au chocolat, but I think that the good sisters of the Abbaye NotreDame d’Igny, which is tucked into a pretty fold in the countryside west of Reims, have a better right to it. Everybody else knows them as Cistercians (named after the order’s mother house, Cîteaux), but when I made a flying visit to them last spring, I rechristened them in my imagination after one bite of their ‘bouchons de champagne’, which are made of high-cocoa chocolate filled with a mousse of puréed nuts and raisins macerated in marc. That bite cost me the best part of ten bob: those corks cost two euros a pop.
If you are wondering what virgins consecrated to lives of prayer and self-denial are doing making such expensive worldly delights for the rest of us, let me tell you: they are earning the more modest crust they put on their own plates. They have to. The days when monasteries and convents could rely on income from wide acres or the invested dowries of novices have passed. Now, like grand country houses that let in paying visitors and sell them jam, tea towels and postcards, abbeys have to make and flog gift-shop produce to keep afloat.
This is good news for those of us who like treats temporal as well as treats spiritual. Monks and nuns put their souls as well as their hearts into making the goodies that they sell to keep the Romanesque and Gothic roofs over their heads. Some still till fields or tend animals as the ‘work’ part of their ora et labora lives, but many more make high-quality goods that are sold at the abbey gate or over the internet. The faithful have a duty to support them in these prayerful enterprises, and it is a duty that can be embraced enthusiastically. Their chocolates, biscuits, cakes, tisanes, honeys and crystallised fruits are almost all better than any you can buy in an ordinary shop.
The Abbaye de Brialmont in Tilff, Belgium, grows and dries ‘agaric brun’ mushrooms that have a chocolate-edged flavour of quite extraordinary depth. The Abbaye de Fleury in Saint-Benoît-surLoire makes mint pastilles that taste like mint, and not like the chemical concoctions stacked by supermarket check-outs or sold in sweet shops. The monks of the Abbey of Ste-Madeleine in Le Barroux make a confit of honey and chestnuts that is a marriage made, if not in Heaven, then in Provence, which is probably the next best thing. They also make olive oil that tastes as sunny as it looks, and a characterful Côtes du Ventoux called Cuvée du Monastère that is full of the warm south. I reckon that if Keats had got his teeth round some, his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ might have taken a rather jollier turn after verse two.
Other boozy by-products of abbey life include bottles that now enjoy a commercial life of their own. The Benedictines no longer own or make the excellent liqueur they invented, but the Carthusians still contribute their prayerful input to Chartreuse — and it shows. The monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon have been mak ing ‘tonic wine’ there for more than a century, though I can’t tell you if it’s any good, for I have never tasted it. I do know, however, that it is highly appreciated by teenagers in the west of Scotland, where it is known as ‘Bucky’ and consumed in greater quantities than the Rule of St Benedict recommends.
These brands are made in bulk and can be bought almost anywhere, but the really interesting stuff is hand-made in small batches. I’d love to try the ‘elixir made from selected organically grown plants, distilled according to an ancestral recipe’ by the monks of the Abbaye de la Maigrauge in Switzerland. I don’t suppose that their ‘eau verte’ will ever catch on in the Gorbals — it may be 55 per cent alcohol by volume, but it only comes in 20cl bottles. It does, however, sound like just the cure-all my doctor might order if I ever dared visit him, for it claims ‘des vertus digestives, antispasmodiques, et désinfectantes’. That ought to sort out the morning tummy troubles and shakes. The recommended dose is a few drops on a sugarlump, but I have a fancy that a slug might slip down well with soda on ice.
Prayerful hands also produce noncomestible luxuries. If you want to wash your hair in shampoo made from natural plants and minerals, and not formulated in a factory from E numbers, the monks of the Monastery of the Assumption, between Grenoble and Chambéry, make just the stuff — and they make matching bath soaps, too. The community at Notre Dame de Maylis, in Les Landes, makes traditional polish from pine essences and beeswax; it smells quite as prettily as it shines. At the Monastère des Ermites-deMarie, near Perthus, they breed pedigree Pyrenean mountain dogs. The nuns of the Carmel d’Yzeron, east of Lyon, embroider napkins and tablecloths, and the Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem in Strasbourg make zithers.
These days you don’t have to visit the monastery where something is made in order to buy it. Many European abbeys and convents now operate under the co-operative umbrella of an organisation called ‘Monastic’, through which they sell each other’s merchandise, though I don’t suppose those puppies get put out on other places’ shelves. This stocksharing has turned continental abbey and convent shops into something like our own National Trust gift shops — but something better, too, because the gifts in them are the products of living places and not centrally manufactured souvenirs of houses that have become museums.
So, although I have never been to the Abbaye de Brialmont in Belgium, I was able to buy 100 grammes of its monkish mushrooms (for €10.50) in the shop at Le Barroux, which is packed floor to ceiling with hand-made bread at one end, hand-painted icons at the other, and all sorts of other goodies in between. The abbey church was packed, too, for Le Barroux preserves the unreformed liturgy in its beautiful entirety, which is why the community is blessed with so many vocations, and so many lay folk travel there from afar to join in their worship. To attend Mass in the abbey church of Ste-Madeleine is to stand in the antechamber to Paradise, and I’d give up my last bouchon de champagne to be able to stand there again. But I wouldn’t promise not to call in on the Chocolatines on my return journey, for it would be a serious sin of omission to fail to support them by buying some more.
Many of the items mentioned here (but not the dogs) can be ordered over the internet at www.monastic-euro.org.
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