A few weeks ago, I acquired a raclette machine thanks to the number of S'Miles on my Monoprix store card (this is the equivalent of collecting Green Shield stamps, for those of you old enough to remember that). I've been wanting one for ages and it's made me very happy. I am a woman of simple tastes...
Eating raclette has become a Sunday tradition in our house (yes, well I've never been able to make Yorkshire Pudding). It is a typical dish in mountain regions - you just boil some potatoes in their skins, pour melted raclette cheese over them and eat with pickles and dried meats. The machine is a table-top grill that comes with small pans to heat your cheese in until it's warm and bubbly. In the olden days, they suspended half a wheel of the cheese over the fire and scraped it onto plates as it melted: the word raclette comes from the verb racler - to scrape. Of course, in the olden days people needed this sort of stodgy, comforting food to sustain them while they herded cows, chopped logs and climbed mountains whereas all I ever do on a Sunday afternoon is lie around wishing I hadn't eaten so much...
Anyway, Sunday is a day of rest so I think I'll just take a little nap...à plus
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- Gigi
- Failed wife and poet, terrible teacher and unworthy mother of three beautiful girls, I have lived in France for thirty years. Here are glimpses of my life with a bit of culture thrown in.
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7 comments:
it doesn't sound as nice as those pancake thingys with dripping butter that mum used to make on that horrible yucky black thing
The horrible yucky black thing is a griddle, dear boy.
I remember having my first and last raclette with you in Aix with some of your friends and how much you liked it then - that was 1988! You have been suffering all these years. I remember a very rude girl (francais) at the table who was a fashion designer with signature floppy flowers criticising someone's French. I can't remember whose place we were at - he was very hospitable. It was really very more-ish. I've just got on the scales after a year and had a bit of a shock, which you would do after eating with gay abandon for a year! I don't keep them around because of the teenage girls...it's true! I'll have to go and find some sheep to herd - not so difficult around here.
Sorry if I appear unimpressed by cheese scrapings with potatoes and gherkins but I am very interested in the comment from rowhedgepastor on the pancake things. I believe they were called scotch pancakes and were made by mixing eggs, flour, sugar & milk and then dropping golf ball sized portions from a height onto .. and I quote from a cookery website … a lightly greased girdle. You know what, I’ve gone right off them now.
They were best eaten warm with a knob of butter, served ideally from a hostess trolley, on a Sunday with Harry Worth on the TV doing something very odd in a shop window.
You don't know what you're missing, largerthanlife - cheese scrapings can be very interesting. Almost as interesting as Scotch pancakes...or drop scones...which were indeed cooked on a girdle or a griddle, depending on where you come from. Oh gosh - and I've suddenly remembered Harry Worth! Yes! The shop window and everything! But that's all I can remember - what on earth did he do after that?
Died I think.
Stanley Baxter & Dick Emery are still about though.
"Ooh you are awful ..."
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