Rabelaisian Pleasures

LERNE, France —  “I was born and raised in the garden of France, that is the Touraine,” wrote Francois Rabelais, the author of “Gargantua and Pantagruel” and one of the fathers of the novel.

Rabelais set much of the action in his books in Touraine, an ancient province that straddles the Loire River about 150 miles southwest of Paris. Gargantua drank in Chinon’s wine cellars; Panurge sought “the truth” in the clear waters of the fountain of the town’s Caves Painctes, or painted cellars, and the Picrochole war was fought on its surrounding hills, between the “kingdoms” of Seuilly and Lerne--in reality, two farming villages.

Rabelais, born 500 years ago at La Deviniere, his family’s country home just outside of Seuilly, was the complete Renaissance man. A Franciscan, then a Benedictine monk, he was also a doctor, a diplomat, a lecturer in Greek, an astrologer and, above all, a humanist.

And he was always in trouble. His books, thinly veiled satires of the pillars of society--from Sorbonne academics to Vatican clerics--were routinely censored (Calvin declared one “impious”), and Rabelais was occasionally exiled or imprisoned.

Yet when most of us think of Rabelais we think of bawdy feasting. A reliable chronicler of all things gastronomic, Rabelais describes meals with encyclopedic lists of dishes. What’s surprising--as well as heartening for those of us with a gloom-and-doom outlook for French cooking--is that many of the regional foods described by Rabelais in the 16th Century are precisely the ones that figure most prominently in today’s Sunday dinners in south-central France.

Despite wars and revolutions, not to mention the banalization of many French foods, the Ur -Touraine meal still includes the rillettes , chevre and matelote de lamproie (wine stew of lamprey) that Rabelais noted. And they are washed down with Vouvray or Chinon, direct descendants of the wines his characters guzzle so zestfully.

“ Rillettes are as old as the pig itself,” claims Jacques Hardouin, a leading Tourangeau charcutier . This rough-textured mash of pork conserved in its own fat is documented as early as the 11th Century. In his painting “Les Heures Peintes Pour Anne de Bretagne,” a 15th-Century artist chose the slaughter of the pig to illustrate the month of December and depicted, among other things, stoneware pots for rillettes . Another renowned Tourangeau, Honore de Balzac, speaks of rillettes with relish, noting that this “(brown confiture) formed the principal element of a Tourangeaux midmorning snack.”

Rillettes are a style of charcuterie born in the western Loire, between Touraine and Anjou-Maine, whence come the two varieties--the fine, burnished rillettes de Tours and the chunkier, fattier rillettes du Mans. To see how rillettes were made--if not in Rabelais’ time, perhaps in Balzac’s, 250 years later--I visited Marie Turpault on her farm in Anjou, some 20 minutes from Saumur, the town in which Balzac set his novel “Eugenie Grandet.”

*

Born in 1903, Turpault moved to her current home in 1923 and ever since has harvested its grapes and its wheat and tended its hens, cows, rabbits and pigs. While she no longer churns her own butter or grinds her own flour, Turpault is nearly as self-sufficient today as she was 50 years ago. Germain, her bachelor son, kills a pig a year. Turpault carves out cutlets, conserves the thigh in salt, puts it in a burlap sack and hangs it up the chimney where it will spend six weeks drying over the fire. From other morsels she makes boudins , andouilles and other sausages. Each pig also provides about 30 pounds of scraps and fatty parts, which Turpault puts in a cast-iron kettle with water and salt to cook before the fire for five or six hours to make rillettes. These rillettes are meaty and good and probably taste much as they did to Rabelais.

Of course, this kind of self-sufficiency is rare these days. As farming has become increasingly specialized since the end of World War II, farmers have focused on either wine or cheese making, cattle or cereal. At the same time, charcuterie has become ever more exclusively the business of the professional, a trend reinforced by European Community laws that regulate everything from feed to slaughter to the size of buildings, methods of manufacture, modes of sale and hygiene, hygiene, hygiene.

Rillons , an equally ancient Touraine staple, are large cubes of pork, salted and cooked for two hours until golden. In the neighboring province of Anjou, rillauds are made from the same components, simmered slowly in water and lard until the meat is fork-tender. Anjou claims that its gogue is among the first pork dishes ever created. Basic gogue consists of 15% to 20% each of blood, diced fat and lean pork and up to 60% onions, the whole then stuffed into a skin and simmered for four hours. More elaborate versions add Chinese cabbage, leeks and spring onions. Spicy and dense, with the bloody richness of boudin noir , gogue is usually grilled or sauteed and served with potatoes.

Fressure , an ancient specialty of the Vendee region that makes delicious use of “variety cuts,” was among the dishes Rabelais’ “Gastrolatres” offered to their god Manduce. Head, heart and lungs are cooked with stale bread and onions and thickened with blood, forming a terrine-like block. It is served hot, like a hash.

It is natural that a moist, mild type of charcuterie developed in the moist, mild climate of Touraine, tempered by ocean air sucked up the Loire corridor. Loire goat cheeses tend to be moist too, softer, milder and fleshier than the herbal mountain chevres of Provence.

*

Fossils found near Vouvray indicate that goats have inhabited Touraine since before recorded history. Cheese-making became part of daily life during the Arab occupation. The Saracens brought their herds with them, and legend has it their women taught the craft to the inhabitants.

In the days of mixed farming, goat cheese was made by farmers with small herds. You can still find them. One night I went in search of a hauntingly delicate chevre I’d tasted. As I entered a barn near Chinon, the last rays of sun outlined a man leaning against a pile of hay, languidly smoking a cigarette while his wife milked her goats by hand. The cheese I bought was aging on a basket hanging from a pulley in a cool shed.

In truth, these rustic cheeses are not invariably the hauntingly delicate embodiments of our cheese fantasies. They range from exquisite to nearly inedible--bitter or raunchy. Now, though, most agree that the qualitative differences between chevres have been leveled--glorious cheeses are difficult to come by, but outright failures are rare too. Increasingly, chevres range from bland to very good, and a few are excellent.

Today there are more than 300 chevre producers in Touraine. An average farm is run by a couple with 60 milkers and 75 acres of land on which to grow clover, hay and barley to feed their herd. (Some goats pasture, but the trend is to keep them penned and feed them crops raised on the farm or locally.) Most milk or fresh cheese is sold to cooperatives or to the cheese merchants and dairies that dominate the business. But a growing number of producers age part of their output to sell at the farm and at markets.

*

These chevres may be fresh and yogurt-y, firm and creamy or even hard as rock. They may be shaped like logs, pyramids, bricks or disks--forms that date from the 19th Century. Some have no name, others have brand names, and still others claim an Appellation d’Origine Controllee or a Label Rouge, such as the log-shaped Ste. Maure, the Eiffel Tower-shaped Pouligny-St. Pierre, the disk-shaped Selles-sur-Cher, and the truncated pyramid Valencay.

“In Rabelais’ day both goat’s and cow’s milk entered into many recipes such as leek fondues and spinach flans,” notes Marie-Therese Renault, who, as a librarian for Chinon’s schools, has researched the foods of Rabelais. “They were used to soften the flavor because the greens were nearly wild and were very strong.” Also a caterer, Renault has prepared numerous Rabelais dinners. Spinach tart, a frequent starter, is often followed by civet d’oeufs , eggs poached in a red wine sauce, a dish that sounds like Rabelais’ barbouille.

Local wine appears in many traditional dishes, from fish, poultry or game stews to cold soups of red wine, sugar and stale bread. One of the most popular dishes throughout the Loire is matelote , a stew of eel or lamprey in red wine that is nearly identical to Rabelais’ lamprey in hippocras sauce, made from spiced and sweetened wine. (“Using hippocras was necessary in Rabelais’ time when the wines were thin and acid,” notes Renault. “Today’s wines are richer and mellower.”)

The Tourangeaux often garnish their matelotes with prunes and croutons fried in walnut oil. The Loire and its tributaries still supply eel and lamprey--as well as the carp, pike and shad noted by Rabelais. But salmon, once the king of the Loire, is now rare, the victim of pollution, overfishing and excavations of the river bed.

*

Prunes and walnuts have suffered similar fates. Prunes, once a specialty of Chinon (where they predate those of the more famous Agen, says Renault), are no longer produced in the region, though they still figure in Tourangeau dishes such as noisettes of pork with a sauce of prunes and Vouvray. Hard frosts, followed by the reorganization of fields into large parcels (to accommodate new farm machinery), have killed off most of the walnut trees--which, with the picking, shelling and pressing of oil, once set the winter calendar.

Touraine remains, however, the garden of France--or one of them. Some of the nation’s most celebrated varieties of apples, pears and plums--such as Reinette, Doyenne de Comice and Reine Claude, respectively--were developed in the Loire’s nurseries. (Rabelais, also a bit of a horticulturist, sent seeds of lettuces--romaine and cress--and melons from Italy.) Sadly, many of the old varieties of fruit have been eclipsed by the ubiquitous Delicious, and the slopes of Rabelais’ Seuilly, once home to wine grapes, now produce the kiwis of nouvelle cuisine. But the ancestral fruit tarts, pastes and pies live on, as does the practice of cooking fresh fruit in wine or honey, or steeping them in eau de vie.

And while spices such as cinnamon, mace and saffron, used abundantly in medieval cookery, vanished from the kitchen in the middle of the 17th Century, Renault notes that they are beginning to come back. Other ancient foods are returning to the local menu too, such as pear and apple tapees --fruit sliced, dried in ovens and reconstituted in spiced wine. More salmon are fished than were a decade ago. Gelines de Touraine (rustic, fine-boned black hens), nearly extinct until several producers began raising them, are now served by many of Touraine’s top chefs.

And Rabelais’ fouace bread appears with increasing frequency. No dish is more central--plot-wise--to Rabelais than the fouace . In “Gargantua,” the fouace bakers of Lerne are transporting their goods to market one fine day when the shepherds of Seuilly stop them, asking to buy bread. The bakers refuse to sell, and war breaks out.

*

Rabelais’ recipe for a deluxe fouace --an ancient bread whose name derives from panis focacius (dough cooked on the hearth)--includes “fine butter, fine egg yolks, fine saffron, fine spices.” Jacques Mahou, a baker in Tours, recreated the recipe in 1980 using bergamot, saffron and orange blossom water. Renault substitutes cinnamon for bergamot. The epicerie in Seuilly offers a simpler fouace --a plain, oblong loaf. The Nantes fouace is a slightly sweet, dry cake shaped like a five-pointed star.

Related breads include the fouee , bits of leftover dough that puff as they cook, leaving hollow centers like pita, which are often filled with chevre or rillettes. The sweet fouace , now eaten at breakfast or tea, was traditionally linked with the harvest and new wine: The shepherds of Seuilly, after all, planned to eat their fouace with ripe Chenin Blanc grapes.

Wine and Rabelais. Pick any chapter. Gargantua is born bawling “A drink!” An “eternity” of wine punctuates each epic course: claret, Beaune, Graves, and always the wines of Touraine. It is the Truly Drunk of “Gargantua,” who, delighting in a suave white, swear: “That’s a wine from La Deviniere, from the Pineau grape. By my soul, it’s a wine of taffeta, well woven and of good yarn.” No less appreciated is Rabelais’ fresh “wine of Breton, which doesn’t grow in Brittany but in this good land of Veron.”

Five centuries later, Pineau de la Loire (Chenin Blanc) and Breton (Cabernet Franc) are still Touraine’s leading grapes, and Veron is part of the Chinon appellation.

*

Chenin Blanc is the base of much of the Loire’s sparkling wine. More significantly, it is the sole grape permitted for Vouvray and Montlouis as well as for the great whites of Anjou, among them Bonnezaux, Quarts de Chaume, Coteaux de Layon and Savennieres. These come in a range of sweetness, from bone-dry and off-dry to sweet and luscious as Sauternes.

Young Chenin Blanc wine is charming--floral, honeyed, with scents of quince and apricot. It passes quickly from nubile youth to ornery adolescence. After, say, a decade it begins to reveal its endless complexity and succulence--and keeps getting better. (I’ve sampled as far back as the 1890s.) Simultaneously taut and luscious, austere and voluptuous, it is constantly appetizing. You never get to the bottom of it.

Cabernet Franc is the principal grape of Chinon, Bourgueil, Saumur-Champigny (the current darling of Paris wine bars) and Anjou rouge. At the northern limits of viticulture, Loire reds tend to be lighter, brighter, less tannic than those from southern climes. A young one sometimes tastes of bell pepper, but more often surges with flavors of berries, cassis, plum and cherry.

Chinon and company age beautifully, too--though not like Bordeaux. Chinon passes through a secondary phase when it fairly reeks of hung game. Then it seems to shed its baby fat, to be constantly refining itself, becoming a distillation of scents and nuances--cinnamon, creme de cassis , prunes, anise and sandalwood, dried flowers, mint and truffles, all the while retaining its vigor and mouth-watering freshness.

*

Were Rabelais to taste modern Pineau and Breton, he wouldn’t recognize the raw wines of his day. In the past century alone, numerous upheavals have shaken the foundations of winemaking--from phylloxera to mechanization to the advent of artiste-vignerons .

He would feel right at home, however, in the caves of Chinon, where he has become a sort of patron saint, giving locals a license to eat, drink and be merry. His Caves Painctes is the home of the wine society, Les Entonneurs Rabelaisiens, which has turned organized carousing into a cottage industry. And despite a France with a strong “neo-prohibition” movement (not bad in a land that has never had a Prohibition to begin with), the Chinonais have adopted, literally, Rabelais’ dictum: “ Beuvez tousjours, vous ne mourrez jamais. “ (“Drink always, never die.”)

*

This cross between a brioche and a French country walnut bread is adapted from Jacques Mahou of Le Vieux Four, Tours. Mahou, whose family has been baking in Touraine since 1620, created this recipe from Rabelais’ guidelines. Fouace is delicious at breakfast or tea time and is wonderful with fresh goat cheese.

RICH WALNUT BREAD (La Fouace de Rabelais)

2 packages dry yeast

1 1/4 cups lukewarm milk

1 tablespoon coarse salt

1 heaping tablespoon honey

3 to 3 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour

1 to 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/8 teaspoon orange blossom water

1/4 teaspoon bergamot, or ground cinnamon

Dash saffron, crumbled

4 eggs

7 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

In large mixing bowl combine yeast and milk, stirring to help dissolve. When milk begins to take on color of yeast, stir in salt and honey.

Gradually stir in 3 cups whole-wheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose flour. Add orange blossom water, bergamot and saffron. Add eggs one by one.

Turn onto floured board and knead 10 to 15 minutes. Add flour if dough is too sticky to work, but dough should be somewhat sticky and soft. Work in butter by tablespoon as for brioche dough. Knead to incorporate. Add walnuts and knead another 2 minutes.

Place dough in floured bowl, turning to cover all sides with flour. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise 1 1/2 hours or until doubled in bulk.

Turn bread out on board and divide. Form each half into ball or dome and place on baking sheet. Cover with kitchen towel. Let rise for another hour.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Place ramekin with boiling water on bottom of oven.

When ready to bake, dust top of each round with whole-wheat flour and, using sharp knife or kitchen shears, cut cross into top of each bread.

Place loaves in center of oven and reduce temperature to 425 degrees. Bake 30 minutes, or until bottom of each loaf sounds hollow when tapped and tops are crusty and browned. Makes 2 loaves of about 8 servings each.

Each serving contains about:

229 calories; 471 mg sodium; 68 mg cholesterol; 12 grams fat; 26 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams protein; 0.84 gram fiber.

*

“Cooking rillettes without a cover is what distinguishes rillettes de Tours from those of le Mans,” maintains charcutier Jacques Hardouin. Hardouin uses only salt, Vouvray wine and Marc (brandy distilled from grape skins) to flavor his rillettes. You may want to add more spices. Traditionally, this would be made with half pork shoulder and half pork breast, but the latter is almost impossible to find in the United States.

RILLETTES DE TOURS AU VOUVRAY

2 pounds pork shoulder

10 ounces fatback

1 tablespoon coarse salt, or to taste

1/2 cup dry Vouvray, or other white wine

1 tablespoon Marc, or other brandy

Remove any remaining skin from pork and discard. Cut meat away from large bones. Cut in cubes of 1 inch or less. Cut fatback into 1/2-inch dice.

In cast-iron pot melt fatback over medium-high heat. Add cubes of meat gradually, stirring to color without burning. Stir in salt. Reduce heat as low as possible. If you cannot get heat low enough (fat should not come to boil), create double-boiler by putting pot inside larger pot filled with water. Let cook over extremely low flame 4 hours, stirring occasionally, about once every 20 minutes.

When big pieces of meat break apart easily, increase heat and stir continuously. Add white wine and Marc. Let wine evaporate, stirring continuously, 15 minutes.

Remove from heat. Drain rillettes in sieve, separating fat from meat and reserving some fat. Pour rest of fat back into cast-iron pot. Let meat cool.

Remove any small bones and cartilage from meat. Coarsely crush pieces of meat with fork. Return meat to pot with fat. Bring back to boil. Let boil 2 minutes.

Cool mixture, stirring regularly so fat and meat blend and fat whitens. When mixture becomes homogenous but still soft, ladle rillettes into pots or conserve jars.

Melt reserved fat and pour thin film over each pot. Covered with film of fat, rillettes will keep in refrigerator 1 month. Bring to room temperature before serving. Makes 3 1/2 cups. Each 1-tablespoon serving contains about:

34 calories; 158 mg sodium; 11 mg cholesterol; 2 grams fat; 0 carbohydrates; 3 grams protein; 0 fiber.

*

Replacing figs with prunes, Marie-Therese Renault adapted this recipe from a cookbook written by the great medieval chef Taillevent . She serves the pears with dry, spiced cookies at medieval dinners. They would go well with biscotti and ice cream too. Make this the night before and bring to room temperature just before serving.

SPICED PEARS (Poires aux Epices)

3 cups water

3 tablespoons honey

7 sticks cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon ground mace

1/8 teaspoon anise seeds

1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

3 tablespoons raisins, steeped in hot water

15 prunes, pitted, steeped in 1/2 cup tea

6 pears, peeled, cored and cut into quarters.

In pot, boil water with honey 10 to 15 minutes so mixture reduces slightly.

Add cinnamon, mace, anise and clove to honey syrup. Let reduce 15 to 20 minutes. Add drained raisins and prunes, cut into 2 or 3 pieces.

Add pears and gently baste with cooking juices without stirring. Let mixture simmer until fruit is firm but knife can easily be inserted, about 10 minutes, depending on type and ripeness of pears. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

275 calories; 3 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 72 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams protein; 4.08 grams fiber.

* Cover design by TRACY CROWE.

* Food styling by Donna Deane and Mayi Brady.