You’ve got to your destination, the local food looks unfamiliar and enticing – but how do you cook it?!  The “On Location” tab provides recipes specifically linked to particular parts of the world. Hover over “On Location”, and a list of areas will appear.  Choose your destination, real or imaginary!

If you’re willing to share them, do send me your favourite recipes local to your favourite places!  If I blog it, I’ll acknowledge it as yours.

Why cook the local food?

A few readers may say – why would I want to cook the local food when I can eat it in a restaurant or a cafe?  Very nice too, but to eat out every night is hard on the budget and can make you more of a tourist than a traveller.  And even if ambitions have to be circumscribed by commitments or companions, by youth or age, or by the size of the budget, many readers of grtw.com probably have more of the spirit of travel about them, rather than wanting merely to be a tourist

For me, there is a limit to how often I want to eat out, no matter how good the food, and I reach that limit pretty quickly.  Having a go at cooking the local dishes gets you just a little more inside the skin of a place, satisfying some of your curiosity.  It means there are no worries about whether the driver can sample the local alcoholic drinks.  It’s a lot less expensive.  And it brings the holiday home with you in a way that almost nothing else can, expanding your repertoire of meals with dishes that prompt “Do you remember when …?”  No clutter with these souvenirs, just experiences that don’t even fade because they will be refreshed every time you cook the dish again.

How can you find out how to cook the local food?

So how do you work out how to cook a piece of fish or meat when the label in the local language means nothing, and the dictionary is seems never to have heard of the word?

If you speak a little of the language – and even if you don’t – I have almost always found that the people serving in fish shops and butchers, and on market stalls, simply love to tell you their favourite recipe, and it is usually pretty simple.  They are telling you how they prepare what they eat, not giving you the recipe for the fancier, and probably “internationalised”, version of the same local dish that you are likely to get in a smart hotel or restaurant.

I had never cooked unprepared mussels until the piles and piles of them in a tiny hut by the shore of the Baie de Mont St Michel in Normandy made it just too irresistible.    A pantomime carried out by the fisherman’s seventeen year old son, who was doing the serving, combined with my schoolgirl French, produced a memorable meal made with what are still the best mussels I have ever tasted.

It was in Southern Brittany, a few years later, when my French was better but still pretty basic, that the fisherman’s wife in the market explained that if the mussels would be travelling in the car with us before they were cooked then I should ask for algue, seaweed, to be put in the plastic carrier bag with them, to keep them at their best. She presented me with a large bunch, all free.   Ask for algue with your mussels and, no matter how bad your accent, you earn instant respect!

It was a fisherman’s daughter (you meet all the family, though only the fisherman himself) in a north Breton market who told me not only how to cook langoustines, but even how much I would need to buy to feed four people..

And if you think that is all very well in French, probably my unlikeliest example was in Prague where the man in a tiny corner shop, who spoke no English, managed to explain to us, who spoke no Czech, that if we wanted to drink the local hooch we must buy Becherovka, which the Czech drink because it is regarded as very good for your health and especially good for your stomach.  Much smiling, much goodwill, and a lot of miming!

All these people are very close to their produce, and almost all relish the chance to share their love and enthusiasm for it.  It is also a way for we visitors to put something directly into the economy of a place that we like and want to see thrive as a real place, not merely as a tourist destination.

We can’t all be in little shops and at market stalls all the time, however.  Too often they don’t exist, or you simply aren’t in the right place at the right time, or you are completely bewildered about what the thing in front of you will cost:  I got my fingers badly burnt once in a butchers, buying what must have been The Most Expensive Chicken In France.  Painful though it was at the time, it has been more than cancelled out (even financially) by all the times I have struck lucky.  And it did taste very good.

Asking an assistant is worth a try even in a supermarket, if it has a fish, meat or vegetable or cheese counter.  Otherwise, if you can work out which words on the label are actually the name of the bit of fish / meat / cheese / veg you are eyeing, then resort to the mobile phone and tap it in.  Goodrecipestravelwell.com (or grtw.com for quick typing) may be able to help you, or else (if you have any signal!) you have the whole power of the internet at your disposal.

How “On Location” works

Recipes in this “On Location” section are roughly – very roughly – grouped by area, but many dishes defy national or regional borders.  For example a dish cooked with cider may well have variants in Somerset, Herefordshire, Kent, Brittany or a host of other places.  I mostly put recipes under the area where I came across them, but maybe elsewhere as well.  You can always search by main ingredient.

Happy culinary exploration!  And if just now you can’t get to a favourite place, or to a place you’d like to visit, try recreating – or creating – that place at home with a local meal.  The food won’t be exactly the same, but it can still be jolly good:  because good recipes travel well!

Happy, quick, and easy cooking, and – bon appétit!

Anna