Food & Drink June 2011
Cherries on the Top
A Food & Drink feature (June 2011)
Sitting in Beziers airport, waiting for the Ryanair flight to Bristol, seemed a good time to reflect on the past few days of fabulous southern French food we had come to research for our Mediterranean courses at the cookery school. When you think of the food of Provence and Languedoc-Rousillon, what goodies spring to mind? Certainly fat tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines and olives but we were faced with much more.
As ever we spent a lot of time going to the markets and already the French shoppers are buying this season’s vegetables while those in our garden at home are merely young plants. Also the quality and flavour of their produce is much more important than the uniformity of size and colour so beloved in shops here so the tomatoes particularly were fairly misshapen but bursting with flavour and being snapped up by shoppers.
Traditionally a non-dairy area, goat’s cheese is everywhere from young, creamy and mild to old, crusty and pungent. Goats are quite happy in the dry rocky countryside – the garrigue – unlike cows that need the lush green pastures of the north to thrive. The garrigue doesn’t have much to offer in the way of tasty treats for a herd of peckish goats so they chomp on the wild thyme and rosemary, scrubby bushes and stunted trees and produce litres of creamy milk which are turned into the mini-discs of goat’s cheese found in every market and restaurant.
Although cows don’t do well here, the locals are hugely proud of the black cattle of the Camargue – the taureau – which are on every menu and in every butcher’s shop. Slimmer than their Spanish counterpart, at a mere 400kg, they are bred for their meat but also their speed and aggression as they are used in the bullfighting arena. Banned in Spain but still popular in southern France, hundreds of thousands of people travel from all over the world for the bullfight season in Nimes. The locals also run the black bulls and the white Camargue horses through the villages in the summer evenings having cordoned off the pavements first. This is a great spectator sport - young men wait in the narrow streets to show their machismo and when the gates open, the bulls and horses charge out clattering over the cobbles. The winner is he who runs furthest fastest before hurling himself over the barriers away from hooves and horns. After that the attention turns back to a Pastis at the café and putting the world to rights.
Back in the markets, as good as expected was the bread and we noticed artisan breadmaking is growing as at home. No longer just baguettes, ficelles and croissants for sale but rye breads and wholewheats were commonplace and more exotic quinoa breads made a surprising appearance on many market stalls and boulangeries.
Fresh fish stalls were laden with crevettes, oysters, scallops, squid, bream, red mullet and everything necessary for a good bouillabaisse. Clever down-lighting made the silvery, plump fish glimmer and sparkle as if they had just leaped out of the water.
A big surprise to us was the utter abundance of fresh fruit, already well into the harvest. By chance we had picked to stay in a hugely important fruit growing area and everywhere we went there were apricots, melons, strawberries, vines (of course) and cherries. The cherries were overwhelming – over-burdening the trees, for sale by the side of the road for a mere 3 euros/kilo, given out like sweets and piled in bowls in our guest house for us to help ourselves. The colours ranged from buttery-cream to dark purple and for us, used to the brief English season of Kentish cherries, it was a complete joy to be faced with such quantity.
On the last night of our stay we were invited on a cherry picking excursion to a 100 year old orchard in the village of Remoulins. Our host Pierre and his friend Christiane took us through the village fields to where they had just chopped down a tree too high to harvest. We cleared the branches and filled baskets with the juicy red cherries. At home, we would never have the problem of deciding what to do with such a quantity but they were making lists and plans as we were picking – jams and confitures, jellies, jalousies, cakes, liqueurs, wines and into the freezer for ice creams and future puddings. Christiane’s family had owned the land since the 1600s but now they just keep the fruit trees for family and friends – labour costs have risen so sharply that it is impossible to make a good living from selling the fruit and as this year’s harvest from southern Spain to mid-France has ripened all at the same time the price of cherries has fallen more than usual.
We were happy to help them strip the tree and as payment in kind we packed 10kg of cherries in our bags like treasure to take home. We hadn’t quite counted on the vagaries of cheap air travel however. On the runway in the plane to Bristol, the crew couldn’t shut the door which seemed fairly crucial even to someone as non-technical as me. The usual solution for any problem of turning the engine on and off again had no effect and we were soon sitting back in departures.
Rumours of delays bounced around before they announced an engineer was being flown out from Luton to solve the problem. With one book between us and no distraction of airport shopping, the 4 hours wait dragged by but eventually his plane landed to some half-hearted cheering. Carrying his tool box, he looked just the man for the job and not showing any nerves despite the 100 pairs of eyes trained on him from the departure lounge, he climbed the steps to the Bristol-bound plane. I’m not sure if he even took anything out of his tool box but within about 30 seconds the problem was fixed…..
Back in our seats, my thoughts turned back on the cherries and specifically those in our bag sitting in the hold of the plane in the heat of a runway in the south of France. You know they say things never travel so well back from abroad but these cherries were being tested to the extreme. We rescued the bag from baggage reclaim – no noticeable stains or leakages – and then headed south down the M5. Back in Kingswear the cherries headed for the fridge and we headed to bed before a full-on week of teaching.
A quick peak the next morning reassured us that cherries are indeed successful international travellers and had survived the journey with maybe a little quicker ripening than normal. So now we are faced with what to do with this excess - shall we make jams and confitures, jellies, jalousies, cakes, liqueurs, wines or ice creams and puddings? A lovely problem to have….
First Published June 2011 By The Dart