Although Basque cooking shares many of the dishes of the southwest and the central Pyrenees – in particular garbure, a thick potato, cabbage and turnip soup enlivened with a piece of pork or duck or goose confit – it does have some distinctive recipes of its own. One of the best known is the Basque omelette, pipérade, made with tomatoes, chillis and sautéed Bayonne ham (salt-cured and resembling Parma ham), mixed into the eggs, so that it actually looks more like scrambled eggs. Another delicacy is sweet red peppers, or piquillos, stuffed whole with morue or cod. Poulet basquaise is also common, especially as takeaway food at the traiteur: it consists of pieces of chicken browned in pork fat and casseroled in a sauce of tomato, chilli, onions and a little white wine. And in season there's a chance of palombe, the wild doves netted or shot as they migrate north over the Pyrenees.With the Atlantic close at hand, seafood is a speciality. The Basques inevitably have their version of fish soup, called ttoro. Another great delicacy is elvers or piballes, which are netted as they come up the Atlantic rivers from the Sargasso Sea. Squid are common, served here as txiperons, either in their own ink or stewed with onion, tomato, peppers and garlic. All the locally caught fish – tuna (thon), sea bass (bor), sardines (sardine) and anchovies (anchois) – are regular favourites, too. Cheeses mainly comprise the delicious ewe's-milk tommes and gasna from the high pastures of the Pyrenees. Among sweets, one that is on show everywhere is the gâteau basque, a sweet flan pastry garnished with black cherries or filled with crême pâtissière. As for alcohol, the only Basque wine is the very drinkable Irouléguy – as red, white or rosé, while txakolín is a yeasty cider, and the local digestif liqueur is the potent green or yellow Izzara.
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