Mark Porter visits the town of Bar-le-Duc, whose currant jam has been the preserve of the rich and powerful since the Middle Ages. Photographs by Marie Hennechart.
Mary, Queen of Scots, called it a "ray of sunshine in a jar". What she was describing was a fruity, French confection that now costs nearly as much as caviar. To the rest of us, it is known as jam - but this is a jam of unparalleled excellence. Alfred Hitchcock loved it so much, he had it flown to film locations so that his jar-a-morning breakfast addiction could be satisfied.
Marie-Antoinette was a guzzler, as were the Sun King and Victor Hugo. And the great French diplomat and politician Raymond Poincaré used to clean his teeth twice after his petit déjeuner of jam-daubed croissant, to prevent Prime Ministerial tooth-rot. It is the ambrosia of popes, cardinals and kings, and yet you are unlikely ever to have heard of it. I certainly hadn't, nor had the food halls of Harrods in London, or Jenners in Edinburgh. Welcome to the world's most rarefied jam, the currant preserve of Bar-le-Duc.
If you have heard of Bar-le-Duc, it's probably because you've been lost in the hilly countryside south of Champagne, come off the motorway at the wrong junction, or you're a connoisseur of Renaissance architecture who has visited the splendours of the haute ville as part of a Pevsner-inspired grand tour. Bar-le-Duc is a small town in the heart of Lorraine, the region that gave gastronomy the quiche. It's also the only place on earth that produces confiture de groseilles (the aforementioned currant jam) to an ancient recipe and painstaking method dating back to the early-14th century. So, I hear you ask, what's the big deal? Why is it so expensive, and, if it's so good, why isn't everyone making it?
Here's why: the production of one small jar (85 grams, or three ounces) is as labour-intensive as a rugby match, and to call it a cottage industry would be inaccurate: you could not fit the requisite number of workers into a cottage. Even though there is only one confiturier in Bar-le-Duc left making the preserve, he starts off by employing at least a dozen local women in July to gather the fruit from the surrounding area.
They in turn subcontract or dragoon, bludgeon and blackmail daughters and granddaughters into helping. Once gathered, the massed bunches of tiny berries are taken home, individually washed in iced water and prepared for cooking by the women, who are called épépineuses (seed-extractors). Each pea-sized berry, which weighs around one gram, is held between the thumb and index finger of the left hand while, in the right hand, a finely tapered goose-quill is used expertly to remove each of the eight or so tiny seeds. The skill involved in this is quite surgical: the pulp must not be damaged, and the tiny flap of skin left by the insertion of the quill must be replaced so that the berry looks whole.
This is the unthinkable bit, the part of the operation that perhaps appeals to sheikhs, kings, plutocrats and sadists: approximately two kilograms must be de-seeded to produce one kilo of jam-worthy fruit, meaning that the goose-quill procedure must be performed on about 2,000 berries just to make that kilo. We're talking about the removal of about 16,000 seeds. Talk about the patience of saints - though no saint in his right mind would do this job, particularly at the rate épépineuses are paid (between £10 and £12 a kilo, and even the world champion can only manage three kilos in a day). But the seedlessness gives the jam a clarity of colour and smoothness of texture, rather like a jelly before it sets.
I am pondering all this as I stand in the basement where Jacques Dutriez creates his seedless confection. He is the last maker of confiture de groseilles in a line that stretches back 656 years. He sits amid cloth-covered trestle tables and boxes full of tiny jars, some with redcurrant preserve, others with white. His atelier is defiantly low-tech: most measurements are done by hand and eye, and the most sophisticated piece of equipment, apart from someone's Porsche outside, is the Fifties fridge. Dutriez, now 73, has his back to five gas hobs, each with an aluminium bowl on top, into which the berries go, along with sugar and water. More than that he is unwilling to divulge. "The French did not invent this confiture in 1344 for me to hand over the secret to you," he says, with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. "But what I can tell you is that there are no artificial ingredients, just berries, sugar and water. And a jar of my jam will be just as good after 100 years." And if it is not, the Confrérie des Gousteurs de Groseilles will surely tell him, for the members of this historical society, wearing the red cloak, hat and quill of office, sample the jam to ensure that the conserve reaches its vertiginous sugary standard year on year.
However, I have discovered a recipe. It is in the original American edition of The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Becker (Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), but this does not include de-seeding. For that, I recommend a month's training chez Dutriez next summer, but don't count on earning enough to eat.
Each year, Dutriez produces about 30,000 jars, or verrines. Each jar sells on for £8 or £8.50 and, by the time it reaches top retailers in New York and Tokyo, the price has been known to increase tenfold, according to the confiturier. In the summer, he will be handing over the reins to his granddaughter, Anne, who is 20 and finishing off her medical studies in Aix-en-Provence. She has been learning the traditional art of jam-making since she was a little girl.
At last, Monsieur Dutriez opens a jar. We smear it over delicious, buttery madeleines and take the plunge. The blood-red pearls, suspended in divine vermilion goo, are, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins might have said, mouthed to flesh-burst. All other jams pale in comparison.
Bar-le-Duc is not the sort of place where you will meet many tourists, but it's worth a trip just to see and taste this ancient art in all its glory, as well as admire some of France's finest architecture. And during the redcurrant season, the épépineuses dress up in traditional costume and compete for the title épépineuse of the year, an accolade conferred by the Confrerie and dearly won among the jam-makers of Lorraine.