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| Poached Eggs in Melted Epoisses |
Imagine you are taking a California road trip. You are starting in Santa Monica, ultimately
destined for San Diego. But before leaving the swaying palms of this famous
stretch of beach, you stop for a bite to eat.
It doesn’t really matter which restaurant, diner or taco shack you end
up at, in this imaginary Southern California the eateries of this town all
serve the same local specialty. We’ll
call this special dish “Eggs Santa Monica”: poached eggs perched atop avocado,
oven roasted tomatoes, and a thick slice of grilled country bread.
Fortified, you hop in your car for the 30-mile drive to Long
Beach. You have heard that though Long
Beach and Santa Monica fall within the same county lines, there is a completely
different specialty here, a dish that has a place on every Long Beach
restaurant menu. We’ll call it, “Eggs
Long Beach”: two fried eggs on black beans with pico de gallo.
So your trip continues, stopping 20 miles later in Newport
Beach, 30 miles after that in San Clemente, then Carlsbad, then La Jolla, and
finally downtown San Diego. At each city
stop you find a dish that is both completely unique to that town, found in
virtually every restaurant in that town, yet almost nowhere outside those town
limits.
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| Winemaker Cyril Audoin (left), me and a travel companion |
Sounds a bit wild?
Well for anyone that has traversed the famous routes of France,
particularly along the verdant Burgundy corridor, that is pretty much the
experience.
The distance from Chablis, the northernmost part of Burgundy
to Macon in the south is approximately 134 miles, the same distance from Santa
Monica to San Diego. In place of the
pristine California coastline, the road trip in Burgundy is graced with mile upon mile of some of the world’s best grapevines and, as I found on a
recent wine tasting trip, excellent food.
With each village boasting it’s own unique wine identity-
from the ancient oyster shell bed that gives Chablis is distinctive taste to
sun-ripened chardonnays of the Côte Chalonnaise- perhaps I shouldn’t have
been so surprised to find the same proud individuality can be found in their
cuisine.
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| Oeufs meurette- poached eggs in red wine sauce |
Just north of the Burgundy border, in a small village in
Champagne, the local bistro was serving one of the most famous dishes of its
neighbor appellation. Oeufs meurette, is a dish of poached
eggs served in a red wine (classically Burgundy) sauce often with a scattering
of bacon lardon. Here the red wine was
reduced down to an unctuous concentration but retained enough acidity to act as
a foil for the golden yolk as the punctured sack released its insides. As I wiped the last drops of the egg and wine
sauce from my plate with a torn piece of baguette, it occurred to me that
French bread may exist solely for the sopping up of that delicious mess.
A few days later sitting down to an al fresco lunch in
Fixin, a village in the north of the Côte d’Or, poached eggs were again on the
menu, but here with a whiff of fromage. On our drive from Chablis to the heart of
Burgundy, our car had passed the village of Époisses. It is in that village that they make a famous
orange rind, soft-ripened cow’s milk cheese of the same name. In Fixin the
restaurant was serving this cheese, rind removed and melted down to a creamy
puddle, as the sauce for two poached
eggs. Our winemaker host, Cyril Audoin
of the nearby Domaine Charles Audoin, told us this was a dish we would only
find there. Indeed, as we continued our
drive south, never again did I encounter the eggs in Époisses. The decadent slurry of
yolk and liquid cheese was left behind, a signpost on the journey.
At this point eggs took a bit of a back seat to meat. They would reappear further south in the
Rhone Valley, notably in a dish of scrambled eggs with black truffle, but for
the moment my attention shifted to the cured meats of the region.
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| Bucolic pasture and vineyard behind Domaine Danjean-Berthoux |
If ever there was a way to layer meats in a pan and preserve
them- suspended in aspic or sealed beneath a layer of fat- it seems the French
have done it all. Burgundy, particularly this mouth-watering stretch of the
Cote d’Or, has (surprise) a terrine you can find almost exclusively there: jambon persillé.
Unlike its more delicate siblings, this terrine is traditionally made of
roughly torn pieces of unsmoked, salt-cured ham (think prosciutto as opposed to
Easter ham). The shredded pork is set
with a “jelly” of seasoned white wine and a small forest of parsley. The result is a lovely mess of a terrine,
stunning in the marble of pink meat and leafy green herbs.
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| Jambon Persille, right front |
Our traveling party found this dish practically everywhere
in the Côte
d’Or. At the supermarket in Beaune, we
had the butcher cut off a brick sized slab.
We nibbled on the ham for days back in our rented house in Chassagne. On restaurant menus it was a given that it
would appear on a charcuterie spread. It
was no surprise then at lunch in Givry, hosted by winemaker Pascal Danjean, a
small bowl-sized jambon persillé materialized as part of our
appetizer course, naturally homemade by Pascal’s lovely wife.
It would be near impossible to imagine the drive from Santa
Monica to San Diego, or any 130-mile drive in the United States for that
matter, claiming as many unique, traditional dishes as I found in Burgundy. To
think Burgundy is only one of twenty-seven regions
in France. If a place is best explored
through its food, looks like I have some more road trips, and a lot more
eating, in my future.
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| Breaking for a merguez sandwich and Grand Cru Burgundy at a roadside restaurant. |
