Happy September, food & foraging friends!
This month, to celebrate my mom’s 75th turn around the sun, we took a family trip to the gastronomy capital of the world: Lyon.
If France is for foodies, Lyon is for the most gluttonous gourmands of them all. We had several decadent multi-course meals in Lyon’s historic bouchons, unfussy, old-school establishments that were once the domain of the city’s silk workers, dating back to the 1800s. These eateries feature local specialties like quenelles, a savory bread pudding made from river pike and baked in a rich creamy crayfish sauce; pâté en croûte, a seasoned meat pate baked inside a decorative pastry crust; and cervelle de canut (literally, “silk worker’s brain”), a creamy, fresh cheese dip mixed with herbs, shallots, vinegar, and oil. The set menus come with rich desserts like warm chestnut cake (if food were a hug, it’s this) or the classic Rhum baba, a dense cake buried in whipped cream and soused in rum (we were handed a fancy decanter to DIY our dose). There was also Andouillette sausage, which my stepdad mistook on the menu for the meaty Cajun-style Andouille. The French version is pork intestine, cooked down with wine and onion and served with mustard sauce. Not for the faint of stomach!
Ever night I devoured some of Bill Buford’s memoir Dirt, a bonus course. Bill gave up a plum staff job at The New Yorker and packed up his young family for Lyon in pursuit of the secrets of French cooking. The book was a useful and entertaining accompaniment to our food-focused trip, helping me to understand the culinary dynamics of French dishes (oh, the symphony that is a French sauce!) — and the perfectionist, cut-throat pecking order of the kitchen.
One might think that with such a haute cuisine focus, Lyon’s chefs would hunger for precious wild ingredients, but sauvage just wasn’t on the menu, at least not the traditional bouchons we visited.
Rather, I found a touch of wild in unexpected places: mallow and yarrow in Ricola cough drops, marketed in fancy flavors like raspberry-lemon balm. Wild pokeweed sprigs with their juicy, black poison-temptress berries spilling out of a farmer’s market bouquet. Mauve (French for mallow, same as the color of its flower), the aforementioned poke, and fat, red-stemmed purslane sprouting from sidewalk cracks, all thriving in Lyon’s infinity pool of summer heat waves. Cool, refreshing calamint sprouting up at the base of Lyon’s ancient Gallo-Roman amphitheater. Weighty clusters of elderberry tipping over a basilica wall. Wild myrtille (a cousin to blueberry) transformed into a sumptuous gummy candy at les Halles Paul Bocuse and girolles (chanterelles) sold alongside common button mushrooms in the Croix-Rousse market.
The best way to go where the wild things are? Find a forager. I had tracked down Lucile of Balades Sauvages (Wild Walks) just before coming, who was delighted to connect, seeing that Lyon did not have the robust urban foraging community we’re blessed with in DC. We found many common touchpoints, from the health conditions that led us to foraging in the first place, to our love of cyanotyping (like me, she teaches combo foraging-cyanotyping classes!)
Lucile and I had a lovely stroll in Lyon’s Parc de la Tête d’or (Park of the Golden Head), swapping plant and personal stories, stretching the bounds of our botanical vocabulary in the other’s mother tongue. I learned that the French call pokeweed American grape fruit, and she learned about black walnut, sassafras and spicebush from the gifts I brought, ziplocs pushed across the park cafe table like an open air drug deal. I bragged about my sturdy 75-year-old mom, whom I send out like a truffle dog in search of mushrooms on our walks; Lucile one-upped me by recounting that her 80-something maman had harvested several kilos of wild purslane that morning.
That bounty was for Lucile to sell to 220 BPM, a high concept restaurant up in the hills (talk about mystique: reporters covering its opening were blindfolded to come to its secret wooded location). I learned about 220 BPM and a veg, forage-forward restaurant called Cuillette (french for “foraging”) from Lucile too late — but gave me yet another reason to return. We made parting souvenirs of our brief encounter, a pair of cyanotypes Lucile kindly let me keep.
The next day, our last, I gathered wild carrot seed (aka Queen Anne’s lace) from a Beaujolais vineyard, my one wild souvenir of lovely Lyon.
Back home, today I enjoyed a late-day stroll on Theodore Roosevelt Island, where it truly felt like summer’s end. I missed the pawpaw window while in France, but replenished my spicebush stash and gathered shiso for syrup. Time to start squirreling away fall nuts and dreaming up next season’s adventures.
Wildly yours,
April
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Image Block 1: Some wild finds back home, including spicebush, Canadian mint, my first-ever lobster mushroom, two kinds of beefsteak (the plant and the mushroom) and the tiniest pawpaw you ever did see.
Image Block 2: Wild finds of Lyon, including calamint, linden, pokeweed, mallow, purslane, chanterelles and elderberry, with Lucile of Balades Sauvages at center.
