French Provincial Cooking (6 page)

To the traveller as yet unacquainted with Norman cookery an impression that perhaps the inhabitants live on duck pâté and
tripes à la mode de Caen
might arouse a faint feeling of apprehension as he walks round a big Norman town such as Rouen. Every two yards there seems to be a
charcuterie,
its windows fairly bursting with all the terrines and galantines, the pâtés and
ballotines
, all made of duck; and the butchers as well as the
charcutiers
display earthenware bowls of ready-cooked tripe, very inviting looking in its savoury bronze jelly. But neither duck nor tripe, he feels, is quite the dish for every day. There is no need to worry. Take a look round the market in the morning and the spectacle is thoroughly reassuring. The fish is particularly beautiful in its pale, translucent northern way. Delicate rose pink langoustines lie next to miniature scallops in their red-brown shells; great fierce skate and sleek soles are flanked by striped iridescent mackerel, pearly little smelts, and baskets of very small, very black mussels. Here and there an angry-looking red gurnet waits for a customer near a mass of sprawling crabs and a heap of little grey shrimps. Everywhere there is ice and seaweed and a fresh sea smell.

Outside, the vegetable stalls are piled high with Breton artichokes, perfectly round with tightly closed leaves; long, clean, shining leeks; and fluffy green-white cauliflowers. At the next stall an old country woman is displaying carefully bunched salad herbs, chives, chervil, sorrel, radishes and lettuces. So far, it could well be the central market of any one of a score of French towns. But when you get to the dairy stalls, then you know you could only be in the astonishingly productive province of Normandy, where you buy the butter of Isigny and of Gournay carved off a great block, where bowls of thick white cream and the cheeses of Camembert, Livarot, Neufchâtel, Pont l’Evêque, Rouy, Isigny and a dozen other districts ooze with all the richness of the Norman pastures.

How deeply our own roots are in Normandy quickly becomes apparent to the English traveller. The churches, the old timbered houses, the quiet villages, the fruit orchards, the willows hanging over the streams, are familiar. But not the cooking (although I have heard tell of two country dishes which, in effect, must be almost identical with our own rice pudding and apple dumplings, but have never come across them). It is indeed curious that, with such similar pasture lands, we should never have taken to the manufacture of anything like the soft rich cheeses of the Normans, while they have apparently never attempted to make anything in the manner of Cheddar or Gloucester. And while we on the whole prefer to eat our butter with bread and our cream with fruit, the use of these two ingredients in Norman cooking is almost excessively lavish, both of them appearing to possess qualities which make them turn to the consistency of a sauce with very little effort on the part of the cook. When you get melted butter with a trout in Normandy it is difficult to believe that it is not cream. When a chicken or vegetables are served with a cream sauce it is most likely pure cream, unthickened with egg-yolks or flour, although it may well be enriched with Calvados, the cider brandy of Normandy. The quality of this famous Calvados varies enormously (the most reputed comes from the Vallée d’Auge, one of the chief cider districts) and it is rare to come across a really fine old Calvados except in private houses; perhaps in any case it is an acquired taste. In cooking, however, even a comparatively immature Calvados gives to sauces a characteristic flavour which cannot be imitated with any other brandy or spirit, and which I find very delicious, especially with pork and veal. Cider is of course also used in Norman cookery, although not perhaps to the extent generally supposed, and rarely in restaurants, where chefs consider that white wine gives a more delicate flavour and a better colour to the more sophisticated dishes of Norman cookery.

For the rest, the meat in Normandy is of high quality. The sheep from the salt marshes of the Cotentin yield delicious mutton and lamb; the veal is tender, the beef well nourished; the favourite local pork dishes include the
Andouille de Vire,
a lightly smoked chitterling sausage with a black skin, which is a great deal nicer than it looks, and
rillettes
, that soft, melting kind of potted pork which is to be seen in great pyramids in the
charcuteries
, and which, with the duck pâté and the
andouille,
are the mainstays of a Norman hors-d’œuvre.

Then there are the famous duck dishes made with the
Caneton Rouennais,
which is a very different bird from that of Aylesbury. A cross between a domestic and a wild duck, the breed of Rouen has a flavour, rich and gamey, all its own, due not only to breeding but to the fact that in order to retain their blood they are strangled in a manner which would not be tolerated in this country, where we treat our animals with more consideration than we do our fellow men. Mostly, Rouen ducks are partly roasted, the breast meat carved, and the carcase pressed to extract the blood, which forms an important element in the finished sauce. At Duclair, famous for a breed of duck which is a variation of that of Rouen, the Hôtel de la Poste has no fewer than fourteen ways of presenting duck, including a plain spit-roasted one as well as a very rich
canard au sang
and
a pâté de canard au porto
served in the rugged terrine in which it has cooked. It is interesting to compare these Norman duck pâtés with those of Périgord and Alsace, for they have a quite distinct and different flavour.

As for the renowned
tripes à la mode de Caen
, cooked for about twelve hours with ox feet, cider, Calvados, carrots, onions and herbs, I must confess that nowadays I quail from eating it, let alone from undertaking the cooking of such a dish. It is only at its best when prepared in copious quantities and preferably in a special earthenware pot rather the shape of a flattened-out tea pot, the small opening of which ensures the minimum of evaporation. Formerly, the pot of tripe was carried to the bakery to be cooked in the oven after the bread had been taken out, and nowadays it is more often ordered in a restaurant or bought ready cooked from the butcher or
charcutier
and heated up at home. Anyone intrepid enough to wish to attempt it at home will find a recipe in Escoffier’s
Guide to Modern Cookery.
¹
His ingredients include 4 lb. of onions, 3 lb. of carrots, 2 lb. of leeks, 2 quarts of cider and
pint of Calvados or brandy besides the four feet and practically the whole stomach of the ox. And it is highly advisable, having eaten your
tripes à la mode
, to follow the Norman custom of drinking a
trou Normand,
or glass of Calvados, as a digestive before going on to the next course. One might think there wouldn’t be a next course, but one would be mistaken. An important meal in this region, says Curnonsky in a guide to eating in Normandy, is always arranged thus: ‘
bouillon
and
pot-au-feu,
after which a glass of wine is taken; then tripe; then leg of mutton. Here a halt is called for the
trou Normand.
We fall to again with roast veal, then fowl, then the desserts, coffee, and again Calvados.’ This was pre-1939, and a mere snack compared with the lunch described by George Musgrave seventy years earlier in a travel book about Normandy.
²
He watched a couple (on their honeymoon, he thought) on board the river steamer at Rouen consuming a midday meal of soup, fried mackerel, beefsteak, French beans and fried potatoes, an omelette
fines herbes
, a
fricandeau
of veal with sorrel, a roast chicken garnished with mushrooms, a hock of ham served upon spinach. There followed an apricot tart, three custards, and an endive salad, which were the precursors of a small roast leg of lamb, with chopped onion and nutmeg sprinkled upon it. Then came coffee and two glasses of absinthe, and
eau dorée
, a Mignon cheese, pears, plums, grapes and cakes. Two bottles of Burgundy and one of Chablis were emptied between eleven and one o’clock.

My own introduction to French cookery came about, as I have written in the foregoing notes on Paris household cooking, through a family of which every member appeared to be exceptionally food-conscious. That was in the nineteen-thirties. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’ quotation below from the diary of a young English girl staying with French friends in the seventies of the last century reveals that the carefully cooked and delicious food which made such an impact on myself was in precisely the same tradition as that served in a well-ordered household some sixty years previously. The kind of food, in fact, which constitutes the core of genuine French cookery, but which to us seems so remarkable because it implies that excellent ingredients and high standards are taken for granted day by day, whereas in our own kitchens the best efforts tend to be made only for parties and special occasions.

 

‘Before Angust 1914, France was in very truth the land of Cocaigne. The war of 1871 had lasted less than a year, and though during the Siege of Paris the Parisians of all classes had ended by eating dogs, cats, rats and mice, the greater part of the country remained untouched by the fearful scourge; what is now called ‘total war’ was undreamed of. By the summer of 1872 everything connected with the preparation and serving of food, though the prices of most things had increased, had returned to normal. This was even true of a household as devastated as had been my home at La Celle St. Cloud.

‘This beautiful little hamlet between Versailles and Marly-le-Roi is curiously untouched, or was the last time I was there, in the spring of 1939. Our house stands on a hill, and commands a magnificent view of the Valley of the Seine. That view is bounded on the left by the Terrace of St. Germain, and on the right by the haze which always hangs over Paris.

‘Where almost all my childhood and my early girlhood were spent, the head of our family, my grandmother, Madame Swanton Belloc, ruled as Queen. The household was not large, but as her friend of fifty years—Adelaide de Montgolfier, daughter of the inventor of the balloon—who always lived with her in the summer, brought her own personal maid, there were three servants, and a boy of about sixteen who ran errands, and made himself generally useful. Each of the servants could cook, and cook well, and there was none of the formality below stairs which then existed in every English household of the same type.

‘In addition to a considerable circle of friends, my grandmother constantly entertained her daughters and their children, and her great-nephews and great-nieces. They were always welcome, and as there was no telephone, and the coming of a telegram would have been regarded as heralding a disaster, my aunts and my cousins frequently appeared without having given any notice. There were few days when we had not one or more guests to luncheon and dinner.

‘I do not recall any discussion taking place as to food, good or otherwise, but a good deal of thought and care, and, what would have seemed to the mistress of an English country house of moderate size, a great deal of money as well, must have been spent by the even then aged mistress of the establishment, and that though there was never anything served in the way of
primeurs.

‘By an odd chance I quite lately found a diary kept by a young English cousin of my mother, during a visit to La Celle St. Cloud in 1876. She was the only daughter of a well-known London lawyer, and when at home lived in a way many English people would have thought luxurious—but she was evidently astonished and impressed by the
déjeuners
and
diners
to which she sat down each day. So much was this the case that she often took the trouble to put on record what had been served on a certain day. Her diary, which is meagre, contains little of interest apart from what I am about to quote.

‘I find under the date of 19 July, the following entry:

‘ “Today old Monsieur Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire came to lunch (he is said to be a son of the great Napoleon, and he is very much like the famous bust of Napoleon as First Consul). Though he is quite an old man, only a little younger than Madame Swanton Belloc, for whom he evidently feels a fond affection, he did full justice to the
déjeuner
to which we sat down rather later than usual, as he had come from Paris by a way which took two hours and a half, so he must have started about nine!