Auvergne: In the Heart of France
There's no menu at Au P'tit Bistro, a smoke-filled, bare-bones café in the French village of Saint-Martin-Valmeroux—at least not on Mondays. In fact, there's no ordering at all, the presumption being that any person passing through this hamlet in mountainous, rural central France should consider himself lucky to have found a place that's serving food at all on this customary day off for restaurateurs. Here, it was the daily special or nothing. Moments after I took my seat, a small carafe of red wine, a basket of sliced baguette, and a cold appetizer of white asparagus in a vinaigrette appeared before me unbidden. On entering the restaurant, I'd received a scolding look from the proprietor, a thin woman who wore reading glasses on a silver chain and had thrust her chin in the direction of a clock on the wall. I'd arrived for lunch at 1:45 in the afternoon, in a part of the country where they slap shut the sidewalk menu boards at 2:00 p.m. sharp. Only begging and pleading had earned me a seat at one of the tables occupied by farm workers who were already finishing their post-lunch Gauloises.
Here in the Auvergne, a rugged, 10,000-square-mile region in the geographic midpoint of France that is one of the least urbanized areas of the country, people don't cling to some hoary past as much as they just do things by the book, the way they've always been done. Nothing brought that home to me more than the main course I was served at that café: a classic local pairing of flavorful saucisses d'auvergne (country-style fresh pork sausages) that had been simmered in wine and served with delicate, bacon-flecked green Puy lentils harvested in the Haute-Loire, one of the four administrative districts that make up the Auvergne. The main dish was followed by a selection of local cheeses—sharp salers and cantal, nutty saint-nectaire, luscious bleu d'auvergne—served from a platter that made the rounds from table to table. In its rustic, almost obstinate simplicity, the meal honored two of the touchstones of the Auvergne's cooking—pork and dairy products—and, more than that, perfectly captured what is the most dear to me about France as a whole: the notion that it is not only okay but downright righteous to eat and drink richly every day.
For all the frills of their haute cuisine, the French harbor a deep affection for the foods of their heartland: ingredients and dishes that lay bare their rural origins. That's one of the things that struck me as I got to know the Auvergne, an often overlooked land of remote farm villages tucked amid the extinct volcanoes of the Massif Central mountain range, during a weeklong trip there at the end of November last year. I'd lived in France during my 20s and, over the years, had traveled around most of the country's major regions, where I reveled in the local specialties—oysters in the Aquitaine, choucroute in Alsace-Lorraine, bouillabaisse in Provence, and so on. But when I sat down to meals in the Auvergne last fall, including that memorable lunch at Au P'tit Bistro, I tasted wonderful food that felt less like a specific regional cuisine than a pure, distilled culinary embodiment of Frenchness.
Yes, I encountered local specialties like pounti, a meat loaf made with ground pork belly, prunes, and herbs; aligot, a garlicky whipped potato–and–cheese dish; and truffade, a more rustic version of aligot that's sometimes made with bacon. But there were also nourishing potées, or stews, of pork ribs and cabbage that were just like ones served in convivial brasseries all over France. There were the delicious handmade dry-cured hams and sausages that appear on countless charcuterie plates in Paris bistros (see The Auvergnats in Paris). And there were cheeses—the region boasts no fewer than five A.O.C.-designated ones (see Cheeses of the Auvergne)—that have earned fame all over France and beyond. Most tellingly, there were dishes like the sausages and lentils I ate at Au P'tit Bistro: a plain but elegantly conceived marriage of foods that reflected a respect for time-honored cooking techniques that use good products close at hand. Eating the Auvergne's hearty, unpretentious cuisine, I kept saying to myself, This is what France tastes like.
Indeed, more than a few of my French friends have described the Auvergne as la France profonde, "deepest France", a place where the country's sacrosanct values, represented by a closeness to the land and the pleasures of simple cooking, are thought to be enshrined. The phrase kept ringing in my ears as I ventured into the region last November. After a three-and-a-half-hour train ride due south from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand, the unprepossessing industrial hub of 140,000 people that is the only city of any size in the Auvergne, I drove south and west along increasingly narrow and serpentine roads—the region is largely unserved by major motorways—into Cantal, the most mountainous and arguably the most rural of the Auvergne's districts. Here and there, in a stark landscape of bare trees, snow-dusted mountaintops, and upland grazing pastures, the turret of a castle would ease into view—vestiges of a feudal past that reaches back to the Arverni, the Gallic people who originally inhabited this land and gave the region its name.
Mostly, though, I saw small dairy, hog, and cattle farms, which are the cradle of the Auvergne's cuisine. Before my trip, I'd met a woman named Sylvie Favat, who grew up in Cantal and had provided me with introductions to a handful of farmers she knew in the region. So, early in the morning after I arrived in Salers, the quiet medieval village where I'd decided to stay for a few nights, I followed Favat's directions in the frigid predawn darkness to a small dairy farm run by the Benech family.
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