Lunch party decisions
- rosemary
- Jun 11
- 6 min read
"Please all, and you will please none." Aesop
I haven't hosted a lunch party for ages - well I sort of don't count my occasional family gatehrings, although perhaps I should. Anyway on Saturday a group of our oldest Australian friends are coming for lunch, and this painting by Joanna Davies rather sums up how I feel about it at the moment. Blurry. It won't be as grand as this one looks even through the blur - I doubt there will be candles. Well of course there won't, because this is lunch. We are all old and some are travelling from the other side of Melbourne, so quite understandably don't want to travel for an hour or more in the dark.
But how on earth do you decide what to cook? The choice is virtually infinite, what with my large cookbook library plus the internet. I still haven't quite decided what it will be on the table on Saturday, but herewith a ramble to light at the end of the tunnel.
Initially I was somewhat captivated by a recipe in one of my recent op shop purchases The Food of Italy - one in that series from Bay/Murdoch Books with absolutely gorgeous photos of the food, and also a compendium of all the well-known dishes of the country involved. But I'll talk about the book another day. It was appealing because of course it's winter and there are pears - a much underrated fruit I think. I later discarded the idea, for reasons I shall come to but I shall definitely try this sometime soon. The book calls it Fresh pear tart and the recipe is on a website called Homecooking with Teresa, who says "it is simple to cook and just gorgeous". I was so keen on this recipe, however, that I did ask David to buy me some pears a couple of days ago, because I know they are never ripe enough when you buy them if you buy them on the day you need them.
Tempting though this was it left me with no idea what to do next. My usual mode of thinking is to look in the fridge and see what needs using - and at the moment that's a fennel, some pumpkin and carrots. Not a lot of inspiration there. I pondered on Ottolenghi, but decided that was, ironically, just too unadventurous. I should really resort to my cookbooks.
And eventually, I'm not sure why now, having discarded Italy, I decided on France, and to be more specific, the parts of France I visited as a teenager. The Orléanais - the area around the town of Orléans and the mid River Loire, and also perhaps Paris - home of Danielle and her family - my other French family.
Initially I tried to think back to those times and the food that I ate whilst staying in that beautiful village on the River Loire. Maybe I should just do a selection of hors d'œuvres - that carrot salad I was talking about recently, maybe I could even make a terrine or rillettes, although that would probably leave me with leftovers that would never get consumed. Served with cornichons and wouldn't it be wonderful if I could find some French saucisson. Well not around here.
I remembered going mushrooming in the forests of the Sologne for chanterelles - these beautiful golden, fluted mushrooms - which of course you can't get here, although I may have package of dried ones from Aldi in my overflow drawer. Perhaps I could do some kind of mushroom based starter - champignons à la Grèque perhaps. Mushrooms are a bit of a thing at the moment after all - perhaps not quite. I'll see what I can find perhaps, and then maybe just do a mixed hors d'œuvre platter.
Although there's soup. My every evening dish from all those years ago. A transforming but humble dish, which made me buy my first mouli, and changed the way we made soup forever. Not the fancy French onion soup, but maybe Potage Crècy or Potage Bonne Femme - both from Elizabeth David. I think the carrot soup might have been the very first of her soups from French Provincial Cooking that I made. And yes it did taste French. The picture from the book At Elizabeth David's Table, could well be featuring our 'best' Arabia soup bowls as well. Maybe that's a sign. Soup on a cold day is wonderful.
I don't remember many of the 'mains' that I ate at that time - I remember a fair bit of steak and frites - but I'm really not going to attempt frites - or steak come to that. I'm not very good at steak. There was roast chicken, and some very tiny fish from the river, but I didn't remember much else.
And so I turned to my cookbooks - selecting only those French cookbooks which had chapters on particular regions. And here I found my choices really narrowing down. For the Loire did not seem to have many 'classic' dishes. Well not unless you like eels or snails. Indeed when I did find the Loire mentioned, the recipes mostly came from the Atlantic end of the river. Not my bit. So I also checked out Paris which also did not turn up much. In fact my cookbook exploration - at this stage anyway - only gave me Melted goat's cheese on sourdough (Crotton chaud sur toast), from of all people Luke Nguyen in his book Luke Nguyen's France. The plus side of this was that - apart from this particular recipe being a distinct starter possibility - it reintroduced me to the book. There are so many tempting dishes in there - mostly French dishes with a distinctly Vietnamese twist. I don't look at it very often, but I should.
Even Gabriel Gaté's book associated with the Tour de France, only had a strawberry tart - and he is from the Loire as well!
So I eventually turned to the net and even here I could find very little in the way of Orléanais 'classic' dishes. I checked out several sites that promised me the ten best dishes from the Loire - yes I expanded my search to the entire Loire and virtually always just found a list of products - like Orléans vinegar - Orléans is the vinegar centre of France it seems - some cheeses and wines - Sancerre, Vouvray; some pralines, prunes, from the lower Loire and andouille sausage - that revolting sausage made from pig's intestines. I almost gave up. There is tarte tatin - and yes that could be pears. But I held it in reserve. There was also another pastry - the pithiviers - an almond based dessert, so perhaps that might be something.
So I looked for recipes for chicken with vinegar - I was dimly aware of this as a French classic - and it is - but from Lyon. I almost gave up but then revisited pithiviers because somewhere I remembered a reference to savoury versions. And this is where I simultaneously found a potential solution and more problems. There are masses of recipes for savoury pithiviers out there - including one from Ottolenghi - a mushroom version but no I am not going to do Ottolenghi this time, however tempting. A pithivier, by the way is a puff pastry pie, with a kind of spiral pattern on top, but it seems as if you can put almost anything in it. I have so far narrowed it down to four: Leek, cheese and mushroom pithivier - Valli Little/delicious.; Perfect cheese and potato pithivier - Felicity /Cloake; How to make pithivier - Gourmet Traveller - this one was the most complicated involving charred carrots, garlic shoots (or spring onions) and cavolo nero, leeks and butter beans and a goat's cheese cream; and Leek, feta and potato pithivier - Phoebe Wood/delicious.. Which left me dithering as to which to choose. Not Gourmet Traveller I think. Apart from being relatively light as a main dish, the other advantage is that it can be made the day before up until the actual cooking.
However, if I go for this then there is no way I shall be making any kind of tart for dessert, and maybe even cheese toasts are a bit close as well. Which has got me thinking about the vinegar chicken again - even if it won't even be Orléans vinegar.
Or I can start all over again with something else. Decisions, decisions.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide." Napoleon Bonaparte
Indeed. One more day to decide before I have to commit. Maybe I'll start again - with that pear tart and forget all about France.
YEARS GONE BY
June 11
2024 - Nothing
2023 - Nothing
2020 - Deleted
2017 - Nothing
Hope it all goes well. I do soup these days.