Tian De Legumes A Complete Meal In A Dish

Margaret Rens shares a recipe for a nutritious one-dish meal prepared with vegetables from her kitchen garden at Château Coulon Laurensac

- Margaret Rens

Summer is officially nearing its end here in Bordeaux. That doesn’t mean the good weather comes to an end as well. In the harvest months of September and October we are lucky to experience several weeks of “Indian summer”. Warm days and cool nights provide perfect conditions for the harvest of the grapes. In my garden I don’t grow grapes. The many vintners all around us do a way better job than we ever could. But this hasn’t always been the case. Château Coulon Laurensac, where I live, used to be a wine growing domain when it was founded in 1724 by Bertrand de Roberic, the great chancellor and provost of Guyenne. According to tradition the house was called a bourdieu. By deed, a bourdieu is a farm estate consisting of a noble residence, housing for the winemaker and staff, an aboveground cellar called a chai and a cuvier. Other buildings, vineyards and gardens were also part of the estate.

Well-off citizens in Bordeaux built country estates to cultivate vineyards, of course, as well as grow hay to feed their horses and cattle, and create vegetable gardens. A pleasant advantage of having such a bourdieu was that you could spend the warm summer months in the relative cool countryside of the Entre Deux Mers. By the end of the harvest the family would return to their residence in the city of Bordeaux.