In Flaubert country

It isn't difficult to see why Emma Bovary envisaged for herself such a life of bucolic bliss after growing up in Normandy. The undulating countryside, idyllic villages, and dramatic coastline vibrate with a romanticism and purity that is largely unsullied by modernity. Gloss over the happenings of 1944 and their aftermath and there is little to distinguish the landscape from how it might have looked 150 years ago. Close your eyes and all you smell is the sea, all you hear is the swell of the ocean, and the (incessant) squawk of gulls. No trains chuntering past; traffic sporadic at best; sirens? You kidding? It is utterly peaceful.

But let me tell you, some bad shit went down round here. Nazi officers occupied the very house that we ate dinner in on our first night. Elsewhere in the village, the grandmother of my dear friend Danielle returned home to find it had been used as a field hospital for the German army. Out of spite the recently vanished soldiers had blocked sinks and drains and turned the taps on, leaving the house 6 inches deep in water and rising. Going down into the basement she found a lone Nazi soldier, too poorly to have left with his division and close to death. The collaboration was in full flow, and to be discovered housing one of the enemy was to, at best, be ostracized for life; at worse, well....She fed the invalid supper and ordered him to leave. He died before reaching the end of the garden.

Down on the beach, lazily gazing along the cliff tops yields further reminders of this terrible moment in history. The chalky battlements are punctuated by concrete pill boxes, sinister evidence of a time that everyone would rather forget. Further west from the sleepy village of Yport the cliffs spill down onto Le Havre, where allied bombardment of the German stronghold spared but the churches, leaving a wasteland little improved by the post-war industrialisation. Yet further on you come to Colleville-sur-Mer, also known as Omaha Beach, where thousands of American troops were killed on D-Day. In short, there must be a lot of lost souls in Normandy.

And yet there is an air of positivity. Those still around today will happily talk about their experiences, their lives strangely enriched by having lived through such an extraordinary time. Or perhaps it is just because they eat so well. Because my word did we eat well. Lunch was, in a funny way, always the highlight. Cold cuts, salads, tarts and pates. Chunks of creamy coulommiers were slapped onto roughly hewn hooves of baguette and washed down with cider. Heart-stoppingly rich pork rillettes were similarly gobbled uncomplainingly. Indeed, bread became a vehicle for pretty much everything. A starter of mushrooms on toast was a particular highlight:

Champignons a la Normande


Serves 8

25g butter
2 tablespoons oil
2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced
225ml cider
225ml double cream
500g button mushrooms, quartered
A lemon
8 slices of pain de mie or a rustic loaf
A handful of parsley or chives
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a large saucepan with the oil. Add the onions, season with salt and pepper, cover and sweat over a low heat for 30-60 minutes (the longer the better), stirring every few minutes. Your onions should be rich, soft and lightly caramelised. The kitchen should smell heavenly and you should want to bury your face in the onions. You might choose to add a little crushed garlic here. I don't think it's necessary, but by all means do.

Increase the heat and add the cider. Bring it to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes until the alcohol has cooked off. Add the cream and bring to a simmer before adding the mushrooms. Cover and simmer until the mushrooms are cooked - 15-20 minutes - stirring occasionally. Add the juice of the lemon and keep warm. Toast the bread and roughly chop your herbs. Serve the mushrooms on the toast scattered with a generous handful of herbs and another squeeze of lemon juice.


A simple tarte a l'oignons made for another elegant lunch, though slightly marred by some careless shopping on my part. Ideally buy anchovy fillets (not whole anchovies, as in the picture) and arrange them in a lattice over the top of the tart.



Serves 6-8

Shortcrust pastry - I couldn't be arsed to make my own, though it's always better to
6 large onions, peeled and sliced
50g butter
2 teaspoons finely chopped thyme leaves
2 egg
100ml double cream
100g grated comte or emmental (optional)
a tin of anchovy fillets
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and add the onions. Season with salt and pepper and gently cook until you've reached the stage explained above.

Meanwhile, roll out your pastry and lay it into a tart tin, pricking it a few times with a fork. Chill in the fridge for half an hour (the tart, that is).

Preheat the oven to 170C. Line the tart tin with baking parchment and pour in some baking beans, or some old pasta. (What you're doing is holding the tart shell in place so that it holds its shape as it cooks.) Put in the oven and 'blind bake' for 25-30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and pour away the beans (saving for the next time you make a tart). Whisk the eggs and, with a pastry brush (though kitchen towel does the job) lightly brush the pastry case with egg wash (you won't need much). Return to the oven for 5 more minutes.

Meanwhile, stir the thyme into the onions and remove from the heat. Cool for a couple of minutes before stirring in the cream, the cheese, and finally the rest of your whisked egg. Mix together thoroughly and season with salt and pepper. Pour into your waiting pastry case and arrange the anchovy fillets artfully on top. Slide into the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes until set.

Cool for a good hour before serving with a green salad.

Lot of cream in these recipes, I know. That's Normandy. That's also me, sure. But mainly it's Normandy. A la Normande pretty much just means 'add cream and cider'. I didn't complain, though by the end of our daily prandial plethora of cream and butter there was little room for anything but a piece of fruit and a nap.




At dinner I tried to ease off on the cream, though that didn't mean we couldn't eat handsomely and indulgently. One ingredient that seemed to be everywhere, and that intrigued me (having never come across it before) was foie de lotte - monkfish liver. If you've ever seen a monkfish you will know how terrifying they look. If you've ever eaten monkfish you will know how delicious they taste. Their livers do little to buck this trend. They are vast. I didn't want to imagine how big the owner of the particular one that I bought must have been, its liver being, no exaggeration, 2 foot long and as thick as a beef fillet. I was tickled by the idea of farming foie de lotte like foie gras, imagining the intrepid farmer trying to force feed a fish that could devour his dog like an old twix.

The flavour of the liver was extraordinary - rich and fishy, in its incarnation below the dressing was essential as a foil to the intensity of the flesh. I'd like to track down some of this stuff in London to experiment with - it's terribly cheap - so if anyone knows where I might find some do point me in the right direction.

Salade de foie de lotte


Serves 4

A piece of monkfish liver, about 6 inches long
25g butter
A little oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons dijon mustard
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 slices of pain de mie
Frisee salad leaves
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a frying pan with a little oil and warm over a medium heat. Season the liver with pepper and a pinch of salt and add to the pan. There should be a gentle sizzle, not the sort of hiss you'd look for when cooking a steak. Leave the liver for 5 minutes while you make the dressing.

Whisk together the vinegar and mustard, then whisk in the olive oil before seasoning with salt and pepper. Carefully turn the liver and cook for a further 5 minutes on the other side, basting with the butter continually. It should be lightly caramelised and rich, without having to thick a crust.

Remove the pan from the heat and rest the monkfish while you toast the bread. Cut the toast into rounds and arrange the salad on plates. Put the toast on the salad, slice the monkfish and put a slice of liver on each piece of toast, before drizzling generously with the dressing. Serve immediately.


There are many other recipes I'd love to divulge, though I fear this post has already drifted into the realms of self-indulgence (as did the holiday). After all, it's the month of holidays, and you have better things to do than read my ramblings - like telling me about your own favourite holiday recipes. Bring them on.

A bientot

I'm quaffing cider and munching cheese in Normandy for 10 days. Full update on return. Until then.

Carluccio's, St. Pancras

It must be a difficult thing to become extremely successful while remaining in touch with your own human limitations. History is littered like the streets of Shoreditch with the stories of great men who bit off more than they could chew. Napoleon, Hitler (when I say 'great' I don't mean like, "hey, what a great guy", I mean, you know...impressive, in their own psychopathic bastard kind of way), Hannibal, Ricky Ponting. These men - wildly, ruthlessly ambitious, just didn't know when to say 'enough is enough'.

Neither, it would seem, do many chefs. Gordon Ramsay, if reports are to be believed, is a whisker away from filing for bankruptcy, having tried to break a record by opening a restaurant in every city in the world. Unfortunately he did this just as the global economy came to a shuddering standstill. In 'Kitchen Confidential', Anthony Bourdain warns potential restaurateurs of this very problem - just because one of your restaurants is booming, that in no way means that another one will be as successful. Yet Antonio Carluccio, the godfather of southern Italian cooking, and one of the most charming men on the planet, is in danger of falling into this trap and badly overcooking the Carluccio's franchise, if my dinner last week was anything to go by.

I was seeing my mother onto a 7 o' clock train at Kings Cross, and so we decided to treat ourselves to an early supper, and I tell you what, I'd forgotten how fucking horrendous that statue at yon end is. What were they thinking? It's an absolute monstrosity - the man's wearing a nerdy little rucksack for chrissakes! No chic little overnight bag at his feet - a rucksack. Beggars belief. Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower so much that his favourite restaurant was in the tower itself, as it was the only place where he didn't have to look at it (though with his head so far up his arse it's a wonder he was able to see anything at all). Perhaps subconsciously following similar snobbish principles we made a beeline for the restaurant below the statue - Carluccio's - and ate a pitifully average meal.

Nothing was bad, per se, just woefully indifferent. Bruschetta that was neither charred nor garlicky enough; a green salad with Parmesan for my mother that was fine but a rip-off even at £4. My sister's boyfriend's calamari were clearly frozen and rubbery, and lacking the salty crispness that one so yearns for in calamari. My antipasti were good (the foccaccia exceptional), with particularly tasty meats, but the bits that had been, I hope, made on the premises - roasted peppers and pesto - really let the side down, lacking seasoning and zip.

My heart had leapt when I saw spaghetti alle vongole on the menu. It was less buoyant when the dish arrived. It's hard to say why this dish wasn't a success. The clams seemed fresh enough, the chilli poky enough, the spaghetti cooked well... I just don't know. It didn't feel loved. Mum's vitello tonnato found itself in a similar category. Adequate but underwhelming. Mary's penne with sausage tasted like it had been made ahead in a central kitchen, along with the sauce to go to Bristol, Reading, Manchester, Leicester etc, as I suspect it was. Again, it was fine - if a friend served it at home you'd probably quite enjoy it. But not for £7.60. Even looking at the menu I can't remember what Adam ate. It can't have been very good.

A shared chocolate pudding wrestled a positive out of the meal, though that is hardly testament to the skill of the kitchen. If that thing was made on site I'm a Dutchman. Adam and I went for the vin santo with cantucci. Though the little biscuits were good, the wine tasted like it came from a bottle that had been open too long, slightly bitter and stale-tasting.

It was far from being a bad meal, but it highlighted the flaw in the franchise. Antonio Carluccio has been absolutely instrumental in helping to diffuse the idea of 'less is more' when it comes to cooking - just a few choice ingredients cooked well. Unfortunately it is this very concept that is his downfall. Because when these few ingredients are not cooked with complete care and attention, and not sourced from the very best places, they, like Napoleon in Russia, inevitably fall short of the mark.

The silk purse

You can't, as Aristotle once said, shine a shite. If a piece of fruit is rotten, let it rot; if a piece of meat has gone off, throw it away; and if you are Prime Minister and not a naturally handsome or smiley sort, well then so be it - wearing make up and a grin that makes you look like a bipolar Shrek is only going to frighten the children. But we are a nation of turd polishers, locked in interminable attempts to rebuild that which should be knocked down, tippex that which should be erased, justify that which should be forgotten about. Betjeman was dead right.

Or was he? A particularly successful bit of poo polishing has happened only recently in my home town of Ripon. The area behind Philip Hall, "Ripon's very own department store" (and somewhere that has to be seen to be believed), was, until a couple of years ago, the most desolate, depressing piece of land imaginable. Walking into that car park from the aforementioned retro (not in a good way) Philip Hall was like walking through the back of a wardrobe, but instead of walking into Narnia, you found you'd walked into Warsaw, c.1940. To say there were potholes would suggest that there were also areas of flat, solid concrete. Instead, the entire surface of this sump-cracking wilderness undulated with boulders and fractures, the aftermath of an earthquake so artfully recreated, if only it were intentional. Dead trees lined crumbling walls, cats scratched around the bins for last night's pizza from the eternally moribund Italian restaurant, and the smell of smoke and nicotine drifted across the wasteland from the lung of William Hill in the south-east corner. It was an abject disgrace.

Fast forward to June 2009 and the years of closed roads, diversions and drilling seem worth it. The car park, for one, now has real bays and everything, and is flat and concreted and really rather smart. The seemingly recession-proof Philip Hall is somehow, impossibly, still there (though Ripon wouldn't be Ripon without it), but across the concourse now stand our two newest imports - an Argos, that most surreal of shopping experiences, and the uber-fancy, up-yours-Waitrose northern supermarket, Booths. And it is super. Sure, it's expensive, but it's big and light, and the jars are all shiny and contain stuff you'd want to eat. Even the ready meals look good. And - AND - the basket check out actually says "10 items or fewer". A grammatically accurate upmarket supermarket is exactly what we've been waiting for up here. I give it 6 months.

Perhaps a more elegant way of phrasing Aristotle's somewhat crude version is the old adage "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". Well I disagree. I mean, you can't literally do this, sure, but the implication that a sow's ear is a lost cause is a foolish one, a proclamation by somebody who clearly had no interest in food. The only bit of a pig that you can't eat is its oink. A pig's head, in all its various permutations, is utterly delicious - ears, tongue, cheeks, brain, snout, they all play an important role in the gastronomic tapestry and history of the world. One of the better things I've eaten lately was fried pig's head in the Albion in Bristol, a breaded and fried pig cake of the most tender meat, singing with gribiche, topped by a less apologetic manifestation of pig's head (in that it was just the meat, unadorned, unfussy, unbelievable), and then finished with a poached duck egg. It was perfection, and anyone squeamish about the idea of eating pig's head would do well to try that dish.

Yesterday it was the ears I was after. Two quivering, pink, waxy (I know), hairy (yep), ears that I had swiped from Martin and Rachel (who run a forest garden at home) before they embarked upon their day's butchery.



I started by trimming the hair with a pair of kitchen scissors before singeing off the remaining stubble with a cigarette lighter (a blowtorch would have been considerably more effective). Next job was to get the ears clean. You'd be amazed at the nooks and crannies that wax finds its way into. The best method is to wrap a couple of pieces of kitchen roll around a sharpening steel and working it into all the gaps until you have two clean ears.

Pop the ears in a medium saucepan, cover with water and add some peppercorns, a bay leaf, and a handful of thyme. You might also add a few crushed juniper berries and a clove or two, though considering the end product I'm not sure there's much point. Cover the saucepan, bring to a boil and simmer for 3 hours, maybe more. My final product was crisp, though still had a strip of cartilage running through the middle that had the look and texture of calamari. I'm not convinced it's possible to get rid of this.

After three hours, remove the ears, shake dry and place on separate plates. Flatten them out as best you can, and pop one plate on top of the other, then a final plate on top of that with something to hold it down. The idea is to press the ears so that when you come to roasting/frying them they won't curl up. Once thoroughly weighed down, refrigerate for a couple of hours.



Preheat the oven to 250C.

Remove the ears from the fridge and place on a roasting tray. Season generously on both sides with sea salt and olive oil, and pop in the oven for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile make the tartare sauce:

2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons mustard
A pinch of salt
200ml olive oil
juice of half a lemon
2 tablespoons chopped gherkins
1 tablespoon chopped capers
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley

Whisk the egg yolks with the salt and mustard, then slowly whisk in the olive oil. You want to start with the merest of trickles. Then as you see the mixture emulsifying (ie coming together) you can start being more bold, by which I mean a gentle, steady stream, never more forceful than a little cream being elegantly poured over a duchess's dessert. When you have a lovely, thick, wobbly mayonnaise (for this is indeed what you have), whisk in the lemon juice, gherkins, capers and parsley. Taste and adjust the acidity of necessary. Ideally the tartare sauce needs to be, well, tart.

Now, when the half hour is up, turn the pig's ears over and roast for a further 5 minutes, just to ensure the underside is crispy. Remove from the oven and rest for 5 minutes, before slicing and serving with the tartare sauce. It's up to you whether or not you tell people what they're eating. I like to see people's faces when I tell them what it is, and silently judge them if they refuse to at least try a little. Though you might prefer the more cruel method if offering your guests 'crackling' before revealing the truth.

Either way, it's silly for people to be squeamish about these things. The pig we ate was a happy little thing, free range and as good as organic (though Martin and Rachel, quite rightly, see no need to fart about jumping through hoops in order to be 'certified' - 'organic' means nothing these days). Compared to the kind of pork one finds in a supermarket (yes, even Booths) a nibble on this little piggie's ear is far less abhorrent than a budget pork chop. And just tell me, what on earth is the difference between eating a pig's ear and a pig's arse?

The unbearable wetness of sweating

It's blinkingly hot outside. I'm up north for a week doing a cooking job at a rather wonderful 13th century house just south of Ripon, and while cranking out endless lemon polenta cakes (or 'lemon placenta cake' as one of my brother's friends once called it when waitering for me) is just about bearable on a drizzly day, when the weather is like this it is not much fun. I want to be swimming in the river, or fishing, or, ideally, sitting with a book and a beer. Even sitting in the window writing this has given my forehead a light sheen - us northerners just aren't built for the heat. I'm dreading my return to London and my stuffy bedroom. There it's a toss up between the unbearable wetness of sweating and the excruciating noise that greets me when I open my window onto the Hackney Road. It's like trying to get some kip on the hard shoulder of the M1. Industrial earplugs and an industrial fan are probably the only ways to get through this heat wave. But I'm not complaining. Last summer was utterly miserable, and I vowed never to complain about good weather again. Bring it on.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, pot-roast chicken, as I discovered a couple of nights ago, is a better summer feed than your standard roast chicken, which is associated with root vegetables, bread sauce and a roaring fire. This pullet, juicy in its light broth and perky with the accompaniment of broad beans and peas, was just the ticket.

Pot-roast chicken



Serves 4

A little groundnut oil
6 rashers of streaky smoked bacon, sliced finely
2 onions, peeled and roughly chopped
4 sticks of celery, trimmed and roughly chopped
A handful of whole and unpeeled garlic cloves
200ml white wine
A chicken, 2kg in weight or so
A bouquet garni
As many new potatoes as you think you can eat - they are fantastic cold the next day with a little Maldon sea salt
Salt and pepper

In a large saucepan (one large enough to house your fowl), heat the groundnut oil over a medium heat and add the bacon. Fry until golden, then add the butter, onions, celery and garlic, season, stir, cover and soften for 5-10 minutes, giving them a poke occasionally.

Slosh in the white wine and scrape up all the bacon bits from the bottom of the pan. Season the chicken generously, inside and out, and place on top of the vegetables. Add enough water to come halfway up, along with the bouquet garni and potatoes, and bring to the boil. Put a lid on and gently simmer for 1 hour.

After 45 minutes or so, preheat the oven to 220C. When the hour is up, remove lid and potatoes (keep them warm somewhere - they don't need to be stinking hot), and put the pan in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the skin on the chicken has crisped up (you made need to add a little oil to help it along).

Rest the chicken for 15 minutes, during which time prepare any other vegetables you want to accompany - broad beans/peas are perfect, sauted courgettes would be lovely too. Serve with the spuds and green veg, with a generous ladleful of broth.