Welcome to Dolly’s Wax. I’ve dubbed this ‘a food blog with a difference’, partly to quickly head off any expectations that this might be a site devoted to wax dolls or the like, and partly because I suspect this won’t be like the majority of food blogs, of which there are many excellent examples. Continue reading
I’d abandoned London by the end of 1987 and had moved in to a little farm cottage in Wiltshire that I shared with a friend, her Border Collie called Bilbo, two pianos, three cats and four ducks. It was a very basic affair; a two up, two down configuration with a small Rayburn stove in the kitchen that provided all the cooking, heating and hot water for the cottage. There was a small garden separated from a farmer’s field by a stream, and plenty of agricultural smells.
We tended to live in the kitchen for warmth, and the table soon became covered with maps and guide books as I planned my gastronomic driving tour. I soon realised I would have to break the journey into two stages, the first devoted mainly to France so that I could travel in an anti-clockwise direction down the west coast to northern Spain, along the bottom toward Italy and then back up the middle through the Rhone valley and Burgundy.
Ferries, restaurants and hotels were booked, routes mapped, bags packed and, with a certain amount of trepidation and a healthy amount of self doubt as to whether I could actually pull this off, I loaded up my beloved Golf GTI and set off for the coast. The ferry crossing to Cherbourg was uneventful and, apart from attempting to drive round the first roundabout I came to in the wrong direction, I soon got the hang of driving on the other side of the road and headed off with barely concealed excitement to my first scheduled meal in Rennes.
The restaurant I had selected to review was currently the most talked about in the town, and I was looking forward to sampling the region’s excellent seafood and some ‘nouveau Rennais’ cooking. Suffice to say the result was a bit of a mixed bag, with the highlight actually being a baked-to-order tarte aux figues fraîche. It was not long after I had checked-in to my hotel for the evening that the first symptoms appeared, and rapidly developed into full scale ‘I am going to die’ food poisoning. Fortunately the design of the bathroom was such that the hand basin was right next to the loo otherwise I don’t know how I would have managed, but I do remember spending the majority of my first night in France fixated by the patterns of the bathroom tiling.
The following morning I couldn’t face breakfast for fear of seeing it again on the way back up, and sat in my room pondering just how I was going to be able to keep to my carefully worked-out schedule that had taken weeks of planning and would be thrown into disarray if I failed to make the next destination that afternoon. There was nothing for it, I had to keep moving, so I checked-out of the hotel and drove off toward Nantes for my rendezvous with the famous restaurant Delphin. I decided to take the back roads and, despite having to stop at the side of the road every so often, made it to my destination without any major ‘accidents’.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had food poisoning. I don’t mean feeling a little dodgy having eaten unwisely, or the toilet bowl-hugging result of too much wine on top of a rich meal, I mean the full eviscerating horror that is bacterial poisoning. Now I’d like you to try to imagine what it must be like having to review one of France’s great restaurants with professional objectivity whilst still enduring the effects of projectile vomiting and truly staggering diarrhoea. Not easy I can tell you, but there was no option but to press on and try to write about the experience as fairly as I could. I think I got away with it – you can find the review under ‘Reviews’.
The return leg of this first stage of my tour was equally eventful but for different reasons – more on that later – but I do remember thinking at the time that someone ‘up there’ had a lousy sense of humour to inflict upon me such a vicious bout of food poisoning after the very first meal of this wonderful gastronomic adventure. Life is indeed a great leveller.
About half way through the first leg of my gastronomic driving tour through Europe I chanced upon one of the most memorable meals of my life. It was the end of 1987 and I’d taken delivery a few months earlier of a brand new VW Golf GTI, which was my pride and joy, and great fun to drive. The weather as I drove down the west coast of France was grey and dull, very like typical English weather in fact, but as I approached the foothills of the Pyrenees, the sun came out, the air filled with the warm scent of wild flowers and lavender and joy filled my heart. I opened the sunroof, turned up the music and, singing along at the top of my voice, gunned the motor and pushed the Golf to the limits of its adhesion on the twisting mountain roads.
The meal was sensational, and although my original notes are sadly lost, I found the following edited excerpt in a guide book still in my possession. Annoyingly I see that menu descriptions were ‘helpfully’ translated into English, as a result losing quite a bit in translation, as they say, but hopefully there is enough here to convey the essence of this marvellous discovery.
If you have driven from Pamplona over the dramatic Col de Roncevaux to this picturesque Basque village, you will already be familiar with the superb scenery that forms the backdrop to this charming restaurant and hotel. What comparatively few people seem to know, however, is just how rewarding is a meal here, lovingly conceived and faultlessly executed by the largely self-taught Firmin Arrambide who, aided by wife Anne-Marie, has been at the helm [since 1972] and now ranks among [France's] top chefs.
He is proud of his Basque origins and the region’s influence shows in dishes such as baby sweet peppers with a farcie of cod or warm terrine of cèpes with herbs, while his equal mastery over both simple and complex is exemplified by a perfectly grilled fillet of grey mullet with thyme and fresh tomato fondue, and the intricate offering of young rabbit with a stuffing of baby vegetables served with stuffed red peppers and raviolis of cèpes. Nothing is overfussy but attention to detail is extraordinary, and natural flavours and textures predominate.
Enjoy local farm cheese with nut and raisin bread, marvel at the towering warm feuilleté of caramelised pears or succumb to the ‘grand dessert au chocolate’. And be sure to sample the wonderful array of vintage Armagnacs.
19 place du Général-de-Gaulle
64220 Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port
Tel: (16) 59 37 01 01
Postscript
When this review first appeared in, I think, 1988 the restaurant had only one Michelin star. Although I have only eaten there once, my experience that glorious lunchtime still lives with me, and I felt fully justified at the time in giving them two stars, which I’m happy to say the publisher supported. It brought home to me just how out-of-step the Michelin guide was in those days, still recognising old dowager establishments with two and even three stars that were well past their best, whilst largely ignoring the exceptional cuisine of more modest out-of-the-way places. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise.
In 1987, soon after leaving Marco Pierre White’s first Michelin-starred restaurant, Harvey’s, I was offered what I considered at the time to be the best job in the world. It was to spend a few months devising and researching a gastronomic road trip through Europe for a new guide that the British AA (Automobile Association) was publishing under the Egon Ronay banner, whose titles they had acquired some months earlier. Needless to say I didn’t hesitate to say yes, and set about planning two routes that would take me through France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Germany.
The brief was to devise two driving tours to two of the most popular destinations for British holidaymakers, Northern Spain and Tuscany, with stops every 100 kms or so at gastronomic restaurants of interest. I was only 29 at the time, and although I had been working for several years as a hotel and restaurant inspector for the Egon Ronay guides, I felt very honoured to have been commissioned to write this feature, which ended up taking me five months in total what with one thing and another.
It was a remarkable journey in many ways. Many of you will no doubt have eaten at some of the country’s finest restaurants. Some may have eaten at two- or three- Michelin starred establishments abroad, but what struck me as unique about this particular job was the chance to eat in many of the world’s greatest restaurants within a compressed time frame. In other words, it provided an extraordinary opportunity to assess like with like, to truly identify which of the grand old establishments were trading off past glories, and which were justifiably at the top of their game. Great journeys tend to fuel equally great stories, and this was to be no different, proving just as remarkable for what happened away from the table as for what happened at it.
More on this later – promise. I’ll also include a few reviews I wrote at the time of some of the more memorable meals. You can find them indexed under ‘Reviews’.
The earliest memory concerning food that I can clearly remember is waking to the sound of my mother scraping the carbon of a slice of burnt toast. This was done with some vigour over the sink using the back of the bread knife, and left a fine dust of grey over the stainless steel bowl and caused lovely rivulet patterns, much like an aerial view of the mouth of the Amazon, when the tap was run to wash it away.
This early morning ritual, as reliable and regular as an alarm clock, left me with the innocent belief that this was in fact how one made toast, and to this day I still prefer toast to be ‘well done’. (I also happen to believe that toast is best eaten once it has cooled for a short while in a toast rack, but that’s a discussion for another day.) In fairness to Mum this was in the days of ‘manual’ toasters, which had a central vertical element and two fold down sides hinged at the base. Nothing as sophisticated as a timer or automatic eject, one just had to remember to take the slice out when toasted, which of course Mum always forgot to do. I can remember thinking how clever the toast-turning mechanism was – an angled piece of metal at the base of the toaster door which flipped the slice end-on-end when you lowered the door and raised it again.
Simple pleasures, but I confess I still find the smell of burnt toast strangely comforting, and if you were to scrape a piece of toast with a knife I suspect I would know it was time to rise and shine.
Don’t you just hate it when Christmas starts appearing in shops about half way through the year? And as soon as that’s over and done with, what happens? Easter arrives, in January. But this is where I get off my high horse and make a confession. I’m pretty well addicted to hot cross buns, so they can’t come early enough as far as I’m concerned. There’s something wonderfully moreish and comforting about them, and although everyone seems to automatically toast them, I happen to think they’re better untoasted, provided they’re freshly baked of course. I could do without that silly white cross thingy too, except that normal fruit buns sans croix don’t taste the same for some reason, so I suffer the religious symbolism in silence.
Which brings me to the point of this post. I happened across the most wonderful sticky buns last week and just have to have a little rave about them. They are as near to perfection as I have come across in 30 years of gastroporn. Everything about them is exquisite; how they taste, smell, look and feel. I suspect if they could sing they’d be pitch perfect as well.
They remind me a bit of a wonderful West Country (UK) indulgence called Lardy Cake. As the name implies, Lardy Cake is basically cholesterol on a plate, but it has the same indulgent texture, mouth-filling flavour and feel-good factor that only comes from lovingly baked, hand made produce that’s come fresh from a real baker’s oven.
So too with these ‘sweet buns’, made by the good folk at Pure Bread Bakery in Surrey Hills (114 Union Road) from, I suspect, a sourdough base with the addition of a bit of yeast. They are crammed full of vine fruit and orange zest that combines luscious sweetness with the merest hint of bitterness from the orange pith.
Resist the temptation to toast them (which spoils the texture and masks much of the flavour and, therefore, pleasure) and simply enjoy as is or halved with a smear of unsalted butter. Absolute heaven.
Worth exploring too is their exemplary sourdough bread, including flavoured, grain and part-yeasted varieties, plus a small selection of very fine cakes and tarts made by their own pastry chef – the tarte au citron is particularly good.
Do you happen to know of any outstanding fruit buns out there? All suggestions gratefully received.
…a bowl of cherries. Can there be anything quite as perfect as a simple bowl of glistening, deep scarlet cherries? Visually it’s up there with ripe figs in my book, but I concede not quite as erotic.
Two thoughts were puzzling me as I munched my way through just such a bowl the other day. First, why is it that ‘life is just a bowl of cherries’, and second, is there a name for the syndrome of not being able to finish eating a succession of items until you find one that is ‘just right’?
The first, it turns out, is fairly easy to answer. The phrase refers to a song of that title popular during the great depression years, or so Wikipedia tells me, but frankly I’m none the wiser when it comes to understanding what a bowl of cherries has to do with making the best of a bad situation, which I think is the gist of the song.
As for the second puzzle, it was only when I noticed that I couldn’t stop eating the cherries until I had found one that tasted ‘just right’ that I began to worry that it was all a bit weird. I mean, I’ve heard some lame excuses when it comes to gluttony, but to persist with eating a particular item, all the while embracing the desperate psychological justification that somehow it is not only acceptable, but desirable, to stop once a completely indefinable apotheosis is reached, struck me as, well, a bit obsessive compulsive. Not that I’m losing any sleep over it. After all, there are too many bowls of cherries, and boxes of chocolates for that matter, to explore until just the right one is found, but it did make me wonder if I’m the only one who suffers enjoys this particular syndrome.
Does anyone know what I’m talking about here? Any fellow sufferers? A special mention goes to the person that comes up with the best name for the syndrome.
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