In lieu of pissaladière

A few hours before we set off for France, a colleague, who is at least as passionate about food and cooking as me, asked if I was taking any recipes on holiday.

He seemed surprised when I said that no, nothing was packed.

Three years ago, I did sit on the beach with Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking as reading material, but I didn’t really cook from it.

Indeed, as I explained to the said colleague, I had no recipes with me because we tend to eat out at lunch and then sup on charcuterie, bread, tomatoes and wine in the evening.

He agreed that, given the quality of such simple foods, nobody would want to do much else.

But the best laid plans etc …

That was all well and good when that was still our core eating plan, but partly because St Elme has been less inspiring that on previous holidays, we’ve continued lunching on the beach from Cyril’s café, and then I’ve been cooking more at the house in the evening.

As it happens, I’d bought a small book of Catalan dishes within 24 hours of being in Collioure – and a magazine of seasonal French recipes only a few days later. So I had plenty of material for inspiration.

As it happened, two of the three dishes I’m going to describe didn’t need any magazine – although the third was a pretty accurate version of one (I can read a French recipe, in French!).

On Saturday, heading back from the beach, we popped into the alimentation.

There, at the little butcher’s counter, was a single duck breast. But at almost 400g, it was enough for the two of us.

We picked up a vacuum pack of pre-cooked new potatoes too.

The duck turned out to be real magret de canard duck – by which I mean that apparently it should be breast from a duck that’s been reared for foie gras.

It was dried with kitchen paper and then the skin scored and salted.

Into a hot frying pan it went, cooked for six minutes, skin side down, with the liquid fat drained off into a deep saucepan.

Turn and cook for a further seven minutes.

After which, it was popped onto a plate, covered with foil and placed into a warmed oven to rest.

Next, a spot of improv.

I deglazed the pan with two miniatures of Banyuls, the local dessert wine, which happened to be in the fridge, and then added a knob of butter – there was no flour in the house, so this thickened the sauce a little as well as giving it a gloss.

Into this went a punnet of blackberries that was also in the fridge.

Cooked down a little, they were crushed into the sauce.

In the meantime, the potatoes were taken out of their vacuum packing, rinsed and drained and dried on more kitchen paper, before being cut into thick slices.

Here, the duck fat came into its own. The potato slices were popped in – ouch! The spitting! – and cooked until just golden, before being served with a sprinkling of fleur de sel that I had found doing its best to hide away in the back of a draw.

These were then served with the duck, sliced in the traditional fashion and with a good portion of the blackberry and Banyuls sauce.

It proved to be a very tasty meal indeed.

And all from a tiny ‘corner shop'!

Last night, I actually did cook from the magazine.

Chicken breast, bought on Sunday at the boucherie, was marinaded for an hour in minced garlic, the juice of three limes and some paprika.

In the meantime, a dish was prepared with a large halved tomato, and slices of courgette, all spritzed with oil and topped with more minced garlic, combined this time with breadcrumbs (made by hand-chopping Sunday’s left-over bread, since there is no processor here).

Then this went into the oven, with the chicken (and marinade, plus a glug of oil) in its own dish alongside.

It had 20 minutes – and then another 10 because that was required.

The courgette slices were piled into neat heaps alongside a tomato half, and the chicken was napped with the juices it had been cooked in.

The only other things required were the usual rosé and bread, with dipping oil/vinegar.

Amazingly, it worked. And there was certainly no danger of any vampire coming near overnight.

But my pièce de résistance (so far) was fish again – which is particularly pleasing, given my historic struggles with cooking seafood.

It was the market on Sunday morning. Only one of the fish stalls was present, and it didn’t have a large selection of fish.

More to the point, there was no monkfish.

I’d had this in mind, since we’d been given a big bag of tomatoes by a couple who live across the street (friends of the woman who owns the house).

It was a kind gesture, but left me with a surfeit. So I was thinking of something like monkfish, baked with lashings of tomatoes.

Bearing in mind The Other Half’s fish limits, I was drawn to a fillet of white fish labeled ‘lieu’. I had no idea what it was, but it looked a tad like cod. So in incredibly French fashion, I bought a piece.

Later, Google being my friend, I discovered that it was pollack. Which I have never cooked.

So what to do?

I set the oven to 150˚C and liberally oiled a baking dish.

The fillet was cut into two, laid in the dish and gently seasoned.

On top went a further drizzle of oil, three anchovies and three black luque olives.

And then the dish went in the oven. It had about 13 minutes in total (I checked after 10) and then was served with a tomato concasse – three tomatoes, peeled, deseeded and diced, seasoned and dressed with virgin oil, and garnished with shredded basil.

Of course, there was also fresh bread, with oil and Balsamico to dip, and a slice of lemon on the side.

And, if I say so myself, it was pretty damned good.

So I have christened it my pollack pissaladière – or rather: ‘In lieu of pissaladière’, which might not quite roll off the tongue, but I do rather like the multilingual play on words.

A fishy outing

In a week of erratic weather – ie, some cloudiness and even one spell of rain - we found ourselves exploring things to do in Collioure other than sunning oneself on the beach.

Quite a lot of that, to be fair, involved sitting out on the little terrace at the house we were renting, with books, fags and coffee to hand.

But on one such day, after we'd whiled away a morning in such pleasant fashion, the weather was showing signs of improvement and we decided to be up and out.

One of the things I've been meaning to get around to doing in Collioure for at least the last three years is to visit one of the two anchovy houses that still operate there. 

Both apparently allow you to have a look around, including watching the women who still fillet these tiny, pungent fish by hand.

Have finally sussed where one of them was, we decided to start a general afternoon perambulation by paying a visit.

There was a door quite clearly marked, suggesting that you enter to visit the production area. But I'm still a reserved English person, so I checked in the shop first.

'Of course; go on up - it's the first floor - you can taste the anchovies too.'

We climbed the short staircase. A door stood before us, telling us to enter, but not to knock.

So we did - and we didn't.

In a large old room two women were at work; one filleting, one taking the result and packing them into jars and weighing them.

The only obvious difference from the past, which I'd seen via photographs, was that they wore the regulation hygienic attire and that the surfaces they were working at were stainless steel. Otherwise, this was as old as the hills.

I asked if photography were okay. The woman doing the filleting said yes, barely interrupting her work.

It was fascinating. She had a pile of fresh anchovies next to her and a box for the discarded spines on her knee.

She took a fish and stripped it open and removed the spine with deceptively easy movements, laying each completed half neatly on a paper towel in front of her, just overlapping the piece before.

When a paper towel was full, her colleague then took it, picked a handful of the delicate fish up, overlapping as they were, and started lining the jars, then measuring them on a scale to check the net weight.

The uniform might be new, but this was a skill that dated back centuries.

I was astonished that we could wander around freely. To be honest, I'd expected to be allowed only to see anything from behind glass: but whisper it quietly, this is a Eurocrat-free zone. Concessions, fine - ie the uniform. All-out change - no way!

There, in one, is another reason I love the French. They love rules - but they know the rules to love and those to ignore.

So, for instance, they are close to religious about having at least one boulangerie in every village, no matter how small (there are at least four in Collioure that we know of) and they are serious about laws on democracy and the press that mean that, if you want to stock one newspaper (with one opinion), then you stock them all (with all opinions).

We tasted both types of anchovy - the dark brown ones are very salty and I find them a bit bony, to be honest, but they're still very tasty. The silvery ones are known as boquerones (or roquerones, as they're called by the company in question, Roque Anchois) and they're a tangy mouthful, marinated in vinegar. These have no bones left at all.

Downstairs and back in the shop, it was time for a little stocking up - not on anchovies themselves, which I can easily get in London – but on some of the other products that the company has developed, including small pots of anchovy cream and sauce (one of which can be thinned to use either as a salad dressing or as the base for a soup, according to the absolutely charming woman who chatted with us for some time), plus a jar of monkfish liver, which is a new one on me - and I'm seriously curious - and a little jar of a mustard with Banyuls, the local fortified wine, and honey.

I resisted a jar of green olives, stuffed with almonds, which had been arranged so beautifully in jars that they resembled pineapples, and heaven alone knows how many other tempting goodies, but the bags were already in panic mode at what was already waiting to make the long journey back to England.

The coming months will see some serious experimentation in the Catalan cooking stakes.

Bread and fishes

Food was always going to be a key theme of our trip to the south of France, but not just for the first chance to buy and cook in that country.

We ate in more often than we might have expected – not just full-blown meals, but sometimes just a few slices of saucisson, some cheese, fruit and a bottle of wine. And, of course, bread.

Bread is close to a religion in France. And it's not difficult to understand why. Delightfully, there was a boulangerie two minutes out of the house, just on the seafront. More than once, The Other Half pottered down there early in the morning to pick up a baguette and croissants while I put a pot of coffee on (another French culinary religion). And the bread from the twice-weekly market was even better.

Every town and village in France has, by law, to have at least one proper baker. It was no wonder that Marie Antoinette so upset the hoi polloi with her infamous "Let them eat cake" comment on the bread shortages caused by a shortage of flour (although something has been lost in translation, since it was really: "let them eat brioche", which makes a modicum more sense, since brioche requires less flour to bake than bread).

But the bread is wonderful; crisp on the outside and so tasty, with a glorious aroma, inside. 'Our' local boulangerie opened early in the morning to sell fresh bread and other goodies, before closing. Only to open again later in the day after baking a new batch of bread.

Bread is one of those things that makes me despair about the UK. I wasn't able to buy really good bread until yesterday, when our weekly market has a number of artisan bakers present. Before that, I'd had to make do with a loaf from our local 'baker', the chain Percy Ingle. I wandered in on Monday and asked for a wholemeal bloomer: 'oh, we don't do wholemeal bloomers, just white ones,' came the reply. 'Bread', that is, shipped in by van in large pre-made batches to be baked on the premises – it's really not quite the same thing.

We work the longest hours anywhere in western Europe – and care the least about our quality of life. Bread seems to be an illustration of that, together with a culture (and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else) of sitting at my work desk, eating generally poor food for lunch, while we carry on working.

The French, I should point out, are not lazy. Contrary to the implication of the much-touted statement in the UK about the notorious two-hour lunches of the French (accompanied by eye rolling), that doesn't mean they work a much shorter day: workplaces are often open at 8am and don't shut until gone 6pm – even 7pm.

But let's forget that for the time being. It's too depressing.

When we weren't dining in, the restaurants in Collioure presented no shortage of opportunities to enjoy eating out – literally: only twice did we not eat al fresco and that was only because the restaurants in question were full outside at the time.

Collioure is famous for its anchovies – and although they're no longer fished from the little harbour (they arrive at Port Vendre, about 10 minutes away by bus), two factories (Desclaux Ets and Roques Ets) still exist, where the women fillet them by hand before potting them in various ways; some in oil, some in salt, some in brine. I'm not a huge fan of the brown ones, which are too strong for my tastes and generally very bony. The ones I enjoy most are the silver ones, that are served with a Collioure salad.

But away from salads, which I've mentioned in an earlier post, the seafood is the thing that strikes you most.

Once we'd hit our stride with the sun at Plage de Port d'Avall (and after the man who ran the beach café and rented out the sunloungers had decided to close for the season), we hit Plage Saint-Vincent, where the shade stays away for far longer in September days.

Here too, there is the pleasure of Au Casot, an open-sided restaurant at the top of the beach that tempts you from your repose with the enticing smell of cooking fish – in particular, grilled sardines. The sardines are lovely – but I'm a bit of a typically English wuss when it comes to bony fish, so I stick to tinned sardines at home. But there was no shortage of other options to choose on the brief menu when we chose to eat there – which we did more times than we ate in any other single establishment.

While The Other Half stuck to Catalan sausage and Catalan boudin (a blood sausage) with chips, I stayed with the seafood. First up was gambas: six huge beasts, grilled and served with a thick wedge of grilled tomato and thick slices of potato, with lashings of persillade to garnish – the combination of olive oil, parsley and garlic proving a match made in heaven and a perfect garnish for everything else on the plate.

In one of his TV series, chef Rick Stein talks of seeing customers at his Cornish restaurants trying to eat such shellfish with a knife and fork. The Other Half even noticed a couple of people trying it when we were away. It's impossible. One of the reasons I love gambas is the sheer, sensual pleasure of getting your hands messy; of ripping off the heads and sucking them out; peeling the shells from the bodies and then dipping the dense, sweet flesh into utterly gorgeous aioli. Who cares about the mess! There's a reason that they give you a wet one tissue with such a dish.

Indeed, I loved the gambas so much I had them twice, trying the St Jacques – scallops – done in pretty much the same way, in between. Very good – but not quite as good as those joyfully messy gambas.

My last Au Casot meal, though, was sea bass, grilled and then served with a vanilla oil dressing. I'd read about this idea of using vanilla in savoury dishes before, but had never tried it: it was sumptuous – subtle and not overpowering, but a really lovely compliment to a superb piece of fish.

After meals like that – and I usually finished with what instantly became my favourite ice cream combination of coffee (the frozen coffee beans are brilliant) and apricot – it was a case of waddling back to the sunlounger to resume the exhaustive work of the day. If I was feeling really energetic, then after an hour or so (we constantly reminded ourselves of maternal warnings against swimming too quickly after food), I could go swimming – with a variety of fishes gliding gracefully just out of my watery reach, busy nibbling at rocks in search of food.

You'd see dorade – some as big as a dinner plate; your legs would be surrounded by fish that were almost transulcent with a stroke of orange just visible in the shimmering water; long, thin fish, with brown go-faster stripes down their middles, and small black creatures fish, darting in and out of the rocks.

Fish, fish everywhere – and no shortage of the beauties to eat.

Sun, sea and salt

The sun on your skin has to be one of the most sensual experiences ever. Warmth in the air and salt on the sea breeze. Gulls wheel above, flying and shrieking as though out of nothing but joy.

A friend sent me some extracts from Mark Kurkansky’s excellent Salt: a world history this morning, and managed to turn my mind straight away to the south of France; to Languedoc-Roussillon, to the Mediterranean coast, to the vast salt pans visible from plane or train and, most of all, to Collioure.

The little port, nestling below the Pyrénées, has two claims to fame: anchovies and art. The art in question is Fauvism – Matisse thought the light there the most beautiful in the world. The little fish were integral to the village’s economy; salted and dispatched to various parts of the world, valued as the finest anchovies anywhere.

Just reading about it made me long to be back there. The pebbled beaches leave the Mediterranean crystal clear. Venture in and fish will soon be swimming around your legs. Don a snorkel and goggles and float, face down, gazing into a different world; a world where sunlight, refracted through the water, glistens all around.

Keep your eyes open and watch: spot the tiniest of lifeforms shifting around in their shells; creatures scooting out of sight behind rocks as the seabed falls away and weeds sway languorously below. Daurade as big as dinner plate and busy shoals of multi-coloured smaller fish go about their business.

Stay still: let your body stop. And just watch.

Wander along the narrow, winding streets of brightly painted houses: admire the art – there’s plenty of it. Sit at any one of the seafront cafés and watch the world go by. Banish any timepieces.

Lunch on anchovies and olives, or sardines charred on an open grill right next to the beach and stuffed between bread with the fingers. Dine on squid dipped into unctuous aïoli or tuna with ripe tomatoes and fresh bread dipped into virgin oil, squeezed from the groves on the surrounding hills. Drink the sweet, local Banyuls to start, before moving on to a carafe of the house rosé. Perfection in simplicity.

Relax and let the place rub away all the stress and the tensions of modern living. And still the sun; blissfully hot, caressing the skin; the water, lapping the shore, and the blue, blue sky overhead.

The end of February nears. It’s still chilly in London, although milder than for some weeks. Time for winter to end. I need the sun on my back and the salt in my nostrils again.