Garlic Soup: A Gascon Roadmap

Recipe from Garonne River Valley Farms and Gardens

Abandoned Tobacco Barn- Garonne River Valley, France

The textured fields of the fertile Garonne River valley, where Camont nestles alongside it’s sleepier canal, are planted with four season orchards and crops of every color: snowy plum blossoms, red cherries, golden pears, white cauliflower, silver artichoke spears, bronze wheat, sunflower yellow, myriad shades of green-- potato plants, cabbage, lentils, parsley, onion tops-- and a rainbow of lettuces. A drive across the wide valley floor is like driving through a colorful vegetarian cookbook. This is where I seek one of the key ingredients in every Gascony dish- the field grown, rustic, violet-tinged garlic.

Garlic is grown on lesser fields. Those pockets of poorer soil accept planted cloves in November putting down roots and barely showing green shoots on these sunny days. They’ll be ready to harvest as aillets and early harvest larger bulbs in a couple months. Just along here I know a farm that sells their braided garlic all year long from a dilapidated wooden building, an old tobacco barn, now emptied of surplus tools and sporting a worn kitchen table, a heavy enameled scale, and baskets of dried garlic. I stop to buy enough garlic for a month or two—and enough to plant one of the many spring planting varieties. Click here for all you need to know about growing French garlic and shallots.