Garbure

Garbure (French pronunciation: [ɡaʁbyʁ]; Occitan: [ɡarˈbyɾe]) is a savoury French dish, described either as a soup or a stew. It is a one-pot dish of vegetables – mainly root vegetables – with one or more of several meats, slowly cooked in an earthenware dish in an oven. The cooking liquid is sometimes served as soup before the meat and vegetables are served as a main course. The food writer Curnonsky named garbure as one of the four great regional dishes of France.

There is some argument about the origin of the name of the dish. Some sources say that the name garbure derives from the French word gerbe – sprig – referring to the many aromatic herbs that perfume the dish. Some who maintain this theory point out that the Béarnais word gaburoye means a mixture of fresh green vegetables like those which are put in the soup, but the food writer Waverley Root comments that this word may just as well have come from garbure as the other way around. He advances the theory that the origin of the name may be the Spanish garbias – stew. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française dates the word to the eighteenth century and says it is borrowed from the Gascon garburo, meaning a hearty Béarnaise soup, made with rye bread, vegetables, bacon and goose or duck confit.

Elizabeth David says of garbure, "This soup, which, like the potée, is rather more of a stew than a soup, is traditional in the Landes, the Béarn, and the Pyrenees". Root calls garbure "one of those soups which is more than a soup, providing a full meal". According to Root the ingredients should be so crowded in the cooking pot that a ladle pushed into it will stand straight up, prevented by the contents of the garbure from sliding to the side. The gastronome Curnonsky hailed garbure as one of the four great regional dishes of France, along with cassoulet, bouillabaisse and choucroute garnie. In later recipes the principal meat in the stew is variously given as bacon, duck confit, goose, goose confit, salt pork, The vegetables, mainly root, include some or all of cabbage, carrots, celery, haricot or white beans, fava beans, green beans, green or red pepper, leeks, Lima beans, onions, peas, potato, pumpkin and turnip.