We sing the praises of canned goods here. Several days a week, Chris and I meet in the kitchen for a big bowl of something out of a can. And for the first few minutes, there is no sound but the clink of spoons as we gobble away. Well, also little murmurings of wordless pleasure.
Yesterday we had our first can of Saucisses aux Lentilles. It comes in a large can with a brown, unglossy wrapper, from Eymet, a town not far south from us. The ingredients are: lentils, fresh vegetable broth, goose fat, tomatoes, salt, pepper, onions, thyme, bay, garlic, and pork sausage. No ingredients that began life in a lab, nothing you've never heard of that has forty-two syllables, no fake color, fake flavor, fake anything. It's nothing but food.
And OH MY is it good. How I weep for my vegetarian friends, for what goose fat does for lentils is sublime and irreplaceably, monumentally delicious. The sausages are all fine and well, but you could throw them to the dogs and eat only the lentils and be a happy, happy person.
An old favorite is canned cassoulet; we've made a minor hobby of trying the products of as many of the local farms as possible, and they're all fantastic. The ingredients are roughly white beans, Toulouse sausage, confit of duck or goose, garlic, tomatoes, and more goose fat. Part of the reason canned cassoulet is so good is that it isn't prettified -- there are bones and flabby pieces of skin to contend with, but of course that's part of why the flavor is so deeply satisfying.
Today we stopped in a very good boulangerie in Lembras, on our way to Bergerac to Christmas shop. Maybe fifteen different kinds of bread, including bread with figs and bread with various kinds of nuts. I picked out something that looked like a big mess studded with olives, called fougasse.
We raced through the shopping as quickly as possible, got the fougasse home and warmed it in the oven, and, well, how good was it? It's true that we did not run around the yard waving our arms in the air and shouting with glee, but we felt like it. Chris ate his standing up, moaning. I kept saying, "oh, this is good!" taking another bite, and saying "this is really good!" over and over. After Nellie tried a bite, she beamed. Julian, in true nine year old fashion, refused to have anything to do with it.
Fougasse is like a rough puff pastry, messily assembled, with little bits of ham mixed in, a lot of green olives, some gruyère. But not enough ham and gruyère and butter to be all greasy and heavy, oh no. Just enough to give it a wondrous flavor. The outside has crispy bits and soft bits, it's kind of chewy like pizza dough in places, kind of flaky in others. Fougasse is worth making the fifteen-minute drive to Lembras, any time of the day or night, singing all the way.
(The photo is the Catholic church in Villamblard.)
