A Small, Unique Act of Patriotism, With Cherry or Custard Filling

Late this summer my friend Jeanine Pereuil died. She had lived her entire 78 years in the same town in the valley of the Nivelle River, where whitewashed houses with red shutters cluster into villages, the pastures look like soft chartreuse pillows, the mountain crests like broken teeth, and the trout-filled river storms past rocky banks. It is not hard to see why one might love this place.

Jeanine was a Basque, and although she feared such words, she was what Americans, who love tossing this label around these days, would call a patriot. Unlike many patriots, however, she abhorred violence and never killed anyone. Her only war experience was in the 1940s, turning a blind eye as refugees -- American pilots, French Jews and others -- scurried past the family bakery, avoiding Gestapo headquarters across the street, and headed up the mountains to nearby Spain. She married one of the refugees, a Parisian.

Though she embraced all things Basque, like many of her people she feared and disliked the extremists who used violence to promote Basque nationalism. Her patriotism -- in fact, her entire life -- was expressed in the baking of a cake, and she baked more than a million of them in her lifetime.

Her family had a shop in a town the French call St Pee-sur-Nivelle and the Basques call Senpere. The shop makes only one kind of cake, though in modern times it has started selling some bread and cookies made from the cake dough. The cake is usually called gateau Basque, French for "Basque cake," and like the Basques themselves both the name and origin of the cake are uncertain. It is buttery, and there are two versions that are commonly sold. One is filled with xapata, the Basque name for the black cherries famous in the nearby town of Itxassou. The other is filled with a custard cream. The French name, the buttery taste of the cake and the cream filling all suggest French rather than Basque origins.

But some years ago I investigated the history of this cake, which was how I met Jeanine. The cake seems to have originally had a Basque name, bistochak, and may not have been buttery at all, more like a cherry-filled bread. The cream filling probably came later.

I was passing through Senpere, the town where a farmhand in 1857 invented the game known in the U.S. as jai alai and which is played in every Basque village. I saw Jeanine's sign advertising "gateau Basque bread" and, not realizing that there was a comma missing, thought that perhaps this was a place that made the original bistochak.