pssst…shd be “Camarguais” on the cartoon - sorry!
The buffet dinatoire, aka apero dinatoire, is the gallic version of the tapa and mezze habit that’s proved popular in the farmhouses of the Massif Centrale, reported Josephine Mills, my neighbour when I lived in the remote uplands of western Wales until about five years ago.
Jo was born and raised in the wilds of Lorraine in north-east France, a region of drifting frontiers depending on whether France or Germany had the upper hand. Politics made little difference to the way the country people lived - unless, as now when the tractors are barricading Paris, potesting decisions taken by city-based politicians directly affect the livelihoods of those who depend on the land. As a child in the 1960’s, while the adults hunted deer and boar – their father was a keen huntsmen – Jo and her siblings were in charge of gathering small game for the pot - snails and frogs. After she married her Welshman, Jo and their children headed to the family property for the boar-hunting season in the forested foothills of the Massif Central.
“As our own children grew up, I noticed a change in the way people entertain each another at home. Instead of the usual invitation to a formal meal - hospitality in the countryside always involves eating - people would invite us to what they called a dining-buffet.” Rather than a formal table-setting and an orderly procession of dishes from savoury to sweet featuring restaurant-style plating, guests were invited to help themselves from a variety of dishes placed on the table all at once. “It’s not like tapas and mezze - nothing to do with what they call ‘small plates’ in UK restaurants or the way of serving many little courses and call it an experience, as if you were in church. It’s really just a way of presenting family dishes as you would at the kitchen table - a casserole or a daube, something good that can be prepared ahead with everything set out all at once for people to help themselves. Very different from my own childhood.”
Jo’s early memories include encounters with wild boar in the forest. “They can kill people, you know. Every now and again, you read about it. The little striped babies run behind their mama, so sweet.” The children were told to keep out of the forest in the hunting season by day, but were allowed to go on night-hunts for frogs with torches. “It was easy. You shone the torch down the stream bank and you could see their eyes and the shapes where they were. They didn’t move and all you had to do was pick them up and pop them in a canvas bucket and take them home.”
Maman prepped the frogs for the pot, an unsentimental affair best avoided by the tender-hearted. “We were fascinated by how it was done. Attitudes have changed. In those days, you had to know how to take responsiblity for what you killed and ate. We cooked the frogs - just the legs, of course - in two different ways. For the grownups, they were dusted through flour, fried in butter and finished with white wine and cream, which is what we do in Lorraine. For the children, they were fried in the same way but finished like an omelette, with whisked-up egg poured into the pan and allowed to set like a pancake.
Snails can no longer be gathered from the wild in France. But things were different then. “In spring, you could find them just before dawn, when they climb to the top of the vines. But in winter, they hibernate and you had to look for the little holes in the river bank that tell you where they are. The harder the winter, the deeper they dig. Winter snails can be cooked right away - twenty minutes in a court-boullon - as they’ve already cleaned themselves.”
When they were young, Jo and her siblings took all their meals with the adults. “Papa was very strict. We had to know how to behave at table. You had to make sure you didn't take too much of anything and finished everything on your plate. And my mother always transferred the food to serving dishes which were handed round from person to person. This is more formal than the buffet dinatoire, when everything is on the table and if you've cooked a daube, it’s permissible to serve it in its cooking pot."
During the hunting season when the family table is always crowded, Jo serves the products of la chasse, mostly wild boar, marcassin, scourge of the farmer’s crops. A single well-grown boar will feed a large household for a month, so she fills the freezer with slow-cooked casseroles, the perfect centerpiece for an informal meal. This when the buffet dinatoire comes into its own. “The old folk sit at the kitchen table, but the young just sit on the floor and help themselves from the pot set out on a coffee-table in the middle. Everyone has a fork and a plate - c’est tout. And I always provide something for the vegetarians: a quiche, maybe flamiche* with leeks and cream.”
Traditionally, nothing more formal than the French at table. So it’s something of a breakthrough that the apero dinatoire (the version popular with young Parisiens entertaining at home) is now well-established in urban as well as rural situations, with appropriate recipes published regularly in the cookery sections of lifestyle magazines.
Perhaps a relaxed help-yourself attitude to entertaining is a revival of the old service a la française, when sweet and savoury were served together in sequence as ‘removes’. This, a tradition dating back to medieval times, gave way in the opulent nineteenth century to service a la russe, a labour-intensive style that demanded - still does - several changes of crockery and the full complement of waiting staff, a reason for expensive fine dining in restaurants, but not exactly convenient for the servantless cook-host. Or it might even be a new tradition that challenges the tyranny of multi-coursed art-on-plate and chooses happiness and enjoyment over la philosophie du gout. A return to conviviality at table is long overdue. Pass the ladle for the casserole, Josephine. Time for a change.
p.s. Beloved paid-subscribers will shortly be in receipt of a recipe for flamiche with leeks and cream - ostensibly a Belgian speciality, but much favoured in Alsace-Lorraine. Yes indeed!
p.p.s. Check out my website for my fruit and veg prints at https://www.elisabethluard.org/shop-1
So much to enjoy in your posts - the small details...eg about the snails. Thank you for another excellent read
Didn’t know the dish at all, and it sounds divine! The pot it is cooked in reminds me of the ones used on the Cycladic islands to slow-cook chickpeas overnight in the receding heat of the wood-fired oven.