French Provincial Cooking (3 page)

The enticement of the wonderful smells of fine cooking, now diffused and muddled by the obligatory plate service, the intense visual stimulus once inseparable from a meal in a good French country restaurant but now destroyed by misguided imitation of Japanese-style presentation, could quite easily be restored to us. In other words it is not so much the cooking that is wrong, except in the most blatantly arrogant establishments, as a certain coldness and ungenerosity of spirit, an indifference to the customer, now manifest in establishments operated on
nouvelle cuisine
principles. ‘It is to the real gastronomes and gourmets that even the greatest chefs have to play,’ wrote Egon Ronay, the only non-French member of L’Académie des Gastronomes, in a
Times
article in August 1980. Perhaps. I’m not sure if I know any chef who can be described as ‘the greatest’. What I do know is that the chefs of the
nouvelle cuisine
school are not playing to the customers. So long as they pay for it, the customers may take or leave what the chefs give the waiters to put in front of them. The chefs are playing to, by, and for themselves.

In July 1981 Susan Lee, a writer on the
Wall Street Journal
, had a ball telling her readers about the aberrations, exaggerations and insufficiencies of
nouvelle cuisine
and its rapid spread throughout the United States. A recent reaction from the French nation against the novelty of yesteryear was also reported by Miss Lee. I can’t say that I saw any such reaction myself that same summer when I was in France, but if the ‘newly appointed
cuisine de terre
’—the French usually, I think, say
cuisine de terroir,
cooking smacking of the soil—‘and big brimming bowls of hearty coarse food’ reported by Miss Lee have this year become a reality, that would be the most natural reaction in the world. But of course those brimming bowls will contain food cooked in new combinations according to recipes newly evolved, and presented in ways fresh to the eye. To quote Philéas Gilbert, author of that very fine book
La Cuisine de Tous les Mois,
published in 1893, ‘in the cottage as in the château (for which we should now read château-hotel) we need novelty to stimulate our appetites. Cookery cannot and must not live on its past glories ... it must continually modernise according to circumstances’.

 

Meanwhile, back so to say in our own kitchens, we have most of us to some extent been influenced by a variety of new trends, of which current French restaurant cooking is only one. Let us, for example, not forget that without the French invention of the
robot-coupe
, known generically as the food processor,
nouvelle cuisine
simply would not have come into being. Some years ago, dining in a London restaurant at the time much praised for its new style food, one of my fellow guests was Julia Child. When the charmingly solemn young maître-d’hotel had come to the end of his recitation of the content and style of each dish on the menu, Julia remarked, and it was a simple statement with no trace of criticism, ‘Oh I see, cuisinart cooking’. Cuisinart, I should explain, is the name by which Americans know the
robot-coupe
. Well, Julia wasn’t far wrong. About seven dishes out of ten on that restaurant menu could not have been created without the food processor. The light purées, the fluffy sauces and the fish mousselines so loved by today’s restaurateurs can also be achieved at home more or less by pressing a button. ‘Now mince, chop or process everything—pan juices, chicken, spinach, bread, flavourings, eggs, together’ is the kind of cooking direction one may read any day in newspaper and magazine articles, and it is indeed a marvel that the food processor does all the mincing, chopping, puréeing and blending, without a thought of all that hard pounding of the past. But let’s not treat the food processor as though it were a waste-disposal unit. Bland, monotonous and in the end characterless food from the processor could all too easily become the new plague.

 

E.D. August 1983.

WHAT a privilege for us to have this new edition of Elizabeth David, England’s most loved and distinguished food writer. She was here in print in the 1950s, with her first books, and although certain of our well-traveled cognoscenti were admirers, the general American public was not ready for her. She wrote about the glorious food of the Mediterranean, and the French provinces, and Italy, but those were faraway places. You had to go by ship, and it took several days to get there and several days to get back. Besides, we were still a mostly meat-and-potatoes culture, with cake-mix cakes and their mile-high white coconut frostings. I well remember a typical dessert of the fifties—a jellied molded object somewhat in the shape of an upright banana (or other less innocent object). Imbedded in this structure were cubes of banana, peeled white grapes, and diced marshmallows, the whole garnished by canned whipped cream generously squirted in mounds about its base. Proudly presented by our hostess, it was heartily applauded and gobbled up with enthusiasm.

No. We were not yet ready for Elizabeth David. But the English were. Only a hop, skip, and ferry ride from France, and starved for good food after the lean war years, the English welcomed Elizabeth David, with her wonderfully readable and sensuous descriptions of good things to eat—olives and garlic and sausages, rare cheeses, truffled terrines and pâtés, long-simmered wine-steeped beef stews, and herb-drenched soups. The English took to her at once; she was adored and immensely appreciated from her first book on.

Now, with full and fast access to the rest of the world by air, we in America have enjoyed a number of awakenings. Our first was certainly sparked in the sixties by the Kennedys in the White House, with their glorious French food. Suddenly, as never before, food was news! More news followed in a decade or so with the decorative minimalism of nouvelle cuisine, followed by the diet version and then a downright fear of food coupled with an overdose of nutritional discipline. At last we seem to be emerging into an era of food that tastes and looks like real food. Eggs are no longer forbidden, nor is a little butter; steak houses are flourishing. This is the time for those who knew the books of Elizabeth David to revel in them again. You will be surprised and delighted to find them so contemporary and so fresh. And if you don’t know her yet, you will have a new world to discover, and your food will never be quite the same again.

Born in 1913 and raised in comfortable upper-class British circumstances, Elizabeth David was privately educated in London until she was sixteen. She then spent a year and a half at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where she lived with a French family and was thoroughly inducted into the pleasures of the French table. Next, being of an adventurous spirit, Elizabeth (a real beauty and budding sophisticate) spent time in Munich, dabbled in the theater in London, worked in Cairo, and visited Greece, Crete, and Alexandria. Much of her knowledge and love of good food came from her friendship with the international bon vivant and writer Norman Douglas, whom she met during her Mediterranean travels. Although several decades older than she, he became young Elizabeth’s most influential companion and mentor during those exploratory years abroad.

After World War II Elizabeth David, then in her early thirties, returned from the sun and warmth of Greece and Cairo to chilly food-rationed England. She found living and eating so dismal in the hotel where she was staying, and English food so discouraging in general, that for her own comfort and amusement she began writing down memories of meals and recipes from her years abroad, particularly those from the warm and sunny Mediterranean. These notes and jottings became the basis for her first published work,
The Book of Mediterranean Food
, which appeared in 1950 with a jolly cover illustrating a small round dining table loaded with shellfish, salads, and the inevitable bottle of wine. The summery scene continued around on the back cover, showing a sandy beach and a colorful seaside village—a setting to dream about during long and dreary winters. A handful of rustic woodcuts were scattered throughout the text, making an appealing small book of not quite a hundred pages. It was an immediate success, and she followed it with another small book,
French Country Cooking.
Another resounding success, and she had found her niche at last. Wishing to enlarge it, she decided to take on Italy, where she had spent so many happy days with her fond mentor, Norman Douglas. After serious background study and much travel and tasting in Italy, her next book was on Italian food.

Elizabeth David was now a recognized name, and an authority. When her books started to appear in paperback in 1955, she was reaching an ever-widening audience. British rationing was ending, food shortages were disappearing, and European imports were slowly arriving in English markets. In 1960, after immense research, historical documentation, and on-the-spot verification, the large and authoritative book
French Provincial Cooking
appeared. Here it is, in your hands, the new edition of a book that appeared nearly forty years ago. It was considered a classic then, and so it still remains.

The editors have wisely left the text untouched, including her immensely valuable eighteen-page bibliography. Page 228 in my 1966 edition, for instance, starts with a noble recipe for Saucisson Chaud à la Lyonnaise. That same splendid sausage appears on page 228 here in this new edition. It is satisfying to know we are getting the real book here—no modern shortcuts, no modifications, we have it just as she wrote it. Because of the “no touch” decision, however, all the measurements are British, and instead of a pint of water being “a pound the world around,” a pint of British water weighs a pound and a quarter. However, the conversion tables are easy enough to find since you’ll see them on the inside cover.

Jill Norman, editor, food writer, and custodian of the Elizabeth David archives, writes that before the David books, English cooks were of the opinion that if it was French, it was all fancy Parisian haute cuisine. The discovery that French cooking could be home cooking as well lured many English visitors to France, where they for the first time enjoyed the hearty fare of the French provinces. As a result, Norman notes, vegetable soups enriched with garlic and bacon, meat and poultry stews simmered in wine, open-faced tarts, and other rustic delights were finding their way into British homes. Also because of Elizabeth David’s influence, many enterprising amateurs were opening little restaurants with nothing more than Elizabeth David books to go by.

The David style is easy, informal, and graceful. It is also very personal. She voices most definitely her opinions and her likes and disagreements. How to make a simple green salad, for instance, and a simple vinaigrette, the proportions for which are not at all 3 parts of oil to 1 part any old vinegar—much too vinegary. They are 3 tablespoons of olive oil to
tablespoon (if that) of mild red or white wine vinegar. For mashed potatoes, you are to “whisk and whisk with great thoroughness—until your arm aches.” Again on potatoes, she speaks of a saute of potatoes Lyonnaise as being well known “but so seldom properly cooked” that she gives her own recipe, which bears little resemblance to the greasy mixture usually served. Her secret is to cook the onions in a separate pan. Her whole attitude is of careful cooking,
la cuisine soignée
—indeed the mark of the great French cook.

For those in this country who are used to rigidly accurate measurements like “
cup plus 2 tablespoons,” her “2 slices of white bread, parsley, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper” seem refreshingly casual. How can you give an exact measurement for parsley anyway? While her recipes are a pleasure for those reasonably at ease in the kitchen, they may not be for those who are renderd helpless and whinnying when they have only 1, rather than the 2 tablespoons of tomato paste specified. Her recipes are for the fearless ones who love good food and cooking, as she does, and who are willing to jump in for the excitement, the adventure, and the reward.

This is a deeply researched and carefully thought-out book, which makes for fine reading and learning. You realize, once you start on a dish, that this is a book for people who really want to cook, written by a person who really is a cook, a person who visualizes your every move. For instance, I made an omelet for lunch today and tried out her egg theory. “As everybody knows,” she says, “there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own.... Stick to it and let others go their cranky ways, mistaken, stubborn and ignorant to the end.” But she goes on to give advice for those still experimenting—that’s me, actually and honestly after fifty years! “The eggs are very often beaten too savagely,” she observes. “They should not really be beaten at all, but stirred.” I have always beaten them vigorously, but certainly not savagely, to mix whites and yolks thoroughly. Today I just stirred, leaving patches of white mid patches of yolk, and—she’s right! I made an unusually delicious and tender omelet. I shall try it again tomorrow, stirring even less.