"Dry cakes with almonds." Almond biscuits (US: cookies).
Brioche. A rich, bready bun made from yeast dough with eggs and butter. Brioches are often cooked in a characteristic fluted mould. Brioche dough is used for breads, cakes and for enclosing other ingredients which may be either sweet or savoury. Italian brioches may be filled with jam (US: jelly) or custard or plain.
A name for dogfish in southern France. Also known as the rough hound (US: small cat). Slightly better eating than the nurse-hound.
Béarnaise white (uncooked) or roasted maize flour and milk porridge, savoury or sweet, often made into fritters. It can be cooked with vegetable stock until thick, cooled, sliced and then fried. In Poitou this is a large biscuit (US: cookie) made from a shortbread-like dough.
This is the practice of force-feeding ducks and geese to provide foie gras (fat liver). Said to have been pioneered in ancient Egypt, where tomb paintings show the practice in detail, gavage was formalised in France in the 18th century and is now controlled or close to being banned in several countries. As with all things, practice differs from place to place and large producers are more inclined to use cruel methods involving pinning birds down and force-feeding them mechanically. Smaller concerns are more likely to raise the birds in free-range settings and only bring them in for the intensive feeding phase of the last two to three weeks of their lives, when they are fed by hand. Protections of the animals are such that conditions are humane and the force-feeding for birds which, in nature, would feed hugely before migrating, is not so ghastly as might be expected.
Lovage. A large unwieldy herb. Pick the stems off the leaves, tie them and hang them to dry for about 3 days. When crisp, crumble the leaves and store. Good in hotpots. Lovage seeds are used mainly in Indian cooking, and are from a plant of the caraway family. The greenish-brown seeds are a little larger than celery seeds and have a strong aroma of rather coarse thyme. Oregano can be substituted.
