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French Nursery Food

Far Breton, or Custard Cake with Prunes

When we think of nursery food, most of us are acutely

nationalistic. One cannot imagine toad-in-the-hole, milk

pudding and junket being consumed in any other country.

Some of us never escape the grip of the nursery and are

happier eating very bad food than going to any damned

foreign restaurant, while others so loathed the food of

their childhood that they are forever sworn against it. If

anything, I belong in the first camp, even if I have happily

migrated from the world of club food and institutionalised

deprivation. I liked almost everything I was given as a

child, from Nanny’s Mess (a sort of Irish stew with scrag

end of lamb and pearl barley) and spam fritters and, not

even but especially, prunes and custard.

I am always surprised by the degree of animosity the

poor old prune provokes. Even the great Jane Grigson

seems to have been infected with this loathing: ‘In a

masochistic and patriotic egotism of suffering, I had

always thought that prunes and rice pudding were unique

to Great Britain (like strikes). Alone in the world we

suffered, or made our children suffer.’ Yet, soaked in hot

black tea – brought to a simmer after twenty minutes for

an extra little nudge towards plumpness – and served with

custard or cold double cream, prunes are a quietly enjoyed

pleasure, each stone arranged on the rim of the soup plate

to determine future fortunes (‘tinker, tailor…’). This is

purely subjective, but the objection, made with a snigger,

that prunes are unduly laxative, is a low and unkind slur

on a discreetly helpful fruit.

The prune is not remotely locked in a uniquely British

past. The French – in the Southwest where they are

cultivated, in the Loire Valley where they often accompany

pork, or in the Northwest where the dish below originates

– highly esteem the prune. The Far Breton may not be

French nursery food but it certainly inhabits a similar

realm where food provokes a kind of reverie of the past.

‘Far’ is a sort of cake, originally quite savoury, and possibly

a stuffing. It is an abbreviation of the dialect ‘farz’, itself

surely derived from ‘farce’ (in the sense of forcemeat rather

than trouser-dropping stage comedy). Being a simple

batter pudding, it is similar, I daresay, to a clafoutis, but

it is superior in as much as it is best eaten cold and is

comparatively delicate and distinctly moreish. It is also

childishly easy to make.

39

January