First things first. Food talk!

Having grown up with French AND Chinese cultures, I am suitably obsessed by food: once I have finished a meal, often I will start planning my next one.




In my mind, days are made up of several chunks of time, separated by meals. Meal times are happy times because you can experience one of the best pleasures in life: eating. And the world is so full of wonderful dishes!

This is the French side of me.




Now to the Chinese side...

My grandparents' experienced hunger in their early lives in China, and recently to my great surprise my grandmother told me that she spent her childhood surviving solely on sweet potatoes. Once she begged her father for a bowl of rice with some soy sauce as a treat. Now this is what I would eat as a student if I had run out of money at the end of the month from too much partying!




Overall this background has stayed deeply ingrained in my family culture in many ways. Although my parents grew up in relative abundance, they never let me waste food as a child - they would threaten us with 'if you don't finish every single rice grain in your bowl, then you will be a beggar when you grow up'.

At family gatherings, meals would be one of the main highlights and would occupy close to half of the conversations at least.

At home my parents would always cook much more than absolutely necessary, and we would never leave the table hungry (actually I often felt like a goose destined to be turned into foie gras and sometimes had to feign a stomach ache to avoid finishing my bowl of food).

If we have guests for dinner, we have to display abundance and quality in food to show that we honour them. Food is used as a communication channel to express respect and love.




In my life as a Franco-Chinese expat in the UK, I have a very strong relationship with food: it occupies my mind for a significant proportion of the day.

I am by no means a great cook, but cooking, especially for other people, provides me with incredible pleasure. Eating, either a new dish at a restaurant or rediscovering a familiar one at home, can still trigger a large flow of - not just saliva, but also - superlatives, along with huge grins on my face and a sensation that everything in the world is just wonderful.






My friends love that I can rustle up some easy but tasty French food for quick casual lunches (a little bit of imagination and you start having many tasty variants of quiches and salads), and also love my Chinese homemade food, dishes taught as a compulsory part of my upbringing by my mother.

And because when I cook, I feel truly relaxed and happy, I just can't think of any better way of cheering myself up on a bleak day than cooking and inviting friends round for a meal or some tea and cake.






I am also very pleased to observe that over the years I have spent living in the UK, the food I have experienced in restaurants has become better and better and better (and it's not just because my food budget in my first years here was much more limited).

Nowadays I would rarely feel that my options are so restricted that I would have to settle for disappointingly mediocre food in bland restaurant chains, and I have had countless wonderful meals in gastropubs.

I am very thankful to Jamie Oliver for opening people's eyes to easy tasty and healthy food, and feel even less inclined to leaving the country when 1) I see how many lovely food-related TV programmes we now have and 2) I increasingly come across British people who are wonderful home cooks and love talking about food!

The food culture here is changing dramatically!!




Although nowadays I feel completely at home living in the leafy English home counties, every so often I will miss foods that I still cannot find that easily in my suburbian village.

'Escargots' (or snails), the soft and tender melt-in-the-mouth small piece of meat in the shell full of garlic and parsley butter (if it's chewy then it's not right).

I sometimes go to London's Chinatown solely to have my fix of roast duck and crispy pork. I like to have them with chili paste, a side dish of Chinese vegetables (pak choi, choi sum, or morning glory are my favourites), lots of rice, and a glass of hot soya milk.

If I haven't been back to Paris for too long, then I will start dreaming of the smell that comes out of the many 'boulangeries' and 'pâtisseries' of the city. The quick cheeky purchase of a chocolate éclair, or simply a 'croissant' or 'pain au chocolat', devoured on the street.

Vietnamese sandwiches (or 'banh mi') from Paris Chinatown, the succulent fattiness of the roast pork meat balanced with sweet grated carrots, crunchy cucumber and fragrant coriander, topped with a little chili sauce wrapped in a tasty French baguette.

The list is endless, but I have to say that Rachel Khoo in her recent TV programme 'The Little Paris Kitchen' did a really good job of showing what the world of food in Paris is about.




Chinese cuisine is full of 'weird and wonderful' foods. You will probably remember the HSBC advert with the dish of giant eel (I'm not even sure that is what it was)?

I came across a food writer who enabled me to understand Chinese food from my French / English brain. Before her, I was always frustrated that I could only talk about Chinese food in Chinese but could never find the right terms in French or English, and therefore could not share certain experiences with my non-Chinese friends.

Fuchsia Dunlop is a British writer who spent years in a (solely Chinese-speaking) Chinese cookery school. She renders the complexity and peculiarities of Chinese food with admirable accuracy and skill. As she describes the umami taste, I can feel my mouth producing exactly the reaction that I previously failed to explain so many times.

Fuchsia Dunlop, the woman who built a bridge between two previously seemingly unreconcilable parts of myself




There are certain proofs that I am not all Chinese. To this day, despite many attempts from my parents to develop the acquired taste in the expensive delicacy that is sea cucumber, I still take a bite and have the same inner dialogue: 'yes, it still looks like a turd, and yes, it still tastes of... well... something like that' (or what I can imagine of it).




There are also certain proofs that I am not all French. I spent the first years in my life being treasured like a little princess by my Chinese grandparents, being the first grandchild that they had to look after. They are originally Teochew, which is a place within the province of Guangdong. Many Teochew people fled the region for Western and South East Asian countries: a high proportion of Singapore Chinese people are Teochew, many live in Thailand, the Chinatown in Paris 13th arrondissement is dominated by the Teochew community, and many other places. In fact, if you type 'Teochew' on YouTube, you find a lot of Teochew communities abroad.

I remember breakfast in my early years was congee (rice porridge), with salted radish omelette, many wonderful pickled vegetables, and sometimes some fried fish. All meals were wonderful Chinese dishes sometimes tinted with Cambodian influence (my grandparents lived in Cambodia for many years).

So when I first went to school, my palate was incompatible with cheese. In fear of being told off by teachers and dinner ladies, I would put a piece in my mouth, and would invariably need to run to the loo once the greasy tangy taste hit my tastebuds.

Years of French school dinners, meals at nice French restaurants, and willingness to be able to join in at Cheese and Wine parties have now made me able to enjoy quite a few cheeses, although still today, if I find a cheeseboard solely composed of brie, goats cheese and blue cheese, I disappointingly have to turn it down, which triggers teasing comments from my friends about how I cannot possibly be French if I don't really like cheese.


What is your experience of foreign food? Any good or bad surprises?



And finally, since I promised in my last post some guidance for any tarte Tatin virgin, here is a link to Raymond Blanc's recipe of this deliciously sticky heavenly experience.



Raymond Blanc's tarte Tatin recipe


You can also try using pears for this recipe, which I much prefer.

I made the mistake of licking the spoon I was using while making the caramel syrup when I made this - ouch!! I would recommend you don't do that.




Bon appétit!