French Provincial Cooking (4 page)

Another example: she goes deeply into the details of preparing and cooking sweetbreads, and beef à la mode. You can’t go wrong with directions like these. She has a most perceptive discussion on the major brown sauces. In a mass-cooking restaurant they all tend to taste somewhat the same, whatever their name, because they are all made from the same general base. In contrast, the good small country restaurant and the French household cook make small quantities with fresh ingredients supplied by the elements of the main dish. This ensures that the sauce is an integral part of the whole, an extension of flavor rather than a largely unrelated new element.

“We all know how to make parsley butter,” she notes. “But do we always do it really well?” Then she tells us how to take 2 ounces of butter and a tablespoon and half a finely minced parsley (this is the only way to measure parsley—it has to be finely minced) and blend them thoroughly in a bowl rinsed in hot water, adding a few drops of lemon juice. You chill it. Then she gives examples of its use: “New potatoes or carrots with a little of this butter melting among them are exquisite,” she writes, adding that it is equally fine with boiled white beans or with lentils.

Well, I could go on endlessly, quoting the whole book, which of course is hardly necessary, since here it is. I have loved going through
French Provincial Cooking
again, and admiring it as a timeless treasure. I envy those of you plunging into it for the first time.

 

Julia Child
Cambridge, Massachusetts
July 1998

WHEN Curnonsky, the famous French gastronome and writer, who died in 1956 at the age of 83, describes the four distinct types of French cookery ‘
La Haute Cuisine, la cuisine Bourgeoise
,
la cuisine Régionale, et la cuisine Improvisée’
he might perhaps also have mentioned that other well-known branch of French cooking,
la cuisine À LA française,
or French food as understood and cooked by foreigners all over the world. As a Frenchman, perhaps he did not think this cooking worth consideration, but certainly he would not have sought to deny the fascination and the influence which French cookery exercises upon civilised people in all parts of the world.

With
la haute cuisine
I am not here concerned. Although at its best it is professional cooking by chefs of the very highest achievement, many sins have been committed in its name; and for financial and economic reasons it is becoming rare, even in France. The feeling of our time is for simpler food, simply presented; not that this is necessarily easier to achieve than
haute cuisine;
it demands less time and expense, but if anything a more genuine feeling for cookery and a truer taste. It is the kind of cooking which, once more, was meant by Curnonsky when he repeated, over and over again, that good cooking was achieved when ‘ingredients taste of what they are.’

The principle is the one upon which English cookery also is based. Fundamentally, then, there is little in the French system which need inspire us with awe of the unknown; no basis for talk of mysterious ‘secrets,’ nor for easy jibes about poor materials masked with complicated sauces. There is one factor, though, that has to be remembered. A country’s national food appears completely authentic only
in
that country. It is a curious fact that French dishes cooked by a Pole or a Chinaman in France are liable to seem more genuinely French than the same dishes cooked by a French cook in England, Germany, Italy, Poland or New York. The climate, the soil, the ingredients, the saucepans, the stove, even the way of arranging the food upon the serving dish, of folding the napkins and setting the table, as well as the French attitude of mind towards food, and the very smell of their kitchens while they are cooking, all play their parts.

It works both ways. A
rosbif
in Paris is not English roast beef; what the French eat and drink at
le goûter
would puzzle and infuriate an English nanny invited to tea. In France it is mildly surprising to find that any cooked ham goes by the name of
jambon d’York,
and that, all unbeknown to us, one of the most highly esteemed English cheeses is called
le Chester
. But this is quite encouraging to us, who are often mocked by the French, however amiably, for our misconceptions about their food, and scoffed at by our own catering profession, some eminent members of which are fond of claiming that English stomachs are fit only to digest roast meat, boiled vegetables, and fried fish. But then all of us nowadays, except perhaps these curiously bigoted members of the catering profession, have travelled a little, and on visits abroad have acquired tastes which, so far from disagreeing with us, have become a part of our daily lives.

Not that we all return from France so converted as the bus conductor who, a Soho shopkeeper tells me, comes in regularly once a week for two dozen snails, nor even so well informed as the barrow boy who asked me, when I was buying aubergines and peppers, if I was ‘going to make a nice
ratatouille,
dear?’ But when we say to friends, ‘we’ll just have an omelette and a salad and a piece of cheese,’ what we mean is ‘we won’t make any fuss, but what we have will be well chosen, will make a satisfying meal and will go nicely with a glass of wine’; without our even knowing it, a little piece of French wisdom in the matter of eating has rubbed off on to ourselves.

It is when it comes to cooking of a slightly more elevated kind than the simple omelette and salad that we go astray. We get self-conscious, try too hard, and the result is perhaps a failure. Now, any woman, or man, who is capable of cooking a good English roast with potatoes, is a good enough cook, given a little encouragement, to produce something rather more imaginative. If a dish does not turn out to be quite as it was at the remembered auberge in Normandy, or at the restaurant on the banks of the Loire, is this a matter for despair? Because it is
different
, as by force of circumstance it must be, it is not necessarily
worse
.
It is for us to exercise our common sense in selecting what is within our powers, in taking what suits us from the immense variety of dishes which France has to offer, and to learn how to make them our own (within limits, of course—you can’t cook up a sole and a piece of hake and a couple of tomatoes and call it a
bouillabaisse).
But there is one mistake we nearly all make when first attempting French cookery. We make it too complicated. A galaxy of seasonings, oceans of wine and cream, thick sauces and a mass of garnishes are alien to the whole spirit of French cookery. Does a Paris milliner put lace trimmings on a fur hat?

Well then, here is the advice of Escoffier, one of those extremely rare great chefs whose work, although the longest and most brilliant period of his career was spent outside his own country, is as respected there as it is in England. And two of the most valuable words he ever wrote were these:
Faites Simple.

What a Frenchman intends these words to mean may not be quite the same as what an English cook would understand by them. They mean, I think, the avoidance of all unnecessary complication and elaboration: they do
not
mean skimping the work or the basic ingredients, throwing together a dish anyhow and hoping for the best. That is the crude rather than the simple approach. To prove the point, try simplifying a recipe which calls for rather a lot of ingredients down to the barest essentials. You may well find that the dish is more pleasing in its primitive form, and then you will know that your recipe was too fanciful. If, on the other hand, the dish seems to lack savour, to be a little bleak or insipid, start building it up again. By the end of this process, you will have discovered what is essential to that dish, what are the extras which enhance it, and at what point it is spoilt by over-elaboration. This system is also useful in teaching one how to judge a recipe for oneself, instead of following it blindly from a cookery book.

To compile a comprehensive volume of French regional recipes would take a lifetime of work and research; even then it could not be complete, because like any other lively art, or science or craft, whichever you prefer to call it, cookery is continually evolving. So all I have set myself to do in the present volume is to put together a small collection of French recipes which have pleased me and which can be reproduced in English kitchens without too much difficulty. Such a selection must naturally reflect the author’s own tastes and preferences. But I have also tried to exercise a due regard for practical matters, omitting dishes which, however good, are disproportionately expensive or troublesome. But people’s ideas as to what constitutes extravagance, or tediousness in the matter of preparation, naturally differ a good deal so I have tried to provide as wide a choice as my experience and space allow. I hope that readers who wish to pursue the knowledge of French cookery beyond the limited introduction contained in this volume will find the bibliography on pages 462‒73 useful.

In the brief survey of the different kinds of French provincial cookery which follows I have tried to convey some idea of the variety of dishes which may be found by those who care to look. These notes are, like my choice of recipes, based on personal preferences and experiences. If I start off these impressions with a description of the food of Provence it is not necessarily because I am convinced it is the best. I have heard people with some claims to being connoisseurs assert that ‘there is no cooking south of Dijon.’ Preposterous though such a statement may sound, it is a question which each person must judge for himself. And if I seem to be biased in favour of the food of the South, it is perhaps because the country itself has for me such a very powerful appeal. But that is by no means to imply that I am blind to the charms of the lovely dishes of Normandy and Brittany, of Anjou and the Loire Valley, of Alsace and Lorraine and the Dauphiné, of the Languedoc and the Auvergne and Burgundy.

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on to a train. Here in London it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place at all. But now and again the vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof, or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside will rise out of my kitchen pots with the smell of a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew. The picture flickers into focus again. Ford Madox Ford’s words come back, ‘somewhere between Vienne and Valence, below Lyons on the Rhône, the sun is shining and south of Valence Provincia Romana, the Roman Province, lies beneath the sun. There there is no more any evil, for there the apple will not flourish and the brussels sprout will not grow at all.’

It is indeed certain, although the apple of discord can hardly be said to have been absent from the history of Provence, which is a turbulent and often ferocious one, that the sprout from Brussels, the drabness and dreariness and stuffy smells evoked by its very name, has nothing at all to do with southern cooking. But to regard the food of Provence as just a release from routine, a fierce wild riot of flavour and colour, is to oversimplify it and grossly to mistake its nature. For it is not primitive food; it is civilised without being over-civilised. That is to say, it has natural taste, smell, texture and much character. Often it looks beautiful, too. What it amounts to is that it is the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat.

Madame Léon Daudet who, under the pen-name of Pampille, published many years ago a little collection of regional recipes called
Les Bons Plats de France,
goes so far as to say that ‘the cooking of Provence seems to me the best of all cooking; this is not said to hurt the feelings of other provinces, but it is the absolute truth.’ Whether or not one agrees with Madame Daudet’s wonderfully sweeping statement one should on no account be deceived by the often clumsy attempts of London restaurateurs to reproduce Provençal dishes. To them Provence is a name, a symbol to display to their customers; the string of garlic hanging on the wall is something like the equivalent of an inn sign. Nor must some ostentatious meal in a phoney Provençal ‘oustalou’ whose row of medals stands for price rather than true taste or quality be taken as representative. Provence does not consist only of the international playground of the coast. Northern and western Provence, the departments of the Vaucluse and the Basses Alpes, are still comparatively unsophisticated, and the cooking has retained much of its traditional character, the inhabitants relying on their own plentiful resources of vegetables, fruit, meat, game and cheese rather than on the imports from other provinces and from Algeria which supplement the more meagre resources of the coastal area.

Provençal food is perhaps best considered in terms of a meal such as that described, again, by Madame Daudet: ‘I know of nothing more appetising,’ she says, ‘on a very hot day, than to sit down in the cool shade of a dining-room with drawn Venetian blinds, at a little table laid with black olives,
saucisson d’Arles,
some fine tomatoes, a slice of water melon and a pyramid of little green figs baked by the sun. One will scarcely resist the pleasure of afterwards tasting the anchovy tart or the roast of lamb cooked on the spit, its skin perfectly browned, or the dish of tender little artichokes in oil ... but should one wish, one could make one’s meal almost exclusively of the hors-d’œuvre and the fruit. In this light air, in this fortunate countryside, there is no need to warm oneself with heavy meats or dishes of lentils. The midi is essentially a region of carefully prepared little dishes.’

This was written in 1919, but these little dishes of Provence are still to be found in country restaurants where they aren’t falling over backwards to provide local colour; places where you may perhaps have the routine Sunday grilled or roast chicken but with it an interesting anchovy sauce, or a mayonnaise made unmistakably with real Provençal olive oil; or a
rôti de porc with pommes mousseline
, the interest lying in the fact that that purée of potatoes will be good enough to serve as a separate course because the aromatic juices from the roast have been poured over it. It may be an hors-d’œuvre of anchovies and eggs, a salad of chick peas, a
pot-au-feu
or a beef stew which will be different from the
pot-au-feu
and the beef stew of other regions because of the herbs and the wine that have gone into it, even because of the pot it has cooked in. There will be vegetable dishes, too. The
haricots verts
are remarkable, although of course you won’t get them on the crowded coast in August. Provence is now a great market garden centre, and from Cavaillon and Pertuis come melons, asparagus, artichokes, lettuces, courgettes, aubergines, peaches and cherries to enrich our own English markets. The little town of Le Thor supplies France with great quantities of table grapes; Carpentras is the centre of a lively trade in the local black truffles. The natural caves round about the astonishing red and ochre village of Roussillon are used for a large-scale cultivation of mushrooms; Apt provides peach jam and bitter cherry jam and most of the crystallised apricots we ourselves buy at Christmas time. It is also one of the few places hereabouts where you can still find the old traditional earthenware
gratin
dishes, saucepans and cooking pots of Provence.