Rick Stein’s Secret France

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I love a Rick Stein book. I also love a bit of France. Rick Stein’s Secret France should therefore be right up my street. The Francophile thing might have something to do with living in Poole and being closer to Cherbourg than London. Maybe it’s down to childhood holidays, or even the French student that came to stay with us and whom I had a crush on (I can still smell her cigarette smoke stained leather jacket). Oh Veronique!

Rick Stein – simple is good

Anyway, the premise for the TV series Rick Stein’s Secret France, and the book of the same title, is Stein’s quest to discover if French cuisine is still as good in our modern world as it used to be in bygone days of long lunches and even longer dinners.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Stein’s enormous success, he’ll quite happily speak of his annoyance at over-complicated food, and occasionally, the pretentiousness sometimes associated with the world of Michelin-starred restaurants. ‘I see this overpriced, over-elaborate food everywhere, absurdly delicate plates of little twists of chives, cubes of tomatoes, smears and foams’.

Stein stance, and candidness, is good news for us amateurs, and bodes well for Secret France.

The book, as with all of Stein’s later releases, is beautifully presented. From the layout and its use of colours, to the typography and photography – it’s all lovely stuff. I find it often helps to see a photograph of what the finished dish should look like. Occasionally, my efforts come close to the images on the pages, other times, well, let’s not talk about those.

Soups, salads and souffle

Secret France isn’t a book of purely seafood recipes. We have chapters on eggs & cheese, soup, salads & appetisers, poultry, meat, vegetables, desserts, and thankfully, for the point of this review, fish & seafood. To be honest, if you fancy a break from filleting fish and picking crab meat you’ll easily find an alternative in the other chapters. However, that’s not why we’re here.

A couple of seafood recipes do slip into the other categories, for example Crab & emmental souffle, and salad of peppers, anchovies & hard-boiled eggs. The poissons et fruit de mer chapter opens with Stein admitting that due to the nature of his journey he didn’t reach as many coastal areas as he would have liked. If I’m being honest, that does come across in the selection of seafood recipes. It’s a bit of a mish—mash and perhaps it would have been better to present the chapters based on regions visited, as per the television series.

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However, what we do end up with are some very good recipes. We begin with a simple mussels dish that doesn’t sound much, but having cooked it myself is actually a very enjoyable dish.

The Mussels with poulette sauce is another immensely enjoyable, and uncomplicated, recipe.

Seafood recipes

Let’s be honest, despite Rick’s worries as to the quality of their cuisine, the French still lead the way when it comes to seafood.

Bearing in mind we share The Channel, it’s unfathomable we don’t hold seafood with the same reverence as our friends across the water. I just don’t get it.

In Secret France Rick gives us simple, yet wonderful recipes, for clams, bream, prawn croquettes, brill, scallops, sardines, John Dory, red mullet, a ‘gurnard’ bouillabaisse, and more. The star of the show for me however is the seafood gratin.

Wow. What. A. Dish. If you only cook one recipe from Secret France, then this has to be it. Rick recommends using a section of white fillets. By chance, I also had some sea trout fillets that I also whacked in. The resulting dish was like a receiving a heartfelt hug from a massive, bearded, overfriendly hermit who hasn’t seen a fellow human for 20 years.

In his introduction to the dish, Rick writes, ‘I thought the accompanying sautéed apple might be a bit too ‘Normande’ for foreign consumption…’ Whatever you do, make sure to cook the apple. It’s the final touch, the moment that elevates the dish from something very good, to something very irresistible. When put altogether, it’s one of those dishes that is difficult to stop eating. You only stop when you’re two mouthfuls from exploding.

Rick Stein’s Secret France – good all-rounder

So, while your thoughts are starting to turn to buying a gratin dish, I’ll conclude. Secret France isn’t for those looking solely for seafood recipes. You’d be better off going for Rick’s Seafood or Mitch Tonk’s Fish. However, if you’re looking for a few very good seafood recipes, and you’re a bit of a Francophile, and willing to learn from our friends across The Channel, then simply put, buy this book.

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