But recipes alone are not enough. A flourishing tradition of local cookery implies also genuine local products; the cooks and the housewives must be backed up by the dairy farmers, the pig breeders and pork butchers, the market gardeners and the fruit growers, otherwise regional cookery simply retreats into the realms of folk-lore. France is still largely an agricultural country and the right conditions for the preservation of their traditions still prevail. These traditions are constantly being renewed from within; the professional cooks and the housewives adapt the old methods to changing tastes and altered conditions without thereby standardising all the food; competitions and gastronomic festivals encourage the chefs to develop new dishes based on the old ones but still using the essential ingredients; the tourist organisations work hard to foster their own local products and cookery magazines publicise them in a sane and sober way, so it is not so surprising that the regional cookery of France is a profitable and flourishing industry as well as a beneficent one.
One hears, however, and reads in the newspapers, so many bitter criticisms from English tourists about French food that a few words of warning may not be out of place. Many people who have read of the great regional specialities such as, let us say, the
Bouillabaisse
and the
Estouffat de Bœuf
of Provence, the
Cassoulet
of the Languedoc, the pike with
Beurre Blanc
of the Loire or the
Coq au Vin
of Burgundy mistakenly suppose that these dishes are cooked every day by the local housewives and the restaurateurs, and are disappointed and indignant if they are not forthcoming at a few minutes’ notice. This is as absurd as if a Frenchman came here expecting to find plum pudding or Cornish lobsters at every meal and in every wayside café.
The great traditional set pieces are only made by the country people in France for feast days and holidays, wedding celebrations and other special occasions; their day-to-day food will be the simple dishes of ordinary middle-class French cookery, vegetable soups, egg dishes, beefsteaks, veal roasts, mutton ragoûts, sausages, pâtés, and salads; these may well have a regional character owing to some local tradition of seasoning or according to whether olive oil, butter, or pork fat has been used in the cooking; but they will not be the dishes advertised in the travel agencies’ brochures. The restaurateurs do, of course, put these specialities quite frequently on their menus, but not every day, and very often to order only, and the fact that this is so is reassuring to anyone who prefers his food to be freshly cooked rather than dished out of a great pot kept warm over steam for several hours.
Again, there is the seasonal aspect of French cookery; to many tourists French food is known only through summer holidays, and many of the great specialities of regional cooking are then out of season. Although, yielding to a certain extent to public demand, the restaurateurs put on as many of their well-known dishes as they are able, many of these will not be at their best. High summer is not the most propitious moment for freshly made pork products and pâtés: with the best will in the world I do not think one could eat a
cassoulet toulousain
, a Provençal
chou farci
or a
gratin dauphinois
on a hot August day, even if a chef would consent to cook them. Few of the great French cheeses are in prime condition in the late summer, and the price of fresh fish and vegetables rises steeply in the tourist season.
Unfortunately, there are a few restaurateurs in France today willing to barter their birthright of taste, moderation and simplicity in cooking for the cheap publicity and quick profits of showy food served in and out of season to gullible customers with more money than sense. It is, however, perfectly easy to keep away from such pretentious and phoney places, three or four stars in the guides all too often indicate expensive décor and fussy service rather than good food; but it is equally inadvisable to go too far in the other direction. Half the complaints one hears come from people who expect to go to a humble bistro or transport café, the equivalent of which in England it would not occur to them to enter, and there to find an impeccably served and perfectly cooked meal of choice ingredients for the price of a glass of beer and a sandwich in an English public house. They will, of course, be disappointed, and the publicity recently given to the
Cafés Routiers
in this country is partly to blame. These transport cafés are places where an adequate meal, served, it is true, rather more attractively than in their English counterparts, is provided in a somewhat perfunctory manner by nimble but overworked waitresses who have not the patience to stand at your table while you deliberate upon your meal; nor has the cook the time to attend to special orders. You must take what is on the menu, unless you want sour looks and a bill out of all proportion. Occasionally you come across an exceptional establishment of this kind; if it happens to be your first experience of such a restaurant, it would be unwise to assume that it is typical; but if you are not in a hurry and if food happens to be one of your serious interests, it would probably be worth staying in the neighbourhood and making friends with the proprietor, who will almost certainly be pleased to provide special local dishes to order, particularly in the evening when there are not so many customers.
For it should be remembered by the traveller in France that in provincial towns and in the country the main meal of the day is at noon. Nowadays many summer tourists economise by having picnic lunches, and this is an admirable plan in some ways because the buying of provisions in the local shops and markets is not only itself an entertainment and an education but gives the traveller a good idea of the resources of the country; in the market you can find out for yourself which are the genuine local cheeses, what kind of sausages and hams are favoured in the district, what vegetables and fruit are in season, what is the particular characteristic of the local pâtés, and which fish have been plentiful in the market, so that even if you can’t afford the really good restaurants you will at least get some idea of the region’s food. On the other hand, when you arrive at your evening’s destination, you may well find, at any rate in the more modest hotels and restaurants, that the specialities on the midday menu were all eaten up and you will have to make your choice from the already rather too familiar
terrine du chef,
the
truite aux amandes,
the
entrecôte garnie,
the
poulet rôti
and the
crème renversée
of the routine and relatively expensive set meal.
The cooking of these dishes would possibly make them into notable meals here in England, but in France one’s expectations are higher, and one’s disappointment at a dull meal consequently greater. But still, with a little forethought (one’s plans all too often go astray when driving about the countryside, but I am supposing for the moment that they have not) one can nearly always get good food in France. Often it happens that a long day’s drive, arduous sightseeing, or hours in the unaccustomed sunshine have made one too tired to cope with a ‘menu gastronomique’ of seven or eight courses even if money is no object, and in any case so much of one’s enjoyment of a meal depends upon having the right food at the right moment. So as long as one arrives in good time for dinner, it is always worth explaining to the
patron
of the restaurant or the hotel what sort of meal one would like; the chances are that he will be able to provide one or two of the lesser local specialities such as some sort of
charcuterie
and perhaps a little cheese which he would not otherwise have thought of offering, because English people are generally thought only to want beefsteaks or fried eggs and chips; he will be only too pleased to find tourists interested in the genuine food of the country, and those who reject the pompous menu got up for innocent foreigners are likely to find all the more respect in his eyes.
Under such circumstances I have eaten some of the most enjoyable of French country meals; unexacting ones, ordered and served with the minimum of fuss. An omelette, perhaps, followed by the sausages which were a speciality of the local butcher, a vegetable dish and some cheese; or perhaps snails and a homely stew, intended probably for the
patron’s
own dinner but gracefully surrendered; or a vegetable soup, a slice or two of country-cured ham and a beautiful big green artichoke; and on another occasion, a
langouste
with a mayonnaise which was among the best I have ever tasted, because of the fine quality of the Provençal olive oil which had gone into it, and which was followed by a dish of tender young string beans of that intense green and delicate flavour which only southern-grown beans seem to acquire.
Surely, then, good food is there for those who look for it; bad food, too, and rather more than there used to be, but if one gets it, one very often has only oneself to blame, for arriving late and tired in some small town, for weakly going into a place obviously unsuitable, for omitting to make friends with the
patron
before ordering, for mismanagement generally. Such occasions are bound to occur, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. And one of the great points about the cookery of France is that it is so extraordinarily varied. There seems to be an inexhaustible fund of new dishes to be discovered.
Note to 1977 Edition
It is the best part of thirty years since I started amassing the material which eventually turned into this book. It was published in 1960. Over the years, a certain amount of what I wrote about the provinces of France has inevitably passed into history. Nobody would pretend that the deep freeze isn’t everywhere, or that restaurants don’t sometimes serve disgraceful prefabricated sauces and inadmissible travesties of famous dishes. I’m afraid that guidebook promises have made us expect rather too much of French restaurant food.
In the markets, however, all over France, incomparable produce still abounds. Buying food for picnics or to cook in holiday houses is more than ever a joy and an inspiration.
When it comes to using the recipes, my inclination now is to try harder than ever for quality. A little fine olive oil, or true, clear stock, or double cream from Jersey herds, or a few fresh eggs laid by decently-fed, humanely-reared hens go a lot further than twice the amounts of third-rate makeshifts. Sybille Bedford said it all when she wrote that Escoffier’s injunction ‘
faites simple
’, much invoked since I quoted it in these pages, ‘doesn’t mean
faites slapdash’.
That goes for our choice of raw materials just as much as for their preparation and cooking.
E.D.
April 1977.
Note to 1983 Edition
IN the six years since I wrote the above note for the 1977 reprint of the hardback edition of this book, the style of French restaurant cooking dubbed
nouvelle cuisine
has been the subject of scores and scores of newspaper and magazine articles. It has been extravagantly praised and merrily derided. It has been so widely imitatated that one of its most publicised founding fathers, Michel Guérard, has already declared himself fed up with the carbon copies of his dishes to be found in every second and second-rate restaurant in France and has expressed his wish to dissociate himself from the entire movement. Quite a hullabaloo. What is it all about?
In 1960, when this book was first published, it seemed to me that so called
cuisine classique
with its rigid traditions and immutable rules had already been unrealistic and hopelessly out of date at least since 1939, let alone by fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. Belatedly, then, in the early 70s a group of younger professional chefs began to make rebellious announcements about lighter food and less of it, about vegetables being undercooked in the Chinese style instead of stewed to pulp, about fish being poached or grilled until the flesh just came away from the bone rather than tumbling from it in a shower of flakes. Very laudable aims all these were too, if not perhaps as startling to the ordinary public as they seemed to the young men themselves.
Before long other innovatory ideas were aired. There was to be a veto on flour-thickened sauces. These were duly replaced either by syrupy reductions or glazes given a medieval sweet-sour treatment with the addition of cherry, blackberry, rosehip or bilberry vinegar. Alternatively the reductions could be given fragile substance with an admixture of
fromage frais
or a light purée of chervil or watercress. Cream and butter were evidently to be retained in plenty (this was not
cuisine minceur),
pools of
beurres blancs
and
hollandaises
would compensate for the banished
béchamel
and
mornay
sauces. Startling combinations and novel juxtapositions, such as sautéed parsnips with fresh
foie gras
or a wing of skate lightly laid on a mattress of rhubarb
roulade
, a spoonful of currants plumped in sherry scattered with exquisitely studied carelessness all around were the kind of impishly original ideas which a couple of months after launching became restaurant clichés. Soon the nest of
pommes paille
and the little bunch of watercress, for about fifty years the obligatory garnish of every roast chicken in France, but spurned by the new regime in favour of more diverting decoration such as sliced pawpaw with oak-leaf lettuce and candied cardomum seeds, began once more to exert a certain allure. An old-fashioned pate de campagne, rich and coarse and for a while superseded by genteel little slices of
terrine de petits légumes
with rows of peas embedded in a
mousseline
of spinach and courgettes is—speaking for myself—already a welcome retrogression from those airy little nothings accompanied by their
trois sauces
served in dolls’ house swimming pools round one side of the plate.
To be sure, it is easy enough to make fun of
nouvelle cuisine
affectation. Everyone who has experienced it in restaurants where it is practised, whether in France, England, elsewhere in Europe (in Holland and Italy I have had some quite bizarre
nouvelle cuisine
meals set before me), or in the United States, has his or her own story of the five green beans sitting lonely on one side of a huge white plate, three tepid chicken livers
avec ses quelques feuilles de salade
nine inches distant on the opposite edge. The ineffably precious style of plate presentation developed by the current generation of chefs and restaurateurs is of course—and this is something which neither its admirers not its critics have so far as I know pointed out —nothing at all to do with cuisine but everything to do with portion control. Take away those huge and inappropriate plates with their finicky and often inept arrangements, put the cooked food back where it belongs in serving dishes to be offered to or set in front of the customers, and French restaurant cooking would, I think, very quickly regain its faltering status, and with it its diminished spirit of generosity.