Learning to love the muscat (it didn’t take long)

 
I now discover I really like the muscat. This is the reverse of that syndrome where you drag home from your holidays a lurid liqueur (it’s almost always a liqueur), the drink that was so delicious over five-hour lunches on the terrace, only to find that back home it has all the charm of a Fairy Liquid daiquiri. I think the Ms Murderous Heels sour puss made the muscat taste of ashes in my mouth.
Anyway, I like it now. So that will teach her.

I’m always on the hunt for small cookbooks, the sort sold to raise funds for the church roof or the local sanctuary for tap-dancing owls, the ones with four-line recipes and no glossy pictures. So I was very happy to find Recettes d’un Petit Village en Languedoc. It’s a collection of recipes from the residents of Saint Xist, a little village in the Aveyron, collated by Denis Cristol to raise money for their twelfth-century priory. It contains a recipe by Régine Fargier for a simple cake made with muscat which, along with a bowl of very pretty purple plums, inspired a bit of tinkering about and this is the result. Try it. It’s very easy and looks impressive. If you like, you can serve it straight away, warm, as a pudding with cream, crème fraiche or custard. Or serve it cold. Whichever way you serve it, naturally a glass or two of muscat goes very well with it.



Plum and muscat cake

This is really good with the plums, but in summer I imagine it would be really lovely made with peaches or nectarines too.


For the plums:
4-5 plums, just ripe, not too soft
3 tablespoons demerara sugar

For the cake:
250g caster sugar, vanilla sugar if you have it
200g unsalted butter, softened, plus a little more for greasing the tin
4 eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
A good pinch of salt
200ml muscat

Some icing sugar for dusting, if you like
Serve with crème fraîche or lightly whipped cream


Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4. Lightly grease a 23cm springform baking tin and line the bottom with baking parchment. Butter the parchment.

Halve the plums, stone them, and cut each half into four pieces. Toss them with the demerara sugar and line the tin with the pieces of plum. Try to cram them as closely together as possible.
Beat together the sugar and butter until pale and light. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt into a separate bowl.

In another, scrupulously-clean bowl whisk the egg whites until they form peaks.
Begin to add the muscat and flour mixture to the batter in alternate batches, starting and ending with some of the flour (flour/wine/flour/wine/flour), folding in well with a spatula after each addition.
Fold in a third of the beaten egg whites with a spatula to lighten the batter. Then stir in the rest, lifting the batter with the spatula and gently folding it into the mixture. It should be well combined but you want to keep in as much air as possible. Spoon the mixture over the top of the plums, smooth the top with a spatula, place the tin on a baking tray and bake in the oven for about 55 minutes – a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake should come out clean. It may need a little bit longer. Put it back into the oven and test every 5 minutes.

Place the cake tin on a cooling rack. Run a palette knife around the sides of the tin but leave it to cool for 15 minutes before releasing the sides of the tin and turning it out onto a plate. Gently remove the base of the tin and the baking parchment; serve warm or cold.

All change

A nice, neat plait of violet garlic, which cost a satisfying €5.

Here’s the thing. As soon as I arrive in France, I transfer a credit card and some nice, crisp Euro notes from my large, London wallet to my small, zipped holiday purse. Within an hour of running about to buy fruit and yoghurt, loo paper, bottles of wine and water, and stopping to refuel with coffee, rosé or Ricard, with a reasonable aim and a little luck that little purse could take out a rhino. It weighs as much as a brick.

I suffer from a fear of change. Not merely an antipathy for altering circumstance (though I confess that I was embarrassingly tearful when our beloved hardware shop closed), but a fear of change, monnaie, coin.

I’ll be standing in a queue with my shopping basket, hopeful that this time I’ll make it, this time I will be able to suffer the patient or impatient gazes of the greengrocer, supermarket checkout man, lady in the newspaper shop, queue of locals snaking along behind me, for long enough to count out €2.87, €4.26 or €1.42. And in this fantasy of coin-based confidence, I will be able to perform these mathematical gymnastics without having to dig my glasses out of the very last, most secret and difficult-to-access compartment in my handbag. Ta da! Watch the amazing counting lady, marvel at her fearlessness.

Let’s forget for a minute the one, two and five cent coppery pieces, which surely must cost more to manufacture than they’re worth (Tip: they make excellent curtain weights). It’s the brassy 10, 20 and 50 cent pieces that push my queuing anxiety into overdrive. They’re of an almost identical size and colour and yes, yes, I know there is some tricksy system of grooves around the edge, a half-arsed attempt to help you to distinguish one from another, but really? Enough of this coin-based parlour game. Europe, please could you be the change I wish to see in the world and make the coins substantially different from one another? Perhaps cover the tens in glitter, make the twenties into a flower shape, the fifties play a happy tune (I suggest Ode to Joy is something we could all get behind)?

Until then, I have two choices. One, take on the habit of the very, very young or the very, very old – fill my hand with change and rely on the kindness, patience and honesty of strangers to pick out what the need. Two, my preferred method, just drag out another note and hope for the best. This works, but like all forms of instant gratification, there’s a price. In this case, a little zippy purse overflowing with a pirate’s ransom of coins.

The other day my mother, who is quite terrifyingly clever, said ‘Oh, I’ve cracked that.
‘What, what?’ I asked, excited over what was no doubt a terrifyingly clever solution.
‘I keep all of my notes in my wallet and five euro coins in my pocket,’ she said.
‘And what about all of the small change?’ I said.
‘That? I just leave all that on my dresser.’
Sometimes Terrifyingly Clever is no help at all.


Roasted garlic

Roasted garlic. Simply squeeze the softened cloves onto pieces of bread. So good. Don’t forget to mop up the cooking juices with more bread too.

I was very excited to buy plaits of garlic – rose garlic, violet garlic, regular garlic - from the stall in Agde market on my last trip, not just because it’s delicious, but also because they cost a nice, round €5 each. No change.

Roasting whole heads of garlic is so easy and it makes a good starter or easy lunch with some salad and bread.

Per person:
a whole head of garlic, unpeeled but outer papery layer removed
a splash of white wine
a small bay leaf
a sprig or two of thyme or lemon thyme
a knob of butter and/or a splash of olive oil
some salt and pepper
Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4.

Place a small bay leaf, some thyme, a splash of oil and a bit of white wine into the bottom of a small dish. Put a head of garlic on top. Place a knob of butter on top of the garlic or trickle on a little more olive oil. Sprinkle on some salt and pepper. Seal tightly with foil. (My little dishes have lids, so I bung these on top too. Belt and braces.) You can also do quite a few heads of garlic all together in one dish, of course, just make sure you cover it tightly with foil.

Bake for about 50 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the cloves. The flesh should be very tender indeed when pierced with a small, sharp knife. If it’s not soft enough, just put it back into the oven for a bit and check again every 5 minutes or so. Remove the foil and lid if your dish has one, and return to the oven for a further 15 minutes. Serve hot.

I love the papery skins.

On not visiting vineyards

 

For years and years and years, I’ve spent part of the summer in the south west of France, where the Hérault river and the Canal du Midi tip into the Mediterranean. If I were working for the tourist office, I would tell you this region enjoys more days of sunshine than anywhere else in France. Fat, minerally oysters from the étang du Thau are as cheap as sardines. From the air, dusty terracotta-roofed towns and villages poke out from the ragged corduroy of vineyards.

In all of these years and years and years, I have never visited a vineyard. Not a single one. I have kept secret from my family that I’d rather do almost anything else, as this revelation most certainly damages my cred d’épicure.

This is me: ‘Oh, I’d love to, I really would, but I need to finish my book/make something incredibly complicated requiring reductions and foams for lunch/regrout the bathroom tile. No, don’t let me stop you. You go, GO…Have a LOVELY time.’ Wave, slam door,relax.

In my working life I’ve visited dozens of vineyards, from the vastly vatted to one so adorable that in the movie of her life, the young wine maker would most certainly be played by Juliette Binoche, circa 1998. On these occasions, half a dozen or so crumpled journalists uncrease themselves from air-conditioned mini buses to be greeted by a selection of good vintages, daunting rows of twinkling glasses and sometimes smears of something olive-y on toast or a plate or two of excellent ham. They’re expecting you. They have their game face on.

When people tell me of their holidays in France or Italy or Spain where they, oh, you know, just drive through the countryside, stopping here and there at these tiny rural places, tasting as they go, picking up wonderful cases of a little-known red or white or sparkling, a bit of me twists with embarrassment.
I would no more zip, unannounced, along the rural lane to someone’s house than I’d knock on your door tonight and expect you to give me my tea. What if, what if, what if? What if you’re feeding a dying kitten with a pipette? Making love to someone irresistible but wholly unsuitable? Mugging up on fractions so you will forever remain a genius in the eyes of your ten-year-old? I wouldn’t want my desire for an inexpensive yet versatile rosé to get in the way of any of that so sorry to bother you, sorry, I’ll be going now. Bye. Bye. Bye.

But this summer, a friend who knows about these things recommended a local producer who made a really good muscat. It wasn’t one of these up-a-lane places either, so the risk of a kitten/pipette situation was negligible.

On the last day of the holiday, in between taking the dog to the vet for his €50 pat on the head (seriously, if two minutes on table and a scribble in a book is all it takes to stop rabies, I don’t know what we were all so worried about), buying trays of peaches for jam from the roadside stall and running to the supermarket for cheap sea salt, Marseilles soap flakes and tins of confit de canard, I broke the habit of a holiday and caved in for a cave visit (sorry).

We pitch up in the neat car park of an office building so bland, in England it might have been the headquarters of somewhere selling air conditioning or paper products. It is clear to anyone with eyes that there are no dying kittens on the premises. Fine.

Inside, bottles glisten on glass shelves. A young woman (tight white shirt, tailored trousers, murderous heels, oppressively straightened hair - one of those people who, just by breathing in and out, has the capacity to make you feel grubby) taps at a keyboard. It’s very quiet. The slap-slap of our flip flops on the stone floor sounds indecent.

Murderous Heels Woman looks up but doesn’t move. ‘Can I help you?’
Séan mutters something about muscat.
‘You want to TASTE it?’

Not now, bitch, I’m thinking, but we have set in train a series of events that I realise could easily conclude with me screaming ‘LET’S BUY ALL OF THE WINE. ALL OF IT!’ That’ll show her.
In the end, because I married a good and reasonable man, we bought a single, face-saving case of wine neither of us loved but, as my grandmother would have said, I’m sure will come in handy. And no kittens died which, in the circumstances, is the very best we could have hoped for.
 
Winegrowers’ potatoes

I first read about this splendid and substantial combination of bacon, potatoes and cheese as something which was fed to workers during the grape harvest to keep them going. I scatter a little sage over mine as I love it with all of the above ingredients, though that’s not traditional. If you love it too, add it. If you don’t, leave it out. It makes a great lunch with a salad of peppery and/or bitter leaves – rocket, watercress, mizuna, raddiccio, frisée are all good – and a dollop of French mustard.


Serves 4
Some butter or goose fat
About 300g streaky bacon, unsmoked or a combination of smoked and unsmoked, rind removed
About 600g potatoes, peeled (I used Maris Piper)
About 130g Gruyère cheese, coarsely grated
4-6 small sage leaves, finely shredded, optional
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6.

Rub the inside of an ovenproof frying pan* of about 20cm diameter with some softened butter or goose fat. Line the pan with the bacon, letting the ends fall over the sides and pressing the rashers together so there are no gaps.

Slice the potatoes very thinly with a sharp knife or a mandolin, as for dauphinoise. Rinse them in cold water and pat them dry with kitchen paper or a clean tea towel.

Layer a quarter of the potatoes on top of the bacon. Season and scatter on some sage if you’re using it. Dot with a bit of butter or goose fat and scatter on a third of the grated cheese. Continue with the layers until you've used everything up, finishing with a layer of potatoes. Pull the bacon up over the potatoes and press everything with your hands so it's all quite firmly mushed together. Dot a bit more butter or goose fat over the top. Cover tightly with a couple of layers of foil (I put a lid on it too).
Warm the pan for about 20 seconds on the hob over a high-ish heat so the fat begins to render then place the pan on a baking tray and bake in the oven for about an hour. The potatoes should be really tender when pierced with a small, sharp knife. If they’re not, return it to the oven for a bit, checking every 5 minutes or so. Remove it from the oven and let it stand for 15 minutes before turning out onto a plate or board.
*Or wrap a non-ovenproof handle tightly with a few layers of foil.

Line the pan with bacon.

Pat the potatoes dry.

Season, then dot the potatoes with sage and goose fat or butter.

Scatter with cheese.

Press everything together and dot the top with a little more goose fat or butter.