Tielles de Sète
A distinctive seafood-filled pastry from a Mediterranean fishing town
Let’s consider this a sort of “part one” on the topic of tielles. I plan to dive deeper in the coming weeks, reading up on the history of this interesting savory pastry and working on a version of the recipe that I hope does justice to the original while being approachable for most home cooks. So there will be more to come.
For now, an introduction.
Tielle de Sète is a pastry with a simple leavened dough enclosing a filling of seafood in a tomato sauce. As the shop-keeper in Sète where I purchased the tielles in photos just below told me, the dough is essentially like a pizza dough, with some olive oil mixed in. The traditional seafood filling is octopus, and the couple versions I had on the trip were quite simple: not much more in there than the octopus, tomato sauce, a bit of chile for some zip.
It’s one of those French regional foods that lodged in my brain many, many years ago, in the course of my time studying and working at La Varenne cooking school. Aside from knowing it was associated with a small city on the Mediterranean coast and had a seafood filling of some kind, I knew little of the tielles themselves.
So, I relished the opportunity on last month’s trip to the south of France to finally get to Sète and learn more on location. It was a quick and easy train ride, about 20 minutes, from Montpellier where we were based for a few days. Sète is a small city with rich fishing and maritime heritage—we saw fishing boats and piles of nets, ferries in port that may have come in from Morocco or Corsica, walked past the building where fishermen sell their catch to restaurants and wholesalers.
I ate tielles on two occasions, one in a Montpellier restaurant, another reheated in our aparment having purchased the tielles at one of the longstanding vendors in Sète. Tielles Cianni Marcos has been in business since 1937, operating a small corner store that’s all about the tielles, with a few other local products available as well. The case you see in the photo above has just one type of tielle in it, the classic with octopus, in three different sizes. A smaller case to the side held two other types: one filled with mussels instead of octopus (of which I bought one to try as well, also very good), and another with vegetables (didn’t try that one).
I came across tielles multiple times in our few weeks in France, including at the Victor Hugo market in Toulouse, in the freezer section of a grocery store in Montpellier, and even in the quite posh seafood department of Le Grand Epicerie, the gourmet food hall of Le Bon Marché department store in Paris. I’m now kinda wishing I’d tried more versions, though quite happy with the two I had. It’s enough to feed my inspirations for further research and coming up with a recipe to share with you down the line.
And it serves as a perfect example of why I find the melding of seafood and travel to be such pure delight: delicious and intresting experiences to have while on the road, followed by great memories to relive through exploring new cooking adventures once home.
