French Provincial Cooking (5 page)

Of course the inhabitants of Provence do not live upon
aïoli
and
grillades au fenouil
and
bouillabaisse;
in the hill villages of the Var and the Comtat and the Vaucluse you are lucky if you get fresh fish once a week; on the other hand nearly every village butcher makes his own sausages and pork pâtés, up in the Basses Alpes their own
pâté de grives,
too, and sometimes there will be locally cured ham,
jambon de montagne.
Once in the little town of Sault, on the lower slopes of the Mont Ventoux, I heard an old peasant lady getting very agitated because the shop assistant had inadvertently cut her a slice of ordinary commercial ham instead of the locally cured variety. The ham was for her dish of
petits pois
and that
jambon de Paris
would make it insipid, did Mademoiselle understand? Yes, Mademoiselle understood perfectly, and kept everybody in the crowded shop waiting while she cut the precise piece of ham required by the old lady.

In the season, in the villages of the Vaucluse, asparagus or wonderful broad beans will be a few francs a kilo, a basket of cherries or strawberries the same. Perhaps you may arrange for the bus driver to bring you some
brandade
of salt cod out from Cavaillon or Apt for Friday lunch; at Les Saintes Maries and Aigues Mortes and other places isolated out in the marshes the travelling market stall called the Lion of Arles sets up in the Place and sells Arles sausage,
charcuterie
and good butter. Perhaps a sheep farmer’s wife will come down the hill with rabbits to sell, and the ewe’s milk cheeses called
Banons
, wrapped in chestnut leaves or flavoured with the peppery herb called
poivre d’âne
, the Provençal version of savory.

Provence is not without its bleak and savage side. The inhabitants wage perpetual warfare against the ravages of the mistral; it takes a strong temperament to stand up to this ruthless wind which sweeps Provence for the greater part of the year. One winter and spring when the mistral never ceased its relentless screaming round our crumbling hill village opposite the Lubéron mountain we all seemed to come perilously near to losing our reason, although it is, of course, only fair to say that the truly awful wine of that particular district no doubt also contributed its share. It was the kind of wine which it was wisest to drink out of a tumbler so that there was room for a large proportion of water. I often wonder, when I hear people talking so enthusiastically of those fresh little wines of Provence, how they would feel about them if they had nothing else to drink. Most of them are made by the cooperative societies nowadays, and what they have lost in character they appear to have gained in fieriness. Of course there are good wines in Provence but finding them is not easy, and the situation is further aggravated by the growing habit of Provençal restaurateurs of serving all white and rosé wines so frozen that any character they may have had has become unrecognisable.

Then there was the tragic spring of 1956 when it was not so much the mistral which had struck Provence as the terrible frosts of the preceding winter. Acre upon acre of blighted, blackened olive trees made the Provençal landscape almost unrecognisable. Hundreds of small farmers had lost their livelihood for years to come.

It does not do to regard Provence simply as Keats’s tranquil land of song and mirth. The melancholy and the savagery are part of its spell.

Although I did not realise it at the time, it was by way of Norman cookery that I first learned to appreciate French food. Torn, most willingly, from an English boarding school at the age of sixteen, to live with a middle-class French family in Passy, it was only some time later that I tumbled to the fact that even for a Parisian family who owned a small farm in Normandy, the Robertots were both exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well fed. Their cook, a young woman called Léontine, was bullied from morning till night, and how she had the spirit left to produce such delicious dishes I cannot now imagine. Twice a week at dawn Madame, whose purple face was crowned with a magnificent mass of white hair, went off to do the marketing at Les Halles, the central markets, where she bought all the provisions, including flowers for the flat. I don’t think any shopping at all was done locally, except for things like milk and bread. She would return at about ten o’clock, two bursting black shopping bags in each hand, puffing, panting, mopping her brow, and looking as if she was about to have a stroke. Indeed, poor Madame, after I had been in Paris about a year, her doctor told her that high blood pressure made it imperative for her to diet. Her diet consisted of cutting out meat once a week. With Friday a fish day anyway, this actually meant two days without meat. On Wednesdays, the day chosen, Madame would sit at table, the tears welling up in her eyes as she watched us helping ourselves to our
rôti de veau
or
bœuf à la cuillère
. It was soon given up, that diet. Her grown-up children, two of whom were afflicted with a tragic eye disease and were probably going blind, simply could not bear to watch her sufferings—although, of course, they were not prepared to go so far as to share in her privations. Denise, the only able-bodied daughter, was the greediest girl I had ever seen. She worked as secretary to a world-famous Parisian surgeon, and came home every day to the midday meal. Before she took off her hat and coat she would shout out to Léontine to know what was for lunch. Munching through two helpings of everything she would entertain us to gruesome details of the operations performed by her employer.

It never occurred to me at the time to wonder whether she had really witnessed these harrowing sights or if it was just her own way of expressing her family’s morbid preoccupation with death and disaster, which reached its peak every Thursday. For Thursday was Madame’s
jour,
and not even the really remarkable turn-out of cakes and
petits fours,
mostly made by Léontine, reconciled us to the fact that courtesy demanded we put in an appearance and listen to stories of the appalling catastrophes which had befallen during the week la cousine Anne-Marie, Tante Berthe, her daughter Marguerite, mortally stricken with diabetes, and about half a dozen other ladies always dressed from head to foot in deepest black.

To make up for the ordeal of Thursday afternoon, the boarders (there were only three of us) soon got round to finding some pretext for not being present at Friday lunch. Ever since those days it has remained a mystery to me how people who were so fond of good food and who knew so much about it could endure to eat the boiled salt cod which was the regular Friday lunch. Grey, slimy, in great hideous flakes, it lay plonked on the dish without benefit of sauce or garnish of any kind. At that time I had not even heard of Provençal cooking, or of any of the excellent ways they prepare salt cod in the south, and did not of course know how the people of Provence would scoff at the very idea of a Norman cook producing a decent dish of
morue
. In any case, to avoid this horror, we used to treat ourselves to lunch in a students’ restaurant near the Sorbonne, where we thought ourselves lucky to eat egg mayonnaise and a dish of
petits pois
without being questioned by the family as to what the morning’s lectures had been about.

Another place where we enjoyed ourselves hugely was at the automatic restaurant, in the Boulevard St. Michel I think, all shining chromium and terribly noisy, where we got a plate of ham and an orange out of a slot machine for a few francs. Eating here was forbidden by Madame, who considered that neither the
ambiance
nor the food were suitable for young girls. We used to memorise the menu posted up outside some approved restaurant so that we should have an answer ready when she questioned us. We seldom got away with it, of course, because we were never able to describe the food in the detail required. What appalling
ordures
had been in the so-called
vol-au-vent?
Were the
boulettes de viande
made from beef or veal or lamb? Ah, tiens,
des épinards à la crème,
and did they really contain cream or some horrible
sauce blanche?
Vous ne le savez pas? Mais comment, chère Elisabeth, you did not notice? No, chère Elisabeth had not noticed and did not care, for the fact was that although we enjoyed the good food in the Rue Eugène Delacroix, we were bored with the family’s perpetual preoccupation with it, and there was little else to talk to them about; for when they were not actually eating or going to market, Madame and her eldest daughter were either wearing themselves out with long vigils in church or knitting for the poor. We felt stifled by the atmosphere of doom which seemed always imminent in the household, and spent more and more time in our rooms mugging up for our exams and thinking of every possible excuse for not coming in to meals.

So it was only later, after I had come home to England, that I realised in what way the family had fulfilled their task of instilling French culture into at least one of their British charges. Forgotten were the Sorbonne professors and the yards of Racine learnt by heart, the ground plans of cathedrals I had never seen, and the saga of Napoleon’s last days on St. Helena. What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before. Ever since, I have been trying to catch up with those lost days when perhaps I should have been more profitably employed watching Léontine in her kitchen rather than trudging conscientiously round every museum and picture gallery in Paris.

I do not think that the Robertots spent, as the French are always said to do, a disproportionate amount of their income on food. What with the bargains from Les Halles, the wine arriving in casks from Bordeaux, and cream and butter from their Norman property, their food was lovely without being rich or grand. Above all, as I see it now, it was consistent, all of a piece, and this of course was due to Madame’s careful buying. There was none of that jerky feeling you get when the marketing is erratic or careless. So what emerges from those days is not the memory of elaborate sauces or sensational puddings, but rather of beautifully prepared vegetables like
salsifis à la crème
, purées of sorrel, and
pommes mousseline.
Many egg dishes, and soups delicately coloured like summer dresses, coral, ivory or pale green, a salad of rice and tomatoes, another of cold beef, and especially, of course, Léontine’s chocolate and apricot soufflés. On soufflé days Denise would suddenly find she was in a fearful hurry to get back to work. This meant that the soufflé was handed to her first. She not only saw to it that she got it before it had had a chance to sink, but if there was enough for a second helping she had first go at that too.

Sometimes I spent part of the Easter or summer holidays with the family at their little Norman farmhouse near Caen. Here a local girl, Marie, took over the cooking, while Léontine returned to her family in the country for what must have been a well-earned rest. The only vivid memory I have of the food in this peaceful and pretty house with its old-fashioned kitchen garden is of tasting mussels for the first time. They were served in a thick creamy sauce which no doubt had cider or white wine in its composition; this seemed to me a most mysterious and extraordinary dish, something which must be quite special to the family or perhaps thought up by Marie, the little village girl, so that when a year or two later I found
moules à la crème
on the menu at Walterspiel’s in Munich, at that time one of the most famous restaurants in Europe, I was quite astonished and wondered how it had found its way from that obscure little Norman village all the way to Bavaria. To this day a dish of mussels is one of the first things I ask for upon landing in Northern France, and the last thing I eat before crossing the Channel to return to England, for although since that first time I have eaten mussels served in dozens of different ways in many parts of Europe and have cooked them myself hundreds of times, they never seem to have quite the
cachet
, the particular savour, of those mussels of Normandy, so small and sweet in their shining little shells.