Bourride

My mother made a bourride for the first time in 1983. We were staying in our caravan in Fréjus. I recall chicken pieces, boiled potatoes, carrot in broth. I was charged with making the aïoli. Handmade mayonnaise but with a clove of garlic crushed in the bottom of the bowl before I added the yolks. I can recall even now the eye watering perfume of the garlic permeating the contents of the bowl. It was an early supper, a perfect supper, the blandness of the meat and vegetables offset by the garlic mayonnaise. A view of pine trees and mountains.

I said it was the first time my mother ever made bourride. It was also the last. A few days later we left the campsite, my mother mysteriously ill. She had Guillain-Barré Syndrome it turned out. Although she recovered, months later, she commented that the associations with that disastrous holiday meant that bourride was not something she would ever want to make again.

Mixing

The thought of mixing can make the heart sink or lift depending on the skills of the mixer. Pineapple and cottage cheese; potato salad and hard boiled egg; clotted cream and fudge; the thought of all of these, you might think surprisingly, at best cause indifference and, at worst, repel me. But other mixes interest me enormously. Baking meat into pastry. Scraping the residue of a tomato salad - chopped onion, tomato pips, olive oil and the tomatoey juices - into a saucepan of just drained pasta or into gazpacho.

Authenticity

It is possible to be a little obsessive about authenticity. Those obsessives who assert, for instance, that cappuccino should never be drunk after 11 in the morning. Or that cheese and fish do not go together.

I have no difficulty with people putting into a meal whatever ingredients give them pleasure ... but my hackles are raised if someone asserts that it is a particular dish when it is in fact something possibly delicious but completely different. Quiche Lorraine, for example, should have double cream, eggs and bacon. Not cheese. Not onions. And Elizabeth David says so.

I feel the same way about Tricolore. Tomato, mozzarella and basil. NOT avocado, which is perfectly pleasant but is not an ingredient of Tricolore and does not go particularly well with mozzarella. As I was writing this, I mentioned I was writing about Tricolore and, immediately, the enquirer said: “Mozzarella, tomato and avocado?”

But on the subject of avocado, there is, in my view, no one authentic way of making guacamole. And the same is true of gazpacho - which does not even have to have tomatoes in it. Indeed, given that it came into existence long before the Spaniards sailed for the New World and discovered tomatoes in the process, some might say that tomato in gazpacho is inauthentic.

A dish of miga

I have mentioned Joan Aiken before. Repeatedly, in her writing, I encounter descriptions of food I have never sampled but long to, as a result of what I have read. Enid Blyton, too, often writes of food, appealing to children’s gluttony. More about her in another post. But Joan Aiken’s descriptions are often of more spartan meals than the joyous picnics and farmhouse high teas of Enid Blyton. For instance, in “Bridle the wind”, Joan Aiken’s hero, Felix, and his travelling companion have “a dish of miga” cooked for them by gypsies. This is how Felix describes it: “breadcrumbs steeped in water, sprinkled just with salt, then with hot oil in which garlic has been scattered”. He tells us that it is eaten with flat cakes of unleavened bread and cups of hot chocolate. Basic provisions: how these details enhance the raw sense of adventure.

Delia's peppers

I am an admirer of Delia Smith. Unlike others, she has never gone out of fashion. Unlike others, she does not sneer at her readers. She is not the type who would waltz smugly into the dining room to the awe of her guests, having spontaneously whipped up some delicious concoction having found the ingredients in some corner of a hidden market. No: for her, I suspect, preparation is key; and while I doubt she needs to use a recipe book much of the time, she would do so - unlike others - without embarrassment. Her recipes work (by which I mean she puts in enough detail for anyone making the thing for the first time not to have to guess) and she should undoubtedly be included in the line of writers in this country who have been responsible for social change in the art of cookery: Mrs Beeton, Elizabeth David and Jamie Oliver are others.

Both my mother, my grandmother and even my grandfather (only an occasional cook) were keen on Delia; her Complete Cookery Course a well-stained volume in their kitchens. But one aspect of her writing used to irritate to the extent that it became quite a good parkour game: find a recipe of hers which is not one of her “favourites”...

This comes from her “Summer Cooking”. I do not have it in front of me so I may not be as precise as its author usually is, but it is a forgiving recipe.

INGREDIENTS

Red peppers (at least half per person).

Salted anchovy fillets (at least two per person).

Cherry tomatoes (at least three per person) - or, if fresh tomatoes not available, a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes.

Plenty of olive oil.

METHOD

Halve and seed the peppers and place the halves on a baking tray.

Halve the cherry tomatoes and stuff them into the peppers. If you are using the chopped Italian tomatoes, add them, including the juice.

Chop the anchovy fillets and top the tomatoes with them.

Fill the peppers to the brim with olive oil.

Bake. Then refrigerate. Eat.

I think these should be served fridge-cold. As Delia herself might say, nice for a starter or a collection of starters on a summer’s day.

Hungarian sausage

My mother once came to visit me when I was at boarding school in Canterbury in the nineteen eighties. I seem to recall that she had come with my grandparents who took us out for lunch. It would have been somewhere smart. After they had departed, my mother stayed and took me shopping. I do not recall where we went but I can remember one of the things she bought me: a large Hungarian sausage: bright red, coarse, full of garlic and studded throughout with fat and peppercorns. I think I ate it in one sitting, on my bed, after Mum had left; that I still recall it, thirty years later, is a testament to its quality. Ever since, I have been trying to find something similar, but have never succeeded. The Hungarian sausages I have encountered since have been disappointing: too salty or too greasy, like the worst kind of Danish salami. One day, though, I will find what I am looking for.

Swedish meatballs

The Swedes know how to make tender little meatballs. And they do not require a sauce. A freshly-cooked meatball, studded with onion fragments, neither dry nor soggy, is a delight. Astrid Lindgren’s hero, Karlssoj, a man with a built-in helicopter propeller,  is fond of them and persuades his friend Milo to go downstairs and fetch some for him. Milo’s mother, busy frying them in the kitchen downstairs, obliges. But she is not best pleased when she discovers that Karlsson has not eaten them but has used some of them to decorate a toy brick tower.

I discovered recently that Swedish meatballs originated in Turkey. The Swedish King, Charles XII, brought home the recipe from Turkey in the early eighteenth century.

Bear

“The Dwarf had splendid ideas about cookery. Each apple (they still had a few of these) was wrapped up in bear’s meat - as if it was to be apple dumpling with meat instead of pastry, only much thicker - and spiked on a sharp stick and then roasted. And the juice of the apple worked all through the meat, like apple sauce with roast pork. Bear that has lived too much on other animals is not very nice, but bear that has had plenty of honey and fruit is excellent, and this turned out to be that sort of bear. It was a truly glorious meal.”

From C S Lewis’s Prince Caspian

Cherries in chocolate

Fresh cherries, dipped in plain chocolate, still with their stems on, make a spectacular after dinner comestible. Somehow, they have never quite worked for me. The chocolate is too thick in parts, and the cherries make the chocolate wet-tasting.

Although not homemade, I prefer Mon Cheris which, despite their French name, come from Germany. They are wrapped in pink foil, rectangular and should, in my view, be fridge cold. The chocolate cracks; the liqueur floods out and you chew the cherry. A feast for Christmas Day to be enjoyed while opening presents. And one should not drive afterwards.

I am always willing to try alternatives, but my opinion is that nothing beats a Mon Cheri. There is the Marks & Spencer’s cherry liqueur: beautifully wrapped in red foil, looking rounder and redder than Mon Cheris, but lacking in flavour or texture. Many years ago, before I even discovered Mon Cheris, my favourite chocolate of all was the Liquid Cherry, to be found in a box of Black Magic.

C’est à Balaruc

The first meal on holiday is always memorable, no matter how ordinary. We stopped on the way from the airport in our hire car at the hypermarket at Balaruc for a big shop. The dangers of doing such a shop on an empty stomach are well-known. So we had a quick lunch, sitting outside, in the simple adjoining restaurant.

Being France, it had to be three courses. I had Museau Vinaigrette to start, slightly unsure what it was, but having a feeling - these were pre-smartphone days - that it was a meaty terrine of some sort. So it proved: boned pig cheek to be precise, as I discovered much later.

I cannot recall what was to follow - steak frites followed by Glace? - but it set us up well for the delights of wandering round the hypermarket. Though it didn’t stop us from buying far too much.