Cépage et Cuisine: A Culinary and Cultural Spectacle

May 21, 2016 – Beaune Market Day and La Ciboulette

Hi, everybody. Bounjour a tous! Welcome back to our blog, Cepage et Cuisine, as we chronicle our return to Burgundy and points beyond over the next couple of weeks or so. My traditional practice is to wake up before Mary and go to the boulangerie down the hill at Ladoix-Serrigny and pick up a croissant or other baked item for Mary’s breakfast. Today I got a simple fresh croissant. Mary says there is just no substitute for the real thing. Surely there is an authentic bakery somewhere in the U.S. that can make these, but we haven’t yet encountered one. She says the real McCoy is lighter and more buttery and just not easily duplicated back home.

The Beaune market on Saturdays is not to be missed if you’re in Burgundy. What a spectacle of people, food, and other specialty items! We always schedule our travel so that we can shop the Beaune market and have a few more days to enjoy our fresh items.

The market consumes la place de centre ville, the square or plaza at the center of town, and spills out into nearby streets. All manner of vegetables, cured and fresh meats, dairy products, cheese, flowers, olives, you name it, are sold.

Shoppers are elbow to elbow, literally, and sometimes there is a little jostling. Vendors offer samples for tasting as we walk past, and it’s all so appetizing. You just have go with the flow and keep the river of humanity moving slowly past the stalls of a bewildering array of choices. If you want to spend more time really browsing a particular display, you just about have to go around the circuit and catch it on your next pass. Same applies to dawdling tourist photographers … like me!

Traiteur translates to caterer. In this case, the name of the company is a rather unfortunate English meaning.

We decided on cuisse de confit de canard, haricot vert, pomme de terre, ail, champignons blanc, courgettes, confit tomates, olive tapenade vert, fraises, et fromage de Beaufort d’Alpage. That translates to duck legs preserved in their own fat, green beans, potatoes, garlic, white mushrooms, zucchini, sundried tomatoes, green olive tapenade, strawberries, and a cheese from a nearby region (managed to remember all those in French except the zucchini … had to look up that one).

After dropping off our loot at the gite, we drove the 10 minutes to Nuits-Saint-Georges to one of our favorite lunch spots, Bar L’Etoile. We stumbled onto the place six years ago and have been coming ever since. The weather was beautiful today (ille fait beau), and we enjoyed lunch on the patio.

We ordered a simple rosé, which is locally produced, inexpensive, and comes to the table in an ordinary, unlabeled bottle. It’s practically consumed over lunch on a warm day the way Americans might consume iced tea.

Here’s Mary, enjoying a refreshing lunchtime quaff.

And Brian doing the same.

The restaurant is located in the heart of Nuits-Saint-Georges in an area called the Place de la Liberation, so named to honor the liberation of the area by the advancing American army in World War II.

Later in the afternoon, we dropped in at a tasting of Crémant de Bourgogne, a locally produced sparkling wine. Our wonderful friend and host, Marie, gave us the flyer for it. It turned out to be sort of a school project for students of l’école du vin, the school for wine professionals in Beaune. They had produced a lovely sparkling wine for us to try. Our host could understand English a little better than he could speak it. I asked him if the wine was all chardonnay or if other varietals were present. He replied, “cent pour cent,” 100% chardonnay.

Here we are with our young student hosts.

Dinner was at La Ciboulette, one of our very favorite restaurants. I make reservations many weeks in advance, which isn’t easy because they have no website and everything is done by phone. We’ve become friendly with the owner, Isabelle, who speaks enough English for us to place the reservation.

Isabelle greeted us warmly. "You have not changed!" Here she is, reviewing the wine list with me.

I just placed ourselves in her hands and she chose a wonderful wine for us.

Mary loves this salad of warm goat cheese called salade chèvre chaud. White asparagus is in season and I enjoyed a cream of asparagus soup called velouté asperges.

The main course for Mary was joue de porc, roasted pork cheeks. I had the same dish a few years ago and enjoyed it very much.

I had pave de boeuf, sort of like a strip steak, which I ordered mainly because I love the sauce Époisses, a fantastic sauce made from cream and the locally produced cheese. The steak was fine, but I think the best American steakhouses produce a better, more tender cut than is generally available in France.

The wine was a Domaine Tollot-Beaut Chorey-les-Beaune 2013, a straightforward village wine that was nonetheless perfumed and delicious. We’re familiar with Tollot-Beaut, have several bottles in our collection at home, and have visited the domaine. The aromas showed the typical earth, floral, and red fruit profile. The palate was smooth, fresh, with a beam of vivacious red cherry, consistent with its youth. It was wonderfully balanced and a terrific accompaniment to both dishes. The bottle price was 48€, which converts to about $55. In a fine U.S. restaurant, I imagine it would be priced more in the $65-$75 range.