THE POWER OF THE PICNIC
Anthony Peregrine recalls the picnics of his youth while our experts remember picnics in France, Italy and Spain
It’s tomato sandwiches on white bread that do it. Proper, springy, sliced white bread, I mean. One bite, and I’m back on the beach. The sands were endless, the sea distant. I was in scratchy swimming trunks, my mother in a floaty summer dress, my dad in slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and tie. Aunts, cousins and uncles were similarly got up. Welsh grandma never revealed her ankles or took off her hat. It was lunchtime. There was a light breeze but the sun was ample.
The picnic hamper was open, the kids ate the tomato sandwiches and drank squash in a nuclear shade of orange.
There were infinite holiday possibilities. We could get up and run around midsandwich. Or play cricket. Or soccer. Or dig a motorboat into the sand. Or roar off to the sea. The shore was our dining room.
A sense of freedom burgeoned for young and parent alike. (“You want to go straight to the ice cream? Why not!”) We couldn’t keep our elbows off the table, for there was no table. Uncle bowled badly. Grandma smiled. We were a family. We were all together, all happy and all on the same side.
I cannot recall any childhood meal taken in a café or restaurant. But the beach picnic comes bounding back over the years, sometimes even without a tomato sandwich as prompt. That is the Power of the Picnic. Normal room-bound rules fall away, and leave you laughing. Of such fleeting shifts of liberty are memories created.
The ideal picnic requires nearby water — sea, river, lake — for the cooling of wine and feet and to lend purity and timelessness.
Crockery plates and proper glasses are essential, unless you anticipate violence. Drinking wine from plastic goblets is like dressing your kids in bin-liners.
Take your time. Have a pre-lunch swim. Afterwards, opt for non-energetic activity in which everyone can join. This rules out rugby league. Prefer pétanque, the Finnish skittle game molkky or, best of all, French cricket.
Look around you. These are your family and friends. Freed of walls and quotidian concerns, you may be reminded that you quite like them. A picnic achieves this as no other meal can.
FEAST A LA FRANÇAISE
Édouard Manet’s 1863 is, without argument, the most famous picnic picture ever painted. You’ll maybe recall it, Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe notably the foreground in which a naked woman sits on the forest floor besides two over-dressed dandies.
This in no way tallies with my experience of French picnics — which, while lacking nudity, are horns of abundance. Down by the Vidourle River where we often meet friends, three choices of drink (pastis, rosé, beer) plus saucisson and radish-with-dips are aperitif minima. Further courses require strong men to carry the cooler-boxes — melon, chicken, more charcuterie, baguettes, quiches, rice and pasta salads, as much wine as you can fit into a Peugeot, three sorts of cheese, fruit salad and lemon tart. French picnics are not, in short, about eating skimpily— they’re about carting French gastronomy out of doors.
SPANISH EXTRAVAGANZA
Sunday is picnic day in Spain, when friends and families congregate on beaches and in the countryside. On Canyamel beach in the northeast of Mallorca on a Sunday in midJuly, I witnessed the Spanish picnic extravaganza in full swing. In the shade of pine trees at the quieter end of the beach, half a dozen groups were tucking into their lunch. Folding tables with checked tablecloths were piled high with Tupperware boxes and surrounded by baskets and cooler-boxes.
One family was eating squares of coca de trampó — a thin, pizza-like base topped with finely chopped tomatoes, peppers and onions, while the people next to them were pouring gazpacho from flasks and scoffing wedges of tortilla omelette and rolls stuffed with squashy sobrassada sausage. A couple of toddlers licked lollies as they splashed in an inflatable paddling pool alongside.
As the afternoon wore on, some people played cards, while others snoozed in hammocks strung between the trees. A few of the ladies, with their straw hats on, carried on their conversation knee-deep in the sea. It wasn’t until at least seven-ish that anyone thought of packing up.
AL FRESCO IN ITALIA
It’s midday in a picnic area shaded by beech trees on the slopes of Tuscany’s Monte Amiata. A family are unloading everything they need. Tables. Chairs. Plates. Cutlery. Glasses. Tablecloths. Serviettes. Fractious children. Smartphone-glued adolescents.
Next comes a seemingly endless procession of food: baked, cooked, fried, marinated, all of it still in the pots or trays grandma made it in. And ecco! Here come the cooler-boxes, four of them, brimful with birra-acqua-fanta-coca-vino.
There’s also a little camping stove and a big Bialetti metal coffee pot — because it’s unthinkable to finish a meal without a caffettino (a little espresso), and unthinkable that this should not be hot and freshly prepared.
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