Verdun Sugar Coated Almonds

Keywords:	French cuisine ¦ Traditional ¦ Vegetarian ¦ Behind the scenes ¦ Industrial Visit ¦ France ¦ Reportage ¦ Hattonchatel ¦ Confectionery
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Mr Heusele, the manager of Dragées Braquier in Verdun, is the exact opposite of the product he makes. whereas his sugar coated-almonds are sweet on the outside but bitter inside, Mr Heusele first comes across as surly but after half an hour you realize he is the sweetest man. He took me on a private tour of the largest dragée factory in Verdun. After the interview, Mr Heusele said he was sure he knew me. I said it's unlikely, but in the end we realized he had seen me on French TV a couple times. What a small world! This bought me two free boxes of beautiful dragées, and then I bought as much as I could fit in my car from the factory shop.

People have been coating almonds in honey since the Romans, but since the 1300s Verdun became the European center of sugar-coated almonds. These were said to have as many health benefits as the vitamin supplements we guys buy today, including those of increasing fertily. Naturally, dragées became a traditional gift at weddings and baptisms. The the Italy-born French queen Catherine de Medisis started eating dragées and offering them to her guests, a powerful endorsement for the product if it were.

Mr Heusele started the tour with the almond-picking room. We only use almonds from Avola, a village in Sicily. They are the most expensive in the business, €20 a kilogram wholesale. But our Sicilians friends send us all of their almonds and only some of them look good enough to make a proper dragée. So this lady's job is to sort tons of almonds by hand. She looks at each almond and decides what her fate will be. Plump, shapely almonds get to be coated in sugar and offered at weddings. Almonds that deviate from the established standards of physical beauty are mercilessly sent to be crushed and caramelized into nougatine.

There are three types of defective almonds in this business. Clockwise from the bottom left: "twins", "twisted" or "domed".

We store our almonds at 6°C (42°F) otherwise they are damaged by mites, explains Heusele. With 16 employees, Braquier makes 100 tons of candies a year.

Before the almonds are processed, they spend 6 hours in a hot room at 65°C (150°F) for drying. Then the almonds are covered with gum arabic to prevent any almond oil from seeping out and tainting the finished dragée.

A syrup is prepared with water and sugar and boiled in a large copper wat with a false bottom where steam circulates. Here we see the washing in hot water, the syrup itself makes less steam.

The picked, dried and gummed almonds are carried to a long room where dozens of large copper drums revolve slowly.

The sugar syrup is added one ladle at a time and the gentle circular movement gradually coats the almonds with sugar and polish them to a smooth finish at the same time. When they are sufficiently coated, a final dose of sugar syrup with a little coloring is added to make them pink, or green or blue.

The same drums are used to make all sorts of sweet candies, included sugar coated hazelnuts, cocoa almonds and chocolate bonbons.

I kind of like this room!

Mr Heusele takes me into the central corridor while I admire the architecture. We refurbished the factory recently, it's all clean an modern and light now., he explains modestly.

We enter a room that looks like a jewelry. Heusele shows me the jewels in his crown. We make them with pure gold - edible gold, a mixture of gold with a little silver to make it pliable. And of cours silver

These beautiful gilded sugar-coated almonds are sold in jewelry boxes, mostly in Dubai. A delicious way to eat through your savings!

The package room is abuzz with an atmosphere of concentration and work.

I ask the man weighting the cocoa coated almonds what is the measurement tolerance. They all laugh, then he answers The point is to always have at least the quantity it says on the box, otherwise we get complaints! The high season is between Easter and August, when most of the weddings take place.

We then make a little incursion into the factory shop, a huge room filled with candies of every color known to man. But these are not the industrial crap-candies soaked with chemicals we can see in some city shops. These are all artisan candies, made by hand where each almond is known by her first name. For luxury candies, they are quite cheap here at the factory. I fill my trunk with the most improbable combinations of sugar and almonds, pay and go back to see the most intriguing product made at Braquier.

Click below to read the second part of this article - the edible exploding artillery shell.

Mr Heusele does not think that the most intriguing product made at Braquier is of very good taste. But we sell 1000 chocolate shells a year, people love it. Only 200 are exported, mainly to the UK. We can't export them anymore into the US.

This is no Chinese crap. Each artillery shell has a brass base and handmade thread.

The lady in charge of artillery shells assembles each base by hand...

... carefully tying the cotton thread to a small chamber filled with smokeless powder, the kind used in guns.

The chocolate artillery shells come in three standard versions "10", "15" and "20", according to the number of gadgets inside. They work fine, the only complaints we ever get is when from time to time there is only 19 gadgets in a "20" shell, says Heusele with tongue in cheek. They go for €78 to €108 a piece. Some people order them special, and ask for wedding rings or car keys to be placed inside the shell. With gas prices going through the roof already, is that such a good idea?

The chocolate artillery shells are place upside down, filled with the candies and gadgets, and finally the exploding mechanism which will sit at the base is carefully placed.

You can probably find similar, although less tasty, wedding bombshells elsewhere. But although Mr Heusele insists that Braquier sold those candy shells already in 1869, the mention of a Verdun Bombshell for dessert is bound to catch the attention of even those with the flimsiest historical culture. For Verdun is known was the center of one the worst battles of WWI.

The visitor of Verdun who needs a reminder of how transient human life is just needs to drive on the same road were Braquier is for about 2 miles, and he will arrive at the Douaumont Ossuary. 1916 was a bumper crop for the Grim Reaper, with the military operations at Verdun leaving about 300,000 unidentified dead soldiers on the battefields in but a few months. Pétain, who successfully defended Verdun, inaugurated a large ossuary in 1920 where the young bones of those harvest by the Reaper's mighty scythe could be mourned by their families who so far did not even have a grave to weep on.

A chapel was made for each of the 52 sectors of the Battle of Verdun inside a giant church shaped like a black femur with an artillery shell as a belfry. They say it was designed to look like a giant sword buried into the earth. This is not a sight you are likely to forget, and any warmonger should visit this place to know what war comes down to. The light inside the ossuary comes from reddish stained glass and sent my camera into an immediate cerebral attack. I kept the color as it gives an impression of what you feel inside this place, where you are surrounded by the earthly remains of 300,000 people.

During the first Gulf War, in 1991, French television interviewed Antoine Pinay, a former French finance minister and WWI veteran. The journalist wanted him to bless the war and to say that cause was just. I still remember him unbuttoning his cuffs. You see, he said, showing a scar on his right wrist, I have been wounded in the First World War. There is still a piece of shrapnel in my wrist. I am now 100 years old, and it has made me suffer every single day of my life. So Madam, I do not wish war for anybody.

You can visit Dragées Braquier in Verdun and join the public factory tour or just ransack the extraordinary factory shop:

Dragées Braquier
http://www.dragees-braquier.com
email
50, rue du Fort de Vaux
F-55100 Verdun
France