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This was published 8 years ago
Travel tips & advice: The best way to appreciate food in another country
I'd try to look like I knew what I was doing, sniffing cheeses and poking them to test their wobble.Credit: Getty Images
It was always the cheese room that I looked forward to the most. You could have fun in the rest of the supermarket, in the fresh fruit and vegetables section, in the frozen foods section, in the comedically large bulk items section, but none of those places had anything on the enjoyment of the Paris Metro cheese room.
Just picture it: an entire room, probably four or five supermarket aisles worth, filled with French cheese. Gooey, smelly cheese; hard, aged cheese; small cheese and big cheese; round cheese and square cheese; washed rind cheese; sooty, ash-covered cheese; crumbly goats cheese; stinky blue cheese. And best of all: a few thousand euros of other people's money to spend on it.
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I bought some weird cheeses in that room. I bought some great cheeses and I bought some average cheeses. I bought expensive cheeses and I bought really expensive cheeses.
Even going into the room was fun. The whole thing was refrigerated, so you had to don a long white lab coat to stay warm enough to do some proper decision-making inside. It would make you feel like a scientist going in to do some intensive lab work. On cheese.
I would generally wander around and try to look as if I knew what I was doing, sniffing cheeses and poking them to test their wobble, before throwing three or four of the most interesting-looking ones into my trolley and moving on.
Those cheeses were destined for greatness. They would eventually be unveiled as the piece de resistance of the huge picnic I was putting on at Champs de Mars, the gardens that sit in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
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Those Parisian picnics were the traditional beginning to the tours I was working on as a cook, a chance to showcase all that's great about French food, and all that was great about my powers of cheese selection, on the first full day of the trip.
From that day on, it would unfortunately all be downhill, culinarily speaking, for my lovely passengers. Not that the food would be bad, but there wouldn't be any more sumptuous platters of pork rillettes and pate de foie. There'd be no more escargot or blinis smothered in fish roe. It was the end of the line in terms of cheese platters.
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For me, however, the fun would continue, because for tour after tour around Europe I'd have to prepare and present the group's meals, which meant hanging out in various supermarkets and other purveyors of food across the continent, checking out their wares and then attempting to cook with them.
I love eating at restaurants when I travel, but if you really want to get to know a country's food culture, you have to get in and try to cook it yourself. And the best way to do that, to experiment with ingredients weird and wonderful, to try all of the delicious and bizarre foods that inhabit the shelves of supermarkets across the continent, is to be spending someone else's money on it.
For each tour, I would get a certain amount to spend on food – kitty money that had been contributed by each passenger. The idea was to spend as much of that money as possible, to go as close to ending up with zero dollars at the end of the trip as I could, while producing nutritious, tasty meals three times a day.
On a trip with only, say, 15 or 20 passengers that would mean a lot of rice and pasta. On a full trip of up to 35 or 40 passengers, meanwhile, you'd be freed up to go a little crazy on the good stuff.
I could stock up in the cheese room at the Metro supermarket in Paris. I could buy slabs of Parmigiano Reggiano in Rome. I could purchase huge stacks of pre-sliced jamon iberico in Barcelona, and go to town on the best bratwurst in Munich.
For someone who loves food, it was an absolute dream.
There were, of course, mishaps. When you're given less than an hour to shop for three days' worth of food for 35 people, you really have to motor around the supermarket. I'd fill up three or four trolleys in that time.
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Sometimes I'd get back to the campsite and realise I'd bought yoghurt instead of sour cream. Or that the bus driver I'd asked to help out with the vegies had bought 20 cucumbers instead of 20 zucchinis. It was like a MasterChef challenge: come up with a dish that includes vast amounts of yoghurt and cucumbers. Now. (Answer: Raita.)
I made some good meals on those tours, and I made some average meals. But I always loved experimenting. And hanging out in that cheese room.
b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au
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