Midpoint. Week three of my six week journey into French cuisine was redemption round as I successfully negotiated my way through two recipes; Rouget a la Suzanne (Baked Snapper in Tomato Sauce) from the Cote d’Azur region on the Mediterranean Coastline and Fruits de Mer a la Provencale (Garlic Scallops and Prawns in white wine sauce) from the Brittany region. Dividing ourselves into two groups of six for the first recipe, we worked through some clear instructions from Ann on method. One of us (Pravin) worked on cleaning “Stuart” – indeed – we named our dead fish – whilst Alison, Lynette, Maria and Margaret worked on peeling and deseeding tomatoes. The end result of our team work was a delicious served Stuart (Snapper) in rich tomato flavouring. This is exactly what you need to finish off a mid-week. We have some very generous people in our class. This week, Margaret brought in some good white wine. It was a perfect complement to Stuart.
Our next recipe, Fruits de Mer a la Provencale , required that we work in pairs. Fate’s good fortune determined that I work with my new cooking partner – Margaret. Margaret is a school teacher by profession with a meticulous eye for detail and clear leadership abilities. She helped me navigate past many of my unsure moments with handling seafood. Let’s just say that I’m not enthralled by the idea of cleaning and deveining decapod crustaceans. I did learn how to butterfly scallops, a technique I shall no doubt use in future cooking. The highlight of our evening has to be Margaret’s retelling of her first encounter eating fish at a French restaurant.
Margaret went to a boarding school in Sydney. She was just a sixteen year old girl at the time with not a lot of experience in dining at fancy restaurants. Her father came to Sydney on a business trip and took her out to a French restaurant. Margaret ordered a Flounder and enjoyed eating the top of the fish. She asked her dad, “now what do I do?” Margaret’s dad demonstrated how she should take her fork and knife and turn the fish over on her plate. “Off it went,” Margaret recalls as she gave the fish a heavy flip. Her dinner landed on her serviette. Waiters stood watching around the restaurant with their hands behind their back. Instructed by her dad to do nothing until the waiters looked the other way, Margaret sat still waiting for the first opportunity to push her dinner back onto her plate. “It was amazing. They all managed to look away at the same moment. I flipped the fish back onto my plate and it landed the way up that I needed it to be and I enjoyed it. I always say that I was saved by the white starch of a French restaurant.”
– Bridgett
Bridgett Leslie is the 2014 Winner of the British-Australian Literary Award. Visit her at www.hopewords.org or https://twitter.com/bridgettleslie
To book one of Ann Palmer’s classes, please visit her website.
