Where to stay

Hostellerie Aux Vieux Remparts Quiet, well-maintained hotel, with very attractive attic rooms. Cuisine is ambitious, verging on star quality, and there’s a small spa and pool. Doubles from €115. 3 Rue Couverte, Provins, 00 33 1 64 08 94 00, auxvieuxremparts.com

L’Aigle Noir A central three-star hotel a stone’s throw from the Château de Fontainebleau. Doubles from €170. 27 Place Bonaparte, Fontainebleau, 00 33 1 60 74 60 00, hotelaiglenoir.com

Château de Graville On the estate of a Fontainebleau forest château, eight tree houses are perched up to nine metres above the ground. €120 per cabin for two; champagne dinner €40. Vernou, 00 33 1 64 23 08 97, lacabaneenlair.com

Hostellerie du Cheval Noir The atmosphere is cosy but comfortable. Gilles de Crick’s cuisine is colourful, inspired by the town’s artist hero Alfred Sisley. This is a great base for hot-air ballooning – Gilles owns three Montgolfières. Rooms from €105; menus from €28 per person; ballooning from €140. 47 Ave Jean-Jaures Moret-sur-Loing, 00 33 1 60 70 80 20, chevalnoir77.com

Les Pleiades This boutique hotel has been an inspiration to artists, among them Diaz, Descamps, Corot, Millet and Rousseau. Suites are cool and modern. The restaurant serves molecular cuisine, from €100 per person, including wine. The brasserie is simpler, but very good, from €50 per person. Rooms from €190, €650 for the penthouse suite. 1 Grand Rue, Barbizon, 00 33 1 60 66 40 25, hotel-les-pleiades.com

Travel Information

Currency is the euro. France is one hour ahead of GMT. The average temperature in Seine-et-Marne in January is 3°C and 19°C in July.

GETTING THERE

Railbookers (020 3327 0800, railbookers.com) organises train journeys to the most central station in the Seine-et-Marne region, Marne La Vallée Chessy, and accommodation in the region.

Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies twice daily from London Luton direct to Paris Charles de Gaulle.

Air France (airfrance.co.uk) flies seven times a day from London Heathrow to Paris Charles de Gaulle.

RESOURCES

Seine-et-Marne Tourism (tourisme77.fr) provides detailed information about the region including how to get there, cultural places of interest, where to stay and where to eat.

FURTHER READING

French cooking: classic recipes and techniques by Hubert Delorme and Vincent Boué (Flammarion, £29.95). A well-illustrated tome of traditional French recipes, with extensive sections on classical technique. The book comes with a 90-minute DVD which demonstrates some of the more advanced methods.

WORTH A DETOUR

La Roseraie de Provins Three hectares of lovingly maintained rose gardens in the shadow of the town’s citadel. Nice tearooms, too. 11 rue des Prés, Provins, 00 33 1 60 58 05 78

Where to eat

Prices quoted are per head for a three-course meal, including wine.

Relais des Saveurs Beautifully judged, elegant cuisine, served in a small family restaurant overlooking the Seine. From €100. 2 Grande Rue, Vernou la Celle, 00 33 1 64 23 15 78, relais-des-saveurs.com

L’Auberge de la Brie Smooth operating, classic Michelin-starred restaurant. From €45. 14 Avenue Alphonse Boulingre, Couilly-Pont-aux-Dames, 00 33 1 64 63 51 80, aubergedelabrie.com

Salon de Thé Cassel Tea room and light lunches from one of France’s most fêted pastry chefs (closed Monday); tea and a cake about €12. 21 Rue des sablons Fontainebleau, 00 33 1 60 71 00 64, frederic-cassel.com

Bistrot du Broc Village bistrot-cum-junk-shop where everything is for sale including the cutlery. Traditional bistrot fare. €30. 5 Rue Murger, Bourron Marlotte, 00 33 1 64 45 64 43

Food Glossary

Asperges d’Argenteuil

White asparagus grown in the village of Argenteuil under mounds of earth. This method prevent photosynthesis which usually gives the plant its green colour. Milder in taste than its greener cousin.

Bordelaise sauce

A classic named after the Bordeaux region of France, made with dry red wine, bone marrow, shallots and reduced meat juices.

Brie

A soft cow’s cheese with a white rind, originating from the Seine-et-Marne region.

Chou de Pontoise

Green cabbage with a red tinge, related to the more common Chou de Milan, but with smoother leaves.

Miel de printemps

A smooth-tasting light-coloured honey with a soft taste. Harvested at the end of May or beginning of June, from fruit trees, willow trees, rapeseed, hawthorn blossom and clover.

Miel de tournesol

Harvested at the end of July and the beginning of August, this bright yellow honey comes from the abundant sunflowers in the Seine-et-Marne region.

Millefeuille

A cake made up of three layers of puff pastry, alternating with two layers of cream pâtissière, but sometimes layered with whipped cream, or jam.

Sucre d’orge

A traditional barley sugar from Moret-sur-Loins.

Food and Travel Review

Another TGV pulls into Marne-la-Vallée station and offloads its quota of Disney-bound passengers. Headed for Fantasyland, Big Thunder Mountain and fast-food a go-go, they’ll never know what it’s like to sit on a terrace at Le Relais des Saveurs, Cellesur-Seine, watching the barges ploughing their watery furrows along the river while papa Coignée coats a chocolate bombe packed with passionfruit, prepared by son Florian, with a chocolate sauce.

Seine-et-Marne is the commuter belt’s gold-plated buckle on the soft underbelly of Paris. Property prices in villages like Bourron-Marlotte or Barbizon underline the fact. By its land mass it’s rural, but peasant farmers, once the bedrock of French agriculture, have stashed their scythes. Instead, fields carved from the forest of Fontainebleau grow sugarbeet and rape – agribusiness staples.

Having bowed to the inevitable, the region is now reinventing itself. The rose de Provins, Nemours poppy and barley sugar from Moret-sur-Loing slipped below the radar of all but the most dedicated edible-curio hunters, but knowing about them is suddenly chic again. Wannabe epicures argue the respective merits of Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun. Those intent on upstaging them will drop Bries de Montereau, Favières, Coulommiers or Nangis into their small talk – or the brie stuffed with a layer of goat’s cheese blended with herbs they enjoyed in an auberge at Couilly Pont-aux-Dames. In fact, brie’s history stretches back over a millennium to the court of the Emperor Charlemagne.

Le Relais des Saveurs serves its take on the cheese – a hot crumble with melted cheese and pear – as a mini-pud. This is a family restaurant in the truest sense of the word. Dad, a retired fireman, serves at the five tables. Mum washes up, and junior, built like a sumo wrestler, cooks exquisite dishes such as a fillet of duck with a Bordelaise sauce and polenta chips.

‘The difference between bries isn’t just the name,’ says Jacques Cochaud, who makes four distinct kinds for La Compagnie Fermière Benjamin et Edmond de Rothschild (yes, the name does reflect the banking family’s ownership). ‘Our farmhouse Meaux is made with partially skimmed milk. It’s a larger disc with a lighter flavour. The smaller, thicker Melun is richer, fruitier and more gutsy – and hard to make, too, since we ladle the curd into hoops by hand.’ The way to tell whether mould-ripened cheeses come from raw milk, he says, is by looking at the rind: ‘What you’re looking for is the reddish-brown mottling beneath the white mould.’

Does he like to eat the rind? ‘I myself do. The surface is salted during manufacture and it’s edible.’ Should it run? Personal preference comes into play there, too. Some enthusiasts like it to bulge outwards when cut. Others prefer it dribbling over their plates.

Sucre d’orge, barley sugar from Moret-sur-Loins, is a mere 373 years old. Like so many other sweetmeats it originated in a Benedictine convent. During the French Revolution it disappeared, re-emerging a century later thanks to some nuns in the town. They in turn passed the baton to a family of bonbon makers called Rousseau, which has been making it ever since: boiling sugar and barley-water to a shade of dark traffic-light amber in copper pans. Except for its texture, it bears no relation to chemically coloured boiled sweets. Sucked, it has a honey-like taste, not cloying nor overly sweet. Gilles de Crick, chef-patron of the Cheval Noir, scrunches up the sticks to flavour a soufflé.

By midnight, his last tarte fine aux rougets (spiced red mullet tart) and déclinaison de pigeon (stuffed pigeon legs, breast and a pigeon tartare) served, he heads for bed. Five hours later, wearing a baseball cap, he’s ready to take to the skies in one of his flotilla of four hot air balloons. A short flight north, following a bend in the Seine takes him over the rooftops of Thomery.

Seen from the ground it’s a typical French commune tucked between the river and the forest de Fontainebleau. From a thousand feet it’s unique: row upon row of parallel stone walls, some creating alleyways, others running up the middle of gardens. Until the Second World War, the inhabitants, known as Thomeryons, supplied Paris with Chasselas table grapes in winter. They fastened their espaliered vines against the walls, protected them from hail with glass overhangs, thinned each bunch while it was ripening to ensure the fruit’s plumpness and protected it against birds with a paper bag.

That’s only half the story. They needed to store their crop until Christmas, when it commanded a premium. To do this, they converted cellars into ripening rooms, lining them with narrownecked bottles filled with water. At harvest time, they picked the grapes with a length of vine attached. One end went into the bottle providing moisture. The other supplied air. Bunches hung in the dark for months, developing a golden skin and the special sweetness that earned them their reputation.

A handful of amateur gardeners have saved the traditional skills from extinction. Their commitment could pay off. Parisian chefs, like Michelin three-star Yannick Alléno at Le Meurice, are campaigning to revive the cuisine of the Ile-de-France, the region around the French capital. Sour Montmorency cherries (perfect for clafoutis), champignons de Paris, grown in an underground quarry, asperges d’Argenteuil (white asparagus), even the humble green cabbage chou de Pontoise receive star billing on their menus. Saffron crocuses are planted and cropped 20 minutes’ drive from Fontainebleau.

In the town’s market Jean-Michel Kamoun stands behind piles of white asparagus: ‘I farm near Moret. My family has been coming here for 70 years. Argenteuil may be a variety that originated in the Paris suburb, but it’s all built up there now. There’s no space for market gardeners.’ Why are some white and others green? His ones, he explains, are blanched. The soil is piled around the spears. Once the tips poke their noses above ground they start to change colour.

Anne Hamette sells honey in the next aisle. Her family keeps a sepia-tinted photo of her husband François’s great-grandmother doing exactly what she does. Four generations of bee-keeping have taught them where and when and how to move the hives they own from orchards to fields of sunflowers and lime or chestnut woods. Their miel de printemps, smooth and creamy, comes from apple blossom and early clover. Liquid acacia has a lighter flavour – children eat it with brie spread on a split baguette. Miel de tournesol (sunflower honey), yellow as lemon curd, blends intense sweetness with a touch of acidity.

Gilles Goursat, a few stands away, says he also has a fromagerie in the Grande Rue. It’s the home of a cheese that isn’t. Bellifontains (what locals call themselves) were enjoying it before the French Revolution, but it has stayed one of the town’s secrets. How to describe it? A bit like softened butter, a bit like crème Chantilly, a bit like clotted cream. Two creams or a double cream and fromage blanc are chilled and beaten, not whisked, until they form a fragile, compact mass. When ready, it’s spooned into tubs lined with gauze. Sprinkled with sugar, or piled over strawberries or raspberries, it’s both decadent and fattening.

In a similar vein are the cakes in Frédéric Cassel’s patisserie, just across the road. Frédéric is the current champion millefeuille maker in the Ile-de-France. ‘Puff pastry sprinkled with sugar is baked under a tray, glazed with icing sugar and decorated with gold leaf,’ he explains. ‘The filling is a mixture of pastry cream and butter cream that has been impregnated for at least 24 hours with Tahitian vanilla.’

Provins is 50km east of Fontainebleau. In the early Middle Ages it effectively belonged to a separate country. An international trading centre, important enough to mint its own coins, it was controlled by the Counts of Champagne. One of them, Thibaud ‘le Chansonnier’ (the songwriter), is said to have returned from the Seventh Crusade with a red rose that he planted on the slopes outside the city walls. True or false, he would have admired the Persian legend that it was a white rose stained with a nightingale’s blood. Back then, the rose was valued most for its medicinal value. English doctors knew it as the Apothecary’s Rose. In France rosa gallica officinalis has kept the name of the place where it took root.

Provins has two halves. In 1840, the novelist Balzac described its fortified citadel as ‘clean, silent and solemn, dominated by its ruins’. Out of season it hasn’t changed. The lower town is pocketsized, provincial and prosperous. Uptown or down, scented rose concoctions pack the shop windows. Dominique Gaufillier’s patisserie sells pink macarons smelling of the powder-puffs with which ladies once dusted their cheeks, candies and rose-petal jellies. La Roseraie, a perfect perfumed garden of lawns, flower beds and arbours, does jams, biscuits and bonbons. The speciality of the restaurant at Hostellerie Aux Vieux Remparts is a dessert combining soufflé, ice cream, jelly and milkshake – all rose-perfumed. Overkill? Not at all – each element brings a separate shade and texture.

Edouard Manet’s famous painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe focuses on a naked lady preening herself for two dandies in a wood. Claude Monet painted his version with the same title while staying in the forest of Fontainebleau at Chaillyen-Bière. His is a proper impressionist picnic, with grapes, peaches, pâté en croûte, roast chicken, crusty bread and several bottles of wine on the menu.

If these artistic geniuses were alive today and looking for an inspirational dinner, they could choose between one in a wooden tree house 30 feet up in the air with al fresco champagne, smoked salmon and foie gras at the Château de Graville, or a molecular blow-out at Les Pleiades in the artist village of Barbizon where the chef, Philippe Geneletti, is an El Bulli old boy who’d do well as an Elvis impersonator.

He’s at the stage of his career when he can pull elegant rabbits out of his hat with unaffected ease: a slab of rare tuna in a mist of eucalyptus smoke under a glass dome, gingerbread Melba toast accompanying foie gras nougat, a wasabi milkshake to drink with crab or three crisp sesame-seed ribbons with a layered fruit salad and a cactus shot. And he has aberrant moments, too: fennel wafers stained with passion fruit backing slow-cooked beef.

Statistics may be hard to swallow and harder to digest than the Pleiades’ ‘Happy monkfish with a vanilla incense and grenadine sauce’, but more people visit the forest of Fontainebleau than Euro Disney – and it doesn’t have any rides. Assuming that the majority coming here is French, it says a lot for their taste. Dressed or undressed, it’s a great setting for a déjeuner sur l’herbe.