THEY can harmonise the currencies, they can harmonise the laws, they can abolish all the borders, but irrespective of all moves towards integration and assimilation, the food cultures of the member states of the EU are destined to forever remain a 15 part harmony.
Of course, the food we eat has been steadily transformed into something of a Euro diet, over the past two decades, as we have opened up firstly our minds, and then our appetites to, European food.
Twenty years ago pasta was exotic, now it is commonplace, a staple almost on a par with our sacred spud; we drink wines from every country in Europe, go to restaurants which describe their cuisine as "Mediterranean provincial", and when Joel Robuchon retires, we read all about it.
We love Belgian beer, German sausage, a good smorgasbord from Sweden, taramasalata, schnitzel - in fact, almost everything about the food culture of our neighbours has proved attractive to us. And vice versa, as Irish butter and beef and Irish pubs - have conquered the continent.
And yet, the more we are together, the more we continue to define our separateness, our distinctiveness, by our food. Regardless of what we share, Chancellor Kohl remains a sausage and beer man, Chirac is definitely a chap for escargots, and our own Mr Bruton proudly wears that physiology which suggests he is never happier than when feasting on good beef and spuds from Meath.
If there is a problem with the Euro melange, it is this while we know a lot about our neighbours' cuisines, we frequently adapt them in a shoddy way.
Just think of the last dreary moussaka you had, or some God awful spag bol. Just think of some industrialised pork pie, or a shop baked croissant which flakes apart into thin air. Yuk!
So what we need - and what our politicos desperately need - for the next six months of EU Presidency, is a failsafe guide to the true nature and culinary specialities of our Euro compadres.
And here, just in time - phew! - it is.
DENMARK
WE love them dearly, because they have gifted to the world everyone's favourite foodie movie, Babettes Feast. Directed by Garbriel Axel from a Karen Blixen story, Babette's Feast is pure food lover's bliss, as Stephane Audran, as the exiled cook Babette, uses food to tear off the veneer of northern European Calvinism, to reveal the sensual stomachs underneath.
What You Need To Know: Fish balls
"The Danes are great ones for meat balls (frikadeller) and for fish balls too," writes Alan Davidson. His recipe for fish balls minces white fish meat and combines it with butter, cornflour and any one of certain optional seasonings: tomato puree, nut meg, chopped chives, a little shredded onion. Milk is added, then eggs, and the beaten mixture shaped into fish balls which are then fried for a few minutes.
BELGIUM
WE know all about their wonderful beers, but Belgium has been unfairly tarnished as a nation of folk who eat masses of mussels and little else, apart from salad cream on their chips.
In fact, Belgium is home to some seriously fine cooking, has more three star restaurants per head than France, and prides itself on a cuisine which fuses the generosity of the German table with the finesse of the French kitchen.
What You Need To Know: Waterzooi
What is waterzooi? It is, writes Ruth Van Waerebeek, "a confusion of a soup with a stew, in which the main ingredient (it can be chicken, rabbit or fish) is poached in a creamy broth with aromatic vegetables. Throughout Flanders, one can find as many variations of waterzooi as there are church towers on the horizon".
GERMANY
GERMAN cooking tends to be derided as lumpen and heavy. This is unfair, for German cooking is distinctive and precise, even if that does makes it sound like the culinary equivalent of a BMW.
But if the Germans are great bakers, great brewers and great butchers - and they are all three - then their cuisine suffers mainly from a little linguistic difficulty, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his travel book, Neither Here Nor There: "It really is the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you want whipped cream on your coffee in much of the Germans speaking world, you order it `mit Schlag'. Now does that sound to you like a frothy and delicious pick me up?
What You Need To Know: German Beer
You should really know that drinking beer with a great many dishes is absolutely fab. Only the Germans seem to appreciate this secret, but the next time you are frying some liver, try a glass of weissbier instead of some wine, and see just what these clever chaps appreciate.
IRELAND
IT is essential that we retain some aspect of modesty and when discussing our own cuisine in comparison to the other EU states, so let us just say that the wise Eurocrat who chooses carefully as he or she makes his or her way around the city and the country, will likely discover the most dynamic cuisine of any European country.
The reason for this is relatively simple. In the last decade, Irish cooks have created a cuisine which owes little to the cooking of the past. Unshackled by the heavy hand of history - which is the case with the French, for example - a vibrant, almost unlikely style of cooking has emerged. There is still much too much, bad food, but when you find the good stuff, you find some of the best food in the EU.
What You Need To Know: Understanding the North South Divide
The curious thing about the cooking of Paul Rankin, of Belfast's Roscoff, and Robbie Millar, of Bangor's Shanks - to take just two of the best known Northern cooks - is not merely that their food is at the cutting edge of contemporary food, but that it should seem so expressively Irish. Lots of European touches, of course, and plenty of that pizzazz which the best chefs in the UK can muster. Yet above all, their food shows mostly that borders and political designations mean doodleysquat when it comes to cooking.
GREECE
THE Ouzo and Islands tourist culture has unfairly tarnished Greek cooking as consisting of little more than ropey meat stews, known as stifado, salad with feta cheese, and kebabs. In fact, there is a very considerable difference between the cooking of northern Greece and that of the islands.
"In my opinion, the food of the north is a fascinating melange of dishes spicy and earthy, more complex and better seasoned than in the south, probably because the area is a genuine crossroads of culinary ideas", writes Paula Wolfert.
What You Need To Know: Taramasalata
The oozy pink concoction which so many of us discovered as a vital, very pink, accompaniment to our 1.5 litre bottles of liebfraumilch back in the 1970s, is strictly made with salted mullet roe, and not smoked cod's roe.
FRANCE
THE French remain the most serious and studious cooks of lithe EU, their rock solid confidence in the kitchen founded on centuries of treating - and respecting - cooking as an art. But, much like Italy (see below), French cooking is actually marvellously diverse, its orientation cent red on whether the base ingredient is the butter of the north, the goose fat of the south west, or the olive oil of the Mediterranean.
From soup to nuts, they remain the team to beat for good cooking, though their influence as the guiding style for good food has dwindled in recent years, as the Cal-Ital school has gained ascendancy.
The worst foodie habit of the French remains their disregard for everybody else's cooking, a blinkeredness which is obdutately chauvinistic.
What You Need To Know: French food away from home
Its classical structures and disciplined rules have meant that French cuisine travels extremely well, as it is more of a craft than other styles of cooking, which remain centred on ingredients. So, for example, you can have marvelously accomplished French cooking in Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, in the centre of Dublin, and marvel at the fact that the experience could be happening in Paris or Lyon or Bordeaux, or in New York, London or Tokyo. This is the great session of French cooking, that if you understand the rules, you can create cuisine Francaise anywhere.
SPAIN
SPANISH cooking is one of the glories of Europe, as intensely sensual and dramatic as the Spanish people, and to enjoy it you simply have to go to Spain, as I don't think it travels very well.
Never mind the intricacies and variations of relatively complex dishes such as paella; even a simple potato omelette - a tortilla Espanola - tastes radically different the way they cook it.
But in Spain, what joy to explore the diverse foods of the Basques, the Catalonians, Galicia and the other regions. In Santiago del Compostela, a young Spanish woman once said to me: "In Galicia we have two topics of conversation. One is food. The other is the weather." In Spain, food seems to be not only omnipresent, but to be regarded as the axis of family life, to a greater degree even than Italy.
What You Need To Know: Eating late
Nobody cats dinner later than the Spanish, and beginning at 10 p.m. is a commonplace throughout the country. How do they keep going? By virtue of snacking, particularly on tapas, of course.
ITALY
THERE is no such thing as Italian cooking. Each region in Italy is proud - extra proud - of its regional specialities, and regards its food a better than everyone else's. In Piedmont they will tell you they have the best wines and the best food, but down in Sicily they will tell you much the same thing, which is pretty much what you will hear in Umbria, Tuscany and everywhere else.
This is why Italian cooking is so good: it is, in fact, intensely competitive, and certain subjects - "Do you really use tomatoes when cooking Ossobuco alla Milanese?" - are considered worth fighting over.
LUXEMBOURG
THE Luxembourgeois seem to suffer from acute shyness when it comes to pressing themselves forward on the world stage. I have no doubt that there is fine food there - if they are lucky they will fuse French influences with Belgian influences and produce something excellent.
But I must confess to knowing nothing whatsoever about it, and a trawl of my library revealed only one entry - in a book called Master Chefs of Europe - devoted to recipes by a chef called Tony Tintinger, whose restaurant is called Clarefontaine. Mr Tintinger contributes Green Coated Duo Of Turbot And Salmon With Chive Butter, Tournedos Of Lamb, Ardennes Style, and a Mango And Papaya Gratin, which sounds pretty delicious.
What You Need To Know: Drinking in Luxembourg
The Luxembourgeois produce some decent wine, which rarely leaves the country, though I tried a very dry white wine once and found it good and lively, and they brew beer. They are famous for having a very high per capita consumption of booze.
FINLAND
SOUND people, the Finns. In certain villages on the coast, a gift is considered ready for marriage when she is capable of preparing Baltic herring no fewer than 25 different ways.
Impressive, but true male gourmands with an eye for a Finnish lass should note that one can prepare Baltic herring in more than 150 different ways, so don't pop the question to the first girl who brings you herring toasts for breakfast.
What You Need To Know: The Finnishness of things Finnish
In his brilliant book North Atlantic Seafood, Alan Davidson notes that "most Finnish cookery is hard to disentangle from Swedish cookery ... or from that of Russia and the Baltic republics", but he goes on to say that there is "no possibility that the visitor to Finland could be mistaken, whether travelling through the lake filled countryside or eating in a city restaurant, about where he is. The Finnishness of things Finnish may be difficult to define, but it is remarkably easy to recognise."
Eh, yeah, Alan.
NETHERLANDS
THE Dutch have given us two of the world's most popular rich cheese types - Gouda and Edam - but have, sadly, left behind the once popular colourful medieval variety which was known as Dead Man's Head. Often regarded as Calvinists who insisted that food was not something to be enjoyed, they nevertheless had a celebrated reputation during the Golden Age as being guzzlers - and boozers - of astounding enthusiasm.
What You Need To Know: Dutch Gin
The Dutch are very fussy about their drinks, and have long been famed for their meticulousness in brewing tea and coffee, but Dutch Gin is their great gift to the world. They like to flavour the juniper elixir, known as jenever, with caraway and aniseed. A variety of Dutch gin I recall from my youth was DeKuyper's, which bore the inscription on the bottle: "He who De Kuyper nightly takes, soundly sleeps and fit awakes".
AUSTRIA
IN his book The Wine and Food of Austria, Giles MacDonagh notes: "Austrians have known periods of great poverty this century ... Experiences of this sort have led them to a simple conclusion: one should never go hungry. Wherever you go you will be offered food."
MacDonagh also notes: "One breakfast is rarely sufficient for an Austrian, with the second breakfast known popularly as a `fork breakfast'."
Fair enough, except that after lunch the Austrian devotion for coffee and cakes raises its peckish head, with maybe some famous Sachertorte - chocolate savoy cake coated with apricot jam and covered with a chocolate frosting - wolfed down with a cup of Einsponner. For dinner, they like to eat a whole lot more. Boy, do these guys like food.
What You Need To Know: Austrian Crooning
Apparently, provincial restaurants in Austria like to play piped music, especially Frank Sinatra songs.
PORTUGAL
SALT cod, sardines and hake are the happy trinity of favourite Portuguese fishes. As well as being excellent footballers, the Portuguese are fine cooks, and do things others wouldn't dare, like using mayonnaise as a hot sauce, seen in the recipe Maia Hake, from Carol Wright's book Portuguese Food.
Basically, you boil potatoes, then peel and cut them into dice. Fry in oil until they are golden brown. Take 1.5 lbs pounds of hake fillets, place them skin side down in a baking dish. Sprinkle with seasoning and the juice of half a lemon, then arrange the dice of fried potatoes around and between the fish. Now, spoon some good mayonnaise mainly over the fish and a little over the potatoes, and sprinkle the exposed potato with onion. Bake for 20-30 minutes in a 350, gas 4 oven.
What You Need To Know: Salt Cod
The Portuguese are reputed to have a salt cod recipe for every day of the year.
That is an awful lot of salt cod.
SWEDEN
THE Swedish Eurocrat who finds himself desperately lonely for the food of his homeland has come to the right country. Grab a car, head down to Cork and then to Bandon, follow signs for Butlerstown, and there, on a windswept coast, the happy Swede will find Katherine Noren's Dunworley Cottage Restaurant, and here the happy Swede will find amazing cured herring, brilliant veal stew, terrific smoked mussels, fabulous steamed bread, smashing meatballs, all the glories of Swedish cuisine in one tiny space.
Mrs Noren's restaurant offers the truest example of a foreign cuisine to be found in this country, and her work reveals a remarkable affinity between the local foods of West Cork and a Scandanavian approach. Tel: 023 40314
What You Need To Know: Aquavit
The Swedish state monopoly produces about 20 varieties of this sublime, ethereal concoction, and as a partner for a good smorgasbord, there is nothing better than to swap different flavours of aquavit as you swop different tastes on the plate. There is nothing so earth swipingly alcoholic, either.
UNITED KINGDOM
THE cleverly fudged solution to the BSE crisis achieved at the Florence summit reveals two things. One, the heads of state are smart chaps. Two, nobody trusts the quality of English food.
Other EU states - us included - have a problem with BSE, but everyone saddles the blame on the English. This is, of course, unfair, but even the English don't seem to think it unsurprising. Only the Scots show lower self esteem about their own food than the English.
And yet what this nation has produced, surprisingly, has been some of the greatest food and wine writing in the world. Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David and Alan Davidson remain peerless scholar cooks, while Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Oz Clarke are the classic expositors of the mysteries of wine.
English food journalism is excellent, and the English are great appreciators of good food, with a quixotic restaurant culture that can show great talent.
What You Need To Know: The English Pudding
The fashion to be skinny has robbed the great English puddings of the healthy appetite they require above all else, but they remain splendiferous things, with enchanting names: Queen of Puddings, Sussex Pond Pudding, Poor Knight's Pudding, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Manchester Pudding, a legion of good, sweet things, and unfairly neglected.