Yet another edible souvenir I brought back from my stay in Lourmarin over the Easter week-end: this large jar of thick and gloriously amber-colored honey.

I happen to have somewhat childish tastes in honey, and I am often put off by honeys that taste too much like sap, sharp and woodsy to the point of bitterness. This probably makes me a dilettante honey lover — just like real hardcore coffee lovers are supposed to appreciate strong hardcore coffee — but I think I can live with that.

Luckily, this particular honey is one of the most flowery and mellow I have ever been given to taste. It was produced by my aunt’s beehives and harvested by her, late last summer. She explained to me that since the bees feed on the nectar from different kinds of flowers at different times of the year, each season brings its own blend and shade of honey. But last year she had to skip the end-of-spring harvest, so this honey is a mix of the bees’ spring and summer production, making it a highly polyfloral honey — also called miel mille-fleurs or thousand flower honey. It has the texture I like best, velvety but slightly grainy, like an embroidered drapery, and it is delightfully sweet with no bitter hint, complexly flavored but instantly pleasing to the palate.

In addition to this — which I immediately shared with my neighbors because they like honey so much and I am such a good friend — my Lourmarin bounty also included a few rounds of locally produced goat cheese in various stages of ripeness (they are but a distant memory now, but they were really good friends with the honey) and fresh herbs from the garden: sage, blossoming rosemary, and even a small thyme plant, which travelled happily on the train with me for Maxence to add to our little herb patch.

Le Gibassier is a specialty from Lourmarin, the beautiful village in Provence where I spent Easter in my aunt and uncle’s house. It is a large blond cookie of about a foot in length made with olive oil and shaped like an oval leaf.

It is possibly named after Le Gibas, a nearby summit of the Luberon mountain range, but the confusing thing is that gibassier is also a type of sweet focaccia-like bread baked with olive oil and flavored with orange flower water. This also goes by the name of fougasse or pompe à huile (literally “oil pump”!) and is one of the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts. I have been able to locate recipes for the bread-like Gibassier, but not the cookie: this may warrant a little offline research, as is often the case when you get to such specific and local micro-facts.

What I can tell you though, is how delightfully tasty this biscuit (in the French sense of the term) is. The large amount of olive oil that is obviously involved in the recipe (the paper bag was smooth and shiny within the hour) gives it a very sophisticated flavor and a unique moistness, yet it does not taste greasy at all and is very subtly sweet. The surface shows an unusual scale-like texture and this, combined with the multiple slits that were cut in the dough prior to baking, ensures interesting sensations in every bite and for each of the happy friends you will share it with. Because yes, as you may have guessed (didn’t we recently talk about portion-control?) this is most definitely a break-off-a-chunk-and-share cookie — yet another thing I like about it.

I bought it from Riquier, my aunt and uncle’s favorite boulangerie, where they bought the loaves of bread to feed the twenty-plus family members that they entertained with such natural talent over the week-end, and where I also purchased pignolats, these fabulous crescent-shaped pinenut cookies.

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Salade de roquette, vinaigrette à l’échalote et amandes grillées

Last week I had lunch with someone who told me about a cooking class she had attended. It was one of those conversations between two persons who don’t know each other very well, who suspect they are in the company of a fellow food enthusiast, but are still trying to determine how deeply infected the other person is, and just how much detail might be too much detail.

So they end up talking in layers like a mille-feuille, giving general information at first, to test the waters and see how the other person reacts. If he/she prompts for more, they elaborate a little, and if the eyes of their interlocutor still don’t glaze over, then they feel completely at ease and connected, and can lavishly share the mouth-watering details and the minute practicalities of whatever dish, recipe, or technique they are conversing about.

Of course, my lunch companion and I ended up discussing the whole menu that they had prepared during the cooking class. In passing, she explained the word contiser, a culinary term I knew not (I have found just a few references to the English translation “to contise”), which means to cut regular slits in a raw piece of meat or fish to insert ingredients that will lend flavor during the cooking — like slivers of truffle or, in her case, a sprig of fresh rosemary in a chicken breast. This is a bit like larder (to lard), only larder should theoretically be used for pieces of lard inserted in meat.

She also mentioned (getting to the point here) preparing a vinaigrette cuite à l’échalote, a cooked shallot vinaigrette, which had you slow-cook the shallots in balsamic vinegar (optionally cut with water) until completely absorbed. This idea stuck with me, and I decided to give it a try on Sunday morning, for brunch with our friends Marion and Benoît.

I intended to use the vinaigrette to dress a fresh green bean salad, but the store was out, so I got arugula instead. I dressed it quite simply with a little olive oil and walnut oil, added in the cooked shallots, and tossed with chopped toasted almonds. The trio was a very successful mix of textures (snappy greens, crunchy almonds, soft shallots) and flavors (tangy, peppery, piquant, sour, toasted and sweet) in every bite.

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Cheesecake is among my favorite desserts, and I find it hard to resist, with its fresh, creamy yet cake-y body, and its tasty cookie crumb crust. But when you try to make American-style cheesecake in France, you quickly run into a procurement hurdle: neither cream cheese* nor graham crackers are easily available. You can find them — at least if you’re in Paris — but this requires time and effort and the planning of a trip to one of the few stores that carry those items. I prefer my baking to be a bit more spontaneous.

This allows us to transition, as smoothly as a cheesecake, to the French semi-equivalent: le Gâteau au Fromage Blanc. Fromage blanc (literally “white cheese”, and the “c” is mute) is a type of fresh cheese, most commonly made with cow’s milk, that has the consistency of thick and velvety yogurt but is typically tarter than yogurt. It is a very common and popular product here, there are many kinds (fermier, battu, en faisselle…) and you can find it in different fat percentages, from maigre (0% fat) to entier (40% fat).

Gâteau au fromage blanc differs from cheesecake in that the crust is usually a thin pastry crust with a rim, and it incorporates beaten egg whites into the batter: this gives the cake a very airy and light texture, almost mousse-like, and makes it higher than most cheesecakes I’ve been served — usually around three inches. My habitual (and, need I say, beloved) cheese store sells their own, a huge and tempting affair beneath a cloche à fromage (a glass cheese cover, literally “cheese bell”) on the counter, to be sliced and sold by the weight like any other cheese.

I love Gâteau au fromage blanc, but have two objections to making it myself in the traditional way. One, nothing, and I mean nothing, beats a cookie crumb crust: the patting or the eating, it’s hard to tell which part I enjoy the most. And two, I don’t love recipes that call for “beating egg whites till stiff” because it often sounds like too much trouble.

In any case, when the desire and occasion for a cheesecake arise — and arise both did last weekend to end a dinner party with a flourish — I go for my own easy version, which enrolls fromage blanc and Northern European cookies (the spice-rich and toasty and delicious Speculoos, or Bastogne) in a sort of mid-Atlantic rendition of the cheesecake. Only this time, as promised a couple of weeks ago, I used the remainder of my gingersnaps for the crust, making this a 100% homemade cheesecake, which we all delighted upon with forceful cries of felicity.

* 2014 Update: I can now find Philadelphia cream cheese in most supermarkets around me.

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