Relais Routier as Touchstone

Much though I enjoy a wide variety of culinary cultures, like Brits many of my generation French remains the ne plus ultra. Of course French cooking covers another wide variety in itself: regional traditions; the haute cuisine of Escoffier and the like; cuisine bourgeoise; etc etc. But the sub-group to which I am drawn most is the cookery one finds (or at least used to find, my travels in France having been limited of late) in Relais Routier establishments.

The Relais Routier restaurant is a marvellously democratic institution. Along with the lorry drivers who form a significant percentage of their clientele you'll see lunch tables occupied by gendarmes, business travellers, maybe the local mayor being lashed up so he'll sign some permission or other; families en route to the coast, country or mountains. They're drawn to these places for several reasons, including that they offer great value for money; rapid turnover means the food is fresh; and the cooking is excellent (otherwise they fail and close). We counter these independent eateries with Little Chef. Worse, Little Chef after Heston Blumenthal stuck his mottie in.

I thought about Relais Routier yesterday because I cooked leeks vinaigrette, one of the great standbys of the RR buffet table. It's one of those dishes that needs no chefy spin. Good fresh leeks (in our case dug from the allotment an hour before they hit the pot) washed carefully of grit and dirt then boiled in salty water until tender; carefully drained, cooled (you can dip them in iced water to keep the green bits greener, but why bother when they get covered up anyway?), slit lengthwise and placed cut-side-up on a serving plate. Their surfaces are then given a liberal dose of chopped parsley followed by hard boiled egg grated over, and a very mustardy olive oil and red wine vinegar vinaigrette.

That buffet table would also include a regularly refilled dish of olives; cervelas or some similar charcuterie; lentil salad; tomato salad (made with tomatoes that taste of something more than water); potato salad; grated carrots squeezed until almost dry and mixed with herbs and salt; maybe salade nicoise. The list goes on, every entry on it both - relatively - cheap to make and delicious.

A Matter of Tripe and Death

A matter of tripe and social death to be more accurate. 

With flat cap on head, whippet down my trews, and clogs on my feet I cooked tripe one night last week. It is something that I make infrequently, though the Dear Leader (may her reign of terror never end) enjoys it as much as I do. Perhaps it is tripe's association with poverty that we'd prefer to detach ourselves from. 

For the record the tripe I used was the prepared version sold in Booth's, supplied by Andy Holt's Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company, and very good it is too. The recipe I used was my standard one for the stuff - for two of us I prepared about a pound and a half of chopped onion, three quarters of a pound of that tripe cut into commemorative stamp rectangles, lots of pepper, a bit of salt, a grind of nutmeg (posh aren't we?) and a pint of milk all in one pan brought to a simmer and cooked very slowly thus for about an hour. The cooked milk, an antique ivory (who let Nigel Slater in here?), is thickened with a roux before being returned to the tripe and onions and the lot served with buttery mash. 

The result is delicious, almost too sweet for a savoury dish. It slips down the throat beautifully, the tripe with a texture/feel like oysters, the onions melted into the sauce until their presence is hard to detect. This is something that merits inclusion in a meal with friends, but I would not dare to because of its poor origins.The French are far less class conscious about their food, indeed they are proud when dishes have peasant origins, but we still seem intent on following their haute cuisine rather than cuisine paysanne or even bourgoise. In this context a typically British saw springs to mind - it is social death to serve offal at a dinner party. 

Why is that?

I would welcome a plate of kidneys devilled or otherwise at some social troughing. I think there are few meats as delightful as lamb's liver, if it is cooked so the inside remains pink and moist. Of all the beef stews (casseroles or perhaps ragout, surely - Mrs Bottomley-Smythe) oxtail is the most unctuous and satisfying. Do sweetbreads, horribly expensive and hard to source, still count as offal? As with the lamb's liver, cooked with a gentle hand they are sublime. I love pig's trotters cooked to jellied perfection. 

Will I then have the courage of my convictions (I rarely do) and get around to serving say a tripe amuse bouche or hors d'oeuvre (there we are again, as so often in culinary matters we slip into French to 'raise the tone,' as per Mrs Bottomley-Smythe) to dinner party guests? Probably not. In Britain even in 2015 it would still be social death. So in a French saying of which Mrs B-S would not approve, vive la revolution! Aux tripes, concitoyens.

The French Country Hotel Test

In my distant youth family holidays were largely spent camping in France and Switzerland. Finances were rarely flush, so we lived off dishes cooked beside the tent, or later in the caravan, bulked out on occasion with frites from the camp shop. When economies allowed we had a special treat of eating a meal out, generally in a small hotel restaurant. The quality, simplicity and generosity of that food is part of my culinary DNA now.

Best of all such places was the Midi Papillon in St Jean de Bruel, south of pre-bridge Millau. My parents had found a campsite nearby at Nant that was so good they did a deal to leave their tourer there permanently, Ruth and I free to use it when they did not.

By chance they and we discovered the Midi Papillon, and pockets by then being deeper would eat there maybe three times in a fortnight. Buying The Sunday Times on our way over we were delighted and annoyed to find it listed in their top 10 restaurants in France. Yet a seven course tasting menu cost little more than a Berni Inn steak and chips follwed by Walls Ice Cream.

The Midi Papillon (run by the Papillon family - how nice to be called Mr Butterfly) merited the honour. Highlights included stuffed sheep's feet: gelatious, meaty, herby, delicious; freshwater crayfish in a muscat and cream sauce (with a bib unpretentiously provided, the sauce flew everywhere); the best Vieux Cantal and Roquefort cheeses in the world (Roquefort is made half an hour away by the hazardous Cevenne roads); and soups.

The aroma of beautiful freshly cooked soup at home still conjures up memories of such pleasures in those hotels. For the hotelier of course it is a cheap dish, made no doubt with vegetables past their very best, stock that uses bones and trimmings from other dishes, and enormous care. Such soups appear daily as one of the two options on the Table d'Hote menu. But nobody objects, especially as they will be eaten with baguette of perfect crispness. Tired and troubled on a business trip I once arrived late on at a small auberge in Bourgoin Jallieu. That soupy smell greeted me, and I chose soupe au pistou for my first course. It was so good I finished the tureen. The chef-proprietor, clearly pleased by my appreciation of his food, chatted with me - he'd worked at the Dorchester it turned out.

Earlier this week we had such a super soup moment ourselves. A cauliflower bought for a salad I never got around to making needed using up, or so I thought - once the leaves were peeled back it was revealed as blemish-free. Cooked with butter and cream (a rare treat these days), an onion, a few chopped celery stalks and leaves and some chopped chard stems for bulk and depth, and using cheaty bouillon vegetable stock, its scent pervaded the house and greeted the Dear Leader when she returned from her travels and travails. It would have passed the test of acceptability in a small country hotel in France. There were no leftovers.

Austerity and Aligot

Last week I was on a press trip to the Midi-Pyrenees region of France, and very enjoyable too. During the four days we visited six Michelin-starred restaurants. This was a privilege, though the urge to be different produces such horrors as foie gras with raspberry sauce alongside works of perfection like a coddled egg in an asparagus crust, the yolk when cut oozing unctuously into a morel sauce.

But that is clearly not austerity fare (though a variation on that egg dish, effectively a subtle scotch egg, could be). Aligot, however, most certainly is. At the market in Rodez we tried this local speciality, which is simply very smooth mashed potato blended with melted cheese (young Tomme d'Aguiole or Cantal) and garlic. Happily the last Michelin-starred place we visited served some with a beautiful piece of lamb, a real bow to culinary tradition. That I think had a bit of cream in it, not a heresy but a variation, perhaps a refinement, and still traditional. They matched perfectly, unlike the foie gras and raspberry car-crash.

A bit of research shows that the proportions potato to cheese are 2:1, with garlic to taste and likewise seasonings. An acceptable-ish substitute for the Tomme would be Mozzarella, or a mixture of that and a harder cheese like cheddar, melted before marrying. I will be making some soon, either to eat on its own (now that is comfort food Nigel) or to accompany lamb. It forms strings as you try to fork it up from the plate. Huge quantities are not needed, such is its richness.

Chicken and Memories

In about 1988 I was visiting a customer in the hills above Bourgoin Jallieu, about half an hour's drive east of Lyon. My appointment was in the afternoon, so I found the place then looked for somewhere to eat. This was in agricultural country, not blessed with choice. The one I did find has stayed in my memory though, and epitomizes what I love about basic French food.

There was no menu. The bovine waitress brought a carafe of water, another of red wine, a basket of sliced baguette, and a serving plate of charcuterie with sharp knife for me to cut a few slices of sausage and grab a couple of cornichons before she collected it for the next table. Next was the main course, a roasted chicken-joint served with gloopy beans that tasted of the chicken stock and garlic. Lots of garlic. Then a plain green salad, just fresh lettuce dressed with vinaigrette. 'Un fromage?' meant that, the choice of a piece of good cheese, eaten with the bread, or a petit suisse. And pudding was a plastic tub of supermarket creme brulee.

It cost FF50. That's 50 francs to the Euro generation, about £5 then. For five courses. They doubtless made their money on simplicity, ease (hence the tub of pudding) and volume. Not gourmet stuff, but it filled me like it filled the blue-overalled farmers at the other tables, and it was really enjoyable, though not being able to drink more than a glass of wine was a pain. The chicken indeed was more than enjoyable, it was perfect of its type: robust flavours, pleasing texture of tender meat and soft beans, the kick of garlic.

Last night I tried to recreate that chicken dish, with some success, roasting a cut-up bird (dusted with plain flour) with lots of onions, a few cloves of garlic, a bay leaf and a little dash of wine. Near the end of the cooking time two tins of flageolet beans rinsed of their canning liquid went in, plus some cheaty chicken stock. Inflation having taken its toll the bird alone was more than £5, so call it £7.50 with the beans and onions. But it fed three, the scraggy middle bit of the chicken and a wing made my lunchtime sandwich, and there is a breast that will go on a pizza tonight, so not exactly profligate. And what price re-living a pleasure of 25 years ago?

One Flame Cooking Part Deux

The post on my experience as a student in France, where I had one Calor Gas burner and a kettle as the only means of cooking, has generated some traffic, so maybe the topic is one of specific interest. I wonder if at this time of year students new to university and now coping with the colder weather are having minds turned towards culinary survival strategies? Whatever, I thought another idea I used at that time would be of potential value.

With the one burner and the need to minimize gas usage or face high costs a dish I developed was a quick soup. Not cuppa soup - though I did at times add one of those to the pot - but a proper soup rapidly cooked. The logic behind this is the same as for stir-fries - if things are cut small they cook quickly and retain good flavour. A pot of soup is also cheap and generally nutritious, and offers the chance to incorporate interesting ingredients, though when I lived in France my version varied little.

The basic idea was a potato, a carrot, an onion, garlic, and maybe a mushroom or two, all cut into tiny dice - really tiny, just 2mm or 3mm across. That takes time, but not too much, and I still find chopping veg to be therapeutic - when I worked in industry the more stressed I was the smaller the onions were cut. The tiny veg - and if you are cooking for one as I generally was you don't need much - are fried briefly in butter or oil, then a cup or two of boiling water from a kettle poured over them (my electricity was covered in my rent then, the Calor Gas I had to buy, and a kettle anyway costs about 1.5p to boil). A stock cube was added, or on occasion a cheapo cuppa soup packet, the lot simmered for a couple of minutes until the potatoes were done (no problem if the onion or carrot has a bit of toothsome  resistance still). A sort of (to echo 10CC for those of us old enough to remember) mini-mini-mini-minestrone.

It was nicer than a packet of soup, promised freedom from scurvy, and importantly made a great partnership with heavily buttered French stick. These days I'd hope to use my own chicken stock, though only saints never reach for a cube, and would cut the dice a bit chunkier, simmer the soup a bit longer. And when I did a variation on this the other day I added spag broken into tiny lengths and the still good remnants of a white cabbage cut very small.

One of my culinary heroes, Edouard de Pomiane whom I discovered much later, suggests something very similar to the bedsit soup in his Cooking in Ten Minutes, a witty and clever book written decades before Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver et al got onto the same topic.

One Flame Cooking

A recent comment about having to cook on one burner while kitchenless made me think about my year living in France during my degree course - living in a disused school accommodation block at the Lycee next to the one where I worked, and cooking on a single calor-gas burner (with a kettle too). Youth of course made it easier to accept a restricted diet - often wine, cheese,  and fabulous French bread from a bakery 200m distant - but I learned a huge amount about food and cooking in that year. Austerity, restrictions, can teach us coping strategies and the value of what we have. Variations on beans with big thick smoked pork sausages when it was cold were great, the sausages already cooked, but benefiting from the heat, their flavour enhancing the beans (not at that time Heinz in France, but some sort of cassoulet flavoured versions, often with chunks of petit-sale in them.

The big thing that I learned there was the value of great bread. Sadly it is still, 30 years later, almost impossible to find really good bread in this country. Waitrose makes an effort, Booth's sadly has very expensive stuff without a hint of crispy crust, and Sainsbury's is a disaster zone. So I make my own when moved to do so, which at least is free of additives, and for a brief moment has a crust worthy of the name.

It is totally impossible to find good French sticks here. They need a Vienna oven, and should have both crispy crust and a very holey interior. Not one that supermarkets go for as they are stale within three hours at most, but when fresh there is IMHO no better bread anywhere. The stuff I bought when living in France was inevitably nibbled on the short walk home, nobody could resist that aroma surely?