I first encountered “savory cake” as most French people do: at an apéro dînatoire, a boozy buffet-style dinner of room-temperature offerings. On the table were a number of unfamiliar dishes—I recall a cold rice salad studded with bright pink surimi and dainty plastic verrines of layered vegetable purées—but one was a revelation: a loaf cake filled with black olives, shredded deli ham, and hunks of barnyardy goat cheese. They told me it was cake salé (“savory cake”), and with one bite, I was hooked on its tender, olive oil-scented crumb. 

When you hear the French 101 word “gâteau,” you probably envision architectural pâtisserie marvels, but le cake is far humbler. The sweet versions are domed loaves that are often glazed with lemon or marbled with chocolate, while the savory iterations are filled with meats and cheeses, perfect for lunches and picnics. 

In the 16 years I’ve lived in France, I’ve encountered many such casual cakes, but while quiches have become a Starbucks mainstay and savory tarts like pissaladière have starred on Food Network, le cake salé is nowhere to be found Stateside. 

I’m not the only one who’s noticed a dearth of this delight. “I don’t get it,” says author and French pastry eminence Dorie Greenspan, who has included a savory cake recipe in nearly every cookbook she’s published in the last decade. “It’s easy to make. It keeps well. And once you have the basic recipe, you can add whatever you find in your refrigerator or pantry.”

Indeed, le cake salé is a testament to what Aleksandra Crapanzano, author of Gâteau: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes, considers a characteristic frugality in French home cooking. It isn’t so much about the cake itself as it is about the add-ins: sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese in Provence, perhaps, or Reblochon cheese and lardons in Savoie. (Or, more pragmatically, chopped-up leftover roast chicken, or cubes of those past-their-prime cheeses kicking around the fridge.)

But cake salé wasn’t always an anything-goes blank culinary canvas, according to French baker and cookbook author Sophie Dudemaine. When she discovered the dish in a magazine in 1998, there was only one type French people were making, filled with olives and ham. 

Dudemaine saw huge potential in cake salé, but she didn’t dig that recipe, which turned out a dry, one-note brick. So she got to work, first reducing the flour, which made the cake less dense. Then she swapped the butter out for sunflower oil, which resulted in a moister crumb. Finally, she turned to the fillings, where she really let her imagination run wild, developing versions filled with melty raclette cheese and bacon or seasonal creations with chanterelle mushrooms and asparagus. Bonus: She could fit far more loaf tins in her oven than pie pans, which led her to abandon the idea of selling savory tarts at the local market in favor of the rectangular cakes.

A decade later, Dudemaine had enough loaf cake recipes to fill a cookbook. Les Cakes de Sophie, published in 2000, sold over a million copies. The media dubbed her the French Martha Stewart, and suddenly savory cakes were omnipresent on French tables. Twenty years later, they still are: The 2022 edition features 100 recipes, most of which are new (think cake salé with rabbit in mustard sauce, a nostalgic French favorite revisited in a new format).

Most French cooks don’t know the debt they owe to Dudemaine. And yet, despite the unabating cake salé craze back in the Mother Country, the dish has hardly leapt its borders. This cake-shaped hole Stateside may have less to do with the dish itself and more to do with when it’s traditionally served. In France, wedges of savory cake are a mainstay of the aperitif, the course of pre-dinner drinks and nibbles so sacrosanct it’s protected by UNESCO. Americans love their cocktail hour, but there’s simply no U.S. equivalent to the French apéro. 

Beyond divergent mealtime traditions, cake salé has a visibility problem. Unlike their sweet counterparts, savory cakes are glaringly absent from French bakeries and restaurants both in France and abroad. “I’ve never seen a savory cake outside the home,” says Crapanzano. That means even the most adamant visiting Francophile would struggle to catch a glimpse of the dish, let alone taste it.

“Unless you’re close enough with a French person to be a frequent houseguest,” she says, “these are things that you would never know about.” French dinner invitations tend to be hard-won, following weeks or months of meeting in bars, cafés, and restaurants—and even then, it would likely take several such meals before you could be served what’s essentially upgraded leftovers.

But there’s hope for the savory cake seekers among us, whether a trip to France is in the cards or not. Recipes by Greenspan and Crapanzano abound; some are filled with Roquefort and walnuts, while others toss in chorizo and crumbled goat cheese. 

Back in France, there are signs that cake salé is finally beginning to fly the nest. Recently I glimpsed shrink-wrapped tomato-feta cakes in the apéro aisle of my local Monoprix, and two savory cakes have popped up on the menu at the Marcounet, a floating bar on the Seine. 

Paris even has a new bakery, CakePart, that’s dedicated to “les cakes” both savory and sweet. The owners, Sarah Zerbib and Margaux Sodoyer, say the business is an homage to their childhood love of cake: the vanilla-scented ones Zerbib’s mother made for four o’clock goûter, or the chocolate ones Sodoyer’s mom brought to weekend meals with extended family. 

Each day, in addition to these sweeter offerings, CakePart bakes off a handful of cakes salés, whose ingredients vary seasonally: In winter, butternut squash may dot the batter; in summer, tomato and eggplant peek through the crust. “We see it as a ‘fast good’ meal—one with healthful ingredients, but where you don’t necessarily have to go sit in a restaurant for hours to eat,” says Sodoyer.

Americans may never fully embrace the French apéro, but savory cake is a gateway to its palpable joie de vivre, whether you serve the dish for lunch or brunch (which Greenspan recommends) or take it on the go. Crapanzano rightly points out that savory cakes keep longer and hold up better than most sandwiches, making them perfect for hikes and picnics.

Regardless of the occasion, you’ll want to keep a few tips and tricks in mind when making cake salé. Crapanzano says full-fat buttermilk is your best bet for achieving a moist crumb. A tablespoon or two of extra olive oil ensures the cake remains moist even when  the add-ins are on the drier and less fatty side. Filling-wise, three cups is a good amount to add to the batter to ensure each bite marries rich, eggy dough with pleasing pockets of texture. 

“I say, open your fridge. Now that you have the base, add whatever you like,” says Dudemaine. Greenspan agrees: “It’s the kind of thing where if you make it and love it, it can become yours.”

Recipe

Cake d’Alsace (Bacon, Guyère, and Caramelized Onion Loaf)

Get the recipe >

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Most people who have dined in a French restaurant have come face-to-face with escargots de Bourgogne, a classic dish of plump snails broiled with parsley and garlic butter, typically extracted from their shells with the help of a unique tool that will look familiar to anyone who’s ever used an eyelash curler. But while these escargot are à la mode in Burgundy, another snail tradition endures in the south, near Spain.

Cargolade is a northern Catalan specialty popular in Occitanie, the southernmost region of France along the Spanish border. Its name is derived from the French word for “snail,” but with the addition of the suffix –ade, which regionally denotes a meal based around a single ingredient—as in escalivade, a dish of charred, roasted vegetables, or bullinade, a fish soup made from the catch of the day. A proper cargolade is made with the local variety of petit gris snails cooked outdoors over sarments de vigne, or vine wood, and is a harbinger of pleasant springtime weather. A ritual feast of sorts, the first cargolades of the season traditionally take place on Easter Monday, and a July festival in the village of Bompas celebrates the snails at their peak, serving over 160,000 to locals and visitors alike.

Two slightly different versions of the dish exist: The first, and most traditional, has been served the same way for 28 years at Le Petit Gris, a restaurant (named for the snail) in Tautavel, in the Spain-adjacent department of Pyrénées-Orientales. Here, around 1,000 snails a week are stuffed with a mixture of chopped lard, parsley, and garlic before being seasoned with salt and paprika. The live snails are then arranged over a wire grill and cooked over an open flame.

“Some people say that as soon as they start to whistle, they’re cooked,” says grill master Romain, watching carefully as they bubble and create a liquid known colloquially, if unpleasantly, as “drool.” But for Romain, the whistle is just the beginning, not the end, of the cooking process. “Some people like them with more drool,” he says, which dries out as they continue cooking. “Others like them better done.” I get a medium-rare cuisson on mine, which he sets at a table along with a ramekin of the traditional accompaniment, aïoli. The snails are delicious, with a crispy salt crust and a tender, well-seasoned interior.

Given the winding roads I’ve had to navigate coming from Perpignan—and which will only lead me further into the mountains—the responsible accompanying beverage would be a glass of water. But a fellow customer, speaking with the local lilting southern accent, is affronted by my request. “One must not drink water with snails,” he says. “It’s bad for the stomach.”

I’m breaking another rule, too, I find, at Le Petit Gris: eating sitting down. Traditionally, a cargolade is a convivial experience enjoyed outdoors. Snails are snatched from the grill and eaten piping hot—one of only two things, along with the quignon, the crusty heel of the baguette, that the French may ever choose to eat while standing. The snails themselves, 100 or so per person, are usually the precursor to grilled sausages and meats, all to be accompanied by chilled local rosé.

For the second method, I had to travel to a neighboring village in the Aude, another department of the Occitanie, just north of Pyrénées-Orientales. Here, the snails, in a preparation only the French could dream up, are flambéed with sizzling rendered lard. Our host, Christophe Pla, a local winemaker at the Cave Coopérative de Tuchan, jokingly claims that this is the gavach method, borrowing the Catalan pejorative for a non-Catalan.

To prepare this family-style cargolade, everyone lends a hand, from grandma to her 10-year-old granddaughter. The snails are scraped clean before being dipped headfirst into a mixture of salt, herbs, and piment d’Espelette, and arranged on the special cargolade grill, a family heirloom. Slices of lard are tucked into a special device—a flamboir, or flambadou in local dialect—and ignited. The flaming fat is drizzled over the bed of snails before the entire grill moves to a heap of smoldering vine-wood coals, where the snails are cooked until sizzling and enjoyed with slices of bread spread thick with homemade aïoli.

Snails may have a reputation of being slow, but in a cargolade, they wait for no one. As we dig into the hot snails, richly yet simply flavored with fatty lard and accompanied by Christophe’s own rosé, we also address the more difficult questions—namely why, despite a time-honored tradition of foraging for wild snails, we had to buy ours from a purveyor.

“After a rainstorm, we used to go out and gather them,” recalls Stéphanie Pla, Christophe’s sister. Their mother, Régine, notes that a certain expertise is required, as well as a period of “fasting” in which the wild snails are purged of any unpleasant viscera, a process similar to purging clams of grit and sand. Snails found in oleander bushes, Régine says, can make a diner quite ill; those found among local genêt flowers, meanwhile, are very bitter, unless made to fast even longer than the recommended 15 days. “We feed them flour and thyme and rosemary,” explains Christophe of the fast. After two to three weeks, they’re clean and ready to eat.

Today, it would be impossible to assemble the 500-odd escargots that fed our small party by finding them in the local fields, but the reasons behind the change are hotly debated. Some say the dearth of wild snails is due to the ever-increasing use of pesticides and insecticides in the region; others claim the local population has been picked over—not just by overzealous harvesters, but by wild sangliers. “A wild boar will eat anything,” says Christophe. “It’ll find a snail, even if it’s buried; it’ll dig it up and eat it. And the boar population here has exploded.”

This is a problem plaguing not just Occitanie, but the country as a whole. France now boasts more than 2 million boars, according to French newspaper Le Figaro, four times as many as are hunted each year, and more than France has ever seen before. The side effects of this population surge, according to the outlet, account for more than 60 percent of the 40,000 road accidents involving wild animals every year, and as much as €50 million in annual agricultural losses. The rise in the number of wild boars is due to a myriad of factors, including increased cultivation of crops they love—like corn—and diminishing popularity of the once-common hobby of game hunting.

Climate change has taken its toll, too. Warmer springs have increased the fertility of female boars, and as a result, boar populations are growing between 60 and 200 percent every year. Milder winters also mean that populations are not being culled by the chill, according to AgriSur. The warmer weather affects the snails directly as well. Petit gris are nocturnal animals that thrive in cool, damp spaces, and many of the ones that manage to avoid being devoured by wild boars end up literally cooked in their shells in the dry summer heat.

All of these factors combined might have pointed to the end of southern France’s illustrious cargolade tradition, but some locals have come to the rescue, like Lorenzo Sanchez, a former restaurateur turned artisanal snail farmer. In a country where foraging is so commonplace that pharmacists will examine your wild mushroom harvest to weed out any poisonous specimens, it isn’t easy to convince locals to buy what they have long been scavenging for free. But that’s exactly what Lorenzo did when he started farming snails in the small town of Saint-Féliu-D’Avall, in Pyrénées-Orientales.

When I visit, Lorenzo is gathering a few rogue snails, returning them to his covered snail park planted with Swiss chard—not for food, but to afford his snails the shade they so crave. He explains the slow-but-sure change in local attitude. “I had clients who would come buy a hundred or two because they hadn’t found enough themselves,” he says. “And you could see that pissed them off, that bugged them.”

Nine years later, during the first days of the spring thaw, Lorenzo’s phone doesn’t stop ringing: Locals are desperately placing orders for their weekend cookouts. The arrival of people like Lorenzo on the marketplace may well prevent the petit gris from succumbing to the same fate as that of the Burgundy escargot: While the dish is still omnipresent nationwide, after years of overharvesting and destruction of natural habitats, all of France’s most famous snails are imported from Central Europe, Romain Chapron, director of Croque Bourgogne, tells NPR.

But while experts note that the Burgundy snail is impossible to farm, the petit gris take quite well to it, and that might be their salvation. They grow so well in captivity that Lorenzo can produce snails at full maturity—which can take two years in the wild—in as little as three months. “It’s a passion,” says Lorenzo of his work. “Of course, it’s a business. Like anyone, I work to make money. But it’s a passion, above all.”

The same could be said for Cathy Joly, a short drive away in Toulouges, who became a professional snail farmer seven years ago. “It started as a joke,” she says. “One night, I came home from work, a bit aggravated, and I said to my husband, ‘You know what? I’d rather go up to the mountaintop and raise goats.’” Snails seemed like a good compromise. While Cathy attended some formal classes to learn the ropes, snail farmers are so few and far between that, for the most part, she had to teach herself. Those first few years, she recalls, she ended up with “more dead than alive.” But now things are working in her favor. “Now, everyone who was laughing before is saying, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool!’”

Today, Cathy lays claim to an all-natural product over which she exerts full control. While she bought baby snails from a French producer when she first started out, she now culls the larger snails from each harvest and uses them as reproducers, packaging the others for sale in net bags of 100, along with a sprig of thyme and a red-and-yellow ribbon: the colors of Catalonia. “Sometimes I get people who find snails in the wild bringing them to me to add them to the parks,” she says. “I tell them no. It’s kind; it comes from a good place, but no.” Taking such measures helps ensure a safer product. After all, hardy snails, occasionally used to ascertain pollution levels in the environment, can be toxic or even deadly if they stumble across the wrong contaminants in the wild, something that no amount of fasting will fix.

Not only is Cathy producing top-quality snails, but she’s also trying to encourage the revival of the cargolade culture, which she says is falling by the wayside in families where the younger generation hasn’t taken the initiative to glean tips and techniques from the older. Cathy hopes to launch cargolade classes soon; in the meantime, she shares her own insight with customers and sells all the tools they need, including locally handmade wire cargolade grills and even special blacksmith’s nails—a nod to the makeshift escargot forks of old. A true cargolade, cooked over local vine wood and eaten amidst the rugged topography of the garrigue, encourages people to remember where they come from. It is this conviviality, this tradition, that is so essential to preserve. “It’s really about tradition,” Cathy says. “Meeting up with friends or family, everyone lending a hand.”

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