Felicity Cloake - One More Croissant for the Road

And whereas a list of my most treasured British dishes would skew heavily towards stodge, this lot, though a little low on salad, is pleasingly varied: (almost*) anything we can do, France does better. They’ve even beaten us on our specialist subject, the spud – I like a baked potato as much as the next noted gourmand, but I think we can all agree that Alpine tartiflette takes it to the next level. (Mostly by adding more cheese.)

The dog and I make a trip to Stanfords in Covent Garden, home of every map under the sun, and pick up a massive road atlas that seems to list every hamlet and track I might possibly wish to traverse, as well as a map of national bike routes, which, it quickly becomes clear, will be of almost no use to me whatsoever. These purchases give me the pleasing sense, as I spread the map out on the floor at home and try to stop Wilf trampling muddy paws across the Bay of Biscay, of embarking on an expedition. They also make terrifyingly clear how large France is.

Taking a deep breath, I open the atlas. Dodging Calais and its horse-fat frites, it makes sense to start off with moules in Normandy, then curve round the coast to Brittany, which does such good crêpes and butter and, even better, crêpes with butter. From the wind-swept Atlantic coast I’ll start to head south, first to the Loire Valley, home of the tarte Tatin, as well as all those famous chateaux everyone goes on about, then down to Limousin to coo over some of its famous cattle, before zipping through Bordeaux towards the Spanish border and Bayonne, the French capital of chocolate.

Having run out of France to the south, and skirting a furry tail currently draped over the Pyrenees, my route turns east for poule au pot, and the cassoulet country of the Languedoc, before hitting the Côte d’Azur, with its rust-red fish soups and deliciously oily ratatouille. Tempting as it is to head for Provence proper at this point, that herb-scented heaven-on-earth where I spent every rosé-soaked summer of my twenties, I fear I’d never tear myself away in mid-June and I cannot ignore the siren call of tartiflette from my second-favourite place in France, the Haute Savoie. I wish I could say that it’s the thrill of the physical challenge that attracts me to the mountains, but it isn’t, it’s the cheese.

From there, the map suggests I’m quite close (i.e. a-whole-day-on-a-train close, due to aforementioned size of country) to Lyon, often touted as the culinary capital of France. Though I’ve only driven past it, my reading suggests it specialises in an extraordinary array of animal parts, and oddly, one of France’s best salads, the lyonnaise, with its bitter leaves dressed with salty bacon fat and rich, runny egg yolk.

The logical next stop on my way north is Burgundy, for all sorts of things cooked in its perfect wine, but particularly beef, sticky, soft and intensely savoury, and then, looking at the route I’ve traced thus far, which flirts with the Spanish, Italian and Swiss borders, it feels like a dereliction of duty not to go and make eyes at the Germans in Strasbourg, too.

It’s a long way to go for some fermented cabbage and faggots, and yet I have a lot of time for fermented things and sausages, especially washed down with cold beer. Also, I note with satisfaction that this puts me in the ideal place to knock off a wobbly quiche Lorraine in Lorraine, and the fluffy little madeleines that occupy such a central place in the national psyche, before making a triumphant entry into Paris via Champagne, which may or may not have invented French onion soup (and God, who doesn’t love French onion soup, all cheesy and oozy and glorious?), but which does, happily, have an awful lot of fizzy wine going for it.

Paris, of course, like any cosmopolitan capital city, is a place where you can eat yourself around the globe, but my ambitions are more modest. I’m hoping, as a crescendo of my trip, to achieve croissant nirvana in the city of light. Certainly, I’ll have eaten enough of the things by then to judge what’s good and what’s not – I’m intending to put away at least one a day, barring any more interesting offers.

Pay attention, because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of this. I started rating croissants on the coast-to-coast trip of 2017, for no better reason than they’re reliably found throughout France, I enjoy over-thinking food and most importantly I like them. The perfect croissant is, of course, entirely a matter of taste – professional pâtissières put a lot of store by the lamination of the dough, or how skilfully the pastry and butter have been folded together to create hundreds of distinct layers: according to one equation I find online, the average croissant has 649. Me, I’m less concerned with looks; some of the most disappointing pastries I’ve eaten in London are the ones flaunting their perfect strata of dough all over social media, but which turn out to have very little in the way of flavour. What I look for in a good croissant is:

1 butteriness (no margarine-based croissants for me)

2 a good balance of caramelised sweetness and bready savoury notes

3 a crisp base

4 a slightly damp middle – squidgy but not doughy

In the text that follows, all scores are out of 10: 1–4 denotes a poor croissant not even worth finishing (a croissant contains about 260kcal); 5–7 as a mediocre-to-decent example not worth complaining about and 8+ as a good croissant worth repeating immediately if time permits.

It’s a satisfyingly neat loop around the country, but one, I note, that covers an awful lot of ground. A cursory google turns up the terrifying fact that France is the largest country in Western Europe, a whopping 27 times the size of Wales. Distances are vast – it looks like it might take me at least three days to cycle across Brittany alone.

Unfortunately, I have a day job as a weekly columnist, and a mortgage to pay, to say nothing of a terrier with a truly prodigious appetite; I can’t afford to dawdle around this place like a tourist – I need to be a Tourist. So like the boys in Lycra,† I’ll need the odd lift. Until quite recently I’d assumed the Tour de France actually rode around France, but they don’t; they get on team coaches and doze their way to the next starting line. Me, I’m going to let the train take the strain.

To add to the fun, I’ve hit a summer of rail strikes: two days out of every seven are to be given over to industrial action in a dispute over President Macron’s attempts to open the passenger network up to competition. On the plus side, the dates have been announced in advance. On the minus side, the actual services affected won’t be decided until the night before, which makes the whole thing a bit of a Russian roulette.

If the reactions of my friends and family are anything to go by, anyone who hasn’t ridden a bike since childhood finds the idea of weeks doing nothing but this a bit daunting. In fact, as I always breezily explain, cycling is much easier than running, especially when your feet are actually stuck to the bike. Once you’ve got going, momentum will keep your legs spinning round with surprisingly little effort on your part, and on good roads with a forgiving gradient, you can cover a decent distance without much expertise: it’s not for nothing that 100 miles is said to be the cycling equivalent of running a marathon, though having done both (preens), I can confirm a marathon is a lot more unpleasant.