Fougassette, Fougasse, Focaccia & Maison Venturini

Most historic French towns have culinary specialities, and Grasse is no exception.

Maison Venturini (1 Rue Marcel Journet)

Along the main street of the old town stands the small shop of a business which is over one hundred years old, Maison Venturini. It’s a bakery, and its star product is fougassette, a pastry sweetened with orange blossom water which provoked the foundation of the business in 1923.

It also produces other historic sweetmeats, including ‘échaudés’, flavored with lemon, nougats and sugared almonds, and ‘brigidinis’, small biscuits made with anise.

Fougassette (left) and échaudé in the window of Maison Venturini

The founder of the business, Galileo Venturini, like so many Italians, came to Grasse from Tuscany in 1904. He learned how to make fougassettes, at first selling them from a market stall. The fourth generation of the family now operates from the shop at 1 Rue Marcel Journet to which the business moved in the 1960s.

The origin of fougasse

Fougasse is a flat bread whose name derives from the Latin for a flat bread, 'panis focacius' or 'hearth bread'. It was supposedly used to assess the temperature of a wood-fired oven, long before thermometers. The time it took to bake gave an indication of the oven temperature and whether the rest of the bread could be loaded.

It is known as fogassa in Catalonia, pogača and pogácsa in parts of the Balkans and Hungary respectively and fogatza in Provencal. Most famously, of course, it’s known by its Italian name, focaccia.

Fougasse and focaccia are not quite the same, although the ingredients are identical, especially the use of olive oil. Fougasse is traditionally leaf shaped, more crunchy and has less olive oil than focaccia, but both can be either sweet or savoury.

Personally, and perhaps disloyally, I prefer focaccia, as long as I’m eating it in Liguria (preferably Genova) or at a stretch northern Tuscany, but fougasse has a very long tradition. Like focaccia, it suffers from being applied to a variety of offerings in bakeries which tend today to owe more to pizza than to genuine fougasse or focaccia. Fougasse can be eaten with olives, cheese, garlic or anchovies.

Fougassette

Fougassette seems to be genuinely a speciality of Grasse. L’eau de fleur d'oranger (orange blossom water) has been made in Grasse for centuries. It’s actually a by-product of the distillation of bitter orange flowers for the manufacture of neroli essential oil, which has always been an important product of Grasse’s factories.

This reproduction of a Fragonard advertisement for l’eau de fleur d'oranger appears on the trompe l’oeil image next to the post office on bd Fragonard

Adding it to the same ingredients as fougasse to create a sweet flatbread may have been happening before the Revolution, but as the production of neroli and eau de fleur d'oranger increased in the later nineteenth century, it’s more likely to have become a regular product of bakeries at that time.

It is light and has quite a delicate taste: it goes very well with English tea, and I recommend that you try it if you're passing by. If you’re not visiting Grasse or can’t get to Maison Venturini, you can even find a recipe for it here.

Another kind of fougasse...

A fougasse is also, of all things, an anti-personnel land mine. Perhaps it’s because any visible part was flat like focaccia/fougasse.

Fougasses were successfully and prolifically used by the Russians during the Crimean War, and in the 1940s, the British developed a concealed ‘flame fougasse’ which was intended to attack potential German invaders. It’s still around in army manuals – today it might be better known as an IED or improvised explosive device.

On the other hand, ‘Fougasse’ is also a (rather uncommon) French surname, so maybe a Mr Fougasse invented the weapon and gave it his name!

...and yet another

Some of the most familiar images from World War II are cartoons, this one for example:

Source: Imperiial War Museum

If you look carefully in the top left hand corner, you'll see the artist's pen-name, 'Fougasse'.

Kenneth Bird had been badly wounded in the First War. When he took up drawing for a living, he used Fougasse as his pen-name, taking it, no doubt, from the weapon rather than the bread. During World War II, he drew the classic series of cartoons with the punchline 'Careless talk costs lives' for the Ministry of Information.