Sud de France

Winner of the André Simon Memorial Fund’s "Food Book of the Year" award, 2013 and the Fortnum & Mason award for "Best Cookbook, 2013"

Languedoc-Roussillion (not forgetting the Midi-Pyrénées and Aquitaine) are the regions of France most settled by expatriate colonists in recent years. Caroline Conran has spent much time there since the early 1970s and her collection of recipes reflects years of travel, conversation, cooking, eating and drinking. She has shared her knowledge with readers in a previous book, Under the Sun, but here she concentrates on the single region of Languedoc which curls up from the Spanish border along the Mediterranean coast as far as the Rhône valleys. This is the France of Crusades and Cathars; its towns and cities – Nîmes, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Montpellier, Béziers – make up a fiercely independent region. Its people are passionate about rugby, about hunting and foraging, with a cuisine of their own, more Southern, simpler, more earthy, and less influenced by the Michelin style than the rest of France.

The book provides information on their particular specialities such as chestnuts, sweet onions, Bouzigues mussels and oysters, salt cod, poufres (baby octopus), charcuterie, salades sauvages (salads of wild plants), the rose-coloured garlic of Lautrec, wild asparagus and local mushrooms. And there are descriptions of places where oysters, truffles, chestnuts or calçots – a giant spring onion, eaten roasted on a fire of vine-prunings – are the obsession of everyone in the community.

The book is illustrated throughout by the author with black and white drawings of foodstuffs and ingredients. The author also painted the watercolour that is used for the cover.