Le Beurre
A Salted Butter-Filled Journey Through Western France, Part I
I recently joined BB on a work trip to Nantes, a dynamic hub on the Loire river in western France with spectacular markets and gardens and whimsical contemporary art scattered among historical landmarks.
The city pulses with a creative energy and somewhat offbeat character that culminates on the Île de Nantes, where a disarmingly-lifelike, 40 foot-tall elephant spits water on unsuspecting passersby, and joyful children fling themselves off trampolines embedded in a makeshift lunar landscape.
Nantes boasts a formidable food scene. I enjoyed a galette (the crêpe’s savory cousin made from milled buckwheat) with gooey gruyere, goat cheese, an over-easy egg and ham, paired with local cider. That same morning I had indulged in an eclair with pudding-like chocolate piped inside a perfect pâte à choux, crowned with luxurious icing. Très magnifique.
Yet what truly stood out in this extraordinary culinary scene was a much simpler pleasure — Le Beurre.
Our first night in Nantes, BB and I had charcuterie and Muscadet on our hotel’s sweet terrace. The saucissons: superb; the Muscadet: crisp and refreshing. However, it was the elongated Tootsie Roll of daffodil-hued butter that neither of us could resist.
According to its cellophane-wrapper, this was no ordinary butter. This was Beurre Charentes-Poitou: butter with a capital “B” and an AOP seal, a hard-earned designation indicating protected regional ingredients and traditional production methods.
Creamy on the tongue with a slight tang and nuttiness enhanced by the scant inclusion of salt (demi-sel refers to butter containing between 0.5% and 3% salt), this pale beauty stood head and shoulders above any butter I’d ever encountered.
The following day BB and I experienced our first of many jambon-beurre, the classic French lunch on the go of a baguette filled with Paris ham and butter. The French treat butter like Americans treat cheese, not as a condiment but rather as an equal to the meat, laying down finger-thick slabs. I was so drawn to the butter’s cultured, earthy taste that I found myself pushing aside the luscious sliced ham so that I could scrape my teeth through the butter, savoring mouthfuls of the salt-flecked cream and bread alone.
Left to my own devices on subsequent days, I fortified myself with butter-laced laminated pastries: a butter croissant plus either a pain au chocolat or chausson aux pommes, a glossy puff pastry turnover enclosing a heady, cinnamon-scented apple puree.
I told myself I needed energy — do buttery pastries actually possess caloric value? — before setting off along the ligne verte, a lime green filament painted on the city’s pavers that charts a pathway between more than 100 permanent artworks. In spite of how much walking I did, the ligne verte quickly became a ligne jaune as my veins filled with more cheese-like butter and buttery cheese.
While I had consumed enough butter during our short city break to shame a Wisconsin State Fairgoer, Nantes was a mere warm-up for the next leg of our trip into the heart of Brittany.
Stay tuned for part deux, where we binge on Brittany’s celebrated “butter cake”
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I had no idea that butter could be so special. I guess the tape measure is so long because of expansion after eating all the rich food! The pictures make me want to visit Nantes.
Reminded me of the one time I did make it to France. I was eating at a bouchon in Lyon with a Japanese friend who lived there. Next to us was another Japanese person (we could tell because he was reading his Japanese guidebook). We got to talking, and it turns out that the stranger was on his way from Paris to Geneva to meet his friend, and he had some French butter as a souvenir.