3 July 2015
A few years ago I would regularly head up to Camden Lock market on a Sunday morning, not because I felt myself short of a leather jacket, pashmina, or candle, but just to help me decide what to have for lunch.
I would walk round all the food stalls, having a good look and an even better sniff, getting the hang of what was on offer and that would typically include Indian, Thai, Chinese, Mexican, Spanish, etc.then when I’d decided what it was I wanted, I’d leave and go home and make it – or have a good stab at it, and it was usually OK.
It was on one of these forays that I first met Tartiflette. Imagine a metre-diameter paella pan full of potatoes, bacon and onions, bubbling away in a creamy cheese sauce – it was food Heaven, if ever I saw it. The expression ‘Love at first sight’ springs to mind but that could possibly be too clichéd to use right now.
I hastened home, dug around on the internet and found a recipe (note that I say ‘a’ recipe rather than ‘the’ recipe, as I’m not sure the latter exists), and had a go. It was wonderful – everything I’d hoped it would be.
The dish originated in the Jura, that mountainous region of south-east France, and the correct cheese to use is called Reblochon, a gutsy, creamy cheese local to those parts. actually the name itself is interesting , being derived from the old French word rebler meaning to steal – many moons ago, the region was under the heel of the Austrian empire who taxed extortionately everything that anyone made or needed. The locals would hold back some milk, thus evading the tax thereon, and make this cheese, which became known as Reblochon because the milk was effectively stolen.
I used to think Tartiflette was the kind of dish that would have seen the hardy French mountain types of yore through the toughest of winters, but apparently not. It is no more traditional food of the country than the humble Ploughman’s Lunch, that staple of the English pub, is of England. If you had visions of centuries of ploughmen homeward plodding their weary way with a plate of bread, cheese and a bit of pickle at the end of the road, then you are seriously deluded.
During World war 2 only 1 type of reddish, Cheddar-type cheese could legally be made for reasons of efficiency of production, but certainly not because of the taste. When this situation ended in 1954, the Milk Marketing Board, in order to sell more of the new types of cheese that could now be made, invented a marvellous new vehicle for this and christened it The Ploughman’s Lunch. It was enormously successful.
Tatiflette may be considered similar as it met the same objectives for French cheese as the Ploughman’s did for English cheese, so not traditional peasant food at all!
Reblochon, although perfect in a tartiflette, is a tad on the expensive side and so one may resort to other creamy French cheeses, like Camembert/Brie or grated Emmental instead.
