French Provincial Cooking (7 page)

‘ “We began with an omelette, in which was some delicious minced kidney. This omelette was so ‘tasty’ that I later asked Catherine, who was the cook this morning, to tell me exactly how it was made. She said two kidneys were first braised very slowly, then cut up, minced, and added to the omelette at the last moment, just before it was turned over in the pan. I told her I had heard it was a mistake to use more than two or three eggs when making an omelette. She laughed, and said that was true only if one hadn’t a big omelette pan; but as she had a huge pan which is used for nothing else, it is easy for her to make an omelette for as many as five or even six people.

‘ “After we had eaten our omelette, we had cold salmon trout with a large silver tureenful of mayonnaise sauce. The salmon was brought from Versailles yesterday, by the housemaid who had gone there to see her sweetheart who is doing his time in the Army. It was cooked at once, as the weather is very sultry, and was far nicer than if it had been served hot. French people do not care for salmon—only for salmon trout, a fish which is seldom seen in London.

‘ “We then had hot roast chicken, and with it simply an endive salad. To my astonishment I learned that the chicken had been basted with the best butter for something like an hour and a half at frequent intervals. The butter was served as a sauce, in a separate sauce-boat.

‘ “Where the French, in my opinion, do not compare with the English is in the matter of puddings and sweets. But always, when Monsieur Saint-Hilaire is expected, there is his favourite
cœur à la crème.
This is a kind of sweet cream cheese, shaped like a heart, and with it was served a large dish of tiny, very ripe
fraises des bois
which were truly delicious. There was sugar, but without the cream which always accompanies strawberries in England.

‘ “Coffee was served in the drawing-room, and as I was the only girl in the party (we were five), I poured out the coffee, handed round the cups, and offered Monsieur Saint-Hilaire a choice of either brandy or a liqueur. To my astonishment Bessie told me that she thinks one reason why Madame Swanton Belloc is so vigorous, and still does so much work—she spends every morning at her writing table—is because of the good food she has always eaten during her eighty years of life. Yet I noticed that she ate much less than her old admirer. She only had a small helping of the omelette, and a little chicken and salad. Nothing else. But
he
ate everything and evidently enjoyed it all. At about three o’clock he got up and declared it was his intention to walk down to Bougival, where he would find a tram to take him to St. Germain, where he was going to spend the afternoon and dine with Monsieur Thiers.”’

It was a late spring afternoon as, driving from the ancient city of Bar-le-Duc, we approached Nancy. It was already getting dark, and we preferred to see the capital of Lorraine for the first time in daylight. Turning back into the country, we spent the night in a seedy roadhouse on the banks of the Moselle, where the cooking was of about the same standard of artistry as the blue pottery gnomes with which the dining-room was unsparingly ornamented. It was just the sort of place in which the tourist is liable to land when too late and too tired to drive any farther, so we had only ourselves to thank for this bad beginning. In this case it was of little consequence (and it might have been worse, for we did manage to needle out some very acceptable local wine, the
vin gris
of Toul, the existence of which the landlord had done his best to conceal at the very end of a pretentious and expensive wine list) for we were all the more anxious to be up and away before breakfast, and to see the great Place Stanislas for the first time in the early morning sunlight.

The extreme elegance and aristocratic grace of the Place Stanislas, the beauty of Héré’s columns and arcades, the delicacy and fantasy of Lamour’s black and gilt wrought-iron balconies, and of the grilles and the gates which mark the four entrances to this square make a powerful impact when seen for the first time. As a monument to pure eighteenth-century taste the Place Stanislas must be unique in Europe. It was indeed of Nancy that Maurice Barrès, himself a native of Lorraine, wrote that ‘here remains fixed the brief moment in which our society achieved its point of perfection.’

On our way from the Place Stanislas to the central food market we pass what seems, at least at breakfast time, to be an almost unbroken line of bakeries and pastry shops, wafting infinitely beguiling smells from their warm interiors. In the end, of course, we have not the strength of mind to pass another. As we go in to order our croissants, there in front of us upon the counter and all round the shop are piled hundreds of flat round orange and gilt tins, glinting and shining like little lamps in the pallid sunshine. The tops of the tins are decorated with pictures of the wrought-iron grilles of the Place Stanislas and in gilt lettering bear the words LES BERGAMOTTES DE NANCY. Upon inquiry the assistant tells me that these are little boiled sweets, scented with essence of Bergamot, and are one of the oldest specialities of Nancy. I had heard vaguely of these Bergamottes without having any precise idea as to whether they were a cake, a sweet, or perhaps some sort of candied flower petal, and as I walked away carrying my pretty little tin of childish sweets I thought how often some such trivial little discovery colours and alters in one’s mind the whole aspect of a city or a countryside. On a former occasion it had been the crystallised violets of Toulouse which had caused that remarkable city of ferocious history and dignified rose and ochre buildings to show yet another side of its character; for frivolous little boxes of
violettes de Toulouse
tied up in pale mauve satin ribbons are displayed amid swirls of violet tulle in every confectioner’s window.

The province of Lorraine is rich in such small associations. The first city you enter driving east from Champagne is Bar-le-Duc, ancient capital of the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine, but more familiar to me as the home of those magically translucent preserves, half-jam, half-jelly, of red currants, white currants or little strawberries, sold in miniature glass jars in luxury Paris grocery stores, and sometimes served at dessert with cream or cream cheese. At the little town of Commercy originated the small, fragile, shell-shaped cakes called madeleines so beloved of French children, and which have become celebrated in French literature because it was the taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea which Proust used as the starting point of his long journey into the past. (How the English madeleine, a sort of castle pudding covered with jam and coconut, with a cherry on the top, came by the same name is something of a mystery.) The name Epinal on a signpost brings back another childish memory, of primitive coloured pictures and sheets of brightly uniformed soldiers, the
images d’Epinal
which have the same primitive charm as our penny-plain twopencecoloured prints. To Lunéville, where the château was built as a replica, on a small scale, of Versailles, belongs that thick white china sprayed with stylised pink and red roses which is, to me, inseparable from the memory of café au lait in bowls, and croissants, and crisp curls of very white butter on little oval dishes. On the map of Lorraine are also to be found Contrexéville and Vittel of the mineral waters, reminders of countless restaurant cars and wagon-lits; Baccarat of the crystal decanters and wine goblets; and on all the postcard stands are crude coloured pictures of a young woman serving a great flat cartwheel of a
quiche Lorraine
to some rough peasantry seated round a scrubbed farmhouse table. The pink wine of Toul may remind collectors of insignificant information that it was in that city that Claude Gelée, rather better known as le Lorrain, was apprenticed as a pastry cook before he found his real vocation as a painter. Le Lorrain is, in fact, sometimes credited with the invention of puff pastry, but this is perhaps over-enthusiastic on the part of French cookery historians, for surely it was already known to Italian cooks before Lorrain’s time. (He may of course have learnt how to make it in Italy, for he worked as pastry-cook to an Italian landscape painter in Rome.)

In the great covered market place of Nancy there are new sights to be seen. Here are big bowls of pale amber-green and gold
choucroute
, and stalls bulging with sausages, the special smoked ones to go with the
choucroute,
and large, coarsely cut, but as it turns out later, most subtly flavoured sausages for boiling (our own sausage manufacturers could learn a thing or two from these Lorraine and Alsatian
charcutiers
if they cared to do so); smoked fillets and loins of pork, terrines and pâtés of pork, duck, tongue; and deep dishes in which pieces of pork lie embedded in a crystal clear jelly; this turns out to be the famous
porcelet en gelée
, an elegant brawn of sucking pig which makes a fine horsd’œuvre; then there are trays of highly flavoured salad made from pig’s head, and flat square cuts of streaky bacon smothered in chopped parsley—‘to keep it fresh’—the delicious mild-cured pale pink hams of Luxeuil, strong creamy cheeses called
Géromé des Vosges,
and others studded with caraway seeds, the
Anisé
of the Lorraine farmhouses; and —but it is nearly lunchtime, and in a busy provincial town like Nancy it is as well to secure your table soon after midday, and we have already learned from the menu pinned up outside the Restaurant of the Capucin Gourmand that that famous
quiche
is cooked fresh for every customer, and we shall have to wait at least twenty minutes for it....

Although it is usual to think of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as very similar in character, a distinct change becomes perceptible as one leaves Lorraine and drives down to the wine country of Alsace.

Lorraine, although it was an independent Duchy until it passed to the crown of France on the death of Stanislas, father-in-law of Louis XV and last Duke of Bar and Lorraine, appears to the visitor to be very French. After a few hours in Alsace one begins to feel that France is far away. The people seem to be very quiet, reserved, even wary. It is not surprising when one remembers their history. But one misses the noise, the chatter, the stuffy typical smells of France. There is something disconcertingly Swiss, or is it Austrian, about the apparent calm and neatness of the wine villages, many of them completely destroyed in the last war and now rebuilt. Those that escaped intact, such as Riquewihr, almost unchanged since the sixteenth century, have a curiously unreal air, almost as if they had been put up for a Walt Disney film. But then, as one recognises names such as Ribeauvillé, Bergheim and Mittelwihr which have long been familiar on wine labels, these places come once more into a life of their own.

The cookery here is very interesting, with a variety of traditional dishes remarkable even for a French province. This is partly due, no doubt, to the tenacity with which the people clung to their old customs during the years of German domination, partly also because of the influence of an old-established Jewish colony whose traditional dishes, brought from Poland, Austria, Russia and Germany, have become part of Alsatian cookery. Again, in spite of the devastations of the last two wars, the Alsatians have each time succeeded in rebuilding their towns and villages, re-establishing their industries, agriculture, and wine production. The expansion of this wine industry and its attendant publicity being an important part of the rehabilitation policy, the restaurants in Alsatian towns, and particularly in the wine districts, tend to serve specialities very much designed to go with the local white wines.

For instance, discussions as to the best wine to serve with
foie gras
are always cropping up amongst connoisseurs and in wine and food magazines; in Alsace there is no question: a Riesling or a Traminer of the country will be placed upon the table almost before you have ordered it. The combination seems to me to be an excellent one, but whether it is the best I am in no position to pronounce. (H. Warner Allen advocates a red wine, finding a Côte Rôtie from the Rhône ideal.)

The
foie gras
, a slice or two of the whole goose liver, studded with truffles, or else a pâté or a terrine, is served very cold as an hors-d’œuvre, in solitary splendour, and is very expensive even in its home town of Strasbourg. The rest of the meal will be composed with an eye to the continued service of white Alsatian wines. In one very old-established restaurant of Strasbourg, so discreet as to be hardly recognisable as a restaurant until you get the bill, we followed our
foie gras
, on the advice of the management, with whole baby chickens grilled and coated with breadcrumbs, parsley, chopped hard-boiled egg and
noisette
butter. A little bowl of caraway seeds came with the Münster, a strong, rich, creamy textured cheese which, at the right stage of ripeness, is one of the great cheeses of France; then there were pancakes stuffed with a Kirsch-flavoured cream. The very fine Mirabelle which was our
digestif
was served in large wide goblets cooled with ice. But except for the superb
foie gras
this meal was far outclassed by the beautiful and imaginative cooking provided by M. Gaertner at the Armes de France in the rebuilt village of Ammerschwihr (it was almost totally destroyed in 1944) in the wine country.