PENGUIN BOOKS

FRENCH PROVINCIAL COOKING

Elizabeth David discovered her taste for good food and wine when she lived with a French family while studying history and literature at the Sorbonne. A few years after her return to England she made up her mind to learn to cook so that she could reproduce for herself and her friends some of the food that she had come to appreciate in France. Subsequently, Mrs David lived and kept house in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India, as well as in England. She found not only the practical side but also the literature of cookery of absorbing interest and studied it throughout her life.

Her first book, Mediterranean Food, appeared in 1950. French Country Cooking followed in 1951, Italian Food, after a year of research in Italy, in 1954, Summer Cooking in 1955 and French Provincial Cooking in 1960. These books and a stream of often provocative articles in magazines and newspapers changed the outlook of English cooks for ever.

In her later works she explored the traditions of English cooking (Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, 1970) and with English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) became the champion of a long overdue movement for good bread. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984) is a selection of articles first written for the Spectator, Vogue, Nova and a range of other journals. The posthumously published Harvest of the Cold Months (1994) is a fascinating historical account of aspects of food preservation, the world-wide ice trade and the early days of refrigeration. South Wind Through the Kitchen, an anthology of recipes and articles from Mrs David’s nine books, selected by her family and friends, and by the chefs and writers she inspired, was published in 1997, and acts as a reminder of what made Elizabeth David one of the most influential and loved of English food writers. A final anthology of unpublished recipes, uncollected articles and essays entitled Is There a Nutmeg in the House? is also available in Penguin.

In 1973 her contribution to the gastronomic arts was recognised with the award of the first André Simon Memorial Fund Book Award. An OBE followed in 1976, and in 1977 she was made a chevalier de l’ordre du Mérite Agricole. In the same year English Bread and Yeast Cookery won Elizabeth David the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award. The universities of Essex and Bristol conferred honorary doctorates on her in 1979 and 1988 respectively. In 1982 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1986 was awarded a CBE. Elizabeth David died in 1992.

INTRODUCTION

Staying in Toulouse a few years ago, I bought a little cookery book on a stall in the marché aux puces held every Sunday morning in the Cathedral Square. It was a tattered little volume, and its cover attracted me. In faded pinks and blues, it depicts an enormously fat and contented-looking cook in white muslin cap, spotted blouse and blue apron, smiling smugly to herself as she scatters herbs on a gigot of mutton. Beside her are a great loaf of butter, a head of garlic and a wooden salt box, and in the foreground is a table laid with a white cloth and four places, a basket of bread, a cruet and two carafes of wine.

The promise of the cover was, indeed, fulfilled in the pages of this delightful little book, called Secrets de la Bonne Table, 120 Recettes inédites recueillies dans les provinces de France. The author, Benjamin Renaudet (date of publication not disclosed, but probably about 1900), had collected genuine recipes from country housewives, gourmet doctors, lawyers and senators, from gamekeepers and their wives, from landladies of seaside pensions, from the notebooks of family and friends. The dishes described are not spectacular, rich or highly flavoured, the materials are the modest ingredients you would expect to find in a country garden, a small farm, or in the market of a quiet provincial town. But it is not rustic or peasant cooking, for the directions for the blending of different vegetables in a soup, the quantity of wine in a stew, or the seasoning of the sauce for a chicken reflect great care and regard for the harmony of the finished dish. This is sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill, with due regard to the quality of the materials, but without extravagance or pretension.

The book exudes an atmosphere of provincial life which appears orderly and calm whatever ferocious dramas may be seething below the surface. Here you find the lawyer’s wife at work preparing her special noisettes d’agneau for a dinner party; a great-aunt of one of the author’s friends serves the same soup her mother served to Madame Récamier when she came to dinner; the farmer’s wife gathers mushrooms to garnish the chicken she is cooking for her husband when he comes in with friends from a day’s shooting; a senator’s cook proves to a sceptical company that an old hen can be made into a dish fit for a gourmet; the author’s great-uncle at last discloses his recipe for the liqueur he makes every year and keeps locked in his linen-cupboard.

The ravages of two world wars, the astronomical rises in the cost of living, and the great changes brought about by modern methods of transport and food preservation have not destroyed those traditions of French provincial cookery. In one way indeed these circumstances have oddly combined to preserve them. After the 1914 war patriotic Frenchmen began to feel that the unprecedented influx of foreign tourists hurrying through the country in fast cars, Riviera or Biarritz bound, not caring what they ate or drank so long as they were not delayed on their way, was threatening the character of their cookery far more than had the shortages and privations of war. Soon, they felt, the old inns and country restaurants would disappear and there would be only modern hotels serving mass-produced, impersonal food which could be put before the customers at a moment’s notice, devoured, paid for, and instantly forgotten. It was at this time that a number of gourmets and gastronomically-minded men of letters set about collecting and publicising the local recipes of each province in France.

At the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1924 there was, for the first time, a culinary section devoted to regional cookery. Under the direction of Edouard Rouzier, proprietor of the celebrated Rôtisserie Périgourdine, a series of regional dinners were organised and proved an immense success. Subsequently Marcel Rouff and Maurice-Edmond Sailland (who, under the pen-name of Curnonsky, came to be known throughout France as the ‘Prince of Gastronomes’) together published a series of guides to regional eating and drinking, not hesitating to criticise the pretentious, the dull, or the over-expensive meal when they encountered it. About the same time Count Austin de Croze compiled a book listing the products, the dishes, the cheeses and wines of every province, followed in 1929 by a closely-packed volume of recipes called Les Plats Régionaux de France. Before long regional cookery became fashionable. There had, of course, previously been a few restaurants in Paris specialising in the food and wines of the native province of the proprietors, but they were little known except to the habitués of the quarter and to provincials exiled in Paris. These regional restaurants now began to multiply and become smart. Today one could eat some different provincial speciality in Paris restaurants every day for weeks on end.

Country and seaside restaurateurs also began to realise the possibilities of attracting tourists by advertising some famous local dish on their menus. Often such dishes derive from peasant and farmhouse cookery and depend rather upon some typical product of the region such as a cheese or ham, mountain mutton or river fish, chestnuts, walnuts, lentils, dairy produce, rather than upon important sauces or the skill of professional chefs. But the restaurateurs do not despise them on this account. They are encouraged to serve them by the local Syndicat d’Initiative, some member of which hardworking body has probably searched the municipal archives for cookery manuscripts and persuaded members of old local families and the librarians of the great religious houses to contribute recipes.

But recipes alone are not enough. A flourishing tradition of local cookery implies also genuine local products; the cooks and the housewives must be backed up by the dairy farmers, the pig breeders and pork butchers, the market gardeners and the fruit growers, otherwise regional cookery simply retreats into the realms of folk-lore. France is still largely an agricultural country and the right conditions for the preservation of their traditions still prevail. These traditions are constantly being renewed from within; the professional cooks and the housewives adapt the old methods to changing tastes and altered conditions without thereby standardising all the food; competitions and gastronomic festivals encourage the chefs to develop new dishes based on the old ones but still using the essential ingredients; the tourist organisations work hard to foster their own local products and cookery magazines publicise them in a sane and sober way, so it is not so surprising that the regional cookery of France is a profitable and flourishing industry as well as a beneficent one.

One hears, however, and reads in the newspapers, so many bitter criticisms from English tourists about French food that a few words of warning may not be out of place. Many people who have read of the great regional specialities such as, let us say, the Bouillabaisse and the Estouffat de Bœuf of Provence, the Cassoulet of the Languedoc, the pike with Beurre Blanc of the Loire or the Coq au Vin of Burgundy mistakenly suppose that these dishes are cooked every day by the local housewives and the restaurateurs, and are disappointed and indignant if they are not forthcoming at a few minutes’ notice. This is as absurd as if a Frenchman came here expecting to find plum pudding or Cornish lobsters at every meal and in every wayside café.

The great traditional set pieces are only made by the country people in France for feast days and holidays, wedding celebrations and other special occasions; their day-to-day food will be the simple dishes of ordinary middle-class French cookery, vegetable soups, egg dishes, beefsteaks, veal roasts, mutton ragoûts, sausages, pâtés, and salads; these may well have a regional character owing to some local tradition of seasoning or according to whether olive oil, butter, or pork fat has been used in the cooking; but they will not be the dishes advertised in the travel agencies’ brochures. The restaurateurs do, of course, put these specialities quite frequently on their menus, but not every day, and very often to order only, and the fact that this is so is reassuring to anyone who prefers his food to be freshly cooked rather than dished out of a great pot kept warm over steam for several hours.

Again, there is the seasonal aspect of French cookery; to many tourists French food is known only through summer holidays, and many of the great specialities of regional cooking are then out of season. Although, yielding to a certain extent to public demand, the restaurateurs put on as many of their well-known dishes as they are able, many of these will not be at their best. High summer is not the most propitious moment for freshly made pork products and pâtés: with the best will in the world I do not think one could eat a cassoulet toulousain, a Provençal chou farci or a gratin dauphinois on a hot August day, even if a chef would consent to cook them. Few of the great French cheeses are in prime condition in the late summer, and the price of fresh fish and vegetables rises steeply in the tourist season.

Unfortunately, there are a few restaurateurs in France today willing to barter their birthright of taste, moderation and simplicity in cooking for the cheap publicity and quick profits of showy food served in and out of season to gullible customers with more money than sense. It is, however, perfectly easy to keep away from such pretentious and phoney places, three or four stars in the guides all too often indicate expensive décor and fussy service rather than good food; but it is equally inadvisable to go too far in the other direction. Half the complaints one hears come from people who expect to go to a humble bistro or transport café, the equivalent of which in England it would not occur to them to enter, and there to find an impeccably served and perfectly cooked meal of choice ingredients for the price of a glass of beer and a sandwich in an English public house. They will, of course, be disappointed, and the publicity recently given to the Cafés Routiers in this country is partly to blame. These transport cafés are places where an adequate meal, served, it is true, rather more attractively than in their English counterparts, is provided in a somewhat perfunctory manner by nimble but overworked waitresses who have not the patience to stand at your table while you deliberate upon your meal; nor has the cook the time to attend to special orders. You must take what is on the menu, unless you want sour looks and a bill out of all proportion. Occasionally you come across an exceptional establishment of this kind; if it happens to be your first experience of such a restaurant, it would be unwise to assume that it is typical; but if you are not in a hurry and if food happens to be one of your serious interests, it would probably be worth staying in the neighbourhood and making friends with the proprietor, who will almost certainly be pleased to provide special local dishes to order, particularly in the evening when there are not so many customers.

For it should be remembered by the traveller in France that in provincial towns and in the country the main meal of the day is at noon. Nowadays many summer tourists economise by having picnic lunches, and this is an admirable plan in some ways because the buying of provisions in the local shops and markets is not only itself an entertainment and an education but gives the traveller a good idea of the resources of the country; in the market you can find out for yourself which are the genuine local cheeses, what kind of sausages and hams are favoured in the district, what vegetables and fruit are in season, what is the particular characteristic of the local pâtés, and which fish have been plentiful in the market, so that even if you can’t afford the really good restaurants you will at least get some idea of the region’s food. On the other hand, when you arrive at your evening’s destination, you may well find, at any rate in the more modest hotels and restaurants, that the specialities on the midday menu were all eaten up and you will have to make your choice from the already rather too familiar terrine du chef, the truite aux amandes, the entrecôte garnie, the poulet rôti and the crème renversée of the routine and relatively expensive set meal.

The cooking of these dishes would possibly make them into notable meals here in England, but in France one’s expectations are higher, and one’s disappointment at a dull meal consequently greater. But still, with a little forethought (one’s plans all too often go astray when driving about the countryside, but I am supposing for the moment that they have not) one can nearly always get good food in France. Often it happens that a long day’s drive, arduous sightseeing, or hours in the unaccustomed sunshine have made one too tired to cope with a ‘menu gastronomique’ of seven or eight courses even if money is no object, and in any case so much of one’s enjoyment of a meal depends upon having the right food at the right moment. So as long as one arrives in good time for dinner, it is always worth explaining to the patron of the restaurant or the hotel what sort of meal one would like; the chances are that he will be able to provide one or two of the lesser local specialities such as some sort of charcuterie and perhaps a little cheese which he would not otherwise have thought of offering, because English people are generally thought only to want beefsteaks or fried eggs and chips; he will be only too pleased to find tourists interested in the genuine food of the country, and those who reject the pompous menu got up for innocent foreigners are likely to find all the more respect in his eyes.

Under such circumstances I have eaten some of the most enjoyable of French country meals; unexacting ones, ordered and served with the minimum of fuss. An omelette, perhaps, followed by the sausages which were a speciality of the local butcher, a vegetable dish and some cheese; or perhaps snails and a homely stew, intended probably for the patron’s own dinner but gracefully surrendered; or a vegetable soup, a slice or two of country-cured ham and a beautiful big green artichoke; and on another occasion, a langouste with a mayonnaise which was among the best I have ever tasted, because of the fine quality of the Provençal olive oil which had gone into it, and which was followed by a dish of tender young string beans of that intense green and delicate flavour which only southern-grown beans seem to acquire

Surely, then, good food is there for those who look for it; bad food, too, and rather more than there used to be, but if one gets it, one very often has only oneself to blame, for arriving late and tired in some small town, for weakly going into a place obviously unsuitable, for omitting to make friends with the patron before ordering, for mismanagement generally. Such occasions are bound to occur, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. And one of the great points about the cookery of France is that it is so extraordinarily varied. There seems to be an inexhaustible fund of new dishes to be discovered.

NOTE TO 1977 EDITION

It is the best part of thirty years since I started amassing the material which eventually turned into this book. It was published in 1960. Over the years, a certain amount of what I wrote about the provinces of France has inevitably passed into history. Nobody would pretend that the deep freeze isn’t everywhere, or that restaurants don’t sometimes serve disgraceful prefabricated sauces and inadmissible travesties of famous dishes. I’m afraid that guidebook promises have made us expect rather too much of French restaurant food.

In the markets, however, all over France, incomparable produce still abounds. Buying food for picnics or to cook in holiday houses is more than ever a joy and an inspiration.

When it comes to using the recipes, my inclination now is to try harder than ever for quality. A little fine olive oil, or true, clear stock, or double cream from Jersey herds, or a few fresh eggs laid by decently-fed, humanely-reared hens go a lot further than twice the amounts of third-rate makeshifts. Sybille Bedford said it all when she wrote that Escoffier’s injunction ‘faites simple’, much invoked since I quoted it in these pages, ‘doesn’t mean faites slapdash’. That goes for our choice of raw materials just as much as for their preparation and cooking.

E. D. April 1977.

NOTE TO 1983 EDITION

In the six years since I wrote the above note for the 1977 reprint of the hardback edition of this book, the style of French restaurant cooking dubbed nouvelle cuisine has been the subject of scores and scores of newspaper and magazine articles. It has been extravagantly praised and merrily derided. It has been so widely imitatated that one of its most publicised founding fathers, Michel Guérard, has already declared himself fed up with the carbon copies of his dishes to be found in every second and second-rate restaurant in France and has expressed his wish to dissociate himself from the entire movement. Quite a hullabaloo. What is it all about?

In 1960, when this book was first published, it seemed to me that so called cuisine classique with its rigid traditions and immutable rules had already been unrealistic and hopelessly out of date at least since 1939, let alone by fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. Belatedly, then, in the early 70s a group of younger professional chefs began to make rebellious announcements about lighter food and less of it, about vegetables being undercooked in the Chinese style instead of stewed to pulp, about fish being poached or grilled until the flesh just came away from the bone rather than tumbling from it in a shower of flakes. Very laudable aims all these were too, if not perhaps as startling to the ordinary public as they seemed to the young men themselves.

Before long other innovatory ideas were aired. There was to be a veto on flour-thickened sauces. These were duly replaced either by syrupy reductions or glazes given a medieval sweet-sour treatment with the addition of cherry, blackberry, rosehip or bilberry vinegar. Alternatively the reductions could be given fragile substance with an admixture of fromage frais or a light purée of chervil or watercress. Cream and butter were evidently to be retained in plenty (this was not cuisine minceur), pools of beurres blancs and hollandaises would compensate for the banished béchamel and mornay sauces. Startling combinations and novel juxtapositions, such as sautéed parsnips with fresh foie gras or a wing of skate lightly laid on a mattress of rhubarb roulade, a spoonful of currants plumped in sherry scattered with exquisitely studied carelessness all around were the kind of impishly original ideas which a couple of months after launching became restaurant clichés. Soon the nest of pommes paille and the little bunch of watercress, for about fifty years the obligatory garnish of every roast chicken in France, but spurned by the new regime in favour of more diverting decoration such as sliced pawpaw with oak-leaf lettuce and candied cardomum seeds, began once more to exert a certain allure. An old-fashioned pâté de campagne, rich and coarse and for a while superseded by genteel little slices of terrine de petits légumes with rows of peas embedded in a mousseline of spinach and courgettes is – speaking for myself – already a welcome retrogression from those airy little nothings accompanied by their trois sauces served in dolls’ house swimming pools round one side of the plate.

To be sure, it is easy enough to make fun of nouvelle cuisine affectation. Everyone who has experienced it in restaurants where it is practised, whether in France, England, elsewhere in Europe (in Holland and Italy I have had some quite bizarre nouvelle cuisine meals set before me), or in the United States, has his or her own story of the five green beans sitting lonely on one side of a huge white plate, three tepid chicken livers avec ses quelques feuilles de salade nine inches distant on the opposite edge. The ineffably precious style of plate presentation developed by the current generation of chefs and restaurateurs is of course – and this is something which neither its admirers not its critics have so far as I know pointed out – nothing at all to do with cuisine but everything to do with portion control. Take away those huge and inappropriate plates with their finicky and often inept arrangements, put the cooked food back where it belongs in serving dishes to be offered to or set in front of the customers, and French restaurant cooking would, I think, very quickly regain its faltering status, and with it its diminished spirit of generosity.

The enticement of the wonderful smells of fine cooking, now diffused and muddled by the obligatory plate service, the intense visual stimulus once inseparable from a meal in a good French country restaurant but now destroyed by misguided imitation of Japanese-style presentation, could quite easily be restored to us. In other words it is not so much the cooking that is wrong, except in the most blatantly arrogant establishments, as a certain coldness and ungenerosity of spirit, an indifference to the customer, now manifest in establishments operated on nouvelle cuisine principles. ‘It is to the real gastronomes and gourmets that even the greatest chefs have to play,’ wrote Egon Ronay, the only non-French member of L’Académie des Gastronomes, in a Times article in August 1980. Perhaps. I’m not sure if I know any chef who can be described as ‘the greatest’. What I do know is that the chefs of the nouvelle cuisine school are not playing to the customers. So long as they pay for it, the customers may take or leave what the chefs give the waiters to put in front of them. The chefs are playing to, by, and for themselves.

In July 1981 Susan Lee, a writer on the Wall Street Journal, had a ball telling her readers about the aberrations, exaggerations and insufficiencies of nouvelle cuisine and its rapid spread throughout the United States. A recent reaction from the French nation against the novelty of yesteryear was also reported by Miss Lee. I can’t say that I saw any such reaction myself that same summer when I was in France, but if the ‘newly appointed cuisine de terre’ – the French usually, I think, say cuisine de terroir, cooking smacking of the soil – ‘and big brimming bowls of hearty coarse food’ reported by Miss Lee have this year become a reality, that would be the most natural reaction in the world. But of course those brimming bowls will contain food cooked in new combinations according to recipes newly evolved, and presented in ways fresh to the eye. To quote Philéas Gilbert, author of that very fine book La Cuisine de Tous les Mois, published in 1893, ‘in the cottage as in the château (for which we should now read château-hotel) we need novelty to stimulate our appetites. Cookery cannot and must not live on its past glories … it must continually modernise according to circumstances’.

Meanwhile, back so to say in our own kitchens, we have most of us to some extent been influenced by a variety of new trends, of which current French restaurant cooking is only one. Let us, for example, not forget that without the French invention of the robot-coupe, known generically as the food processor, nouvelle cuisine simply would not have come into being. Some years ago, dining in a London restaurant at the time much praised for its new style food, one of my fellow guests was Julia Child. When the charmingly solemn young maître-d’hotel had come to the end of his recitation of the content and style of each dish on the menu, Julia remarked, and it was a simple statement with no trace of criticism, ‘Oh I see, cuisinart cooking’. Cuisinart, I should explain, is the name by which Americans know the robot-coupe. Well, Julia wasn’t far wrong. About seven dishes out of ten on that restaurant menu could not have been created without the food processor. The light purées, the fluffy sauces and the fish mousselines so loved by today’s restaurateurs can also be achieved at home more or less by pressing a button. ‘Now mince, chop or process everything – pan juices, chicken, spinach, bread, flavourings, eggs, together’ is the kind of cooking direction one may read any day in newspaper and magazine articles, and it is indeed a marvel that the food processor does all the mincing, chopping, puréeing and blending, without a thought of all that hard pounding of the past. But let’s not treat the food processor as though it were a waste-disposal unit. Bland, monotonous and in the end characterless food from the processor could all too easily become the new plague.

E. D., August 1983.