Sud de France

Caroline Conran

• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780714520414
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Languedoc-Roussillion (not forgetting the Midi-Pyrénées and Aquitaine) are the regions of France most settled by English expatriates. Caroline Conran has spent much time there since the early 1970s and her collection of recipes reflects years of travel, conversation, cooking, eating and drinking. Hhere she concentrates upon this single region of Languedoc which curls up from the Spanish border, along the Mediterranean coast as far as the Rhône valley. This is not polite France, this is 'in your face' France; it's history buried amidst the Crusades and Cathars, its towns and cities - Nimes, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Montpellier, Beziers - making up a fiercely independent region. Its people are passionate about rugby, about hunting and foraging, with a cuisine of their own, more Southern, simpler, more earthy, and less influenced by the Michelin style of cooking than the rest of France. There is information on the particular specialities of the pays, such as chestnuts, sweet onions, Bouzigues mussels and oysters (shellfish reared in the Bassin de Thau), salt cod, poufres (baby octopus), charcuterie, salades sauvages (salads of wild plants), the rose coloured garlic of Lautrec, wild asparagus and local mushrooms. There will be descriptions of places where oysters, truffles, chestnuts or calçots - a giant spring onion, eaten roasted on a fire of vine-prunings - are the obsession of everyone in the community. Caroline Conran is a writer with a quiver of successful books in her armoury.

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Chapter One

The Tastes of Languedoc

24This chapter introduces some of the special foods of Languedoc – favourite ingredients and local produce, both familiar and unfamiliar. Some have a Spanish connection, or are special to the French Pays catalan; others have Moorish roots; many are products of the Mediterranean, like the oysters and mussels of the coastal lagoons.

Foraging is important in Languedoc; there are local methods of foraging and hunting in the mountains and forests, and practical ways of eating these free wild foods.

It would be impossible to find room for everything of interest, so I have simply described some of the things to look out for, and attempted to introduce a few of the unusual ingredients of the pays, all part of the siren song of the Sud de France that makes us long to be there.

Catalan Influences in Languedoc-Roussillon

I spent several summers in Spanish Catalonia. We ate well there, living on pan amb tomàt (Occitan, pa amb tomàquet in Catalan), tomato bread (see page 80), and grilled fish, prawns or chicken. More recently, I encountered Colman Andrews’ book, Catalan Cuisine, and A Catalan Cookery Book by Irving Davis, and I began to realize what a fantastic and special way of cooking the Catalan people have developed over the centuries, part Spanish, part Roman, part Moorish. The cooking of Catalonia has ancient roots, and the Roussillon has the same heritage; it is still the Pays catalan today.

Catalan food includes salt cod, beans and emphatic deep-flavoured sauces. It has anchovies, pigs’ feet and snails, grilled onion shoots (calçots) dipped in a spicy nut sauce, aubergine and peppers baked in hot wood ash, duck stewed with peaches, paella, potato omelettes, crème caramel, fresh figs, and toasted hazelnuts still warm from the oven. It revels in saffron, nuts and paprika. Every kind of chilli pepper, fresh and dried, mild and hot, green or red or black, makes a contribution and blood sausage and chorizo are key ingredients.

The Moors were the eighth-century conquerors of Spain and part of what is now southern France. They brought Arab influences and spices into the kitchens and streets of the western Languedoc. Even in the mountains the smell of cumin perfumed the air; we know this as it is mentioned as a spice brought to the village of Montaillou in the early fourteenth century by pedlars. The book about this village, made vivid by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s painstaking dissection of the 25trial documents of the Inquisition as it pursued Cathar heretics, offers a bird’s-eye view of home and farm life, right down to what they ate (cabbage soup with bacon, snails, wild mushrooms, ewe’s milk cheeses), the way the women carried their bread (on their heads) and the kind of game they preferred for their pies (ptarmigan, pheasant and squirrel).

Catalan cuisine is essentially natural; it is not expensive but it can be quite complex and even quite fiddly – lots of pounding, which is made much easier by using a food processor.

Colman Andrews laments the fact that there is not much of a record of French Catalan food, but food historian, writer and cook Éliane Thibaut-Comelade has documented it thoroughly over the last few decades and she paints a colourful and detailed picture. She describes the legacy left by the Moors as crucial – it has given a taste for meat with fruit, for hot and sweet, sweet and salty and sweet and sharp flavours.

Nuts are often ground and used to thicken sauces; cinnamon and chocolate appear in savoury dishes as well as sweet ones; poultry might be cooked with prawns as in paella; and both meat and vegetables can function as dessert. In several Pézenas bakeries, little pies containing candied lemon peel and lamb, the Petits Pâtés de Pézenas, are still available today. Meat with preserved fruit is a popular flavour combination, for example spiced pickled figs or fig or peach chutney are eaten with roasted or boiled meat. These preserves are made with white wine vinegar, preferably home-made (vinagre d’hostal), cinnamon, cloves and sugar.

From Spain comes a love of mixing sea and mountain (mar i muntanya), shellfish and game birds or chicken, sausage and rabbit with snails, 26pork and chicken with squid. Rice dishes cooked in a cassola (a large, deep earthenware casserole) or a cazuela (an earthenware paella dish made north of Barcelona), such as costellous au riz, are ubiquitous; paprika abounds; and omelettes are thick, creamy tortillas (or truita in Catalan).

Although Languedoc is a major olive oil producer, Catalans like to cook in a mixture of lard and olive oil. Catalan sausages and black puddings are famously good, as are their ham and bacon – once enjoyed when slightly rancid, though less so today.

Many Spanish and also Italian immigrants ended up in the coastal towns of Perpignan, Narbonne, Agde and Sète. Pasta is indigenous and supermarket shelves are crammed with all shapes including fideu (Catalan, fideo in Spanish) – a local vermicelli – often cooked in fish stock with paprika, monkfish, calamars and prawns.

Le Ranxo – carnival feasts, repas de carnaval – are organized all over the Pays catalan, celebrating omelettes, snails, artichokes, the pig or anything else. They have been going on since the Middle Ages. Special celebration dishes such as riz ‘a la cassola’ – rice with vegetables, meat and seafood – escudella (page 139) and paella are their staples.

Black Truffles (La truffe)

Around Christmas and all through January there is truffle mania in Languedoc, particularly in the Gard. There are truffle festivals and fairs scattered across the region and chefs dream all night of new recipes involving truffles. Recent delights have included a hot toasted truffle sandwich fried in olive oil and served with a glass of iced champagne, black truffle macaroons, and truffled soup of boudin blanc.

In Moussoulens, north of Carcassonne, the January truffle fair, the Ampélofolies, is a fête day. It is often freezing cold and all around the centre of the village are stalls selling local winter produce (confit of duck, duck breasts and giblets, turkeys and other poultry from the Cabardes, nuts from Narbonne, spicy gingerbread, rosemary or lavender honey, huge mountain cheeses, charcuterie, bread, nougat, chocolate with nuts, rose petal jam, live snails, onions and the rose garlic of Lautrec), as well as hot food to keep out the cold (little meat pies, chips, grilled duck-breasts or Toulouse sausages, tripe, hot chestnuts, millas or polenta, beignets, oysters and omelettes). Stalls 27overflow with plastic cups of local wine, people picnic and snack everywhere, spilling onto the grass roundabout and verges, even into the bus shelter.

At the very centre, under the bare trees, trestle tables are set out, with a rope barrier round to keep jostling customers at bay. At a given time, country men and women (and children) drift in, carrying bags, baskets, holdalls, tins and boxes, from all of which exudes a powerful smell. Small hunting spaniels run amongst the excited crowd. The brushed truffles are laid out in baskets and on boards. ‘Tonton a faim’, a small marching band, plays loudly, while the buyers decide, from a distance, whose truffles they like best. The Mayor announces that there are altogether 22kg of tubers to be sold. Everyone cheers.

Finally, a figure appears holding a gun which he fires into the air; this is the signal for all the buyers (including me) to duck under the rope and rush forward to their chosen dealer, shoving their way to the front to grab the best truffles. It is hugely chaotic, competitive and exciting.

The knowing buyers choose round, large, smooth truffles which they weigh in their hands and sniff before buying, to make sure they are not worm-eaten and smell sufficiently strong. Some people pick out one, others five or six. Then they are weighed, wrapped in a twist of paper and put into little plastic pouches.

The idea is to take them home and use them immediately in omelettes and so forth, or to make pâtés, or to preserve them for an important occasion, for a truffled sauce for beef or chicken. Many buy truffles to eat at the Christmas or New Year’s dinner, but they are at their best at the end of January and the first week in February.

There are quite a few of these small country fairs going on through January but, like the truffle itself, they can be hard to find, partly because of the general air of secrecy that envelopes the trade, partly due to the unreliability of the truffle – some years plenty, some years none – so these markets are not widely publicized. In order to track them down, contact the local Syndicat des Trufficulteurs.

In more sophisticated Uzès, they celebrate ‘La journée de la truffe’ which starts with ‘Une nuit de la truffe’, when all the best chefs get together to cook a magnificent truffle dinner, followed the next day by a truffle market. Demonstrations by truffling pigs and dogs show animals who seem to be very happy in their work. There are truffle...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Maps of Languedoc and Languedoc-Roussillon
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Tastes of Languedoc
• Chapter Two: Basic Recipes, Sauces, Dressings and Aïoli
• Chapter Three: First Courses, Salads, Gratins and Eggs
• Chapter Four: Soups, Winter and Summer
• Chapter Five: Fish and Seafood
• Chapter Six: Poultry and Other Birds
• Chapter Seven: Meat
• Chapter Eight: Vegetables, Pulses and Wild Foods
• Chapter Nine: Desserts, Preserves and Baking
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright
• Back Cover