On my recent return from an excellent gastronomic romp through France, what an honour it was to be begged by the editor of Food Monthly to contribute to these highly esteemed and extremely posh pages, though the words 'time', 'ruddy' and 'about' rose and browned soufflé-like in the hotly miffed fan-oven of my mind (food writers, watch your backs).Said editor's grovelling aside, she'd come to the right man and I'll tell you why. It's because I'm probably the only French food expert that'll tell you straight that there's no mystery to the blinking stuff. You don't even have to understand the lingo for crying out loud. 'Oui', 'non' and 'gracias' are all you need to get yourself fed and watered in France and if you're too stupid to remember those three words then pointing at something on a menu and then at your gob is 'feed me' in anybody's language!Quite frankly, given the Frenchies haven't got enough of their own words and so have stolen and misspelled loads of ours, all sorts of recognisable delicacies can be teased out of the most unhelpful of Parisian menus. 'Moules Mariniere', for instance; any twit with a vague knowledge of the alphabet can get from 'Moules' to mules and 'Mariniere' to mariner and safely come out with seafaring donkeys. Another squeeze of the old loaf and bingo: seahorses! They don't get my taste buds a jumpin' but there you go.
'Gratin Dauphinois'. There's another one. Grated dolphin. See? Easy. On a more sinister note, 'Les Poissons' on a menu is a friendly warning that Les, the chef, is on tonight, Paris St Germain are three-down to Man-U, so we Brits better check our garlic seahorses for strychnine.
You get my point, I trust. There's no need to starve over there if you keep your wits about you.
It was deep in the lovely French countryside that I found myself slightly more comfortable with the nosh, I must say - the TGV train from Gare de Lyon firing me into its depths at 200 miles an hour to halt at some delightful, though unpronounceable, rural village where walrus-faced men rode bicycles and ancient, dust-drenched women trudged along, towering stacks of firewood on Gallic shoulders too tired to shrug. (Food writers, beat that, suckers.) T'was amid this rustic idyll that I fell upon a deliciously exquisite delicacy the natives call 'coq au vin'. (That's chicken in wine if you're thick. And if you're not thick, it's still chicken in wine.) I don't know if you can get it over here but it's nothing you can't knock up at home. Gordon Ramsay, wash your mouth out and write this down:
Coq au vin
1. Get a chicken drunk on red wine.
2. Wait until the chicken falls asleep and wring its neck. Or get an alcoholic chicken that was dying anyway. Or get one from the shops (recommended).
3. Fry onions and garlic in a big pan.
4. Add dead chicken.
5. Add bottle of red wine.
6. Simmer for two hours.
7. Add more wine.
8. Add garlic.
9. Simmer for another couple of hours.
10. Go out and get more wine.
11. Add more wine.
12. Boil for three hours then serve (with glass of red wine if you've got any left).
It's the absolute dog's trousers. Have that one on me, Gordon, you'll clean up with it.
My esteemed editor reminds me that I haven't said anything about the country's fine wines. She's right. I wasn't going to but ... Oh, all right then, she's the boss and I want her to plug my book at the end.
French wine
French wine or 'plonk' as the natives call it, like all wines from around the world, tastes like cough medicine to me. Cook with it, fine, but just half a glass down my gullet and I'm bumping into the furniture and jabbering like a basket case. So that's the wine covered then.
There is a certain item of French cuisine I advise the inexperienced traveller to steer well clear of: 'Fruits de Mer'. Fruits de Ruddy Nightmare, more like. This stuff is evil on a plate with ice. Ice! It arrives on a three-tiered-platter contrivance writhing with seriously ugly marine crustaceans hellbent on eating you alive. Literally. They're alive and they literally eat you! The little monsters sneak off your plate and take chunks out of your wrists while you're grappling with a tricky artichoke or something. Look, I'll try anything once: snails, frogs' legs, larks' tongues, a sparrow on a stick. Ox bowels? Bring 'em on. But food that physically attacks your person? You can stuff it. It's typical of French chefs, if you ask me. They flout every health and safety directive sent from Brussels and set raw, man-eating grub on you simply to save a few euros on the ruddy gas bill.
And artichokes! What's that about? Dismantling one is a three-hour surgical procedure ending with chucking most of the stupid thing into your finger bowl. And no wonder. It's a ruddy thistle, for crying out loud!
So the only mystery about French food, as far as I'm concerned, is why anyone eats half the blooming stuff. For a nation that gets so much right; art, culture, crochette, culottes, how does it get so much wrong? Driving on the wrong side of the road and stinky cheese, for instance. The country's knee-deep in cheese and it's really not anything to write home about. Try this at home if you've got the stomach for it (Gordon, get out that pen and paper):
Stinky French cheese
1. Take an ordinary piece of English (non-smelly) cheese.
2. Prepare a smelly sock by wearing it for two or three days.
3. Insert cheese into sock.
4. Leave in sunny spot in the garden for a week.
5. Remove cheese from sock with gloves and tongs before serving, and enjoy friends' comments such as: 'Hey, this cheese really stinks. Is it French?'
On re-reading my excellent article thus far, I feel I'm possibly painting a too disparaging picture of the country's eating habits. After all, I was but merely passing through, as 'twere. For all I know, Monsieur Pierpoint, the local brassiere owner, may well sit down with the kitchen staff and tuck into Cumberland sausage and mash of an evening while the rest of us are locked in mortal combat with the ruddy Fruits de Mer out front. Les, the chef, probably enjoys fish and chips behind closed curtains with Madam Les and the nippers in front of the football. Could the French really be fobbing us off with home-grown haute cuisine while actually tucking en masse into meat'n' two like the rest of us? It puts a whole new slant on secret eaters, doesn't it?
Well, two can play at that game, when you think about it. In fact, next time I go through the Channel Tunnel I'll be armed with a suitcase stuffed with sandwiches. Oh yes. Then once seated in some extremely posh brassiere off the rue de Longchamp, or somewhere sounding just as silly and having successfully ordered a grated dolphin (via the old 'point to menu then to gob' technique) I've got at least 15 minutes to demolish a couple of egg-and-cress sandwiches under the table. Once replete, and the snooty waiter having returned (with something looking nothing like a grated dolphin), my task is to now dispose of whatever muck's on the plate in front of me.
Am I daunted? Am I buggered. I've found most posh restaurants to be amply equipped with handy receptacles in which to dispose of inedible food morsels. The floral table arrangement, obviously. The depths of a silver sugar bowl. The palatial Gucci handbag belonging to the woman sitting behind. And, if I'm lucky, when the irritating accordion player sidles up to serenade her with some Parisian dirge or other ... Plop! What's left slips off the plate into the back of his pantaloons. Bingo. Bring on the second course. But that's next time. This year's gastronomic romp is far from over.
I arrive in Cannes, on the French Riviera, in time for its famous film festival, where, being the kind of man I am, I'm soon rubbing shoulders with the cream of the moving picture industry. It was while in conversation with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola (a director I think), Stevie Spielberg (ditto) and Gerry Depardieu (?) that I discovered what I'd been looking for all along. For whilst waiters zigzagged amidst the stars on the red carpet, foisting foie gras and truffle vol-au-vents on unsuspecting foreigners, Stevie Spielberg invited me to his hotel suite for hamburgers and Coke! He'd had them flown in from Hollywood fresh that day! They were absolutely brilliant, just like English burgers but better.
We all had a good laugh about that later, though, because, as Frank Coppola pointed out, there's a dozen blinking burger bars on every corner in Cannes! How we laughed ... and Gerry Depardieu (French actor, as it turned out) announced he was opening a ruddy fish and chip shop on the seafront so French people could get what they've been missing out on all these years! My kind of guy, Gerry. I stuck around yapping with Nicole Kidman for a bit then came home.
So like I said, there's no need to starve in France if, like me, you've got half a brain cell. Happy eating, gracias and adieu.
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