Brittany: Salted Butter, Caramel, Sardines and the Sea That Seasons Everything
For most of French history, salt was taxed, heavily, by a levy called the gabelle that made it one of the most hated imposts in Europe. Brittany, which joined France late and on its own terms, was exempt. Salt there was cheap, because it was made on the coast, in the marshes around Guérande, by evaporating seawater in clay pans, and Bretons put it in everything, including the butter. The rest of France ate sweet butter because salt was expensive; Brittany ate salted butter because it was not. That single fact runs through the entire Breton table: the caramel, the pastry, the crêpes, the way a sardine is eaten. This is the region and the shelf it explains.
The salt
Guérande sits at the mouth of the Loire on Brittany's southern edge, and its salt marshes have been worked since the Middle Ages. Seawater is led through channels into shallow clay basins, where sun and wind concentrate it until salt crystallizes. Heavy gray crystals sink and are raked from the clay bottom, picking up the gray color and mineral flavor that make sel gris. On still afternoons a thin white crust forms on the surface and is skimmed by hand: fleur de sel, the delicate flake that goes on food rather than in it. The salt workers, paludiers, use wooden tools and no machines, and the marsh is a protected landscape. Our finishing salt guide covers what the crystal shapes do on the tongue; Guérande is the origin of the whole idea of finishing salt, and a sel gris flatbread from our cracker shelf is named for it.
The butter
Breton butter is cultured and salted, often with visible crystals of Guérande salt folded through it, and it is one of the reasons a plain radish with butter is a dish in France. The salt tax exemption made it the local default, and the cool, wet climate makes for exceptional pasture and cream. It is used with abandon: on bread, in sauces, and in quantities in pastry that would alarm a dietitian. The beurre blanc, the great French butter sauce, comes from the Loire border at the region's edge. When a recipe from Brittany says butter, it means salted, and when it says a lot, it means a lot.
The caramel
Salted caramel was invented in Brittany, in 1977, by the chocolatier Henri Le Roux in the seaside town of Quiberon, who cooked the region's salted butter into caramel with crushed nuts and called it caramel au beurre salé. It won a prize in Paris three years later and, over the next three decades, conquered the world's dessert menus. Our caramel guide tells the story and the science; the short version is that salt suppresses bitterness and sharpens sweetness, and Brittany had been salting its butter for five hundred years before anyone thought to put it in a caramel. A spoon of goat's milk caramel with a pinch of gray salt is the closest thing on our shelf to the Quiberon original.
The sardines
The world's first commercial sardine cannery opened in Nantes, at Brittany's southeastern edge, in 1824, and the region's coast filled with canneries in the century that followed: Douarnenez, Concarneau, Quiberon, Saint-Gilles. Breton sardines are packed in olive oil or, distinctively, in salted Breton butter, and the region treats them as a serious food, with vintage tins aged for years and opened like wine. Our history of tinned fish begins there; the Breton sardine toast in sardine toast five ways, brown butter poured over the fish, is how the coast eats them.
The crêpes and the galettes
Brittany's soil is poor for wheat and good for buckwheat, so the region's flatbread became the galette, a large thin buckwheat crêpe cooked on a griddle and folded around ham, cheese and an egg, or eaten plain with salted butter. Sweet crêpes, of wheat flour, come after, with sugar, salted butter, or salted caramel. A crêperie serves both, and the drink beside them is not wine but cider, dry and cloudy, poured into a ceramic bowl rather than a glass, which is the correct vessel and always has been.
The pastry
The kouign-amann, from Douarnenez, is a laminated dough folded with salted butter and sugar and baked until the sugar caramelizes into a crust, and its name in Breton means, approximately, butter cake, which undersells it. The far breton is a dense custard with prunes. The galette bretonne is a thick, crumbly salted-butter shortbread, and the thin, crisp gaufrettes of the northern coast are cousins of the fine waffles on our cracker shelf. Every one of them is built on the same salted butter.
The Breton table at home
Salted butter on good bread with radishes and flaky salt to begin. A tin of sardines with brown butter. A buckwheat galette if you are ambitious; a stack of sel gris flatbreads if you are not. A bowl of dry cider, or a sparkling tea. Caramel over something at the end. The region's whole cuisine fits in one sentence, and so does the shelf that supplies it: the salt, the caramel, the sardines and the waffles are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. The butter is the one thing worth driving across town for.
