Human Flower Project

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Luc’s Violet Ice Cream

Dessert has arrived in Montolieu, and it’s purple and floral.

Figs and violet ice cream
by Luc Lemeur, chef of Le Marque Page
Photo: Bill Bishop

Montolieu, France, has more bookstores than schools, more bookstores than restaurants—maybe more bookstores per capita than any city in the world. The French government nursed this old town in the Aude region north of Carcassonne back to vitality by helping book dealers move here and rehabilitate the beautiful old (and empty) buildings around town. Now the “ville des livres” is home to 15 book shops—a secular shrine for a certain humanist pilgrims.

After a long, happy day of snooping and page-turning, we recommend, as kind hotelier Heidi Miller of Les Anges au Plafond recommended to us, Le Marque Page (The Bookmark), a wonderful restaurant right on the tiny town’s square. Imagine our elation when for dessert we found ourselves looking into a white bowl of fresh figs and violet ice cream. (Violets have been a specialty “crop” of Toulouse, one hour to the west, for more than a hundred years.)

Chef Luc Lemeur has quite a number of tasty tricks up his sleeve, but this Human Flower Project, as well as delicious, was telepathic. A cold scoop of purple violets turned this bookworm into a butterfly.