by Chris Morvan
Technically, you couldn’t argue with what was presented to me for dinner. I had ordered skate with black butter and capers, and the waitress had assured me it came with vegetables – or at least I think she had, because she was speaking French and my grasp of the language is functional but I can still get lost amid the flurries of strange words punctuated by the extended “errrr” they use to tell you they are still speaking but thinking about what comes next.
So I was errr expecting a ‘ow you say pis of feesh weeth something grown in a field or greenhouse.
But there sat my wedge of ray, as the fish is called even though for some reason the English call the food version skate.
And next to it was a boiled potato. One boiled potato in splendid isolation. If ever a meal could be described as sarcastic, this was it.
Only the French could get away with this. Having been accused of serving heavy food, all cream and succulence in a world that was trying to lose weight and get back to nature, they came up with nouvelle cuisine, an approach that majored on simplicity and presentation.
My skate and potato, then, was not a result of a cripplingly low budget or heightened environmental awareness. It was a deliberate demonstration of the fact that a fine fish needed no accompaniment, no entourage of spinach or petits pois with pommes de terre Lyonnaise. Like a headstrong, independent beauty destined for a lonely life in a Parisian attic, the fish was presented almost naked, daring the customer to question the divine creator’s omniscience.
This incident didn’t take place here and it wasn’t now. It was long ago and far away on a French island off the coast of Normandy. A small group of islands, in fact, called Chausey. We stayed in a hotel decked out like a yacht, with heavily varnished wood all over the place and a push-button shower that gave you literally one minute to do your stuff and get out before it would shut off, leaving the slowcoach covered in froth and shampoo. Water was a problem in this place.
Maybe that meant they only had the eau to cook one potato at a time and certainly not enough for such fripperies as carrots or green beans.
As the gastronomic map of St. Martin gradually recovers, including the shell-shocked beachside gourmet street of Grand Case, it is great to see them getting back to what they do best.
Last week, after a pleasant day getting baked and sandblasted at Orient Beach, we happened upon a luxury food and wine emporium located, with impeccable French logic, in a sort of roadside industrial estate by a roundabout in the local equivalent of the middle of nowhere.
You find this sort of thing a lot in France. Never mind the fact that it’s miles from civilization, if there is room for a cavernous building and a big car park they will fill it with escargots and Beaujolais. As the film said: build it and they will come.
And what this little haven of good taste contained was not just excellent wine and cheese but the kind of tasteful knickknacks you can’t find in Town, everything from coasters to aprons, none of them bearing the name of the island.
I also came across a range of wines branded Arrogant Frog, which, being of distant French ancestry, I found both amusing and slightly offensive.
We’re all labeled like that, in fact: arrogant Yanks, arrogant Brits, arrogant Germans, arrogant Dutch, and it’s not arrogance at all. It’s doing what we do in our own way, without feeling the need to consult others, because it’s second nature.
One national on his own is a citizen of the world. Two or more from the same country makes either a ghetto or a gated community. A group of Americans starts acting American, going on about the Trump administration or the Superbowl, while three or four Brits start talking about Brexit or the World Cup – as if anybody else cared.
One national group that isn’t shouting about the World Cup (which I should explain means the FIFA World Cup, in which the second F stands for football – not soccer) is the Italians, of whom there are plenty on the Dutch side, particularly in Simpson Bay. And the reason they’re not getting excited about it even though it starts in about six weeks is that they’re not in it. They didn’t get through the qualifying stages, even though they have a stellar history in the game, and several Italians I have talked to about it have drawn parallels between the failure of the national team and the parlous state of the country politically.
Intellectual football fans? Whatever next?
