Where to stay

Citiz Hotelw

Well-designed, central and only five minutes from the station. From £85. Toulouse, 00 33 5 61 11 18 18, www.citizhotel.fr

Hotel Terminus

A restaurant – Le Balandre – with rooms, it’s next to the station and an ideal introduction to the Lot. Rooms from £65. Cahors, 00 33 5 65 53 32 00, www.balandre.com

Le Pont de l’Ouysse

Michelin-starred (and old school) dining, great location overlooking the river. Cosy rooms. From £120 for room, dinner, breakfast. Near Rocamadour, 00 33 1 72 72 92 02, www.lepontdelouysse.com

Manoir de Malagorse

Luxurious guest house/gîte off the beaten track. Lovely set menu dinners and breakfasts. Truffling weekends in winter. From £110 (low season), including breakfast. Add £35 per person for dinner too. Cuzance, 00 33 5 65 27 14 83, www.manoir-de-malagorse.fr

Travel Information

Currency is the euro. France is one hour ahead of GMT. The Lot region enjoys plenty of summer sun, and its warmest months are from June to September, with average temperatures hitting 28°C in July and August. Warm weather can, however, run well into October before it drops. Between November and February, average lows can reach 2°C.

GETTING THERE

Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies direct to Toulouse from Bristol and London Gatwick.
Jet2 (jet2.com) operates direct flights to Toulouse from Edinburgh, Leeds Bradford and Manchester.
British Airways (ba.com) operates direct flights to Toulouse from London Heathrow.

RESOURCES

The French Tourist Board (francetourism.com) offers practical advice on planning a trip, including tips on rail travel and car hire.
Tourism in the Lot (tourisme-lot.com/en) has plenty of detailed advice on exploring the region and offers interesting guides on its gastronomy, vineyards and villages.

FURTHER READING

Lot: Travels Through a Limestone Landscape in South-West France by Helen Martin (Moho Books, £18.99). A classic guidebook to the Lot Valley that paints an evocative – and comprehensive – picture of the region’s villages, traditions, food and wine. Even those familiar with the region will find something new here.

Goose Fat and Garlic: Country Recipes from South-West France by Jeanne Strang (Kyle Books, £14.99). Definitive cookbook on southwest France. Compiles more than 200 authentic recipes, including many from the Lot and Quercy, backed up with anecdotes and observations.

Where to eat

Prices quoted are per person for three courses (without wine) unless otherwise stated.

Auberge Beauville

Simple workaday restaurant in an isolated hamlet. Good cooking by a team that’s been at the stoves there since 1985. From £10. Espédaillac, 00 33 5 65 40 55 62

Au Père Louis

A charming, antique bar-bistrot. Be sure to try the potent quinine-based liqueur – Quinquina – which is surprisingly good. Toulouse, 00 33 5 61 21 33 45

Le Bibent

A spectacular brasserie with a beautiful Belle Epoque interior. Listed as a National Monument in the main Place du Capitole Square. From £18 for two courses. Toulouse, 00 33 5 34 30 18 37, www.maisonconstant.com

Le LCutting

edge but simple and accessible. Coquillettes (small macaroni) with ham and truffle are worth the stay in Toulouse. From £30. Toulouse, 00 33 5 61 21 69 05, www.restaurantlel.fr

L’O à la Bouche

Friendly, modern and ambitious restaurant. Leave room for a Vin de Cahors macaron dessert. From £25, tax and service included. Cahors, 00 33 5 65 35 65 69, www.loalabouche-restaurant.com

Maison de la Violette

A barge and tearoom selling every conceivable variation on the candied violet theme. Set menus from around £10. Toulouse, 00 33 5 61 99 01 30, www.lamaisondelaviolette.com

Monsieur Georg

Set in the Place St Georges, perfect for sitting outside and sampling charcuterie from Garcia, Toulouse’s top charcutier. Plat du Jour: £10. Toulouse, 00 33 5 61 29 81 96, www.monsieurgeorges.fr

Restaurant le Marché

Classic bistrot serving regional specialities with fresh produce straight from the market. From £16. Cahors, 00 33 5 65 35 27 27, www.restaurantlemarche.com

Food Glossary

Cabécou de Rocamadour

Unpasteurised, medal-sized goat cheese.

Cajas

Kind of clafoutis (batter cake) made with whatever fruits are in season.

Cou d’oie farci

Goose neck packed with a foie gras based stuffing.

Cougeas Quercynol

Baked pumpkin pie.

Croustilot

Round pain de campagne made with stone-ground Causses flour.

Grattons

Crunchy scratchings of goose or duck pieces cooked in their fat.

Miques

A kind of bread and herb dumpling.

Mourtayrol

A festive pot-au-feu with saffron – once traditional at funerals.

Pastis (serpent)

A pastry that’s stretched by hand and flavoured with honey and rum or plum eau-de-vie. There’s a chicken pie called a pastis too, better known as a tourtière de poulet.

Tourrin

An onion soup that often contains tomato. It’s thickened with egg.

Food and Travel Review

The train takes less than an hour and a half to get from Toulouse to Cahors, but in that time it journeys across centuries, back to a far older France. It leaves behind the dynamic city that, for many travellers, serves as a gateway to the Lot river valley. Aerospatiale’s Airbus factories dip below the horizon as the carriages plunge into what the French call La France Profonde. ‘Deep France’ is a place of ancient oak forests and prehistoric caves, where medieval citadels cling to both vertiginous limestone gorges and their distinct culinary traditions.

The Pont Valentré’s pencil-tipped towers, which have spanned the Lot river since the 14th century, signal the train’s arrival in Cahors. This medieval market town used to be the capital of Quercy, a French province under the Ancien Régime, the system of aristocratic rule that lasted from the 15th century until it was swept away by the French Revolution of the 1790s.

Today it’s the administrative centre of the Lot, a region whose terrain shifts from rolling plains to rift valleys and limestone hills dappled with chestnut and walnut trees. Beneath the surface, it’s a gruyère cheese of caverns and underground rivers. The Gulf of Padirac burrows into an ornamental park of stalagmites and stalactites. Visitors see a few hundred metres, but the subterranean network of caves stretches for over 40km.

Far above these caverns sit castles, fortified farms and villages, strategically perched on crags that would have helped defend them from the attacks – whether by armies or armed bands – that were once a constant threat. These vantage points also protected communities from natural dangers: the broken stone bridge (a 1966 flash flood carried away its central arch) over the Ouysse near Rocamadour is a pretty backdrop to a dinner of ceps and crayfish at the auberge beside it.

Floods are a reminder that this land can be as volatile as it is generous. Criss-crossing lanes link villages to hamlets and they scratch lines in a fertile landscape seemingly designed for peasant farming. This is countryside that’s wedded to the seasons. In winter, there’s time to hunt truffles and stuff goose necks. In summer, perfumed Quercynois melons and Mara des Bois strawberries ripen. The end of September brings the vendange, when winemakers harvest grapes for the robust Vin de Cahors.

In spring, Gilles Marre is roasting his carré d’agneau des Causses (rack of lamb in a herb crust). He’s the owner of the Hotel Terminus, and its restaurant, Le Balandre, close to Cahors railway station. His family built the large bourgeois house five generations ago (it figured in the Michelin Guide in 1910). Given such history, it’s unsurprising that Gilles is a traditionalist. His menu features a speciality of Grandfather Pierre: an egg mollet, puff pastry, a sautéed escalope of foie gras and a truffle sauce.

A backward glance at Toulouse shows how different modern French cuisine can be. Inventive chefs are doing wonders with the dishes of south-west France, evolving them into inventive creations that surprise and delight. Les Jardins de l’Opéra serves its duck liver with poached oysters and lemongrass foam. Restaurant Le L blends regional ingredients with Asian flavours. Master ice cream maker Philippe Faur offers up a foie gras parfait in his ice cream parlour. You can eat it out of a cornet

Because it’s a central plank of south-west France’s cooking, the rights and wrongs of foie gras need addressing. As with all animal husbandry, there’s good and bad. Done on an agro-industrial scale it’s nasty. On small farms, ducks and geese are reared slowly outdoors. The gavage (force-feeding, or cramming) happens twice a day, just for the last fortnight before they’re killed.

Ban this age-old food and you also threaten garbure (cabbage and winter vegetable soup), tourrin (onion and tomato soup), grattons (goose scratchings), cassoulet, magrets de canard and dozens of other delicacies that rely on goose or Moulard duck fat.

In the tiny village of Espédaillacit, in the middle of the Parc Naturel Régional des Causses du Quercy, the Auberge Beauville – a workman’s restaurant with a £9.50 menu – marks the end of the pâté binge. For the money, you have soup, pork and duck terrine, a chicken and salsify pie, cheese, a dessert and a pitcher of red wine. Another potential casualty would be the pastis Quercynol that Elise Terret takes to Cahors market. It’s a sweet pastry also called a ‘serpent’ because it’s often shaped like a coiled snake. She makes the dough on a table covered with a cotton cloth.

‘I stretch it out with my fingers,’ she says, ‘till it covers the kitchen table, and then I brush it with goose fat using a feather’. A little liquid honey, chopped apple and rum go on next before she rolls it up and bakes it. ‘I make each one individually by hand,’ she says. They come out of the oven crisp and golden.

Gilles Marre of Le Balandre also goes to the market at 7.30am to source ingredients for his kitchen. For him it’s as much a social event as a job. He buys a tray of baby purple figs. ‘They’re for a jam,’ he says. ‘It’s more of a compote really.’ From one organic farmer he collects a handful of baby white aubergines. He pulls out the freshest bunches of herbs from another stall and a pot of chestnut honey to soothe a summer cough.

Before he’s finished, he’s prepared a vanload of fruit and veg. Armed with a bag of palmier pastries and sablé biscuits he drops by a fellow chef’s bistrot, Le Marché. They drink coffee and talk shop. His grandfather, he recalls, was a man of strict values: ‘He’d been through the First World War – country, work, family mattered to him.’ There’s more than a hint of nostalgia in his voice.

Partly, it’s this yearning for a lost age that brings so many visitors from across France to the region’s villages. From Le Mont St Cyr, an eminence overlooking Cahors, there’s a view of the perfect U-bend in the river. It winds east towards Saint-Cirq Lapopie, voted France’s most beautiful village in a television poll. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come here every year to scale the narrow streets of this ancient stronghold, which perches atop a cliff 100m above the river and is a bastion for the region’s culinary traditions.

Meanwhile, westwards along the meandering river lies the wine-making region of Cahors. This wine has, or rather once had, a mythical quality. If someone peered through a glass of it, he or she wouldn’t see their fingers clasping the bowl. The sombre ruby hue earned it the soubriquet vin noir (‘black wine’). Its ancient past is more colourful: Henry II of England drank it at his wedding; its winemakers fought a trade war with Bordeaux; Peter the Great liked a tipple; phylloxera destroyed the region’s vines in the 19th century; and in 1956, when the vineyards had been replanted, a frost almost wiped them out again.

Jean-Luc Baldès’s ancestors were survivors. The eighth in a line of vignerons-viticulteurs on his Clos Triguedina estate at Viresur- Lot, he is pioneering efforts to transform this rugged, powerful and often tannic wine into a palette of distinctive styles reflecting its terroirs. The traditional grape of the Lot Valley has a triple alias. Locally, it’s known as auxerrois or cot. To the rest of the world, it’s malbec. Jean-Luc produces a trilogy of wines (Les Galets, Petites Cailles, Au Coin du Bois) from separate parcels of land. Probus, his emblematic top-of-the-range, is made with the attention to detail of a grand cru. Not one of these wines tastes remotely like the Argentine malbecs that have become so familiar.

Jean-Luc is also using this traditional grape to create his ‘New Black Wine’, but adapting an old technique. Ripe grapes from a selected 1.5 hectare plot are spread out on racks and gently baked to concentrate the juice before vinification. In the old Quercy, the drying was done in a loft and the wine known as vin de grenier. Dark as a currant, raisin-like but still fresh, it delivers the dark berry fruit that the label promises. In some ways it tastes like a fénelon – the heady mix of red wine, walnut liqueur, plum eau de vie and a dash of cassis that is the aperitif of choice in the Lot and neighbouring Dordogne.

It’s unlikely, however, that you’ll need any aperitif to fire up the appetite after climbing the steep streets of Rocamadour. This craggy citadel is a termitarium for pilgrims visiting its chapels and sanctuary to admire the statue of a miraculous black virgin. They have been passing through in their millions for a thousand years. At night, when the crowds leave, it has a special magic. Nightingales flit around the towers and rock-face hundreds of feet above the Alzou valley, warbling in the darkness.

Rocamadour is somewhere every French child learns about before quitting primary school. Its fame may be why farms in the Lot adopted its name for their little-known cabécou goat’s cheese. It influenced farmer Franck Bonneval. ‘We were farming cattle,’ he recalls. ‘Then, when they created the Rocamadour AOC in 1996 we decided to switch to goats.’ He’d never, he admits, made cheese before, but he did a course, sold his cows and went to work.

Nobody, Franck says, buys just one: ‘At the start of the month, customers take them a dozen at a time. Come the end of the month it’s by the half dozen – and with the economic crisis it may be just three.’ Eaten with bread they are delicious. They are also the perfect size for serving with ripe pears and a coffee spoon of acacia honey, or a walnut or pear salad (see box, left). Or just for taking on a picnic.

We unpacked our hamper by a field outside of Peyrac: Cantal cheese, croustilot bread, saucisses sèches, duck rillettes and a bottle of Cahors. A battered Renault van drove past, stopped and reversed alongside us. Had we been trespassing? Possibly, but the driver just wanted to wish us a good day. He’d been hunting with friends and had shot a boar. He was off to celebrate. We gave him the remainder of our bottle of wine, which he plonked on the passenger seat.

In a Cahors underground car park is an excavated length of the Roman city’s walls, stonework intact. Noticing it or not depends on luck. It’s also about being ready for the unexpected. That’s true of much in the Lot: like truffle hunting. After a while, an experienced forager can find one, even without his dog. He just has to follow his nose.

DON’T MISS

Cahors Market Everything a traditional French market should be. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Cahors.

Le Marché Victor Hugo This covered market has an exceptional charcuterie: Garcia (www.maison-garcia.fr). Outside it is Xavier, an extraordinary cheese shop (fromages-xavier.com) that also invites customers to visit its cellars. Toulouse, www.marchevictorhugo.fr

Maison de la Violette A barge and tearoom selling variations on the candied violet theme (see Where to eat). www.maisondelaviolette.com

Ratz Very good artisanal beer made by an ex-rugby star. The organic amber brew is excellent. Fontanes, 00 33 5 65 53 05 63, www.biereratz.fr

Vieille Prune The Louis Roques distillery produces rare and delicious plum eau-de-vie, aged in oak; a walnut liqueur; and another with Quercynois saffron. Has a museum too. Souillac, www.lavieilleprune.com
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