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Numidia corresponded to what is today north-eastern Algeria and part of Tunisia - that is, to areas whose capacity for fertile abundance was first exploited by the Romans. They grew vines, olives, wheat. It was also the chief source of wild beasts for gladiatorial combat. Its autochthonous Berber population was nomadic and so did not cultivate. It practised transhumance - the moving of flocks according to season and climate: that word, the same in French, is still used on the causses of the Aveyron and Lozère to signify the migrations of the ewes which provide the milk for Roquefort. After the Romans came the Arabs. The French were there for little more than 130 years before de Gaulle pulled out in 1962, an example we would have done well to follow in Northern Ireland a decade later. "The French" is approximate. Although for all but 18 of those 130 years Algeria was deemed an integral part of metropolitan France its pied-noir population was of predominantly non-French origin. It was Maltese, Sicilian, Spanish. In my teens I met (and failed
subsequently to avoid) several pied-noir families in
Bordeaux. Their drink was Suze, the gentian flavoured
apéro whose flavour and colour reminded me of the
bitter aloes applied to my bitten fingernails as a child.
Of course he can't play soccer the way that Zizou can - but then no one can, no one ever did: the homage is characteristically ad hoc, a ripped page of newspaper with a photograph of the man's stooped shoulders from behind and a text by Richard Williams. Beneath it there's a postcard of Brel and across the room a larger framed shot of Brel with Brassens and Léo Ferré. And, of course, he can't sing like Brel - but then no one can, no one ever did. And though he must have been a small child when that most harrowing and melancholy of 20th-century songwriters died he seems to know all his lyrics. I'm all for a chef who comes out of his kitchen and recites to a table of customers, who are also evidently his friends, Le Plat Pays: "Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague/Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues/ Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassentŠ" I guess that the conjunction of the footballer and the poetic vaudevillian are in a way a reminder of the francophone world's contraction - from Biskra to Brussels, and that's about it today - and of that world's decreasing influence in all areas save soccer. It's a contraction that has occurred over the past quarter of a century, since the end of les trente glorieuses. And while cooking in France itself has refound its feet after the hiatus of nouvelle cuisine there's no escaping that its primacy in the anglophone world has been usurped by - well, by what? By rootless "world cooking", by confusion, by a failed esperanto. Even at its most basic - maybe that should be especially at its most basic - francophone cooking has a coherence and integrity which derives from its resolve to subsume all other forms of cooking under it. Some examples: French chefs at Russia's imperial court took native dishes and remade them in a French manner - a not too distant version of this cooking can be found at the soi-disant Russian restaurant Firebird off Bond Street; when London's top Turkish restaurateur opened the eponymous Ozer to showcase the best of his national cuisine, he employed a French chef and soon found that he had opened a French restaurant; Anton Mossiman's reworking of bread and butter pudding is tremendous, probably because all it has in common with the English horror of that name is that name; the dishes of France's former colonies and dependencies and of the metropolitan department of Algeria have been incorporated into the mainstream of its cooking: couscous and tagines in every other bistro, lamb curry (from Pondicherry) at La Coupole, the manifold styles designated, for instance, as à la créole or à la catalane (which came by way of Catalonian pieds-noirs rather than from Perpignan or Collioure); the use of spices in such ports as La Rochelle and St Malo - when Robert Abraham (Parisian, Jewish) had a restaurant just outside the walls of the latter in the Eighties he cooked a repertoire of extraordinary dishes derived from Malouin recipes of the 18th century. (M. Abraham is now down furthest south at Les Feuillants in Céret, inland from Collioure and a mere hike from the Bofill/Hodgkinson monument to Catalonia at Le Perthus.) The point is that the emphasis is always on making it good, ie, making it French, rather than making it "authentic". This may be taken as a symptom of French arrogance. But then France's kitchen, unlike, say, its navy, has much to be arrogant about. And it's an arrogance which transmits itself to the culinary practices of those who might be expected to abhor this Frenchification, those very peoples whose dishes have been thus amended or traduced. The Lebanese outfit Noura, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, surely owes its excellence to the rigorous application of French technique. And Numidie is, despite Serge Ismail's ethnicity, more French than it is north African. When it is north African, or Numidian, it is those in a French way. Quite a bit of the menu is generically southern French. There's a gratinated brandade whose proportion of salt cod to potato was perhaps too meagre but it was delicious nonetheless; there's steak with a smothering of foie gras and gratin dauphinois. Equally there are merguez with a chilli'd tomato sauce of some force and a fish tagine (langoustine, prawns, squid, cod) based on a similar but less aggressive sauce with prunes in it. It's all enjoyable, proficiently prepared (if with too much chive and leaf garnish) and it's served with the greatest and most unaffected charm by Serge, by his wife, Ashleigh, and by one helper whom fans of Adjani should flock to. This is a part of London which I have never lived in but which I have come to as an ever-returning tourist since I was a student with a Red Rover ticket. This is ur-London, these south-eastern burbs of red brick Victorian hills and spectacular panoramas and life-size dinosaurs. This, to adapt Henry James's epithet for Charlecote, is deepest mid-most London: racially and socially mixed, entirely unpredictable and thus persistently surprising - one almost expects surprises, so the presence of such a delightful joint should perhaps not be such a surprise. The best of it is that this inveterate tourist no longer need take with him a bag of crisps when he goes to gape at the friable concrete of the former Swedenborgian church or the vastness of north Kent or the spa that never was or the precise corner where his father stood to watch the Crystal Palace burn - it was, apparently, the noise that hurt more than the heat. For me it's that inexpressible loss that hurts. If only Brel had been over from the flatlands that night when he was just seven and a half... Numidie (6) |
Today it reminds
me of those genteelly embittered, confidentially racist,
discreetly illiberal, entirely bewildered people of the
pied-noir minority whose only possible haven was real
metropolitan France. They were atypical. The majority took
their ugly, if understandable, resentments to Valetta and
Palermo, and to Alicante, which remains to this day the
centre of pied-noir rotarianism. It used to be rumoured that
the import of fruits and vegetables to London was controlled
by this extended family of the dispossessed. Rumoured,
that's all. Should it still be true, then Serge Ismail would
know better than most whom to avoid. He is a Marseillais
Berber whose unusually home-made restaurant Numidie in Upper
Norwood, a couple of hundred metres from the site of the
Crystal Palace, whilst hardly a shrine, doesn't dissemble
his devotion to Zinedine Zidane (also a Marseillais Berber)
and to Jacques Brel (a Belgian).