I’m driving over hills colored, like an artichoke, in varying shades of green. The windows of my rental car are open to the afternoon breeze, and from the radio an announcer speaks in staccato bursts that crackle like machine-gun fire. This is Euskera, the mother tongue of the Basques: laden with x’s and k’s and unrelated to any other language in the world. It’s said to be almost unlearnable for adults, but to my ear that announcer must be calling a match of pelota, the Basque national game, which is a cross between tennis and handball. I can’t understand a word, but just listening to it makes me giddy; I know I’m heading in the right direction.
The Basques, after all, are one of the few ethnic groups to have retained a strong regional identity in an increasingly homogenized Western world. And though the Basque region encompasses areas of France and Spain where Iberia joins the bulk of the European continent, many Basques identify themselves only as Basques, the lone European ethnic group to have resisted migratory urges and stayed put.
I’ve spent plenty of time in Spain’s Basque region, which includes the stunning seaside city of San Sebastián, part of the Rioja wine appellation, and Bilbao, home to the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Museum. There I’ve found that the unfortunate image of bomb-toting terrorists has little to do with the food-obsessed bankers and businessmen you are likely to encounter in the region.
I’ve also passed through the Pays Basque of southwestern France, but only along the coast, usually stopping at Biarritz for a meal and a stroll along the beach on my way to Spain. Biarritz is a splendid old-world resort town, but with its wrought-iron railings, its American surfing schools, and its ascot-wearing men walking poodles, it is the international façade the Pays Basque shows to the world. The dinner menu at the restaurant inside the imposing Hôtel du Palais, which was built at the behest of the decidedly un-Basque Napoleon III, features veal scaloppine with spaghetti, Caesar salad, smoked salmon with sour cream and blini, steak tartare. I remember that food from Walt Disney World.
You have to travel over those verdant hills to find the real thing. The Basques have their own architecture; sports like pelota, goat races, and the flinging of heavy iron bars; even their own typography: the rounded letters, small i’s, and capital A’s that constitute a sort of national font. And they have their own food, from exquisite dishes at Michelin-starred restaurants to village specialties.
One of those specialties is cider, and I’m on my way to the town of Sare to meet an apple grower named Xavier Laussucq, who has promised to teach me about it. As I pull into the town square and park beside a tent with a striped awning, I see a woman there selling gâteaux basques, pastries filled either with cream or with a type of cherry grown only in the nearby town of Itxassou. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, so I buy a slice of the cherry. When the woman hands it to me, I nearly drop it because of its surprising heft. The Basques are not a subtle people. Yet the crust is somehow flaky to the point of translucence, and the center filled with the richest, darkest, most intensely flavored cherries I’ve tasted. If the packaged fruit pies of my youth were the gustatory equivalent of tinny AM radio, this is a fruit pie in glorious Dolby stereo.
Next, I head over to the Herriko Etxejo Edantegia, which for all its alarming consonants is nothing more than the bar next door. I’ve just been served a bottle of cider when Xavier Laussucq walks in. Taking one sip of my cider—a tart, rustic brew that tastes as if it has run head-on into grappa—he immediately invites me to his house for a bottle of his. “Mine is less green,” he says. “More smooth.”
Soon I’m standing in his driveway of mismatched stones, gazing at a typically ageless and immaculately kept Basque house, with whitewashed walls bisected by the timber beams that are always painted either green or red, the colors of Basque nationalism. “Built by a pirate,” his wife volunteers.
Laussucq’s cider seems no smoother than the bottle I had at the bar, but I’m distracted from all thoughts of apples by something dangling from the frame of the garage—strings of drying peppers, the renowned piments d’Espelette. The peppers of Espelette are a Basque phenomenon, like the cherries of Itxassou, the jambon de Bayonne, and the apples of Sare: They help define this singular nation-state without a nation.
I suddenly want to taste those peppers, to learn Euskera against all odds, to wear a red beret as the Basques do. I’ve been on the ground two hours.
The peppers of Espelette came from the Americas, carried back by explorers in the 15th century. The Basques didn’t have the money to actually buy the spices, which in some cases were worth their weight in gold, so they planted the peppers instead. They grow unusually well in Espelette—a town of maroon-colored shutters with maroon-colored peppers dangling from the window frames—because it is hot and humid in the summer. “The mountains stop the clouds, so it rains quite a lot here,” pepper grower Maritxu Garacotche tells me. In August, he adds, the fields turn bright red, “the color of a matador’s cape.”
“Most hot peppers are nothing but fire,” Garacotche says. But the Espelette peppers are not hot, not compared with the peppers of Mexico or Asia. Instead, they have an undercurrent of sweetness, a point of pride in this town. “This pepper has its own special flavor,” he says. “We use it with meat and with fish, in traditional dishes like axoa[a stew of minced veal], and in our blood sausage. We use it in charcuterie, and we use it with eggs.”
Sheep farmers, the Garacotches harvest peppers both as a hobby and as a sideline. They pick them in August and dry them for a month by putting 40 to 50 on a strand and hanging them everywhere.
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