Last year I bought myself a paperback cook book at a fair called La Vrai Cuisine Française by Savarin.
It purports, like a lot of other French cook books to give the authentic recipes for French dishes. It then blots its copybook ( my copybook anyway) by including garlic sausage as a basic ingredient in a Quiche Lorraine.

It does however answer one question which has been troubling Síle and I since we started serving dinners here.
Even more so than in Ireland the French make a point of serving cheese with a meal and we are determined to follow this tradition here.
They serve it, correctly I think, before the dessert so that one eats it with the remains of the red wine.
The trouble is that our Irish friends, having gorged on France’s excellent cheeses, can often not find room for my carefully prepared dessert.

In the cookbook I was delighted to find a quotation which supplied the French reason for the cheese course;

Le fromage est le compément d’un bon dîner, mais c’est aussi le supplément d’un mauvais repas.

This brings me back instantly to my very first job in Snaffles in Dublin.
My boss there, Nick Tinne, used to slather on butter before adding a piece of Brie to his Carr’s Table Water quoting Clement Freud’s dictum;

“A bad cheese needs butter, a good cheese deserves it”

I can then instantly translate the French saying as;

A bad meal needs cheese, a good meal deserves it.

I will just have to make my main courses a little smaller to leave room for the cheese.