Menu from the Midi: A Gastronomic Journey through the South of France

By Colin Duncan Taylor

Menu from the Midi explores French gastronomy from the farmer’s field to the dining room table. Concentrating on the South of France, the book is structured as a menu carefully compiled to give the reader a balanced diet of gastronomy, history, legend and local colour. Uniquely, it adds into this mix a celebration of the dedicated and passionate people who produce some of the finest raw ingredients and foodstuffs you are ever likely to taste.

Appreciating good food and wine needs the right ambiance, the right company and plenty of time. Sit back, relax and savour the oldest sparkling wine in the world, le Rolls-Royce of olives, pink garlic soup, meats of the black Gascon pig, the legendary cassoulet, cheese from the caves of Roquefort, and learn how the Midi’s ornate pigeon towers ensured a constant supply of roast pigeon.

No wonder the father of food journalism and gastronomic guides, Grimod de La Reynière, had this to say 200 years ago: ‘In good towns of the Midi, a great dinner is an affair of state. One speaks of it three months beforehand and digesting it lasts six weeks.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800466487

Colin Duncan Taylor

Colin Duncan Taylor has had a life-long passion with France - its language, its culture and its history. He has been exploring and living in the Lauragais for nearly twenty years. Before devoting himself to writing, his career included spells as a naval officer, management consultant and business owner.

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Copyright © 2021 Colin Duncan Taylor

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For Donna

Menu

Where is the Midi?

A Word from the Chef

Aperitif

1    Blanquette de Limoux

2    Lucques du Languedoc

3    Charcuterie

4    On the Rocks

The Wine List

5    Wine’s Wild West

Entrée

6    Pink Garlic Soup

7    Omelette aux Cèpes

Main Course

8    Cassoulet

9    Roast Pigeon

10   Assiette Végétarienne

Comfort Break

11    The Diet Detectives

Cheese, Dessert and Digestif

12    From the Caves of Roquefort

13    Mesturets

14    A Glass of Armagnac

After-dinner speech

A note from the author

Discover the Lauragais

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Where is the Midi?

The Midi is the southern part of France. As with most north-south divides, where it starts and where it ends is open to debate. For some, the Midi represents half the country, everywhere below a horizontal line stretching from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, through Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon to the Swiss border. To others, the Midi is the southernmost third of France, the sunny side of a line between Bordeaux, Valence and the Italian border (conveniently for geographers, this is also the 45th parallel).

If you cross the first line (the dotted line on Map 1), you are unlikely to notice any immediate difference. Cross the second, and you will. The culture is different, the mindset is different, the accent is different, and until a century or so ago even the language was different.¹ But for many people, the most striking difference is the change in the climate caused by the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the mountains of the Massif Central. The link with sunshine is not only a meteorological fact; it has become part of the language. The word midi with a lower-case ‘m’ means both midday and south. If you want to find the sun at noon, look due south towards the Midi.

The purpose of this book is to celebrate and discover the gastronomy of the Midi rather than discuss its weather, but climate has a profound effect on the food people grow and eat, the flavours and aromas of the dishes they prepare, and their style of dining. Come south of the 45th parallel, and these aspects of daily life change too, as I have been fortunate enough to observe at first hand for over 20 years. I have cultivated my own produce in all four seasons and taken careful note of the crops and animals my neighbours grow or raise. I have enjoyed countless home-cooked gastronomic meals in the homes of my French friends and spent many hours in the region’s eateries from humble cafés to Michelin-starred restaurants. I have discovered the history and legends, the festivals and fairs, and the cultural background surrounding the Midi’s most iconic culinary specialities. Day by day, bite by bite, sip by sip I have absorbed the true tastes and gastronomic traditions of the Midi.

Although the Midi can claim to have distinctive cultural, gastronomic and linguistic roots, administratively it does not exist. The closest it has come to officialdom was in the name of a region, but Midi-Pyrénées disappeared after a 2016 merger with Languedoc-Roussillon. The new region is called Occitanie, and today it holds centre stage in the Midi in terms of physical size and geographic position (see Map 2).

At the heart of Occitanie lies a land which used to be the county of the Lauragais. Catherine de’ Medici was its countess and Castelnaudary was her county town. The Lauragais is where I live, and Castelnaudary is where this gastronomic journey begins.

Endnotes

1 In 1914, more than ten million people spoke Languedocian, Provençal, Gascon or one of the other Occitan dialects. That was around a quarter of the French population.

A Word from the Chef

The gastronomic meal

The town clock strikes midday. It is midi in the Midi. Everyone stops for lunch.

The sleepy streets of Castelnaudary jolt to life as if they had received an electric shock. Cars, mopeds and bicycles course through the twisty lanes, and pedestrians surge out of buildings as if they had sensed the first tremors of an earthquake.

I was the sole customer when I chose a table on the restaurant terrace ten minutes ago. With the coming of autumn, tourists have vanished like the leaves on the trees lining the avenue, but now that the bells have struck noon, the empty seats fill with expectant diners. The waiter sprints among the tables handing out menus. He is working on the premise that all his customers need to be back at work by two.

The regular clients ignore the printed bill of fare; their eyes swivel towards the menu of the day chalked on a board by the door. Less-seasoned customers like me start to peruse the printed menu, but I am soon distracted by my neighbours. Most of them are in the company of colleagues or clients or friends, and they exchange words of welcome or exclamations of delight, accompanied by a brief handshake or a kiss on both cheeks.

I, in contrast, have come here alone to marshal my thoughts at the start of a new project that will combine my appetite for writing with my taste for eating, drinking and cooking. There can be no better way to begin my work than with a good lunch, but already I encounter a problem: I have the distinct impression that my fellow diners intend to enjoy the occasion just as much as the food that will grace their plates. And that raises a question: if I am to celebrate and investigate the gastronomy of the Midi, how broad a definition of gastronomy should I adopt?

The Académie Française first included the word gastronomie in its dictionary of 1835 along with the definition ’l’art de faire bonne chère’, or the art of eating well.² Various modern dictionaries add drinking to the eating, turn gastronomy into a science as well as an art, and extend its scope to include culinary preparation as well as appreciation.

Gastronomy also plays an important cultural role. In 2010, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) enshrined something new on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: ‘The gastronomic meal of the French is a customary social practice for celebrating important moments in the lives of individuals and groups, such as births, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, achievements and reunions. It is a festive meal bringing people together for an occasion to enjoy the art of good eating and drinking. The gastronomic meal emphasises togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature.’ ³ There is no mention of what is being eaten; this is all about the importance of how it is eaten.

As well as agreeable company and the right ambiance, appreciating good food and wine needs time, and the two-hour lunch break being enjoyed by most of my neighbours on this crowded terrace in Castelnaudary is bordering on the ascetic. Ideally you should devote the whole afternoon to culinary pleasures, or if other commitments make this impractical, perhaps you should stay for dinner. I have noted over the years that, although most people in the Midi profess to eat their main meal at midi, when they invite friends, it is usually in the evening.

For many years I lived near London and worked in the metropolis. Most members of my social circle were shorter of time than money, so sharing a meal with friends usually consisted of meeting in a restaurant at eight and leaving by ten-thirty because the babysitter had to be home by eleven. Since then I have been lucky enough to dine regularly in the homes of the people of the Midi, and I have become accustomed to lengthier affairs. Arriving at someone’s home at seven and still being at table at midnight is the norm, and I have observed that it makes no difference if our hosts are retired or if they need to be up at six in the morning to plough a field or drive to work in Toulouse.

If we are to believe the man who is regarded as the father of food journalism and gastronomic guides, even these prolonged feasts are merely a truncated version of the traditional approach to eating in the Midi. Among the most notable works of Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière were ten editions of the Almanach des Gourmands published between 1803 and 1812, and among his most memorable quotes are these words about dining in southern France: ‘In the provinces, and above all in good towns of the Midi where one makes excellent food, a great dinner is an affair of state. One speaks of it three months beforehand and digesting it lasts six weeks.’

All is not well in the kitchen

A poet called Joseph de Berchoux is often credited with inventing the word gastronomie when he used it in a poem published in 1801.⁴ At around the same time, French cooking began to establish itself as Europe’s pre-eminent cuisine, a striking achievement when one remembers that the country was at war with its neighbours for most of this period. French chefs such as Carême, Riquette and Ude demonstrated their skills in courts across Europe, and they spread their ideas more widely in society via recipe books and culinary treatises in English and French. Gourmets like Grimod de La Reynière and Brillat-Savarin wrote passionately about the pleasures of the table, and a chef from Alès called Charles Durand brought provincial cooking to national attention with a book containing 885 recipes from the Midi.

Despite this flowering of interest in the art of good cooking and fine dining, all was not well in the kitchen.

Until Europe began to industrialise towards the end of the 18th century, the common people mainly ate and drank local produce, and for the vast majority who lived in the countryside, most of their sustenance came from land they or their neighbours worked themselves, or the animals they kept upon it. But then, the advent of faster transportation, new techniques of food processing and preservation, and the depopulation of the countryside all nibbled away at this traditional proximity of the place of production and the point of consumption. Opportunities for fraud exploded.

In 1820, a German chemist called Friedrich Accum published a book in London entitled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons in which he asserts: ‘It would be difficult to mention a single article of food which is not to be met with in an adulterated state.’ ⁵ He catalogues how products such as beer and bread, cheese and cognac, olive oil and vinegar were all being adulterated or counterfeited, and he goes on to explain case by case how the lay person can unmask the fraudsters with a little knowledge of home chemistry. Unfortunately for his readers, technological developments during the subsequent decades allowed unscrupulous purveyors of human sustenance to develop countless new ways of disguising poor-quality or badly-deteriorated food.

Even today with independent food agencies, strict labelling regulations, random testing and stringent quality controls, it can be challenging for the authorities and impossible for the consumer to know the origin or even the composition of what is on someone’s plate. The supply chains for many foodstuffs have become bewilderingly complex.

Take the horsemeat scandal of 2013, for example. It started when frozen beef burgers in Ireland were found to contain up to 29% of a cheaper ingredient: horsemeat. Follow-up tests were carried out in Britain on frozen lasagne and spaghetti bolognese sold by the major supermarkets. The ‘beef’ in some of these dishes turned out to be 100% horse, and they had all come from Comigel, a French company that supplied leading supermarket chains across Europe. Comigel subcontracted its ready-meal production to a subsidiary, Tavola, in Luxembourg. Tavola bought its ‘beef’ from a French company called Spanghero, and Spanghero bought it from Draap Trading Limited which was registered in Cyprus but run by a Dutchman who had already been convicted of passing off horsemeat as halal beef (clue: try spelling Draap backwards, and you have the Dutch word for horse). Draap said it bought the ‘beef’ in Romania, but the Romanian government insisted that the meat was legally exported and correctly labelled as ‘horse’. After a lengthy investigation, the French authorities concluded that the point in this labyrinthine supply chain where the meat’s labelling had mysteriously changed from ‘horse’ to ‘beef’ was Spanghero. Where was Spanghero based before it went bust? In Castelnaudary.

The best possible ingredients

I am sure that you, dear reader, have not opened this book to learn about budget burgers and frozen lasagne. I suspect you already count yourself among the growing army of food lovers who truly care, and sometimes worry, about the origin of their food and how it is produced. So please treat the previous section as a health warning, a reminder of the hazards of industrialised food production and global distribution. Instead, we are going to explore the authentic cuisine of the south of France, but first, let’s consider the wine list.

In his book, Friedrich Accum also observes that few commodities have been adulterated to a greater extent than wine. This is an age-old problem. Writing 2,000 years ago in his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder makes frequent complaints about malpractices such as wines from Narbonne being darkened with smoke and flavoured with aloes, or one wine being passed off as another.⁶

It is perhaps no accident that wine was among the first foodstuffs to benefit from legal protection of its quality and origin. In the 11th century, the counts of Toulouse introduced production rules to protect the quality of wines from their vineyards around Gaillac, and in 1387 the town’s winemakers began stamping their barrels with what is probably the earliest example of a quality mark in the world of wine. In 1716, Chianti became the first wine to have a legally-defined geographic area of production. Champagne followed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and from 1936 a system of appellations was gradually extended to cover wines from all parts of France. Before long, similar schemes were introduced in many other wine producing countries.

More recently, the European Union has applied similar concepts to a far wider range of foodstuffs which have been recognised as having unique links to a particular geographical area. Under the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) scheme, every part of production, processing and preparation must be carried out in the specific region. To obtain the less-stringent Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) label, at least one of these stages must take place in the designated area.⁷ Italy and France lead the field in terms of the number of food and drink products protected in this way. In the Midi, they include varieties of beans, cheeses, fruits, grains, herbs, honey, meats (cured and fresh), oils, poultry, pulses, seafood, vegetables, wines and spirits.

The art of eating well starts with fine ingredients like these. In the Midi, the gourmet can enjoy a whole menu based on local specialities, many of them unique, and some with international reputations. You can enjoy Lucques olives from the Languedoc, cured pork products from the foothills of the Pyrenees, soup made with pink garlic from Lautrec, omelettes made with boletus mushrooms from the forests of the Montagne Noire, cassoulet from Castelnaudary, and the profusion of magnificent pigeon towers is a reminder of the culinary importance of pigeon before the invention of artificial fertilisers all but erased the bird from the menu. There is even something for vegetarians: the founder of Spanghero went on to create a new company in Castelnaudary which makes food products that are 100% vegetarian and 100% local.⁸ The caves of Roquefort are close by, and many other powerful cheeses fight for a place on the cheese board. Lastly, there is an enormous cellar of wines and spirits waiting to be uncorked.

Commencing with an aperitif

Back on my restaurant terrace in Castelnaudary, the waiter returns with his pad and asks if I would care for an aperitif. I hesitate between a glass of the oldest sparkling wine in the world, discovered down the road in Limoux, or Get 27, a mint liqueur invented in Revel a few kilometres to the north. I decide to order both because I am embarking on a serious project where no stone can be left unturned.

When my drinks arrive, I start with the Blanquette de Limoux, much beloved by Thomas Jefferson and many others, but surprisingly unknown elsewhere in France. I half-listen to the fizz of the bubbles and continue studying the menu. Is there too much to write about? I intend to use a broad definition of gastronomy, and living in the countryside of the Midi as I do, I am aware of the crucial role played by the dedicated and passionate people who produce some of the finest raw ingredients you are ever likely to taste. Ninety-five per cent of our food has its origins in the soil,⁹ but few works about gastronomy reward these producers with the recognition they deserve.

I switch to Get 27 and the fumes of menthol help to clarify my thoughts. A menu should not resemble a supermarket buyer’s catalogue listing every conceivable product. Instead, it should be a harmonious selection of dishes chosen with love and affection by a skilled chef. Like any well-constructed menu, the fare I am about to offer you in this book is my own personal choice, selected to give you a balanced diet of gastronomy, history, legend and local colour, from the farmer’s field to the dining room table.

The dishes on my menu from the Midi are not elitist; neither does their preparation require the services of a great chef like Carême, Riquette or Ude. Instead, they are typical of the food prepared and eaten at home by the inhabitants of the Midi, and you will also find most of them in restaurants across the region. In case you want to try making them yourself, I shall add in a few recipes, some of them tried and tested, others included as historical curiosities.

How shall we begin this gastronomic journey? By following some sound advice given in UNESCO’s declaration on dining the French way: ‘The gastronomic meal should respect a fixed structure, commencing with an aperitif.’

Bon appétit!

Endnotes

2 Bonne chère shares the same Anglo-Norman roots as the more versatile English phrase good cheer which can mean (i) good food and drink, (ii) being in good spirits, or (iii) merrymaking in general.

3 UNESCO website: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gastronomic-meal-of-the-french-00437.

4 Berchoux, Joseph de. La gastronomie ou de l’homme des champs à table. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Giguet, 1801. Retrieved online from: https://play.google.com/books.

5 Accum, Friedrich Christian. A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820 (page 3). Retrieved online from: https//archive.org.

6 Pliny the Elder. The Natural History of Pliny Volume III. Translated by Bostock, John and HT Riley. Ebook edition, Project Gutenberg, 2019 (Book XIV, chapter 8).

7 In French, PDO is called Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP) and PGI is called Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP). For completeness, there is also Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC), similar to AOP/PDO, but the label only protects the product’s name in France (despite this, some French products use the AOC label even though they are entitled to an AOP).

8 Laurent Spanghero had no personal involvement in the horsemeat scandal: his sons had sold the company in 2009 but it continued to trade under their family name.

9 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Healthy soils are the basis for healthy food production. Retrieved online from: http://www.fao.org/soils-2015.

Aperitif

Blanquette de Limoux

Lucques du Languedoc

Charcuterie

On the Rocks

1

Blanquette

de Limoux

The longest carnival in the world

I am bewitched by the masked dancer. His glittering wand is longer than that owned by any wizard. He glides in my direction and reaches out a white-gloved hand to remove my cap. I know what is coming next and I dare not move. With his other hand, he pats me on the head and I can feel the weight of the confetti. Shredded paper is light, so I know I have been baptised with an excessively generous handful. The dancer replaces my cap and resumes his slow, mesmerising steps. Self-consciously I remove my cap and shake my head. Confetti cascades to the ground. I glance around me and am reassured to see that all my fellow spectators look as if they have wandered outside in a snowstorm.

My dancer is still within touching distance and I stare at his mask, curious to know if there is a genuine smile behind those blue painted lips. Maybe the eyes will tell me, but through the lozenges of the eyeholes the eyelids appear to be closed in a moment of transcendental bliss. My location suggests a more secular possibility: perhaps this gentleman has simply drunk too much Blanquette de Limoux. Or perhaps I should say ‘lady’, for in truth I can no more tell the age or sex of the person behind the mask than I can judge his or her state of inebriation.

I admire the costumes of the other dancers in this particular troupe. Each outfit is made from two colours of fabric, one of them always cream and the other selected from a dazzling palette that includes gold, purple, scarlet, aquamarine and French navy blue. All the costumes are cut in the same style: a four-pointed jester’s hat, a long tunic with a wide collar that covers the shoulders and upper arms, plain cream trousers, and surprisingly everyday shoes. I note that all the dancers have chosen comfort over style, and either the women of Limoux have unusually large feet and a penchant for thick black leather, or this lot are mostly men.

Two accessories are essential to the dancer’s performance. First is the wand, around two metres long (six feet six inches), and made from reeds gathered on the Mediterranean coast just after the first frosts of January. Second is the confetti bag, coloured to match each dancer’s costume, long enough to sling over the shoulder, and large enough to hold several kilograms of shredded paper at each end. Eight tonnes will be used during this year’s carnival, and I idly watch one of the dancers toss a handful skywards. The cloud of paper hesitates on high before deciding to drift back to earth. Nothing happens quickly at the Carnival of Limoux.

Venice may boast the oldest and Rio the largest, but Limoux claims to have the longest carnival in the world. Around 600 dancers belonging to 30 different troupes ensure that these festivities can be sustained three times a day every weekend – plus Mardi Gras – from the end of January until early April.

The Carnival of Limoux is unusually compact. Here, there are no carnival floats, no long parades. Events unfold in the intimacy of the medieval square with a graceful beauty which has been described as a miraculous combination of immobility and movement. Spectators have all the time in the world to take photographs and admire the masquerade because they themselves are an integral part of the performance.

Each procession starts at one of the cafés on the square and continues to the next, and there are so many watering-holes beneath the arcades, the road is never a long one. I have been observing this particular troupe – Les Pitchouns – since they started in the southern corner of the square. They have taken 20 minutes to advance 40 metres to the steps of Le Grand Café, and their dance would be soporific if it were not for the loud rhythmic music of the band – brass, woodwind and percussion.

A purple-clad performer pauses at the top of the café steps and waves at the crowd. I wave back and, to my surprise, nothing prevents me following the troupe inside. The dancers take off their masks for a breather, and reveal the cotton balaclavas they are wearing underneath.

The musicians join us. Their russet jackets and black felt hats make a drab contrast with the colourful costumes of the dancers. They lay down their instruments but the decibels inside the bar are still deafening. Above the clamour of people ordering drinks and shouting greetings, I hear a volley of shots. Instinctively I duck my head, but no one else flinches. A cork lands at my feet and I look up and spot a barmaid filling glasses from freshly-opened bottles of Blanquette de Limoux. This ancient drink is the town’s other claim to fame: Blanquette de Limoux promotes itself as the oldest sparkling wine in the world, and there is no better place to taste it than at the carnival. These festive companions share a heritage that stretches back to the 16th century, and according to some sources, the slow rhythmic gestures of the carnival dance represent the peasants pressing the grapes with their feet.

Naturally I order a glass for myself. It’s the end of the bottle and I ask the barmaid to let me see the label. The most prominent feature is a big pink number ‘1’ and the words ‘Première Bulle’ or ‘The First Bubble’. A black medallion below the pink foil neck proclaims in gold letters, ‘Sieur d’Arques. Depuis 1531’, and from the back of the bottle I learn that in 1531 a Benedictine monk from Limoux invented the first bubbly in the world. I set the bottle down on the bar and decide that these bold claims call for further investigation, but not right now. This evening I am here to enjoy the carnival and a glass or two of this historic wine.

The legend of Saint-Hilaire

Saint-Hilaire lies halfway between Carcassonne and Limoux amid gently rolling countryside, a bucolic patchwork of pasture, vineyard and woodland adorned with the occasional rocky outcrop and slender cypress.

The abbey