Miles Collins

A Frenchman’s verdict….

My pastry chef is from the Auvergne in France, a real country boy who is passionate about good food, especially anything that has been made by local artisan producers, the smaller the better. We both share a love of good cheese, British and French alike and I would like to think our dessert menu reflects this.

We serve tete de moine (monks head) from a girolle cutter and serve it with pickled red cabbage, baked baguette and caraway vinaigrette as a savoury dessert, and our cheese boards are served at two levels. One is a cheaper option using well known varieties, the other, a selection of award winning cheeses all with varying characteristics from small and usually independant makers.

This week I bought a range of French cheeses for the arrival of the hotels owner who enjoys blue cheese in particular. The smell of the box upon delivery is unmistakable (an understatement if ever there was one) but the range and quality is fabulous.

Every so often we come across a real stinker, the sort that can clear a restaurant in five minutes. I suggested we took a couple out of the refrigerator to come to room temperature at lunchtime, Frenchie begged me to leave it until the last possible moment because he couldn’t bear the smell!!

I once put a soup on the menu which was garnished with toasted raclette just to annoy the Australian larder chef at the time, he hated raclette with a passion, and to my pleasure and his disdain it was very popular. He still mentions that whenever we catch up.

Best of all was a young chef from Toulouse whose elderly grandmother decided to send him a parcel of soft cheese through the post. After a postal strike in France it was then stuck in a postal office in England for a weekend until finally arriving at the staff cottage some six days later. The postman used some very colourful language upon delivery which paled into comparison with the other staff’s comments. 

Some varieties such as the one above smell stronger than they taste, others do not! So there you have it, French cheese really does smell, Frenchie has been chastised by the French government and packed off to fight for the Foreign Legion armed only with a pot of vaccherin. Should keep the mosquitoes at bay!