MY COOKING YEAR: JANUARY
How are you doing? I hope you had a blissful Christmas full of family, friends and good food. For many of us, there’s a price to pay for all these celebrations; a food hangover that means it can be deeply challenging to pull ourselves out of bed to face the daily tyranny of Real Life, when the bloodstream is equal parts gold chocolate coins and turkey stuffing sandwiches.
The only thing that can make this feeling worse is the relentless, cheerless bombardment of advertisements and articles extoling us to embrace a ‘New Year, New You’. Please. Ho ho ho no, absolutely not. I quite like the old me, I’d just like her to be a little less tired.
One of the aspects of life in France I enjoy the most is, while they go full-on with their Christmas celebrations, by December 26 it’s all over for another year. Everyone goes back to their normal lives. And this seldom involves punishing diets – good food is too important, too central to civilised life to sully yourself with the misery of crackers and low-fat cottage cheese. In fact, I don’t even know where you would buy cottage cheese, low fat or otherwise.
Once the last of the goose has been fricasséed, the ends of the festive cheese stirred into one final sauce, I’m much more likely to fall into the tart embrace of the many kinds of citrus that fill the shelves at this time of year. My greengrocer calls the orange ‘la reine de l’hiver’, the queen of winter, which is more poetic and beautiful than the rather industrial-sounding French word for citrus fruit, agrumes. Before Christmas, market stalls are filled with beautiful, jewel-like confit fruit, sparkling whole satsumas, fat slices of candied pink grapefruit, limes and oranges. In January, they are replaced by crates of fresh citrus, mostly from Spain and Morocco, some from the south of France: ‘Lulu’ clementines, wrapped in tissue paper covered in the company’s mascot, a little white terrier; heavy, thick-skinned navel oranges; kumquats; and baskets of lemons and limes.
In Fresh, the smart organic shop, I sometimes find more exotic citrus such as bergamots, little caviar limes and crinkly-skinned combava (also known as makrut lime), so precious and expensive it might be cheaper to fly to Morocco and pick your own.
In the markets and greengrocer there are sometimes, prominently displayed, piles of ‘oranges chocolats’. These are nothing to do with our magnificent Terry’s Chocolate Orange. They
