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Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Les digestifs are a very important part of a good meal, certainly not to be missed. As any French person will tell you, they help digest all the magnificent rich food you recently imbibed.
My personal favorite is Charteuse, a digestive liqueur made by Carthusian Monks in mountains not far from Lyon, near Grenoble. Since 1740, the monks have been making this delicious digestif made from the extract of 132 plants. Serve it over a couple ice cubes or neat.
Eau de Vie, or water of life. This stuff is strong! Ouf! I don't particularly like it, but it is incredibly popular and très chic as a digestif. There are all sorts of fruit flavors: pear, raspberry, blueberry, kirsch. But don't expect them to be sweet!!
My favorite is the pear as it often has a real pear inside the bottle. Farmers attach the bottle to the tiny fruit and it grows inside its glass cage until plucked for the Eau de Vie Poire.
There are of course the homemade digestifs. I recently tasted a homemade bottle of blueberry Eau de Vie from a friend's wine cellar. It had been made by her grandfather decades ago. The bottle was ancient and crusty, the cork looked as though it had been hanging around for forty years. And, oh, was it delicious! That is the only Eau de Vie that I have thoroughly enjoyed.
Grappa. Not French but Italian. There is nothing like a stiff shot of Grappa at the end of a meal to cut through the old grease! I kid, I kid. I just got us a bottle of Grappa from Cofi, a store that imports Italian foods and wines. It smelled insanely delicious in that store! All those Italian cheeses, meats, and assorted goodies!!
These are three of the top digestifs and my preferred to serve with a meal. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love a French meal: hard work goes into preparing a meal just so for yourself and your guests, each moment is appreciated and respected, the table is elegantly set, the right wines are served with the right dishes, it lasts for hours and conversation is lively and intriguing, then you go on to the digestif and things begin to wind down. A meal will last from eight pm or so until midnight or two am. You don't drink to get drunk, you take your time and savor every bite and each sip.
Voila! Bon digestif this weekend, gros bisous et a demain!
Love, Charley
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