French Provincial Cooking (26 page)

If all precautions fail and the sauce disintegrates, put another egg yolk into a clean bowl. To this add your failed sauce a little at a time, replace it over the hot water and proceed with greater circumspection this time until it has once more thickened. I should add, perhaps, that this only works if the sauce has
separated
. If the eggs have got so hot that they have granulated, what you have is scrambled eggs.

A
sauce hollandaise
is served with asparagus, artichoke hearts, broccoli, poached salmon, sole and all white fish, chicken, and poached or
mollet
eggs.

These quantities will serve four to six people.

This is
sauce hollandaise
with, for the above amount, about 2 tablespoons of whipped cream folded in at the very last moment before serving. Allowing for the cream, a little extra seasoning may be necessary for the sauce.

A quarter-bottle of dry white wine, 2 or 3 shallots, herbs, parsley, garlic, lemon juice, 2 oz. butter, the yolks of 2 or 3 eggs, salt, pepper.

First prepare a snail butter with 2 tablespoons of chopped parsley and 1 or 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic mashed up with 2 oz. of butter. Season with a little salt, lemon juice and pepper.

Now put the white wine into a pan with the shallots, another clove of garlic, a faggot of herbs and a little ground black pepper. Reduce by rapid boiling to half its original quantity. Strain, put into the top half of a double saucepan over hot, but not boiling, water. Stir in the beaten yolks of eggs. When thick, add the snail butter, about a quarter at a time. Whisk until amalgamated.

For anyone who likes garlic in strong doses this sauce can be served with a number of dishes—roast mutton, grilled chops, steak, grilled or poached fish (but not delicate fish like trout), eggs, raw vegetables such as celery, fennel and cauliflower, or with boiled or grilled chicken.

In 1956, French cooks celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the creation of mayonnaise. The legend that the sauce was invented by the cook of the Duc de Richelieu in 1756, while the French under his command were besieging the English at Port Mahon in Minorca, is probably no more reliable than other legends of the kind, usually thought up by imaginative cookery historians at a later date. There are indeed various other and older versions of the origin of mayonnaise, one of them being that the name came from the word
manier
, to manipulate; another attributes it to
moyeu
, an old French name for a yolk of egg. It certainly seems likely that by the 1750’s the sauce was already known in Spain and in Provence and it is an interesting point that the Spaniards are the only people who, so far as I know, have a special and traditional utensil for pouring the oil for mayonnaise. This is a teapot-shaped can with a long straight spout from which the oil comes out drop by drop; it is sold in all sizes in Spanish hardware shops. Similar oil pourers in glass or plastic are also commonly to be found in Spanish kitchens.

What, however, is more to the point than the origin of mayonnaise is the fact that it is one of the best and most useful sauces in existence, but because it is not cooked at all the making of it seems to represent to the uninitiated something in the nature of magic, or at least of a successful conjuring trick, although the mystery has been somewhat diminished by the advent of electric mixers and the fact that a beautiful thick mayonnaise can be produced from the liquidiser in a matter of a minute or two. But although I regard this machine with the utmost gratitude, since it is a mechanical kitchen-maid rather than a gadget, I do not care, unless I am in a great hurry, to let it deprive me of the pleasure and satisfaction to be obtained from sitting down quietly with bowl and spoon, eggs and oil, to the peaceful kitchen task of concocting the beautiful shining golden ointment which is mayonnaise.

(1) Proportions, to make it really easy, and for six plentiful helpings, are 3 egg yolks (although you can easily make do with 2 when you have a little experience) to about half a pint of olive oil. Half a teaspoon of salt, a few drops of tarragon or wine vinegar or the juice of half a lemon at most.

(2) If the oil has become congealed in cold weather, stand the bottle in a warm room to thaw very gradually and do not use it until it is once more quite limpid and clear. Frozen oil will curdle the sauce as sure as fate. But also it must not be too warm. In tropical climates the oil has to be cooled on ice before a mayonnaise is made.

(3) Stand the bowl in which the mayonnaise is to be made on a damp cloth or newspaper to prevent its sliding about. Use a wooden spoon for stirring.

(4) Whisk or stir the yolks pretty thoroughly before starting to add the oil, which is best poured out into a measuring jug, so that you can see just how much you are using.

(5) Add salt, then the oil, drop by drop at first, but with 3 yolks the drops can quickly be turned into a slow, thin stream. It is only, with this quantity of eggs, when about a third of the oil has gone in that the mayonnaise starts coming to life and acquiring its characteristic solidity. After this it should, if a spoonful is lifted up and dropped back into the bowl, fall from the spoon with a satisfying
plop
, and retain its shape, like a thick jelly.

(6) Add the vinegar from time to time from a dropper or a teaspoon, not straight from the bottle, or you risk ruining the whole thing by adding more than you intended.

(7) If it is more convenient to make the mayonnaise a day, or even two or three days beforehand, stir in at the very last 2 tablespoons of boiling water. The mayonnaise will then neither separate nor turn oily on the surface. Keep it in a cool place but not in the refrigerator.

(8) Groundnut oil
(huile d’arachides)
at about a third of the price is usually substituted for olive oil in such restaurants as do take the trouble to serve proper mayonnaise. Although, to me, nothing can replace the flavour and aroma of a genuine, mildly fruity olive oil (but not too strong, for in mayonnaise its flavour is accentuated), this is expensive and none too easy to obtain, so it should be said that a great many people both here and in the non-olive-growing parts of France prefer to use groundnut oil not only because of its cheapness but because they are not accustomed to the flavour of olive oil. Groundnut oil makes quite passable mayonnaise and could certainly be used for practising but, as it is absolutely devoid of taste, it is necessary to add flavour in the form of a little extra lemon juice and perhaps mustard. If this is used, it should be stirred, in powder form, into the eggs before the oil is added.

Chop very finely a small shallot or a little piece of onion with a tablespoon of parsley, add salt and freshly milled pepper, stir in 3 tablespoons of olive oil, a little vinegar or lemon juice and, when available, a few chives, cut with scissors. Boil an egg for 3 minutes, scoop out the yolk into the sauce, give it a stir, add the chopped white. This sauce is excellent with a boiled chicken, or with fish.

Much the same as above but with the addition of chopped gherkins, a scrap of chopped lemon peel, and hard-boiled instead of soft-boiled egg.

Pound the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs to a paste with a drop of vinegar. Stir in a raw yolk, a teaspoonful of French mustard, salt, pepper. Add olive oil (about
pint) as for a mayonnaise. Flavour with chopped tarragon, chives and capers, allowing about one teaspoonful of each. This makes a sauce of a creamier consistency and less rich than a mayonnaise.

Bertrand de Guégan
⁸
quotes this recipe as being from the hand of Maneille,
chef des cuisines
of the famous restaurant of the Trois Frères Provençaux, which flourished in Paris in the days of the First Empire, and the proprietors of which are said to have been responsible for introducing the
brandade de morue
to Parisians and to have invented
poulet à la
Marengo
for the benefit of Napoleon’s generals, returned victorious from Italy. It is a more likely theory than that which attributes the invention to Napoleon’s cook upon the battlefield. Maneille’s version, incidentally, is made without tomatoes.

Here is the Provençal sauce for salmon; it is, as anyone can see, very little different from what we now call a
sauce rémoulade,
but it is an excellent version which can be followed in every detail.

‘Take a medium-sized onion, 50 grammes (approximately 1
oz.) of capers and a substantial pinch of parsley; chop all together, after having washed the onion and parsley and wrung all three ingredients dry in the corner of a cloth. Take 2 anchovies (which you rinse well before pounding), 2 cooked yolks of eggs and 1 raw one. Beat all together and incorporate, little by little,
lb.
⁹
of olive oil, smelling of the fruit, and the juice of a lemon. Your preparation, being well worked, can be kept for at least three days without being retouched. This sauce needs a great deal of care to be made without failure.’

I must say it does not seem at all difficult to me—much more reliable than a straightforward mayonnaise. But I find a tablespoon of capers and 3 or 4 anchovy
fillets
rather than 2 whole anchovies provide a sufficiently strong flavouring.

Chop very finely a big bunch of mixed parsley, tarragon, and watercress, with chervil and chives when they are available (about 2 oz. altogether), plus 3 anchovy fillets, a tablespoon of capers and 2 or 3 little gherkins or a small pickled cucumber. Stir in about 4 tablespoons of olive oil, a very little tarragon vinegar, and a thread of lemon juice. The sauce should be pretty thick, and can also be further seasoned by the addition of a little mustard. Good with boiled beef and chicken as well as with fish. Enough to serve four to six people.

This is, I think, one of the great achievements of the simpler French cooking, but when I say simple I mean simple in conception rather than in execution, for it is hard work to make in any quantity, and so far as I know there is no short cut.

First prepare a very thick mayonnaise with 2 or even 3 egg yolks,
to
pint of best olive oil, and a few drops of wine or tarragon vinegar. The other ingredients are 10 fine spinach leaves, 10 sprigs of watercress, 4 of tarragon, 4 of parsley. Pick the leaves of the watercress, tarragon and parsley from the stalks. Put all these leaves with the spinach into boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes. Strain, squeeze them quite dry, pound them and put the resulting paste through a fine sieve. It should emerge a compact and dry purée. Stir it gradually into the mayonnaise but leave this final operation as late as possible before the sauce is to be served.