French Provincial Cooking (11 page)

As far as the true regional dishes are concerned, Basque and Béarnais cooking is easier to follow in manner than to the letter; when you have goose fat saved from the Christmas bird, try using it as a basis for these dishes. It gives an entirely characteristic flavour. When there is none, or if you feel as Norman Douglas did about it, then substitute pork lard or olive oil; all but the most rabid of French regionalists will tell you that there is no call to be more royalist than the king in these matters. Use the red peppers, the spiced Spanish-type sausages when they are obtainable, the salt pork, the ham, the wine, the garlic, the onions. Something of the highly individual character of this local cookery, part Spanish, part traditionally Gascon, with affinities to the cooking of Provence and even to that of parts of Italy, will still emerge. These dishes may not be for every day. But then once again it was Norman Douglas who said, ‘Who wants a dish for every day?’

On the Basque and the Bordelais coasts there is naturally a great tradition of fish cookery, and here olive oil comes into its own again, for the oniony fish stew called Ttoro, or Tioro, for the little squid called
chipirones,
stewed with their own ink for sauce, for fresh sardines plainly fried, and prawns, langoustines, and mussels cooked with rice and peppers in the manner of the Spanish
paëlla.
Oysters, raw and ice cold, are often accompanied by sizzling hot little spicy sausages called
lou-kenkas,
which have some resemblance to the
chorizos
of Spain. Inland, there is particularly fine river trout from the streams called
gaves
in the Béarn, and in the strange bleak country of the Landes there are ortolans and wild doves, delicious birds unknown to the English kitchen; and there are duck livers cooked with grapes, and goose liver pâtés with as great a reputation as those of the Périgord and Alsace.

About the traditional cookery of the Bordelais, Count Austin de Croze expresses the view that it is only in England that the ancient dishes have been preserved, a circumstance due presumably to the long British occupation of this part of the country in Plantagenet times. As examples he cites the English love of ‘ginger, and of rudimentary accords and discords’ in their cookery.

One of the few ancient dishes still current in the Bordelais is the
tourin
, an excellent onion soup with several variations, and the custom of pouring a glass of wine into the
garbure
as the amount in your plate diminishes also still survives. The custom is known as
faire chabrot,
and is, or was, common to all Gascony and south-western France. Other old dishes cited by Count de Croze are those filling peasant maize meal cakes and galettes (maize is extensively grown in south-western France and is used among other things for cramming the geese in order to fatten their livers) called
millias
and
milliassou,
and an
estouffade de Lesparre
, a beautifully enticing name, but a dish I have never yet come across. What we now know as ‘the beautiful, good, refined Bordelais cuisine,’ says Count de Croze, ‘dates from the time when Louis (the architect, Victor Louis) built lovely Château Margaux with its Greek temple façade, and the theatre of which Bordeaux is so justly proud. The famous—and sumptuous
—lamproie aux poireaux et au vin rouge
dates, at the earliest, from the time of Montesquieu.’ Two other Bordeaux dishes universally known are
cèpes à la Bordelaise
, the rich mixture of cèpes or boletus cooked in olive oil with garlic and parsley, and
entrecôte marchand de vins
(the old Bordeaux recipes for these dishes will be found on pages 249 and 337). From what period these dishes date I do not know, but properly done both have the savour and pungency of genuine country food.

The Bordelais are, no doubt, able to console themselves for their upstart cookery, dating back no farther than the end of the eighteenth century; they have the wherewithal, with the greatest wine production of any district in France, with the greatest number of classified first growths, among which are the most renowned wines in the world, with fifteen hundred châteaux of which an enormous number bear celebrated names and of which even the least-known produce good table and everyday wines.

With all this, the Bordelais can afford to play a few tricks now and again with their combinations of food and wine. As a curiosity, the menu of a dinner given at Château Margaux in 1957 in honour of a famous English wine shipper is a good example of this somewhat casual attitude. In the opinion of another highly distinguished wine merchant, to start off a meal with the very rich 1952 Château Climens was ‘somewhat overdoing the salmon,’ the rest of the meal was really two meals, the mixture of Burgundies and Bordeaux wines was an atrocity, and the whole arrangement was ‛CHAOS.’

Here is the menu drawn up by the Académie du Vin de Bordeaux. The mixture of Burgundy and Bordeaux wines is explained by the fact that Burgundian wine growers were associated with those of the Bordelais on this occasion:

‘Château Climens 1952 (Barsac), après le consommé en tasse, avec le saumon de l’Ardour Aurore—La Tâche du Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1948—Hospices de Beaune, Volnay—Santenots, Cuvée Jehan de Massol 1929, avec le poulet Bercy—Château Canon 1945 (St. Emilion) et Château Pétrus 1945 (Pomerol), avec le Mignon de bœuf à la Neva—Château Haut-Brion 1934 (Graves) et Château Margaux 1929 (Médoc), avec le plateau des fromages—Château La Tour Blanche 1949 (Sauternes), avec la glace Napolitaine et les petits fours.’

And as a contrast here is a dinner given at Château Lafite Rothschild in 1951:

It is a remarkable fact that the two writers who have had the most profound influence upon the English attitude to food and wine in the twentieth century have both been Frenchmen writing
in English
. (I am not forgetting Escoffier, whose influence was very great, but his books were written in French and the English translations were, and remain, a good deal short of perfection.)

How M. André Simon and M. Marcel Boulestin, arriving in England as they both did, the former in 1894 and Boulestin about 1910, speaking little or no English, almost immediately settled down to assimilate themselves into English life and before long to write and publish books in the English language is something of a phenomenon.

André Simon’s work is justly famous; he has had a long and fruitful working life, but Boulestin died untimely during the 1939 war and all his books, with the exception of an anthology compiled after his death, are out of print. But the influence exercised by Boulestin, both by his books and through the restaurant which he founded, went very deep, if not sufficiently wide.

All this is not entirely irrelevant to the wonderful province of France which is the Périgord, the country of Montaigne, the country of painted caves and romanesque cathedrals, the country of black truffles and Roquefort cheese and walnut oil, of pigs and geese, and an immensely rich tradition of cookery, the country through which flow the Dordogne, the Lot and the Garonne, the country where the names of half the towns and villages end in that short, sharp yet infinitely evocative syllable
ac
—Souillac, Moissac, Capdenac, Figeac, Bergerac, Monbazillac, Montignac, Marcillac—the country which, with the Bordelais, formed the ancient territory of Guyenne which in 1154 Eleanor of Aquitaine brought as dowry to the Plantagenets and which for three hundred years remained a dominion of the English crown. And this was Marcel Boulestin’s native province. His recollections of the food and the cooking pots, the kitchen and the garden of his childhood home are wonderfully evocative. Here is what he wrote in his autobiography
Myself, My Two Countries
(Cassell, 1936):

 

‘There I lived all the daytime out of doors, and in the evening my favourite place was the kitchen. The ways of cooking were very primitive (and in many parts of the south-west of France they still are); that is to say they were perfect, and gave results which I did not appreciate enough then, and which we try now, often in vain, to imitate. The roasting was done on a spit, and the rest of the cooking on charcoal. If a dish had to be braised, it was cooked in a casserole with a hollow lid; in this warm ashes and burning charcoals were put, and the dish cooked slowly, resting on square holes. There were three or four holes in the tiled covered stand, which was a fixture. This was called a
potager.

‘If something required baking as opposed to roasting, it was sent to the baker’s to be cooked after the bread had been removed. There was a baker’s oven in the house at the end of the yard, but I do not remember seeing it in use.

‘The grandest place was the chimney, so high and deep I could walk into it, and the dogs (which were called
landiers
) were almost as tall as I was. It was lovely to see a fat chicken or a row of partridges revolving slowly on the spit and becoming more and more golden. They were carefully basted and a subtle perfume filled the kitchen. Meanwhile, a crisp salad was being prepared with a
chapon
rubbed with garlic.

‘Next to the fireplace was a large cherrywood
saloir
, where in pounds of sea-salt pieces of pork were pickled, and I can still see the unerring gesture of the cook: pushing the sliding lid out, she would put in her arm to the elbow and draw out a handful of salt, which she would throw, positively throw, in the soup, a yard away. . . .

‘Some of the dishes and kitchen forks and spoons were of pewter. To my great joy I discovered one day that they melted easily. . . .

‘In the store room next to the kitchen were a long table and shelves always covered with all sorts of provisions; large earthenware jars full of
confits
of pork and goose, a small barrel where vinegar slowly matured, a bowl where honey oozed out of the comb, jams, preserves of sorrel and of tomatoes, and odd bottles with grapes and cherries marinating in brandy; next to the table a weighing machine on which I used to stand at regular intervals; sacks of haricot beans, of potatoes; eggs, each one carefully dated in pencil.

‘And there were the baskets of fruit, perfect small melons, late plums, under-ripe medlars waiting to soften, peaches, pears hollowed out by a bird or a wasp, figs that had fallen of their own accord, all the fruits of September naturally ripe and sometimes still warm from the sun. Everything in profusion. It is no doubt the remembrance of these early days which makes me despise and dislike all primeurs, the fruit artificially grown, gathered too early and expensively sent, wrapped in cotton wool, to “smart” restaurants.

‘The garden could hardly be called a garden; it was large, wild and not too well kept. There were fruit trees amongst the flowers, here a pear tree, there a currant bush, so that one could either smell a rose, crush a verbena or eat a fruit; there were borders of box, but also of sorrel and chibol; and the stiff battalion of leeks, shallots and garlic, the delicate pale-green foliage of the carrot, the aggressive steel-grey leaves of the artichokes, the rows of lettuce which always ran to seed too quickly.

‘It was not a proud ornamental garden, but it symbolised more than anything else the French provincial life.’

You have decided upon your meal, and Madame, in her black dress, has moved majestically towards the kitchen to attend to your wishes. A bottle of cooled white wine is already in front of you, and from the big table in the centre of the restaurant a waiter brings hors-d’œuvre, to keep you amused and occupied while more serious dishes are being prepared. Now, in spite of all that grave gastronomes are in the habit of saying about the pernicious custom of starting off a meal with a lot of little oddments and titbits, it is nevertheless a fact that the quality of a restaurant may very largely be judged by the way in which the hors d’œuvre are planned and presented. At Nénette’s they bring you quantities of little prawns, freshly boiled, with just the right amount of salt, and a most stimulating smell of the sea into the bargain, heaped up in a big yellow bowl; another bowl filled with green olives; good salty bread; and a positive monolith of butter, towering up from a wooden board. These things are put upon the table, and you help yourself, shelling your prawns, biting into your olives, enjoying the first draught of your wine. Gradually you take in your surroundings: the light and sunny dining-room, neither too big nor too small, the comfortably worn flowered wallpaper, the country flowers on the tables, and the shady garden which you can see through the open window at the far end of the dining-room.