Great cooking: often best at home

It can be great to eat out in restaurants. The ambiance, the wine, the company. Sometimes the food.

But only sometimes. Because often food is far better cooked at home.

Now I say that after decades of enjoying the outstanding cooking produced by my wife Danielle. She amazes me, regularly, not just with her main dishes but also with those other accessory dishes, as it were, that enhance mealtimes.

For instance, for my birthday, she produced a favourite cake of mine, a marble cake. While, at the same time, also making yet another batch of outstanding marmalade.

Danielle's marmalade and her marble cake

Marble cake and Marmalade. Why, her cooking even alliterated.

The marmalade took some planning. The Valencian province is full of oranges – honestly, groves everywhere, right up to the start of the mountains – but few are the bitter ones, for which Seville is famous, and which alone guarantee proper orange marmalade. What’s more, even among those producers who have the bitter variety, an even smaller proportion grow their fruit organically. Since marmalade generally has peel in it, you need organic fruit if you don’t want to be eating large quantities of chemicals.

Fortunately, Danielle found a supplier in the fine old Roman city of Sagunto, up the coast, who delivered us 10 kilos of bitter, organically grown oranges, for this year’s marmalade production. She’s now converted all ten kilos into three varieties: straight marmalade, marmalade with ginger or marmalade with vanilla. All excellent.

But it’s not just Danielle’s cooking I’m thinking of. Our neighbour Isabel is quickly turning into a close friend. Her sister is a keen maker of the quince jelly known in Spain as membrillo, and excellent it is too. It goes extremely well with cheese, but I’m more than happy to eat it as it comes.

Membrillo: quince jelly, great with cheese, great on its own

Then there’s Paco. We met him through his wife Begonia. We met her through our dogs, who made friend with hers, in the Turia river park in Valencia. She looks after our dogs if we go away and can’t take them with us. It’s a task she takes on with delight, threatening us on each occasion not to give them back when we return.

Paella is a great favourite of mine, and Valencia is the homeland of that glorious dish. But the Valencian version isn’t made with seafood. You can get that other version in Valencia too, but the traditional paella Valenciana is made with chicken, rabbit and snails. I’m not a huge fan of snails as a delicacy but, hey, in a great paella I can handle them too.

We’ve had some great paellas here, including in the Albufera area, a huge area of flooded land south of the city, where most of the rice is grown. But no one has made a paella as good as Paco’s. Just moist enough, full of flavour, practically addictive. The invitation to share one with him was a culinary highlight.

Paco's paella Valenciana: exactly as it should be

Nor is all the home-made food we enjoy so much Spanish. Danielle has discovered, online of course, that in the town next to ours lives an Indian woman who, as she puts it, from time to time decides to make some delicacies that she offers for sale. Most recently, it was samosas. Boy were they good.

Our excellent local samosas, vegetarian and meat-filled

I’ve even got in on the act myself. Years ago, probably decades, I made a brief visit to Marseille, in southern France. The purpose of the visit has completely slipped my memory. It was something to do with business, but for the life of me I can’t remember who had invited me or why. What I shall never forget was the lunch I had. It was the first time I’d eaten fish ‘au gros sel’. The fish is entirely encased in coarse salt and then cooked in the oven.

To my astonishment, it’s anything but salty. On the contrary, the salt forms a crust over the fish. You crack the crust to get at the fish, and the skin just peels off, leaving the flesh, perfectly cooked but still deliciously moist. It’s a wonderful way to cook certain types of fish, particularly sea fish.

A week ago, I talked about Danielle’s purchase of sea bream, and a restaurateur’s advice to cook it in just that way, encased in coarse salt. Decades on from my first, and only, experience of that dish, but still remembering how appetising it was, I decided it was time to have a go.

With the restaurateur’s instructions clear in my mind, I had a go. And, wow, it was like being right back in Marseille all that time ago. The same flavours, the same consistency, the same pleasure.

Sea bream cooked in coarse salt
A lot better than it looks...

Yet another illustration of the principle that, however good restaurants may be, often the best place to eat is at home.

Your own or someone else’s.