A Gourmet's Glance at the French Alps
At the mention of the French Alps, most winter enthusiasts or summer hikers fathom a peppery fondue or a slice of lightly burnt raclette melted over fingerling tubers and cornichons.
For centuries, geographical boundaries inhibited the intrusion of industrial products, commercial dairy farming, and the introduction of foreign ingredients, making the French Alps a hotspot of endemic food culture. Ingredients center around the plants, fungi, and animals available in the immediate vicinity of villages.
Although blessed by their relative isolation, the Haute Savoie and Haute Alps Regions—like the greater Alps—face population decline in traditional villages, the rising tide of commercialism, and, ultimately, the loss of culinary traditions.
Myrtille Myrtille
Alpine pastures offer a plethora of aromatics, berries, and fungi. The famed myrtille, a sweet-sour wild blueberry with slightly bitter skin and tannic after-notes, makes its home on shrubby steep moraines and ridge lines right above tree line, also growing in dwarf varieties besides shaded spruce groves and ant piles.
The myrtille attracts local pastors, gastronomists, and children alike. It is best picked in mid-to-late-July with a blueberry harvester, which separates the unpalatable stems and leaves from the berry.
After picking, it is readily consumed or immediately frozen to satisfy the sweet-toothed alpinist even into the depths of winter in the form of a myrtille tart. A good tart is not overbearingly sweet and has a healthy serving of lightly sugared berries atop a crumbly butter dough base, topped with local sweet cream. Knowing the French, though, it doesn’t come by surprise that these delectable indigo berries make their way into everything from liquors to charcuterie to jams.
Saucisson Montagnard - A Cured Delicacy
Nothing screams Haute-Savoie more than a good saucisson, cut haphazardly with an old rusty Opinel knife and paired with a morsel of warm sourdough baguette tucked into a ski jacket. The saucisson holds everything the starving mountain traveler desires.
A good saucisson comes in all shapes and sizes. It should give slightly to the touch, with greyish-blue molding and a somewhat thicker intestinal lining that is easy to peel. Hardness to the touch or difficulty peeling indicates overdrying. Overdried saucisson usually has a sinewy texture and imparts a sour and oversalted taste.
Pork should come from local low-lying pastures with organic pig hens. Quality additives should include nothing but herbs, noisette, myrtille, boletus edulis (cepe) mushroom, pure salt, and saltpeter (potassium nitrite), perhaps a dash of grape sugar (dextrose). There should be a juicy-chewy sensation at the first bite as the uncanny combination of flavors of mold, ammonia, ash, forest, salt, and sweet pork unfold on the palate.
Liquor
To those with strict health regiments, the French mountains will prove testing. What stone-fruit brandy is to the Swiss and Austrian alpinists, Génépi is to their French neighbors. Distilled from wormwood flowers—an herbaceous plant that grows in the high alpine—Génépi offers an enthralling experience of rosemary notes, pepper, caramel, anise, licorice, and lemon peel.
On a sunny March day, perhaps after a nice ski in the afternoon sun and a hearty meal outside a traditional refuge, it is not uncommon to uncork a bottle of Génépi and relax for hours in the alpine silence. Your ears are crunching from the cold, only the faint hum of condensation trails high above and the early spring birds interrupting the sparkling white bliss. Génépi warms the body and spirit.
Cheese
Charles de Gaule once pointed out to his fellow Frenchmen that it is impossible to govern a country with over 246 types of cheese, and that certainly holds true in this southeastern corner of the country.
Cows of various breeds graze on the aromatics, producing a rich and herbaceous milk that, with the assistance of carefully guarded bacterial cultures, makes for incredible cheese. From Comté to Tomme to various other goat’s, cow's, and sheep’s milk cheeses, the French Alps have much to offer.
The raw milk gets boiled in copper cauldrons, separating fat from curd, after which a select strain is added to start the lengthy fermentation process. The rind gets dusted, brine-washed, or covered in chestnut leaves or walnuts. Special cellars (cave d’affinage) allow ammonia, lactic acid, and hydrogen cyanide to produce the perfect balance of bitterness, sour notes, and earthiness. Too much ammonia and the cheese will give a “kick” up the nose.
Local Produce
Like the Rhône valley of the Swiss Valais, a significant portion of the valleys in the French Alps fall within a more seasonal Mediterranean-influenced climate than the maritime-continental ecology more predominant in the northern Alps.
Unlike in the Eastern Alps, larch trees, pines, and chestnuts dominate over dark spruces, mossy creek beds, and humid pastures. The alpine zone is a bright moonscape, with steep cliffs leading into remote valleys covered in grey fog and temperate forest for most of the winter.
Lower precipitation, higher solar radiation, and greater temperature inversions allow abundant walnuts, prunes, and vineyards to thrive. The cooler valleys of the Haute Savoie also provide ideal growing conditions for pears and apples, such as the tart Reinette heirloom—a Canadian import. Lettuce is one of the few garden plants that thrives in the mountains and is a popular staple.
While the proximity to Italy, the French Riviera, and Spain make for easy access to vitamin C today, the harsh geographical barriers of the 4000-meter massifs historically forced a reliance on mealy and sour fruit at the local primeurs. Even today, fruitarians will be disappointed by the paltry produce offerings in remote mountain towns, especially in the winter. Cheese, sausage, baguette, and wine still dominate.
