Dinner at the Cheval Blanc

We stayed a couple of nights at the Cheval Blanc, Chamouilley, a pleasant village beside the canal. The hotel is also the bar-café on the square, and the lady who I assume to be the proprietress was behind the bar when we arrived, showed us into the restaurant in the evening, and was back in the café the following morning at breakfast. I don't know if she ever sleeps, but she was smiling and helpful despite the long hours.

Dinner on our first night was:

Aperitif maison

kir pétillant, made with sparkling wine and a discreet quantity of mirabelle liqueur - subtle and delicious

Foie gras maison

served with pain d'épices grillé and compôte de mirabelles - yes, more mirabelles. I like mirabelles (and besides, we were almost in Lorraine). Foie gras with gingerbread toast was a new one to me, but worked extremely well.

Pavé de boeuf aux morilles

steak in a dark, rich mushroom sauce, with a little bundle of green beans tied round with bacon, half a tomatoe with some sort of herb topping, and mousseline potatoes - all very tasty, but the least interesting course of the meal

Cheeseboard

from which we were served with quite alarmingly generous quantities of cheese: I chose Munster, Chaource, Reblochon and the most local selection, a Troyes persillée - a cream cheese with parsley, (and garlic too, so that the end result was not unlike Boursin

Chocolate indecipherable

You may all mock me now, but I can't read my note of the name. It was, however, a fine chocolate mousse on a crunchy base, with something syrupy at its centre, which I know from the menu to have been apricot liqueur, but could not have identified by taste. This was served with one of the many ices of the trip, a mandarin sorbet.

And there was a delicious bottle of Madiran 1998 to drink - I know ten years is not an exceptional age for a wine, but it's exceptional for us, and it had matured well.

ETA: For the purposes of the "Which wine with which food?" game, I note that I drank the last of the apéritif with the foie gras, as you would a dessert wine, and it worked beautifully. I don't thinbk it would have been as happy with the Madiran, which had softened somewhat from the levels of tannin I'm used to in younger Madiran, but not that much!