SOME of my fondest memories of eating in France are not of lunches and dinners eaten in good restaurants, but of cooked food bought from small traiteurs and eaten sitting on a bench in a park, or on a train speeding from one city to another.
One such unforgettable taste was a simple potato puree, bought from a shop just beside the train station in Lyon; also the quails' eggs in a salad bought - at shocking expense - from the stylish Fauchon, on Place de La Madeleine, Paris.
Indeed, window-shopping for food is one of the joys of French life: the lovely piles of celeri remoulade; the lamb stews with their buttery, tomatoey sauces; the crisp, green beans; the choucroute; the boudin blancs; the meticulous little creme brulees; the effete tarts.
We still have relatively few cooked-food shops - traiteurs - in Ireland, but what we have is a small band of shops with lots of panache and personality, and food with lots of charm. Over a few weeks, we sampled the cooking of some of the best known of these, beginning with a sample of food-to-go from Cargoes, on Belfast's Lisburn Road.
Cooking here is relatively straightforward, yet always a little special. Their leek and cheddar tart, for example, is superb, perhaps the best of their pastry baking. Second place goes to their red pepper tart, which is light and full of flavour with a good, rich, buttery pastry.
Their more elaborate dishes, such as Chicken with Tarragon and Orange, are excellent, with their strength shown best in sauces which are precise, flavourful and not at all heavy. The chicken in question wasn't perhaps the greatest fowl ever to walk the planet, but the dish was nevertheless very successful.
The stars of the Cargoes show, however, were a splendid Aubergine Parmigiana - two towers of aubergines with cheese and tomato sauce which was perfectly done the seasoning just right. Equally fine was a Puy Lentil Lasagne.This is the sort of dish which is almost a challenge too far - how can you make a lasagne light when it features lentils? But. this is achieved. and the dish is not at all heavy, with a lovely filling and sauce: this was true comfort food, and a superb supper.
All of the pies and dishes were reheated in a stove, by the way, which does the job wonderfully.
Prices for the dishes range from £10, for an eight-portion tart, and £2.50 a portion for the chicken and other main courses.
After Belfast, it was south to the capital, and firstly to the elegant Douglas Food Co in Donnybrook. The arrangement of food in Richard Douglas's shop, displayed in dishes one can peruse from the other side of the windows, makes this the quintessential traiteur, and it is difficult to control yourself, faced with such a handsome selection of food.
For dinner, I bought some gravlax, which came with an excellent dill mustard sauce: with a good bottle of Alsatian Riesling bought from Terroirs just down the road, this was a magnificent starter.
For a main course, I chose Chicken with Spring Onion, Orange and Ginger, and while the sauce and the chicken were both respectively good, one seemed to have little to do with the other, and there was no true blending of flavours. A Gratin Dauphinoise was good - perhaps slightly undercooked, but a few more minutes in the oven would have just brought the flavours to the sort of communion they needed. The seasoning was spot on.
A piece of excellent Brie de Meaux saw a fine dinner to a happy conclusion, at a cost of £21 for two people: good value, for such attention to detail.
Buying dinner from Kim Condon's Delicatessen, in Rathgar, a fellow customer said: "This is so much nicer than going to a restaurant."
She was right. Ms Condon carries the D. Swift range of sous vide dishes, and we found them splendid.
For three people, I ordered Stuffed Pheasant Breast with a Red Wine Jus; Char-grilled Salmon with a White Wine Sauce; Breast of Chicken with Potato and Bacon. We enjoyed three superb dishes, with the salmon a narrow winner.
Sous vide dishes - known in places as boil-in-the-bag - used to have a bad reputation because people didn't really know how to prepare them. The D. Swift dishes' show how much more sophisticated this cooking has become, and with everything we ate the flavours had been beautifully captured, both in the main dish and the sauces.
Serving is a piece of cake - your simply put the bags into boiling water for five or six minutes, with the sauces heated separately for two minutes, and there is real accomplishment in the cooking. The smart appearance of the food makes you feel like a professional, and everything looks gorgeous on the plate - the only exception being the chicken, which had great flavour but where the filling oozed out, slightly spoiling the finish. Vegetables, heated separately, were potatoes, turnips, mangetout and carrots, all perfectly cooked.
For good measure, I ordered a French apple tart, which was not some slick sweet baking but had a fine rusticity. We paired this with McCambridges vanilla ice cream, which could do with a little more oomph. Starters cost about £3, main courses around £5, which is excellent value for such professionally executed work.
Back then to Donnybrook, and to Butler's Pantry, one of Eileen Bergin's two famous traiteurs - the original is Mount Merrion Avenue, in Co Dublin.
We began with a good Seafood Chowder, well-balanced and properly cooked - indeed, soups would appear to be a strong point of the Pantries: the tiny cubes of potato were just right, the fish and mussels still firm, the whole concoction not too creamy. At £1.60 a portion, this was excellent value.
A main course of Navarin of Lamb with Mangetout and Carrot was enjoyable, but a little too much dried rosemary dominated the flavours. A Pilaff of Rice with Fresh Herbs was just right, but dessert of Chocolate Mousse was disappointing, tasting principally of egg whites and grains of chocolate. The lamb costs £4.80, desserts about £1.80 a portion.
Our final Dublin dinner originated in Wicklow, and was a very inexpensive Butterbean and Leek Pie, which cost the princely sum of £2.50 at the Dublin Food Coop: it was made by the little firm of Sage Health Foods, from Avoca, in Co Wicklow.
This was simple, and very enjoyable, and I would reckon these dishes are a God-send for anyone who wants to fill the freezer for vegetarian children, who need lots of carbohydrates. A nice mix of carrots, sweet beans, mushrooms, onions, garlic, olive oil and basil and leeks, it was true wholefoody cooking - there isn't a whole lot of finesse, but its simplicity and directness of flavour made for a good dinner, and the value is remarkable. I cooked some fennel braised in tomatoes to partner it, and it was a delightful supper.
Leaving the capital behind, we headed for Rochestown, just outside Cork city, to Carol and Kieran Murphy's highly-regarded Cinnamon Cottage, and bought a three-course dinner.
We began with that contemporary clasic, Spicy Chicken Wings - though these were not too spicy, and quite richly buttery. Warmed through in the oven, we served them with a yogurt and cream cheese dip, which gave a good counterpoint to the flavour. A tomato-based dip would also be good with them, perhaps something like Jasmine Hyde's Ballymaloe Relish, which has just the right piquancy.
Boeuf Bourguignon was splendidly rustic in appearance, with batons of carrots and mushrooms, and refreshingly under-seasoned. This was a nice meld of tastes rather than a stonewall of flavours, and impressed us to remark that if you made a Boeuf Bourguignon, then you would want it to taste just like this: good meat, a genuine sauce, no gloopiness, all for just a fiver.
They are well known in Cinnamon Cottage as dessert specialists, and profiteroles with vanilla ice cream and butterscotch sauce were superb, the sauce nothing less than a sensation, the icecream creamy and rich, the profiteroles perfect. Great sweet baking. A chocolate sauce is also available, arid we shall be heading back to Rochestown to sample it. The profiteroles cost a mere £1.90.
As a contrast to these small traiteurs, we also bought some dishes from Marks and Spencer, which has branches in Belfast, Cork and Dublin, and is a major player in this cooked-food-to-go market.
Six Prawn Spring Rolls were good, the fine little cigars of pastry packed with sweet shellfish and this was good zingy grub for the hungry eater and at £2.25 was a fair price.
Aromatic crispy duck was somewhat disappointing. For one thing, the dish needs 40 minutes to cook, which is quite long, and the assemblage of the duck with the pancakes is difficult, as the pancakes are awkward to steam and get cold very, quickly. There was little flavour in the accompanying scallions and cucumber, and it is the hoisin sauce which ends up dominating everything. So £8.49 seemed a lot of money for a dish which was perhaps a little too ambitious.
Dessert of fresh mixed salad with pineapple, melon and strawberry was poor, with the strawberry and the pineapple underripe, the preparation rather clumsy, and the pieces of fruit too big. Too expensive at £1.99.
Of all the food-to-go we tried, the most successful were the D. Swift foods from Kim Condon, and, for sheer flavourfulness, the cooking of Cargoes.
Narrowly edged into the runner-up spot was the lovely cooking of Cinnamon Cottage.