A House Divided...

Ours is a house divided – but in an interesting way.

On one side are the food gourmets; they are knowledgeable, fine cooks and food tasters with discriminating palates.

Mum is an exquisite Chinese cook, spending hours in preparing, marinating, cooking, subtly spicing and presenting dishes. Elder son is of the Heston Blumenthal mould, devoted to enhancing flavour, molecular gastronomy and surprises guaranteed to tingle the taste buds. (He also has an extraordinary sensitivity to flavour, being able to distinguish the merest tinge of a spice, name it and describe it).

On the other side....well, younger son and I are food Philistines.

We have trouble distinguishing beef from pork, lamb from chicken  but we can tell meat from fish - at least six times out of ten. Our idea of a good meal is eating fried chicken (particularly from a certain Southern Colonel’s establishment) with our fingers, or fish and chips (wrapped in the Times newspaper - but not in the Argus though – never the Argus!)  

So, when elder son returned from four months working in Paris we might reasonably have expected him to bring back a souvenir, maybe a silk tie, a first edition from the barrows on the Quais beside the Seine or from Shakespeare & Co, a bottle of Armagnac or fine wine, maybe chocolates from Patrick Roger.  

No, it was a box of macaroons from Ladurée, who have apparently been making them for more than 150 years – long enough to get it right I should imagine.

Apparently you have to eat them soon after baking - and they were hours old, fresh from the Paris ovens - so we bowed our heads over the table, solemnly extracted the first one and got down to the solemn business of tasting.

 

 

The macaroons' egg-white shells were filled with cream infused with pink pepper. They were delicate and had done well to survive the various train, plane, and car journeys. The flavours included mint, orange, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, rose, lemon, pistachio, caramel with salt and coffee.

And they tasted...‘lovely’ – well, what else would an unrefined  barbarian like me say? Actually, I did learn one thing, the flavours were very subtle and had a particular quality. They tasted not like a synthetic chemical, not like an extract from a concentrate - but like the thing itself. For example, the rose flavour was like what I imagine nibbling on rose petals might be like, similarly for the mint, it felt like the taste that might come from masticating a bunch of mint leaves,,,

Perhaps there’s hope for me yet and one day I might join the ‘other side’ of the family!