Another weekend, another festival

This weekend, the annual eel festival comes to the village. Plus a recipe for sobrassada and chickpeas, best eaten on a tray in front of the television. Tell no one.

Carriage rides in front of the house.

We haven’t had any kind of festival, parade or street concert for at least a couple of weeks, so it was a great relief on Friday to see the town’s trestle tables and benches being laid out in the theatre car park in preparation for this weekend’s Fête de l’Anguille, the eel festival. I don’t like to think of those tables gathering dust for a minute more than necessary, and honestly they are seldom left unbothered.

On Saturday morning, I lay in bed listening to the clop-clop-clop of a horse taking visitors on carriage rides around the village as the smell of vine smoke – ready to prepare the smoked eels – drifted through the shutters.

When we moved to Marseillan two years ago, the eel festival happened on our first Saturday as residents. It felt particularly joyous – the theatre square filling up with people, the town band, la Pena Bella Ciao, wandering around playing their greatest hits, the smells of garlic – perhaps because this was the first one since the wearying confinements of Covid. But no, I now realise this is just what it is. In this village, cheerfulness is a habit.

The Fête de l’Anguille - video courtesy of ville-marseillan.fr

All around the theatre square there are stalls selling wine from local vineyards, a €6 ticket entitling the bearer to three glasses, and eels in many forms – bourride (a fishy stew served with aïoli), persillade (chopped garlic and parsley), Provençale (cooked with onions, tomatoes, garlic and white wine), and smoked, along with stalls selling oysters, of course, tielles sétoises (octopus pies from Sète). My favourite dish of the day – and you must promise me you will tell no one – were paper cones filled with hot, crisp onion beignets, more of a bhaji than a doughnut, and judging by the length of the queue, they were the favourites of others too.

For this special weekend, some of the restaurants have eel on their menus. For one weekend only… you never see it the rest of the year, and you hardly see eel in the fishmongers’ either, though they fish it from the étang. So though I would have liked to make a bourride for you this week, or try out a recipe for eels Provençale, I am afraid it wasn’t to be. Perhaps this is not a bad thing. We had a busy time this weekend, with festivals, and friends, and lunches out. I’m not sure when we would have got to eat it.

Instead, I made this recipe for sobrassada slowly cooked in a tomato sauce with chickpeas. Sobrasada, the spicy, Catalan paprika-spiced pork sausage – called sobrasada in the Balearics – lends its flavour to the chickpeas. If you can’t find sobrassada, you can use cooking chorizo or any other strongly flavoured sausage. This recipe serves three or four, but you will probably have more chickpeas than you’ll need, unless you are some kind of chickpea maniac.

Years ago, when I was food editor at River Cottage, I worked on a book called Love Your Leftovers: recipes for the resourceful cook. In that book, we explored the notion of planned-overs, the idea of making more than you need for one meal with the intention of using the leftovers, rejigged, in future meals, a sort of time-saving investment in your culinary future. And that is what this recipe is to me. Serve the sausages with some chickpeas, perhaps a handful of green beans, a salad, and you have the perfect easy supper. In the coming days, use the spicy chickpeas as the building blocks of other meals: put them, cold, in a container and take them to work as part of a packed lunch, serve them warm over thick slices of toast with a fried egg on top, a sprinkling of chilli flakes and a trickle of olive oil, add them to vegetable soups, or stir the tomato-ey chickpeas though some cooked pasta and grate lots of Parmesan on top. You get the idea.

Oysters, always.

Eel persillade.

Tielles Setoise.

Onion beignets, yes please.

Chocolates from Emmanuel Servant, the local chocolatier.

Sobrassada with chickpeas

I used dried chickpeas (see how to cook TIP at the end of the recipe) to make this. Their texture is so good, but if you have neither the time nor the inclination, do use a couple of tins of chickpeas. It will still be delicious.