LES LAUMES—Hôtel de la Gare
A simple station restaurant with a long-sustained reputation for honest fare and special dishes, among them coq au Chambertin and truite meunière.
ST. SEINE-L’ABBAYE—Restaurant de la Poste
A country inn providing a pleasant garden and good provincial cooking. They serve the celebrated dodine de canard here and a pâté chaud en croûte which should go well with their good red Burgundies.
In the Saône-et-Loire Département, the lower part of our chosen district, the itinerant voluptuary has a most heartening choice. Mâcon, the capital of this region, has always been celebrated for its fine cuisine. Although some of its famed temples of gastronomy have faded, new ones have come along to maintain the high standard. The best of these is the Auberge Bressane, an inviting spot in Mâcon, presided over by a charming couple who preserve the old French tradition of true hospitality. And the cooking is superb.
Among the other towns in the Saôneet-Loire which offer noteworthy fare to the “gastro-nomad” are:
ANOST—Restaurant Guyard
A quiet, long-established retreat in a verdant corner of the Morvan, where good Burgundian dishes are served in a shaded garden. Monsieur Guyard, your host, is an excellent cook, and proud of his galantine de volaille and civet de lièvre St. Hubert. And he has some robust Beaujolais to accompany them.
AUTUN—Hôtel St. Louis et de la Poste
This is a comfortable hotel of ancient reputation, serving praiseworthy food and providing a good stopover between Paris and Nice. The town of Autun is picturesque and historically rich.
CHALONS-SUR-SAONE—Hôtel Royal
On the larger, more modern scale, with good cuisine and Burgundian dishes.
CHAROLLES—Hôtel Moderne
A country hotel in the land of fine local beef, where entrecôte Charolais is a natural specialty.
FLEURVILLE—Hôtel Chanel
A country hotel specializing in such substantial dishes as pâtés chauds, poularde au grossel, meurettes, and, in the summertime, frogs’ legs.
PONTANEVAUX—Hostellerie Compagnons de Jehu
This is a picturesque auberge, known for many years as a shrine of fine regional cooking.
TOURNUS—Hôtel du Sauvage
A good local hotel, well spoken of by writers on matters gastronomic.
Still another Département is included in Burgundy. This is the Yonne, famed for its Chablis. It offers enough for a separate article in itself and will appear in a later chapter.
Our intention is to list outstanding local wines from each of the French provinces. But “local” wines in this instance become the most famous in the world, with names which take your breath away. So an informal listing will be omitted this time.
The regional dishes of Burgundy, to repeat, have been devised to go with the blessing of good wine. The vocabulary of its dishes is not wide, but almost all of them call upon wine as a basis for their sauces. If you would like to bring a little of this regional cooking into your home, we hope you will set aside some reputable red and some dry white wine and try some of the five recipes which follow. Some of them have been adapted from an admirable little book, published in Dijon and written by Pierre Huguenin, entitled Les Meilleures Recettes de ma Pauvre Mère. One doesn’t feel very sorry for Monsieur Huguenin’s poor old mother after reading this mouth-watering book. She must have led a noble life. One of her best recipes concerns jambon persillé. Ham is not a dominant factor in Burgundian cooking except at Easter time, when jambon persillé becomes practically obligatory. There is a very pleasant counter-point between the aromatic ham in this recipe and the cool layer of parsleystrewn jelly which covers it. Despite our skeptical daughter’s opinion that it looks precisely like algae, we recommend this subtle cold dish with considerable affection.
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