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.

One Pot Two Dishes - One Flame Rides Again

My son, aka Sternest Critic, has some quirky dislikes. One is that he likes meat that is stewed (let's face it he likes meat), but hates it to come with the liquid in which it cooked. A neat solution to this enjoyed last week was a version of the French Pot au Feu, where the liquid is served as a soup before the rest makes it to table as a main course. Two courses, one pot.

It helped the soup part that the dish was made with stock prepared previously using free bones from the butcher (I've taken to doing this when buying a load of meat, and never get any hassle) and another from the freezer, the penultimate bit of our Serrano ham bone. Those had cooked with some veg and other flavour enhancers, so the stock itself would have done as a soup (some more in fact did at the weekend, with mushrooms, noodles and star anise). But after it had in addition been the cooking medium for chuck steak and shin, with more veg, it was excellent - served without any thickening, likewise sans meat and veg, it was a really really good beef consome.

The original stock benefited btw from a beetroot being one of the vegetables, giving an earthy depth, but more importantly a fine colour.

The solid components were tasty enough, the beef not needing a knife to cut it, but not in the same league as the soup.

I've been trying to think of similar two-dishes-one-pot stuff, with little success. The only one that sprang to mind could in fact be a threefor, doing a similar stew for the soup and solids, but cooking a sweet dumpling or several in with the savoury bits. To modern eyes that may seem odd, but to cooks of centuries past (including the last one) with limited cooking equipment it made sense, and our contemporary separation of sweet and savoury would seem weird to medieval cooks in particular, but even our grandmothers (for those of us in the third decade of our thirties) were not averse to such things.

I have made apple dumplings in this way to eat as pudding, the edge with its meaty tang not putting anyone off devouring them.

Not So Bare Bones

The aroma of ham stock pervades the house. A month to the day since I bought the Serrano ham from Aldi its remnants have this morning been hacked from the bone and frozen, to enrich stews and soups in months to come. In good Ba Ba Blacksheep style we got three bags full, plus the knuckle wrapped up separately.

The ham was advertised as 6.5kg, though I didn't weigh it, and cost £40. Those remains must total a good 750g, and even the main bone isn't going to waste, simmering with stock vegetables and herbs various in a pot with the capacity of a cricket club tea urn. When the stock is right - as soon as I finish this - I'll pour it through a sieve into a cold metal bowl to cool before skimming, which given there is a load of fat and skin in the makings may well account for 10 per cent of the volume. Some will go in the fridge for imminent use, some freeze for future value.

As I do whenever I see those annoying TV adverts for stupid piddly stock pots I'm tempted now to say balls to Marco Pierre White. That idea that a magic bought ingredient will make your cooking cheffily brilliant is just so wrong. Good ingredients can help, but a miniscule plastic pot of jellied goo probably doesn't qualify, and is not going to turn a thin ragout into a rich and fragrant feast. A properly - lovingly - made stock just may. Thus tomorrow's turkey risotto made with some of the ham stock has a decent chance of being really flavoursome, the meat and bones backed up by carrots, onions, garlic, bay, pepper, cassia bark, celery and thyme. 

On Friday I asked the Booth's butcher for some beef bones for another stock, and was surprised that he fished out two short bones from what may have been flat-rib, very meaty indeed. No charge - I heard someone say the other day that butchers pay to have the bones taken away, so welcome such requests. That price definitely fits the austerity remit. Again simmered (and carefully skimmed of gunk), but this time with lots of star anise and chillis along with the stock vegetables, they made the basis of a fine noodle soup (per SC damp noodles, though I notice that he had no problem downing plenty). Naturally both of these exercises took a lot longer than peeling the lid off a Knorr potlet, but it's worth it. One more chorus of balls to Mr W.

Not so Much Soup as Miracle Cure

With Sternest Critic somewhat poorly over the weekend Sunday lunch was made with his delicate stomach in mind. Chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin; the Chinese swear by ginger for the upset tum; and noodles are one of the great comfort foods. Thus our lunch was chosen for its healing qualities as much as culinary.

That said, the stock was delicious, simmered for two hours with the pan packed with chicken joints, veg, ginger, star anise and dried chilli, the veg including two whole garlic bulbs (not cloves, bulbs - some of the last of our home grown) to try to purge the blood, or something. It wasn't just him comforted with the dish. Making stock is therapeutic for me. It can be rushed - grating the veg is one way to push things along - but if time allows shouldn't be.

Taking time means the scum from the meat can be cleared before the veg etc are added. Do that and much of the fat is removed too. A clear and flavoursome stock is a mini-joy.

More than any other cuisine that I have come across, Spanish food delights in the consome (still can't do accents). It makes a great light starter before their heavy main courses and even salads that tend to be far chunkier than we are used to. We went for the heavy and the light in one dish, the stock almost a background to a load of noodles, though as they are bland and the stock was pretty powerful, we lost nothing in terms of taste by it. And the boy was fit enough to face roast chicken in the evening, and go to school today.

It was economic too, the chicken - one thigh and two drumsticks cost £1.50 (it wasn't exactly a consome in the end, as I tried the meat and it had enough flavour to make it worthy of inclusion); the veg - three carrots, one onion, two garlic bulbs, chunk of ginger, three sticks of celery - maybe £1.25; and the three nests of fine noodles 40p. Allowing a generous 25p for dried chilli, two star anise and half a dozen peppercorns makes a total for a substantial dish and a miracle cure of £3.40.

A Whole Ham for the Hambone?

Though Ruth said I was being foolish to do so, I went early to Aldi to buy - on the day they were to be in store - one of their Serrano hams advertised at £49.99 with knife, stand and sharpening steel. For some reason (it being sold cheaper on the internet apparently) it was actually £39.99. Not surprisingly perhaps the one I got at 8:30 was the last then in stock, the store having opened at 8:00.

The ham weighs 6.5kg, so quite a bit to go at over the Christmas break. It will make life easy when we have friends and neighbours (who generally are friends anyway) over. I'm looking forward to the meat, but having a hambone with which to make stock is a massive bonus. For the next few days I'll be thinking of recipes for the scraps and the mis-shapes too as we try to cut see-through slices. Omelette, pizza, risotto, tiny cubes in paella...

As per a previous post, however, the simplicity of the thing appeals hugely too. Any of us fancying a snack or a quick starter will be able - with a bit of practice - to dig in. It does take practice, as we found pre-Joe when I brought a whole cured ham back from France, nestled among the wine that filled the boot at the end of every continental business trip by car. We had no long thin knife then, and so every other slice was too thick, chewed determinedly or cut up and used in stews etc. 

Cooking with the stuff is not, though, the real point of it. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity again: ham, bread, wine, salad, talk. And more ham. That's the point.

Elegance for Pennies - Floaty Cheese Dumplings

This post harks back to the whole austerity cooking thing of buying the most bang for your buck, as yesterday I made some very pretty little cheese dumplings with Parmesan. Any well-flavoured hard cheese would do, but Parmesan was to hand so I used it. A cheese with little flavour would have been cheap compared to Parmesan, but more would have been needed which balances it all out. You gets what you pays for. And for the same flavour cheap cheese would have meant eating much more fat.

The cheese was in fact free to be honest, as I just returned from a press trip to Parma with a suitcase weighed down with some wonderful samples, gratefully received, though I had some in my fridge anyway and it is what I would have reached for.

In the morning I had made some chicken stock with the carcase of a bird roasted at the weekend and a few pot vegetables - turnips past the first flush of youth, a carrot, sage, onion, garlic, leeks, par-cel and bay all from the garden or allotment, and a half chilli looking sad and unwanted. To make it more substantial as a first course and to use up a dried-out bread roll I later made some dumplings to poach in the stock.

Bloke cooking means no precise measurements were made, but in rough terms I used about half the crumbs from the roll, added the yolks of two eggs, some seasoning, and maybe three or four tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan. The egg whites were beaten till stiff-ish, a little stirred into the crumb/cheese mix to loosen it, then the rest incorporated as lightly as possible. More crumbs were needed to make a consistency that would hold together. In wet hands I formed the resulting mix into big marble shaped and sized pieces, and dropped them into the simmering stock to poach for about five minutes.

The results looked and tasted so good - they were really light and soft, (very different from my usual efforts in meat stews) that they were served out of the stock with more cheese grated on them, the stock served as a consome after them.