pubs, or the trip to Brighton where I made the mistake of eating fish and chips just before tackling Ditchling Beacon. I did a couple of 100-mile sportives, fuelled almost entirely by malt loaf, a glorious four days eating crêpes and drinking cider from teapots in Brittany – and then, summer 2017, came that ride down to the Mediterranean, the biggest and greediest yet, when I finally realised my destiny lay in pedalling round France, eating stuff.
Of course, cycling is a pleasure in itself – as an adult, there’s little as thrilling as freewheeling downhill, wind deafening in your ears, eyes streaming, mouth open in a silent scream of pure joy – but for me at least, there’s as much pleasure in a pint and a pie afterwards, to say nothing of the snacks en route. I firmly maintain that any ride over an hour and a half requires emergency rations; what are you supposed to put in all those pockets if not chocolate and a hip flask? Someone else will always have tyre levers, but not everyone, sad to say, knows the restorative powers of Cadbury’s Wholenut.
Yet, spindly though the pros may be, cycling has always been a peculiarly epicurean pursuit. In the early days of the Tour de France, one wealthy competitor had his butler lay out lavish picnics by the side of the road, while Henri Cornet, winner of the second race in 1904, apparently achieved victory on daily rations that included a staggering 11 litres of hot chocolate, 4 litres of tea and 1.5 kilos of rice pudding. Bernard Hinault, who triumphed five times in the late Seventies and Eighties, glugged champagne on the last climb of the day, while the equally great Eddy Merckx refuelled with patisserie, on the basis that ‘It’s not the pastries that hurt, it’s the climbs’ (it is this quote that later moves me to name my beloved new bike after the great man).
Even in the 1990s, Dutch pro Tristan Hoffman recalls a fellow rider starting the day with that breakfast of champions, two Mars Bars and a litre of Coke. Now, of course, nutrition is taken much more seriously, which is why you no longer get brilliant stories like that of Abdel-Kader Zaaf, who is claimed (slightly dubiously) to have got so inadvertently drunk on wine offered by generous spectators on the blisteringly hot 1951 Tour that he passed out underneath a tree.
Modern pro teams travel with their own chef, whose job it is to keep the supply of low-salt, high-protein, easily digestible food and drink coming: as Sean Fowler of Cannondale-Drapac delicately put it in a 2017 interview, ‘intestinal stress’ is less than ideal in a tour situation. That means rice rather than glutinous pasta, lots of fish and white meat, and definitely no salty ingredients that might lead to water retention. Understandably, no one wants to carry a single extra ounce up an Alp.
Sickly energy gels and bars are handed out to riders en route, along with rice cakes, fizzy drinks (‘for a bit of pleasure’) and the odd ham sandwich, if they’re lucky. On particularly tough stages, however, competitors struggle to find the time to swallow all the calories they need and still keep up with the race – ‘You kind of have to force it down,’ according to current pro Joe Dombrowski. I literally cannot imagine burning 7,000kcal in a day, and not stopping for a bar of Milka. In fact, so much wasted opportunity for sugar makes me feel a little bit weepy.
As a result, I never watch the Tour on TV without a large box of chocolates; though I’m no sports fan, it has a nostalgic pull for me. The occasionally excitable, generally soporific commentary was the soundtrack to the summer holidays of my childhood, turned up loud in the campsite bar to compete with the thwack of plastic on rubber and the squealing ruckus around the babyfoot table. Those endless afternoons eating Mr Freeze lollies and waiting for a turn at ping-pong have left me with a lifelong weakness for men in Lycra and cycling’s most famous race.
The glorious backdrops are a part of it, of course: no one who spent every childhood summer somewhere in l’hexagone can be entirely immune to the attractions of a neat Norman village flashing by at speed, or indeed one of those endless straight routes départementales flanked with poplars and enormous billboards for thrillingly large hypermarchés ‘à gauche au feu’. I see France zip past behind the riders, and my heart aches for it – for the landscapes and people, the Orangina and bad pop music, and most of all, for its glorious, glorious food.
My tour will be in less of a hurry than the actual race – bad for the digestion, and if I’m going to do this properly, there will be a lot of digesting on the menu. When I sit down and try to make a list of my 21 favourite French foods (to match the number of stages in the real Tour), not only is it hard to whittle them down, but those that make the cut come from almost every corner of the country, with the exception of the far Nord, which, despite an admirable facility with the deep-fat fryer, did not particularly wow me with its cuisine on my previous visit.
And whereas a list of my most treasured British dishes would skew heavily towards stodge, this lot, though a little low on salad, is pleasingly varied: (almost*) anything we can do, France does better. They’ve even beaten us on our specialist subject, the spud – I like a baked potato as much as the next noted gourmand, but I think we can all agree that Alpine tartiflette takes it to the next level. (Mostly by adding more cheese.)
The dog and I make a trip to Stanfords in Covent Garden, home of every map under the sun, and pick up a massive road atlas that seems to list every hamlet and track I might possibly wish to traverse, as well as a map of national bike routes, which, it quickly becomes clear, will be of almost no use to me whatsoever. These purchases give me the pleasing sense, as I spread the map out on the floor at home and try to stop Wilf trampling muddy paws across the Bay of Biscay, of embarking on an expedition. They also make terrifyingly clear how large France is.
Taking a deep breath, I open the atlas. Dodging Calais and its horse-fat frites, it makes sense to start off with moules in Normandy, then curve round the coast to Brittany, which does such good crêpes and butter and, even better, crêpes with butter. From the wind-swept Atlantic coast I’ll start to head south, first to the Loire Valley, home of the tarte Tatin, as well as all those famous chateaux everyone goes on about, then down to Limousin to coo over some of its famous cattle, before zipping through Bordeaux towards the Spanish border and Bayonne, the French capital of chocolate.
Having run out of France to the south, and skirting a furry tail currently draped over the Pyrenees, my route turns east for poule au pot, and the cassoulet country of the Languedoc, before hitting the Côte d’Azur, with its rust-red fish soups and deliciously oily ratatouille. Tempting as it is to head for Provence proper at this point, that herb-scented heaven-on-earth where I spent every rosé-soaked summer of my twenties, I fear I’d never tear myself away in mid-June and I cannot ignore the siren call of tartiflette from my second-favourite place in France, the Haute Savoie. I wish I could say that it’s the thrill of the physical challenge that attracts me to the mountains, but it isn’t, it’s the cheese.
From there, the map suggests I’m quite close (i.e. a-whole-day-on-a-train close, due to aforementioned size of country) to Lyon, often touted as the culinary capital of France. Though I’ve only driven past it, my reading suggests it specialises in an extraordinary array of animal parts, and oddly, one of France’s best salads, the lyonnaise, with its bitter leaves dressed with salty bacon fat and rich, runny egg yolk.
The logical next stop on my way north is Burgundy, for all sorts of things cooked in its perfect wine, but particularly beef, sticky, soft and intensely savoury, and then, looking at the route I’ve traced thus far, which flirts with the Spanish, Italian and Swiss borders, it feels like a dereliction of duty not to go and make eyes at the Germans in Strasbourg, too.
It’s a long way to go for some fermented cabbage and faggots, and yet I have a lot of time for fermented things and sausages, especially washed down with cold beer. Also, I note with satisfaction
