Panckhurst - Fait maison: Recipes from a Kiwi in France

A French kitchen in the south of France

My favourite cuisine is Mediterranean, including simple French food from the south (with liberal use of olive oil and fresh market produce), and dishes from North Africa since cooking in the south of France invariably includes recipes from the other side of the Mediterranean. Some foods are served raw, or marinated and slightly cooked, others are steamed or baked. I dont often fry food, unless its the middle of winter and I feel like sinking my teeth into a good steak, and even that often tastes better grilled.

In translating some of these recipes from French, Ive also taken into account utensils and measures used in preparation. In France, metric measurement is the rule, while Anglo-Saxons still often use the imperial cup, for example. In France, a teaspoon becomes a coffee spoon or cuillre caf or more simply petite cuillre, and traditional French ovens are often gas, and therefore measured by thermostat, not always in Celsius. I have standardised these measures for international use. Unless otherwise specified, most recipes cater for four to six people.

Yeast/baking powder: In France, self-raising flour is seldom used. Plain flour is preferred, with added (11 g) sachets of levure chimique chemical yeast of which the Anglo-Saxon equivalent is baking powder. It contains starch, sodium bicarbonate and sodium pyrophosphate. All of the recipes in this book use this specification. For baking bread, one uses levure boulangre, which is dry bakers yeast.

My first taste of France came in 1975 when my parents obtained a six-month sabbatical to London. Including my brother Michael, the four of us lived in a small apartment in Bloomsbury. I continued my education via the New Zealand correspondence school but complained at having left my friends back in New Zealand. At thirteen or fourteen, what is more important than friends?

The highlight of our stay was a six-week campervan tour of Europe, including France. Driving 5,000 kilometres on the wrong side of the road must have been very stressful for my parents, and changing lanes somewhere near Toulouse, we banged into a car. The accident and the needed repairs were minor, and nobody was hurt, but it was our first experience of trying to speak French in a stressful situation. The woman driving the car spoke no English and our phrase-book French was hopeless. We looked for the expression Im sorry and could find nothing; how to ask for an ashtray in a restaurant was included though! The incident was eventually sorted out by other means: my mother understood when the woman touched her ring that she wanted to contact her husband before filling in the constat amiable or accident sheet.

My diary of that time contains a lot of detail on food: either market variety (French baguettes, pt, cheese, grapes and apples bought at the roadside, Spanish melons, Italian market pizzas), or restaurant food and cheap wine:

27/8/75 Arrived in France by hovercraft about 11.50 a.m., drove off and experienced real Frenchmen, right-hand drives & cyclists by the million. Great fun, pity we cant speak French entirely. Stopped in several villages on our way to Paris & bought some French bread & pt for lunch. Cest parfait!

4/9/75 Had breakfast of French bread (made in long rolls which you break off according to your consumption rate) & cereal (Weve been having French bread for a week, the sliced stuff is very scarce & pricey, but the rolls are baked every day & are usually very nice).

9/9/75 Later [we drove along] country roads with grapes dangling on bushes (very tempting) in rows of millions; we even saw people harvesting the grapes and at that stage they had a truckload full! We bought a kilo of grapes later (which we ate for dinner & were very beautiful & very cheap) & some apples also very cheap.

I also vividly remember picking apples from trees growing at the roadside, before racing back to the campervan chased by an angry farmer! French people seem to respect these open orchards; in three decades I have not once seen people helping themselves to fruit in private properties.

10/9/75 Stopped at Arles to see the Roman amphitheatre which was very impressive. Lots of dark passages & supposed lion pits; it was used as an arena for festivities by the Romans & is now used for bullfights. Had a look around Arles & bought some bread, biscuits, cheese, pt & set off on our travels.