A memory on my desktop

I change my computer desktop picture every now and again, and I changed again a couple of days ago. I randomly pick one of my Photo libraries and then pick something that takes my fancy and this is what I chose. Normally it's some kind of landscape or building detail, but I think this is the first time I chose food.

And why this one? It's not actually a particularly good photo - a bit wonky, but it's actually a bit impossible to get it straight - the plate is - because the table setting itself is a bit wonky. the tablecloth is not quite aligned to the edge of the table, the knife and fork are wonky - though that could have been me and there's even a bit of a wonkily placed plate in the top right hand corner. Anyway it took my fancy.

It's much larger on my desktop of course, and as I look at it every day I notice little things. Like I have just noticed that the rather lovely tablecloth is probably a Christmas tablecloth - there are little Christmas trees around the border, stars and holly leaves. And the colours are Christmassy too. At first glance, and until now, even at the time, it just looked slightly exotic. Maybe because it was June when we were here in Beaucaire at the Brasserie des Arts in the Place de la République, just outside our gorgeous mini palace that we were renting with friends, I did not see Christmas. Which just shows how unobservant I am usually. And probably most of us.

It's all in the detail is it not? In life as in things. If you study anything in detail you see so much more than in a glance. The French are particularly good at this in their approach to almost everything. They dissect everything - from the television announcer's clothes, makeup and voice, to the placement and meaning of every word in a paragraph of text. It's the tiny things that reveal truths.

You can learn so much from detail. Detail tells you another story from the big picture, and yet it reflects it. There is one literary exercise that the French do which I learnt in my French course at university where you take a paragraph - usually the first in a book - analyse every single word - it's meaning, symbolism, placement, choice and then relate that to the themes of the book. It's very revealing. Well it probably wouldn't work with Dan Brown but it would with Margaret Atwood I suspect.

In the same way this little restaurant/cafè was emblematic of the town. A hidden treasure. Beaucaire sits on the Rhône downriver from Avignon and across the bridge from Tarascon. Each of these towns has a castle and beautiful old streets and squares. Beaucaire has a canal. It was a stunning little place, but not on the main tourist beat. Somehow major tourism has passed it by. Yes it had a large North African origin population, but then so do most places in the south of France. Yes there is industry on the fringe - but again the French do this a lot. Beautiful centres - not so beautiful edges. Beaucaire had just about everything and yet it was relatively undiscovered.

We dined at this little place twice. As I said - it is on a beautiful little square. That's it at the end of the square under the red awning and this is virtually all of the square. Our home was on the left-hand edge. It also looked nothing from the outside but inside was a palace with an extraordinary stepped garden. Small but full of so many surprising things. Like the square which even had a dragon.

And the food we ate was very, very nice, if not quite magnificent. Typical of so many little places like this in France. I think the menu changed each day and it was all beautifully presented. For example look at the simple dish that David is about to eat at right - and this was on our second visit - the tablecloth has changed. You could try this dish at home - well if you have wonderful tomatoes. It's just very thinly sliced tomatoes with a scattering of some kind of sprouts on top and probably a delicious dressing. I can't remember now, though I had the same dish I remember. I think they called it a carpaccio of tomatoes. So simple, so delicious. So reliant on the quality of the ingredients.

So back to the picture that inspired this post. Another simple dish and another entrée. Simple ingredients artfully arranged and suddenly you have a dish fit for the gods. A gorgeous piece of toast from quality bread, a perfectly poached egg, tasty tomatoes - I cannot remember now whether they were cooked or raw, and something else - maybe cheese artfully winding through with a scattering of very thinly sliced radish, parsley - every tiny little leaf is perfectly placed, and an even tinier dusting of something. And look it's on a square plate! Anyone could do this.

But that's the thing isn't it? We don't and maybe we can't. To be fair, as I have commented before, there is a bit of skill in cooking a perfect poached egg. I recently saw someone say that whenever they had breakfast in a restaurant or hotel they had a poached egg because they couldn't cook them properly. But really it's all in the presentation is it not? Like David's tomatoes. And you would need a mandoline. I do have one but rarely use it. Maybe I should get it out again. I am also willing to bet that although that presentation - plating to be technical - looks easy, if I tried to copy it it just would not look the same. Another 'looks easy but isn't' example of every trade skill.

My photo shows the perfect presentation with some endearing homely - even disconcerting touches, just to show that the world is not perfect. There is a fly - I noticed yesterday - at the bottom of the table on the left. Well we were eating outdoors and it was summer. The crease in the middle of the tablecloth has not quite been straightened out. The knife and fork are slightly askew - but isn't that knife lovely and so, so French? My almost daughter-in-law gave me a set of those cricket (as in insect) salad servers for Christmas. I treasure them and hardly dare use them.

I remember the meal - well both of them. Yet again we heard a waiter's tale, although I can't quite remember it. He came from one of the North African French colonies - Tunisia I think, but was possibly a French North African. Hard to tell. There were nine of us and some of us spoke French pretty well so maybe we got better treatment than some. I don't know.

And this picture - a single dish in a single restaurant in a single town, reminds me of so many different things - a holiday, a house, friends, a bit of French colonial history, a town and its people, a legend of a dragon (I think the dragon is the town's emblem and there is a sculpture of a dragon in the square), and it also teaches me how to make food look good.

Every picture tells a story they say.