France knows where its food comes from

By Carolyn Boyd

When in France, thousands of foods vie for your attention. Whether you’re buying it at the market, a restaurant or la fromagerie, the choice can be as overwhelming as it is pleasing. Once you’ve made your choices, you are soon enjoying some unmistakeably French flavours: a chunk of oozy camembert, a forkful of ratatouille, a bite of cream-laden patisserie or a spoonful of Corsican honey.

Yet what comes as a virtual side-order to many French foods is a story. It might tell you about its origins, a local legend or tradition, or it could be about the effort, skill and talent of the farmer, the food producer or cook who brought it to your plate. It was all these such stories that inspired me to write my book Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France, a collection of more than 200 vignettes that together show the rich tapestry of French regional foods.

My research led me to meet and talk to farmers and producers, chefs and cooks throughout France, each championing their product in their own ways, just as members of the Slow Food network do worldwide. Around them, their communities shared their passion for the local product, organising and attending festivals, joining ‘brotherhoods’ (a kind of guild) to promote and protect the product, and serving them to visitors such as me, a curious Anglaise. Each time, I was heartened to discover the locals knew how their food and drink came to be on their plate – from the nearby orchards, pastures, vineyards. And they were often keen to share recipes and serving tips that would add flavour to even the simplest of dishes; be it the drizzle of hazelnut oil and toasted hazelnuts on grated carrots, or a pinch of piment d’Espelette chilli on scrambled eggs.

In many cases, the product they celebrated was produced as a result of a specific terroir. The term is more commonly associated with wine, but just as grapes’ myriad flavours will be influenced by their location’s topography, geography, soil type and climate, so too will many, many foods.

As a result, I gained an understanding of these such landscapes which meant that my travels took on a whole new meaning and I saw the countryside differently. As I drove through the Jura mountains in far eastern France, it wasn’t simply vast prairies and spruce forests, flower-laden meadows and grazing cows that made my heart soar, it was understanding how all those elements are the very start of Comté cheese’s production journey. The Montbéliard cows need the space of those golden meadows in order to consume enough of the 30 different plants, which infuses the 400 litres of milk – the total daily amount of 20 cows – required for just one wheel of the cheese, which takes on the flavours of those plants.

In the Bresse, in southern Burgundy, a visit to an award-winning chicken farmer helped me see how the land was unfit for arable agriculture but perfect for rearing chickens – which went on to become the most famous chickens in France, le Poulet de Bresse (incidentally, its tricolore characteristics are perfectly apt: blue(ish) feet, white feathers, and a red comb).

Neither of these foods are rare enough to warrant a place on the Ark of Taste, and indeed the list of French products on it is relatively short compared to Italy or the United States. This is perhaps because French products are protected by other structures, such as the appellation d’origine controlée (AOC) or its European equivalent appellation d’origine protegée (AOP, or PDO as we call it in the UK), which protects the origin and production of some 1,200 French products, including wine, cheese, meat, fruit and vegetables.

There are products that are protected by both Slow Food and the AOP, such as Salers Tradition cheese. It is made by just seven producers who live high in the volcanic mountains of Cantal, in the Massif Central. In the meadows, you will see the rust-coated, horned Salers cows grazing on the abundant flora, the volcanic soil is rich in biodiversity, and you may also see the stone huts (known as burons) in which the cheese was originally made in the summer months. The cows belong to a capricious breed and will only yield their milk when their calves are present. When I visited the Galvaing family’s farm, one of the few that still make this cheese, it was quite an emotional experience to witness a technique that is centuries old. Each cow came in from the meadows and took her position at her named milking station, I stood in awe as Philippe Galvaing called each calf by name to join their mother and to feed before the farmers applied their milking apparatus. Later, in the dairy, where Philippe’s daughter Louise offered me a cube of the tangy Salers cheese, it was all the more poignant for having understood its origins. And that is the beauty of so many French foods: their stories and origins are there to be discovered and devoured, which adds a truly special dimension to their flavours.

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Carolyn Boyd is one of the UK’s leading food and travel writers and an expert on France.

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