|
|
|
|
|
|
Food
diary This diary is written by Jon. Above - food at the restaurant l'Authentic in Lunel. |
|||
|
This is about the things we eat and drink. Obviously it overlaps with the wine diary, since often a good bottle accompanies a good meal. I will try and include both things we have enjoyed eating out and things we have eaten at home. |
|||
|
The
meal, and food, as ritual. We
are in France partly because we adore good food, and because in any case
we have prepared and eaten meals much as French people do for years.
But we are often less formal than some of our French friends.
Typically you can't start laying a table without a table cloth of some
kind (practical for spills and crumbs) and for those who have not given
up alcohol an apéritif is normal.
People take their time over meals, and many enterprises and
schools close for 2 hours at lunchtime to allow ample time for entrée,
plat, fromage and dessert. There
is a big division (perhaps between habits in the north and the south)
between taking the salad first as an entrée or eating salad between the
plat and the cheese, but in any case cheese always comes before dessert,
not afterwards as in England. When
it comes to ingredients the exact source and nuance of flavour is often
a topic of animated conversation. We
know people in England who like 'sea salt' as opposed to ordinary or
rock salt, but here salt from the Camargue is specially prized,
sometimes the fleur de sel' (crystals formed on the surface of evaporating water
rather than what remains from the complete evaporation of salty water)
is important - at a recent shared lunch each person round the table had
her favourite, and one even spoke glowingly of pink salt from the
Himalayas! This is the time of year when there are more French food rituals than usual. At Christmas, especially on Christmas eve, there are the 13 desserts, served as the sweet course of the grand meal which is more important here than that on Christmas Day. The 13 include nuts (walnuts or hazel nuts), figs, almonds and dried white grapes or sultanas - symbolising the 4 monastic orders; dates which saved the holy family from hunger on their journey into Egypt; nougat, both white and a harder, toffee-like dark kind, symbolising good and evil; currants which symbolise the sweet grapes left to dry on the vine when the wine harvest is over; and pompe a l'huile, a sweet cake made with olive oil which must be broken, not cut with a knife or bad luck will follow! |
|||
|
With these 9 come various fruits - apples, oranges, mandarins, pears and so on, and/or sweets, to make up the 13 which may stand overall for Jesus and the 12 apostles or for the 13 lunar months or - well, there are lots of explanations. All these are eaten with a 'vin cuit', a rich sweet wine such as Maury or Rivesaltes. We are reminded of our much less specific traditions of dried fruit and nuts with Port at Christmas - this is much more ritualistic and poetic, and perhaps allows a little time for reflection and digestion at the end of a wonderful festive meal. You can see the 12 we assembled here - no cake unfortunately! |
 |
||
|
In the new year, at the feast of the kings or Epiphany, special cakes or pastries are eaten. These may either be galettes des rois (tarts with almond paste filling) or royaumes, cakes in a large ring or doughnut shape topped with big grains of sugar and pieces of crystallised fruit. In either case the baker hides a token or fève (traditionally a real bean but now usually a little ceramic piece with a bean shape outlined on it) and the person who finds the fève in their portion gets to wear the paper crown often provided with the cake. Echos here both of sixpences in Christmas puddings and of paper hats in crackers, but more closely linked to the old traditions of the Christian festivals. A food diary ought to be about what we eat every day, not just about gourmet meals and treats. So here are a few highlights and discoveries. Bread - there are at least 15 boulangeries (bakers' shops) in Lunel, many of them 'artisanal' i.e. still making their own bread on the premises, although nationally France is succumbing to more centralised bakeries and local 'depots de pain'. One day I shall know which is open when - lots of things close on Mondays for example, but bakers rotate it so you can always get bread somewhere. While we have shopped in more than a dozen at times, one of our favourite boulangeries is on the other side of town (a bike ride away rather than a walk) which cooks country bread with less refined flour, and many other goodies including a fairly regular line in strawberry tarts!. None of this is much good for me since I have more or less given up bread and pastry with my weight loss diet, but we usually have a bit for Mary who continues to enjoy it. Fruit and vegetables - lots of small shops sell excellent greengroceries from far and near - we discovered wonderful pineapples from at least 3 different overseas French territories earlier in the winter, and there are many varieties of oranges from Spain, Italy and north Africa. But lots of produce is from this part of France, and with the mild winter and early spring we have continued to get wonderful salads, and the local producers are out in force on market days on street stalls in front of Les Halles. The first local asparagus and strawberries have appeared in the past week or two. Our favourite greengrocer near the station seems to have good fresh produce and excellent bananas so we go there now rather than to supermarkets. One oddity - French shops seem only to sell very large apples and pears - the smaller ones you get in England are not common. Fish and seafood - the fish stall in Les Halles has produce from both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, so there is a huge variety of unusual fish to choose from. The over-fishing of the old standard species means that lots of names and shapes are quite unfamiliar and we seek the advice of the stall owners about what's good and how to prepare it. We had wonderful grey mullet a few weeks ago. We tried more shellfish when right by the sea near Agde last year, but there are oyster stalls in Lunel too and we are only a 20 kilometres from the producers. Cheese - one of the highlights. Supermarket cheese is OK but bland, but the cheese stall in Les Halles is terrific, with a great range of sheep and goat cheeses as well as cow. We are gradually working our way through marvellous hard and soft cheeses from all over France, and we have got to know the stall owner who recently offered us Devon farmhouse cheddar he had found at a trade fair - very delicious, but on the whole we are too enraptured by the variety of French wares to seek out English cheese in France, good as it may be! The secret of a good cheese merchant is that s/he is an affineur - that is, cheeses are not just bought and sold but kept to the peak of perfection in the right conditions. So they are bound to taste better than supermarket refrigerated versions. Finding good meals in restaurants is one of our pleasures. Sometimes they are elaborate and unusual, but often they are simple straightforward lunches in unassuming places. Two brief starting points: first, bacon as we know it is hard to come by in France, thought there are lots of kinds of ham and pork, most of them delicious. We've always thought that the bacon sandwich was a French natural, since rashers and a chunk of baguette fit together perfectly. But this depends on kind English friends bringing us smoked back bacon (this is a shameless hint!!) in which case we promise The Goods. But there is a French alternative, bacon and egg à la français. Lardons, small pieces of bacon which are usually fried and sprinkled on salads, are available everywhere and taste just right. If you fry them then crack an egg into the pan, lo you have bacon and egg - delicious. Second, milk products. As I've mentioned on the health page I try to avoid cow's dairy products. While we still have to find sources of goat or sheep milk and butter (both available quite easily in England) the range of goat and sheep cheese available here is very good, and there are plenty of goat and sheep yoghurts too. Indeed, we have even found sheep's' fromage frais, and if you do eat cow's dairy products, the range of un-flavoured, un-sweetened milk products is huge - we realised by comparison that British supermarkets have gone over almost completely to flavoured, sweetened products - but if that's what you want, you can always add jam!!
October-November 2006 A few memorable meals and one memorable for the wrong reason! We went to Narbonne to eat in a recently-opened restaurant Fleur de Thym owned by Georges Lemarié, son of the winemakers at Château Aiguilloux in Corbières. It proved a real delight, a genuine gastronomic experience with lovely meat and fish elegantly presented. He serves his parents' wines and one other local maker's from the little La Clape area between Narbonne and the sea, which we also happened to know. A contrast in the Corbières was lunch in a simple village restaurant - a set menu with a salad of local ham, lasagne and îles flottants, all fresh and hot with local wine in a carafe. While we were near Agde we ate twice at a small, friendly Lebanese restaurant in the town - Middle Eastern food with a French twist - and twice at a specialist fish restaurant in Le Cap d'Agde, Les Halles aux Poissons, with oysters (I can't eat them but Mary loves them), marvellous crevettes and coquilles Saint Jacques, and fish fresh from the boats sold whole by weight at your table and then cooked. The less appealing side of our experience was a restaurant I won't name and shame, in Béziers. It's one of two or three places a group of friends Mary got to know meet most weeks to eat and talk, and one of the group feels loyalty to the restaurant owner. But the food is often slapdash and the menu rather sketchy, and after a very tough faux filet (a cheap-ish cut of steak quite common on lunch menus and usually perfectly edible) we vowed not to go back there, even for the sake of the group fo friends. Another friend said she felt the same - maybe they will revert to the much more acceptable place nearby. But of course, not all French eating is good. There's just more that is, at reasonable cost, than you would ever find in England. At home we have not really changed our eating habits - we tend to eat meals in a rather French way often with a main dish, a salad and cheese, sometimes adding a hors d'oeuvre and/or sweet when we have guests. Arriving in winter, the range of fresh fruit and vegetables is smaller than in summer, but exceptionally warm autumn weather has meant that salads were grown locally until recently, and the vast growing factory of southern Spain is even nearer that it was in England. We shop with pleasure in markets (and continually enjoy the range of olives and tapenades on sale there) or now, in Lunel, at the permanent covered market Les Halles, a common feature of many French towns and cities. The range of meat, fish, cheese and charcuterie there is extraordinary and tempting. Bread and croissants are also great, especially from the several artisan bakers that still thrive here in Lunel, in Agde and in most towns in France we have visited. A lot of what I'm writing about (and shall write) is not good reading for vegetarians. It's true that many restaurants struggle to serve a vegetarian meal (although more and more, including some of the gastronomic ones we have visited, have vegetarian choices) but often at home we eat vegetarian dishes and take pleasure in cooking them. We feel that the range of fresh foods available in France, not just cheese and olives, fruit and vegetables, but nuts and pulses too, are more than adequate for a good and varied vegetarian diet if you choose it - one of the highlights of our visit so far has been Ali's Walnuts fresh from the garden in Saint Roman, and the salads have been excellent. December 2006 There have been 3 good experiences since we moved in - one quite simple visit to a takeaway pizzeria just up the road from us where all the ingredients including dough are fresh-made and assembled in front of you - giant portions too (and of course plenty of veggie options)! The second amazing one was a ready-cooked 5-course meal delivered by the traiteur who makes it - he runs a market stall in Les Halles and the special 'festive' menu included a quail stuffed with foie gras and half a dressed lobster (neither of us had ever eaten lobster before - it is quite messy but delicious). But the highlight - and we have eaten there three times already - is the restaurant L'Authentic in Lunel, just at the eastern edge of the town centre. We'd spotted it on holiday 2 years ago, but it was closed then. It's run by a couple from the Aveyron region (around Millau, north west of here). After our first meal there soon after we arrived, we booked for Christmas day lunch and had a memorable meal of many courses including foie gras cooked in three ways, skate noisettes cooked in champagne, and a marvellous venison dish on a bed of truffled celery purée, with a marvellous confection of apricot compote and ice cream stacked between thin curved plates of chocolate like a nun's winged hat or a pagoda roof. By the way, the vegetables with the main course included a circle of thin-sliced courgette around fine-minced garlic-laced carrot which Mary is still recalling with pleasure. However, wonderful as Christmas day was (over 3 hours at table, and the wine list is as impressive as the food) the highlight today (29/12) was a simple lunch menu, 2 courses and a glass of wine for 13 euros. Not much more than you would pay in any average lunch restaurant, but this was not average - Mary had tripe stuffed with pork and enjoyed something she'd vowed never to eat (since memories of her grandfather chewing away at flaccid white slabs of tripe with vinegar and raw onion!) and I ate venison again, then a nice platter of cheese and some coffee. With that kind of quality on our doorstep I don't think we shall look far for a good meal out.
|
|||
