A similar fate had already overtaken the Italian pizza and the salade niçoise, which by the time they’d all finished with it turned out to be nothing more than the time-honoured English mixture of lettuce, tomato, beetroot and hard-boiled eggs. And now it’s the turn of a cold soup called crème vichyssoise.
This recipe, as evolved some forty years ago by Louis Diat, the French-born chef of the New York Ritz-Carlton, is, basically, every French housewife’s potato and leek soup, puréed, chilled, enriched with fresh cream and sprinkled with chives. One of our troubles about reproducing this dish here in England is that leeks go out of season about the beginning, if any, of the summer, and don’t normally come into the shops again until the end of it. Which means that if you must have vichyssoise during the heat-wave period then it has to come out of a tin. Those people, however, who won’t stoop to tinned soups but still want to be in the swim with their vichyssoise, have taken to using cucumber instead of leeks, and watercress or mint instead of chives – which are hard to come by unless you grow them yourself. The mixture is still thick and rich and cold – and what’s, after all, in a name?
All this seems to be typical of the uneasy phase which English cooking is going through. As soon as any dish with a vaguely romantic-sounding name (you may well ask why anyone should associate Vichy with romance) becomes known you find it’s got befogged by the solemn mystique which can elevate a routine leek and potato soup into what the heroine of a recent upper-class-larks novel refers to as ‘my perfected Vichyssoise’. Then a semi-glamour monthly publishes a recipe in which the original few pence-worth of kitchen garden vegetables are omitted entirely and their place taken by cream of chicken soup and French cream cheese. With astounding rapidity the food processors move in, and launch some even further debased version which in a wink is turning up at banquets and parties and on the menus of provincial hotels.
‘INGREDIENTS Skim Milk Powder, Edible Fat, Flour, Gelatine, Super-Glycerinated Fats, Whole Dried Egg, Cayenne Pepper, Lemon, Oil, Edible Colour. Immerse unopened bag in boiling water and simmer for ten minutes.’ So runs the legend on a packet of boil-in-the-bag hollandaise (cut along dotted line and squeeze into sauceboat) garnered from the deep-freeze in a self-service store in the King’s Road, Chelsea.
What I’m waiting for is the day when it’s going to be clever to serve some relaxed English dish like cauliflower cheese. It’ll be fun to watch it going up in the world, and getting into the glossies (pin a gigantic starched linen napkin round the platter) and the sub-Mitford novels (Jean-Pierre’s got a hangover and won’t touch a thing except Fortnum’s tinned cauliflower cheese), thence into the women’s weeklies (Maureen was piping her own very special cheese dip round the cauliflower. The candles were lit …), and eventually through all the inevitable transformations and degradations until, dehydrated, double-quick deep-frozen, reboiled and debagged, it finally reaches the tables of our residential hotels and the trays of forty-guinea-a-week nursing homes.
Punch, 6 November 1961
Secrets
Paris isn’t the only city where August-stranded inhabitants find themselves bereft of familiar tables to rest their elbows on and nowhere to take the visitors who turn up without warning. In my quarter of London two at least of the better restaurants have been closed for the holidays. Investigation of other local resources has produced the Beau Geste, an establishment situated on the South Kensington-Fulham-Chelsea borders. If this restaurant were listed, which it isn’t, in any of the guide books, I think it would be described as of modest aspect. This means that it doesn’t have a striped awning or canopy over its doorway and is about the equivalent of any of those restaurants in any French town which you notice only because outside you bump into a cut-out figure representing a waiter proffering a prix-fixe menu at 8 N.F. and poulet rôti cresson (supp. 4 N.F.). In France you don’t go into this restaurant but in London s.w. 3/7/10 you do. Inside you find that the walls of the Beau Geste are papered in vandyke brown. On them hang, here and there, a brass sabot or two and a handful of framed reproductions of sketches of picturesque corners of places which might be Montmartre, St Ives or Florence. There are eight tables. At midday only two of them are set with cloths, but such as they are they are clean, cheap and bright. The Beau Geste is not licensed so you have brought your own wine. The waiter takes it away and brings it back five minutes later, and the label looks a trifle damp. You ask him what he has done to the wine. He is Spanish, he does not understand. He fetches the proprietor from behind the matchboard partition at the end of the restaurant. M. Pigeon says ah yes, the wine was cold so he has permitted himself to warm it a little. He has been five years with the French navy, alors vous comprenez madame je connais les vins, moi. What he doesn’t connait is that I like my Beaujolais cold, straight from my cellar.
The hors-d’œuvre announced on the yellow menu sheet of the Beau Geste are piments vinaigrette, rillettes de Tours, pâté maison, salade niçoise, saucisson de Lyon, egg mayonnaise. There are omelettes, three or four fish dishes including amazingly enough two scampi variations and truite meunière. Meat dishes are entrecôtes and veal escalopes, each in three different ways. There is a good line in tinned vegetables such as petits pois and flageolets, and the routine pommes sautées. There is a salade verte and a salade panachée – the panache consists of tomatoes quartered à l’anglaise – a plateau de fromages and for dessert three kinds of ice and two sweet omelettes, jam and flambé.
I have already tried the piments vinaigrette. They are tinned, but M. Pigeon makes the best of them with a good dressing, slivers of onion and chopped parsley. Today we will have saucisson de Lyon, entrecôte maître d’hôtel and a salad without panache. The saucisson de Lyon turns out to be Danish salami. As we are picking at it Mme Pigeon, in hat and mackintosh, walks through the restaurant from the street and disappears behind the partition. She re-emerges with an apron tied round her waist, walks past our table, glances to see what wine we have brought. The entrecôtes appear. They are not the best quality Aberdeen Angus meat but they are well and freshly cooked, hot, and served on hot plates. Our green salads are brought, on flat oval hors-d’œuvre dishes. My guest says the salad is delicious. I think she is being polite, because she is herself an instinctive mixer of exquisite green salads. We drink our tepid coffee. M. Pigeon, dressed in his street clothes, bustles out of the restaurant. Madame comes to collect payment. With the tip about £2.10s. Madame says no, no holidays this year. Business has not been famous. It has been a sad summer.
Five days later I take another guest to the Beau Geste, today we will try one of the plats du jour announced on the slip of paper attached to the yellow menu sheet. M. Pigeon peers round the partition. Yes, the veau à la fermière is an escalope in a sauce au vin rouge. Il est très bon. We order it, plus green salads and one portion of pâté maison for the more experimental member of the party. The pâté is of M. Pigeon’s own confection. It is not discreditable. The red wine sauce with the escalope is. It is a thick brown paste. A fork would stand upright in it. The escalopes could be veal. They could just as easily be the bedroom slippers I threw away last week. My guest says the green salad is the best she has ever had in a London restaurant. I don’t doubt that she is telling the truth. The coffee is lukewarm. As we are drinking it (it is 2.20 p.m.) M. Pigeon walks through the restaurant in his street clothes. At 2.25 the waiter also leaves. Madame stays behind to collect the £2 odd for one portion of pâté, two escalopes, two green salads, two coffees.
Four days later I am to be guest at the Beau Geste. It is Saturday and on Saturdays you can park a car in the street right outside the Beau Geste, a circumstance which naturally entrances my hostess. What for a first dish today? The rillettes, are they made by M. Pigeon? The waiter shakes his head. We can’t make out if this means yes, no, or doesn’t know. We will have entrecôtes only, one with tinned pimentos and fried onions, one with a tomato and anchovy garnish; and two green salads. The steaks cost 15s.6d. and 14s.6d. respectively. They are very nice. My h
ostess is a good cook. She always has a lovely salad with her meals. Nevertheless she says she wishes she could make a salad as good as M. Pigeon’s. As we are finishing our tepid coffee M. Pigeon leaves. On Saturdays midday at the Beau Geste is quite lively. At other tables people are sitting over their factory-made sorbets. Madame attends to them. As she passes our table she looks apprehensive. Perhaps we, or the other customers, may stay too long. She turns out the lights. Possibly the Spanish waiter gets overtime on Saturdays. He remains to collect my hostess’s £2 odd for two steaks, two salads, two coffees.
On Tuesday an old friend turns up from the country. She wants me to have lunch with her, and to go shopping afterwards. We will take a bottle of wine round to the Beau Geste and eat quickly. The plats du jour today are potage cultivateur (that’s an old familiar I haven’t seen on a menu since the days of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway) and escalope de veau lyonnaise, and changes her mind when I decide on the Spanish omelette. She says I always get something better than she does. Two omelettes and two green salads then. The Spanish omelettes aren’t too bad. The filling contains tinned petits pois, tinned pimientos and nicely cooked potatoes and onions. The omelettes are not at all Spanish but also they are not at all stodgy. We enjoy them. Good gracious me, says D., this salad is delicious. Her faith returns. Shall we try the orange sorbet? I deflect her to cheese. The Spanish waiter brings the plateau. On it are a half Camembert, a whole new Camembert, a little log-shaped cheese which might be Neufchatel, and a piece of tome aux raisins about one inch square. D. says the Camembert looks a bit shrivelled. The waiter says something we take to mean that that is only because it has been in the fridge. We choose the near-Neufchatel. Perhaps we should have plumped for the sorbet. At least it wouldn’t have been any more icy. Today the coffee is not tepid. It is cold. Ten minutes later we get our bill. For two omelettes, two salads, cheese and coffee thirty shillings with tip.
Cherished in our dreams, held close to our hearts in deathless legend is the humble French restaurant, the unpretentious petit coin pas cher where one may drop in at any time and be sure always of a friendly welcome, a well-cooked omelette, a good salad, a glass of honest wine. The Beau Geste is the dream made manifest. There are those, and I am one of them, who are so disloyal as to think that thirty shillings for two omelettes, two salads and two coffees accompanied by honest wine of one’s own providing is not all that pas cher. Like myself they will probably still go back to the Beau Geste and for the same reasons, which are that if M. Pigeon is a rascal, he is at least a cheery one and certainly has a deft hand with an omelette pan and a tin-opener. That he can get away with his prices is partly our own fault, partly that of the local standards of catering. When the alternative is cold sausage rolls and a glass of warm Spanish Sauterne in the local pub we are pleased to get anything eatable at all for two pounds ten shillings. And M. Pigeon’s brown wallpaper and even the concierge-type blight cast by his wife are still rather more acceptable than the amateur theatricals of the ex-Eighth Army corporal down the road, whose eating establishment is got up to look like the inside of a saddler’s shop and where if you order an omelette as likely as not it will turn up inside a crust of puff pastry, and as for the composition of the dressing on the avocado pear it is a secret, and one you don’t want to penetrate. M. Pigeon is at least not revealing much of a secret when, if you can catch him as he hurries to the pub before closing time, he tells you that his salad dressing is made with arachide oil and malt vinegar. This I have kept from my friends and guests. Where French cooking is concerned they like secrets. They shall have them.
The Spectator, 6 September 1963
Ladies’ Halves
What on earth comes over wine waiters when they take the orders of a woman entertaining another woman in a restaurant? Twice in one week recently I have dined in different restaurants (not, admittedly, in the expense-account belt of the West End, where women executives have tables and bottles of 1945 Margaux permanently at the ready, or it’s nice to think so, anyway) and with different women friends, on one occasion as the hostess and on the other as the guest. On both occasions, after the regulation lapse of twenty minutes, the wine waiter brought a half-bottle of the wine ordered instead of a whole one. Please don’t think I have anything against half-bottles; on the contrary, I find they have a special charm of their own. There are occasions when a half is what one wants, a half and nothing else, in which case I really don’t believe one has to be a master-woman to be capable of specifying one’s wishes in the matter. I suppose the assumption on the part of wine waiters that women are too frail to consume or too stingy to pay for a whole bottle must be based on some sort of experience, but instead of having to go back to change the order (ten minutes the second time, one is getting edgy by then, and well into the second course; if they held up the food to synchronize with the wine one mightn’t mind so much) he could inquire in the first place, in a discreet way. Or even in an indiscreet way, like the steward on the Edinburgh–London express a few years ago who yelled at me across the rattling crockery and two other bemused passengers, ‘A bottle, madam? A whole bottle? Do you know how large a whole bottle is?’
The Spectator, 13 July 1962
Letting Well Alone
VITAMIN H, JAM reads the last item on the menu of the famous Azanian banquet in Black Mischief. I remembered about Seth’s dinner (‘There is the question of food. I have been reading that now it is called Vitamins’) when the proprietor of a village inn in the Var, about twenty-five miles from Aix-en-Provence, brought us bowls of jam as the final course of our delicious lunch. For the English, it’s always good for a laugh that the French eat jam for pudding – and jam by itself, jam without bread and butter, without toast or teacakes, or cream or even sponge or roly-poly. Just jam, and the point about this jam, and I can’t help how quaint it sounds, was its absolute Tightness on this particular occasion. The meal was faultless of its kind, a roughish country inn kind, beginning with tomato salad with chopped onion, the little black olives of the Nyons district, and home-made pâté – the basic hors-d’œuvre in this part of Provence – each item on its own separate dish, and left on the table so we could help ourselves. It was followed by a gratin of courgettes and rice. This dish, new to me, was made with courgettes cooked in butter and sieved, the resulting purée then mixed with béchamel and rice, all turned into a shallow dish and browned in the oven. A mixture with delicate and unexpected flavours. Then came a daube of beef, an excellent one, with an unthickened but short sauce of wine and tomato purée, beautifully scented with bayleaf and thyme, brought to the table, and left on it, in a metal casserole in which it kept sizzling hot. Finally, this famous jam – home-made, of green melons, fresh-tasting, not too sweet, a hint of lemons in the background. The wine was coarse red, by the litre. Even the coffee was drinkable, and the bill was very modest.
The English public must be sick and tired of being told that cooking is an art and that the French are the great exponents of it. Or, alternatively, that cooking is not an art but a question of good basic ingredients, which we have more of and better than anyone else (it’s surprising how many otherwise quite sane English people really believe this) and so QED we also have the best cooking, while the French, poor things, toil away in their kitchens in a desperate effort to disguise what Lady Barnett, in a speech delivered at a caterers’ dinner in the Midlands a few weeks ago, referred to as ‘meat not fit to eat and fish without taste’. I don’t want to enter into this abysmal argument. I just want to describe that same Provençal meal as it would be if one ordered it in a London restaurant. With the exception of the tomato salad, which can’t be made here because tomatoes fit for salad aren’t acceptable to the greengrocery trade, there was nothing about that meal which couldn’t be reproduced by a moderately skilful English cook, professional or amateur.
So here we go. A slab of pâté, smelling powerfully of smoked bacon and rosemary, is brought to your table on a teaplate loaded with lettuce leaves; it is covered wit
h a trellis work of radishes or watercress, interspersed with a tasteful pattern of very large olives, brown rather than black. (Here we can’t get the fine black olives of the Nyonsais, the best in Provence, but Italian, Greek, and North African small black olives are quite easy to come by. Those huge brown ones they sell in delicatessens are bitter and over-salt.) For pretty, as American fashion journalists say, there is a spoonful of tinned red peppers, and a couple of gherkins falling off the overcrowded plate. Now, the gratin of courgettes and rice. Well, that doesn’t contain fish or meat, so it’s not a course by English standards. What about adding a few scampi, or a slice or two of ham, or some little bits of bacon? Or better still, economize on the service or washing up and present it with the meat, plus, naturally, potatoes and a green vegetable. What? The taste of the courgette purée is too fragile to go with that beef and wine? Put plenty of cheese in it then, that’ll pep it up. And anyway that daube, it smells all right and it tastes good but there isn’t quite enough gravy with it. Add a cupful of the chef’s brown sauce to each serving, it’ll make it nice and thick and it’ll look more shiny and stylish on the plate – it’ll be on a plate of course, there’d be chaos if you left a casserole of the stuff on the customers’ tables. And now we get to our Vitamin H. Will the customers stand for jam potted in plastic thimbles like they have on British Railways and at Ye Old Sussex Tea Gardens? Going too far perhaps. Better heat up the jam, stir in a little Curaçao, a dash of vanilla essence, some green colouring to cheer it up, and serve it as a sauce with ice-cream. That’s more like it. Charge them 8s.6d. for it, it’s worth it what with all the trouble it gave the cook. And the wine? This is an expensive meal, so the red plonk won’t do. Put a bottle of Château Pont d’Avignon rosé ready in a basket, will you?
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 5