The local onion, l’oignon doux de Cévennes, is prized for its tender texture, honeyed taste and fine, pearly white, almost iridescent papery skin. They are sold all over France, as well as in Belgium and Luxembourg, with producers currently trying to break into the UK market. The sweet onion boasts an AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée), the French regional food certification, along with Nîmes olive oil (the Gard is the second highest olive producing region in France), Perrier and pélardon – a soft ripened goat’s cheese with a distinct aromatic flavour thanks to the goats’ diet of grasses, chestnuts and heather.
Small producers have been eking out a living on steep dry stone terraces known as faïsses since the 1830s. The landscape of this isolated and impoverished area has changed little since Robert Louis Stevenson travelled through here and wrote his account, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes in 1879. But here, as in communities all over France, communities are seeing an influx in younger generations returning to their family homes and working the land.
Bruno’s sister Francoise, runs the local guesthouse with three simple ensuite rooms and lovely views over the valley. In
a dusty cold garage, their 95-year-old parents are taking off the outer layer of sweet onions by hand with a knife one by one. They do this smilingly seven days a week, for seven months of the year, beginning before breakfast and continuing after supper, getting through an onion mountain of 1000 kilos each week. Francoise’s parents (aged 76 and 81), live in the nearby village with a small herd of 25 goats, and make their own cheese. They, like her parents-in-law, who also keep sheep, have worked in onion production all their lives.
The family is happily self sufficient and over dinner we work our way through a range of nameless homemade aperitifs. Distinguished only by their various shades of pink, sweetness and potency, they are all made, along with jams and fresh juices, with whatever fruit they happen to have a surplus of. Philippe is proud of the generous harvests of aubergines, olives, tomatoes, salad leaves and turnips that their garden yields. Meat is usually a gift or a barter – pork sausages from a neighbour or a lamb from a family member’s smallholding - or purchased from the marchant ambulant (travelling shop).