A few easy-to-reproduce Vendée recipes!
The Vendée is a gourmet region, from breakfast to dinner, from aperitif to dessert, from Monday to Sunday. If you try the specialities of the Vendée, you’ll love them!
To help you make the most of them, here are the traditional recipes for these local dishes. You have to imagine them handwritten, on a notebook a little creased and yellowed by time, strewn with butter stains (salted of course)… That’s how they were passed down from hand to hand, from generation to generation.
You’ll find below all the flavour of your holidays in Pays de Saint Jean de Monts, and you’ll be able to impress your guests with delicious sweet and savoury Vendée recipes.
1. How to cook “pignons” from the sea
Pignons (small local clams) are a real treasure that can be found on the huge beaches in Pays de Saint Jean de Monts.
You need to be equipped with a basket and a scraper with 3 prongs to try out this shell-fishing on foot.
It is the perfect combination of leisure and food.
Cleaning / preparation
Soak the pignons for several hours (overnight or throughout the day) in a bowl with salted water (sea water or water with large salt crystals) so that they can disgorge all the sand and grit.
Cooking method:
- Rince the pignons in clean water.
- Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the pignons, cover and stir regularly.
- When they are open, add finely chopped garlic, parsley and cream and continue to stir for around a minute (the time for the cream to heat up and the pignons to absorb the garlic and parsley).
- It is also possible to try them raw with bread and butter or just in butter.
2. Moules à la maraîchine – Marshland mussels
Ingredients:
- 1 kg of mussels
- 2 shallots
- 40 cl of white vinegar
- Crème fraîche (cream)
- Parsley
Recipe by an inhabitant of the marshes in Soullans
- In a saucepan, cover the chopped shallots with white vinegar and heat until the vinegar has been absorbed.
- Open the mussels naturally in a large saucepan.
- Collect the cooking juices and filter them.
- Add the juices to the shallots, then add the cream and the very finely chopped parsley.
- Pour this mixture over the mussels, only one of which should be left in its shell.
3. La gralaïe – mogettes on buttered toast
Ingredients:
- Mogette beans (semi-dry beans)
- Salted butter
- A clove of garlic
- Bread
- Spirit vinegar (optional)
- Salt
- Pepper
