My kingdom for a knife that cuts!

A knife – that cuts

A knife that cuts, a knife that cuts – my kingdom for a knife that cuts!

It is a mystery – albeit not, perhaps, one of Earth’s greatest – how some people view self catering.

We are, as we have been for the past six summers, in a self-catering cottage in Collioure.

On Saturday, after our overnight sleeper from Paris had pulled to a halt at the little station above the ville, we wandered down into the village, found our abode for the duration and dumped the cases, and headed out to Delice Catalans for breakfast.

A quick stock-up of basics in the little Carrefour followed – water, bog roll, kitchen paper, oil, vinegar, fromage frais and rhubarb compote (the last two combine for my breakfast) – and then it was off to the beach.

We ate out that evening: a pleasant – if not stunning – meal at Saffran Bleu, where we’d first tasted dorade some summers ago.

So why bother with self-catering? There are plenty of reasons: not least, that it is ultimately far more relaxing than having to abide by a hotel’s schedules and, of course, there is the food.

With a twice-weekly market as good as the one here, who wouldn’t want to cater for themselves – at least for part of the time?

Sunday marked this year’s first visit for produce.

First up was the usually grumpy man at the organic tomato stall, who grinned broadly, reached over the orange, green, striped, yellow and red tomatoes to shake my hand and ask how I was.

A bag of these divine fruits in hand – I really do dream about them for 13 months of the year – I headed to find Caro, who sells lovely charcuterie and regional cheeses. Fruit was added, and a campagne gris from the nearest boulangerie.

That done, it was back to the house and, with everything neatly stashed in it’s proper place, off to the beach, where Cyril had transats waiting for us.

Lunch brought with it our second chance to eat out.

This was, as per annual ritual, at St Elme, which is right behind the beach. It’s rather touristy, and I get bored of it very quickly, but for the first few days, it hits the spot.

We had steak haché with a fried egg and chips.

But it was in the evening, after we’d returned from sunning ourselves, that the problem hit: where oh where was there a knife that would cut charcuterie and tomato and fruit?

Last year, we had the lunacy of an electric bin: this year, there is not a knife in the place that will cut anything other than hot butter.

There is lashings of cutlery, a plethora of glasses and plenty of plates – but just two paring knives that could be safely given to a toddler, a small serrated knife that is hardly razor sharp, and a bread knife for ... well, bread.

Fortunately, the oversight does not extend to a bottle opener.

What sort of self-catering does that represent?

That night, we muddled through. On Monday, however, with no obvious kitchenware shop in the village, I headed to a local shop that specialises in knives and the odd samurai sword jobby; so sharp it could split a hair. I even managed a conversation with the man in the shop after he asked if it was for a present, using my pigeon French to explain the situation.

He indicated that it was a similar issue in many of the houses that are let.

Later, The Other Half put it to me that, if I was letting for the summer months, I wouldn’t leave my knives out for just anyone.

“Well no,” I observed. “My Sabatiers and Zwilling-Henckels would be under lock and key. But I’d equally make damned sure that were still solid, sharp knives around, together with something with which to sharpen them, other than a steel or the doorstep”.

I’d also ensure, come to that, that chopping boards were labeled – there’s no way of knowing which one has been used for what in previous weeks and months.

Just two hobs (and a microwave)

However, the Opinel allowed us to continue with our simple evening repasts of charcuterie, tomato and bread (plus rosé, of course) with much increased ease.

For lunch on Monday, we returned to St Elme, where I joyfully wolfed a plate of gambas with persillade, aïoli and frites.

On Tuesday, doing so little that the nearest we got to the beach was lunching at the back of one, we hit my beloved Au Casot, where I wolfed baby squid, with persillade, aïoli, tiny tomatoes and wafer-thin slices of roasted potato.

I haven’t relished food so much for a long time – both meals were as perfect as they could be.

And so as it turned out, Wednesday was my first night of actual cooking.

There is no oven, but just two rings on a tiny hob.

I had bought boudin Catalan – the regional, lightly spiced  version of black pudding; always a treat – a tin of potatoes, a jar of haricots blanc and an onion.

The thinking was that I could cook the onion in the pan to which would, late on, be added the sliced boudin, while the beans and spuds could be cooked in another pan, in some olive oil.

That, however, had been based on an absurd assumption that a reasonably large saucepan and a frying pan would fit on the aforementioned dinky hob. Fat chance.

As I confided to The Other Half: thank goodness this hadn’t happened five years ago, because I’d have been flummoxed.

The onion thinly sliced – thanks to that rather fabulous Opinel – I let it soften gently in olive oil for some time, before adding some of the haricot blanc, drained and dried.

Heating a generous amount of olive oil in a saucepan, I drained and dried some of the potatoes and then added them to the hot oil.

After around 15 minutes, sliced boudin joined the onion and beans, and was warmed through gently for a further 10 minutes, turning the pudding slices once.

All was served with a generous dollop of sweet, grainy French mustard.

I must say, it was perfectly fine fodder – but bugger me sideways with last year’s Christmas tree, this was cooking as a challenge, in the face of ridiculous obstacles!

So I ask – what do some people imagine ‘self-catering’ means? And this in France, of all places – sacredieu!

The shock of the modern

Wheatfield and Cypresses; van Gogh

Art is addictive. After nine months in which I’ve probably visited more galleries and exhibitions than in any comparable period in my life, I now want the occasional dose.

On Friday evening, with three and a half hours between the end of my working day and the beginning of the play I had a ticket for that evening, I headed down to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square for a top up.

It’s huge gallery; so labyrinthine that a map is vital. The first time I visited was right at the beginning of the 1980s.

I was studying for an art ‘A’ level at the time, and I made a point of going to see Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, which had already become my favourite painting after studying it in class. Painted in 1434, the detail staggered me, together with the ‘joke’ of the artist reflecting himself in the mirror on the wall behind the couple.

It wasn’t that I only liked old pictures – I loved the sheer photographic gloss and perfection of photorealisim and hyperrealism – so for me, that picture was a 15th-century example of something as close to that as it was possible to be.

Sunflowers; van Gogh

Amazingly, there were so few visitors that day that I could actually get really close to it – close enough to marvel at the detail.

But elsewhere, there was a revelatory moment lying in wait. The Impressionists at their most chocolate boxy were always going to delight me, but what really took my breath away was van Gogh’s Sunflowers from 1888.

I didn’t like modern art. I simply couldn’t see – couldn’t ‘get’ – anything that was beyond the clearly and obviously figurative.

It’s probably hardly surprising then, that while I could draw impeccably, I had the devil’s own job of being able to take a drawing an develop it beyond the obvious and photographic.

And I’d thought little of the likes of van Gogh. But that day, I suddenly got a least a little bit of the sense of the texture and the colour.

I’ve loved the artist’s work since.

A few years ago, I did an Open University humanities foundation course. One of the sections concerned art, and included a documentary about a Jackson Pollock painting.

Girl on a Divan; Morisot

It used computers to strip away each layer of pain, illustrating that there was a balance to the work – that it wasn’t just random drizzles, and that each layer added something without which the final piece would not work.

It was a step forward in ‘getting’ modern art – at least the non-figurative variety.

Then, this summer, something struck me.

Memory had long suggested that we didn’t really study any modern art at school. But memory had been playing tricks.

Because I started to recall that, however such it was that I had forgotten that part of the course, the reality was that I had studied the Fauves – which presumably means Matisse. I remembered suddenly that I knew the word and had known it for decades, because and I had first heard it at school.

How extraordinary the human mind is.

I’m currently reading Matisse: The Life by Hilary Spurling – not least because that, when he gained the burst of energy or inspiration that, in effect, led to the creation of Fauvism, he was in Collioure.

Bathers at Asinères; Seurat

Looking at reproductions of some of the paintings – in particular, at Open Window, Collioure from 1905, and it was with a dawning of what he had been doing. Because now I saw the light and recognised it.

And then I started to see colour as I hadn’t before – to look at it for its own sake, if you will.

Maybe that’s the key: Like Matisse himself, in a way, I needed the revelation of the south.

Anyway, with the time to spend on Friday evening, I headed to the gallery, armed with the knowledge, gained from a search of the website, that it has one Matisse – Portrait of Greta Moll, which was painted in 1908.

However, in my enthusiasm, I’d missed the little link for ‘key facts’, which also revealed that it is “not on display”, and therefore spent some time trailing from room to room, double checking whether I’d somehow missed it.

Still Life with Mangoes; Gauguin

However, it was never intended as a visit for just a single picture, but one in which to return to the most modern works on display.

Speeding past the Canalettos and the Hogarths, I found myself in a large room with the Turners – something else I’d not given much consideration to in the past.

This time, I stopped and looked. And started to wonder why on Earth I’d always preferred Constable. You can see why the likes of Matisse felt they owned something to the former: they don’t appear to have found anything from the latter.

And then the Monets and the Manets. I’d had a substantial (if brief) dose of Manet at Easter, so appreciated them differently, and there was also a Berthe Morisot, Girl on a Divan, from 1885.

Hillside in Provence; Cézanne

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, dated 1884, is one of the gallery’s most famous canvases.

It wasn’t actually a pointillist painting, since the artist hadn’t created that style when he painted this, but he did incorporate some dots into the picture.

I’d seen it previously, but never realised just what a luminous quality it has.

Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Mangoes from 1891-96 was seemed to radiate with the same lessons about colour that I’m learning from Spurling’s book.

Of the Cézannes on display, Hillside in Provence (1890-92) is beautiful in it’s light and colour.

And again, looking at it anew, I could start to appreciate the breaking down of the painting style and the capturing of something different from the merely ‘photographic’.

Les Grandes Baigneuses (1894-1905) is a very different canvas, with the artist setting out to reinterpret he sort of nude in landscape that had been painted by Titian and many more.

Les Grandes Baigneuses; Cézanne

The gallery had acquired in 1964, but I don’t remember seeing it before, and it’s so striking – in terms of colour and composition: look how the eye is drawn.

You can also quite clearly see the link to Matisse here, in both the simple way in which the figures are conveyed and the use of colour.

And then there were the van Goghs – and what turned out to be two very special treats.

First, Two Crabs (1889) is on loan from a private collection – exactly the sort of reason to visit nearby galleries on a regular basis so that you catch such gems.

The colour is sumptuous, while the varied brush strokes used to convey the textures are fascinating.

And then, A Wheatfield with Cypresses from 1889.

Two Crabs; van Gogh

Now this has been on display for a long time – and I’ve seen it more than once before. But somehow, on Friday, the colours seemed to take on a new intensity and vibrance.

Sometimes, a painting is so famous that you possibly don’t even really see it in all its glory because you can’t see beyond its reputation.

And suddenly, this had a 'wow' factor about it, with its swirling, curvaceous quality, and its wonderful hues.

The moral of the story is that you can never stop learning or seeing anew.

There might also be a second moral – the chance to repeat the old saw that travel broadens the mind, not least when it comes to appreciating art.

North and south on a plate

Boles de picolat

It seems almost impossible that only just over a week ago, the days were still sunny and hot, with humid nights.

It’s perfectly possible that such weather could return to grant us an Indian summer, but at present, it feels very much autumnal.

The nights are lengthening and the days shortening. The tipping point cannot be far away.

As we emerged from the British Museum on Friday evening at around 7.20pm, it was already pretty much dark, and rain was pitching down.

It didn’t stop until the following morning, yet there was something comforting in hearing the rhythmic pattering outside as I curled up in bed later.

The temperature has dropped and, while it’s not actually cold, it’s a lot cooler. The weekend saw more rain and some pretty blustery wind, largely grey skies, and the first signs of yellowing leaves on the two tall, slender silver birches in the carpark.

When all this is happening, the last thing you want to eat is salad.

I had already contacted Longwood Farm early last week, deciding that a slow Sunday afternoon cook was perfect and could easily be done again.

This time, it was shin of beef and beef kidney for a Vlaamse Stoverij, the Flemish dish that we first ate in Bruges 18 months ago.

The meats are diced and sautéed, followed by onion, carrot and celery. Everything goes into the big Le Creuset pot and is topped with three bay leaves, a sprig of thyme and a slice of bread, spread on one side with mustard.

Then it’s all covered with beer, lidded, and popped into the oven.

I stuck with the 160˚C (fan) from last week’s casserole and cooked it for approximately four hours.

Shin has to be cooked for a long time so that all the connective tissue beaks down, but it’s a cheap and tasty cut – and not one you’ll easily find in a supermarket.

And that was pretty much that.

But if Sunday’s dish evoked northern Europe, and that fluid region where the northernmost part of France meets the south of Belgium, Saturday’s food was all of the south.

I have cooked Boles de Picolat before, but only from that sort of point where you’ve never tasted a dish and are, ultimately, guessing what it should be like.

After our experience at Le Marinade, I decided to give it another whirl.

As with so much traditional food, there is no one cast-in-stone way of doing it.

Between French-language Catalan recipe books and a recipe postcard, I have five recipes – and all are different. One even calls for a small cup of coffee to be added.

The nearest coffee came to my version was the mug beside me as I spent an amiable hour or so studying the recipes on Saturday morning. After that, the books were put away and I worked from the memory of that meal in Collioure, taking a general sense of all the written recipes I’d looked at and combining it with the fact that meatballs are something I consider myself rather good at.

Figs, raspberries, blackberries, cream

So, for two of us, I used 400g of mince.

Now it should have been a mixture of beef and pork (some recipes also use sausage meat or substitute it for the pork), but since no pork mince was forthcoming, I stuck with beef, without too much sense of major loss.

Two small slices of bread were soaked in a small amount of milk and then added to the meat, together with an egg.

Normally, I don't add milky bread or eggs to meatballs – they do not need it to bind – but these ingredients do help to make a particularly light meatball, and the Le Marinade experience suggested that this is what you want for Boles de Picolat.

The flavourings that were added were a good shake of smoky paprika, a little cinnamon and slightly less ginger. You just want a hint of spice to come through.

Once thoroughly mixed together and shaped into balls, these are rolled in plain flour and browned in olive oil.

Okay, I don’t usually flour my meatballs either, but when the mixture is this soft, it helps with the initial cooking. One of the recipes, clearly aimed at rather inexperienced cooks, offered a ‘tip’ in a sidebar, explaining how to four your meatballs by rolling them on a plate of flour. Rocket science.

Once browned, set the balls to one side.

Add a little more oil if you need, and soften a diced onion and some finely chopped garlic. I added a stick of finely chopped celery too.

Give it a very, very large squeeze of tomato purée – we’re probably talking half a 100g tube here – and stir gently into a little warm stock (I had a small jar of defrosted homemade chicken stock that was perfectly okay).

To all that, add some dried mushrooms, a cinnamon stick, some ground black pepper and some finely-chopped flat leaf parsley. Pop the meatballs back, lid it and cook gently for about half an hour.

At this point, test for seasoning and add salt if needed, then add a drained and rinsed tin of haricot or cannellini beans, and some drained green olives. Pop the lid back on and give it a further 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls with the broth, and top with more finely-chopped flat leaf parsley.

And that is that: easy and very tasty.

I might not seem as obviously ‘southern’ as, say, a ratatouille or a bourride, but it is every bit as much indicative of a region that includes mountain country as well as the coast and the plain.

Perfect Sunday brunch

As a fusion of north and south though, a quick Nigel Slater dessert of figs, served with clotted cream and a scatter of raspberries would take some beating – perfect at this time of year, and you could easily substitute blackberries for the raspberries depending on taste and availability.

The final food note for an autumnal weekend that is worth a mention is the joys of a decent home-cooked English brunch late on a Sunday morning, after a delicious doze snuggled beneath the covers.

Downland’s marmalade sausages and a huge, halved tomato were grilled, while tinned (sorry) mushrooms were cooked in butter.

Three eggs were scrambled in more butter and were served on real fried bread – cooked in lard, in other words.

The only other addition was HP sauce.

North or south, it’s good to remember that, even as you mourn the passing of summer, autumn has many glories and pleasures to offer.

When autumn leaves you hankering for comfort

Chard from the potager

The return from France was followed by several days of continued high temperatures (and high humidity), which managed to give the sense that summer was set to continue for a while.

In fact, one of the first things that we became aware of getting back to Blighty this year was just how much earlier the sun seems to set in the UK – party, of course, because of the hour difference, but it still left us feeling that the world was closing in rather suddenly.

However, at the end of last week the temperature had dropped too and, by the weekend, one could sense autumn on the wind. When that happens, food has to change.

The delivery, while I was away, of Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food gave me a starting point, and the discovery within its pages, during my Saturday morning browse with coffee and notepad, of a dish involving chard, was enough to inspire.

In this case, it was pan-fried grey mullet on a bed of chard, with a butter sauce. Fortunately, since mullet isn’t always readily available, the recipe also mentions bass. I found some of that without any problem.

The sauce is made of two finely-chopped banana shallots, with white wine, white wine vinegar and water, all of which are measured accurately to 75ml each and then reduced to a glaze. It has cream stirred in and is then seasoned with lemon juice.

I suspect that there were shortcuts taken in the editing of the book. The picture shows a smooth sauce, but no mention is made of sieving it to remove the shallots. I chose to do so, since that made sense. There’s also a strange, contradictory instruction on the chard.

Okay, with an ounce of culinary experience you should be able to work around such things, but you still don’t expect such issues in a book that was hardly dirt cheap in the first place.

That said, the sauce was delicious, although you really do need to reduce it to a glaze at the first stage, which I didn’t quite manage (you fret that there’ll be nothing left).

The chard – our first from the potager – was nice, and still remarkably tender, given how long it had been growing. It’s cooked in water and butter and lemon juice.

The fish fillets are pan fried, having had the skin side lightly floured. That, I will say, is a superb way to cook fish – and very easy.

Kerridge says to put it in a little oil (I used olive oil), floured skin side down, and leave until you can see that it’s almost cooked through.

Then it really only does need a minute on the other side.

Sunday, however, was set aside for Cooking Without Any Book Anywhere Near (well, not open at any rate).

To start with, a piece of braising steak, bought from Matthew, was trimmed and cut into large pieces, joined in a bowl by a diced carrot, a chunked onion and a chopped stick of celery, plus a couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns and (secret ingredient coming up) a good strip of orange peel.

That last item is very much a southern French influence, used in daubes.

A bottle of red wine went over it all and the bowl was covered in cling film and popped into the fridge over night.

The wine in question was a JP Chenet syrah shiraz (under a fiver from Ocado, so complying with Raymond Blanc’s assertion that you should never pay more for wine for the pot).

I picked it because that syrah that we’d had at La Balette was so smoky a taste that I thought the grape would go well with the beef.

Beef, cooked in a southern French style

Fast forward to Sunday morning.

Everything was drained, the wine reserved and the meat separated from the vegetables.

Each piece of beef was then patted dry individually – it’s the only way to do it if you’re going to get it dry enough to brown, but if the pieces are large, it’s hardly very onerous.

Next, a couple of carrots were peeled and cut into large slices, a large onion was diced, four cloves of garlic were peeled and smashed, and a couple of sticks of celery were sliced.

Shortly before we went away, Blanc had been demonstrating, on his new TV series, slow cooking. And to cook a piece of beef, he’d put it in the oven at 160˚C (fan) for four hours.

I’ve been using 150˚C for four to five hours, and it’s been just missing the completely melted point by a tiny amount. A case of: nearly there!

The basis for my 150˚C was that most books that deal seriously with slow cooking – “seriously” meaning more than pretending that 90 minutes or two hours is an example of the method – talk of a low or medium oven.

However, in this case, I preheated the oven to 160˚C.

And then some dripping was melted in a large sauté pan, and all the pieces of meat were browned before being popped into a Le Creuset casserole.

The onion and garlic went into the fat and was softened a little, before a dessert spoon of plain flour was sprinkled on top and stirred in. After a minute cooking, a ladle of the reserved wine was added and stirred carefully in, before another followed.

That too all went into the casserole, together with the other vegetables – three more bay leaves, another couple of strips of orange peel, plenty of black pepper and a shake of ground ginger. The aim was to add a hint of warmth, but not a discernible ginger flavour.

Mixed gently together, the rest of the reserved wine was added, a piece of foil placed over the dish with the lid on top, and then into the oven.

After four hours, it was essentially done. The meat was flaking, the wine had reduced and thickened and sweetened gloriously.

Since it was earlier than I’d intended, I added a little boiling water to thin the liquid and gave it another hour, with the heat reduced to 150˚C. I added some pitted black olives at this point.

After that, it was served with a helping of boiled basmati rice.

I was absolutely delighted with this: finally, I’d got the wine to a taste and consistency that you find if you eat such a dish in France.

The flavour that the orange gave the dish was wonderful. The meat was flaking and the vegetables were all cooked.

As a slight diversion: carrot is remarkable, in it’s ability to be cooked for hours without falling apart.

And reheated gently, it also served well for an easy Monday night supper.

Finally, it seems, I’ve sussed slow cooking. Next up will be something a bit more northern, with beer – and a similar cooking time. Perhaps it’s time for a Vlaamse Stoverij again? Autumn does have its advantages.