Tray chic

Today, being strict in the face of temptation and the joy of Sunday night dinner on a tray.

Life is…

On Sunday morning, we drove to Montpellier. The wild rocket flowers in the vineyards are so thick they look like fresh snow. Along the verges, the almond trees are dusted with pink blossom. We’re heading to the brocante in the Parc du Peyrou. I love being on the way to a brocante almost as much as being at a brocante. Everything feels possible, like the moment you put your money on a horse rather than the race itself.

I’m not quite the free-ranging brocanteuse I once was. I try to be strict with myself, to buy only things we need, rather than employing my previous method of Oh look, a nice plate with fish on it, a lovely linen sheet, a basket, or on more occasions than I care to admit, Oh look, I’m not sure what that is but I really, really want it. Today, my shopping list is as follows: a draper’s table no more than 210 centimetres long, a plate cupboard no wider than 110cm, a foot stool I can needlepoint a cover for (if only to employ the French word for upcycling, relooker), possibly a chandelier.

Sunday mornings at the Parc du Payrou have replaced my London Sunday mornings at Columbia Road flower market. The people are part of the pleasure. Montpellier is an elegant, lively city of about 400,00 people (and growing, post Covid, as people seek out more space and a better quality of life). It’s home to the oldest medical school in Europe, founded in 1289 - Nostradamus was a student there in the 1530s – and it remains very much a university city, with all the energy and sense of possibility that usually bestows. The park is full of little families, tourists and students. People are smartly dressed or artfully underdressed. Around the coffee stalls, you hear a scrabble of different languages.

I sit on a bench and sip my coffee. The man beside me holds a plate in his hand with a photograph of a peasant woman on it, a sort of Franklin Mint thing, if Princess Diana had been a milkmaid in 1950s Normandy. He catches me looking at it. He laughs. I laugh. ‘C’est original,’ I say. It’s original, not always a compliment in French, usually not a compliment in French. We both laugh. ‘It reminds me of my childhood,’ he says. The heart wants what it wants, I guess.

I keep walking round the stalls. There’s an older couple who often have good things just to the left of the entrance. On their stall, I spy a nice wooden tray, not very old, perhaps from the 1970s. It’s a breakfast tray, the sort with a stand so it fits over your lap. You can adjust the flat part at an angle, to make it easier to read your book. I buy it instantly. The woman asks me who makes the breakfast and who has their breakfast in bed. I smile. ‘Excellent!’ she says. We chat for a while about their recent trip to Ireland and the differences between whiskey and whisky. She tells me about another brocante in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon on Saturday mornings. I tell her I’m looking for a draper’s table, no more than 2.1 metres long, and she takes my number, maybe her friend Jean will call me.

We’re hungry now, so we walk through the golden sandstone streets to a restaurant I’d read about in the Gault Millau guide. It sounded promising, but everything comes with microherbs and the garnish on my soup is the same as the garnish on my fish. The Paris-Brest I order for pudding doesn’t come with microherbs but, for no apparent reason, with blueberries and a scoop of raspberry sorbet.

Microherbs with everything. And fruit with your Paris-Brest.

We often go out to lunch on Sunday, so I seldom want a big meal in the evening. Sundays are for dinner on a tray in front of the television. That dinner is often eggs of some sort, fried, scrambled, boiled, poached, perhaps an omelette, or a version of today’s oeufs cocotte. It’s quite an old fashioned dish and none the worse for that. Once you’ve mastered it – which will take a hot minute – you can adapt it in so many ways, adding mushrooms or bacon or different cheeses, some scraps of smoked salmon or trout, replacing the cream with crème fraîche and so on. It will honestly take you longer to decide on something you want to watch on Netflix than to make these eggs, so make sure you pick out your telly first.

Oeufs cocotte aux épinards

Baked eggs with spinach

This is the simplest supper dish on its own, or you can serve it as a starter as part of a bigger meal. You can prepare the eggs a few hours before you want to serve them, just add another minute or two to the cooking time. If you want to, add some cooked lardons, bacon or chopped ham to the bottom of the dish, too.

Serves 2

100g spinach, prepared weight
20g butter
1 garlic clove, halved and any green germ removed