So I talked about the lovely little French village of Montchavin where we go (click here for Part 1), and I talked about the skiing and other activities in which we participated (click here for Part 2). So there’s really only one thing left to talk about: The food!
Two years ago, while perusing t-shirts in Montchavin’s souvenir shop, I saw a t-shirt that glorified the primary three attributes of a skiing vacation in the Alps. It said Ski, sex, et tartiflette (no translation necessary, although tartiflette is a regional dish, a casserole-style conglomeration of the mainstays of French Alpine cooking: Potatoes, ham and cheese.)
“That’s the best t-shirt ever!” I screeched, and would have promptly bought it had the design not included a crude illustration of two stick figures engaged in vertical lovemaking. Of course, it wasn’t the sex bit that made the t-shirt so great. It was the tacit acknowledgment that, along with sports and leisure, food is an essential part of the skiing vacation. And because France is so tied to this notion of regional cuisine, there is not a single bit of, say, seafood to be found in Montchavin’s restaurants or markets. Even the most chic Parisians do not come to the mountains and expect haute cuisine. No, in the cold and rigorous Alps, even the most sophisticated palate craves little more than potatoes, ham, and cheese.
The majority of our dinners were with my in-laws, but the most memorable meal was in a restaurant with some friends. We ordered a raclette and were amused to be presented with an extremely antiquated contraption that used burning hot coals instead of electricity. Mr. P was tasked with scraping the melted raclette cheese onto a plate for each of us to spread onto our ham and potatoes. It’s a very slow, very involved meal that is totally focused on cheese.
Raclette has definitely usurped fondue as my favorite cheese-overload meal. I almost bought this place mat but decided a photo would suffice.
We had fondue, too… a regular cheese fondue, plus my first ever meat fondue. Meat fondue is grapeseed oil heated in the pot, with diners spearing raw meat to cook in the oil. My proclivity for rare beef served me well during the meat fondue, as I had much higher meat turnover than those who can’t tolerate a lick of pink in their steak.
Midweek, we went to Montchavin’s farmer’s market. The farmers lure prospective customers by distributing glasses of home-brew wine. Honestly, it was probably the nastiest wine I’ve ever drank in France, but we bought their sausage and cheese anyway.
On New Year’s Day, we had a la galette des rois. This is a cake with a trinket baked inside, and the person who finds the trinket is king for the day and gets to wear a paper crown not unlike the one at Burger King. It was the first piece of cake I’ve eaten in over 6 months, so I was in such sugar bliss that I scarcely cared when my brother-in-law came upon the trinket.
Traditionally, the trinkets are of a religious nature, but obviously we got a secular trinket.
So that concludes my culinary review of my trip. Also memorable but not pictured: the tartiflette on Christmas night; the slabs of braised ham on New Year’s; and the fancy restaurant meal in Geneva with some cousins, the night before our plane returned us, alas, back to the US.
