What to eat in Hauts-de-France

As I sit on Calais’ golden beachfront, eating from a bag of deliciously hot frites, it strikes me that it’s a shame so many travellers dash past this northernmost region of France, heading to the south. But those who pause a while will reap great culinary rewards.

Hauts-de-France — stretching from Calais to the edge of Paris — is famed for its excellent frites, sold from mobile trailers and cabins known as friteries. But it’s also replete with seafood, samphire and many other sea vegetables, plus an array of cheese, macarons and Chantilly cream, to name just a few notable specialities.

From Calais, I follow the undulating coastal road north west to Boulogne-sur-Mer. As France’s biggest fishing port, it doesn’t have the bucolic charm of, say, Brittany or Corsica’s fishing villages, but it’s fascinating to see a place that handles over 300,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish a year. Away from the old town, with its immaculately preserved medieval citadel and impressive street art murals, the fishing district is lined with brine-scented warehouses and a vast wholesale market, La Criée, where seagulls caw overhead.

I miss seeing La Criée in full throttle, its busiest time during the early hours when fishing vessels return with their catch. By the time I call in for lunch at Le Chatillon, the area is quiet and the restaurant’s fisherfolk regulars are long gone after their post-shift meal, taken when most people are still eating breakfast. The dining room is decorated like the deck of a ship, complete with porthole-shaped mirrors on the walls. I order turbot, delicate and light and served with the region’s ubiquitous frites, which are both crunchy and indulgently fat and floppy.

At Le Crotoy, 45 miles south along the coast, where the River Somme meets the sea, there’s a different product on the menu. The seaside plant samphire, salicorne in French, grows in abundance on the banks of the river, but so too do other plants that I’ve never heard of before — sea vegetables that are just as tasty. I join local forager Reinette Michon, known as a ‘pecheuse à pied’ as she fishes on foot. She first started learning how to find cockles, worms for bait and various sea vegetables as a child. Now in her sixties, she’s president of the Association of Samphire Collectors, which issues licences to the few dozen people allowed to gather the plant here during the summer months, many selling them, as Reinette does, to restaurants and fishmongers.

Our tour starts from Phare du Hourdel, a lighthouse on the opposite side of the estuary from Le Crotoy. She kits me out with giant wellies from her sand-splattered van and, before long, I’m following her down from the quayside, squelching through the ankle-deep muddy sand and scrambling up the opposite grassy bank as a strong breeze tangles my hair. We’re soon kneeling next to a feathery plant Reinette calls le pompon, which she cuts with her knife and places in a large bucket. “This one’s like samphire,” she says. “It’s lighter and finer, and really nice if you toss it in butter and add to new potatoes.” Next is l’obione, a large, almond-shaped leaf. “This one you can use like you would nori for sushi,” says Reinette. “You dry it in the oven for an hour and it crisps up.”

I ask her how these plants came to be part of the local diet. “The poor have always eaten them, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch came along the coast to forage, as they were very fond of these plants. The added demand led to the need for licences to ensure the plants were protected,” she says. The final quarry on our foraging mission is sea aster, also known as les oreilles de cochon — pig’s ears. Reinette shows me how to measure the leaves on the palm of my hand — if they fit within it, they’re worth picking, but any longer and they get stringy. She suggests frying them like spinach with crushed garlic, stirring in some creme fraiche and serving them as a side dish, perhaps with a pork chop.

When we return to her van, Reinette hands me a bag full of the foraged plants to cook with later. But before I do that, I get the chance to try them at Auberge de la Marine, where chef Pascal Lefebvre weaves them into his dishes.

A starter of tiny cockles in a light broth topped with crunchy samphire is followed by the Bay of Somme’s flavoursome new potatoes, perfectly seasoned to complement the salt marsh lamb.

Some 45 miles inland, the Somme flows through the city of Amiens, where it weaves its way around a 740-acre patchwork of islands known as Les Hortillonnages. The canals that run between them are popular to navigate on either a guided cruise or in a kayak rented from a waterside outlet. This offers the chance to paddle around the islands at leisure, hopping off here and there to explore their sculpture trails and admire the ‘floating’ gardens, which are at their best in summer.

I make a detour into the city to pick up a box of macarons from chocolatier and confectioner, Jean Trogneux. Made with fine slivers of Valencia almonds, egg whites and almond oil, Amiens macarons are very different to their colourful Parisian counterparts made famous by the likes of Pierre Hermé and Ladurée. Indeed, their dense texture and moistness make them more similar to coconut macaroons, and they’re made to a recipe handed down through six generations of the Trogneux family.

The alluring shop — windows are stacked high with ribbon-wrapped boxes and jewel-like confectionary — sits on the same spot as the original maison, built in 1872 and flattened during the Second World War. Here, I meet current boss, Jean-Baptiste Trogneux. He tells me how macarons first came to France. “We think they were created in Italy, as a byproduct of macaroni, which uses the egg yolk,” he says. “Then, it’s believed that Catherine de Medici brought them to France in the 16th century, and they’ve been adopted in different forms across the country — there must be about 20 different kinds.” When I peel off the macaron’s gold paper and bite into one, I discover they’re sweet but not overly so, and thus a second is impossible to resist.

Another town in the region known for its sweet speciality is Chantilly, a further 90 minutes’ drive inland, closer to Paris. The town’s eponymous whipped and sweetened cream is served atop crepes, apple tarts, chocolate mousses and many other desserts throughout France. It’s thought to have been made famous by 18th-century Italian chef Procopio Cutó, who may have come to the elegant Chateau de Chantilly as a guest chef. Certainly, the area was famous for its Montmorency cherries, which pair perfectly with the cream as a topping. My visit to the chateau, now a sprawling historic estate complete with copious turrets, a moat and museum, finishes at a small hamlet in the grounds, where I’m served a plate of fat raspberries and cream, house-style. Here, they whip their Chantilly using unpasteurised cream, which must be served within hours of being made and has a slight tanginess — the perfect match for the tart raspberries.

Later, in the town, I visit L’Atelier de la Chantilly, where owner Bertrand Alaime teaches visitors how to whip up their own Chantilly cream. With my balloon whisk at the ready, he pours in a carton of 35% fat cream — in British terms, this would be equal parts single and double cream — and soon my arms are getting a good workout. As it starts to thicken, we add in caster and icing sugars and vanilla powder and keep whipping until the whisk can stand up in the bowl on its own. Bertrand then hands me a spoon and I take a mouthful. Silky and rich, it’s better than any Chantilly I’ve ever tasted, so good I wish I could be left to lick every last scrap off the bowl. Better still, he gives me two big pots to take away, which I eat with Mirabelle plums for the next few meals. They’re a tangible reminder of the unexpected culinary delights I found across the Hauts-de-France. From frites to fish, samphire to cockles, macarons to cream, there’s every reason to cross the Channel and linger a while.