Paperback cookery books aren’t really designed to last twenty years or more if they have any sort of usage, but my copy of Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking is now brown, wrinkled and infirm, the pages held together by a corset of elastic bands, and threatening to collapse altogether when its stays are removed. Plenty has been written over the years about its influence on the eating habits and attitudes of the nation, and it certainly had an effect on me – someone with the zeal of the recent convert – in its pictures of a country where the pleasures of the table rose above all others.

Oddly enough I didn’t cook much from it, but refer to it still for its picture of a vanished world, emphasized by ED’s own inclusion of cameos from what was to her the fairly distant, but not remote, past – Escoffier on a shooting weekend in Haute Savoie, a glimpse into a bourgeois household of the 1870s, cooking the same things that ED was herself encountering on her travels around France – but I can remember now how impressed I was at her recipe for potage bonne femme. This couldn’t be any more straightforward: potatoes, carrots, leeks, water, and some butter. Furthermore, the carrots aren’t even essential. I was deeply impressed that something so apparently banal could have so much flavour. This woman really knows her stuff, I thought, and still do, in spite of our problem with the duck.

This dish is also simple but you have to pay attention in the cooking or you will end up with a delicious but shapeless mess. It is something that has to be done just before it is eaten, so it will take you away from the table for five minutes, but the result is spectacular. You can use different alcohols to flavour it, but I think Grand Marnier is best.

You will need a large frying pan you can put in the oven, preferably a 25cm or 30cm heavy steel pan, but a non-stick one will do.