The next day, a herd of Limousin cows — 600 of them, according to general manager Vincenzo Iaconis — followed us around as we drove out into the lush green hills. I'm going to stop eating meat," he joked. There are a lot of these outside my home, but they're far too beautiful to eat. Iaconis took us on a tour of one of the six renovated cottages that make up the inn, whose stone walls and wooden beams are made cozier by the addition of plush couches and freestanding tubs. If a visitor requests it, some accommodations offer fireplaces large enough to roast a spit-roast in.
On the way to Brive-la-Gaillarde, we passed through the forested Périgord Limousin Regional Natural Park and stopped briefly at the picturesque town of Uzerche, known as the "Pearl of the Limousin" due to its picture-perfect appearance in the 18th century. In 1952, French singer Georges Brassens recorded a racy song about a brawl that broke out in a Brive food market between female shoppers and the police. The market, renamed in Brassens' honor, retained the earthiness he described, but shoppers were much friendlier and less likely to get into fights than they had been in the past. Cheeses, honeycombs oozing with nectar, and the largest cabbages I've ever seen covered the tables. Bread by the kilo, ripe prunes, and the first mushrooms of the year were all things I came across.
Local chefs who left for Paris to earn their careers there are lured back by the market's allure. Originally from a little town to the south of Brive, Nicolas Eche is a chef to watch. At his bustling En Cuisine restaurant, he offers up creative fare like prawns in cauliflower sauce and a veal trifecta consisting of filet, head, and crispy sweetbreads. Although Francis Teyssandier offers a wonderful terrine and an airy soufflé with raspberries, the playful hand-drawn cartoons that gambol over the walls at Chez Francis make it perhaps the most endearing of Brive's eateries. They're written by the writers that dine there every November during Brive's book fair.
I walked across town for ten minutes and arrived at the Denoix distillery, which seems to have altered little since it first opened in 1839. Sylvie Denoix-Vieillefosse, the proprietor, squeezed green walnuts to extract their juice, which she then mixed with brandy, orange peel, curaçao, fennel, and juniper before putting the mixture to age in oak barrels for five years. To clarify, "We don't make alcohol," she said. Using alcohol to extract the taste of plants, we are more like parfumiers.
Limousin is home to two distinct kind of attractiveness. The former is untamed and unruly, like the "savage and joyous" environment described by 19th-century author George Sand, who grew up not far away in Nohant-Vic, while the latter is well maintained. Uzerche was part of the later group, looking like a wedding cake with its many tiers of towers and turrets rising sharply from the river Vézère. Collonges-la-Rouge, a town almost completely constructed of the native red sandstone (even down to the bread oven in the market square), accomplished the same thing. We dined on delicious mushroom omelettes at Le Cantou, a restaurant housed in a 15th-century structure, and were given free culinary advice ("an omelette should only ever be beaten with a fork or the texture won't be right," said our server) before venturing out into the winding alleyways.
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