As I noted in a previous post – on Virginia Woolf’s To the lighthouse – French food is very close to my heart (and stomach!). But whilst I have spent many enjoyable an hour in cafes, bistros and restaurants, some of my most vivid and long-lasting impressions of French food were nurtured in the home.
My first visits to France came about through school exchanges: three in Normandy, when I was in school (Trouville) and in sixth-form college (Caen). And when I spent a year in France (Lyon) as part of my degree, I lived for a few days with a French family before I moved into university accommodation.
Those weeks spent with French families were an eye-opener, showing me what ‘normal’ French family meals were like.
The dinners – even in the week – were long, comprising at least three courses and accompanied by wine. I still remember watching the father of the first family I stayed with (when I was 13) progressing through wine as the meal went on. He would begin with a glass of water into which he poured a small amount of wine, and as the meal progressed the ratio of wine to water moved increasingly in the wine’s favour, so that by the time the cheese arrived there was just wine in his glass. I can also still picture him letting his young son try the diluted wine, encouraging an early taste for the ambrosial nectar.
These families also introduced me to foods I had never tried before. There were mussels in Caen – slightly marred by the warning from the mother of the family to watch out for the little crabs! – and quenelles and andouillete in Lyon (the latter being a foodstuff I could readily have done without – as the youngest daughter of the family solemnly informed me – having refused to eat the dish herself – “C’est l’intestin”).
Turning to books, the experience of living and eating with a French family is one enjoyed by Stephen Wraysford, the young Englishman at the centre of Sebastian Faulk’s acclaimed 1993 novel Birdsong. The novel opens in 1910, on the day that Stephen arrives in the French city of Amiens. On the first page Stephen walks up the boulevard du Cange to the house of Rene Azaire, the owner of the textile factory where Stephen is on placement. Azaire lives there with his family – his second wife, Isabelle, who is much younger than him, and his two children from his first marriage. It is of note – but perhaps of no surprise when one considers the centrality of food to the French – that Stephen’s first encounter with the Azaires is round the dining room table. When he enters they have already started on the meal: Stephen is served from a ‘tureen of soup’, then offered wine before ‘a dish of sliced meat in thin gravy’ is brought in, accompanied by ‘salad’ and followed by ‘coffee’.
Whilst Stephen spends his days working in Azaire’s factory, much of his leisure time is spent eating with the family, mainly at home but also on the occasional excursion – one Sunday he joins the family and some friends of theirs on a trip to some local water-gardens. They take a picnic with them – a veritable feast of ‘cheeses and pies … jellied tongue … chicken… strawberry tart and some little cakes’ , though no-one is particularly hungry and much of the food is returned uneaten to the hamper.
Stephen and Isabelle – who is desperately unhappy in her marriage to Azaire – grow close and embark on an affair. They flee Amiens and travel south, ending up in the small town of St Remy de Provence where Isabelle has a cousin. They settle into life there, renting a small house and building a life for themselves: Stephen gets a job as an assistant to a furniture maker and Isabelle keeps house and ‘[i]n the evenings … would prepare some dinner from what she could find in the market’. She gets frustrated by what she feels are the scant offerings of the local markets, compared to what she could buy in Amiens, but eventually settles down spending much of the day ‘cooking soup or stew for [Stephen] to eat when he came home.’
I’ll say no more about the plot, as I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it. Thinking of both the ‘meat in thin gravy’ that Stephen eats with the Azaires on his first night in Amiens and the ‘stew’ that Isabelle frequently cooks him, I decided that would be the focus of my cooking. Since the second part of the novel is set six years later – in 1916 – on the Western Front, I thought it would be good to do something with a Belgian influence to reflect the wartime context of some of the novel. So beer came to mind, and a scan through the bible of French cookery, Mastering the art of French cooking by Julia Child (originally published in 1961) brought up a recipe for a Flemish beef stew – Carbonnades a la flamande. To accompany it I made another French dish, pommes parmentier, inspired by a passage in the novel where the soldiers eat ‘fried potatoes’ served in a little local bar (an estaminet).
CARBONNADES A LA FLAMANDE (serves 4)
Ingredients:
1kg diced stewing steak
2 tablespoons olive oil
500g sliced onions
2 cloves garlic
Salt and pepper
150ml beef stock (approx)
300ml lager
2 teaspoons light brown sugar
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons cornflour blended with 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
Method:
Preheat the oven to 160C /140C fan / Gas mark 2.
Pat the beef pieces dry with kitchen roll. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over a high heat until it is almost smoking. Add the beef and brown the pieces on all sides; remove and place on a plate.
Turn down the heat to moderate. Add the sliced onions to the pan and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until lightly browned – if need be add a little more oil. Add the garlic towards the end of the 10 minutes, then season and remove from the heat.
You will need a casserole dish for cooking the beef stew – ideally one that can go on both the hob and the oven. Arrange half the beef in the casserole, season, spread half the onions over the top, then repeat with the remaining beef and onions.
Make up the stock and pour it into the frying pan so mix in any left-over cooking juices. Pour the liquid over the meat. Then pour over sufficient lager until the meat is just covered. Stir in the brown sugar and add the bayleaf, burying it amongst the meat. If your casserole can go on the hob, then place it over a medium heat until the stew is at simmering point before covering it and placing it in the oven on a low shelf. If it doesn’t go on the hob – as mine doesn’t – don’t worry, but just increase the oven temperature slightly (to 180C/160C fan/ Gas mark 3), place the casserole uncovered in the oven and get the mixture to simmering point. Once it is there, cover the casserole and return the oven to the set temperature specified.
The stew will need 2 ½ hours in the oven; keep an eye on it to ensure the liquid doesn’t dry out and the mixture remains at a light simmer the whole time.
After 2 ½ hours the meat will be very tender. Remove the bayleaf from the stew, drain the cooking liquid into a small saucepan and stir in the cornflour paste over a medium heat until the mixture thickens. Then pour it back over the meat and serve with the potatoes below (or cooked in whichever way you wish) and accompanying vegetables.
POMMES PARMENTIER (serves 4)
Ingredients:
1.5 kg potatoes
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon of butter
1 bunch of fresh parsley, chopped
6 sprigs of fresh rosemary, leaves stripped from the stalk and finely chopped
salt and pepper
Method:
Preheat the oven to 200C / fan 180C / Gas mark 6. However, if you are cooking the potatoes to accompany the beef stew (which is cooked at a lower heat), just put them in for the last 50 mins – 1 hour of the cooking time.
Peel and dice the potatoes into small cubes. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat and fry the potato cubes for about 10 minutes. Keep moving them around the pan so they don’t stick or get too brown – you are simply starting off the cooking process.
In the meantime melt the butter in a small pan and stir in the parsley.
Transfer the potatoes to a roasting tin. Mix in the parsley butter and rosemary and season with salt and pepper.
Place in the oven and cook for 30 minutes (or longer if you’re using a cooler setting for the beef stew).
