Anise and delights, a delicate love story

Flavigny-sur-Ozerain is one of the most beautiful villages in France: cobbled streets, ramparts, impressive fortified gates, old houses, sculptures, gardens invite you to stroll.

If the walls of the peaceful village could speak, they would tell a rich and fascinating story.

 

 

 

During the siege of Alesia in 52 BC. BC, Julius Caesar even set up two camps and his headquarters on the mountain of Flavigny. During the Gallo-Roman era, the place belonged to a Roman: Flaviniacum, the place of Flavinius.

During the Viking invasions, the relics of saint Reine d'Alise were sheltered in the Saint-Pierre abbey founded in 719.

The remains of the abbey are open to the public.

What attracts visitors today is not the glory of the past but the love of candies. They only come for them: Flavigny anise, these little round candies whose centuries-old history is as fascinating as that of the village.

This is because anise has many virtues.
Julius Caesar distributed green anise seeds to his soldiers to prevent them from dysentery. To preserve these precious seeds, they were coated with a little sugar…

The Benedictine monks of the abbey cultivated medicinal plants, including anise for its digestive properties.

Since 1591, anise candies are made in Flavigny, always according to the same recipe.

After the departure of the monks chased away during the revolution, the manufacturing of what is probably the oldest candy in France continues. In 1814, there were no fewer than eight manufacturers in the village.

Over time, Jacques Edmond Galimard bought them and regrouped manufacturing within the buildings of the old abbey.

But it was only after the purchase of the factory in 1923 by Jean Troubat that anises achieved glory. Falling under the spell of the abbey and its sweets, he did buy the place and had the idea of selling them in Paris. To do this, he installed vending machines in railway stations and the metro.

Jean Troubat diversifies distribution networks, exports the sweet pearls beyond borders.

His son Nicolas continues this momentum, annual production increases from 80 to 250 tonnes. In 1992, the company was classified as a “remarkable site of taste”.

Catherine, the granddaughter of Jean Troubat, continues to develop the family business which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2023. She launched an organic range.

She also redesigned the little boxes which tell the love story of a shepherd and a shepherdess.

Their romance unfolds through boxes with different perfumes…

The success of these little sweet and flavored pearls perhaps lies in their apparent simplicity. There are only three or four ingredients that go into their composition: a green anise seed (pimpinella anisum), beet sugar (cane sugar for the organic range), a natural flavor. For certain perfumes, a plant extract must also be added. The flavors, all natural, come from Grasse.

The simplicity of candy is only apparent. It takes three years to train a confectioner and five years for them to be excellent.

To obtain these sweet pearls, you have to wait 15 days. In copper basins, the anise seeds are sprinkled with sugar syrup prepared on site. Then begins the long process during which the seeds rotate tirelessly in the basins, slowly coating themselves with syrup.

The noise in the coating workshop is deafening. Sugar makers regularly sieve the anises to obtain a uniform result. The quality of each basin is validated by a tasting team before the anises arrive on the filling line.

• The visit to the place is tasted like candy. There is the crypt of the Carolingian abbey, a vestige of the old abbey church, with architectural elements from the Gallo-Roman, Romanesque and Gothic periods. For more than 1000 years, the crypt was a place of perpetual prayer.

The different rooms of the small museum are rich in ancient objects, stories and old illustrations, some of which date from 1828.

All the old boxes tell the same love story of the shepherd and his shepherdess in settings from different eras.

This is how we learn that Louis XIV always had a can of anise in his pocket.

Or that “room spices” were served at the end of a meal to guests who took them to their rooms to help them sleep.

Visitors’ sense of smell is put to use in the aroma laboratory.

The old packaging and shipping workshops are located in vaulted rooms which were in operation since the French Revolution until 2019!

The new workshops are also located in the abbey.
• A guided tour also allows you to take a look at the new workshops and go up to the manufacturing site to see these famous basins.
  
  

What a pleasure then to let yourself be tempted by tasting anise. By letting it melt in the mouth without chewing it remember, it takes 15 days to make it!