Clapassade

Clapassade is a modern dish of Montpellier, created in 2010 through a public contest — Inventez le plat de Montpellier — organized by the city. The winning recipe, by Michel Otell, was adopted on the sixth of October 2010 as the city's signature culinary creation. The name comes from Clapas, the Occitan nickname for Montpellier, which derives from a word meaning pile of stones and refers to the rocky local terrain. The dish is a braise of mutton in a sauce grisette — a dark sauce of honey, licorice or star anise, and green olives, thickened with a brown roux and deglazed with white wine. The plating stacks the meat in a tower, echoing the pile-of-stones etymology.

A plate of clapassade brings up tender braised mutton in a glossy, dark, complex sauce — sweet from the honey, anise-fragrant from the licorice or star anise, briny from the green olives, and deep from the long braise. The meat is succulent and falling apart; the sauce is the point, its sweet-savory-anise character unlike anything else in French cooking. Eaten with rice or potatoes to soak up the sauce.

Clapassade rests on the braise of mutton and the unusual sauce. The mutton is browned and braised gently in white wine; the long, slow braise dissolves the collagen into gelatin, tenderizing the tough meat and giving the sauce body. The sauce grisette is built with a brown roux — butter and flour cooked dark — which provides starch for thickening; the honey contributes sugar that caramelizes slightly during the braise, deepening the color. The licorice or star anise contributes anethole, an aromatic compound with a distinctive sweet-anise character that is fat-soluble and therefore infuses into the mutton fat during the long cook. The green olives, added late, contribute brine and a fresh fruity note that cuts the richness. The white wine's acidity balances the sweet honey and the anise.