Quiche

DO REAL MEN EAT QUICHE?

There are times when I'm not sure why I bother with this project. I was scratching a bit for a topic for today and then thought I would write about quiche which we are having for dinner tonight. It's one of my favourite meals. So I started to see what my favourite cooks said about it (not a lot really), and I searched on the web for quotes and came across an article by Nigel Slater, which said just about everything I wanted to say, but so much better than I ever could. I almost gave up. Indeed I am floundering a bit. Here is the opening paragraph of his article to tempt you to read the whole thing:

"Nothing tempts like a tart. The buttery crust crumbles under your fork, the savoury filling quivers. You lift it slowly, carefully, from plate to mouth so as not to lose even the tiniest bit down your shirt. The pastry melts in your mouth, the filling dissolves on your tongue. A crumb falls, a crumb that you will rescue later with a licked finger. No roast, no cake, no fruit can tempt and please the way a slice of warm, home-baked tart does."

For what do I want to say about quiche? I love it. It's a quick and easy meal for me to make. I try to keep some quiche sized lumps of pastry in the freezer so that I don't even have to make the pastry. And the filling depends upon what I have in the fridge. For you can put just about anything into it. Tonight's will be pretty traditional leek and ham, with maybe a touch of zucchini. Do I have anything else to say?

Probably not, because to add to my woes the Guardian's food blog and the ever reliable Felicity Cloake also 'do' Quiche Lorraine. And she also refers to an article in the LA Times which talks on the subject for nine web pages! So I don't think I can add anything at all. It would be presumptuous of me to try.

So just a bit of memorabilia - or not as it happens - because I have no memory of where or when I first tasted quiche. I actually do not think it was in France. I certainly don't remember any of my hostesses cooking it - or Madame Perruque - not provençal enough for her I would think. I also don't think we would have bought it from the patisserie because the only things that were bought from there were sweet things for Sunday lunch. Did we have egg and bacon tart (as the English would have called it) at home I wonder? I think perhaps we did. My mother certainly made sweet tarts, so she probably made savoury ones too. Maybe I tasted it in London bistros in my youth. It was probably a 60s staple. I do know I have been making my own quiche for a very long time and that I generally use just cream and three eggs for the filling. There is some disagreement on this though - David told me the other day that Gabriel Gaté of TV cook fame preferred a mix of cream and milk which he said made it lighter. So maybe I shall try that this evening. And I note that opinion out there does seem to be divided on this point - also as to whether you have a richer mixture of more eggs or eggs plus egg yolks. And I'm afraid I'm too lazy to do that. I probably used Robert Carrier or Elizabeth David for the original recipe.

I have bought quiche from patisseries in France for lunch on the run - some are inevitably better than others. I have also bought quiche from lunch places here - again some are better than others. But I have never bought a pre-made fresh or frozen one from the supermarket. So I will not buy into the argument over whether they are any good or not.

They're the perfect picnic food, the perfect lunch food and the perfect party food. I make them a lot and there have even been slightly snide remarks about this. I once fantasised about opening a shop in an apartment building providing dinner for the inhabitants and calling it The Quiche Niche. Now there's an embarrassing thought.

Elizabeth David lamented that it was one of those perfect and traditional peasant dishes that had been destroyed by the English who made it with evaporated milk and other awful things. And this may indeed have happened at the time she was writing, but I suspect these days, that even the supermarket versions are reasonably 'authentic'.

Bruce Feirstein, of course, made it a notorious dish when he called his book on the confused state of modern masculinity Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. Of course they do, but I doubt they eat Quinoa.