From Edouard de Pomiane via Elizabeth David, who says it ‘makes tomatoes taste startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes’.
We had it as a starter but we reckoned it would be fab with some nice fillet steak – or with roast/grilled lamb.
Tag: French
Salade aux lentilles du Puy
This is an absolutely classic French bistro dish. I still remember eating it in a little café in Violès after an arduous morning’s grape-picking.
Poisson cru au lait de coco
The Polynesian national dish, as prepared on a Tahitian beach.
Note: when not on a beach in Tahiti it is much more practical to just buy coconut milk in a can or package. We found it was thicker than the fresh-off-the-tree variety so you could dilute it a bit with water.
Moules farcies au four
Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main course. Best with the large Spanish mussels — small moules de bouchot should not be wasted on this!
Mouclade
Devised by Steve from several different recipes, this is the best sauce for mussels I have ever tasted. It deserves small, fresh moules de bouchot (grown on posts in Brittany). Make sure you have lots of French bread for mopping up the sauce. This will serve six as a starter, or 3-4 as a main course.
Feuilletés de St Jacques au gingembre
A highly successful dinner-party starter — not the cheapest of dishes, but quite easy to do and very tasty. You can prepare everything in advance, and then the shells only need 20 minutes in the oven. Serves 6.
Coquilles St Jacques à la Languedocienne
A simple and quick way of preparing scallops. Serves two.
Mounjetada, or cassoulet ariégois
I must confess I am not fond of cassoulet as it is served in the Aude — too stodgy and grease-laden — but this is something else entirely, lighter and much more digestible.
Mounjettes is the name given to dried haricot beans. They do need to be good quality for this dish, and preferably the new season’s harvest. The dish is much more liquid than cassoulet de Castelnaudary, and it’s traditional to serve the sauce first as a soup, with bread broken into it, followed by the beans and meat. We also had a lovely green salad with this, freshly plucked from the garden.