There are a few classics on my menu, including apple sausage made from a recipe an old charcutier gave to my father forty years ago and which we have been serving ever since. You might sometimes find a new take on Boeuf Bourguignon, but these are just occasional nods towards this region and its terroir.

Cuisine de terroir
A lot of nonsense is being passed off on people under the guise of cuisine de terroir, or regional cooking. They are being hoodwinked! For example, Joigny, where I live, is on the water, along a river. If you had gone to the market fifty years ago, you would have found all the products of the river: whitebait, pike, frogs, crayfish, snails, as well as game from the seasonal hunt. But these days when people come to me looking for these so-called "regional" products, produits de terroir, it would be dishonest of me to claim that they still represent this region's cooking, since these ingredients are no longer found in this area. If I want products traditionally associated with this region, I have to buy pike from Poland, and then in my opinion it's no longer cuisine de terroir. The region has changed and evolved so that now you find different products in the market.

Terroir is something living, not a fixed formula set down in books for all time. When people want to find out about the cooking of a particular region, they take out a book and read about what our mothers and grandmothers did at the turn of the last century. Then they think they're familiar with the cooking of that region, when in fact the terroir is no longer the same. Life has changed, people have changed, society has changed, and so has the land. A hundred years ago, they spoke in terms of Joigny, my town. Then they expanded to talk of the Yonne region, then of Burgundy. Now they speak about the whole of France.

In my opinion, regional cooking today means finding the best products from each region. As an example, people can't come here to eat Burgundy snails. They can be gathered once they're over 3 cm in diameter, but since they're a protected species, we can buy them only from July 14 until August 15. The situation is similar with game: people can hunt it and cook it at home, but they're not permitted to sell it. So if you order "Burgundy snails," they have usually come from Poland and other eastern countries. Therefore, though snails are part of our region's tradition, they can no longer be thought of as cuisine de terroir. Traditional cooking and cuisine de terroir are two different things, one lasting, the other constantly evolving. The products of today set the stage for the traditions of tomorrow.