It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. I have considered giving up on it all together. I have been writing a similar blog: secretcheeseandbeerguy.blogspot.com linking two of my great passions!
However, I am back again. I write as the tail end of an Autumn storm rattles through Corner Cottage. The sky is blue and clear but the wind is strong and cold. Everything is damp outside but bathed in glorious sunshine.
We have had the hottest summer on record meaning lots of salad lunches and cold cuts boards as anything more would seem too much of a challenge. One of the things I noticed this year is the quality of stone fruit on offer. Peaches, nectarines, plums and such have been quite excellent. Inevitably when food is this good nostalgia seeps in and I was often taken back to the first time my family visited France as a child.
I have written previously about our fabulous holidays in Devon and we travelled to France having spent a week at The Farm. We crossed from Plymouth to Roscoff, four of us crammed into my Mum's Renault 4. The overnight crossing was horrific and my Master Mariner father did not sleep a wink. We did all survive to drive out of the ferry port at about 7 AM, waved through by a bored looking Gendarme with a cigarette in his mouth. We were all tired and quiet as the car pulled into a Relais Routier (a French truck stop). My elder brother, who had broken his arm a couple of weeks earlier, was sent to order breakfast in his Year 10 French. Very swiftly 3 coffees and a hot chocolate turned up and 4 croissants. It felt very exciting, I felt very well travelled. My mother maintained to her last day that she could've stood a spoon in her coffee.
We drove on the 20 or so kilometers to Erqy a fishing village and holiday destination. Our accommodation was a small cottage with two bedrooms upstairs a kitchen and living area downstairs with a tiny bedroom. A small shower room was tucked in there too. It was perfect. The building itself was set back from the road by about 15 metres but the next building along on the road was a Boulangerie. After some protests it was decided that I would be the one to go and collect breakfast on our first morning. The pressure was huge - not only did I have to wake up but I also had to speak French on my own. All evening I rehearsed "Quatre croissants et une baguette s'il vous plait, madame"
I woke early to the most amazing smell ever to reach my nostrils. The Boulangerie was baking and I was in love! I shot out of bed, dressed and ran down the drive towards the smell. In the excitement I fluffed my lines but the kind lady behind the counter packed me away with all the right breads. From that moment till the end of the holiday I was known as the Croissant Garcon. They had been baked a couple of hours before we dived in. Please remember, this was 1979, nothing of this quality was to be found in the UK. My lifelong love of French baked goods began at that table with its oilcloth covering.
By about day 3 my mother needed to buy food. We all set out to the street market, and what a complete revelation that was: A Cheese monger who could be smelt at some distance, tables with five or six chickens on them from small farms in the area, a huge selection of fish stalls (which I hated at the time) and fruit and veg stalls that looked like an explosion in a paint factory. I was hooked. It was here that I tried my first nectarine, my first fresh peach, my first green gage and other fruits that all tasted so intense and sweet and rich.
For the first time in decades the fruit this year tasted nearly that good. So you will forgive me for getting a little nostalgic.
A few years ago on this blog I started to write a guide to making Christmas day more of a joy and less of a chore. Unfortunately I fell ill and never finished it; so this year I will be writing my guide starting in the next few days.
