Cèpes and Serendipity

Planning a September trip to Burgundy, France Today’s contributing photographer and gourmet traveler Bob Peterson and his wife Lynn were looking around the Internet for hotels when they happened upon the Auberge de la Tour in Sennecé-lès-Mâcon, a hamlet on the outskirts of Mâcon. They had never heard it mentioned, but they liked the look of it. The Petersons share a fine-tuned instinct when it comes to good eating, and the modest price was right.

After meandering through Beaujolais for several days, they arrived at the Auberge on a mellow Indian summer evening and settled down on the flowering terrace for a glass of champagne before dinner. By chance owner-chef Patrick Gatinet walked by, carrying a big, fresh cèpe mushroom in each hand. Bob took a quick snapshot. Gatinet asked if the Petersons liked cèpes, and soon they were in the kitchen, where they met one of the chef’s mushroom-hunter friends, holding a crate full of beautiful big mushrooms just plucked from the black earth.

Gatinet speaks some English, but he seems never at a loss for words in any language, making himself clear with enthusiastic gestures, a mime’s repertoire of facial expressions and merry twinkling eyes. Soon he was peeling a cèpe, and, with a paring knife flashing at the speed of light, slicing it paper-thin. A few slices slipped onto a plate, olive oil dribbled, lemon squirted, sea salt sprinkled and the delicious little sample served back on the terrace.

Moments later, out came Gatinet with another little dish—a few slices of the cèpes whisked in a pan with a splash of cream. He demonstrated how to put a little heap of the mushrooms on a small piece of toast, held the sample out to Lynn—and suddenly reversed course and popped the canapé into his own mouth.

After everyone stopped laughing, the Petersons got their second cèpe tastettes. Dinner was off to a great start.

100% Mâconnais

The Auberge de la Tour is a wonderful example of the kind of family-run country inns that legendarily lined the main roads from Paris to the south of France in the days before the autoroute—here it was the old Route Nationale 6, which followed the Saône River to Mâcon and down to Lyon. It’s still the kind of place that makes winging it through France such a pleasure—simple, well-kept and comfortable rooms, a gracious dining room with a wood-burning fireplace, and excellent food and wine served up by a gregarious chef who loves his work.

Gatinet is, he says, “100% Mâconnais”. He was born in the region, and so were his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. When his father, a mason by trade, took over the small country café that later grew into the auberge, his mother started out by serving coffee and wine, “and then added a few recipes”. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to a local chef, and at 22, after working in a few regional restaurants, he returned home and, with his brother, took over the family affair. “Our mother was our first employee,” he notes. In 1988, after they wed, his wife Jackie joined him, “and ever since. we’ve worked in tandem.” He’s in the kitchen; she oversees the dining room and the hotel.

By instinct and conviction, Gatinet was a locavore long before the word was coined. For years he has been “a great defender of the authentic products of the region,” he says. “I love the products, and I love the people behind the wines, the beef, the fruits and vegetables…the essence of terroir is really the ensemble of people who produce the great quality. It’s up to us to provide a living for them, and to be sure our clients discover them.”

Since his own terroir is southern Burgundy, he finds everything a passionate chef could ever want right at hand—poultry from the Bresse region just east of the Saône, Charolais beef, pike and pikeperch from nearby rivers, Mâconnais goat cheese, game in season and plenty of mushrooms. The regional wines are Mâcon, Pouilly-Fuissé and Saint-Véran; immediately south is Beaujolais, just north is the Chalonnais, with Rully, Mercurey, Givry and Montagny. And the grand vineyards of the Côte d’Or are less than an hour away. The Auberge’s wine list—an enormous book—counts some 400 references, and its first page is filled with citations from Rabelais, Beaumarchais and other Epicureans, including contemporary French actor Jean Carmet: “The only weapon I tolerate is a corkscrew.”

A lot of those maxims Gatinet learned from his mentor, a man named Jean Desbois: “He drank a lot. He ate a lot. He taught me everything I know about oenology. He died at 102. He was a true Epicurean, to his very core. I was brought up in that spirit.”

Tender is the moon

The wine tome was well sampled during the Petersons’ serendipitous two-day stay. The first night, after the cèpe samplers, a superb 2010 white Mâcon-Villages Terroir de Quintaine, produced by Jean-Pierre Michel, and a lesser red Milly-Lamartine accompanied foie gras, escargots and chicken with cèpes.

The second-night starters had been agreed on long before, and all eyes in the dining room turned to watch as they were served: full plates of those translucent, paper-thin slices of cèpes, lightly drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice, sprinkled with powdered Espelette pepper and barely dusted with freshly grated Parmesan. Then came guinea fowl and Charolais beef and slow-cooked veal, topped off by a huge tray of regional cheeses to choose from, instead of dessert. This time the white Terroir de Quintaine was followed by a 2009 Brouilly, and a fine Armagnac finale.

At breakfast the next morning Gatinet was back in the kitchen, bringing out to the buffet table a sizzling skillet with bubbling fried eggs. (He works an 18-hour day, says Jackie, and it’s clear she comes close to that, too.) As the breakfast room cleared out, he stopped for another chat and wound up explaining the secret of mushroom hunting: it’s mainly a matter of the moon.

For the first half of the lunar cycle, it’s la lune tendre— a “tender” moon that encourages things to grow, that makes lettuces sprout tall, that draws mushrooms up out of the earth, that sucks the sap up into the trees, that makes our hair grow. During the second half of the cycle, la lune dure, or hard moon, stops all the action. With a tender moon, the plentiful sap attracts insects that lay their eggs and infest the wood, so for good lumber, trees must be cut during the hard moon when the sap is lowest. And of course, he says, never have your hair cut during a tender moon, because it will grow back too fast and you’ll have to go right back to the barber. For women too? “Ah, pour les femmes, tout est différent!”

After breakfast, the Petersons asked to photograph the Gatinets outside in the sunshine, in front of the tower that gives the Auberge its name. It stands on a small hill in the large garden off to one side, once part of the medieval fortifications that protected the powerful Cluny Abbey several miles away. It also served as the local tax collector’s office, says Gatinet, and as a silo, since taxes were often paid in sacks of grain or potatoes. The lower level was a handy jail, for those who didn’t ante up.

The gourmet tour then moved on, north to Burgundy’s glorious Côte d’Or, stopping along the way in tiny Berzé-la-Ville to see the extraordinary 12th-century frescoes in the Chapel of the Cluny monks, and then to visit the gorgeous 17th-century Château de Cormatin and its splendid gardens. But dinner that night didn’t hold a candle to the Auberge de la Tour.

604 rue Vrémontoise, Sennecélès- Mâcon, 03.85.36.02.70. www.auberge-tour.fr

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of France Today