A Foodie Feast

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The other night I went out for a shared meal. Our choir was celebrating a successful year and saying ‘Goodbye’ till September. And as usual on these occasions, every single person brought enough food to serve about a dozen people, so there was every incentive to be greedy. Apart from plates of cold meats and hams, roasted pepper salads and radishes from someone’s garden, I ate a wonderful tortilla, rich as fondant, full of the flavours of the tasty fats and herbs it had been cooked in. Our Spanish member contributed that. There was a pissaladière, a tarte à l’oignon, an almost spicy tomato and mustard tart, some fishy salads….and all kinds of things I was getting too full to sample.

Of course at one point, the talk turned to cooking. C’est la France….. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that the average French cook’s just as likely to have a repertoire of Maghrebi dishes as English cooks are to have a few favourite spicy curries. (‘Mmmm. Couscous with pigeon!’ Janine enthused. She’s a ‘pied noir’, a Frenchwoman raised, in her case in Algeria).

It turned out that everyone in the group I was talking to made their own couscous grains from scratch. ‘You can’t use the stuff in packets. It’s foul’ they explained. And they told me how you work with equal quantities of water and semolina and roll the resulting paste with your hands until it breaks down in to the little balls we all recognise. Very boring, takes ages, but very easy, they said. Not with only Google to help me. Not found a recipe yet.

Next to me, Danielle was almost apologetic that she ‘only’ cooks the dishes her mother and grandmother taught her. Just then, I was chasing the last few tender flakes of her tarte au Roquefort round my plate, anxious not to waste a single mouthful of this rich treat with its complex mix of crisp delicate flakes of pastry and smooth, creamy yet piquant filling. Nothing to apologise for, I don’t think.

Everyone loves talking about food. Clara told me about the course she’d been on, gathering wild leaves and herbs and transforming them into appetising dishes. Sorrel, dandelion, all kinds of other names I couldn’t recognise were transformed into mille feuilles like savoury towers, soups and sauces. The course runs every year, she says, so next year, maybe I’ll go with her.

And me? What did I take? Well, apricot crumble of course. Though crumbles are the quintessential English pudding, the French have recently taken them to their hearts, so at least I didn’t let the side down on this spectacularly foodie evening.

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