TwoFools in Zürich: La Crise de Foie: A Tale of Eating (Too) Well on the Canal du Midi

In her autobiography, My Life in France, Julia Child refers from time to time to suffering from la crise de foie, a uniquely French complaint resulting from overindulgence in food and drink. Symptoms include the wonderfully evocative and imprecise "heavy liver" (le foie lourd), as well as other more hangover-like symptoms.

Photo by tylonbrew

Having been to France many times and having certainly overindulged--there can be no other word for spending four to five hours at table consuming multiple courses--I still had never experienced this peculiar malady. Not, that is, until we spent a week on the Canal du Midi.

Eating Well Along the Canal

The four of us (my husband and I and two friends from California) love food and wine, especially French food and wine, and we love boating. Why not, we thought, combine it all into a week-long cruise along the Canal du Midi?

It turned out to be a great idea, not least because we ate very, very well.

It began, quite auspiciously, with dinner at Le Petit Comptoir in Narbonne the night before we picked up our boat. The menu is clever and inventive and focuses on regional products. The wine list likewise represents the region and at reasonable prices. The winning starter that night was the foie gras bonbons, little medallions of mi-cuit foie gras capped with tiny disks of jellied apricot. My lamb main (cooked pink or rosé) was meltingly tender, probably the best of the of our two weeks in France. A second bottle of wine, a cheese course, a desert, a digestive to follow. Well-fed and well-watered (arrosé), we congratulated ourselves for successfully setting the tone for this adventure.

Photo by tylonbrew

Next day we stowed our gear on the boat and headed to the real reason for starting our canal cruise in Narbonne: Les Halles. This covered market is open every morning, even Sundays(!), and hosts 70 sellers offering every kind of food. The fish was gorgeous, clear-eyed and very fresh. Heading towards a boat with potentially uncertain refrigeration, we skipped the fish and stocked up assorted cheeses, dry cured meats, breads, croissants, a quiche, and a narbonnaise, a pine-nut-studded pastry that we found at L'Epi d'Ovalie. The wine seller at La Bodega was wonderful as he guided us (in rapid French with the twanging accent of the region) to the best of his rosés and Corbières reds. These ended up being some of the best wines we found on the whole cruise.

Photo by tylonbrew

We hauled our goodies back to the boat, took the charter base manager's advice and headed to En Face for Sunday lunch. In these parts Sunday lunch is a big deal, and we were surrounded by French-speaking families as well as a sprinkling of tourists, all in search of that elusive but earnestly sought goal of bon rapport qualité prix (roughly, 'value for money'). En Face did indeed deliver value for money. The cassoulet turned out to be the best of the cruise, with a flavor so deep as to make us think it was enriched with demi-glace, as well as a crusty top and perfectly cooked beans. The gazpacho was also the best we found on our travels, bursting with fresh, clear vegetable flavors.

That night we feasted on a picnic from our Les Halles shopping trip as we waited at the Gailhousty lock for the lock keeper to arrive the next morning. (That's another story.)

Foie gras, lamb, cassoulet, cheese, more cheese and sausage. I think you begin to get the idea. The trip continued pretty much in this vein. Not every stop offered memorable food, but every stop offered some kind of delight at the table, if only the entertainment of inventing the back story for one proprietor's sullen teenage daughter.

Photo by mlis

One other restaurant was a standout: L'Ô à la Bouche in Le Somail.

Mooring in Le Somail we asked the important question: Where should we eat tonight? Easy. L'Ô à la Bouche was just a few meters away, right on the canal. We walked over and checked out the menu. Oh yeah. This is our kind of place. And it was. The service was lovely and very patient, given that we were starting to look like we lived on a boat and also that our level of boisterousness was a bit above the norm for the French. The food was an expression of a true culinary métier, where everything the kitchen does matters (the knife work, the sauce, the seasoning, the presentation), and it showed in the results. In terms of progress towards our crise, the standout dish was the oysters with foie gras. Actually, I was a dissenter on that one. (I thought the foie gras overwhelmed the oysters.) But we all loved the Comme à Cayenne, a rich, spicy St. Chinian.

Photo by tylonbrew

Drinking Well Along the Canal

The canal offers many opportunities to tie up and head to a winery for a degustation (tasting). Actually there are too many of these stops (we did need to make our return point after all), and we only tried two. Chateau Ventenac turned out to be pretty forgettable as a winery visit, being staffed by indifferent wine wenches, just like any other winery across the world. (To be fair, the vendage had just started and perhaps these were stand-ins for the regular staff.)

Photo by tylonbrew

However, just a little farther west on the canal we found Domaine de Maels at Argens-Minervois. This is the kind of winery visit you always hope for and never seem to find. We rang the bell and peeked in, but all we could see was one man at work cleaning some equipment. Where was the tasting room? Should we interrupt him?

Before we could decide an older women stepped out of the house next door and led us into the winery to the small tasting area off to one side. When my French failed me (as it did so often that week), the woman called her son, the winemaker, over.

The wines were a revelation. Nothing like these Minervois had ever made it to the West Coast of the US (that I had found) and certainly we would be unlikely to find them in Switzerland. Perfumed with garrrigue and built on fine tannins with black fruits that never overwhelmed, the AOC wines were a joy. We especially liked the single-vineyard bottling, Le Clos de Pech Laurié. We also liked the Carignan and the white blend. The winery is a cash-only operation, so we bought as much as we had cash to cover.

Home Again

Back home now, we're drinking lots of water and dining on poached chicken with steamed veg. It's not the typical French cure, which seems to be either Vichy water or a vile-looking concoction called Hepatoum, but it should do the trick.