Over the course of my stay, I will eat those peppers in almost every form imaginable. That night, in the dining room of the charming Hôtel Euzkadi, I have them roasted with sweet Spanish peppers in one course, ground into axoa for another, and in a sauce with a bit of tomato accompanying a boudin noir as a third. For each dish, they provide a different element: sweetness here, a hint of a bite there, some flavor, some complexity.
With the meal, I drink Irouléguy, the wine of the Pays Basque, which is made from the sturdy but rather inelegant Tannat grape. (Later, I will have a transcendent bottle of this wine, made by Michel Riouspeyrous under the Domaine Arretxea label, but most Irouléguys I try are as interesting as a punch in the head.) For dessert, I have a typical Basque dish—Itxassou cherries in a compote poured over the strong goat cheese called Iraty. So intense is the flavor of the cherries that I decide to set out the following morning on a pilgrimage to Itxassou.
It isn’t much of a pilgrimage, distances being quite manageable in the Pays Basque. In 20 minutes I’m standing beside a cherry grower with the mellifluous name of Xan Estebecomena, looking out at his denuded trees. All three of the varieties unique to the area were harvested at the beginning of June, two weeks before my visit. And some have an incredibly short life span. The small, bright-colored Xapata is delicious for eating, but spoils easily. “They’re only good for two days, and they only ripen during that window in June,” says Estebecomena, one of 15 growers belonging to a cherry-producing cooperative. “People from Bordeaux to Toulouse come just to taste them.”
The other two varieties, Peloa and Beltxa, are dark and black, and live on through the year as cherry compote. Estebecomena gives me a jar, then sends me off to the restaurant at the Hôtel du Pont d’Enfer, in Bidarry, for lunch.
To get to the hotel, I cross a medieval bridge spanning a small river. The restaurant itself isn’t much to look at, with a cigarette machine stuck in the corner and advertising in Lucite stands on the tables. The cuisine is billed as rustic, and nobody is wearing a sport coat, much less a suit. Yet, as it turns out, Estebecomena knows food as well as he does cherries. My lunch borders on magnificence.
I have local white asparagus, a spongy mushroom pâté of startling intensity, and salmis de palombe, a fricassee of wild pigeon. The pigeon meat is the color of clay, and the rich brown sauce, made with Madiran wine, makes me call for another basket of bread to soak up all I can. I struggle with the knife and fork, then give up and grasp the pigeon in my hands, tearing off hunks of meat with my teeth. My server, the chef’s daughter, nods with approval. “Like a Basque,” she says.
Any visitor to the Pays Basque will eventually pass through St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, or Doninane Garazi to the Basques, who have spelled out their version of the name in flowers on a hillside in the city center. Propitiously located near the end of a mountain pass from Spain and at the intersection of three main highways and a river, it serves as the unofficial capital of the region. And Les Pyrénées is the best place to bunk within an hour’s drive. There are postcard racks and souvenir shops along the town’s main street, but also genuine bustle in the air, as if its citizens are going about important business.
The restaurant at Les Pyrénées lost one of its two Michelin stars this year, but by all accounts, the food is as it has been for decades. Firmin Arrambide started cooking in his father’s kitchen at the hotel when he was 15, which was 39 years ago. His meals don’t qualify as Basque cooking exactly, but as cooking born of one Basque’s love of gastronomy. “Things don’t have to be absolutely Basque to make Basque food,” he says. “I take ingredients I like and I make dishes; I put Basque touches in what you’d call European dishes.”
So my salad of panfried crayfish is served with a rich sauce of those ubiquitous Espelette peppers. A piece of sea bass, as meaty, moist, and noble as any steak, comes with beautifully undercooked local vegetables (artichokes, lima beans, and peas) that aren’t a mere accompaniment but an integral part of the whole. For dessert, cheese and cherries are paired with grape and walnut bread that seems almost Scandinavian. Drinking a glass of local pear eau-de-vie, I nibble at exquisite petits fours (and a miniature crème brûlée in a pan fit for a dollhouse), then watch dusk settle over the terrace. It isn’t difficult to understand why the Basques want to preserve their heritage—and their way of life.
That thought recurs at a festival in the town of Hasparren when I watch a game of pelota. Five players on each of two teams, one outfitted in red and one in white, scatter across a blacktop as long as a football field with a high wall at each end and fling a hard ball back and forth (with wicker baskets or paddles or just their hands) until someone drops it and a point is recorded. Later, outside the Relais des Tilleuls, in the town center, I drink a beer as children in berets dance a Saut basque, which is like the elegant Catalonian sardana set on fast-forward. I can be nowhere else in the world.
With the beer, I try a slice of the sweetly salty jambon de Bayonne, which tastes like most any other good-quality ham. What I really want, I’m told, is Ibaïona ham, which is much rarer—there are only three producers who make it. Luckily, one of them, Louis Ospital, has his factory in Hasparren, so off I go.
Ospital is short and balding, dressed in jeans and a madras shirt. He explains that whereas jambon de Bayonne is made from a six-month-old pig that has eaten, as pigs are wont to do, whatever has come its way, Ibaïona comes from year-old pigs fed only cereal. Their meat is coated with a mixture of sea salt, garlic, and—sure enough—Espelette peppers, then hung for months in cold storage. After four to six more months at room temperature, Ospital rubs the Ibaïona hams with a flavorless red pepper from Spain. “Everything here has to be red, white, or green, the colors of the Basque flag, or it won’t sell,” he says.
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