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Fruity Bakes
episode • The Cook Up with Adam Liaw • cooking • 25m
G
episode • The Cook Up with Adam Liaw • cooking • 25m
G
"Aren’t all the best meals just total accidents?" ponders Eddie Perfect, when I ask him about the best thing he's ever eaten.
The multi-hyphenate artist is not one to blindly follow restaurant lists and recommendations when he travels, preferring to let chance guide him. This is how he ended up having a meal that he still remembers a decade later in the French town of Menton.
After writing , a show dedicated to Mentone – the Melbourne suburb where he grew up – Perfect wanted to visit the Italian-turned-French town that inspired its name. The opportunity came during a European holiday with his wife Lucy and their two daughters, then aged one and three. While on their way to Italy, they hopped off the train in Menton.
Aren’t all the best meals just total accidents?
"There wasn’t much happening, but it was beautiful," recalls Perfect about the French Riviera town. "We got back to the train station and still had two hours until our train came. We were starving and nothing was open, but there was this kind of Portuguese restaurant or cafe on the corner. It looked terrible; plastic chairs and tables, and no one was there. It was scorching hot and just two guys were watching a tiny television who said the kitchen was closed. But they saw the kids and took pity on us, and say they’d bring something."
Bake Eddie's recipe
Upside-down apple cake
A long time passed, and the men finally came back with a large earthenware bowl containing a whole oven-baked fish, propped on its belly as if it was swimming. It was surrounded by potatoes, thickly sliced onions and olives, generously drizzled in olive oil and seasoned with oregano and paprika. Freshly baked bread came on the side to mop up the juices.
"It was one of the most heavenly, spiritual food experiences. It was the tastiest, yummiest thing that we've ever eaten. We went to Portugal just to try and find this dish and we found variations of it, but it never comes close to that first meal," says Perfect.
It was one of the most heavenly, spiritual food experiences.
The fish made such an impression that years later, his wife travelled back to Menton in the hope of eating the dish again, but the restaurants had closed.
"It was boarded up and shut down. So it was like a dream, like it magically appeared when we needed it and then it just vanished afterwards. That moment can't be replicated, it was very much a once-in-a-lifetime meal," he muses.
While living in New York, Perfect had another dish that he just couldn’t shake off: latkes with sour cream and applesauce.
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Latkes with apple sauce
"It was genuinely a surprising combination of flavours for me, something that I had never experienced before and that worked so well," he says.
This time, he learned how to replicate the recipe so he can now enjoy the potato fritters at home in Melbourne.
