Winter Cooking means Garbure

A cabbage, some beans, a leg of duck confit...

Kate at 70…

A recent Instagram post divulging my latest big birthday (in November) resulted in an overwhelming response of “Happy Birthday” wishes, “Gosh you look great”, and “Welcome to the Club” from other members of the 70’s decade. While flattered and grateful, I guess I meant to just say—“here we are now”, a gentle accounting, and all that that entails. Being ‘here now’ for over seventy years is a lesson in tenacity if nothing else. And this kitchen door lit portrait by good friend Tamsin Chubb (https://www.instagram.com/athomewithtamsin) is lovely place marker of what I’ve been doing during this 70th year.

While it’s always a mixed feeling to talk about age instead of experience, I am using it as a spring board to write a bit more about those kitchen life lessons accumulated over decades, not just seasons. When I look at the same vegetables or produce that I buy every season like clockwork, and I still see something new that intrigues me, a different perspective or a delayed ‘aha’ moment, I am actually seeing it through a dizzying series of time-traveling life filters that results in a rich, multi-layered understanding that takes some unraveling to explain. Knitters might think of it as ‘frogging’ a recipe or unknotting those threads that create a pattern long held. I’ll tell you an example in a minute and see where that leads us.

I have lots of favorite recipes, but the ones that play on repeat, like a favorite song, or a much loved poem, resurface on their own as if they know when I need them. When I posted a photo from the winter market at Lavardac the other day of cabbages and cauliflowers, I was instantly reminded by a follower of one of my all time favorite cabbage recipes- garbure.

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Garbure is a cabbage and white bean soup from the Béarn and Basque areas of Southwest France. You’ll be offered it as a first course on most Menu du Jour in cafés and family restaurants all across the land. It’s a basic French kitchen recipe using what is at hand including pork charcuterie and duck confit, but always includes cabbage and beans. And it fits in beautifully with my concept of Finding France as it is woven into a tapestry of culinary understanding that helps define terroir as well as any special regional culture. If I make garbure at home, here at Camont, it will reflect my own approach to cooking as well as the fresh vegetables I glean from the neighboring farms and markets. It’s a classic garbure, but my garbure, and let’s dissect how I got there.

Looking through my long lens of 30 years cooking here, I first remember having garbure on one of the first of many R&D adventures into the Basque countries of France. I would drive the meandering two lane highways south and west from Camont until I hit the area where house roofs lost their terra-cotta tiles to slate and grew sharper, church steeples pointing needle-like into the skies; green pastures were dotted with flocks of sheep and white cattle; the Pyrenees stood like a theatrical backdrop between France and Spain. Always in the fall, or the early spring, the warming soup served at routiers and village cafés was nine times out of ten—garbure. Some soups were thin and watery with a large leaf of cabbage floating amongst a handful of white beans, others were thick and stew-like loaded with carrots and turnips, onions, leeks, cabbage and beans; always there was a hint of duck confit or a slice of jambon. Each trip added a new element, like a dusting of piment d’Espelette or a generous spread of golden duck fat on a piece of toast. Soon I looked forward to finding “The Best” example that I could in the workman’s cafés like the one I dubbed The Taxidermy Café in Ispoure—the Restaurant de l’Arradoy, or a more gastronomic example in Saliès-de-Béarn at Les Fontaines Fleuries where an architectural piece of grilled Jambon de Bayonne stood at attention like a salty sail in the perfectly seasoned sea.

My long lens looking at garbure, like I looked at cassoulet, began first as an invited guest, only later as a working cook. The many years of teaching charcuterie at Camont, that coincided with those trips to Basquelandia, meant that by the time I started to cook a big pot of garbure simmering on the back of the stove there was always a ham bone to start with; always a tail end of a piece of ventrèche or French bacon. A winter cabbage would come home from the market, a handful of dried white beans (Tarbais or otherwise) would be tossed in. Whatever vegetables were in the bowl on the counter would be added- carrots for sweetness, leeks because I love them, shallots or onions. Once I abandoned the restaurant starter versions, I concentrated on garbure as a main course with plenty of toasted country bred scrubbed with a raw garlic clove, a full terrine brought to the table laid with rustic bowls, duck confit enough to satisfy, even a slab of foie gras for the festive occasion. A decade later, I now own my garbure as any French cook might and it brings to the table with it, memories of all the meals shared, all the young chefs and butchers, farmers, and enthusiasts that gathered to learn about the french farmstead charcuterie with us here at Camont.

I included the recipe for garbure in my book, Cassoulet: a French Obsession, as well as an earlier version in my first cookbook, A Culinary Journey in Gascony so there is no harm in including another version of the recipe here. Since I have limited my teaching mostly to online learning, I made a ‘how to video’ this last Gascon Year for my Club Camont members. Enjoy and let me know if you make your own garbure this cold winter month. Interested in more videos and online workshops? Check out my Kate Hill Cooks website for all the information here. Why not join me for a year of more good cooking. We’ll start the first workshops in February with an ode to the Fat Duck. Until then, Enjoy a hearty bowl of garbure and snuggle closer to the fire.

Best, Kate