36. A Tour de France – Toulouse

by Diana S. |
Sooooo hungry for cassoulet now. Field trip to Toulouse, anyone?

“Cassoulet is not a recipe; it’s an argument among villages.” – Andre Daguin

Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Land of Desire. Thanks for your patience while I spent some quality time with family at Thanksgiving and celebrating my birthday in NYC. This week we’ll continue our miniseries: “A Tour de France”: What kind of France exists outside the boundaries of Paris? What kind of France exists in the middle of the countryside? What does someone in Paris have in common with someone in the Pyrenées? How many kinds of French people are there? What makes someone truly “French” anyway? For the next six episodes, we’ll be tracing the route of the original Tour de France, traveling through the “in between places” – the vast countryside which traditionally held most of the French population. Beginning in the tiny village of Montgeron, then passing through Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and finally returning to Paris, we’ll be eating, drinking and exploring our way through the nation. On y va!

Episode 36: “A Tour de France – Toulouse”

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Sources:

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography – Graham Robb, 2008.

The Food of France – Waverly Root

The Food and Wine of France: Eating and Drinking from Champagne to Provence – Edward Behr

Roques Mario. Jules Gilliéron. In: École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques. Annuaire 1926-1927. 1926. pp. 3-22.

The incredible and extensive archives of L’Abeille de la Ternoise provided a ton of lesser known biographical details of dear Edmond Edmont. Such a charming local paper!

Dialectology – J.K. Chambers

Further Reading:

I’m loving Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography.

Check out more about the innovations in linguistic mapmaking on Atlas Obscura.

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