It might have been sensible to close the little top window at the front of my cottage in Padstow when I left for the ferry terminal at Plymouth. A week later, on a canal boat from Bordeaux to Marseilles, I found out someone had tried to squeeze through it, but had been surprised by one of my restaurant chefs rolling home at 3am.

It was overexcitement, I’m afraid. One of my prize possessions is a copy of Caroline Conran’s Under the Sun, in which she describes the euphoria of leaving 1960s London and driving the tree-lined roads to St Tropez. As she pointed out, the food from the south of France is simple to make and relies on a harmony of flavours rather than decoration or extravagant ingredients.

“The French call it cuisine de terroir,” she wrote, and that was what I was going to look for — the sort of food that has made Italy so popular but which I knew I could also find in the French Midi.

This was the start of another food journey, a French odyssey. David Pritchard (the producer I work with) and I suggested the idea of a voyage of food discovery through southern France to the BBC, who asked for a written outline. On a paper tablecloth in Le Quartier Vert, in Bristol, David drew a map of southern France.

He put in the canal system we were going to travel along: the Canal Latéral à la Garonne, the Canal du Midi and the Canal du Rhône. Then he drew pictures of various food areas: a rather rudimentary duck here, with the comment “foie gras country”; and a sheep there, “brebis cheese from these marsh sheep near Pouillac”.

Down on the Mediterranean, “Etang de Thau oysters growing on stakes”; and in another place, “Rick has posh Sauternes-maker chum”. Then he spilt a little red wine on it, borrowed a fag and made a couple of cigarette burns, folded the tablecloth and posted it to the boss at the BBC.

And so, some time later, I found myself fishing for shad in the Garonne, 12 miles east of Bordeaux, with Alain Penichon. We had boarded our first canal boat the day before at Bègles, Bordeaux. Named the Rosa, it was 130ft long, slept eight guests in considerable luxury, and had a crew of three.

A perfect base from which to launch a fishing expedition.

We caught a dozen handsome, deep-bodied silver fish using a light net cast out into the current. The softness of the light, the weedy smell and the warm brown river were captivating, quite unlike sea fishing. Alain, like all the river fishermen I met, was quiet, relaxed, content to watch the river flow. We were going to take these fish back to his house and cook them over vine prunings. A vine-pruning barbecue in the Bordelaise: of such things are dreams made.

It wasn’t just the fragrant smoky steaks of fish, but a frying pan filled with sandy pommes sarladaises, cooked in goose fat with a persillade of parsley and garlic, and a sauce gribiche of chopped egg yolks, capers, parsley and red-wine vinegar — the perfect accompaniment. I had to pinch myself.

That night we reached the beginning of the Canal Latéral à la Garonne, which runs beside the river all the way from Bordeaux to Toulouse, built because much of the Garonne is too shallow for barging. I had to become used to the word barging — or, more accurately, bargin’. The crew of the Rosa, Bernard, Philippe and Julie, were French and formal, and so much of the secret life of barging was, at that stage, unknown to us.


Bernard, we soon learnt, ran a very tight ship, but the extraordinary formality of the meals he served was one of the most revealing parts of the trip — revealing about the difference between the British and French attitudes to food. Bernard’s lunches and dinners were always four courses, always taken at a leisurely pace and always just enough and no more. There is a French saying to the effect that one should always leave the table wanting more. That is why French women don’t get fat — they take their time about eating.

I did a little chat to the TV camera towards the end of the voyage: 10 things we like about France. Number one, of course, was the women — their style, their elegance in dress at whatever age — but number two was the simple fact that everything stops for lunch. Other things were that there are very few signs telling you what to do or not to do; and, surprisingly perhaps, after a month or two there you realise that the French, certainly in the south, are actually nice.

What Bernard cooked for us was not particularly unusual: artichokes with vinaigrette, sautéed eel with persillade, an onion tart, grilled magret de canard — the large duck breasts from birds reared for foie gras, with a faint flavour of that delectable luxury. On one occasion he produced a salad of sliced Quercy melons, Marmande tomatoes and cucumber with some crumbled brebis, a sheep’s-milk cheese — summer in Gascony on a plate.

Often, Bernard would only make one course, but that’s another thing so different in France — the availability in any nearby small town of shops specialising in really good-quality cooked food. The idea of doing all the cooking for these four-course meals would be unthinkable. Why make things that you can buy almost better locally?

Meanwhile, life on the Rosa became a routine. The passengers slept at the bow in four cabins. Life was serene; the old girl chugged along at about four miles an hour. These boats are converted cargo barges, their hulls 60 to 80 years old. Barge owners tend to grow geraniums in pots along the railings and put easy chairs and umbrellas on the decks. There you relax as the barge meanders along through arcades of green shade from the overhanging plane or oak trees, planted to keep the sun off the animals in the days of horse power.

It’s a constantly changing vista: sometimes a ruined chateau, then a distant village with church and spire, then yellow fields of corn and endless rows of vines running up the hills beyond. All the time you pass antiquated pumps sucking water out of the canal to irrigate the fields. Some of the bridges are so low you have to duck to go under them.

Coming into a village is particularly easy on the eye. The first two canals, the Canal Latéral and then the Canal du Midi, were built when the waterways were the deluxe form of transport, so that unlike entering a modern town by train, past back gardens, graffiti-daubed walls and rusty factories, by canal you go through the best bits: past chateaux and under elegant bridges and alongside towpaths with pretty houses, right into the centre. In Toulouse, where we would change from the Rosa to the Anjodi, the canal basin is pleasantly close to the Victor Hugo market in the middle of the city.

The Canal du Midi is now a wonder of the world. It was built between 1667 and 1681, and paved the way for the industrial revolution in France. The care its creator, Pierre-Paul Riquet, took in the design turned a technical achievement into a work of art. The oval locks are a visual delight to match any sculpture. Every time we entered one on the Anjodi, they made us smile.

There are restaurants beside the canal, too — not as many as you’d think, but one in particular stands out, just outside Agen, with a lively cook called Vetou. She cooked a beautiful magret de canard for us, with a really good red-wine sauce made from a Côtes du Marmandais, from the Cave Co-opérative de Cocument.

Restaurants in France are the subject of much argument. It is common to hear British people bemoaning the drop in standards. Everyone remembers an excellent tomato salad, steak frites and crème caramel they got for £2.50 in the old days. I can report that you can still eat better in France than almost anywhere in the world, but you need to watch out.



It’s often the case that the less you pay for a meal, the better it is. I can think of a simple dish of clams in a velouté garlic and parsley sauce we had at Les Grillardines, a roadside cafe just by the causeway to the mainland on the Ile d’Oléron, near La Rochelle. And in Brittany, near Rennes, there was a routière, a truck-stop restaurant, where we had good hors d’oeuvres, carrot salad with tomato, chicory, parsley and vinaigrette, beetroot with the same dressing and a touch of garlic, a local rabbit terrine with a few cornichons (gherkins), then a plate of eels stewed in local cider.

Another such triumph was a dark fish soup in a seafood restaurant in Agde, on the final stretch of the Hérault River, just near the sombre, black-granite 12th-century Romanesque cathedral. We were packed in at long tables and an enormous tureen of the soup was produced: deep brown, flavoured with North African harissa, and with piles of French bread and rouille to float in it. The wine was a rugged rosé, the sort of thing that would taste quite unpalatable back home.

Perhaps my fondest memory, though, of incredibly inexpensive eating was the station buffet in Agen. We arrived there on the Rosa by night, crossing over the spectacular aqueduct across the Tarn, and the next morning headed to the station buffet for an early lunch. The €7 (£4.90) menu started, unbelievably, with foie gras salad, then char-grilled ailerons de magret: those little contra-fillets that cling to the main breast. Or I could have had a bavette of skirt steak, a long cut they normally top with shallots fried till brown and a deep bordelaise sauce. In Britain, we turn up our noses at such cuts, since they are a bit tough, but in France, along with the locals, we enjoyed their chewy flavour with frites.

We made our way from Agen to Toulouse, stopping briefly at Moissac. On a number of occasions we came across food I could not give a recipe for in Britain because the ingredients would be impossible to get here. In Moissac, just by the River Tarn, there’s a restaurant called Le Pont-Napoléon.

Here, chef Michel Dussau takes a whole fresh foie gras and sautés it in a little duck fat in a big copper pan. He adds red Banyuls wine and fresh cherry coulis, then he makes a sauce with the cooking juices, more cherry coulis and chicken stock. He gently cooks some freshly stoned cherries, slices of peach and pear in the sauce, then serves the whole foie gras, still weighing about 700 grams, sliced, with some of the sauce and some of the still-tart fruit. It is sensational — and you feel you are eating something you could never re-create.

At Toulouse we remarked on the perfection of the sausages at the covered market, as well as the sophisticated feeling of this red-brick university town. I went into a fish frenzy at the market, where the quality and variety were excellent and, interestingly, there were equal quantities of Atlantic and Mediterranean fish.

The next stop was Castelnaudary, and the search for a perfect cassoulet. First, we visited the French Foreign Legion to see what they eat in their mess. It was confit of duck with a very nice salad and sarladaise potatoes. The Foreign Legionnaires are in very good shape. We watched their parade and their slow, menacing march into battle, which they accompany with the singing of a dirge. It was very moving; almost an anticipation of death.

Next we ate cassoulet, lots of it, at the Hôtel de Paris. It was very good, but needed lots of red wine to wash it down.

At a cassoulet festival that evening, a robed celebrant told me he wouldn’t touch cassoulet in the summer months — far too filling.

Our second barge, the Anjodi, carried us all the way to Port St Louis, on the eastern bank of the mouth of the Rhône, which was the closest we could get to our final destination, Marseilles. Then it was a short drive into town and an exceptional bouillabaisse at a restaurant called L’Epuisette, with my chef friend Simon Hopkinson.

My enduring memory of the whole odyssey is all the markets we visited: Cadillac, Toulouse, Narbonne and, above all, Nérac, near Agen. The quality and range of food and the attention to detail are why I think France is still the best. A final image: a farmer in Cadillac market with a small table and 15 bunches of his own white asparagus. He sold them all in about 20 minutes, packed up and left. In my opinion, food is alive and extremely well in France.



This is an extract from Rick Stein’s French Odyssey (BBC Books £20), which contains more than 100 new recipes inspired by his journey. To buy a copy for the reduced price of £18, with free p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585. His new TV series starts on BBC2 on August 17


EAT LIKE A CHEF

TAKING THIS waterway tour of French country cooking is a seriously tempting prospect, but you might have to quit your job first — the full Bordeaux to Marseilles journey would take at least four weeks. You can easily sample a bit of it, though. For example, Crown Blue Line (0870 160 5634. www.crownblueline.com) has a week cruising on the Canal du Midi in a four-berth vessel from £1,175, or a week in the Camargue on an eight-berth boat from £1,495. Flights for both are available on request. Or try France Afloat (0870 011 0538, www.franceafloat.com) or Minervois Cruisers (01926 811842, www.minervoiscruisers.com).

If you haven’t got the time or inclination to cruise the canals at 4mph, you can follow this route by car. Here’s our step-by-step guide.


1 The Langon district, Bordeaux

Forty minutes southeast of Bordeaux along the Garonne River, Langon is a busy little town, well placed for exploring the river — visiting delightful, entirely overlooked little towns such as Cadillac and Rions, tasting your way round the Sauternes wine zone and touring the byways of the Entre-Deux-Mers region.



Where to eat: Claude Darroze has been a standard-setter in the French southwest for years — and still is. His eponymous restaurant (95 Cours du Général Leclerc, Langon; 00 33-5 56 63 00 48, www.darroze.com; from £28) is somewhat classical and requires best behaviour. Les Remparts (49 Place de la Cathédrale, Bazas; 05 56 25 95 24, www.lesrempartsdebazas.com, from £14) is more relaxed. Don’t miss the local Bazas beef with pommes sarladaises.



Where to stay: the Château d’Arche (direction Bommes, Sauternes; 05 56 76 67 67, www.chateaudarche-sauternes.com; doubles from £86) is a proper, wine-producing chateau, with rooms in the converted, 17th-century chartreuse (monastery). They will give you the impression you’re a minor noble — useful when tasting Bordeaux’s finest white wine. Alternatively, try the Hôtel Les Feuilles d’Acanthe (5 Rue de l’Eglise, St Macaire; 05 56 62 33 75, www.feuilles-dacanthe.com; doubles from £43), a superbly restored 16th-century merchant’s house in a walled village that has barely changed since the Renaissance.







2 Agen and Moissac

In Agen, you’re among plums, prunes and some of France’s most fervent rugby supporters. (“We have oval brains round here,” one shopkeeper told me.) You go to Moissac, 25 miles upstream, for the abbey, one of the most stunning medieval works in France.



Where to eat: Rick raves over Agen’s Buffet de la Gare (1 Place Rabelais; 05 53 66 09 40) — as budget-minded locals have been doing for some time. This is decidedly not just a place of meat pies for passing rail users. In fact, it’s two places: a brasserie (from £5.70) and a restaurant (from a couple of pounds more). For something slightly more intimate, try L’Atelier (14 Rue du Jeu de Paume; 05 53 87 89 22; from £18) at the other end of town. It has an arty and inventive take on regional fare.

Or follow Rick upriver to Moissac, and Michel Dussau’s Pont-Napoléon (2 Allées Montebello; 05 63 04 01 55, www.le-pont-napoleon.com; from £17 lunch, £25 dinner). This spot also has practical, slightly old-fashioned rooms, with doubles from £25.



Where to stay: the Château des Jacobins, bang in the heart of Agen (Place des Jacobins; 05 53 47 03 31, www.chateau-des-jacobins.com; doubles from £70) is a splendid old town house with a stately feel.

More chummy is the Château d’Aubiac (Aubiac, 05 53 66 34 93, www.aubiac.com; doubles from £32, including breakfast), where Evelyne Marraud welcomes you to the gaily decorated chateau outbuildings.







3 Castelnaudary and Carcassonne

Toulouse may be bigger, bossier and more cosmopolitan, but it’s the territory between these two towns that remains the real homeland of cassoulet. South of the Canal du Midi lie lovely villages such as Fanjeaux — or you can head north, into the Montagne Noire and around to Sorèze, Revel and the pleasing little St Ferréol lake.



Where to eat: nobody on earth takes cassoulet more seriously than Jean-Claude Rodriguez of the Château St Martin restaurant (Montredon; 04 68 71 09 53, www.chateausaintmartin.net; cassoulet £15). He has even co-founded an academy to propagate its wonderfulness. After tackling a helping in his classical dining room, you’ll begin to understand why.

At the Hôtel du Centre et du Lauragais (31 Cours de la République, Castelnaudary; 04 68 23 25 95, www.hotel-centre-lauragais.com; cassoulet £12.80), Jean-Jacques Campigotto brings similar attention to the dish. I wouldn’t try to tackle Rodriguez and Campigotto’s skills on the same day, though,especially if you’re barging. You’ll sink the thing.



Where to stay: five minutes from the medieval cité of Carcassonne, the Château de Cavanac (Cavanac; 04 68 79 61 04, www.chateau-de-cavanac.fr; doubles from £57) has a 17th-century core and a maze of additional outbuildings, courtyards, salons and gardens, the whole lightened by the touch of the chatelaine, Anne Gobin. Husband Louis does the wine-making — and the cooking, in converted stables (dinner from £27). Or you could try the light and much more modern Hostellerie du Château St Martin (04 68 47 44 41; doubles from £70), the other way out of Carcassonne and hard by the same family’s restaurant at Montredon (see above).




4 The Agde region

The modern seaside resort of Cap d’Agde gets all the attention, not least because of its vast naturist colony. But Agde itself — its winding streetlets leading to the Hérault River estuary — has more charm.

Where to eat: between Agde and Sète is the Etang de Thau lagoon, on the banks of which is the diminutive port of Marseillan. There, Chez Philippe (20 Rue de Suffren; 04 67 01 70 62; £18) has recently been taken over by folk with a light and inventive approach to Occitan cooking — and a mighty regional wine cellar. If you go there for lunch, stay in town for dinner at the Château du Port, (9 Quai de la Résistance; 04 67 77 31 67; from £20). In Agde itself, try Le Numéro Vin (2 Place de la Marine; 04 67 00 20 20; from £17), another devotedly regional spot.

Where to stay: as you probably know, Sète is crisscrossed by a network of canals — and the grandest hotel overlooking them is, naturally, Le Grand Hôtel (17 Quai de Tassigny, 04 67 74 71 77, www.legrandhotel sete. com; doubles from £68). It has disarming modern style in stately surroundings — a great place from which to issue forth for the port’s bustle and several million fish restaurants.



5 Marseilles

Terribly trendy these days, Marseilles — opening galleries and restaurants and generating acres of articles in glossy publications. But the stark light still casts shadows long enough for skulduggery. Thank heavens.

Where to eat: Rick went to L’Epuisette for his bouillabaisse — and so should you. It’s slotted into Vallon des Auffes, a disarming little fishing village enclave surrounded by the city. The restaurant (04 91 52 17 82, www.l-epuisette.com; bouillabaisse £36) perches on the edge of the sea, whose uglier occupants are the staple ingredients of the celebrated fish stew. The other spot for bouillabaisse is the Miramar (12 Quai du Port; 04 91 91 10 40, www.bouillabaisse.com; bouillabaisse £36), right on the Vieux Port.

Where to stay: round the corniche from the town-centre scrum, Le Petit Nice (Corniche de JF Kennedy; 04 91 59 25 92, www.passedat.fr; from £136 low season, £196 high) is a neo-Greek villa with a fine restaurant; dinner from £57. Marseillais folk have recently taken to opening their houses for chambres d’hôte accommodation. Among the nicest is the Villa Monticelli (96 Rue du Commandant Rolland; 04 91 22 15 20, www.villamonticelli.com; doubles from £56).



Travel details: BMI Baby (0870 264 2229, www.bmibaby.com), Flybe (0871 700 0535, www.flybe.com), and British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) fly to Bordeaux from the UK; and Air France (01 605 0383, www.airfrance.ie) flies from Ireland. Marseilles is served by EasyJet (0905 821 0905, 65p/minute; www.easyjet.com), BA, and, from Ireland, Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com). Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk) has a week’s car hire from £ 137.



Anthony Peregrine

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