Aligot

That can’t be good for you!

photo :wikipedia

It's hard to avoid aligot around here.

Restaurants serve it by the bucketful, confit de canard and aligot, saucisse and aligot , rosbeef d’aubrac and aligot. Tourists can’t get enough of it and often take home small tubs from the market at 5€ a throw. The locals like it as well and many of the fetes serve it as part of the traditional menu every year. If you have a deep enough wallet, and book well enough in advance you may partake of a 3* version chez Michel Bras. The tourist office has even produced a jolly song proclaiming its virtues

http://www.aveyronet.com/fr/index.php/2007/08/13/331--mp3-l-aligot-saucisse-en-chanson

So what is it?........... well basically mashed potato and cheese, for some comfort food par excellence, alternatively a dietitians nightmare!
With the aid of a very large wooden spoon boiled potatoes are beaten into submission together with some tomme, crème fraiche and a bit of garlic. Posh versions might have a sprinkle of nutmeg. The tomme is the secret ingredient, it's a very young cheese (3-4days) purists contend it must be Tomme de Laguiole. There is some mystic about the mixing process and to do it correctly your spoon has to follow a figure of eight so many times one way, followed by so many times in the opposite direction. Its hard work on the arms and takes some time. When it’s ready the potato mixture becomes a shiny mass with a gluey consistency that comes away from the side of the pot and sticks to the spoon. The market vendors raise their spoons a metre high to demonstrate elasticity of their product. The cheesy potato strings stretch from vat to spoon without dropping or breaking. Well made aligot is dolloped onto the plate or into a takeaway box, then can be cut away from the rest in the vat with scissors.
The origins of this dish go back many centuries. It comes from the high plateau of the Aubrac and was probably the type of dish eaten by shepherds on cold (and it gets very cold) winter nights. Before M. Parmentier persuaded the French that potatoes were edible, the dish was made with bread. Some people say that it was originally made by monks. These monks ran refuges for pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. Aligot was probably very welcome on that very high and lonely part of the walk. Almost every ‘pilgrims menu’ now serves it, as we found when we did that part of the Camino last year and most people seem to love it.
Luckily, I’m not one of the majority. I hate the gloopy stuff. It’s just as well, it's high fat, high carb and all that beating will surely have done strange things to the starch structure . Would the broken starch molecules be very easily digested so therfore it's high gi? Or would all that fat in the cheese and creme fraiche slow digestion ? It’s probably like pizza, several hours later the blood sugars would rise with a vengeance to remind you of what you’d eaten earlier. Perhaps it just raises the blood glucose and keeps it raised for a long time. Undoubtably however you tried to give bolus insulin for it, you'd get it wrong.
For someone with diabetes aligot is perhaps not an ideal choice. For other people, given today’s mainly sedentary lifestyles, it’s perhaps better kept for high days and holidays. For many it would prove to be extremely fattening if eaten regularly.

But the food was originally fit for purpose. A hot, cheap dish, made from local ingredients that ‘stuck to the ribs’. It provided the energy necessary for herding animals on a cold draughty hillside or for walking many kilometres over rugged and difficult terrain.
There aren’t really good and bad foods, no food that should be demonised. It just depends on what you are going to do when you've eaten it. Common sense really.

Edit: Other half told me I wasn't being entirely honest. I may hate aligot but I love another dish made with very similar ingredients... tartiflette: sliced potatoes, onions and lardons fried together in a little oil, then baked in a dish with reblochon cheese. Its great after a days skiing and I make it perhaps once or twice during the year. I don't eat a huge portion and it surpringly hasn't been too disastrous on glucose levels but I wouldn't eat it in the days before a cholesterol test. Its not the sort of thing I'd write in a food diary for my diabetologue either ;fortunately she's not likely to read it here .

French Paradox?

Fruit and vegetables, locally grown and sold in large quantities

A variety of well made cheeses, from cows, sheep and goats

Meat, locally reared and killed. The notice shows the names of the farms from which the animals came.

Some fish, always lots to choose from.

Pain de campagne, low gi and eaten in large amounts

Something to finish the meal, not everyday and not too large or too sweet

But don't forget the wine!

So what do the people who according to the statistics are a part of the French paradox seem to buy and eat? Butchers sell all kinds of meat, beef, pork, veal, lamb, lots of duck and other poultry ,rabbit and occasionally goat and horse. Nothing is wasted, almost everything is eaten including parts of the animal usually relegated to pet food in the UK.

Though a long way from the sea, fishis extremely popular and far more plentiful and varied than in the UK. (even our local 'fast food ' restaurant Flunch always has at least 4 fish dishes every day). Dried, salted cod is used in traditional local dishes.

People struggle home with whole trays of fruit, it was melons and peaches this week. Seasonal fruit and vegetables are relatively cheap and people eat lots. Cheese selected carefully but eaten in fairly small portions. Bread, often pain de campagne (made with coarse flour and soudough raised ) rather than baguette is eaten at every meal.

French patisserie , often very rich, tends to be just for Sundays and special occasions, for everyday eating fruit is more common. And the wine, well people drink it,but I often get the impression that they drink less at any one time than the local British inhabitants.

My part of France has the highest life expectancy in France. Most of my neighbours are very elderly. One of the reasons I think they have such long lives is they have been active and remain active. Sadly, when I read the the local paper it often seems that the most common causes of death of the older farmers areagricultural accidents... often turning over the tractor on a steep hill. These men and women have lived hard lives,their youth was during ww2, a time rarely mentioned but I gather that times were hard. Market in the past was as much as anything a social occasion, much of the food was (and is) grown or reared at home. The market was a place to sell the surplus produce and to meet friends and relatives from other villages. Even today much of the chat between locals is in 'patois', here a mix of Occitan and French. Now they drive or are driven to market, but in their youth everyone walked; every week 15km there, followed by 15KM back again.

Whilst they still can, my neigbours continue to walk, perhaps only a few kilometres a day. I see them walking the quiet roads, stick in hand. Apparently the GPs say that they should walk a minimum of 3km a day but I don't think they need to be told, it's what they've always done. The terrain round here isn't easy, it's hard to to farm and you need to be fit to walk any distance. In the photo below I tried to show the hill outside our house . It goes down 250m and then straight up again. One tourist book calls it the land of the 1000 valleys. I'm sure that working and walking in such an area must develop good cardiovascular fitness.

I don't really think there is a paradox. The local diet includes a huge variety of foods, mostly local, fresh and homecooked. People don't count calories, carbs, types of fat or check their vitamin intake. Whats missing, at least in the diet of the older generation are biscuits, crisps, ready meals , sweets and fizzy drinks and snacking between meals. They've also had a lifetime of hard work and whilst they are still able, continue to keep themselves fit.