TARTE FLAMBÉE
January 7, 2016
Eight years I ago I found myself in the middle of a minuscule village in the Germanic region of Alsace in north east France. For four months I lived with une famille d’accieul (a host family), attended lycée (high school) and tried in vain to become une vraie française.
To no avail.
Food became an instrument of my cultural inclusion and exclusion. I picked up most of my language by dutifully helping my host mum Anne-Benedicte prepare the daily repas. Yet my distaste for foie gras and lapin marked my unsophistication. Like the formulation of a national French cuisine, the identity I occupied was always in relation to my ‘otherness’.
I quickly learnt how important regional identity still was to the French. As a border region, Alsace had a complicated history of French and German ownership. Like many other regions across the country, its distinctive culture and dialect was oppressed in the push to homogenise the nation during the 19th Century. Alongside an active autonomist movement campaigning against assimilation policies, Alsassiens enact their politics through the maintenance of regional cuisine.
Every week my host family would feast on tarte flambée (or Flammeküeche in the local dialect of Alsacienne) - a rectangular, paper thin dough crust coated in fromage blanc, oignon and lardons (bacon pieces). The use of pork is characteristic of Alsace cuisine, which favours rich, hearty ingredients to survive the freezing winter months. Tarte flambée is illustrative of what James Anderson describes rural, peasant cuisine; light on meat and vegetables and un-complex in nature.
Our weekly Flammeküeche was a beautiful family tradition to share in.
But also a very painful one. Suffering from many food intolerances meant that tucking into the delights of wheat, dairy and onion caused subsequent days of pain, bloating and nausea.
I have not touched one since.
Given the rise of awareness around food allergies there may still be hope to find a tarte flambée free of gluten, lactose and onion. Since the "pizza craze" of the 1960s” the dish has left the confines of the home cook, now appearing in restaurants across New York, Melbourne and London.
Or perhaps, I’ll just make my own...
