Preserved Dishes

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Floyd on France

By Keith Floyd

Published 1987

  • About
I know everybody has a deep freeze and they are great. You can make Coq au Vin or pâtés and you can pick vegetables from your garden and pop them into your freezer and that’s fine – it makes life easy. But, you know, there is no way that a freezer can ever replace or indeed even help to create the wonderful food, the conserves and preserves of our grandmothers’ larders.

So why don’t we sometimes, when by happy chance we have a rabbit we cannot eat that day, or see a tree full of chestnuts on a late summer Sunday walk, preserve these little dreams for use at some other time? I, for example, hate frozen peas and have never eaten a fresh garden pea that was properly cooked or tasted nice, but I have to admit that I really love those tinned French peas that have lettuce in them and are pale green – almost grey – in colour and, according to the worthy executives of large food companies, are unsaleable in this country because of their pallor. The old motto (ho-ho), ‘Never mind the quality, feel the colour’, still presides in this country, but even better than tinned French peas (petits pois) are home-preserved peas.