Dukes & Snails
Author:
Colman Andrews
photograph by Christopher Hirsheimer Three of us sat down to lunch one day early last fall, jet-lagged and bedraggled, at the Hostellerie des Clos in the world-famous wine town of Chablis—capital of the northernmost major vineyard region of Burgundy. Relaxing in the flower-filled dining room, we took our first sips of icy 1993 Raveneau Valmur Chablis—all chardonnay and stone, round and full but with a flinty core—and then began to talk about why we had come here in the first place; why we had decided to produce a special issue on this fabled part of France.
Laptop Battery We had scarcely begun to address the matter when our first courses arrived: some of Burgundy’s celebrated escargots, out of the shell, in a thick, buttery parsley sauce inset with little jewellike cloves of roasted garlic; a coarsely textured chicken liver terrine surrounded by cubes of chablis-based gelée; and medallions of sautéed foie gras with apples, spinach, and red currants in a vinegar reduction. We sampled our appetizers, we shared tastes, and then we all looked up at the same time and smiled. This was why we had chosen Burgundy, we realized—because it was capable of offering us exquisite, varied, intelligent food like this, based on first-rate raw materials, built on neither fad nor fear. “So much American food today is just assembly,” one of us observed. “This is cooking!”
French food is heavy. French food is unhealthy, snobbish, and expensive. Oh, and by the way, the Italians taught the French how to cook in the first place….
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Thinkpad You hear this sort of thing a lot these days, from chefs and food writers who ought to know better—and who, incidentally, probably wouldn’t recognize real French food if they dropped it on their foot. You also hear it seriously proposed that while Italian cooking celebrates the integrity and purity of impeccable ingredients, the French are culinary obfuscators—who probably invented all those complicated sauces in the first place to cover up the smell of rotten meat.
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Microsoft It implies no disrespect to the copious gastronomic glories of Italy to say that this is utter nonsense. Italian food tends to be intentionally simple and accessible; the French seem more concerned with the extension of possibilities. They are absolutely fanatical about their raw materials, at least as much as the Italians—but they have approached them, for centuries, as starting points, not ends in themselves. It is an almost Augustinian conceit, as if they are saying to each succulent guinea fowl or earthy truffle: “God made you, thus imbuing you with a certain natural perfection…Now, what can you become?”
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Laptop Computers I happen to believe that good, classic (if not necessarily classical) French cooking is the best in the world. It is based on an immensely complex and sophisticated system, constructed almost geometrically on a series of complementary, interlocking bases, and while it can certainly involve trickery (marinating lamb to resemble venison, for instance), there is also something inherently honest, even ingenuous, about the way it acknowledges and respects an old and surprisingly coherent canon— even if it deviates from it. French chefs are trained draftsmen even when they’re painting abstract canvases, and it shows.
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Laptop Computer It is also a surprisingly accommodating cuisine, capable of borrowing flavors and techniques from other kitchens without compromising its own identity. Why is French cuisine ultimately greater than Chinese? Because it can adopt dishes from Chinese and remain true to itself; the converse is not true.
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Desktop Computer I hope that culinary fashion will eventually change in this country, that Med-mania will ebb, that “fusion” and “Pacific Rim” will sail away, and that Americans will come to realize that satisfyingly rich food once in a while is far better for both body and soul than phony “lite” stuff every day. In the meantime, though, I find myself drawn irresistibly to Burgundy—both as a place to visit and as an inspiration for cooking at home—precisely because its attitude towards food is so antithetical to culinary fashion. No other part of France embodies and expresses the virtues of French gastronomy so vividly and consistently. No
Notebooks other region contains more good restaurants, from the simplest cafés to the most elevated three-star palaces. And nowhere else in Europe are wine and food more harmoniously interwoven.
Burgundy is officially composed of four départements in east-central France: the Yonne, the Nièvre, the Côte d’Or, and the Saône-et-Loire. The Burgundian landscape is varied, with thick forests giving way to fertile river valleys and sensuously rolling hills. Steep vineyard slopes and vine-covered rises alternate with vast pasturage crowded with burly white charolais cattle, immense plantings of sunflowers and rapeseed and wheat, modest orchards, and patchwork grids of market gardens full of vegetables and herbs. Lush meadows accented with trees are said to be the conscious model for the formal gardens at many Burgundian estates (like the one at the 14th-century Château de Gilly just outside Vougeot, now an opulent Relais & Châteaux)—while in autumn-yellow fields, hay is rolled into plump cylinders whose shape suggests the oak barrels in which the region’s vintages repose.
Lenovo Another way of defining Burgundy is viticulturally. There are six important wine regions here, occupying only a small portion of official Burgundy: None of these are in the Nièvre, and the Yonne has only the combined appellations of Chablis and the Auxerrois. The other five regions, stretching along the western side of the Saône between Dijon and Lyon, are the Côte-de-Nuit and the Côte-de-Beaune in the Côte d’Or, the Côte Chalonnaise and the Mâconnais in the Saône-et-Loire, and the Beaujolais in the département of the Rhône, outside Burgundy proper. In these places, and especially in the Côte d’Or, some of the best wine in the world is made. So is some of the most pretentious and overpriced, and it can take some doing to find real wine value in this part of France.
Hard Drive Historical Burgundy is still another thing. The region got its name in the early 5th century, when a Germanic tribe called the Burgondiones took refuge here. From the 11th through the 13th centuries, Burgundy was a thriving religious center. As an independent duchy in the 14th and 15th centuries—under a succession of rulers with names like Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, and Philip the Good—Burgundy rivaled the contiguous kingdom of France in wealth and power, and controlled Holland, Luxembourg, Flanders, parts of Switzerland and Belgium, and the regions of Artois, Picardie, Lorraine, and Franche-Comté. The capital of the Dukes of Burgundy was Dijon—noted gastronomically today for its mustard, its spice bread (often called gingerbread), and its ubiquitous wine cocktail, the Kir (see method, right). The splendor of the Ducal period is represented in the modern city by the Palais des Ducs et des États de Bourgogne. This complex of public buildings includes Dijon’s city hall and several museums—as well as the old Ducal kitchen, a freestanding building now empty of furnishings but impressive as a room, with six massive ovens in the form of fireplaces with interior chimneys. Serious cooking was obviously done here, and the kitchen is a reminder of the fact that the banquets given by the hedonistic court of Burgundy were once famous throughout Europe—so much so that the term Burgundian became a synonym for rollicking gourmandise.
Travelstar On two extended visits to Burgundy this year, we found gourmandise aplenty, and even managed some rollicking now and then. And we learned a lot about why Burgundian food is so good, and so deliciously representative of real French cuisine—the kind of cuisine that we think it’s high time to rediscover.
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