La Cuisine Familiale
It’s interesting to see when I was a student living in France as a teaching assistant in a provincial lycée, one of the fundamental lessons I learned when it came to home cooking was that it could not be hurried. Invited to various teachers’ homes for dinner, the purchasing of fresh ingredients on a daily basis, its meticulous preparation from scratch each evening after school, the chat around the kitchen table while a dish was being cooked, then its savoured consumption, was my first introduction to what we now know as Slow Food.
So when I first encountered l’escargot bleu some years ago, I was immediately smitten by the familiar aromas, ambience and sense of anticipation of my earlier experience of French cuisine familiale. A more recent lockdown takeaway meal of chef Fred’s slow-cooked pot au feu brought the authenticity of his rustic cooking into my own home. And a visit to his kitchen garden at Newton only emphasised for me his passion for local produce grown on the Scottish terroir. Cutting food miles, as Fred does, is another fundamental ethos of Slow Food – founded at around the same time I lived in France by an Italian man whose aim was to halt the march of fast food and reconnect us with the land.
Even then, bad eating was starting out on its march throughout Europe, the UK and the rest of the world. That is, scoffing on the hoof without sitting down. Consuming fake cheese melted onto chemical-laden burgers made with complicated-provenance meat and too much salt hidden in a sugar-laden cottonwool bun. Talking throughout consumption about everything except what was being eaten (I won’t call it food) or, worse, alone, and with it the temptation to eat too much because nobody can see you gorge.
Slow food like Fred’s encourages conviviality from the start of the cooking process right through to the end of the eating of it. Which has to be better for our mental as well as physical health. It helps local farmers, fishermen, growers and producers and thus builds the local economy. High welfare and sustainability help the environment.
One of the teachers I was most friendly with in France served Grives au Genievre (thrush with juniper, Cognac and white wine) when I was invited for dinner: a terrifyingly sophisticated dish for a student like me. Actually, it was her husband who prepared the meal, and her young son who described the cooking process to me in great detail. They were familiar with every part of the dish and I can remember straining my brain to understand what they were saying while trying to stave off agonising hunger pangs: it was to be quite a while before we actually ate. From memory, other home-cooked meals included daube de taureau and Sole a la Mistral – posh-sounding to me at the time, but in fact extremely simple and healthy.
Men’s engagement with food was one of the most striking revelations for me when I first arrived in France. Whether in the street, in the bar, at the market or supermarket, men always seemed to be talking about food and the best way to source and eat it. Coming from the then unreconstructed West of Scotland this was a revelation to me. And at another favourite teacher’s home it was her husband who would tell her how to measure, mix and roll out the shortcrust pastry (using unsalted local butter – something I’d never seen!) for the most delicious apple tart I’d ever tasted. I was so hungry I’d have scarfed the raw pastry given the chance. It turned out the apples came from his parents’ bastide just out of town and this seemed to give him a sense of ownership over the entire operation. That connection to food remains natural to the French and most Europeans, and through chefs like Fred we Scots are learning it too: the disconnect between what we eat and where we get it is narrowing.
I was given a copy of La Cuisine Familiale (Flammarion) as a parting gift when I left France to resume my studies at the University of Glasgow. But as long as l’escargot bleu is around, I no longer really need it.
Cate Devine is a seasoned journalist and member of the Guild of Food Writers. Her work has been published in The Times, Sunday Times, The Herald, The Daily Record, The Sunday Post, The Caterer, The Staff Canteen, ft.com and The Telegraph.