It is a little-known fact that Bayonne was the first chocolate-making city in France. In the 17th century, a wave of Jewish immigrants settled there, fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese inquisition and bringing the savoir-faire as a prized possession in their luggage. Local artisans quickly learned how to make the magic happen with those mysterious beans from the New World, and developped the production themselves. One century later, they created a Chocolate Maker’s Guild, and swiftly excluded Jews from it (how nice). These businesses were often family-owned, and transmitted from father to son. In the middle of the 20th century, the growing industrialisation of chocolate production made it difficult for them to survive, and many of these families had to close shop. Seven of them still exist to this day and I was very eager to visit the longest established, Cazenave, which was created in 1854.

Bayonne is renowned for its hot chocolate (originally flavored with cinnamon) and its dark and bitter chocolate — a very good thing since this happens to be my personal preference. In their very pretty boutique on rue du Port-Neuf, Cazenave offers a variety of chocolate bites and confections as well as caramels and turons, but to really taste the chocolate itself I simply bought a 100g-bar of chocolat à l’ancienne (lehen bezala in Basque), their 70% blend. You may find this hard to believe, but it travelled with us, untouched, all the way back to Paris.

Verdict? This is a very elegant chocolate: it has a powerful nose, and an excellent balance between subtly sweet and subtly bitter. Deeply flavored, with woody/mushroomy and spicy/peppery hints, it is slightly acidulated and nicely long on the palate. It also offers just the right textural resistance — your tooth needs a slight effort to break in, and after that the square just melts on your tongue with abandon.

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If there’s one thing that should be said about the South-West of France, it’s that you shouldn’t go if you’re on a diet. Wonderful specialties and artisanal products abound, begging you to take a bite — or two or three just to make sure. As we drove and walked around, taking in the spectacular landscapes, enjoying the sunshine and the quiet, the lack of crowds and the friendly service (the reward for travelling off-season), I kept my eyes peeled (an expression that always makes me shudder but I use it anyway) for interesting food vendors and promising restaurants.

Both are aplenty, and when it comes to restaurants, we mostly went for the unpretentious, family-owned ones, those that serve local fare to local guests. One thing that really struck us was how generous — not to say gargantuan — the portions were. A regular menu would often include three or four courses in addition to the obligatory cheese and dessert. And we’re not talking about dainty little tasting-menu courses either. But however tempting this display of food was, appetite is the food traveller’s most precious resource, and after the first few meals we soon learned to treat it with the respect it deserves.

Our trip started by a train ride from Paris to Brive-la-Gaillarde in the Périgord, where we rented a car. We find this much more comfortable than driving all the way down — well, unless you are sharing your train car with an entire colonie de vacances (kids going to a holiday camp), shrieking with joy at the thought of the upcoming fun and arguing at the top of their voices over who gets the last piece of candy that their parents packed in their lunch boxes. Thank god for iPods. Anyway.

Our first destination was the village of Gourdon, where Maxence’s grandparents live. We stayed there for two days, enjoying their company, driving leisurely around the lushly green surrounding roads (happening upon the delightful medieval village of Martel in particular, more pictures on the moblog) and being treated to two excellent lunches, mostly featuring local duck and goose specialties — foie gras, confits, gésiers, magrets (Bird flu? What bird flu?). One was at the Hostellerie de la Paix in Payrac, and the other at our very favorite restaurant in the area, the Musée Henri Giron, where the owners are kindness incarnate and serve a delicious (though truly marathonian) daily menu. Their restaurant, which they only operate during the week-end, also acts as a museum for Henri Giron’s work, a painter and friend of theirs.

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[Traditional French Cooking Class]

Show-and-tell: this is the gear I bought for the cooking class I am taking this year! It’s part of the Cours Municipaux pour Adultes, a learning program sponsored by the Mairie de Paris (the mayor’s office), and mine is a weekly three-hour class to learn about traditional French cuisine. All classes offered in this program (although the quality of teaching no doubt varies) are a real bargain, since they are financed in great part by local taxes — for once I am more than happy to pay them — but they are reserved exclusively to Parisians (who have paid the aforementioned taxes, it’s only fair) and the odds of getting in are akin to winning the lottery. Word has gotten around, they get a lot of applications, but naturally there is a limited number of seats for each class, so it’s first come first serve.

I first learned about this cooking class sometime over the summer, and in the morning of September 1, the day the enrollment began, I walked over to the Mairie, picked up an application (plus a few for my neighbors) and within the hour had sent it off, with a good luck kiss. The kiss thing seems to have worked, because I soon received a notice to come to the school at a certain date and time, and after a somewhat nerve-wracking test (multiple-choice questions? for a cooking class? what has the world come to?) only 18 or the 42 candidates (out of some 500 applications) were enrolled. Including — big sigh of relief — yours truly.

The classes started two weeks ago, and so far so good! What will we be learning? The basics of traditional French cuisine — Potage Conti, Pintade Grand-Mère, Steak au poivre, Carottes Vichy, Tarte aux Poires Bourdaloue, Paris-Brest (yay!) — you will no doubt hear about some of these as the class progresses. This is in perfect complementarity with my recent acquisition of L’Art Culinaire Moderne and I am delighted for the chance to learn more about this side of French cuisine I don’t know so much about. Looking at the scheduled weekly menus, I got irrationally excited by the thought of making Oeufs Pochés Toupinelle — don’t ask.

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[Warm Leek Salad with Fresh Walnuts]

There is a special kind of grace in the simple combination of a few ingredients that you have on hand. The resulting dish has an air of spontaneity, a certain modesty, that makes it easy to love: you didn’t put much time or thought into it, there is little pressure on its shoulders to be successful, and this allows it to shine even brighter.

I was standing in the kitchen, thinking that something had to be done about the leeks sleeping in the vegetable drawer. Steaming them for a warm salad sounded nice, possibly with a lemon and olive oil dressing to tease their natural sweetness. My gaze then happened upon the fresh walnuts I had just bought from the produce store.

Fresh walnuts are simply walnuts that have been recently picked from the tree, as opposed to walnuts that have been stored for a while, causing their insides to shrivel and dry up. Fresh walnuts are a bit more difficult to break open, because their outer shell is still a little yielding, not yet rock-hard, and it doesn’t shatter as cleanly as that of a dried walnut. When you open it, you find that the brain-shaped flesh takes up the whole space, and there are traces of a slightly sticky sap. The walnut inside is much moister than a dried walnut, its thin skin peels off easily, and its taste is more subtle, less woody: fresh walnuts taste grassy and alive, holding but the promise of the familiar walnut bitterness that will develop later.

This sounded like the perfect ingredient to round out my dish, giving it a third taste dimension: a bit of sweetness from the leeks, a nice tang from the lemon dressing, and a hint of bitterness from the walnuts. The salad did not disappoint: very easy to put together, the different elements worked really well as a team, creating a clean, simple and enjoyable set of flavors.

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