France

Summit cocktail gives Cognac real sass

Posted on by Pat
I was surprised to learn at the Camus Cognac House that the French are rather tepid Cognac drinkers. Sales in France account for only a paltry 3 percent of the brand's market. (America, by the way, is the leader, followed by Russia and Asia.) Perhaps that Gallic lack of enthusiasm spurred the Cognac trade association to assemble mixologists to devise new cognac cocktails that might give the storied brandy a modern edge. One such concoction, the Cognac Summit, appears to have caught on and a great place to try it is at the Bar Louise at the Hôtel François Premier Cognac Centre. It occupies a gorgeous, newly renovated old building right in the heart of town. Young mixologist Yoann Saillard (above) hails from Normandy and...Read More

Learning to blend Cognac at Camus

Posted on by Pat
“You cannot make a mistake,” Frederic Dezauzier assured my small group as we filed into a blending workshop at the Camus Cognac house. We must have looked intimidated by the sparkling clean room and the array of beakers and flasks waiting for us on an orderly workbench. I pushed memories of high school chemistry class out of my mind and concentrated on the four small glasses of amber liquid at each work station. “The best cognac is the cognac you prefer,” the former cellar master and global brand ambassador told us with a smile. Founded in 1863, Camus is the largest Cognac house still in family hands. On a quick tour en route to the blending room, I learned that Ugni-Blanc, Colombard, and Folle Blanche...Read More

Harvesting sea salt on France’s Île de Ré

Posted on by Pat
Sea salt may be hot, but it's hardly new. Since the 12th century, the “sauniers” on the Île de Ré have been literally raking it in. These days about 85 members of the Cooperative of the Sauniers of Île de Ré use the same traditional methods to harvest more than 2,600 tons of salt each summer. With its long, sunny days and mild breezes, this island off the west coast of France near La Rochelle has the perfect conditions for salt production, according to Hervé Rault, who learned the craft from his grandfather. Rault (pictured above) also has a steady job maintaining the dikes and marshes, but harvesting salt is his passion. “I do this after my other work,” he says, “just for fun. The...Read More

French chefs, Spanish ham & summer fruits

Posted on by Pat
During a recent visit to Île de Ré and Île d'Aix, the unspoiled islands off the west coast of France not far from Cognac, I also enjoyed a taste of Spain. In early September, swimmers and bicyclists were making the most of the warm, summer weather and chefs were looking for ways to highlight the last of the ripe tomatoes and melons. Several turned to Spain's jamón serrano, an air-dried mountain ham, to add salt and umami to balance the sweetness of the luscious, ripe fruit. At Le Grenier à Sel (www.grenierasel.fr/) in the town Ars en Ré on Île de Ré, a perfect starter consisted of a tartare of tomato mixed with the chopped ham. The next day, I encountered a slightly different version...Read More

Three (delicious) flavors of ‘bistro’ in Montreal

Posted on by Pat and David
Our latest book, Food Lovers' Guide to Montreal, is finally hitting the bookstores in the U.S. and Canada. The city has always been one of our favorite places for a quick getaway, a winter shopping spree, or a romantic weekend—in large part because the food is so good. We've enjoyed watching the Montreal dining scene evolve over the years, and many of our favorite places to eat are bistros—with or without the French ''t'' at the end. They tend to be small, casual neighborhood places with hearty food and plentiful drink. The old-fashioned French bistro persists in Montreal. La Gargote (351 place d'Youville, 514-844-1428, www.restaurantlagargote.com, Metro: Square Victoria) is one of our favorites in this style. The name is French slang for a diner, but...Read More

The company you keep

Posted on by Pat and David
We're already looking forward to reading Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by Train, the newest thoughtful volume from Ina Caro. Her first book about traveling around France, the 1994 The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France, came out of road trips where her husband, Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Robert Caro, did the driving. We love it that the new book tours France by train, especially capitalizing on the vast distances made possible by booking the high-speed TGV. As she explains, she can cover 800 years of French history by train and still be back in Paris to sleep. But what really drew us in is her attitude about the food: ''It's a terrible thing for a historian to admit, but...Read More

Cooking with Comté

Posted on by Pat
If you've ever eaten a croque monsieur in a cafe anywhere in France (my absolute favorite is served at the News Cafe in Paris at 78 rue d'Assas across from Jardin du Luxembourg), chances are you've eaten Comté cheese. The firm and nutty Comté is the largest selling hard cheese in France. I'd always figured that only a big factory could turn out enough Comté to satisfy the appetites of the fromage-loving French, but it turns out that Comté is still made pretty much the same way that it's been made for about a thousand years--that is, small-scale and personal. And the whole process is open to the public: from brown-and-white Montbéliarde cows grazing in buttercup-laden meadows, to milk delivery and early morning cheese-making in...Read More

Burgundy eggs in red wine sauce

Posted on by Pat
Of all the wonderful food in Burgundy, I have a special soft spot for the bistro staple known as oeufs en meurette. The dish is hearty and warming on a cool autumn night and it is a classic in the region. Maybe I like it so much because sauce meurette is very similar to the sauce in coq au vin. Despite its rich flavors, French cooks usually pair meurette with mildly flavored proteins, like poached eggs or a poached fish. Restaurants in Burgundy often feature this dish as a first course (one egg per person) because everything but the eggs can be prepared ahead and re-heated, making it a quick dish to assemble. POACHED EGGS IN RED WINE SAUCE Most of the ingredients for this...Read More

The tang of Burgundy’s other signature taste

Posted on by Pat
You literally walk on wine in Beaune, the center of Burgundy's wine trade, because the town is honeycombed with cellars dug by the monks who were Burgundy's first vinters. Millions of bottles sleep their way to perfection under the cobbled streets, and millions more are tucked into the cool, dark recesses of the town's 15th century fortified walls. The rough streets, old stone buildings, and a profusion of statues of the Virgin Mary (including one where she holds the infant Jesus in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other) make Beaune undeniably picturesque. But it's even more fun to taste Beaune than to look at it. As close as I can tell, there are no statues of Mary hefting a bag of...Read More

Black pepper, red wine, and strawberries

Posted on by Pat and David
The conjunction of strawberry season with this series of blogs about French cooking takes us back to our first introduction to lightened French cuisine, which was not in France at all but in the second largest French-speaking city in the world, Montreal. Les Halles opened in 1971 as a grand Escoffier-like townhouse palace of dining in a city best known to that point for its great baked beans with salt pork. When Dominique Crevoisier took over as chef in the early 1980s, he skillfully blended the haute with the nouvelle to create magical meals that didn't give the patrons gout. He gave us the best idea of what to do with leftover red wine: Turn it into a peppered syrup to serve on strawberries! He...Read More