What’s Eaten Where: Ardennes

Ardennes is among the world’s most beautiful battlegrounds: its rolling valleys, meandering rivers, and dense forests once the site of WWII’s most violent clashes. Located mainly in south-east Belgium, but extending into Luxembourg, Germany and France, the horrors of the past have today given way to a more peaceful atmosphere. Ardennes is one of the least densely populated areas in Europe. It’s dotted with tiny mediaeval villages and market towns populated in the main by arable and dairy farmers.

Recently, however, the region has become to depend more on tourism, offering the perfect rural getaway for hikers, bikers, and likers of the great outdoors, and many a farmers’ market for the foodies…

Rich in produce, Ardennes teems with wild boar, deer, duck, partridge and fish – a paradise for meat lovers. Its best-known dish is probably the boudin blanc, a unique white sausage that originated in the town of Rethel. Usually made with minced veal or pork mixed with bread and cream, this white sausage is delicately seasoned with marjoram and sage, and served grilled alongside roast potatoes or local truffles and mushrooms.

Champagne joute is another popular regional dish: a hearty winter stew that relies on sausage and cabbage. A more northerly version of the French pot-au-feu, the dish consists of fresh local veggies (carrots, turnips, potatoes and oodles of cabbage), thick smoked ham, bacon, and cockerel.

From the same part of the Ardennes region, we also get Biscuits Roses de Reims – the original ‘bis-cuit’, which means ‘cooked twice’ in French. Developed in the 1600s by a local baker, this confection was initially flavourless. When vanilla pods were added for taste the biscuits appeared streaky and brown, so the baker added cochineal, a natural scarlet dye, to hide the streaking. And we ended up with the pink Roses de Reims – a sweet, crisp cookie that maintains its consistency even when dipped in a glass of champagne!

For the most part, however, the cuisine of the Ardennes is a lot less refined: rustic, generous fare born from farm ovens and honed down the centuries. Potatoes from the garden, dandelions from the fields, and a little bacon from the farm give us the bacon salad; wild turkey wrapped in local bacon and cooked in homebrewed beer becomes the infamous Ardennes turkey.