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From Thérèse Desqueyroux (François Mauriac, 1927):

le gâteau dénommé fougasse ou roumadjade
the cake called fougasse or roumadjade

Footnote on these last terms:

Fougasse est le nom donné à une brioche en couronne, faite dans le Sud-Ouest, qui s'apparente à la fouace d'Auvergne. Les dictionnaires du gascon ignorent le nom de roumadjade.
Fougasse is the name given to a crown-shaped brioche, made in the Southwest, which is related to the fouace of Auvergne. The name roumadjade does not appear in Gascon dictionaries.

Perhaps we can do better than this editor. To me it looks like a possible Arabic term that would have come into Southwest France via Spain. Do the Arabic scholars among us have any inklings?

Frank
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Luke Sawczak
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1 Answers1

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No need to look for an Arabic origin.

This fougasse was likely including cheese, in Occitan: formatge/fromatge, but in the Gascon variant spoken in the Sud-Ouest, cheese is hromatge. With the regular -ade suffix meaning a cooking preparation (like griller gives grillade or lemon, lemonade), it was a hromatjada phonetically transcripted in French as roumadjade. The French equivalent would be fromageade.

That name is also used for the fromadjade, a Pied-Noir dish that comes from the Balears where it is called formatjada.

jlliagre
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    Perceptive noticing of 'fromage' in 'roumadje'! Of course that makes sense. I'll remove the arabic tag for search reasons while leaving the reference to it in my context. – Luke Sawczak Aug 01 '23 at 20:11
  • If you "squint" vocally (!) hard enough, you can plausibly hear the kinship between the 2 words :-) Something like fromage -> froumage -> 'roumage. – Frank Aug 02 '23 at 03:16
  • I never heard about the south-west "fougasse" (a crown brioche). However, when staying in French Riviera, I often buy a fougasse that is a traditional flat bread from Provence. – Graffito Aug 02 '23 at 13:18
  • @Graffito Fougasse est un nom générique qui se décline en différentes spécialités en fonction des régions et pays ( fouasse, fogassa, focaccia, pogača, Pogatschen... ). La fougasse de Mauriac devait plus s'apparenter à la fougasse de foix pour ce qui est du contenu, pas de la forme. – jlliagre Aug 02 '23 at 13:59
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    @Frank La transformation de certains F initiaux en H est une caractéristique du gascon et de l'espagnol. Latin → espagnol : filius → hijo, ferro → hierro, facere → hacer, formosa → hermosa. On a un rare cas en français: foras → hors (mais fuera en espagnol). – jlliagre Aug 05 '23 at 20:41
  • @jlliagre Bien reçu, l'évolution se suit très bien avec cette caractéristique. – Frank Aug 05 '23 at 21:04