What to Eat in France: Typical French Food and Specialties | Page 2 of 2
Aligot: French Mashed Potatoes with Cheese
Aligot is mashed potato from the Aubrac plateau with nearly half a kilo of fresh cheese stirred into a kilo of potatoes. You work it until it trails a rope behind the spoon. Whose dish it actually is, when potatoes entered the recipe and how the truffle version tasted at a Sunday market in Toulouse.
L'Air de Famille: A Toulouse Bistro With a Menu Written in Chalk
L'Air de Famille is a small family bistro in the center of Toulouse that keeps no fixed menu - chef Georges Camuzet chalks the dishes of the day up on a board every morning, depending on what the market has to offer that day. Michelin gave the bistro a Bib Gourmand for it. I explain why half of France fits on a single board, and how we managed to decipher the six courses we picked off it.
Saint-Émilion: A Wine Village Near Bordeaux
Fewer than two thousand locals and more than a million visitors a year - and even at the height of the season I had the lanes to myself. Saint-Émilion is a medieval wine village near Bordeaux with a church carved into the rock, cellars under the streets and a wine classification the châteaux keep fighting over in court. Here is what to see, what to taste and why it deserves at least two days.
Macarons de Saint-Émilion: Convent Macarons Without a Filling
In the wine village of Saint-Émilion they bake a macaron with no cream, no coloring and no second half - just coarsely ground almonds, egg whites and sugar. The recipe has supposedly been guarded since 1620 by a convent of Ursuline nuns, though these days the box makes the case better than any archive. What does the original version of France's famous sweet taste like, and why can't you buy it outside Bordeaux?
La Cité du Vin: The Wine Museum in Bordeaux
The glass building on the bank of the Garonne is meant to suggest wine swirling in a glass - even if half the guidebooks call it a decanter. Inside La Cité du Vin you sniff your way through aromas trapped under glass domes, you click through videos in whatever order you like, and the tour ends with a glass of wine on the eighth-floor belvedere. In the shop I even came across a Moravian Pálava.
La Table de Montaigne: The Bordeaux Restaurant That Got Me Into Fine Dining
For a long time I skipped the better restaurants on my travels. La Table de Montaigne, the gourmet restaurant of the Palais Gallien hotel in Bordeaux, changed that in a single evening: a tasting menu the guest doesn't choose, a manager who took one look at my shorts, paid me a compliment and showed me to a table, and the start of a habit: working out where I'll eat before every trip.
Canelé: The Bordeaux Treat With a Caramel Crust
Canelé is a small fluted cylinder from Bordeaux, baked in a copper mold until the crust is almost black and the center is like custard. Its name comes from the flutes on classical columns, its origin from a legend about nuns and from a guild that was forbidden to use milk and sugar.