A Betrothal Feast

“Strong-smelling Arles sausage with its brown flesh, crayfish in their dazzling armour, pink-shelled clams, sea-urchins looking like chestnuts in their spiny cases, and clovisses, those shellfish that gourmets from the South claim are more than an adequate substitute for the oysters of northern waters; in short, all the delicate hors-d’oeuvres that are washed up by the waves on these sandy shores and to which grateful fishermen accord the general appellation of fruits de mer."

From "The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics)" by Alexandre Dumas, tr. Robin Buss)

Showing off

"That night I met up with some Colombian friends and we went to a Mexican restaurant to celebrate.

'Are you ready to order?' the waiter asked. He clearly didn't like the look of us.

'We'd all like beans, rice and eggs,' I said.

The dish wasn't on the menu. He pointed this out, testily. 'This is a Mexican restaurant - you must eat Mexican food.' All I could do was remind him that what we'd ordered was all most Mexicans ever ate. He couldn't deny this and went to order the food."

Nick Danziger, Danziger's Travels (1987)

First meal in Corsica

Our flight to Bastia had been heavily delayed. We were hungry, and wanting something rather less plastic than the disappointing burgers we had eaten in Stansted Airport (the only compensation being that when I asked for mustard, wholegrain was produced).

The hotel receptionist sounded optimistic when we asked him whether there would be anywhere open. But we were told to be quick. It was about twenty to midnight.

And so we wandered along the edge of the sea, towards the old port. There were still people eating in many of the canopy-covered restaurants but, whenever we asked, “Fermé” or “Terminé” was the response.

The place we ended up in was in the old port itself, called O Sud. In the last restaurant we had tried, the waiter had told us of its existence and where it was, but warned us in strongly accented English, “It is not fine dining”. We headed there expecting burgers and Club sandwiches.

A man behind the bar told us we could eat and we found ourselves a table near the marina but were hastily moved further inside. Pop videos played on a wide screen; we must have lifted the average age considerably. My father would have hated it.

Menus arrived and we were told we could choose from the items with blue spots. There WERE burgers and club sandwiches on offer, but, to our relief, plenty more. Liz plumped for tomatoes and mozzarella and I had a Corsican plank. Liz’s salad came with a whole ball of mozzarella capped with another slice, on top of thick slices of tomato coated in pine nuts and pesto. My plank had salami, coppa and mountain ham. There was sweet butter and something which I thought at first was honey but the man serving it told us, having made us guess, that it was home made fig jam. We drank Pastis and were back in the Midi.