This beef pie has a very British feel to it, despite its French origins.

I was asked exactly what makes it French, and I must admit to struggling to find an answer.

There’s some garlic in it, I suppose, and it has that general feel of traditional French cooking…simple, practical, thrifty and generous of flavour…but really, it could be British.

No matter.

The heart of the pie is brisket, a kilo, cut into roughly four centimetre chunks.  The quality of the beef is important.  Good brisket should have some fat to it, and will have been rolled and tightly tied.

It might even have been matured for a bit longer than normal, too.

Dust the chunks of beef with flour and fry them in a large frying pan with some olive oil, just so that they start to pick up a little colour around the edges.  Do this in batches, don’t crowd the pan, etc, etc.

Transfer the pieces to a large pan when they’re done, and then dust with a little extra flour and add two whole, peeled onions, a couple of peeled carrots, roughly chopped into two or three pieces and a pair of similarly chopped celery stalks.

Add four sprigs of thyme, two bay leaves, a generous shake of white pepper and some salt.  Pour enough hot beef stock over to cover and bring it all to a gentle simmer.

Now, about the stock.

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It’s easy to forget just how influential French cooking is, how it’s still widely regarded as the ‘mothership’ of cuisines, the place where all the best techniques, the best ideas, the best recipes come from.

If I had to choose just one cuisine and eat it for evermore, it’d be French.

That might sound treacherous to my fellow Brits, but we have to face some things – British food has come on in the last few decades, but there’s always been a sense of the ‘catch-up’ about it.

And who were we trying to catch-up to?

The French.

Classical French cuisine is a stable canon of recipes, but there’s plenty more to it than just those familiar recipes.  What interests me most are the edges, where people take something and give it a bit of a spin, where they let their own influences leave their mark.

This feels to me to be just what Serge Dansereau has done in his excellent new book, French Kitchen: Classic Recipes for home cooks.

For a start, Dansereau isn’t French.

He’s French-Canadian.

Not only that, he now cooks in New South Wales.

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If you keep walking up past Sela and North Bar, past the Grand Theatre and across the road with Mojo’s on it, the one where the Chinese supermarket used to be back in the day, you get to a fairly intimidating slip road, a lot of hurtling traffic and a fair amount of climate-changing fug.

If you make it across the road alive, you’ll end up on North Street, or ‘the’ North Street as some wag of a vandal has renamed it, and eventually, you’ll get to The Reliance.

The Reliance is one of those shabby, slightly tatty but effortlessly cool places where the mildly shambolic appearance translates into soul and depth. Nothing matches, but everything looks good together.

There’s a relaxed feel about the place that’s helped along by some friendly staff and a menu packed full of fantastic dishes, including the odd retro classic that everybody secretly likes.

Yes, I had the chicken Kiev.

I’ve always been a sucker for this particular creation.  The chef who chanced on the idea of stuffing a chicken breast with garlic butter, rolling it in breadcrumbs and then deep-frying it had his finger firmly on the pulse of what people really like.  The Reliance’s version was magnificent, and delivered that all-important slick of melted garlic butter on first contact with a knife.  The waiter confessed later that it was meant as not quite a joke, but something that was initially intended as a bit of an ironically  knowing retro throwback, and that they’d been surprised at how much people like it.

The Reliance’s chicken Kiev might stick around a while longer.

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Fish&…that sounds interesting. Go on, then, what is it?

It’s quite a clever little idea.

A nice, blue mobile fish and chip van that rocks up at festivals, parties, events and the like.

We stumbled across it at the glorious Kirkstall Festival the other weekend…a sunny day, fantastic live bands in the Abbey’s cloisters, fairground, local groups with second-hand book stalls…that sort of thing.

Fish and chips? Nice, but…ordinary?

Not so.

Not so at all.

Fish & have a few little twists.  They try a bit harder than your average mobile takeaway. They try harder than your average takeaway, actually…they just happen to be mobile.

For a start, their fish is sourced responsibly from sustainable sources.  It might seem a small point, but it’s an important one given the pressure our oceans and seas are under.

Secondly, and even more importantly, their food is cooked with a bit of a flourish.

Of course, you can get a straight portion of normally battered fish and chips, but that would seem a poor choice up against some of the variations on offer.

I had fish in a lemon, lime and chilli batter, flakes of chilli lodged in a crisp and very light batter.  Enough chilli heat and spice to make a difference, not so much as to kill the taste of the fish.

It was fantastic, unusual and interesting.

Really quite different and very, very tasty.

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