My assignment this week was nougat de Montélimar, a favourite sweet treat from childhood but more recently, from both pastry school and our trip to France. This traditional Provençal confection is full of almond and pistachio nuts, cemented together with very dense Italian meringue cooked with sugar and lavender honey. Different dried fruits or citrus peel can be added for variety. When set, the nougat can be cut into small pieces or long slabs to enjoy; to prevent drying out, it should be wrapped tightly or enrobed partially in chocolate.
My sister and I have vague recollections of how my mom would give us small silver-foil wrapped cubes of white nougat when we were young. During pastry school, my love of nougat was reawakened! As a result, our recent trip to France included a mandatory pilgrimage to Montélimar, the birthplace of nougat, where we spent a few short hours browsing the countless nougat shops before catching the train to Lyon. Interestingly, nougat de Montélimar must officially contain either 30% almond or 28% almond and 2% pistachio, and honey must be 25% of the sugar content. My recipe from pastry school produces a fairly chewy nougat, whereas in Montélimar, both "tendre" and "dur" were available.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Nougat love
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4 comments:
http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/mtype2/whatever/archives/callard_bowser_dessert_nougat/
People all over the world have been searching for this particular nougat made by Callard and Bowser. The company Suchard has taken over the C&B and has ceased production of the C&B lines including our beloved nougat.
Perhaps, if you could recreate this, you could be satisfying thousands of people over the world!
Funny, I came across a whole group of people on a newsgroup several years ago who were discussing this specific nougat.
Hey here is a link to another site which actually has a photo of the nougats. If you do a search on "Callard and Bowser Nougat", there are quite a few hits with people searching...
http://freephotooftheday.com/2007/06/05/callard-bowser-dessert-nougat/
Today I sent a request to Wrigley's to continue production of Callard and Bowser's Dessert Nougat. If you love it as much as I did, please back me up by requesting it too!
This is the sort of marketing decision that's hard to understand. They trashed a whole market, just like that. It would be interesting to see if they'd part with the recipe, start making it and serve what seems to be a pretty substantial niche market.
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