The French are renown for their love of food (and wine), and this time around, I have sampled some of the specialties of the country and Lyon region.
At a dinner with computer programmers from Japan, Germany, Poland and Australia, who are dedicated to the development of (on-line and off-line) handwriting character recognition and verification programs, I tried
cuisse de grenouille (frogs legs), cooked in perhaps an atypical way (not crunchy) in a garlic butter sauce.
They look like a pair of mini chicken wings, joined at the centre. They taste just like you'd expect frog to taste - somewhere between chicken and fish. It wasn't bad, but I probably won't go out of my way to eat them again. Accompanying this particular meal was a bottle of
Pommard, another Burgundy specialty. Apparently it's quite a good wine - it would want to be at €42 a bottle!
A couple of nights later I found myself at an Italian restaurant in Dijon with about 20 other delegates from the
IGS conference. Our table decided to start with
escargot (snails) - just the thing to eat in an Italian restaurant! They were served in a dish with dimples to hold the shells open-side-up, and were generously flavoured with parsley, garlic and butter. We were given a special pair of tongs and a little fork to help prise the meat out of the shell, which we did with very little finesse. But boy! are those things tasty! Granted, the snail meat has next to no flavour of its own, and is so small a portion you can hardly feel its texture in your mouth, so all you really experience is the parsley-garlic-butter. I liked the escargot so much I am considering trying to find a recipe to cook them at home (but will see how this idea fares once I'm back...).
The IGS conference gala dinner was at
Chateau de Gilly, a little ways out of Dijon centre-ville. In lovely surroundings we started with
kir, a Dijon specialty, off cassis liqueur and sparkling white wine, and various morsels of tasty appetisers, including a pureed rockmelon drink (yum!), then moved to a 4-course meal: salmon, duck, cheeses and tarte Tatin. Rémy, one of my friends in Lyon, tells me that tarte Tatin came about via a mistake the Tatin sisters made when attempting to bake a pie. They forgot the pastry on the bottom and put it on the top instead. The mistake worked out, and the French signature dessert was born.
Last night here in Lyon, Jérome (Rémy's brother) organised a dinner for a group of friends including my supervisor Bryan (who we bumped into puffing up the hill to Fourvière in Lyon's old town earlier in the day), at a traditional Lyonnaise establishment called a
bouchon (it's French for lid or cork). Now, the Lyonnaise cuisine is not what you'd call refined, with most dishes comprised of parts of animals I would usually steer well clear of. But I thought I should give them a go while I'm here, and with such kind hospitality.
At Chez Georges, Le Petit Bouchon, we had a degustation menu, which included:
saucisson (a dried pork sausage with chunks of fat, cooked in a variety of ways), veal feet, pig nose/mouth,
Patê de Tête (a kind of terrine made out of the heads of various animals),
Terrine de foies de Volaille (made of poultry liver), a fish dish including lobster and prawn sauce, a fried croquette of pork intestines,
gratin d'andouillette (pig's intestines), plus some potatoes and a lentil dish. We finished up with two kinds of cheese. It was a huge amount of food. The cheeses were tasty, unlike the andouillette, which was so strong I had real trouble swallowing just one small spoonful. We also had a pear liqueur
digestif that Rémy reckons is about 50% alcohol. It burned on the way down, but had a lovely aroma of pears. They place an empty bottle over a new pear on the tree, and the pear grows to fill the bottle, which is then filled with the liqueur.
I'm glad I tried all of that special, strange food, but I doubt I'll hurry back to any of it. Some dishes tasted OK if I didn't think about what they were, and others had a texture that I couldn't quite handle (a bit like sashimi for me). It was a great experience though! Jérome asked the chef for a list of the food we'd eaten (so I would remember) and he ended up writing it in the front of a book full of recipes from bistros and bouchons in the Lyon area, including the one we ate at. What a lovely gesture and souvenir! I don't think I'll try to recreate the andouillette at home though!
After being bumped from a Thursday afternoon interview due to fires on Yorke Peninsula, I had my live-to-air, in-studio radio debut this afternoon on Carole Whitelock's program (ABC Adelaide, 891). I didn't get the chance to hear myself, but I'm told I did OK :)
