francofiled

The Cher comes to Belfast! Having spent a year living in Vierzon, in France's Centre-Val de Loire region, I feel a strong connection to the Cher department and the Loire Valley more generally. This part of France is famed for its châteaux and its wines particularly Sauvignon Blanc, and Chenin Blanc. I visited several times over the decades, but recently, the Cher came to Belfast in the persons of winemaker, Thierry Delaunay, and his wife, Marie. They brought 9 of their wines with them, to Direct Wine Shipments (DWS), for a meet the wine maker tasting, organised by DWS.  There was a large crowd of wine enthusiasts, and the air bubbled with conversations and excitement. Making our way up the stairs we each received a welcome glass of sparkling wine at the top before a member of staff assigned everyone to their place in the tasting room. I had gone on my own but soon our table was a buzz of conviviality, fellow tasters swapping names and sharing wine adventures. A handbell sounded ou...

  Our Cercle français is bringing a taste of Lyon to Belfast later this month.  The special menu has been created by the Culinary Arts team at The Academy Restaurant of Ulster University and in previous years our dining experience there has been simply excellent.  Looking forward to this.

Browsing the wine section at my local supermarket, I suddenly stopped as I found it interesting to come across these bottles with French idioms on their labels.  Varietals / Grape Varieties More about their meanings below, meantime the varietal names, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay are by now so well known to wine consumers that they need no further explanation.  If it were a competition varietals would win among local consumers. In many establishments that's all that is offered.  However, most of the wine in France is bottled with regional or estate names and may not immediately recommend themselves to those who select their wine according to grape variety - Chablis, for example is a Chardonnay.   We're getting there but it may take a while longer until outlets and the wine consuming public develop greater confidence with LaBel(le)France  And that's why these labels are such a good idea.  They create  a splash of fun with the language and...

  Dessert for our French-themed dinner last night. Lovely!

Now that was a substantial and great value lunch. Moules frites and a Moroccan stew.  The mussels were enough for two - a huge portion. Très bon rapport qualité-prix. Next time you are in Dublin give yourself a treat and visit Chez Max at the Alliance in Kildare Street. It's like being in France for an afternoon. Check it out here.

 

 

I have been toying for a long time with this idea:  Taking a stay@home wine tour through the Beaujolais Crus.  I like Beaujolais and find it an excellent food friendly wine.  It's made with the Gamay grape and there are ten distinct classifications.  Over the next weeks and months I aim to taste each of them. Some have been favourites down the years and some are old friends with whom to get reacquainted. Above is an acrostic and below a set of clues.  If you would like to join me on this stay@home journey then use the clues to work out the name of the cru and then look out for tasting notes in future posts on this blog. Here are the clues: 1.   Starting to get foggy in France. (8) 2.   A flower field? (7) 3.   A windmill in France. (6,1,4) 4.   This one on the side. (4,2,8) 5.   Includes a girl's name or a boy's with an extra letter. (8) 6.   Others have left too. (6) 7.  Ends in Russian currency. ...

  Spotted it straightaway on the cheese shelf of my local supermarket. Caprice des Dieux. It might be new here but I tasted it for the first time decades ago. It was one of those introductory tastes to the French cheeseboard and I would often eat it sandwiched in a baguette. Yes it's industrial and at a remove from the artisanal varieties I enjoy these days but it still holds a special place in my taste memories - a first embrace in this amour de fromage. 

A Bastille day breakfast to start the day right. Couldn't find my French flags so improvised with fruit bowls of blueberries, yoghurt and raspberries. Croissants and apricot jam to follow, love it! Bonne continuation !

Author's note: This article was first posted as 24 hours in Saint Émilion on www.cerclefrancaisdebelfast.org in August 2020.  It is a follow up to a post that appeared ten years earlier on francofiled in August 2010.  Click here for the previous post entitled Saint Émilion - Message in a bottle.  The plan to spend a night in the medieval town of Saint-Émilion was uncorked some years back. Nearly two decades ago we had been in the town and purchased a special bottle from the 1981 vintage of  Château Franc-Pourret  to commemorate our wedding year.  The idea, still not realised, was to crack it open at a special anniversary. It was on checking its current status for drinkability that we noted that the Château offered the opportunity to stay in the heart of the  vignoble  in highly rated  chambre d'hôte  accommodation.  The plan developed its aroma when last September, we arranged to spend a few weeks in France starting in Bordeaux bef...

It was a rare afternoon out with friends. Cafés and restaurants had started to reopen after stringent lockdown measures and safety precautions were much in evidence. The waiting staff at our lunch spot wore masks and were getting used to a new way of meeting, greeting and presenting our food. We didn't stay long indoors however and instead made our way to a nearby open air terrace which was situated beside a bus stop. A farewell glass of wine before heading home? Who knows when we'll get out again. Turns out it was a very public glass of wine.  That bus stop was a busy place with passengers pulling off or putting on masks as buses arrived or departed and others waiting for theirs. You know how people say they love to sit at a pavement café in Paris or other big city and watch passers-by? Well this time it was the other way round, the passers-by and passengers were people watching us! The wine we had chosen was a 2016 Louis Latour Pinot Noir from the Domaine de Valmoissine in th...

Quand mon verre est vide, je le plains, Quand mon verre est plein, je le vide.     Raoul PONCHON I have always loved this simple jeu de mots , word play. Literally it means that when my glass is empty I feel sorry about that. When it's full, I empty it. Within moderation of course.

Hands rough with weeding. Cooling bubbles. Ça s'arrose !

Ever had a coffee that was too hot to drink? What about one that was too hot to hold? That latter sometimes proves to be the case when we serve it in some cherished French porcelain Mazagran drinking cups. The ones pictured above are part of a set purchased as a gift way back in 1974. They were bought in Vierzon at a weekly fair at which various artisans plied their wares. I haven't been able to trace where exactly they were produced but each carries the mark "Atelier de Tabalou" and I'm wondering if they come from the Limoges area, home to other fine porcelain products. Mazagran refers to both the drinking cup and a type of coffee popular in Algeria. There's a little more detail over at this wikipedia link . One way of cooling the coffee and the cup is to place a long handled spoon in the hot liquid - it dissipates the heat. I find though that if I hold the cup at its base, holding a finger under the rim for stability it's easy enough to manage.  Ni...

It was a first time visit to Le Pain Quotidien in Kildare Village - and I wondered why I hadn't heard of it before. Of course the initial attraction was the enticing sign in French but a quick look inside was all that was needed to step into the allure of freshly baked breads on artist palette boards and strong flavoursome  coffee served in hand-warming bowls. The concept is Belgian rather than French and I love the story of how originator, Alain Coumont's idea of a traditional bakery was eventually realised, how the name was chosen and how that very first table commune came about. You can read that story here. The place has plenty to offer the vegan diner : Bircher bowls of overnight oats (a favourite in our house), Organic Turmeric eggs with Seaweed and avocado.  For those with a sweet tooth : Raw Nut Cakes of passion fruit and beetroot and the ubiquitous salted caramel - Coupable !   Guilty! Taking up the central area was la table commune - made fr...

Speaking engagement.  Talk prepared, car loaded and off to the meeting; brilliant, I'd left plenty of time to find a parking space at the venue and more than enough to offload the selection of French wine and cheeses that were intended for une dégustation that evening. Things don't always go as planned and when I arrived most of the parking spaces were occupied by a single van! There was one space that just might work so if I could just quickly unload the "stuff" for the talk I could squeeze in. Seemed a good idea up to the point when the sickening sound of scraping metal told me it wasn't! ... Thoughts of an expensive evening crossed my mind as I headed to a public carpark about 5 minutes away. There was still just enough time, if I hurried. Got a space okay and opened the back door to retrieve my laptop from the back seat. SMASH! Not the laptop, fortunately, but a bottle of wine I had chosen to accompany one of the cheeses for the tasting. Wine on ...

What strikes me when reading through internet recipes for salade niçoise is the sheer variation of ingredients.  Everyone it seems has a preference. This one prepared by ma conjointe certainly hits the spot. By the time I got around to taking the picture I had already devoured the luscious black olives but still on the plate are the French beans, tomato quarters, potatoes and anchovies.  A lovely vinaigrette was served alongside. Notice too those quarters of hard-boiled egg.  Egg features a lot on those internet recipes but not in my go-to source of French Cookery - Louis Saulnier's Le Répertoire de la Cuisine .   Saulnier had the famous Auguste Escoffier as his mentor and the Répertoire is a quick reference guide to the master's cookery. Interestingly, the Répertoire does not include tuna either although many recipes do. One that I have to hand even states that Escoffier - there's Saulnier's mentor again - calls for tunny fish in oil to be added. It se...

As was promised in my last post on Cases of Cognac to Belfast available here  I added some cognac to a Belfast Crystal glass and paid a silent toast to those mentioned in the post.... Admittedly it was with a VSOP rather than a 3* but then it is whatever's to hand. Right?

The Friend at Hand is more than just an Irish Whiskey shop in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, it is also an emporium that houses a vast array of whiskeys and whiskey memorabilia; legacies of a bygone time which are definitely not for sale, providing instead a visible, authentic record of the many distilleries around the city in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Among the items on display was the framed telegraph request pictured above. Found in Belfast That evocative word - Cognac   - near the top of the page caught my eye and, interest aroused, I noted the date: 8 August 1891. 1891 - This is a remarkably well preserved document but I wondered what on earth was an order for brandy doing as a display item in a whiskey store.  I set about finding out.  The telegraph as you can see was addressed to a company in Cognac.  This lead me to an internet search but my initial queries on Bouhelleau or Bonhelleau and other variants returned zero results. The solution la...