Telephone: 00 33 321 87 67 00
Address: Route du Paon, 62720 Wierre-Effroy, Pays de Calais.
'Bliss was it that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!" wrote Wordsworth about the French Revolution. Mais oui , I thought, as Danton and I rolled off Le Shuttle, and nosed our way out into the sunshine of the Pas de Calais. Although, on reflection, that "to be young" bit might be stretching it a little.
I don't know about you, but the very arrival in France tends to send my salivary glands into overdrive. The dream of a plateau de fruits de mer, a bavette aux échalotes, a slice of tarte fine aux pommes - or even coquilles Saint-Jacques, purée des dattes, emulsion de pamplemousse rosé; crème de potimarron, écume de lard fumé virtuel; or pigeon roti, cuisson de lait, marrons, jus de chou frisé come to that - lives on.
It is not so easy, however, to turn such dreams into reality upon immediate arrival. Close attention to Michelin, Gault et Millau and sundry other guides suggests that the Pas de Calais is the French culinary equivalent of the Midlands, mid-Wales or mid-East Anglia, where a person can die of starvation before they happen across an approved watering hole. Things were not made any better by the discovery that the one place Danton, who knows those parts quite well, had nominated as our must-eat destination turned out to be closed on the day we had decided to descend on it.
With a little help from various parties, we managed to recalibrate our longitude and latitude, and went our way through the snaking back roads beyond Marquise to La Ferme du Vert, just outside a hamlet with the euphonious name of Wierre-Effroy, where the number of cars with British number plates in the car park suggested that La Ferme might not be quite as undiscovered a gem as we had hoped.
These bold explorers showed sound discrimination. La Ferme, in minor château-style, formed four sides around a large courtyard in which the odd chicken and duck pottered about as if dressing some rural film set. The comfortably rustic dining room looked out on this agreeably Monsieur MacDonald scene.
The menu, too, revolved around the decent simplicities of local produce - asparagus with sauce mousseline, tarte a l'oignon, salade tiède paysanne, cuisse de canard à la bière de Jenlain, cremet d'anjou au coulis de fruits rouges. This is the kind of food I feel comfortable with. It sets no challenges. There is nothing remotely revolutionary about it. You think - I think - yes, I recognise this form of cooking and I feel happy with it.
Danton felt happy with soupe de poisson et sa rouille and the cuisse de canard. I felt happy with a slab of terrine de campagne du Vert and a sauté de veau à la graine de moutarde et tomate frache. And we both felt happy with the artisanal cheeses from Gerard Delpierre, and we finished off with a pudding apiece: a souffle of eau de vie of Poire William for me and a nougat glace au miel et coulis de cassis for Danton.
What we had was well sourced and decently cooked. The duck cooked in beer was outstanding - rich, sweet, weighty and fat-free. The veal stew was soft and velvety, one half creamy with its mustard sauce, the other fresh and fruity with the tomato. The terrine had been chunky in every sense of the word, properly rustic with that slightly metallic note that pigs' liver gives, and served with plenty of cornichons to cut the richness. The fish soup didn't quite have the concentration that banishes the blues, but it was quite adequate for all that. The cheeses were taken from a small but superbly kept local selection, and the puddings, as tends to be the case in France, were fine but not fabulous.
In all, it was a jolly nice dinner, and all ours for Fr300 (roughly £30) - or Fr548 if you include the bottle of beautifully balanced Alsatian Riesling at Fr97 and the powerful, silky Vacqueras at Fr151. It is possible now to find cooking of this assurance, rooted to local produce, in the UK - you have to look for it, but it is there - but you would probably have to pay rather more than £15 a head for the food, and you certainly wouldn't get wine at these prices.
I have eaten three times in France this year. One was a major disappointment - L'Arpège, about which I wrote some weeks back. Another, Marc Veyrat's La Ferme de Mon Père in Mégève, was a majestic, theatrical pyrotechnic tour de force of a kind that only the French can really pull off. La Ferme du Vert was the third. Clearly, it hasn't the ambition of the others, nor, with its top-whack menu gourmand coming in at Fr230 as against Fr1,400 at the others, would you expect it to do so. But in its own quiet way, La Ferme du Vert represents an enticing and enduring aspect of French cooking.
· Open Lunch, all week, from May 15 - September 15 only; dinner all week. Menus: Menu de Terroir, Fr130 (about £13) for three courses; Fr150 for four; Menu Gourmand, Fr230 for six courses. Accepts American Express, Diners Club. Wheelchair access and wheelchair WC.
