Nougat de Montélimar

Appearance & taste

The mass is white to cream-coloured without a yellow tinge and studded with pieces of roasted almonds, optionally also with green pistachios. It has a delicate scent of honey and almonds. Hard nougat is crunchy and brittle, soft nougat melting and supple; which texture results depends on the cooking time and residual moisture. The mass is whipped and crystallised, and its density is between 0.75 and 1.15.

It is sold as a rectangular or square slab or pieces cut from it, covered with a wafer on two opposite sides and with visible almonds on the sides, and also in moulded shapes or as broken pieces with a grain size of 1.6 to 15 mm, plain or coated with a thin layer of vegetable fat. Depending on the texture, the name may be supplemented with “tendre” (soft) or “dur” (hard).

Production

The mass consists of sugar, icing sugar, glucose syrup and honey, which makes up at least 25 % of the sweet ingredients. The only whipping agent is hen’s egg white, fresh or dried; the only flavouring is vanilla as a pod or natural flavouring. Additives are not permitted.

First a “cooked base” of water, sugar and honey is mixed with the beaten egg white without the latter collapsing. Then sugar syrup cooked at a high temperature is added, and the mass is cooked slowly until it is stable. Cooking is done in an open kettle or in a vacuum cooker; only nougat made entirely at atmospheric pressure in a kettle may be described as “prepared in a kettle”. A master confectioner or master chef supervises the cooking and adjusts times and temperatures to the equipment, raw materials, humidity and room temperature.

At the end of the cooking time, the roasted almonds are added. The mass is rolled out between two wafers or poured into moulds and cooled. All steps from preparing the mass to cooling take place in the area.

Origin & history

Montélimar lies in the Rhône valley in the south of the department of Drôme. The climate is Mediterranean, sunny and dry because of the mistral. According to the specification, this dry air favours production, because honey attracts moisture and nougat becomes sticky in a more humid climate.

According to the specification, the confectionery comes from the Middle East; recipes for white nougat have existed in Provence since the Middle Ages. In 1097 nougat in Montélimar was first mentioned in connection with Adhémar le Rouge. At first it was made from nuts, later from almonds, after the agronomist Olivier de Serres had introduced almond trees at the end of the 16th century. In 1701 the town’s archives mention “Nougat de Montélimar” for the first time: Philip V of Anjou was given a hundredweight of it as he passed through.

At the beginning of the 18th century, confectioners made the nougat in blocks that were broken into pieces; from 1760 producers ran their own shops. After 1899, Émile Loubet, mayor of Montélimar and President of the Republic, offered the nougat to many dignitaries. Later, 22 nougat makers on the Route Nationale 7 sold to travellers stuck in traffic jams until the A7 motorway opened in 1968; the box shaped like an RN7 milestone from 1930 recalls this period. Today about a dozen businesses with 200 employees make more than 1,500 t a year. In a survey from 2014, 78 % of under-35s and 94 % of older people associated nougat with Montélimar.