We have a stone house in the hills near a medieval village in southern France; from it you can glimpse the sea. We go out to stay as often as we can. Near the kitchen, there is a large terrace, where we eat much of the year, and an outdoor kitchen with a built-in barbecue and wood oven.
When we bought the house, I revelled in the freshness of the local ingredients, seeking out the best market stalls and places to shop, and trying out recipes on friends and family.
Reading the diaries now, I find that the entries remind me why it is that I especially love to cook in France. Everything takes on a gentler, softer manner, from the chopping of an onion on an old wooden board to the scent of woody herbs, garlic and wine drifting through the summer air.
We have recorded every meal over the years in notebooks with Matisse paintings on the covers. I also include in them any menu cards written for special occasions. Some of these come fluttering out: a dinner party menu of budini di pomodorini (little tomato jellies), courgette flower pasta, vitello tonnato (veal in tuna) and red fruit in champagne; or a Moroccan meal of merguez sausages, salads, chicken tagine, m’choui of lamb (marinated and barbecued) and rose water ice cream.
There is something about food shared with loved ones that sums up a moment in time
We note the names of guests and the food served, so I don’t repeat a meal. They remind me of dishes I’ve made and forgotten: a fennel and dill tart; potatoes cooked in the oven with bay leaves; an aubergine and courgette tian.
We add a few asterisks if a dish has been a particular hit. I notice that gigot à la ficelle (lamb suspended on a string in front of the barbecue), Provençal stuffed vegetables, timbales of courgette flowers, pasta with lobster sauce and daurade in salt all get three stars.
We often comment on the weather, so there are the expected entries of ‘hot, hot, hot’, but also a ‘menu de la pluie’ and even a strategy for when rain threatened: drinks outside; first course on the covered terrace; and main course inside, as thunder rumbled overhead.
I notice the times when the lazy lunches merged into dinner, or when the diary reads ‘bed at 2.30am’. Meals are relaxed and impromptu, with friends often dropping round unannounced. One entry reads: ‘We didn’t know the numbers until the last minute, so off to the butcher’s to get another 20 lamb chops and 30 sausages just in case’. And somehow everything tastes better than in England, maybe because we usually eat outdoors.
So where has this trip down memory lane finally taken me? To these favourite dishes, that deserve to be enjoyed as much today as they were then.