I’m not very old, but for much of my youth in the north west of England, it was almost impossible to find fresh foods that weren’t local. Today such a statement seems like an echo of Victorian times, but, literally, that’s how it was until a supermarket was built behind the Knutsford courthouse in the late 80s.

I often tell my wife about the cheese stall at the weekly market only kept five kinds of cheese – Cheshire, Cheddar, Lancashire, and sage Derby were ever present, with perhaps a Wenslydale reasonably common too. If anything as unusual as a Stilton, from distant Nottinghamshire, appeared, it would generate as much commotion among the town’s housewives, who elbowed their way to the front of the queue to catch a glimpse of this highly perfumed foreigner, as if Julio Iglesias showed up sporting his tennis shorts. My wife usually responds that I should count myself lucky because when she was young there were only four kinds of cheese at her local supermarket: white American, yellow American, cheddar and Swiss and had anything else been available it would have been looked upon with extreme suspicion. Touché.

Making our weekly Tuesday rounds of the covered (indoor) market (the outdoor market sold mostly fruit and veg, bric a brac, and live pets, believe it or not) with my mother, on the cheese man’s left was the egg man, or “mister Chookie” as I knew him, on account of his perennial sales pitch “come tek a look at these lover-lee chookie eggs I’ve got for yuh!”. Unlike his fellow stall-holders, whose wares fell within a particular genre, the egg man also sold milk, orange juice and yogurt due to him being one of the younger siblings of the Sheldon family that owned the local dairy, and who, excepting market days, delivered these provisions to the doorsteps of the town’s residents.

Beyond Mr. Chookie was the fish man, Mr. Scales, as my mother used to call him, although at the time her pun was lost on me. Above his stall ran the legend “fresh daily from Fleetwood, Lancs”, referring to the port just north of blackpool where much of Britain’s catch was landed. That his stall was only open Tuesdays and Thursdays didn’t seem to matter. Whether it was due to her upbringing in blackpool where there is – rightfully – a great deal of local snobbery about the quality of the fish that goes into their fish n’chips, or whether because of an innate suspicion of fishmongers, my mother always eyed mr scales’s wares closely, casting a wary eye over his glossy fish, as if trying to discern if there was anything untoward hiding among the cockle-shells. Because we rarely had fish except on Fridays when we weren’t allowed anything else – even in our lunchboxes at school we had to mark the end of the week with evil-smelling “salmon paste” sandwiches – and because mum worked a full day on Thursdays, whatever we bought on Tuesdays had to last on ice in the bottom of the fridge until then (freezing fish made it taste all woolly, she always said), so freshness was absolutely crucial otherwise it/we wouldn’t survive.

Typically, the fish was cod, but often halibut or hake did service in the flaky white fish department. This was usually broiled and served with oven-baked chips, since as a nurse my mother couldn’t countenance deep-frying at home lest it give the townies the impression she was a hypocrite in her dietary exhortations, and homemade mushy peas, flecked with mint and tangy with a splash of malt vinegar. Apart from a distinctly non-traditional and rather dodgy-looking “curry” she made every so often, friday night fish suppers were my dad’s favorite – he still demands it to this day and he is about as agnostic an Anglican as you’ll find.

Instead of waiting for Friday, and going against my mum’s rubric of no-frying, but keeping with the buying of white fish on a Tuesday, we made a version of the Provencal classic, aioli garni, with a pan seared halibut fillet, steamed fennel and butter beans. Rather like much of the cooking I experienced growing up, it doesn’t look like much on the plate – the pale colors and the two sauces lapping against one another may seem bland – but the sharp tang of the garlicky aiolli with the surprising hot peppery-bite of the brown sauce against the muted flavors of the white fish and butter beans makes for an unusually rewarding dish. I am convinced that my mum would’ve enjoyed this dish a great deal, even though she would have asked why we didn’t save it for Friday night. As for my dad, well, sadly, he wouldn’t touch it on account of it humming with garlic. Too bad for him.

The largely unknown city of Compiegne, France, has the distinction of being the site of one of Louis XV’s most extravagant homes away from home. Under him, the Chateau de Compiegne became one of three distinctly opulent seats of government alongside Versailles and Fontainbleau. The latter French monarchs were hardly known for their desire to live simply as visitors to either of those other palaces can attest, and Compiegne is no exception, taking more than 35 years to complete with Louis constantly tinkering at the design to aggrandize it to his tastes. When finished it made the perfect departure point for forays into the nearby Forest of Compiegne, ancestral hunting grounds of French royalty, for some bracing sport. However, Louis was not into taking chances on returning with his game bag empty, and it is said that the forest was so well-stocked that a blind marksman could still expect to feast on wild meats.

Of course, it’s well-known that the rest of the French population were not eating in quite such grand style at that time, and it wasn’t until after the revolution and the rise of the bourgeois class that the French institution with which many of us are most familiar came into being, namely, the restaurant. Happily for us, upon visiting Compiegne in early 2010, we found that these days the city is much more egalitarian in its approach and makes abundant gastronomic accommodation for a range of economic classes. Indeed, the night we arrived, we dined somewhat opulently on escargot ravioli and kir royal before joining the sans culottes at the other end of the social spectrum the following evening with a carafe of vin ordinaire to wash down a marvelously flavorful jarret de porc, poached pig’s hock, a humble dish that was almost certainly never prepared for residents of the Chateau. Served with some whipped potatoes together with its poaching broth that would have been almost as good without the hock itself, le jarret was juicy, incredibly rich and porky, and meltingly tender.

The porcine counterpart to the famed veal osso buco of Milan, the hock is the lower portion of the animal’s shin bone ending just above the trotter, and is consequently tough and full of connective tissues. As with all such parts of the beast, slow cooking is necessary to get the best out of it, and in the case of the hock, poaching tenderizes it perfectly, but ignores the magic of the skin and underlying fat, comparable with the cheeks in terms of porky flavor. To solve this problem, and improve upon the jarret of Compiegne, we roasted it in a hot oven that performed three special functions: 1) it rendered out some of the fat, 2) crisped the skin into some amazing crackling, and 3) transformed the connective tissue into sticky, almost sweet, gelatin. We then deglazed the roasting pan with some of the strained poaching liquid and reduced the mixture into an almost clear gravy, that combined with a squeeze or two of lemon juice to cut the richness, came together on its own with the pig gelatin.

Unfortunately, and this is why we took until the start of fall 2011 to make this dish, unsmoked pork hocks are rather difficult hard to obtain in America even from reputable butchers where their smoked counterparts are ever present, and it was only last week that we managed to get our hands on some, in, of all places, a regular suburban supermarket. Our freezer is now half-filled with pork hocks which will be dropped into Sunday gravy in the near future, and may well also feature in a special attempt at home-making aspic jelly should we run out of inspiration or suffer from pork overload in the interim. We would encourage you to seek out this humble cut of meat too, you won’t be dining royally but it might help you feel wealthy when you check your bank balance.

Classic French cooking doesn’t get much more classic than chicken in tarragon cream sauce. This bistro menu stalwart has all the unctious elements you instinctively associate with Gallic gastronomy: butter, cream, wine and mild herbs. Likely originating in that blessed triangle just north of Lyon where the famous blue-footed chickens of Bresse neighbor the Cotes de Beaune wine region and abut the renowned mustard-producing region of Dijon, this dish can also be given a Norman twist simply by substituting the white wine for a dry cider.

Loosely based on a recipe I read here, but one that I’ve made countless times, we enjoyed this one with our friends Matt and Joanna this past weekend. There’s something about French classics that almost guarantees happiness among your dinner party guests. It’s as if the way we live today and nervousness about cream and butter rules out eating this kind of food in the home, but that when they do appear together some kind of Pavlovian, slightly hysterical, response is provoked that results in over-indulgence and an ability to somehow accommodate a four-course meal, including cheese, multiple bottles of wine, and after dinner drinks.

Happily, this dish is so easy to prepare and faultlessly scalable to the number you’re catering for that it’s as perfect for a dinner party as it is for a casual weeknight meal when you’re feeling in need of a little self-soothing. You can make it ahead and warm it for service or make it while your guests swarm around you in the kitchen soaking up the hum of the garlic. Serve with roasted, mashed or boiled potatoes, or just with a crusty baguette to wipe your plates of all the creamy, buttery goodness.

According to British and Irish tradition, black pudding has an esteemed place next to the bacon rashers, sausage links, fried eggs, mushrooms, fried tomato and fried slice in an old-fashioned greasy spoon breakfast, but its almost complete absence from the American breakfast table is confusing, especially given our known preference towards an injection of cholesterol to kick-start the day.

This phenomenon might be partially explained by the less euphemistic title of “blood sausage” in use on these shores. The more descriptive terminology acting as a major deterrent. In fact, blood sausages are an integral part of the diets of many European countries — the morcilla of Spain and French boudin noir, among them — and their former colonies in the new world, especially South America, with the Cajun country cooking of Louisiana and the Canadian province of Quebec being the only areas of North America to demonstrate any real enthusiasm for these dark mystery bags.

Supposedly a corruption of the English word “pudding”, boudin are common throughout France in various colors and flavors, and in many ways the term refers to fresh sausages in general, with the more familiar cognate, saucisson, reserved largely for salumi/preserved sausages. Boudin blanc, made with veal and pork are commonly seasoned with quatre epices (white pepper, ginger, nutmeg and cloves) and closely resemble many of the sausages I remember growing up in England where pale colored pork sausages, flavored most commonly with either apple or sage, were a weekend breakfast table favorite. However, it’s the boudin noir, made with pigs blood, grains, fat and seasoned with white pepper and nutmeg that I am most interested in, perhaps, because of a fascination with just how one makes sausages out of congealed pigs blood, but, principally because their gruesome reputation belies their extremely delicate texture and taste. Their rich color, unique minerally-flavor, and loose, unctious mouth-feel, is obscured by our collective fear of blood, though given the current inexplicable popularity of all things vampire-related, whether this is shared by younger generations is unknown.

In France, there are various centers of boudin production, but it is relatively easy to find throughout the country. The meal above is a take on one we ate in the charming medieval town of Arras (more famous for its wall-hanging carpetry than its gastronomy) in north-eastern France around New Year 2009. The potato gratin and green salad of that meal being substituted here with puy lentils and some charmingly minute steamed vegetables – zucchini in this case – and pickled pattypan squash. The latter picked up during some holiday impulse buying at a supermarket outside the nearby town of Noyon, and the jar breached for this special recreation. This dish was extremely good, though the boudin did deflate somewhat during cooking which I took to be an indictment of the particular sausage-maker’s art rather than a facet typical of blood sausages in general. Should you wish to avoid that possibility altogether though, I would certainly council frying thick slices of boudin on a hot plate, or similar device, until crispy on the outside. The contrast with the lentils and the soft interior of the sausage would be even better than what’s pictured here.

There’s a show on public television here in America called “Moment of Luxury” in which the host very generously enjoys all manner of fine things on our behalf and then shares his collected pensees about the experience. Traveling around the food blogosphere lately has felt like a surprisingly similar experience for us since our three month old prevents us from experiencing any luxury ourselves.

Tough titty, I hear you cry. Fair enough, we have lived rather high on the hog these last several years and have been blessed with several unforgettable moments of luxury along the way, but like the princess and the pea, we are finding our current rather straightened circumstances somewhat uncomfortable.

Turning over a new (year’s) leaf, determined to gripe no longer and return to being active participants in our (gastronomic) lives, we had a deuce of a time this past weekend putting together some foie gras and wild mushroom ravioli, in the hope we would be able to enjoy at least one or two moments of luxury. Inspired by ZenChef’s oxtail and foie gras ravioli and our experience eating escargot-stuffed ravioli in France (both) around this time last year (when we bought the can of foie gras we used), we took a brief flight of fancy in the accompanying sauce, combining porcini stock, balsamic vinegar and red currants into a sort of impromptu agrodolce. Some dry roasted wild mushrooms completed this, quite frankly, sublime dish.

Savoring these rich and blissful parcels certainly felt like a moment of luxury. Indeed, when we were roused moments later from this temporary reverie by infantile caterwails echoing from the nursery, these few seconds of pleasure were all the more significant providing much-needed encouragement for us to gird our loins once more for our nightly skirmishes with our darling offspring.

The culinary memoir has to be one of my favorite genres of both cookbooks and books in general. Combining anecdotes, family history and delicious recipes, and spanning literature and cuisine, there’s really nothing better than a cookbook that you can actually read, that’s not just a selection of quick and easy recipes by some personality-laden stand and stir TV show host, and from which you learn the context of the food and about why traditions and patience in food are important. With the holiday season upon us, I can heartily recommend you give the gift of a copy of Food & Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck, to your nearest and dearest this year.

Madame Beck is best known as having been Julia Child’s collaborator on Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes I and II, in which she was both originator and chief tester of the majority of the recipes contained therein. Beck and Child met through a mutual friend while Child was first in Paris with her spy-husband, Paul, in the late 1940s, and struck up a friendship that was to last until Beck’s death in 1991. In spite of her crucial role in these historic cookbooks, many Americans could be forgiven for never having heard of Simone Beck, since Julia Child’s television career and her bright and breezy personality are what most people remember. This is a pity because Beck is a superb raconteuse, whose life, spent in various parts of France, spanning two World Wars, a trans-Atlantic career, and the birth, life and death of nouvelle cuisine, is truly fascinating.

The first half of this reissued book – first published in 1991 – is a charming, rose-tinted memoir, interspersed at key points with beautifully-constructed period menus complete with recipes from the principal events she tells of – dinners with local Norman families, dinners for liberating Canadian soldiers, and lunches made for her Provencal cooking school. The second half is rather more of a straight-up compendium of French recipes, many of which feel, in all honesty, rather old-fashioned and frumpy when deprived of Beck’s evocative descriptions of French country life we find in the first half of the book.

If you are looking for a cookbook full of recipes that you’re immediately going to want to make, then this might not be the book for you, as although there are plenty of recipes that will make you salivate, many feel rather overly ornate for the typical American home cook. For the purposes of quality control, I tried her Poulet de Varvannes a l’estragon et a la creme (chicken in tarragon cream sauce) (recipe to follow in a later post), and found it to be not only completely delicious, but a very straightforward recipe to take on, even for a week night, so one can definitely pick through this books contents for more approachable dishes. However, even if you never make any of Simca’s food, there is plenty to enjoy in her book with its variety of delightful tales of her gastronomic pursuits and friendships with many of the 20th century’s most celebrated bon vivants. For further reading of this kind, I can also recommend Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice, M.F.K. Fisher’s A Long Time Ago in France and the unsurpassed When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman.

It’s one of the ironies of being a new parent that even though we are spending more time than at any other point in our adult lives at home, we are finding it virtually impossible to do any cooking. Even when we do steal a few moments of quiet to get behind the burners, by the time the food is done, so is the nap our baby was taking. Of course, eating your dinner cold is nothing new to a food blogger – teasing the plating and getting just the right lighting usually takes a while – but at least we used to be able to eat our tepid meat and congealed sauce without the throaty vocal stylings of a five-week-old as an accompaniment.

Another delightful aspect of being a home-bound parent is that, when leaving the house involves assembling ten things, a stroller and an acquiescent child, one is motivated to make use of what is close at hand. In a moment of hunger-inspired desperation this past weekend, we took that maxim to its logical conclusion.

Literally lying beside our front door was a pair of pumpkins we had originally intended to carve for Halloween had our sculptural ambitions not been thwarted by the arrival of said infant. Still edible, they were quickly hacked, seeded and roasted in a hot oven with salt and pepper while the baby slumbered peacefully in his swing. In a “waste not, want not” moment, also into the oven went the pumpkin seeds seasoned with chipotle powder and brown sugar, emerging a scant twenty minutes later, crispy and snack-tastic. The baby, now stirring, its nostrils a-quiver.

From all of this, plus the contents of a still well-stocked spice rack and half a Mexican chorizo I rescued from a sad end in the depths of our refrigerator, came a pimentón-scented pumpkin velouté topped with sweet chipotle pepitas, crumbled chorizo and a sprinkle of black Hawaiian sea salt that I forgot we’d bought, somewhat curiously, in a supermarket in France last Christmas.

Even the abundant use of the stick blender failed to completely rouse our newborn, though, in his now-customary fashion, by the time we were seated at the table, spoons-at-the-ready, our charming little nipper was once again in full voice, sharing his anguish at his meager milk-based diet. Happily, this soup is just as good, if not better, when reheated the next day. A quality we might not have fully appreciated before now.

Every now and then I’ll sit through one of those “secrets of the ancient world” shows on the History Channel. You know, the ones in which they have modern experts try to “decode” how the pyramids or the hanging gardens of Babylon were constructed using graphics that make you feel like you’re watching B-roll from The Da Vinci Code, and where, before every commercial break, there’s some sort of cliff-hanger like “Coming up, how this building ought never to have stood!”

So it was this past week, when shortly after the birth of our son, I was rocking him gently to sleep with one eye on a TV show about how Europe’s gothic cathedrals were built. Focusing on the massive limestone spires of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame d’Amiens, St. Pierre de Beauvais and Notre-Dame de Paris, this show was among the more interesting of its genre as not only did it deal directly with how modern architects are trying to prevent these houses of God from collapsing under their own weight, but it also brought back memories of our trip earlier this year to the Picardy region of northern France when we visited the first of these.

While the nave of St. Pierre de Beauvais did in fact collapse because of architectural over-reach, which its foreshortened and incomplete appearance reflects, Notre-Dame d’Amiens stands perilously intact as among the largest of its kind in the world. Sitting on the highest point in town, it can be seen, as was intended, from miles around. At night, it is so illuminated by floodlights that the visitor might be forgiven for thinking it is heralding an alien invasion.

When these giants of devotional architecture were being erected, they were in competition with one another for the title of the grandest monument in the country, but if competitive historic structural design isn’t your exactly bag, there is plenty else to appreciate about Amiens, including a feat of construction every bit as daring, but much more toothsome, than those stonemasons of yore managed. For Amiens, as Picardy in general, is famous for its duck products, and in particular for a fascinating multi-meat confection of duck, rabbit, pork and chicken livers all sealed-up crustily in a layer of savory pastry.

In truth, this was my train of thought. Fatigued as I was by several sleepless nights and hungry for something corporeally rewarding, the enduring might of colossal 13th-century cathedrals was far less intriguing than Jane Grigson’s recipe for pâté en croûte d’Amiens. Moreover, I was even more drawn to it because its preparation seemed to be easy enough for my addled senses to follow. Even after butchering and stripping the duck and rabbit carcasses, it didn’t feel like a lot of work, nor did the very basic pastry recipe cause any pain, persuading me, momentarily, that perhaps this parenting lark isn’t so tough after all.

However, pulling the rich, golden-brown terrine from the oven, and hearing my mother-in-law comment that in spite of the recent arrival of our firstborn I was willing to waste time preparing such a dish in place of a easy greasy take-away dinner, I snapped at her rather meanly, that given the level of the strain I was under, and some fried crap in a tray just wouldn’t cut it. I subsequently apologized, and had my nerves not been so frayed by weariness, I would have replied much more civilly, perhaps saying that in this pâté en croûte, I, like the structural engineers on the History Channel, had found a temporary solution to crushing gravity.

The basic premise of William Alexander’s recent book, 52 Loaves, like his first title The $64 Tomato, is that the author becomes so obsessed with a particular project, in this case creating (and growing wheat for) the perfect loaf of country bread, that he devotes a year (hence the title) and a great deal of energy and money, in the pursuit of his goal.

I’ll leave aside the obvious shades of mid-life crisis that dominate the book’s context, and I’ll ignore the far-too-frequent-for-comfort discussions of Alexander’s marital relations that I feel like he included to appear less of a nerd than a bread-obsessed IT director might otherwise, and focus instead on the fact that, as with many quests, his journey ultimately became more important than his goal. Alexander’s aim may have been to master the art of baking au levain country loaves at home, but in the course of his year-long peregrinations across North America, and to Morocco and France, and wittily transcending his middle-aged, obsessive-compulsive suburban dad identity, he finds much more than a faultless bread recipe, becoming a fount of fascinating knowledge and experience about life and human history.

Many of us, I’m sure, secretly dream of jacking in our workaday lives in the urban rat-race and retiring to a country town to bake delicious breads (or insert artisan career of choice), but Alexander disabuses the reader of this romantic notion through his own strenuous baking experiences as a boulanger for forty monks at the Norman abbey of St. Wandrille. Certainly, hobbyist bread bakers can learn a great deal from the author’s efforts, and benefit from the distilled information he provides in the form of recipes in the appendices, but for me, the most interesting aspect of 52 Loaves is that it raised a thorny issue Michael Steinberger also makes in his recent book Au Revoir to All That, that I was reading concurrently, namely that in France, the country many of us believe to be ground-zero for all that is good in bread baking (not to mention gastronomy in general), there is hardly a decent loaf to be found.

Projecting his theory that a 1,300 year old abbey must be the place to find (and make) artisan country breads, Alexander finds, to his dismay, that not only do none of the monks know how to bake but that even obtaining the correct kind of flour and yeast is nigh-on impossible. Echoing a  situation Steinberger also laments, Alexander questions how things got this way as he finds himself smuggling pots of his wild yeast starter into France when traditionally all the knowledge and great products have been coming the other way.

Of course, recently the French have become a convenient punchline in America for all manner of jokes about their military prowess, supposed lack of backbone and preference for industrial action over actual hard work, and one might be forgiven for thinking Steinberger is cashing in on that incipient anti-Gallic sentiment to herald the demise of the only areas in which the French have typically led the Anglo-Saxon world: food, wine, and artisanal production thereof. In fact, Steinberger is a self-declared Francophile whose enviably thorough research at many of the finest tables, markets, farms and vineyards in France must have caused him terrible distress as he found that a disastrous combination of a poor economy, confounding government regulations and a saddening disregard for traditional French food culture have led to a serious decline in gastronomic excellence.

Alexander notes the irony of  an American computer guy teaching French monks how to bake bread, and Steinberger points to the French Culinary Institute’s 2006 Gala hosted by a bevy of Spanish chefs and not a single Frenchman as evidence of the “end of France”, but it is, all the same, hard to believe that an entire nation’s cultural identity is vanishing to such an extent that hobbyist Americans and a little competition from a resurgent southern neighbor have supplanted centuries of tradition. Indeed, one of the underlying biases of both books is that we in America (and Britain), who have recently emerged from a centuries-long gastronomic Dark Age and have finally embraced the notion that food coming from small, craft producers is better in myriad ways than that of the industrial conglomerate (something we owe in no small measure to our Gallic cousins), are somehow now able to preach this message back to the French and that the joke is on them.

Certainly, Steinberger’s book is persuasive and raises legitimate concerns about how government regulation of cheese making is precipitating the extinction of some of France’s most famous lait cru, or raw milk, cheeses, but I can’t help averring that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. While USDA regulations still rule out the importing of French raw milk cheeses, not to mention actively discouraging domestic production thereof, there is comparatively little hope of their persistence here or there. Moreover, if it is the attraction of McDonald’s and Wonderbread that is behind the decline in traditional French bistrots and artisanal country loaf baking, then who is to blame – the country who popularized both and, now, finding itself now saturated and obese  as a result, is looking to export them to maintain share prices, or lower middle-class French families struggling to make ends meet in a global economic downturn?

If there is a message to be taken combined from both titles it is perhaps an obvious one, that wherever one finds oneself (to a greater or lesser degree depending on location), and whether it be haute cuisine, organic wheat flour or artisanal raw milk cheese, fine food remains a bourgeois passion really only available to those whose considerable purchasing power offers the option to choose. Evidently, a world where delicious, nutritious, locally-grown and organic foods are available to all is the ideal and a goal worth striving for, but until, through government intervention or other means, and especially problematic in a persistently bad economy, these food stuffs are price competitive with the products of industrial agro-business, it is too early to start congratulating ourselves for having seen the light and pointing out the fault in others in the grip of lower-grade processed foods.

As you may have inferred, I am not overly impressed by this show or others like Man vs. Food that marvel at just how gluttonous and boorish the host can be. Perhaps it’s because I frequently over-eat and then avoid looking at myself in the mirror, but in the same way as I don’t favor shows featuring close-ups of young fools guzzling booze, like, say, The Real World, I also don’t enjoy watching some fat guy shoving 4 pounds of pancakes down his pie-hole surrounded by the cheering obese. I find it all, shall we say, sorta gross.

On a more serious note though, if such shows are truly representative of the best road-food in this country, and were I an American truck-driver, I would fear for my health. I know from personal experience that driving isn’t one of the more healthful occupations given the innumerable sedentary hours in the cab, but when the majority of truck-stops offer only greasy fast food, you can be pretty sure that expecting to to enjoy a long and healthy retirement after 40 years in the game may be optimistic.

We mentioned our appreciation for the fare offered at Italian truck-stops a couple of years ago — noting with joy and surprise in equal measure that one can get beer or wine to accompany, amongst other things, fantastically fresh panini — but our recent trip to France has re-opened the debate over which country we’d prefer to be a trucker in.

Known as routiers, French truck-drivers have a reputation for gruffness and industrial action. Rarely a year passes in which they do not blockade the Channel Tunnel or the autoroutes around Paris with blazing oil drums to protest rising fuel prices, increased tolls, or out of sympathy with the similarly militant French farmer. Having driven in France, one sympathizes with their complaints over the miserable state of fuel and tolls, but if there is one facet of Gallic truck-driving life about which they cannot complain, it’s road food.

Perhaps to compensate the routier for his hard life behind the wheel, the weeks away from his family (and it almost always is a him), and the hours of solitude, in true French style, there has grown up a nationwide network of restaurants that principally cater to him: the Relais Routiers. The French trucker network makes sure that wherever he may find himself, from the city to the countryside, from Flanders to Gascony, the hard-working driver can get a three-course meal with wine and a shower without having to resort to such desperate measures as his American (or British) counterpart and settle for fast-food. In fact, a handy pocket-guide is published annually to help them find these often out-of-the-way places.

And therein lies the rub: rather like the average Frenchman who will happily spend an hour of his precious Sunday driving out to a tiny auberge hidden in the hills to support the cooking of a particular chef, the French truck driver will always go out of his way to arrive at a Relais Routiers around noon. And why not? They serve excellent, often regional, food at the correct price that has him returning every time he’s passing by.

But to many throughout the provinces of France, the Relais Routiers are more than just a truck-stop. They are the local restaurant, watering-hole, social club and informal town hall — the locus for ties that bind the community together. And like local businesses everywhere, owners of Relais Routiers know their clientele well enough to understand that their customer’s loyalty to a restaurant is only as strong as its loyalty is to their stomachs and pocket-books. Consequently, they offer reliably good, honest food. Indeed, in these thin times, and with the advent of so many pretentious, expensive eateries causing the collapse of local bistrots across France, some commentators have called Relais Routiers the guardians of the nation’s cuisine. This might be slightly unfair to the Paul Bocuses and Daniel Bouluds of this world, but like a good pub in Britain or quality diner in America, you simply know where you are with a Routiers. You know what to expect and while your expectations might rarely be exceeded, they are always met, and familiarity and comfort are what most people seek most of the time.

Until comparatively recently, the laws governing alcohol consumption and driving in France were less than strict, and it was perfectly normal for a routier to wash his three course meal down with an aperitif, half a bottle of wine and a digestif (all except the digestif being included in the price) before breezily climbing back into the cab of his 10 ton machine and trundling off. These days the carte routiers still includes three (sometimes four!) generous courses, but with the booze sensibly capped at a 1/3 bottle, often served in a small jug that looks touchingly dainty in the nicotine-stained hands of blue-chinned trucker.

When we visited Auberge St. Martin — a Relais Routiers on the RN31 in Pontarcher, Ambleny, between Compiègne and Soissons in the Oise department of France between Christmas and New Years — our delicious three course lunch and half-carafe of house red plus coffee set us back an astonishing 22 euros ($29) for the two of us. The charge of one euro above that levied on many of our fellow diners was due to our inability to flash our routiers membership card.

The Carte Routiers had its customary three options that day, a choice of two starters, two mains and two desserts: a charcuterie plate (containing slices of the local specialty, andouillette, or tripe sausage) or pork rillettes, followed by poulet Basquaise (Basque-style chicken with peppers and onions in a spicy sauce) or biftek (rump steak with french fries), and fromage blanc (a delicious thick natural yogurt) or assiette de fromage (cheese plate) for dessert.

The food was simple and delicious, and the service prompt and informal. The sole problem we encountered was in following directions to the bathroom which appeared to lead to the bar, but in fact directed you outside to a separate door where the shower was located. The most enlightening aspect of the whole experience — quite apart from note penned on the menu listing a shower for 2 euro or 3 euro with a towel — was that this place really did a lot of its business with truck drivers. Outside, packed tightly together on the muddy verges of a country road were 10 or more giant trucks, and glancing around us more than half the diners were sitting quietly by themselves, sleeves rolled up to reveal a bevy of tattoos, breaking their midday bread in companionable silence. We looked at each other and both said, almost simultaneously, “this would never happen in America.” It was a moment of sincere cultural recognition on our behalf, and we raised our glasses to toast these heroes of haulage and their continuing role as custodians of the nation’s table.