French Provincial Cooking (9 page)

‘A superb
pâté de foie gras,
sent direct from Nancy, was scarcely touched; on the other hand, we did considerable justice to the dessert: the season’s fruits and excellent little cream cheeses.

‘Having risen from table at six o’clock, we once more found ourselves there, as if by chance, three hours later, for a little cold supper; have I not already said that the air of the mountains is the best of apéritifs?

‘The following day, which was Sunday, we were obliged, not without regret, to take leave of our hosts and return home. As we had two good hours of driving before arriving at the railway station, where we should not in any case have found a decent inn, we had a final lunch before our departure. It was composed of eggs and bacon, little galettes of maize flour fried in butter, a
terrine
of rabbit and cold meats.

‘The chamois had been put to marinate, and would be cooked some days later for other guests.

‘We all carried away with us the happiest memory of this beautiful country of Savoie and of the very hospitable welcome which we had received. For my part, I have never forgotten the sauce of horseradish and walnuts.’

La Meurette
,
la Pouchouse, la Gougère
,
le jambon persillé de Bourgogne
,
le jambon à la lie de vin
,
les porcelets à la gelée, les escargots à la Bourguignonne, le bœuf Bourguignon, le râble de lièvre à la Piron, le coq au Chambertin, la potée Bourguignonne, les petites fondues au fromage, la queue de bœuf des vignerons, les haricots au vin rouge:
how the names alone of these Burgundian dishes seem to smell of the vineyard, the wine cellar, and the countryside.

Most of them are cooked with wine; others, the cheese dishes in particular, are designed to bring out the best qualities of the wines of Burgundy, whether great or humble, white or red. These dishes might, I think, be said to represent the most sumptuous kind of country cooking brought to a point of finesse beyond which it would lose its character. Here are none of the grandiose or fanciful creations of the over-zealous chef, no
filet de bœuf à la haute finance
, no
poularde farcie à l’archiduc,
no fussy fillets of sole with truffles and stuffed artichoke hearts, but rather meat and poultry, game and fish in copious helpings served on fine large dishes and surrounded by the wine-dark sauces which look so effortless, and in practice are so difficult to get precisely right. The additional garnish of cubes of salt pork or bacon, mushrooms, and glazed button onions are known, wherever French cookery is practised, as the sign of a Burgundian dish.

There is little, it will be noticed, in this full-flavoured cookery to indicate that, in the manner of the English wine connoisseur, you must eat nothing but a grilled cutlet or a mushroom on toast with your fine vintages of the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuits. The menus of the Burgundian wine-growers’ dinners read like something from the age when the Dukes of Burgundy feasted in royal state in the Palace of Dijon where the great vaulted kitchen was also the banqueting hall.

On January 29, 1949, for example, while we were struggling with our little bits of rationed meat and our weekly egg, the Burgundy wine potentates sat down to a meal of
boudin
and
andouillettes
(blood sausage and chitterling sausage) with real Dijon mustard; sucking pig in jelly flavoured with Meursault; the
matelote
of freshwater fish called
Pouchouse
, with pounded garlic stirred into the sauce, a haunch of wild boar with a rich
Grand Veneur
sauce and potato croquettes; roast chickens; and cheeses. The sweet was a confection called a
Biscuit Argentin
in honour of the Argentine Ambassador who was present at the banquet. The wines were a white Aligoté from Meursault, a Beaujolais or two from the previous year’s vintage, two admirable wines from the Côte de Beaune, three great vintages from Nuits-Saint-Georges, Clos Vougeot and Musigny respectively, and a sparkling Burgundy from the Côte de Nuits (the chronicler of the event is reticent about this). The liqueurs were Burgundian Marc and Prunelle. To the Burgundians their wine is the most important consideration. But they are not niggardly eaters either.

The Lyonnais, their neighbours, are inclined perhaps to think more about their food than their wine; not that it could be said of them that they are niggardly drinkers, for their beloved Beaujolais flows in rivers, and it has indeed been said of Lyon that it is situated on three rivers, Rhône, Saône—and Beaujolais. But delicious and fresh as a genuine Beaujolais can be, the wines of this district do not pretend to aspire to the heights of the great wines of Burgundy, and the majority are drunk very young, the draught wine being sold locally by the ‘pot,’ a measure or bottle containing a little under half a litre.

Lyonnais cooking has a very great reputation. It is not, however, of a kind which I find very much to my taste. It is sometimes said that one must be a Lyonnais properly to appreciate the local cookery, and this is probably true. It would also, I think, be fair to say that the cooks of Lyon have given out so much to France, to Europe and to the Americas, that when one actually reaches this fountain-head of French provincial cookery one is conscious of a sense of anti-climax. Of the renowned
charcuterie,
only one product, the
cervelas truffé
, comes up to expectations. This is a large, lightly cured pork sausage, liberally truffled, which may be eaten sliced as an hors-d’œuvre, or poached and served with potatoes, or even used whole as a stuffing for a piece of boned and rolled meat. The ordinary everyday
cervelas
is quite a different product, a smooth sausage more like a large version of the Vienna and Frankfurter sausage, lightly smoked. Then there is the
saucisson de Lyon,
the cured sausage of the salame type (although it does not at all resemble a salame in flavour) studded with the characteristic little cubes of fat, and a big cooking sausage also lightly salted and cured; both this and the
cervelas truffé
find their apotheosis in the
cervelas
or
saucisse en brioche
, a sort of super sausage roll I suppose one might say, but the sausage does not seem to me to have the subtlety of those produced in Alsace and Lorraine, nor the robust, straightforward flavour of the
saucisse de Toulouse,
although the brioche paste in a good restaurant like that of the Mère Brazier is of the most beautiful lightness.

The pig in all its forms plays a large part in the cookery of Lyon, grilled pigs’ trotters in particular appearing on every menu in almost every restaurant. At one at least of the better-known ones the proprietress is said to accept only trotters from the fore-legs, for they are smaller and more tender than those from the hind-legs. Certainly the pigs’ trotters in this establishment were exceptionally good, so perhaps the story is true. But the fact is that pigs’ trotters and sausages, steak and large quantities of potatoes, boiled chicken, pike
quenelles
and crayfish in one form or another soon become monotonous, however well cooked. And those pike
quenelles
, for instance—it is in fact rare to get them as they should really be. Making these
quenelles
is a lengthy and tedious business, involving much pounding and sieving of the flesh of the pike, blending it with a
panade,
cream, white of egg and so on; the paste thus obtained should be either moulded in a tablespoon or rolled into a sausage shape and gently poached, when it swells and puffs up, and should be so light that it resembles a soufflé without a soufflé case. Served in a delicately flavoured and creamy river crayfish sauce these
quenelles de brochet
can be, as I remember tasting them years ago for the first time in a Mâcon restaurant, a dish of great charm. Nowadays they are made on a commercial scale, the pounding and sieving being presumably done by machine, with a larger proportion of flour added in order to enable the
quenelles
to keep their shape when moulded, and to stand up to being set out on the counters and displayed in the windows for sale. This variety of
quenelle
tends to be stodgy, nothing much more in fact than a glorified fish-cake, poached instead of fried, so that one should be very cautious about ordering
quenelles
de
brochet
in any but those restaurants with the very highest reputation to maintain. Even then . . . odious though comparisons may be, I cannot help saying that anyone curious to know what a
quenelle
in all its glory is like will find it, if they happen to be travelling south, worth while making the détour from Valence across the Rhône, and forty kilometres up the winding road into the hills to Lamastre, to eat the extraordinary
pain d’écrevisses
at Madame Barattero’s Hôtel du Midi, a restaurant where all the specialities are of a most remarkable finesse.

The world-wide fame of Lyonnais cooking is largely due to a whole generation of women restaurateurs who flourished during the early years of the twentieth century, of whom the most celebrated was the Mère Fillioux. The story of the Mère Fillioux is so typical of the success of so many French provincial restaurateurs that it is worth recording. In the words of Mathieu Varille, author of
La Cuisine Lyonnaise
(1928): ‘In the category of restaurants
marchands de vin
that of la Mère Fillioux must be placed in the first rank. She has now entered into history through the great door of the kitchen. It is only right that her famous doings should be recounted here, to serve as an example to future generations.

‘Françoise Fayolle was born, as were also her five sisters, at Cuenlhat, in the Puy de Dôme. Quite young, she found employment in the house of a general at Grenoble but was not happy there. She came to Lyon and went into the service of Gaston Eymard, director of the Insurance Company
La France,
and one of the town’s greatest gastronomes. In ten years she learned all that she needed to know about the culinary arts. At this time she made the acquaintance of Louis Fillioux, whose father owned, in the rue Duquesne, a very modest apartment house, of which the ground floor was occupied by a bistro. Françoise Fayolle married Louis Fillioux; their savings were spent in buying out the owner of the bistro, which has since been much enlarged. But the beginnings were hard: “Two daughters in one year,” the Mère Fillioux would recount, “and the bills to pay at the end of every month.” The only customers were the builders employed upon the construction of the new quarter, and a few privileged beings whom the hostess consented to serve. You could get a copious meal for three francs fifty. With the Père Fillioux, wearing the eternal silk cap of the old silk dyers, with the faithful Mélie who waited at table, and later with her daughters, the Mère Françoise worked hard to establish the reputation of her restaurant. Little by little she unified the type of her meals, and the menu of her luncheons is now known in the four corners of the world.