Les Pruneaux

IT IS STRANGE how the French succeed even with those foods which were most hated in childhood and which never get given a second chance. Just as Normandy has a sublimated version of rice pudding – tergoule – so the Lot-et-Garonne in the South-West excels in the production of truly beautiful prunes. Its cooks have also developed a whole repertoire of fascinating dishes to show them off.

Prunes are nothing more than dried plums. It is confusing that the French for plum is prune while our ‘prune’ translates as pruneau. The French prunes which are marketed commercially are not made from any old plums. They come from a special plum tree called prunier d’ente, an old French term signifying simply a grafted tree, but which includes the particular kind of tree which has been used for the production of prunes in South-West France since the time of the Crusades, and is today called Robe-Sergent. The monks of Chirac, an abbey near the town of Tonneins on the river Garonne, were astute enough to spot the commercial value of the prune and by the eighteenth century an extensive market had been built up.