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An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, is much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France. They now live in the Languedoc, where they take guests - and feed them very well.

This month: Martin extols the joys of the mouthwateringly delicious summer fruits in the South of France

The end of May and the beginning of June are the most exciting months on the culinary calendar here in the South of France because this is the time when the summer fruits come into season.

Everyone gets just a little excited when this happens, you know when the canny old market ladies are excited because they spend ten minutes tut tutting over the price of the first cherries, but then buy them anyway.

Cherries are the first fruits to come in, first from Spain which, considering you can see the Pyrenees from our terrace is not so far away and I think carry a permitted amount of air miles.

The first from France come from Ceret, again just down the road, and these are balls of sweet juice which explode in the mouth and every year I think I have never tasted anything as good as the first mouthful.

When we used to come to France only for our summer holidays, when my wife was teaching in a primary school in Waterford, it was a race to get the last of the cherries when we arrived down in July.

Next in are the Apricots, I think I never tasted a fresh Apricot until I bought them in France. Apricots are fruits which are a little more reluctant to deliver their flavour than, let us say, the cherries are.

They require a little encouragement, a very quick poaching in the lightest of syrups; they totally blossom when baked briefly in a hot oven and have over the years built up such a strong friendship with almonds that the Apricot and Almond Tart has become a cliché, but what a wonderful cliché!

The very last of the Cherries actually come in after the Apricots have arrived. These are bright yellow with some red streaks and are called Napoleons. My first encounter with these was one afternoon when we were driving along the Haut Languedoc when we saw a man at a gate selling something from a box.

We stopped (always stop in France when someone is selling by the side of the road!) and saw a box full of these cherries. We asked how much, he looked at us in the eye and said “You can have the whole lot for five Euro - I have been here all afternoon and these are the last we have”

We took them (there was at least five kilos there) and made not only the best cherry jam ever - the Napoleons have a delicious almondy bitterness - but had enough left over to make some excellent Cherry Ratafia. Needless to mention we have never been able to find that man since but this year we will try again.

Sometimes it is not as easy as that to buy fruit. On our way back from Perpignan airport by back roads a few years ago we happened on an Apricot farm. Now Apricot jam is to the French what Marmalade is to the Irish.

Monsieur had five kilo boxes of Apricots in his shed selling for a reasonable five Euros the box. I picked one up and headed off to pay him.

“What are you going to use them for” he asked. When I told them they were for jam he shook his head. “Have you a cellar in your house” he asked. When told that I had he took me to the back of the shed and showed me other, marginally less ripe apricots. “These are only three Euro the box” he told me, “but you must let them ripen in the cellar for a full week before you use them” Then he made me repeat this before he would sell them to me.

Before the Apricots finish however, my favourite of all the soft fruits of summer arrive - the Peaches. Peaches here come in many varieties (especially if you include Nectarines) but principally they are White or Yellow and for me, in any contest the white wins hands down every time.

My Mother was so passionate about the flavour of the white peach that it became the principal crop, with the tomato, of our glass house in Cork when I was a child. However I discovered that these Cork peaches were but an elusive shadow of the flavour of the white peach which has ripened under the Mediterranean sun.

When these arrive (and they arrived this week) there is only one way that I will eat them. First they deserve due ceremony so put them on a plate and get out your best fruit knife and fork. They must be carefully peeled, de-stoned and sliced before being eaten slowly, with the fork and a napkin in hand to mop up the copious juices and to pat your watering mouth.
Ambrosia was certainly these fruits.

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Martin Dwyer started cooking professionally over 40 years ago in the legendary “Snaffles Restaurant” in Dublin. After a time in a Relais Chateau in Anjou and in “The Wife of Bath” in Kent he opened his own much acclaimed restaurant, “Dwyers”, in Waterford in 1989. In 2004 he sold this and moved south to France where he and his wife Síle bought and restored an old presbytery in a village in the Languedoc. They now run Le Presbytère as a French style Chambre d’Hôte. Martin however is far too passionate about food to give up cooking so they now enjoy serving dinner to their customers on the terrace of Le Presbytère on warm summer evenings. Martin runs occasional cookery courses in Le Presbytère and Síle’s brother Colm does week long Nature Strolls discovering the Flora and Fauna of the Languedoc.

Le Presbytère can be seen at: www.lepresbytere.net;
email: martin@lepresbytere.net