An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  *

  The year after the Cornish coastguard’s cottage, it is a loaned bungalow on the West Coast of Scotland. Rain drumming on the corrugated iron roof makes a stimulating background rhythm for my work on the index of a book about Italian cooking. Thank heaven for these wet Augusts. In what other climate could one do three months’ work during a fortnight’s holiday? Gragnano, grancevole, grignolino, gorgonzola, granita, San Gimignano, no, Genoa, ginepro. L. comes in drenched but with a fresh supply of Dainty Dinah toffees and the delicious rindless Ayrshire bacon we have discovered in the village shop, and the information that at high tide the fisherman will be at the landing stage with crabs and lobsters for sale. Must we? Lacrima Cristi, lamb, lampreys, Lambrusco, lasagne … All right, on with our Wellingtons and sou’westers. As it turns out the fisherman is not selling crabs and lobsters, nobody eats them here, nasty dirty things, they are for despatch to a fish paste factory in Yorkshire. I am relieved. Too soon. He holds out a great rogue crab. Here, take this. Sixpence. ‘How shall I cook him? In boiling water or cold?’

  ‘Boiling.’

  ‘The RSPCA says–’

  ‘Don’t know about that –’

  ‘–cruel–’

  ‘Dirty beast. Let him suffer it out.’

  *

  On Tory island, off the Donegal coast – two hours off, in an open boat, on what the Irish describe as a nice soft day, the Scots as a bit mixed, and I as a hurricane, a woman tells me that the best way to cook crabs is to pull off their claws and roast them in the ashes and throw the truncated bodies back in the sea. Some evidence of this ancient folk custom was indeed around. After all perhaps I am better off not inquiring too closely into the local cookery lore of these islands. The kind of windfall cookery which comes one’s way in London demands a less ferocious spirit. Rapid action is more to the point.

  Pale apricot coloured chanterelle mushrooms from sodden Surrey woods have only to be washed and washed and washed until all the grit has gone, every scrap, and cooked instantly before the bloom and that extraordinary, delicate, almost flower-like scent have faded. (As L. was returning to our Scottish bungalow that other year with a damp bundle of these exquisite mushrooms gallantly gathered during a storm, the schoolmaster’s wife stopped to look and used the same expression as the fisherman did about the crab – ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ But she was a kindly woman, and the same evening invited us in for whisky which would dispel the effects of our folly.)

  In contrast, a bunch of sweet basil, the kind with big fleshy floppy leaves, fills the kitchen with a quite violently rich spice smell as it is pounded up with Parmesan, garlic, olive oil and walnuts for a pesto sauce for pasta. Again, action has to be taken immediately. That basil was wet, and by tomorrow will have begun to turn black. The vine leaves from the wall of a house near Cambridge, now they can wait a day or two, wrapped in a food bag in the refrigerator, then they will make a lining for a pot of baked mushrooms – a recipe of Italian origin intended for big fat boletus and other wild fungi, and which, it turns out, works a notable change in cultivated mushrooms, making you almost believe you have picked them yourself in some early morning field.

  The brined vine leaves in tins from Greece work perfectly in the same way too – all that is necessary before using them is a rinse in a colander under running cold water – but fresh ones, a couple of dozen or so if they are small, should be plunged into a big saucepan of boiling water. As soon as it comes back to the boil take them out, drain them, and line a shallow earthenware pot with them, keeping some for the top. Fill up with flat mushrooms, about ½ lb for two, scatter the chopped stalks on top, add salt, freshly milled pepper, several whole small cloves of garlic which don’t necessarily have to be eaten but are essential to the flavour, pour in about four tablespoons of olive oil and cover with vine leaves and the lid of the pot and bake in a very moderate oven for about one hour – less or more according to the size of the mushrooms. When the vine leaves are large and tough they do their work all right but are too stringy to eat; little tender ones are delicious (not the top layer, they have dried out) and there is a good deal of richly flavoured thin dark juice; for soaking it up one needs plenty of bread.

  The Spectator, 24 August 1962

  Big Bad Bramleys

  From where I am sitting it looks very much as if this were another apple-glut autumn, like that of 1960. No question here of ‘at the top of the house the apples are laid in rows’; they are in bowls and baskets, under the stairs and in the passage and on the kitchen dresser; spotty windfalls, a couple of dozen outsize Bramleys, mixed lots of unidentified garden apples, sweet and sour, red, yellow, brown, green, large and small, from old country gardens where, at any rate in the south, the trees appear to be exceptionally heavily laden this year. Commercial crops of both eating and cooking apples are, I am told, no more than average and, like all our crops this year, have ripened at least a month late; not that that excuses those growers who send their Cox’s orange pippins as unripe to market as some I’ve tasted recently and which make one wonder if the reputation of yet another of our cherished home-grown products is on the way to extinction owing to the short-sightedness of the growers.

  Those Bramleys now. What to do with them? There are some who say they make wonderful baked apples. Not I. I find them too large, too sour and too collapsible; and in any case I believe there is no more chilling dish in the whole repertory of English cooking than those baked apples with their mackintosh skins and the inevitable fibrous little bits of core left in the centre; and again, because of the way they disintegrate Bramleys are of very little use for the kind of apple dishes which go so wonderfully with pheasant and other game birds and duck. At the Cordon Bleu school in Paris the other day I saw the chef demonstrating quails à la normande; roast quails served on a bed of sliced apples, cooked in butter in a sauté pan; they were seasoned with salt and sugar, enriched with thick bubbling cream and a good measure of calvados. Delicious; but well-flavoured and aromatically scented dessert apples which keep their shape are essential. I have used those aforementioned unripe Cox’s, which make good fried apples; better still, of course, if the apples are ripe. Both Eliza Acton – where fruit cooking of any and every kind is concerned she is unbeatable – and her twentieth-century French counterpart, Madame Saint-Ange,1 are very insistent about the quality and ripeness of apples for cooking, but Miss Acton doesn’t mention Bramleys, probably because although they were already known in her time (discovered, it is said, in a garden at Southwell in Nottinghamshire in 1805) they were not commercially cultivated until the 1860s, some fifteen to twenty years after she wrote Modern Cookery.

  For apple jelly, for example, Miss Acton specifies Nonsuch, Ribstone pippins and Pearmains, or a mixture of two or three such varieties; and for that most elementary of nursery dishes – which can be such a comfort if nicely made and so odious if watery or over-stewed – which we call a purée and the French call a marmelade, Madame Saint-Ange demands, as do nearly all French cooks, the sweet apples they call reinettes, the pippins of which the old-fashioned russet-brown reinette grise is the prototype.

  All these are counsels of perfection; Bramleys are our problem now (the apple publicity people tell me that there are three million Bramley trees in England today), so with Bramleys I make my apple purée, and the recipe I use is the one Miss Acton gives for apple sauce. There is nothing much to it except the preparation. Every scrap of peel and core must be most meticulously removed because the purée is not going to be sieved. You simply heap the prepared and sliced apples into an oven pot, jar or casserole and bake them, covered, but entirely without water, sugar or anything else whatsoever, in a very moderate oven (gas no. 3,330°F) for anything from twenty to thirty minutes. To whisk them into a purée is then the work of less than a minute. You add sugar (according to your taste and whether the purée is to serve as a sauce or a sweet dish) and, following Miss Acton’s instructions, a little lump of butter. I think perhaps this final addition
provides the clue to the excellence of this recipe, and if it sounds dull to suggest the plainest of apple purées (cream and extra sugar – Barbados brown for preference – go on the table with it) as a sweet dish I can only say that there are times when one positively craves for something totally unsensational; the meals in which every dish is an attempted or even a successful tour de force are always a bit of a trial.

  And how grateful hospital patients would be if such a thing as a good apple purée were ever to be produced in these establishments; it is just the kind of food one needs when not too ill to be interested in eating, but not well enough to face typical hospital or nursing-home cooking.

  One point I should add for the benefit of anyone who has no experience of the idiosyncrasies of the Bramley apple: after fifteen minutes the slices may appear nowhere near cooked; five minutes later you find that they have burst into a froth which has spilled all over the oven; so it is advisable to fill your dish no more than half-full to start with.

  The Spectator, 26 October 1962

  *

  The title of this article was less than fortunate. The English Apple and Pear Board which in the person of Robert Carrier, its PR representative, had helped me with information, was not amused. A lady from Todmorden in Lancashire wrote to my editor in ferocious terms about his cookery expert, furiously condemning ‘the revolting brown jam-like apology for the real thing’ which my Eliza Acton recipe would certainly produce. When some cherished culinary tenet comes under attack from a journalist people do write letters like that. As a matter of fact I had been a bit surprised myself when I opened my Friday Spectator that week. I had not been conscious of launching a deliberate attack on the Bramley. It can only have been my unflattering remarks about English baked apples – a criticism directed at the method of cooking rather than at the object cooked – which prompted the literary editor or his deputy to give my otherwise fairly mild piece so provocative a title. In weekly journalism naming of articles tends to be rather a last minute affair, so when my proof came in there had naturally not been any hint of bad about my big Bramleys. Anyway, the deed was done, and having apologised as best I could to Robert Carrier, I began to think the little commotion had been rather entertaining. In my household, I regret to say, Bramleys had already become forever big and bad.

  The lady from Todmorden, I should add, on receiving a letter from me explaining that the titles of my articles were beyond my control, wrote to me again, in a kindly and friendly way. It had never occurred to her, she said, that feature writers did not give their own titles to the articles they wrote. What a worry it must be, she thought, what with possible misprints, etc. to be a writer. If only those were the only hazards of the trade…

  I think it may be of interest to record what my correspondent, a Mrs Dorothy Sutcliffe, had to say about the correct way to produce ‘a heavenly fluffy mound of translucent ambrosia which is obtainable only by using Bramleys (no others will do). Put your sliced apples, about 1 lb, in a pan on a good heat, boil up rapidly with a dessertspoon of water and about 3–4 oz of granulated sugar, stirring as you go, and there you are. Easy as pie’. Mrs Sutcliffe also told me that she ‘would not consider apple Charlotte, apple Betty, Eve’s pudding, or the famous North Country apple pie worth the effort if made with anything other than Bramley apples’. Good Big Bramleys then? But what apple did they use in the North before the birth of the Bramley?

  1. Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme Saint-Ange (Larousse, 1927).

  Crackling

  A military gentleman I know who used to run a club once told me that one of his clients was asking for the kind of dishes ‘which are practically burnt, you know.’ After some interrogation I tumbled to what was wanted and it seemed it wasn’t so much a question of the breakfast toast as of that method of cooking which is so typically French, the method whereby gelatinous food such as pigs’ trotters and breast of lamb is coated with breadcrumbs and grilled to a delicious sizzling, crackling crispness, deep golden brown and here and there slightly blackened and scorched. At the same time the meat itself, usually pre-cooked, remains moist and tender.

  To achieve the characteristic and alluring stage of doneness in this kind of dish needs a bit of practice and a certain amount of dash. You have to watch the food while it’s under the grill, as if indeed it were toast, and you have to be brave enough to let it go on grilling until you think you’ve gone just too far – the same applies, incidentally, to the kind of gratin dishes of vegetables or fish in which the top surface is covered with breadcrumbs. For unless the dish has a crisp blistered crust, slightly charred round the edges, it doesn’t quite come off.

  One of the breadcrumb-grilled dishes I like best is the one called breast of lamb Ste. Ménéhould. It is very cheap (breast of English lamb was 8d. a pound at Harrods last Saturday – one often finds a cheap cut cheaper and of better quality in a high-class butchery than in a so-called cheap one, and 2½ lb was plenty for four), but I am not pretending it is a dish for ten-minute cooks. It is one for those who have the time and the urge to get real value out of cheap ingredients. First you have to braise or bake the meat in the oven with sliced carrots, an onion or two, a bunch of herbs and, if you like, a little something extra in the way of flavouring such as two or three ounces of a cheap little bit of bacon or salt pork, plus seasonings and about a pint of water. It takes about two and a half to three hours – depending on the quality of the meat – covered, in a slow oven. Then, while the meat is still warm, you slip out the bones, leave the meat to cool, preferably with a weight on it, and then slice it into strips slightly on the bias and about one and a half to two inches wide. Next, spread each strip with a little mustard, paint it with beaten egg (one will be enough for 2½ lb of meat), then coat it with the breadcrumbs, pressing them well down into the meat and round the sides. (I always use breadcrumbs which I’ve made myself from a French loaf, sliced, and dried in the plate drawer underneath the oven. I know people who think this business of making breadcrumbs is a terrible worry, but once the bread is dried it’s a matter of minutes to pound it up with a rolling pin or with a pestle – quicker than doing it in the electric blender.)

  All this breadcrumbing finished, you can put the meat on a grid over a baking dish and leave it until you are ready to cook it. Then it goes into a moderate oven for about twenty minutes, because if you put it straight under the grill the outside gets browned before the meat itself is hot. As you transfer the whole lot to the grill pour a very little melted butter over each slice, put them close to the heat, then keep a sharp look-out and turn each piece as the first signs of sizzling and scorching appear.

  The plates and dishes should be sizzling too, and some sort of sharp, oil-based sauce – a vinaigrette, a tartare, a mustardy mayonnaise – usually goes with this kind of dish. As a matter of fact it can be made with a good deal less fiddling about in a way described to me by M. Kaufeler, the head chef at the Dorchester. No need, he said, for the boning and slicing of the meat once it’s cooked. Just grill it whole or in large chunks. He added that in his youth he and his fellow apprentice cooks used to eat this dish frequently. They called it Park Railings. (It’s a system of cooking which evidently engenders picturesque names. Once in a Lyonnais restaurant I had a hefty slab of tripe grilled in this way. It was called Fireman’s Apron and even to a non-tripe-eater was made delicious by the lovely crackling crust.) I tried M. Kaufeler’s method, and although I did not think it as successful as the Ste. Ménéhould one, I found that it did work a treat for the American cut of spare-ribs of pork (not the fore-end joint we call spare-rib, but a belly piece) which Sainsbury’s are now selling at about 2s. a pound. Not much meat on these cuts, but what there is, tender and sweet. It needs less initial cooking time than the lamb – about one hour. It’s the kind of food you have to pick up in your fingers, and I rather like something of this sort for Sunday lunch. The first cooking is light work for Saturday and the breadcrumbing business is a soothing occupation when you’ve had enough of the Sunday papers.r />
  The Spectator, 11 August 1961

  Your Perfected Hostess

  Not so long ago it was quiche lorraine. You could hardly go out to a cocktail party without somebody tipping you off about the delicious quiche they made in the penthouse restaurant of the new block at the far end of the Finchley Road. At the dinner-table grave discussions would arise as to the proper ingredients of a quiche and the desirability or otherwise of putting cheese in the filling.

  No doubt it was the recipes put out by the public relations departments of our big food firms and taken up by magazines as editorial backing for advertising which in the end put the quiche out of business as a talking point.

  By the time our aspiring cooks had absorbed instructions to make this French regional dish with a prefabricated pie-shell, a couple of triangles of processed cheese and a tin of evaporated milk, nothing much of the original remained. The Lorraine part had got away from the quiche, and with it its charm and glamour.