Central SW France - our holiday destination
"this is goose territory" Diane Holuigue
ME - I THINK IT'S DUCK TERRITORY
It's a lucky dip again and this time I went to the shelf that houses my rather more coffee table books. The book I chose is now rather old (1992) - last century in fact. But it's one of my favourite books, little used now, but much used in the past. It's one of my 'go to' books if I want to cook something classically French. And it's so beautifully illustrated with glorious photographs of French life and scenery. Each chapter has a different author - this one has Diane Holuigue who is a noted writer about France here in Australia. So a coffee table book in the sense that it is glossy but it does have good recipes in it too.
So back to the page I opened - which happens to be the map at the beginning of the chapter on the central south west, which includes the Dordogne, Gascony and - she says Provence - I say Languedoc. We know the Languedoc part of it pretty well and have also visited the Dordogne (too many English and too, too touristy we think - even though it is beautiful). But we do not know Gascony so this year we are going to correct this. We are starting in Narbonne and gradually moving westwards and then back eastwards in a meandering sort of way to Nice where our flight home begins.
The wonderful thing about France I find is that if you stay somewhere for a week, you find you barely scratch the surface of what there is to see and do in the immediate area, which means that you can go back to almost the same area again and still see something new. This time we are revisiting Narbonne and Carcassonne - but not quite where we have been before and I already have my eye on some places we haven't been that are near there - Gruissan, Castelnaudary, Castres. Then we are moving in to Gascony proper near Auch - an area that is completely new to us and then north east to our Australian friends' house which is near Montauban and a bit closer to the Dordogne. So really looking forward to that.
But going back to the food. Yes - this is the part of France that produces all the foie gras - which, apart from its production being somewhat barbaric, I really don't like - and goose fat and goose itself. These I like. But my memory of the Dordogne, and Languedoc too is that duck is the thing you find on every menu. I even remember a meal at a table d'hôte where most of the meal consisted of duck of some kind or another. But there are also prunes from Agen and lamb and pork - not to mention wild boar. And let's not forget Cassoulet - also heavily duck and goose laden. Oh and truffles - most of the country's truffles come from here. Diane Holuigue maintains that soup is a really big thing here too. We shall see. Wine - not so much - Bordeaux is a bit further north - but there is cognac and armagnac to make up for that and the sparkling wine of Limoux - which claims to have been first with this particular kind of wine. The Languedoc of course, traditionally provided most of France's 'vin ordinaire', but they seem to be trying to change their image from this these days and are moving rather more upmarket. We shall see.
Mind you, most of those foods are wintry sort of things. So it will be interesting to see what else there is - fish on the coast I guess - and capsicum is a big thing down towards the Spanish border. I am really, really looking forward to it as we move into Autumn proper here and the nights close in.
"The three provinces boast some of the most beautiful and varied countryside in all France. Here the Massif Central descends to the soft, undulating hillsides of Gascony, which in turn lead to the mountainous Pyrenees and the border with Spain. Rivers tumbling down from the central plateau over the ages have carved a landscape of spectacular gorges, above which perch castles and towns. prior to the Hundred Years War there were said to be as many as one thousand castles standing on Perigord's rocky heights."
