September 12th - Bon appétit!

For only the third time since we’ve been together, John and I suffered a culinary disaster last night and had to throw out the dinner. It should have been John’s favourite and is, incidentally, Britain’s national dish. Curry!

A bit of a nuisance really, as one cannot buy all the spices and condiments you need to create a decent Madras or Vindaloo here in France, and one therefore has to stock up in the UK. A lot of the bigger supermarkets do sell some “Produits du Monde”: Sharwoods Curry Powder, Mango Chutney, HP Sauce, Colman’s Mustard, Jacobs Crackers, and even Helman’s “Real Mayonnaise”! Who remembers the 70’s movie, The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman’s character, the uncouth Popeye Doyle, demands ‘mayo’ for his burger and the French waiter has no idea what he is talking about? Actually, I have a degree of sympathy for him.

The problem started at the butchers. I wanted some chicken breasts. My initial request for ‘fillet de poussin’ was greeted with a blank look. The butcher pointed at a pork fillet. I then corrected myself and asked again for ‘fillet de poulet’. No joy. Looking around, I pointed at a tray of chicken legs and said ‘poitrine’, meaning ‘breast’. The butcher crossed the shop to a chiller cabinet by the door and pulled out an enormous bag of, what looked like, chicken breasts and asked me how much I wanted. He opened the bag and made to slice the meat. To my great surprise the bag contained just one, mammoth, double breast fillet. This thing was huge. The poor bird must have been on steroids! Nevertheless, it was cheap, so I allowed the butcher to slice it into usable pieces and took the whole bag to divide up and freeze.

Big mistake. My suspicions where raised when I had to remove something that resembled gristle as I chopped up the chicken. When cooked, the meat turned out to have the tenderness of a piece of garter elastic and was about as tasty … not that I have ever tried eating garter elastic! It was duly consigned to the bin.

I hate wasting food. Particularly meat. I believe that if some unfortunate animal has died so that I can eat, it is morally wrong to throw it away. In the same vein, I have no problem with shooting and fishing, as long as there is a market for the meat, but generally side with Oscar Wilde’s description of fox hunting as “the inedible pursued by the unspeakable”. But I digress.

Needless to say, we were still hungry. So we ventured out to our local Aubèrge for a pizza. The France v Scotland football (soccer) match was on the television, and a couple of beers soon washed away a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. Though, in all honesty, I cannot recommend the combination of curry followed by a seafood pizza with crème fraiche.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Scotland won and Philippe from L’Ovale (the local rugby bar) bought us a further couple of beers. After the match had finished, most of the other customers drifted home, leaving about 5 of us at the bar. John struck up a conversation around the fact that the majority of the French team play for two UK premiership sides, Arsenal and Chelsea. As a Spurs supporter, John can barely mention Arsenal without spitting, so the talk switched to rugby, notably the upcoming France v Ireland match. More beers were ordered, followed by green ‘prunes’(plums) in armagnac and, when these ran out, ‘pruneaux’(prunes) in armagnac. We eventually got home at about 12.30am.

Oh, if you are wondering, the other two meals that I have reluctantly thrown away were a seafood pasta sauce (because John couldn’t bear the sight of the little squid tenticles sticking out of the spaghetti), and a duck dish, Daube de Canard au Madiran, which called for the reduction of a large quantity of red wine, and smelled so awful that John and I had to leave the house!

Mrs F tells me that I should have asked for ‘blanc’ or ‘escalope’ de poulet.

This entry was posted on 13/09/2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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