Seafood, salt, ham and wine... a trip to the Vendée

To the north flows the Loire - that means wine.   To the west lies the Atlantic, bringing with it fish, salt and moisture for pasture.  For the most part, the Vendée is flat, almost featureless, making it perfect for vegetables, cereals, cattle and sheep.  The Vendée is surely blessed by geography - something that the locals make good use of.  Every town, whatever its size, has a regular market once or twice a week.  But it also has a covered market providing fresh local produce six days a week. 

Photo courtesy of Angela Bird

The Vendée - south of Brittany - is famed for poultry from Challans, fleur de sel from Noirmoutier and Beavoir, its brioche, the oysters, the beef, local white beans, fresh young goats cheese and Vendée ham.  We pretty much went through the lot in our week-long stay.

We catererd for ourselves, typically having lunch out and dinner in.  This meant we actually got to buy the local produce rather than simply oggle at it, so I've got some recipes to follow: Challans black-leg chicken with onions and crème fraîche, bass with prawns and Muscadet and 'a kind of bourride'.  But first, a word or two about the produce...

The ham is quite excellent.  The humidity that blows in from the sea makes it difficult to air-dry ham so instead it is preserved by rubbing it with local eau-de-vie and sea salt.  It makes for a rich and interesting spiciness.

The local cheese is very fresh goats cheese - ours was just three days old; moist, tangy, milky and mild.  I loved it - perfect with fresh bread but it would also be good spread over a wobbly onion and egg tart, I'm sure.

The beans - mogettes - are white and creamy, sold dried on every market stall or cooked in jars.  They are soft and yeilding and perfect with the local ham.

The seafood, ah the seafood.  Markets are packed with oyster sellers, going for as little as €3 a dozen for the little tiddlers, they beg to be sampled with shallot vinegar or just a squeeze of lemon.  There are prawns - from tiny brown shrimps to perfect fat langoustines.  There's fish as well: sole, bass, hake, small red mullet and skate.  The local sardines are tinned and aged, indeed famed for their keeping - sold by the vintage, the tins should be turned every six months and eaten some years later.

And the wine.  The local famed wine is Muscadet.  Today, Muscadet is sadly a by-word for cheap over-produced one-dimensional acid-dry white.  Too much Muscadet available at home is pointless, I'm afraid to say.  However, there is still good stuff to be had.  Muscadet sur-lie is the best, yeasty and dry and perfect with fish.  We bought some disappointing cheap stuff in a supermarket some good stuff from a lady in our local market and a really good bottle in a restaurant.
Other local wines include Gros-Plant - even drier than the Muscadet but sadly not as interesting.

Eating out is (as ever in France) an interesting experience.  Coastal towns boast plenty of pizza restaurants and places offering all-day-breakfasts (in English, of course) but there are certainly good eatieries to be found.  Our two best experiences were in the tourist town of St Jean-de-Monts:  Tante Paulette and Le Richelieu.

At Tante Paulette, we ate a set menu at just €15 for three courses, including the most generous starter of oysters, crab, langoustines, prawns, raw clams, sea-snails and winkles - really terrific value.
At Le Richelieu - a restaurant seemingly stuck in the 1950s with cut crystal glasses and starched napkins - we ate very well for €23 a head.  The amuse bouche was the most perfect salmon mousse; creamy, light, airy and not overwhelmingly fishy.  And my starter was seven of the biggest, fat, quivering oysters I've ever seen.  The bass with fennel and beurre blanc was also delicious.

On the way home, we stayed in Normandie - and we're certainly going back there - we need to get stuck into the calvados, apart from anything else.

Time to go on a diet, I think. 

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tags: france  restaurants  wine  

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