MONITOR:The image is idyllic. A warm summer's day, the odd lazy bee, a green field, a lake or stream, and the car but a short walk away. Picnics are what August was invented for. In reality, the bees are joined by flies, the field in question is far from the car and, in our case, too long will have been spent in search of the perfect spot.
Picnics are a breeze, or rather they were. Read any Famous Five or Secret Seven book by Enid Blyton and somewhere or other there are boiled eggs to be eaten with salt, lashings of ginger beer, and fruit cake. Good old-fashioned food, and lots of it.
Compare that with our chilled rosé, our ever-so-easy Jamie Oliver not-a-salad salad, our Moroccan salad with yoghurt and ras-al-hanout. The car is parked miles away and we have more cool boxes, baskets and boxes to carry than Alexander the Great ever contemplated when he boarded his elephants and headed for India.
The Famous Five never had cool boxes. Their food was as simple as can be. There was no need for complexity because, as every picnic lover knows, food tastes better outdoors. Or does it?
The process of eating is a combination of a reaction of our taste buds and also the food’s smell. And when it comes to smell, while we may be lacking in our bank of olfactory cells (compare our five- to 10-million cells to that of a dog, which has 50 times as many), our noses are certainly more sensitive than our tongues, which can barely stretch to detecting a handful of chemical qualities.
If you are the cook, you expose your nose to a huge and complex cocktail of aromas. Step outside, even for a few moments, and that traffic jam is cleared. Suddenly brightness returns and with it, appetite. Each mouthful is accompanied by a dose of fresh air washing those olfactory cells clean.
It all comes down to ingredients; buy well and you really have very little work to do in the kitchen before your picnic. Chilled rosé goes down well, aged claret less so. A slice of pâté will satisfy, something with foie gras and truffle will taste of little. The point of the latter is lost, its subtlety carried away on a wave of warm summer air.
So for the next few weeks, there is a strong argument for simplicity. It’s a chance to live on tomato salads, simply poached and grilled meat and fish, hunks of cheese, and fruit in their unadorned glory – melons, peaches and berries, and soon, plump figs. Salads are being eaten across mainland Europe with good reason; they are made with punchy, seasonal ingredients combined in a bowl with little more than oil, and a little vinegar to provide just the right amount of oomph.