La Pôchouse: The Forgotten River Fish Stew of Burgundy | Food Tour de France

La pôchouse — the ancient freshwater fish stew of Burgundy and Franche-Comté, made from a specific combination of Saône and Doubs river fish cooked in Burgundy aligoté white wine — is one of the most distinctive and most overlooked dishes in the whole of French regional cooking. Today's Food Tour de France episode finishes in Chalon-sur-Saône — a river city in the Saône-et-Loire, one of the great stretches of Burgundian France — and tells the full story of a dish first documented in writing in 1646, born on the boats and riverbanks of Verdun-sur-le-Doubs where the Saône meets the Doubs, made by the boatmen and fishermen who cooked it in a pot from the morning's catch with the white wine available to them on the Burgundian riverbanks. Celebrated by its own brotherhood since 1949. Still served in the restaurants that line the Saône today. And still made from the same four-fish combination that the pôchoux — the fishermen of the Bresse patois — established on these rivers four centuries ago.

The episode covers the full story of la pôchouse — the four-fish combination of lean pike and perch alongside fatty eel and tench that gives the dish its specific character, the aligoté white wine that is both the cooking medium and the drink alongside it, the lardons and croutons that complete the preparation, and the Confrérie des Chevaliers de la Pôchouse de Verdun-sur-le-Doubs founded in 1949 that has been defending and celebrating this dish for over seventy years. We cover the annual festival at Verdun-sur-le-Doubs — the Fête de la Pôchouse, where local restaurants serve it according to ancestral rules, the Confrérie Saint-Nicolas des Radeliers builds a raft on the Petit Doubs, and the dish is eaten without accompaniment as tradition demands. And we connect the pôchouse to the broader family of French river fish stews — including the lamprey à la bordelaise we covered earlier in the series.

The Food Tour de France is a daily series running alongside the 2026 Tour de France on Fabulously Delicious — one episode for every stage start and finish. The pôchouse episode connects directly to the lamprey à la bordelaise episode from the Bordeaux stage earlier in the series — both are ancient river fish preparations cooked in wine, both are the food of the boatmen and fishermen of great French waterways, and both tell the story of France's rivers through what they have been feeding their people for centuries. Search Fabulously Delicious on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for the full series.

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