La Recette du Jour

Erica’s recent post on life in Italy versus life in France was charming, and made me think about my experience of Spain and France. I’d never been to Spain before I moved to the south-west corner of France in 1997, only an hour’s drive from the Spanish frontier at Le Perthus. For years it was just a destination for quick day trips to buy cheap olive oil and petrol, and eat copious lunches in some country restaurant in the hills behind the Costa Brava. But over the last few years I’ve learned some Spanish and spent more time there, culminating in a 3-month stay in the Pais Vasco.

The more time I spend in this vast and varied country, the more fascinating I find it, and I itch to find out more. I love the conviviality and spontaneity; Spaniards always seem to be ready to party. And I continue to be amazed by the rapidity of social change in Spain since the death of Franco. The French are generally very resistant to change (yes, despite the French Revolution and 1968!), whereas the Spanish seem very open to it. In fact I wish I could have two lives so that I could spend one of them in France and one in Spain.

Anyway, here are just a few differences and similarities I’ve noticed.

Cafe culture

It’s almost dead in France, at least outside large cities and major tourist attractions where there are enough tourists and other visitors to keep it going. It’s very difficult to make a living from a cafe; bars and bistros in villages and small towns are closing at an alarming rate as their owners retire.

In Spain, though, it’s alive and well. Every village with more than a hundred inhabitants has its bar, and in towns the streets are lined with small bars, usually packed. Spanish people love to talk, and rather than invite people into your home, there’s a tradition of meeting friends in bars to chat over a beer or a coffee. I particularly love the evening paseo; in every town, from about 7 pm, the streets fill with people unwinding after a day’s work and filling in the time before dinner: strolling, chatting, shopping, dandling children, sitting at cafe tables, meeting and greeting friends.

And anyway, the coffee in Spain is much better than the poor-quality coffee served in most French bars. Even if in both countries they’ll look at you askance if you order a café crème or a cafe con leche in the afternoon.

Noise

Spain is a noisy place. For one thing, there’s always construction of some sort going on. Every town worth its salt shows two or three giant cranes on the skyline as you approach, and the ghastly mess Spain has made of its Mediterranean coast testifies to the importance of the construction industry. When we were in Terrassa in the holiday month of August, the whole of the town’s ramblas had been dug up and sweating workmen were toiling in the 35-degree heat repaving it, shouting at each other over the noise of earth-moving machinery. People sat outside nearby cafes apparently unperturbed by the racket.

When there isn’t any background noise to shout over, it has to be created. The Spanish love piped music, or rather muzak. Everywhere. They drive their cars onto the beach so that they can open all the windows and listen to the radio. We were once staying in the isolated Parador at Cazorla, which is in a field surrounded by woodlands in the middle of a national park. On the terrace in the evening, guests watched the moon rise in a clear sky and listened to the twittering of birds settling down for the night. Or at least they did after I’d found the switch for the muzak dribbling out of speakers on the terrace and turned it off.

And then there are the all-night parties The French like to party too, but they can’t hold a candle to the Spanish.

Food

I could write an entire blog post about this. Oh, I already have! I’ve always found it easy to slip into the Spanish timetable, eating lunch at two and dinner at nine or ten; it suits my body clock perfectly. But, accustomed as I am to leisurely meals in French restaurants, I can still be disconcerted by the rapidity of service in Spanish ones. It may take quite a while for the staff to take your order, but once they have, courses arrive at the table with bewildering speed. You have barely laid your fork down when the hovering waiter snatches up the plate, ready to serve the next course. I still remember the occasion (in another Parador) when the waiter snatched my plate from in front of me while I was still sipping my shot glass of gazpacho, and smiled tolerantly at me when I protested. It’s also not unheard of for them to serve one person’s main course while the other is still eating her starter. This would be considered terribly bad manners in France.

From observation, though, we eventually learned a way of spinning restaurant meals out. Groups of Spanish people eating out often order a selection of first courses and have them delivered to the table either singly or all at once, with clean plates for each person, and then everyone shares them, tapas-style.

Speaking of which, tapas are definitely the way to eat out in Spain, saving you from the stodgy, unimaginative menus del dia that proliferate in restaurants (unless you can afford to eat in one of Spain’s many Michelin-starred restaurants of course). Although eating tapas can work out rather pricy if you choose to do it somewhere like San Sebastian, where the pintxos are imaginative, delicious – but often expensive. We still treasure the memory of Andalucia, true tapas country, where you will be given (unasked) something to nibble with every drink you order; it could be anything from a plate of crisps or a few olives to a bacon sandwich. And by paying 2 or 3 euros, you can choose from a range of delicious hot and cold tapas. So a bar crawl can turn into dinner with little effort.

In France, of course, eating the menu of the day in a good brasserie or bistro is nearly always the best-value option: you’ll get fresh seasonal food chosen by the chef, cooked in the inimitable French style, and attractively presented. Plus time to linger over your meal as long as you like.

Local culture

France is very much a country of regions, each with its own local peculiarities, from accent to food to music and folklore, and people take pride in their origins. Spain is that in spades. The regions seem even more diverse and independent (though admittedly I’ve spent most time in the more “semi-detached” regions – the Pais Vasco and Catalonia). There are even four official languages, as opposed to only one in France.

The outsider’s stereotype of Spain as bullfights, flamenco, sun, sea, and sangria only really applies to Andalucia (and even then only to parts of that vast region). The Basque Country is absolutely nothing like that; you barely feel as if you are in Spain at all. And Catalonia doesn’t feel that foreign to me because it has a lot in common with the southern part of France where I live. One of the great pleasures of travelling in Spain is its amazing diversity; I’m longing to discover Asturias, Galicia, and Castilla y Leon, as well as the parts of Andalucia I haven’t visited yet.

As I was planning this post, I happened across Pueblo Girl’s recent post about Spanish food. After quite a few 9- or 10-euros menus del dia in local restaurants, I can really relate to a lot of what she says there. Until recently Spain was not a country that was renowned for its good food. If it is now, it’s for many-starred, bank account-busting “creative” restaurants like El Bulli (now closed down) or, closer to here, Arzak and Beresategui. But these are hardly representative. All too often, Spanish restaurant food is ensalata mixta, deep-fried everything, stodgy rice, or stringy, overcooked meat in a claggy sauce with a few mushy green beans.

However, as Pueblo Girl says, it’s not all bad. With persistence and much sampling, we have found a handful of reasonably priced restaurants in the area of Pamplona and San Sebastian that are well worth a visit, serving food that would be recognised as good in other countries, not just Spain. So here’s my list of recommendations: three country restaurants, and two city ones.
Recipe for Restaurants worth visiting: Navarra and San Sebastian »

The friendly group of foodies in the Open University’s food and drink online conference has been talking for some time about a “cookbook challenge”; each person chooses a cookbook and then cooks their way through it during 2009, trying every recipe and blogging about it. I have been on-again, off-again about this project; I like the idea, but time for cooking and blogging is short at present, and the constraint of having to choose a recipe from a specific book two or more times a week seemed an impossibility.

But then I looked at my beautiful Delicious Days cookbook, a coffee-table ornament from which to my shame I have not yet cooked a single recipe, despite being a fan of Nicky’s equally elegant and enticing blog (from which I have cooked some recipes!). Everyone who has visited and picked up this book has oohed and aahed over it, so I really have no excuse. The book is short and eclectic, and I really want to cook some of the recipes from it, so I did a quick count. Only 76 recipes, quite a few of them small and simple. That’s only one and a bit a week; this seems do-able with a bit of discipline.

So my plan is to cook everything by the end of 2009, at least everything I can get the ingredients for; as I do them, I’ll blog about them, including if possible a less-than-wonderful photo. I’ll tag all the individual entries as “delicious days”. Nicky’s blog doesn’t need any more publicity I’m sure — it’s already one of Time Magazine’s 50 coolest websites — but if even a few people discover her creativity via my blog then I shall feel I’ve repaid some of the pleasure I get from reading hers.

Of course I will not be publishing the recipes themselves here; if you are tempted by my descriptions, then hop over to Amazon and buy the book (available in English and German). I think virtually all of the recipes are exclusive to the book, i.e. they are not published on Nicky’s blog. So if you want them, and her beautiful photos, you have to buy the book!

Other bloggers taking up the challenge so far (with different books):

Maggie on Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries — this is sure to be a winning combination!
Dilly on not one, but two Jamie Oliver books: Cook with Jamie, and Jamie’s Italy
Sunny, on Rosemary Conley’s Slim to Win.
Ellie, on Gill Holcombe’s How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet, with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans … – Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher…Yes, really — that’s the title of the book!
Rachel on Sarah Bounds’ Seasonal Vegetarian (this is an out-of-print Marks and Spencer book).

A couple of weeks ago, Joanna nominated me for a Tree of Happiness award. You simply have to list six things that make you happy. So here goes; I’ve tried to make at least one of them food-related!

1. Lazing in bed on a Sunday morning with a purring cat curled up against my shoulder, knowing I don’t need to get up for work.
2. Swimming in a tropical lagoon surrounded by multi-coloured fishes, or just sitting on the beach watching and listening to the waves.
3. Snuggling up by the log fire on a winter night with a glass of red wine and a new book to read.
4. The fact that we took a risk, sold our house, gave up our jobs, and moved to the south of France to start a business — and it worked! Eleven years on, I still sometimes pinch myself to see if it’s true. I would have spent my life regretting it if we hadn’t done it.
5. The moment when you sit down at the table in a special restaurant, feeling hungry, and open the menu.
6. Singing Bach, Handel, Mozart, or Cyrillus Kreek.

I’ve wimped out on choosing the other six bloggers to pass the award on to; I’m picking six recent commenters on my blog, plucked out at random. Don’t feel obliged to do this if you don’t want to, and thanks to Joanna for thinking of me.

Bellini Valli of More Than Burnt Toast
Sally of Blogging for London
Betty (again!) of La France Profonde, And So Forth, and Cuisine Quotidienne
Ivy (again!) of Little Ivy Cakes
Sarah of Quelques gouttes de nous
Talented artist Steffi of Miss Matzenbatzen

I am flattered to have been tagged by Fiona of The Cottage Smallholder — if I’d had to choose who to be tagged by for the first time ever, it would be her, because her blog is the first I read every morning. If you haven’t discovered it, you are missing out on a lot of things! Anyway, here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So here we go; it took me ages to write this post, because I’m not used to writing posts that aren’t recipes.

1. My favourite subject at school was Latin. I was the only person in my year who wanted to take it at A-Level, so for two years I had a teacher all to myself and got an A in the exam, resulting in my being thought an insufferable swot. At that point I was learning four languages simultaneously (French, Latin, German, Russian) but nowadays I speak two fluently (English and French) and one haltingly (Spanish). Time and lack of practice have done away with the rest. But I still think Latin is an invaluable foundation for all sorts of things, including spelling, learning other languages, computer programming, crossword puzzles, and general all-round cleverness

2. Taking a leaf from Fiona’s book, 99.9% of cats like me. Well, maybe not 99.9%, since cats are aloof and discerning creatures, but the vast majority do. When I was a moody teenager, my cat Margo was my best friend, and ever since cats have been very special to me — not just pets but intelligent, interesting, and sometimes baffling companions. I would hate to live without at least one, and I always stop to talk to cats I meet in the street. Dogs on the other hand: some people have a natural authority with dogs, but I’m not one of them.

3. When I was nine, I almost died of peritonitis, and still remember the family doctor telling my mother I was just malingering to get out of school. I was too ill to appreciate the glamour of being wrapped in a red blanket and carried downstairs by an ambulance man before nee-nahing to the hospital in an ambulance for emergency surgery, but my sisters thought it was exciting. And I did get about three months off school, plus an excuse not to join in games lessons.

4. I didn’t learn to ride a bike till I was 25, and I’m still not very good at it. Not to be trusted on public highways. Luckily I took to driving a car better, even if I didn’t pass my test till I was 28, at the third attempt.

5. Music is as essential to life as cats. I love singing, but only with other people, not on my own; I like the feeling of creating harmonies and resonances together, and especially the intertwining threads of baroque music. I’d love to be able to play the piano, but my lessons aged about seven were a miserable failure.

6. I’m addicted to books and have been ever since I learned to read. My mother claims I once walked into a lamp-post on my way home from the library, already absorbed in a book. Fed up of the overflowing bookshelves and piles of books around the house, my husband covered an entire wall from floor to ceiling with shelves, and is surprised I haven’t filled it yet. Another set of shelves is crammed with cookbooks, which I read for pleasure. Since I discovered BookMooch, my habit has found a nice equilibrium: give books away and receive more in the post!

And I’m tagging, in no particular order:

1. Ivy of Little Ivy Cakes
2. Loulou of Chez Loulou
3. Betty of Cuisine Quotidienne, And So Forth, and La France Profonde
4. Nicole of For the Love of Food
5. Stephanie of Fun Foods on a Budget
6. Patricia of Technicolor Kitchen

OK, so they have something obvious in common — their blogs have a lot to do with food But they’re all bloggers that I’ve been reading and enjoying for a while and would like to know more about.