The coastal town of Cancale in the north of Brittany is best known for its oysters, which Louis xiv ardently loved: “the Sun King” is said to have had them delivered to Versailles every day. In the summer months, the port teems with holidaymakers who come to savour the briny, freshly shucked delicacies at the daily oyster market; the shoreline is littered with their pearlescent shells. From there, you can see all the way to the island of Mont-Saint-Michel, the outline of its medieval abbey appearing like a mirage against the horizon. At low tide, the sea can withdraw by as much as 15km in a matter of hours, revealing a garden of oyster beds.
A more thrilling but lesser-known part of this area’s history is the legacy of the spice trade. From the nearby port of Saint-Malo, Cancalais privateers operating under the protection of the king used to raid merchant vessels of enemy states for their exotic wares, including highly valuable spices from the East and West Indies. Over the past 25 years, the Roellinger family, headed by former three-Michelin-starred chef Olivier Roellinger, has delved into this history and explored spices and their infinite possibilities with the bou-tique business Épices Roellinger. Guided by his palate and sense of adventure, Roellinger and his 39-year-old daughter, Mathilde, now source more than 250 raw spices from small-scale growers and specialists around the world, hoping to restore an appreciation and reverence for the spice industry.
“At the beginning of humanity, spices were seen as very precious but people have forgotten their magic and don’t realise the work that is involved,” Mathilde tells me over a lunch of galettes by Cancale’s port. She travels the globe in search of the best pro-ducers and has witnessed much of their work at first hand. In November 2021 she spent three days picking the stigmas of saffron cro-cuses with female cultivators on Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. “You cannot industrialise this process,” she says of the harvesting. “We work with farmers who care about what they do. They want to make the best products for themselves and for the environment.”
The history of the spice route reveals a lot about the advent of the modern world, as well as how our palate has evolved. The cultivation of Saffron (or “red gold”, as it is known) is a long-standing practice in Morocco that can be traced back almost 500 years. In the 19th century, it was also widely grown in France, where some dedicated farmers continue to cultivate the crop today. The Roellingers source it locally from a small farm in the nearby commune of Mont-Saint-Michel and further afield from a supplier in Quercy in the southwest of the country.
Épices Roellinger’s catalogue of 29 peppers (and 17 “pepper cousins”, or related plants) reveals flavours that challenge the perception of the vegetables merely as humble supermarket staples and traces the expansion of their cultivation from India to Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Roellinger sells the very rare Neelemundi variety, celebrated for its unique fragrant and floral notes, which pioneering Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama likely encountered in the 15th century.
After lunch, we meander up the hill to the Maison du Voyageur, the family home for more than two generations, which now serves as the headquarters of the spice business, with a small boutique attached. The house is a malouinière, a name given to 17th- and 18th-century manors with pitched slate roofs that were the winter homes of seafarers. The building once belonged to the Heurtaut de Bricourt family, relatives of Saint-Malo privateer Robert Surcouf, who was awarded the Legion of Honour for the fruitful raids he carried out on foreign merchant ships.
Olivier grew up here and was enthralled by tales of Surcouf’s swashbuckling adventures as a child. And it was here that he and his wife, Jane, raised Mathilde and her brother, Hugo – now a 35-year-old chef who presides over the hot plates in Le Coquillage, the family restaurant in the nearby Château Richeux. As a young family, they occupied the top floor of the house; Olivier’s mother lived on the first floor and, from 1982 to 2008, the couple ran the restaurant Le Bricourt on the ground floor. “It was my whole life,” says Mathilde of the restaurant. “I still recall the smells, the noise of people coming and going, the phone ringing. But we weren’t allowed to be there or play in front of the clients.”
Little remains of the restaurant today, save for a landline phone that is still plugged into the wall near the entrance that used to ring off the hook with reservations. The ground floor is composed of a series of sprawling salons that flow into one another and a spacious conservatory that overlooks the lush gardens and pond. Wood-panelled walls and antiques evoke another time but most remarkable are the heady, fragrant smells: notes of cinnamon and cumin, at once earthy, nutty and woody.
In the site of the former restaurant kitchen, more than 50 tonnes of spices are roasted, oven-dried and ground every year. Some are packaged in their pure form, coveted by clients for their rarity, superiority and distinctive flavour, and it is up to Mathilde and her father to check their quality. “Every spice has its own process and you must use all of your senses,’’ says Mathilde. “You look at the colour, the size and the shine. First, you smell it whole, then crushed, before tasting it.” Black pepper, for example, is mixed with plain yoghurt because this helps to neutralise the heat and allows the subtler notes to stand out.
A significant portion of the business is devoted to the unique blends that Olivier assembles in a way not dissimilar to how a perfumer would compose the notes of a particular scent. His first blend was Retour des Indes, a mix of turmeric, coriander, star anise, mustard and cumin, with a kick of Szechuan peppercorns, which he created in 1982 for a John Dory dish. But Olivier never planned to build a parallel spice business. “His interest in all of this was intended as a punctuation for his cooking because he was bored with the technical French recipes that called for little seasoning – just pepper and salt,” says Mathilde. “Guests would ask for recipes, so my grandmother started bottling the spices in jars and labelling them by hand.”
Olivier, who is now 68, stepped back from the restaurant trade in 2008 to focus on this aspect of his work. His blends feature as many as 24 individual spices and combine a suggestion of French heritage with maritime themes using, in some cases, nori seaweed, local wakame or laitue de mer, which adds depth and saltiness. He also recruits collaborators such as Indian chef Beena Paradin and Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi to help develop blends based in other traditional cultures.
On the day I visit, one of the in-house cooks is heating buckwheat on the stove for use in the Gomasio Breton blend, which also features sesame seed, fleurs de sel, nigella and coriander. A nutty, malty smell fills the air. It is biting and not at all musty. Freshness is crucial, says Mathilde as we sip on a fragrant infusion of Summer’s End, a concoction that is composed of lemon verbena, linden flowers, rose, thyme and rosemary. The company makes one big batch of it at the end of August every year. “When it is finished, it is finished,” she says. (During our conversation I make a mental note to over-haul my spice collection after learning that most items should be stored for only a year.)
Next, we venture downstairs into the cellar to look at a supply of vanilla beans sourced from French Polynesia, Madagascar, the French island of Réunion, Guiana and Mexico (from where vanilla originates, though it is no longer the largest exporter globally). Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés became the first European to encounter it in Veracruz in the 16th century. As with many other spices, the story of vanilla is coloured by colonialism.
A climbing orchid native to the tropical forests of the Chinantla region, Mexico’s vanilla orchids are pollinated by local Melipona bees and hummingbirds. It wasn’t possible to cultivate the spice outside this region until artificial pollination was dis-covered centuries later. Still, the labour- intensive process – hand-harvesting, months-long fermentation and hand-maceration – is the same across the world, making it one of the most valuable spices today.
In the cellar, the air is cold. I take a deep breath and feel blissfully giddy from the sweet, syrupy and intoxicating aroma. “When you smell it, close your eyes and you taste the jungle,” says Mathilde. “All of our spices have the taste of the landscape in which they grow.”