Les Anis de Flavigny
Flavigny-sur-Ozerain is a walled hilltop village in Burgundy of about three hundred people, a Benedictine abbey founded in the eighth century, and one factory, which is inside the abbey. The factory makes a single thing: a hard white pastille the size of a pea with an anise seed at its center, and it has made it, in one form or another, since 1591. The candy is sold in a small oval tin printed with a shepherd offering a shepherdess a bouquet, and that tin is as recognizable in France as a box of matches. This is the producer guide to the village, the method, the family, and the flavors.
The abbey and the nuns
The abbey of Flavigny was founded in 719 and grew wealthy on relics and pilgrims. Anise had been grown and traded in the region since Roman times, prized for digestion and breath, and at some point the monks began coating the seeds in sugar, a medieval habit that made medicine pleasant and that our panning piece traces to the apothecaries. The recorded history of the candy begins in 1591, when the Ursuline nuns of Flavigny were making and selling the sugared seeds; the company still marks that date. The Revolution closed the abbey, the buildings passed into private hands, and the candy passed with them, made by a succession of Flavigny families in the same rooms.
The method
It is panning in its purest and slowest form. A single anise seed, the green-gray, faintly licorice-scented seed of Pimpinella anisum, goes into a rotating copper drum with thousands of others. Sugar syrup, flavored with anise or with one of the other natural essences, is poured in a little at a time while the drum turns and warm air dries each film; layer builds on layer, and the seed grows from a speck to a smooth white pastille of about a gram. The company says the process takes roughly fifteen days. There is no shortcut, because the layers must dry between additions, and there is no machine that can speed it without making the shell coarse. The finished pastille is hard, dissolves slowly on the tongue over several minutes, and reveals the seed at the end, which is the point: the anise is the last thing you taste.
The family
The Troubat family took over the factory in 1923 and still runs it, in the abbey, with a workforce of a few dozen from the village. The company has resisted moving, mechanizing further or selling, and it opens the crypt and the panning room to visitors, who can watch the drums turn under vaulted stone. The tin's design, the shepherd and shepherdess, dates to the early twentieth century and has barely changed; collectors keep the seasonal and limited editions, like the winter-themed violet tin.
The flavors
Every pastille has an anise seed at its heart, and the flavor named on the tin is the syrup around it. Violet is the most famous after the original: floral, faintly powdery, the taste of an old Parisian sweet shop, and the one to give. Lemon is bright and clean, the anise arriving as a surprise at the end. Orange flower is the Provençal flavor, honeyed and perfumed, a natural beside a cup of tea. Mint is the one for after dinner and the glovebox. Coffee is the one for the desk. Liquorice (shop Liquorice) doubles the anise's cousin and is the tin for anyone who read our licorice guide and wanted more. The original plain anise tin is on the shelf when in stock.
How to eat them
One at a time, and slowly. A Flavigny pastille is not chewed; it is held on the tongue and allowed to dissolve, which takes long enough that one is a pause and two is a habit. The French keep a tin in a coat pocket, a handbag or a car and take one after coffee, after a meal, before a meeting or on a walk. They are natural, sugar and essence and a seed, and a tin of fifty grams lasts a surprising time because of how they are eaten. They are also the correct thing to set out in a small dish at the end of a dinner beside the chocolate and biscotti, and a favorite of children who like to reach the seed.
Why it matters
A great many foods claim age, and most of them mean the recipe. Flavigny means the room. The same walls, the same method, the same seed, the same tin, the same village for four centuries, in a country that has lost most of its regional confectionery to factories, is close to unique, and it is why the tin appears in French films, on French desks and in the hands of French grandmothers as a kind of national shorthand for something small and good that has not changed. The six tins are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, in the candy collection beside the other old European houses. Take one. Wait for the seed.
