Food photography

One of us is addicted to food photography – looking at food images and dabbling in making them:

 

(This image of ours appeared in the Observer Food Magazine and probably represents the pinnacle of our food photography career)

Of course a lot of people like looking at images of food but that’s mainly because the image creates an anticipation of its texture and taste, we don’t know of many who look at in with an almost academic interest (which must say something about us, probably not favourable).

One point for discussion is the generic shallow depth of focus style that every image of prepared dishs or ingredients has – just one part of the picture in sharp focus and the rest blurred. How has this arisen and why is it an almost completely universal style that has stayed the same for the last 10 years? It is something to do with the way we perceive food when we look at it is real life? We know that smell and taste are the two most primitive, in evolutionary terms, senses and perhaps when faced with food they can overwhelm our visual sense to produce something that looks a bit like the shallow depth of focus, an incomplete picture. Perhaps other evolutionary patterns of attention also include one that looks very carefully at one part of food to assess it suitability for eating? Perhaps it is just a photographic fashion that everyone has adopted because they can’t think of anything more interesting?

One thing that has been changing in food photography over the past couple of years is the amount of light and the overall colour palette. The lighting used to be bright veering towards overexposure but recently food pictures have generally become darker, often with dark rather than white background. There has also been a trend for darker colours in food containers and accessories, rich browns and burnt oranges predominating. These all combine to make the pictures reminiscent of the Old Dutch masters still lifes of food.

Rick Stein’s French Odyssey

We got this book at Christmas, browsed it enthusiastically, made a couple of recipes from it and then it got lost in the general melee of household life. We retrieved it again before our French holiday but left it at home since it is quite a large hardback. Now that we have returned from France we have read it with renewed vigor since much of it covers the area we have just been visiting.

The book accompanies a television series where Rick Stein travelled across France from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean on a series of canals, meeting food producers, visiting restaurants and cooking food along the way. One of the canals was the Canal Lateral a La Garonne which runs right through the area where we have been staying. The first part of the book is Rick’s diary of the trip, the second is a collection of recipes – some traditional from the regions and others developed by Rick as a result of the journey. The book is illustrated by the beautiful landscape photography of Craig Easton.

Rick places his usual emphasis on relatively simple recipes that rely on good quality ingredients and they are all eminently reproducible in a domestic kitchen. The ones we have made, including the Marmande tomato tart, have been delicious and we must try some of those that seem less immediately appealing (is a small pile of Puy lentils the ideal accompaniment to seared sallops?).

This book is well up to the high standard of Rick Stein’s previous books and functions both as an inspiring coffee table volume and a practical cook book in the kitchen.

La Recreation, Les Arques, Lot et Garonne, France

La Recreation is a restaurant with an interesting story. It was set up by Jacques Ratier and his wife, Noëlle, in an old school in the tiny village of Les Arques which has very little other infrastructure – no shop, bar or other restaurant; and is deep in the heart of the rural Lot et Garonne region. Its excellent food and cheerful ambience soon built up its reputation locally but then something happened to give it a much wider audience – the American writer Michael Sanders went to live in Les Arques for a year with the specific intention of writing a book about the restaurant and the village. That book, From Here You Can’t See Paris, has been an international bestseller.

We have been to La Recreation twice on this French holiday and we have had two wonderful meals there. The menu is always a set 5 courses but there is plenty of choice for 3 of those. On our first visit we had mushroom soup, lobster ravioli (which has apparently been on the menu since the restaurant started), zander in filo pastry on a bed of spring onions, a cheese course and finished up with a creme brulee or chocalate parfait. All the cooking was first class with some great touches such as stuffed courgettes flowers and potato pancakes with the zander. On our second visit we enjoyed fillets of red mullet with a tomato caviar, scallops with a passion fruit sauce and two more impressive desserts. Once again the amazing value of dining out in France was illustrated since this 5 course menu was only 29 Euros. The service was very friendly and efficient. Noëlle runs the front of house and takes all the orders, she is very knowledgeable about the menu, the source of the ingredients and accompanying wines in both French and English. The dining room is airy and has ideal restaurant acoustics (an article on such matters will appear soon) though it is little changed from its classroom origins.

The effect of the book on the dining experience is interesting. This is a lovely unpretentious restaurant in a rural setting, not aiming for Michelin stars but keen to provide a great meal for all sorts of diners including local people, however its exposure in the best-selling book has altered its clientele. Some diners came with copies of the book already signed by the author with the intent of getting Jacques and Noëlle’s signatures as well. There was much conversation between different tables of diners which revolved around the book and its sequel about the local vin de Cahors. Did any of this detract from the experience? – we didn’t think so, it was a bit different to most restaurants and perhaps we would have liked less distraction so that we could concentrate more on the great food but it was very agreeable to be amongst a group of diners who were so enthusiastic about the restaurant and the food.

Is the French diet a low carbohydrate diet?

We didn’t lose any weight on our 3 week French holiday, in fact we put on a few pounds, but we often ate both lunch and evening meal at restaurants and we didn’t take as much exercise as we do at home. Some mornings we felt a bit less bright than usual in the way you might do if on a calorie restricted diet that has tipped your body over into ketoacidotic metabolism because all glucose/glycogen stores have been depleted. This set us pondering about the balance of carbohydrates, fat and protein in the French diet.

We noticed that in restaurants the portions of everything were smaller than in the UK which we regard as a very good thing since the UK seems to have become obsessed with larger and larger portions and produces horrible competitive advertising challenging consumers to eat the largest possible size. We also noticed that the carbohydrate components of the meals were generally much smaller than the UK, potatoes were never presented as a mound in a bowl for self-service but as carefully prepared small portions already on the plate. Bread was freely available with all the savoury courses but we noticed that we would only eat a couple of small slices at a meal. At the end of each meal we felt very satisfied, presumably as a result of the fat and protein in the meal and the relatively long time taken to eat it, but we didn’t feel ‘stuffed’ as one can do after a UK meal.

Perhaps this is the ‘secret’ of the general lack of obesity amongst French – portion control and relatively few carbohydrates?

On Rue Tatin by Susan Loomis

There are countless books about moving to a different country and we have read a lot of them, seduced by the idea that we might one day do the same thing or wishing to extend the atmosphere of a recent holiday. In many cases these are not very good books, the writing is not of a high standard and the content usually revolves around a series of mishaps and setbacks that arise from a lack of understanding of the host country’s language and social structure. We have both recently read On Rue Tatin by Susan Loomis and this in an honorable exception to the rather disappointing overall standard of the genre.

Ms Loomis is a professional food writer who takes advantage of a contract to write a French farmhouse cookery book to move to France with her husband and young son. They originally plan to rent a house for the period but end up buying an old house that needs much restoration. The book is an account of the restoration, integration into French life and French food and cooking. It is well-written with many perceptive observations of French life. Each chapter ends with some recipes of dishes that have been described in that section, many are from French natives living around her in Normandy. We have made the gazpatcho recipe on this holiday and it was very good, we couldn’t quite stretch to making the accompanying cucumber sorbet.

There are a number of factors that probably contribute to the Loomis’s success in their move. Susan Loomis spent a year in Paris at a cookery school when she was a student so she learnt a lot of the French language at a relatively young age and made a lot of friends a few of whom are still prominent in their life in Normandy. They went to France with a ready-made purpose – to write a book, and that book was concerned with one of the most universal interests – food. When they moved they were young and full of energy rather than looking to retire and wind down.

There is a second volume about their continuing life in France and the setting up of a cookery school which we will review later when we have both read that.

Oven roasted sea bream

We bought a pink sea bream on the market at Puy-L’Evêque with the intention of cooking it on an outdoor charcoal barbeque. It was a fine specimen which was very fresh, as was all the fish on the stall. Our barbeque plans had to be set aside due to unseasonally inclement weather so we roasted in the oven using a ubiquitous Mediterranean recipe that we first found in Sophie Grigson and William Black’s excellent Fish book. The recipe is apparently often made as a special meal on Christmas Eve in Spain but we have also found it in September on Greek islands.

The recipe is very simple. Take an ovenproof dish big enough to hold the fish and grease it well with olive oil. Put in a few layers of sliced potato and onion and pour over a blended mixture of olive oil, parsley (plenty of it), garlic and some water. Put this in an oven at around 180 degrees Centigrade for about 20 minutes until the potatoes and onions are starting to cook well, you may need to put some baking foil over the dish to stop the potatoes and onions blackening. Take the gutted and scaled bream and make a few deep slashes down to the backbone on both sides. Season with seat salt and ground black pepper and rub the juice of a lemon into the skin. Place this on top of the potatoes and onions, pour over some more olive oil and return to the oven. You may wish to put some slices of tomatoes in as well. The final cooking time will depend on the size of the fish but it will be readily apparent when the flesh exposed by the slashes is cooked. We have found that the dish can remain in the oven for quite some time after it is first cooked without any significant dryness or deterioration which makes it a very useful dinner party dish where exact timing is usually impossible.

Fish by Sophie Grigson & William Black

We found this book in the bargain section of a bookshop though it was little more than a year after its publication. We can’t understand this at all as it the best fish cookery book we have come across and we have made many of the dishes which have all been wonderful.

Sophie Grigson is of course a very well-known cook and writer who is the daughter of the legendary Jane Grigson. William Black, who was at the time her husband, may be less well-known. He is also a food writer and has worked as a supplier of fish to many top UK restaurants.

In Fish Sophie Grigson contributes the recipes and William Black writes an introductory section to each chapter describing the class of fish, the particular species, their seasonality, cost and yield after filleting. All the recipes that we have made from it, at least a dozen, have been excellent and we have noticed that they have featured on the menu of some restaurants we have visited. The flambéed sea bream with herbs make a spectacular dinner party dish. The monkfish cooked in an unlikely sauce of lager and cream is a lovely warming meal with some new potatoes and brocolli. The halibut with a Welsh rarebit crust is especially good if you can find halibut steaks rather than fillets.

Buying wine in France

Today we went to a wine merchant to but some wine to take back to Britain with us. Buying wine in France poses a few dilemmas for us – all wine in France is much less expensive than in the UK because there is far less tax, we are staying in a wine growing region where we could taste wines at the chateaus on the vineyards, our car can accommodate about 100 bottles, but what wine should we buy that will take best advantage of our situation?

When we came to France two years ago we came equipped with extensive wine gazetteers with virtually all the major vineyards marked on them and some extensive volumes describing French wines. However when we came to use them we found that we couldn’t integrate the information in them with our vacation, there was a completely overwhelming amount of information. We could visit a vineyard each morning and afternoon and taste their wine but that would only be only two wines a day and wouldn’t leave any time to have a holiday. We noted the wines that we enjoyed at restaurants and asked them where they sourced those but they were usually only obtainable direct from small vineyards that were some distance from where we were staying. We then went to a wine merchant and asked their opinion about wines we might like but we found it very difficult to describe the wines that we like using our rudimentary French and their much more comprehensive English because the vocabulary used for describing wines is so specialised. We like the Alsace Gewurztraminer wine and have tasted a particular, and rather uncommon, variety that was dry with a pleasant peppery element to its flavour – but trying to convey that in hybrid French-English conversations proved unproductive. We did buy a quantity of wine from that merchant without the opportunity to taste it but we have been disappointed by quite a number of our purchases. In fact many of the wines that we have enjoyed most from that trip were bought from little supermarkets to drink whilst we were in France.

On this trip we are following a different method that appears to be working well. We happened across a wine merchant in the hilltop village of Montcuq, a little West of Cahors, mainly because they were still open for business at 12.30 on a Sunday after the market. The proprietor seems very knowledgeable about his stock and does speak very good English including many wine tasting terms so that has been very helpful (Vins et Saveurs on the main street if ever you are there). We have then asked him to suggest examples in his stock of grape types or regional varieties that we like and we have been drinking these with our evening meals. We have now identified a few wines that we really like and have bought larger quantities to take back with us.

The region that we are staying in produces almost exclusively red wine, the very dark, almost black, vin nobile de Cahors. This is a very robust wine with a lot of tannins which isn’t really to our taste or, more pertinently, to our migraine-precipitating sensors. This means that we are looking outside the region for the white wines that we might like. On our last visit we developed a liking for Saint Véran after reading about it in Susan Loomis’s excellent Rue Tartin book. It is made from the chardonnay grape grown in the Bourgogne region close to Burgundy and produces a fruity wine with a buttery finish on the palate. The Montcuq wine merchant stocks a very good version of this made by J J Vincent at the Château de Fuissé. Another wine that he has provided us with we would never have found if left to our own devices. It is a single grape Viognier wine that has just started production so it has not passed any accreditation and remains in the Vin de Pays classification.

Presentation of restaurant food – L’O à la Bouche, Cahors, France

Last night we ate out in a restaurant in Cahors. It is an establishment that is recommended in guide books and by the owners of the house we are renting but there are at least half a dozen equally recommended restaurants in this small city. We had a three course meal from the 25 Euro menu and it was extremely good. There were many aspects of the restaurant that impressed us, the professional service, the excellent modestly-priced wine, the décor and furniture, but what caught our eye, and taste buds, most was the care and effort which had gone into the construction and presentation of each dish.

One of our starters was a trio of tomato dishes. On a rectangular white plate there was a shot glass filled with delicious gazpatcho, a small tomato stuffed with fine raw salmon and a slice of tomato terrine with some Rocamadour cheese in its centre. Our other starter was a round Parmesan biscuit covered with a courgette caviar and topped with a mound of crab and mussel rillette, on the plate around it were small piles of finely diced vegetables in a mild curry sauce. That is a lot of preparation for two starters!

The main course and desserts were also high level culinary creations with much thought and preparation. When the waiter took our order for starters and main courses he also wanted to know our choice of desserts. We were surprised at this as we feel it is better to make a choice of dessert in the context of post-main course satisfaction, however he explained that if we did want one of the desserts that contained chocolate cake then the kitchen did need to know because it took 30 minutes to bake the cake! We don’t think many UK restaurants would have that level of dedication to freshness for individual customers. This dessert was very good with the small rich chocolate cake with a sunken centre, a shot glass with fresh coconut milk, a triangle of mint marshmallow and small pools of crème Anglaise.

France is of course the world centre of tradition and expertise for high level cuisine so we might expect high standards of cooking in small restaurants in modest regional cities but the contrast between the standards here and in the UK is staggering. In the UK we live in a conurbation of a million people yet there are only two restaurants of a comparable standard to the one we ate in last night. Both are very good but their prices are three times that of L’O à la Bouche.

L’O à la Bouche, 134 Rue St. Urcisse, Cahors. 05 65 35 65 69

Le menu du jour – is this what lunchtimes should be for?

A recent survey suggested that in the UK the average length of a lunchtime had atrophied to below 20 minutes, and most of that was the time required to purchase a sandwich which was then consumed back at the desk (the survey did seem biased towards office workers).

We don’t know what happens in urban France because we have little experience of that, it may be similar to the UK, but in rural France lunchtime still seems to be accorded respect and a generous allowance of time. Part of this is due to the organisation of the working day with a long break in the middle of the day and later working into the early evening, a sensible arrangement in Southern France where it is very hot in the middle of the day – currently in the mid 30s Centigrade during our mid-September vacation. It would be little use to have such a lengthy lunch hour if there were only sandwiches to eat but fortunately France provides much better lunchtime fare – usually in the form of le menu du jour.

We enjoyed a leisurely lunch today in Montcuq after our visit to the wine merchant’s and another last week in a square in Nerac. Both lunches provided remarkable value from a 12 Euro menu du jour – three courses with a substantial salad as entrée, a main course of meat or fish with vegetables and a dessert. At both restaurants lunch was a very egalitarian affair frequented by smartly dressed office workers in suits and ties, workpeople arriving in from hard manual work in white vans, older couples who had come from sleepy rural areas for market day and a few tourists such as ourselves. All seemed to be enjoying their lunch and many seemed to be taking the opportunity of meeting friends and work colleagues, there were few life partners dining together. It seemed to us that lunch was performing a very useful function of social cohesion in many different ways that is rarely seen in the UK.

We wondered about the relative merits of snatched sandwiches and leisurely menu de jours in terms of work efficiency. Does the French working day mean that workers work at a relatively efficient level all day because they have a long break in the middle whereas UK workers might experience a fall in concentration and efficiency in the late afternoon? Is the amount of time spent at lunch in France simply too long to be as efficient as the desk-bound UK workers? Do French workers waste less time at work on gossip and browsing the internet because they have a long lunch hour when they can catch up with friends and acquitances? Does the French daily schedule taper the effects of rush hour travelling that afflicts much of the UK? If there is evidence which supports the French routine then the UK restaurants are going to have sort their menu du jours out ready for the rush.