Cookery exchange 20th – 24th October 2006

It seems a brave, not to say foolhardy, thing to do. To go to France to teach them how to cook! But or our objective was to give them a better appreciation of British cuisine.

Last time we went to Bellême on a cookery exchange, back in 1987, our temerity made the front page of at least one national paper in France. We got better press this time.

The Bellêmois(es) have visited Goring twice to demonstrate the art of French cookery; now it was our turn to share the secrets of British cuisine.

This time we visited two primary schools in Bellême as well – so what were we up to?

Well, we were invited by the French Twinning Committee, and our brief was to cook normal British food, and show our French friends how we really eat at home.

We tried to select recipes that reflect the variety of regional cooking in the British Isles, that are dishes that we really do cook at home, that use ingredients easily found in France – last time Janine Roy from the French Committee had to grow the parsnips for one of our dishes – and that can be cooked in a communal kitchen in 3 hours. We haven’t included any Indian, Italian or Thai dishes, despite the fact that these are now the most popular foods in the UK.

We spent weeks preparing, testing and rejecting various recipes and then re-tested each recipe at least twice, finally preparing each meal in its entirety, sacrificing our waist lines eating the results.

On each of three evenings in Bellême, five British cooks and their assistants worked with groups of 5 French people to prepare the whole menu and then sit down to enjoy what they had cooked together.

In the two primary schools, we cooked simple cakes and buns, but because the children have started learning English, we had sent them the recipes in English and part of the exercise was intended to be about language learning.

The proof of the pudding, as they say….

There are also some words En Francais