The French, as we know, are a practical people, especially when it comes to food and drink. For example, a good, sporting journal much concerned with the hunting and killing of wild birds, animals and fish, also gives good space to their cooking in the most delicious and nourishing way. In this journal you can fantasise about the lovely kitchen odours that arise from the various wild ducks you imagine you have brought home for the pot, recipes for roasting or making a terrine of your mallard or wigeon or teal. And there is a page on suitable wines. More, they tell you (or your wife) how to make the delectable creme de marrons from the sweet chestnuts. This is a preserve which you can presumably later consume, spread on bread or used in the form of a pudding. And then a couple of pages on the baking of Breton pastries and cakes. Next, to garden hints. And if each year you are impatient when your chives go down for a couple of months, fortunately to arise again, the journal advises you how to avoid completely the gap, or at least to close it somewhat. The trick is that you should already have cut down part of your chive supply to ground level and covered it with a cloche. The first ray of sun in the new year, says the journal, will bring them up again. Hope so. Pages and pages, of course, of advertisements for guns and fishing tackle, and the most important section of small advertisements: "Marriages and meetings". It is divided into sections: Women under 30 years, Women from 30 to 50 years, and Women over 50 - the largest section. All very proper. Sometimes just "to share the future" or "view to marriage". Men are similarly compartmentalised and again the biggest section is for over-50s.
But to the hunting, heart of the magazine, and among the advice about your dog, when you are after woodcock, about fishing for grayling (a lovely salmonid which we do not have in Ireland), a large part of the journal (Le Chasseur Francais) is concerned with the wild boar which is very important now that small game is so rare in France. What an increase. In 198384 82,400 of these huge creatures were shot. In the 1997-98 season 322,767. The hunters themselves have encouraged the rise of the animal in several ways. There is a rule: shoot only the young, never the sow. The animal creates havoc among crops. One picture shows 30 odd corpses. Maize suffers most. In the South, with so much carricue or dry, stony country at the Mediterranean, they can't do much damage.