There was a particular little shop that used to exist on almost every French street corner, and although most of them have quietly disappeared, their ghosts remain if you are lucky enough to spot one. You will be walking through some entirely ordinary town or village, when your eye drifts upwards and catches an old façade, it's painted signage faded and faint, but sure enough - perhaps above a mobile phone shop, an estate agent or some other high street blandness, you will se

An exhausted pizzaiolo, weeps softly in the dim light of a kitchen corner. Floury head, in floury hands. The culinary heritage that was boyhood, manhood and his very lifeblood, just died on the table... ...Rest in Pizza. Gone now, but ever-remembered - the classic beauty of what he called pizza - the disciplined, ascetic stretch of dough, frugally flavoured with a thick slap of tomato salsa, hand-torn mozzarella; perhaps a lean slice of local ham and a leaf or two of basil

I am a sucker for things that are not really traditional food parings. I mean I love things that do go together - fish and chips, buttered toast, and cream on jam, but I do like a new challenge. Enter, Roquefort & Honey Ice Cream. Found on a menu at a not-very-posh bistro in the stunning town of Sant Malo. There were clearly less challenging flavours on offer, and I could very much have made a far more vanilla choice, but something about it made me want to dive headlong into

There is a fine line between what we understand as appreciation and what we immediately deride as snobbery. Somewhere along the way, we decided that knowing too much about wine, coffee, or olive oil, made us a bit "too" something. You will know by now, that I love to look at the roots of words. The Etymology. The Verbal archaeology that whispers through history, where words and phrases orginiated and how we have skewed them to suit modern purpose. Frustratingly, the origins o

It's hot here. The sort of heat that suggests any kind of movement is a bad idea. Last night I sat in the pitch-black kitchen, with the fridge door open. It was not as effective as I would have liked. It was like being interrogated by the faint smell of Melon. Now then, if we played a word association game, and I said "Summer".. chances are someone would respond "Ice Cream". It is a horse-and-carriage relationship. A friendly rebellion against the sun - saying "OK if you want

Like many British people, I came to goat's cheese quite late in life. I mean, when I was a kid, you could order fruit juice as a starter in a fairly posh restaurant... yes, children, it was once thus. Anyway, in our house, goats didn't produce cheese, cows did. And they made it all in a place called Cheddar. Britain in the seventies, was not a place where food was discussed with any particular reverence. It came either hot, or cold. Cold was for lunch, hot was for dinner. Bre

Aren't cherries just a wonderfully optimistic fruit? They arrive quite suddenly, unlike the well guarded blackberries of Autumn, which just take forever to ripen and seem to do so one at a time. Cherries just appear. Reckless and post-box red, they are a bounty of equal opportunity, for birds and beings alike. In France, cherries are not simply fruit. They are a seasonal event. A brief national orthodoxy that, for approximately three glorious weeks, has everyone smiling. Here

On the un-scratched surface, there are few things less glamorous than a bowl of potato chips. They occupy that curious corner in the picnic hamper of human existence, reserved for things people secretly enjoy but rarely defend publicly - like reality TV, cheap rosé, or the schadenfreude of watching downhill skiers wipe out. And yet, somewhere between Devon and the Dordogne, I stumbled into what can only be described as a minor, crispy epiphany. The culprit was a French compan

There was a time, and I might be showing my age here, when butter became the subject of a deliberate, fatty witch-hunt. It seemed to be a hearing behind closed doors, for us butter lovers. It was accused and found guilty of shortening our lives and making us fat. The Western world fell under a wave of nutritional anxiety. Butter, which had been besties with bread for such a long time, was suddenly recast as the insidious villain of the kitchen. Into its golden yellow slippers

March 15th sits in that peculiar place in the French culinary calendar where winter has not quite finished and spring has not quite sprung. The markets still have a bit of an Irish feel to them - with much space still given over to leeks and potatoes. But you can sense that local market aficionados are sensing an arrival of sorts. The first crop of bright, green asparagus. The French love their asparagus. They have been cultivating them since the 15th century and their popula