Still troubled, Harpignies sought out the priest after the burial services and walked back to the village with him. “This longevity, is it unique in his family? His father, his mother…?” asked Harpignies.
The priest thought for a moment. “Well, there is his brother who is 107 years old. But since he hasn’t been sober for the last eighty years, he wasn’t able to come to the obsequies!”
The aged painter felt better after that and stepped lightly into the next café for his afternoon glass of Pommard.
The Burgundian will use water in a tank to keep his trout and crayfish active, and under duress he will endure water in his soup. (He has some fine wine soups, though.) But from this point on, he finds it impossible to cook his savory dishes without wine or to enjoy them at his table without the accompaniment of a clear goblet of Burgundy. Almost all of the fine local dishes have red or white wine as their base. And it should be emphasized that it is good Burgundy they use—not Chambertin or Montracher, of course, but no ordinary wine from the lowlands, either. The high quality of this cooking wine results in subtle sauces, never “winy,” heavy, or overspiced. Burgundian cooking is powerful and delicate at the same time. It is made for robust appetites—but also for keen palates.
The most celebrated of Burgundian specialties is one which causes the most controversy—snails. The famous escargots de Bourgogne have their partisans (the writer among them), who find them utterly delicious, but to others they are repugnant. The first unforgettable sentence of Georges Lecomte’s recipe for snails can hardly be reassuring. This was printed long ago in GOURMET, but perhaps you’ve forgotten it:
“You ambush them in the morning, while they are parading nonchalantly on the humid leaf, when their slow, fleshly promenade makes one think of the throat of a voluptuous woman shuddering under a gross and clumsy caress…”
By the time you arrive at the end of his long recipe, however, you are quivering with anticipation.
Not all critics are so kind to escargots de Bourgogne. Some readers will doubtless share this opinion: “Are there really people who eat snails willingly without being forced to by a diet, a dare, or disciplinarian punishment? The best proof that they are uneatable, is it not this highly spiced sauce, this stuffing, this garlic, this sausage meat, this parsley—everything with which they bedeck this frightful morsel of soft flesh to efface its taste? We prefer to eat the sauce and to ignore these bits of uneatable rubber!”
Nevertheless, the snail brings gustatory sublimity to most, if not all, Burgundians.
There are plenty of places where you can taste the genuine escargots de Bourgogne and weigh their merits for yourself, uninfluenced by the heated controversy. One of the most seductive shrines of the snail is called the Hôtel de l’Escargotière, a charming and unpretentious inn with a garden terrace, in the village of Chenove, about three miles south of Dijon. The chef knows the fine old Burgundian ways of preparing poultry, too, particularly coq au Chambertin and poulet à la crème, and is very proud of his aromatic terrines of pâté. The cave will yield excellent Burgundies to accompany these substantial dishes.
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