Although the friendly and gregarious American thinks well of his fellow citizen in home territory, he suffers a strange change of heart when traveling in Europe. He suddenly finds himself saying, “Well, the place would be all right if it weren't overrun by Americans.” He yearns to get off the beaten path, away from his compatriots. But he keeps right on walking down the rue de Rivoli and the promenade des Anglais. He motors to Brittany and the Touraine, lakes a week end in Deauville and a fortnight on the Riviera, and concludes that his counterpart, like his shadow, is unshakable. Although aloofness is not necessarily a positive virtue, it gives us some pleasure to be able to point out that the Poitou is one of the off-the-beaten-path provinces where very few Americans travel, yet where the countryside is seductive, the architecture inspired, and the regional cooking delectable.
It is an unsung province in the western part of France, composed of three département —Vienne, Deux-Sèvres, and Vendée. It rubs elbows with Brittany and the Touraine and borrows wine from them. It is unspectacular, very peaceful, and imbued with that peculiar quality which is called, for want of a better name, nostalgic. Le Poitou is the pure essence of France, quilted with fields and forests, dotted with châteaux and Romanesque churches. Its citizens are not particularly famed, with the exception of Georges Clemenceau, France's vieux-tigre Premier of World War I, who was a native of the Vendée. It is a land of folklore, native costumes, and long working hours. The eastern part is agricultural. You drive past prosperous fields given over to grain and sugar beets and scattered vineyards. The villages are mostly clusters of farmyards, and the farmyards are thickly populated with ducks, chickens, white geese, goats, and rabbits.
On the west, bordering the Atlantic, is the Vendée, a low, mysterious land crossed with canals and generously moistened with salt marshes (which augur well for the quality of the mutton). Fishermen set out from several ports—Les Sables d'Olonne is the most important—in quest of tuna, sardines, shellfish, and the usual Atlantic miscellany. It is a hard life, and the gains are small, but these hard-bitten fishermen will accept no alternative. The fisherman's wife in Les Sables-d'Olonne is bedecked on Sunday with an elaborate white coiffe, a roomy blouse, a short red-and-white-striped skirt, and wooden shoes. If you are enthusiastic about native costumes, she merits a detour.
The traveler in the Poitou will find few, if any, uniformed guides with monologues, yet there is almost as much to see here as in the Touraine. The architectural gamut runs from prehistoric dolmens to modernistic churches. You will find a Roman theater in the village of Sanxay. feudal dungeons in Loudun and Niort, and Romanesque treasures almost everywhere. They say that Romanesque architecture, like beer, is an acquired taste. If you have made this happy acquisition, a memorable experience awaits you in many villages of the Poitou, particularly in Chauvigny (Vienne) and St. Généroux (Deux-Sévres).
The pinnacle of Romanesque beauty, of course, is reached at Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers. Only the eathédrale St.Pierre in Angoulème attains the same eminence. Ancient stone bridges also flourish in the Poitou, notably in St. Généroux, Airvault, and Parthenay. The rolling hills are punctuated with Renaissance châteaux, less imposing than those of the Touraine but more likely to engender that acquisitive urge. The Château d'Oiron is perhaps the most outstanding. You will find a village of unutterable charm in the Vendée if you search out Fontenay-le-Comte.
The summary could go on and on. but we are also here to discuss fine fare and where to find it. Let it be Stated with emphasis—the Poitou regional cookery is exceptionally good. It doesn't equal the splendor of Burgundy, Périgord, or the Lyonnais. but it has the virtue of honest simplicity combined with absolutely flawless materials. Fine butter is its keystone. The fat of the goose and the oil of the olive are not in favor for cooking. The aim of the Poitou cook is to enhance the natural taste of things, not to disguise it with aromatic sauces. “Absolutely nothing replaces butter”—that is his credo. And the butter which he employs is the finest in France, bringing a higher price in Les Halles in Paris than the best from Normandy.
He has his little secrets, too. A trickle of wine. lemon juice, or brandy at just the right moment lifts his dish above the commonplace. He uses an immense quantity of shallots, plenty of onions, but is sparing with the garlic, He employs a wide range of herbs and is more partial to slowly cooked fowl than red meat. He is “born a cook, and not a rôtisseur,” to alter the phrase. The hurried minute steak with shoestring potatoes is contrary to the reposeful cookery of this quiet country. They much prefer to have something gurgling gently in an earthen casserole on the back of the stove.
This rich province is like the Nivernais—everything grows in abundance. Fruit, grain, and vegetables burst from the soil. The finest of the dry white beans, called mojettes, come from here. Furred and feathered game populates the forests, plump steer roam the pastures. They make a celebrated cheese from ewe's milk, the little white cylinder known as chabicbou. Its taste is gentle at first but it becomes stronger with age. It also hardens, sometimes to the point where you have to attack it with a hammer. Poitevins are rabid fresh-water fishermen, bringing back eel, carp, shad, and pike to rival the Atlantic salt-water catch. Snails and frogs' legs appear on many menus. Nature is kind to Le Poitou!
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