Happy endings

When I brought these to the table, Beth instantly took a picture and sent it to her husband Tom. As he was on stage trying to make people laugh at the time, I’m sure he was thrilled.

It was my turn to host my book club. Normally, we have a wild and wonderful smörgåsbord, with everyone bringing a dish, but what with it being at my house and me being a control freak and everything, I couldn’t resist making the whole meal.

Some of us had been to see Julie and Julia together, so I decided on a simple French feast which would give me a chance to make Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignon again. (Do you do this too? If I love a dish, I often make it a few times in quite rapid succession so that my hands and eyes can ‘learn’ it.)

Reading is thirsty work.

As a nibble to go with drinks, I made warm Rosemary Cashews from Ina Garten’s Barefoot in Paris. They’re so simple, they’ve become a staple in this house – as essential to the cocktail hour as ice and good vodka. I scattered 500g of unsalted cashews on a baking sheet and toasted them at 180C/350F/Gas mark 4 for eight minutes or so until they were golden and then tossed them in a tablespoon of melted butter, a tablespoon of flaky sea salt, two teaspoons of light Muscovado sugar, two tablespoons of finely minced rosemary and half a teaspoon of sweet, smoked paprika (Ina uses cayenne, but I didn’t have any in the drawer, so paprika it was). Serve warm and watch them vanish.

To start, I made a quick salad of leaves dressed in mustardy vinaigrette and put a couple of little toasts topped with grilled goat’s cheese and some finely sliced pickled sweet chilli peppers scattered over the top. For our main event, of course it was the glorious boeuf bourguignon with boiled fir apple potatoes and buttered peas (thank you, Louisette Bertholle).

As a sweet finale, I made lemon posset, that most traditional of English puddings. To create a little entente cordiale on the plate, I served them in those little glass yoghurt pots I hauled back from France in the summer and David Lebovitz’s flawless Lemon-Glazed Madeleines on the side. Just like the boeuf bourguignon, they were so meltingly delicious, they sent me into obsessive-compulsive overdrive and I couldn’t resist making them again the next day. I took a batch to the park as a Friday treat for my 9am dog walking posse (pack?) and they vanished quicker than you can say ‘fetch’.

My second batch of madeleines in two days.

PS We read Raymond Chandler’s Farewell my Lovely. By some miracle, when Séan came home from the football (Arsenal 2 Olympiakos 0 – come on you Gooners!) at 10pm, we were actually talking about the book.

Lemon Posset

‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.’

I made 75 of these for Paula and Jack’s wedding a few weeks ago. They’re the perfect dessert in my opinion, tart and sweet, rich but refreshing, so simple to make and yet they taste as though you’ve spent hours in the kitchen. Also, you can make them the day before, which is always a good thing.

600ml double cream
150g caster sugar or vanilla sugar
The juice of 2 large lemons

Serves 6

Pour the cream into a large saucepan (it will bubble up very enthusiastically – you have been warned) and add the sugar. Warm gently, stirring to dissolve the sugar, then bring to the boil and boil for exactly 3 minutes, without stirring. Remove from the heat and whisk in the lemon juice. Strain the mixture into a jug then pour into 6 small glasses. Cool, cover then refrigerate for 4 hours before serving.

Travel narrows the mind

The roads at the ancient heart of Agde are narrow. Sometimes, you can stand in the middle of the street and – if you stretch out your arms – you touch the walls on both sides. When we first came here a few years ago, you had to hang your rubbish bags on a hook by the front door each evening because the tight little streets were impossible for a bin wagon to navigate. A man with a cart came by at dawn to collect them. These days, there’s a wheelie bin and a nippy little truck comes around each morning to empty it, so there’s no need to hang your rubbish on a hook any more. I miss that a bit. What can I say? I’m a Cancerian. I have an uncomfortable relationship with change.

The narrow streets are shady, even in the middle of the day, with a cool breeze off the Hérault river licking its way up towards the top of the town (we live on la rue Haute, it’s as high as it gets). The houses are built from sombre, volcanic basalt. So sometimes it’s not until you emerge, blinking like a sunscreen-scented mole, into one of the larger squares or onto the quais, that you realise it’s actually 30 ̊C.

Some of the things I love about summer here…

The slip-slap of rush-soled flip flops on a cobbled street.
A cloudy glass of Ricard before dinner. I am yet to try that fiendish-sounding tribute to Hemingway, the Death in the Afternoon cocktail – a measure of pastis poured into a glass of champagne. I think I’ll keep it that way.
Rising early – as soon as the Mediterranean sun curls its way across the floor of our room – and wandering onto the terrace to gaze at an horizon stained the colour of a ripe peach.
Sleeping late. Falling out of bed and into a fat paperback – one of the many that have been sitting undisturbed for months on my bedside table in London.
Swifts circling the house, celebrating their shrieking dawn and dusk patrols, and the seagulls which my friend Avril says, ‘seem to be constantly laughing’.
The house smelling of ripe charentais melons.
Eating flat peaches and cherries at every opportunity, either in their blissfully naked state or piled into sweet tarts on a pillow of frangipane.
Endless small, dark, cups of coffee under the awning of Le Plazza, while listening to the free concerts in the square (one of the benefits of having a communist mayor, sans doute).
Sitting in a smart bar on the marina at Marseillan drinking an icy glass of Noilly Prat approximately 100 metres from where it was made.
Plucking glossy, emerald green bay leaves on the banks of Hérault.
Eating sea salt caramel ice cream on the terrace of Le Commerce and wondering how I could make it at home. This is the reason why I need to go back there almost every day to sample theirs, in the interests of culinary research.
My mother, who can talk about the ancient Phoenecians as though they are sitting at the neighbouring table under the trees outside Le Capitaine, or at the very least about to row past us in a quinquereme.
If I had to have one thing for lunch every day for the rest of my life, it would be a little tartine of grilled cabécou goat’s cheese on a slice of sourdough bread with a trickle of honey and a scattering of toasted pine nuts.
There’s a beautiful roof terrace several streets away which we can see from ours. It’s filled with pots of roses, pelargoniums and pink oleander. The man who owns it is clearly a very keen gardener. Sometimes he likes to do this naked.
The little boy from the gypsy family on the corner – who always looked so sad in his thick glasses and dummy in his mouth, trailing along behind his older brothers as they performed exuberant wheelies on their bikes – has lost the dummy and gained a puppy, a floppy-eared, beagley scrap of brown, white and black fur, which he carries around under his arm all day like a beach towel. Boy and puppy seem very happy together.

What do you love about summer where you are?

Smart doors, scruffy doors, knockers and hinges…

This is one of my favourite doors in Agde, the heavy basalt door to the Eighteenth Century bakers’ oven in the house where we are staying.

Summer on a plate

Summertime, and the eating is easy. Crisp frisée lettuce glistening with mustardy, garlicky vinaigrette, mussels in every way, almost every day, merguez on the grill, earthy Puy lentils tossed with last night’s leftovers and transformed into lunch. These are the things I love.

And now, I have an accomplice. My lovely nephew Angus is here in France with us and he wants to learn how to cook. He is 16, sweet, clever, funny, kind. He is also a keen rugby player, over six feet tall, and tells me he has to eat no fewer than 4,000 calories a day. Apparently not all of these can be in the form of Nutella. This is a new challenge for me, as I spend most of my time trying to figure out how I can stop myself from eating 4,000 calories a day. At least he’s strong enough to help me carry mountains of food up the hill, (almost) without complaint.

We spend our mornings reading the regional newspaper, the Midi-Libre, together. This is of mutual benefit. He’s improving his French and, as we always seem to start with the sports section, I’m improving my knowledge of rugby. Want to know anything about the French back row? Ask me. This is not something I ever thought I would say.

By the time the newspaper is folded away, we’re on to the really big issue of the day: what shall we have for lunch? If it were up to Angus, it would probably be roast chicken. This is the recipe I’ve promised him will impress the girls. I hope you like it too.

Angus’s perfect roast chicken

We buy most of our meat from M Greffier’s Boucherie Artisanale on the rue Jean Jacques Rousseau. I asked M Greffier for a nice, roasting chicken and he enquired how many it was for. I said five, but explained that the towering teenager beside me was included in that number. He raised an eyebrow and came back with the plumpest bird I’ve ever seen, which he wrapped in pink checked paper and then placed in this highly appropriate bag.

200g unsalted butter
1 small bulb of garlic
A good handful of herbs – tarragon, parsley, chervil
A nice, plump, free-range bird of about 1.5-2kg
A bay leaf
A small onion, peeled and cut into quarters
2 lemons
A small glass of white wine
Salt and pepper

You will, if you read this blog, almost certainly want:
Some potatoes

Take the chicken out of the fridge a good 30 minutes to an hour before you want to roast it. Preheat the oven as high as it will go.

Chop most of the herbs and two cloves of the garlic very finely and pound them into a paste with about two thirds of the butter. Carefully loosen the skin of the bird with your fingers and stuff most of the butter underneath it (save a piece about the size of a large walnut), massaging it between the breasts and the skin. Season the inside of the bird with salt and pepper and place the remaining herby butter inside, along with a few sprigs of parsley and tarragon, the bay leaf, onion and the rest of the head of garlic, unpeeled but cut in half horizontally to expose the centre of the cloves. Spread the rest of the butter over the skin of the chicken, season with salt and pepper and place in a roasting tin. Cut the lemon into quarters and squeeze them over the bird. Place the squeezed-out quarters inside the cavity too. Pour the glass of wine into the roasting tin and put the bird into the oven to sizzle for 15 minutes. Turn the oven temperature down to 180C/350F/Gas mark 4 and cook for about an hour – Remember to baste it every 20 minutes or so – depending on the size of the chicken, until the juices in the thigh run clear when pierced with a knife. Squeeze over the juice of the remaining lemon, cover loosely with foil and leave to rest for 15 minutes or so before carving. Any you do not eat at the first sitting will remain perfectly flavoursome and moist for leftover sandwiches and salads.

Stuffed under the skin

If you want to make some roast potatoes to go with the chicken (and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you?), peel about 1kg of potatoes, cut them into quarters and parboil them for five minutes in lightly salted water. Drain them and let them steam for a bit in the colander so that they lose some of their moisture. When the chicken is about 25 minutes from being cooked, remove the tin from the oven and place the potatoes around the bird, turning them over in the fat. Return to the oven and when the chicken is done, squeeze over the lemon, put the bird on a warm plate to rest and put the lemon pieces in with the potatoes. Turn up the oven to 200C/400F/Gas mark 6 and cook until golden, giving the tin a rattle once or twice. These potatoes won’t be as crisp as the ones I describe in my classic roast potato recipe but they will be deliciously lemony and bathed in the chicken’s herby juices.

Green beans with onions and garlic

It’s a common misconception on our side of the Channel that in France, all vegetables are served crisp, al dente (an Italian expression, sure, though I’ve found no greater love of crispness there, either). Certainly, when I’m adding French beans to a salad I want them still to have some bite to them, but when I’m serving them hot as a side dish, there’s something very comforting about cooking them until quite soft and allowing them to take on the flavour of some good stock. Even the queen, Elizabeth David, advocated boiling them in lightly salted water for 15 minutes and then tossing them in about an ounce of butter per pound of beans.

This is not a French recipe exactly, rather one made by me from the contents of our French larder and they went rather well with the chicken.

1 large onion, finely diced
2tbsps olive oil
A knob of butter
2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
About 400g green beans, topped and tailed
About 350ml chicken stock
About 50ml crème fraîche or whole milk Greek yoghurt
Small handful of toasted pine nuts or flaked almonds
Some finely chopped mint (optional)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Warm the olive oil and butter in a large pan over a medium-low heat. Fry the onions gently, with a good pinch of salt, until soft and translucent, about 15 minutes. Add the garlic and fry for another minute or two before pouring over the stock and simmering, partially covered, for about 10 minutes. Add the green beans and simmer, with the lid on, for about 5 minutes. Remove the lid and boil vigorously for a further 5 minutes until the beans are soft and most of the liquid has evaporated.

In a small bowl, whisk together the crème fraîche or yoghurt with a good pinch of salt (you can add some finely chopped mint at this point if you like). Pour a few spoons of the hot liquid remaining in the pan into the crème fraîche or yoghurt and whisk until smooth. Pour back into the beans and stir to coat and warm through. Stir in the toasted pine nuts or almonds and serve immediately.

Cake is my drogue of choice

Ever since we began coming here four years ago, I never feel like I’m really ‘here’ unless – on some pretext, real or invented – I’ve visited the Droguerie Centrale. In part, I’m fascinated by the word, droguerie. Why? And why not the rather beautiful quincaillerie, which also means hardware store. Perhaps once upon a time, in among the carpet beaters, mousetraps, rolling pins, watering cans, fly swatters and bottles of turpentine, there was a corner devoted to medications too? If so, it’s the only thing they no longer seem to stock.

This year, my pretext is cake, yoghurt cake to be precise – a phrase which, when uttered to any French person, is almost guaranteed to elicit tales of visits to a favourite auntie’s house, after school snacks and many, many suggestions on how to make it. I love its simplicity. A French yoghurt pot holds 125ml (half an American cup measure, I think). Once you’ve measured out the yoghurt, you wash and dry the pretty glass jar and then use it to measure the rest of your ingredients.

So I had my inspiration but what I didn’t have was a tin. A simple question, you’d think, ‘I’m looking for a tin to bake a yoghurt cake in’? It took Monsieur Droguerie Centrale about five minutes to introduce me to his full range. ‘You have the classic, then non stick – here’s a round one, or a loaf tin. Or perhaps the kind with the loose bottom, then you have this one, which is a simple tin but with the insert you can also use it to bake baba au rhum, and this one, you can also use to make a charlotte.’ I followed him around the tiny shop, trying not to trip over a plastic sack of corks the size of a bean bag, a towering Pisa of colourful buckets … all the time trying to drag French cake tin vocabulary from the baking recess of my brain.

In the end, I decided on a Pyrex loaf-shaped dish because, today, I quite like the idea of fat little slices of cake rather than wedges, and I thought I could also probably make terrines in it too. If I do, you’ll be the first to know.

Droguerie inside deep

Yoghurt cake

You can make a plain cake, which will certainly be delicious. But I had some lovely, fat sultanas and pine nuts from the market in the cupboard and I wanted to use them. I soaked the sultanas in some Earl Grey for half an hour or so before adding them, which isn’t essential but I like it. You could also, very happily, use simple vegetable oil instead of the olive oil, but I think olive oil gives it a slightly less sweet, more perfumed flavour which I like. If you prefer, orange zest would be lovely in place of the lemon.

1 pot of whole milk yoghurt
2 pots of caster sugar
3 pots of plain flour
1 sachet (11g) of baking powder
A good pinch of salt
2 eggs
½ pot of good, fruity extra virgin olive oil
Zest of a small lemon
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 pot sultanas (soaked in Earl Grey if you like)
½ pot pine nuts
A little butter for greasing the tin

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Lightly grease a cake tin about 24cm diameter by 6cm high, or, as I did, a Pyrex dish about 30cmx6cmx6cm. Line the base with baking parchment and butter the paper.

Ingredients

I like the way that the sugar came in a ‘milk’ carton. It makes it very easy to measure out the exact amount.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and then stir in the yoghurt and olive oil until well combined. Pour the liquid into the flour mixture, beating gently and thoroughly with a wooden spoon as you go until everything is well combined. Fold in the zest, vanilla extract, sultanas and pine nuts. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for about 25-30 minutes until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. (I overcooked mine a bit. I’m not sure if it was the Pyrex or the strange oven which cooks slightly hotter than mine at home – tant pis, it was still delish.) Cool in the tin for 5 minutes and then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Sometimes, when I’m abroad, I’ll buy ingredients just because their packaging looks pretty. In this case, I actually did need this baking powder for my cake…

Scrap table

I was VERY excited to find this pretty little table dumped by the rubbish outside of a neighbouring house. It’s the kind of modest, distressed little thing which would cost a rather distressing fortune in a London shop. I dragged it into the house, gave it a good scrub and now it’s sitting happily under the window – the perfect place to rest a cup of tea, read a book, write a postcard..

Market day

Wednesday night, I go to bed with that unsettled, excited feeling of a child on the eve of her birthday, or Christmas, or some much-longed-for trip to the seaside. Tomorrow is market day.

However early I get up, however quickly I shower and dress, by the time I stroll down the narrow lane to the Place du Jeu de Ballon, the market is already busy. The best tables at the Café Plazza are crammed with whiskery men, gossiping over their breakfast glasses of rouge, and brisk women in neat skirts and neater haircuts, full baskets at their feet and small dogs, some kind of Yorkshire terrier or Westie usually, on their laps. Other dogs – rangy, muscly scruffy spaniels, hounds and herding dogs – wander the market with the glint of the hills in their eyes, a reminder (along with the stall selling knives so sharp you could cut yourself just looking at them) that this is hunting country.

The upper part of the market nearest our house is where you go to buy everything from Marseilles soap to cheap toys, straw bags in a hundred colours, underwear for all tastes and sizes- vamp to vieillarde, huge bottles of bleach, corkscrews, salad spinners, plastic buckets and olive wood bowls. It’s May, so the stalls next to the library are carpeted with trays of geraniums, heliotrope and verbena which, in a few weeks, will tumble down from window boxes like flags hung above the narrow, winding streets. One stall sells pots of tomatoes, peppers, onions, beans and courgettes destined for potagers and, ultimately, cooking pots across the town and its surrounding villages.

But the most exciting part of the market lies a short walk along the rue de l’Amour to the Place Gambetta. Here, you could gather cheeses, charcuterie, sourdough loaves, sparkly-eyed fish, oysters, asparagus and gariguette strawberries until your basket scraped the ground under the weight of all that deliciousness. And I have done just that – in summers, when we’ve had a houseful – but it’s spring and I have to keep reminding myself that we are but four.

Only in France...

Ok, so this last picture I’m throwing in as my little weekend plaisanterie. The woman who runs the leather purses and wallets stall now has a little sideline in canine and feline fashion, modelled coquettishly by her silky Yorkie, who trots along the stall demonstrating what all the best pooches will be wearing this summer (except mine).

Market mussels with merguez

I had in my head a dish for dinner which involves frying chorizo and clams together but – in the best tradition of market shopping – my plans were thwarted by a lack of clams. And chorizo. I had to make it up as I went along – mussels instead of clams and merguez instead of chorizo. It was pretty good. So good, in fact, we all dived in before I had a chance to take a picture, so you’ll have to trust me that it looked good too.

Serves 4

1 tbsp olive oil
4 merguez sausages, about the size of a long, fat index finger, cut into chunks
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
2 ripe tomatoes, deseeded and diced
About half a bottle of white wine
1.5 – 2kg fresh mussels, cleaned
About 80g crème fraîche
1 spring onion, white and pale green part only, finely chopped
1 handful of parsley leaves, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Lots of crusty bread to mop up the juices

In a large, lidded saucepan, gently heat the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the chunks of merguez and fry until they release their spicy, red fat and take on some colour. Scoop them out of the pan and set aside. Add the onions and lower the temperature a bit. Sauté until soft and translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for a further minute, then add the tomatoes and fry until pulpy and soft. Pour in the white wine, raise the temperature a bit and bring to the boil. Simmer for about 5 minutes, then add the mussels. Put the lid on the pan and cook, rattling the pan a couple of times, until the mussels have opened (discard any which do not), about 3-4 minutes. Strain the sauce into a clean pan (keep the mussels warm, in their existing pan with the lid on), bring to the boil, remove from the heat and whisk in the creme fraiche until smooth, then stir in the parsley and spring onion. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Serve the mussels in warmed bowls with the sauce ladled over the top – with lots of good bread to mop up the juices.

The market pictures here are a mere hors d’oeuvre. Séan took lots more so, if you’d like a second helping, he put together a little film which you can view here.