An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  And the English customers will pay £3.10s. a head for this version of a meal which in its original form cost about 25s. for two including service. And they will like it, and they will go home and try to reproduce it in their own kitchens – adding of course a little frill here, a trimming there, an extra vegetable, a few mushrooms in the beef stew …

  It does seem to me that with so much talk about art versus fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it which you like, of leaving well alone. This is a prerequisite of any first-class meal (as opposed to one isolated first-class dish) on any level whatsoever; so is the capacity, among the customers if you are a restaurateur and among your friends if you are an amateur cook, to appreciate well when it is left alone. It’s a capacity which would make meals a lot cheaper and cooking a great deal easier.

  The Spectator, 7 July 1961

  *

  The London restaurant food described in this article was typical of three or four Belgravia-Knightsbridge-Fulham establishments successful and popular at the time, and subsequently much imitated. Indeed the same type of food, liberally sauced, densely garnished, is to be found in any number of London and provincial restaurants (study the Good Food Guide and you will see what I mean) and in up-market pubs. Prices have changed. The English attitude to eating out has not. Quantity is all.

  As for the genuine Provençal restaurant which triggered off my Spectator article, it was just that–genuine and Provençal. It was in a small Varois town called Rians. Last time I went there, in the late nineteen-sixties, road-widening outside and modernization within had made the place difficult to recognize. We did not stop for a meal. The restaurant is called the Esplanade. It is still listed in the Michelin Guide.

  1973

  An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

  Once upon a time there was a celebrated restaurant called the Hôtel de la Tête d’Or on the Mont-St-Michel just off the coast of Normandy. The reputation of this house was built upon one single menu which was served day in day out for year after year. It consisted of an omelette, ham, a fried sole, pré-salé lamb cutlets with potatoes, a roast chicken and salad, and a dessert. Cider and butter were put upon the table and were thrown in with the price of the meal, which was two francs fifty in pre-1914 currency.

  But it wasn’t so much what now appears to us as the almost absurd lavishness of the menu which made Madame Poulard, proprietress of the hotel, celebrated throughout France. It was the exquisite lightness and beauty of the omelettes, cooked by the proprietress herself, which brought tourists flocking to the mère Poulard’s table.

  Quite a few of these customers subsequently attempted to explain the particular magic which Madame Poulard exercised over her eggs and her frying pan in terms of those culinary secrets which are so dear to the hearts of all who believe that cookery consists of a series of conjuring tricks. She mixed water with the eggs, one writer would say, she added cream asserted another, she had a specially made pan said a third, she reared a breed of hens unknown to the rest of France claimed a fourth. Before long, recipes for the omelette de la mère Poulard began to appear in magazines and cookery books. Some of these recipes were very much on the fanciful side. One I have seen even goes so far as to suggest she put foie gras into the omelette. Each writer in turn implied that to him or her alone had Madame Poulard confided the secret of her omelettes.

  At last, one fine day, a Frenchman called M. Robert Viel, interested in fact rather than surmise, wrote to Madame Poulard, by this time long retired from her arduous labours, and asked her once and for all to clear up the matter. Her reply, published in 1932 in a magazine called La Table, ran as follows:

  6 June 1932

  Monsieur Viel,

  Here is the recipe for the omelette: I break some good eggs in a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it, and I shake it constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you.

  Annette Poulard.

  So much for secrets.

  But, you will say, everyone knows that the success of omelette making starts with the pan and not with the genius of the cook. And a heavy pan with a perfectly flat base is, of course a necessity. And if you are one of those who feel that some special virtue attaches to a venerable black iron pan unwashed for twenty years, then you are probably right to cling to it.

  Cookery does, after all, contain an element of the ritualistic and however clearly one may understand that the reason for not washing and scouring omelette pans is the risk of thereby causing rust spots and scratches which would spoil the surface of the pan and cause the eggs to stick, one may still have a superstitious feeling that some magic spell will be broken if water is allowed to approach the precious pan. Soap and water, come not near, come not near our omelette pan … (Personally, I keep my old iron omelette pan, the surface protected by a film of oil, for pancakes, and use an aluminium one for omelettes and wash it up like any other utensil. This is not perversity, but simply the ritual which happens to suit me and my omelettes.)

  As to the omelette itself, it seems to me to be a confection which demands the most straightforward approach. What one wants is the taste of the fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon. And although there are those who maintain that wine and egg dishes don’t go together I must say I do regard a glass or two of wine as not, obviously, essential but at least as an enormous enhancement of the enjoyment of a well-cooked omelette. In any case if it were true that wine and eggs are bad partners, then a good many dishes, and in particular, such sauces as mayonnaise, Hollandaise and Béarnaise would have to be banished from meals designed round a good bottle, and that would surely be absurd. But we are not in any case considering the great occasion menu but the almost primitive and elemental meal evoked by the words: ‘Let’s just have an omelette and a glass of wine.’

  Perhaps first a slice of home-made pâté and a few olives, afterwards a fresh salad and a piece of ripe creamy cheese or some fresh figs or strawberries … How many times have I ordered and enjoyed just such a meal in French country hotels and inns in preference to the set menu of truite meunière, entrecôte, pommes paille and crème caramel which is the French equivalent of the English roast and two veg. and apple tart and no less dull when you have experienced it two or three times.

  There was, no doubt there still is, a small restaurant in Avignon where I used to eat about twice a week, on market days, when I was living in a rickety old house in a crumbling Provençal hill-top village about twenty miles from the city of the Popes. Physically and emotionally worn to tatters by the pandemonium and splendour of the Avignon market, tottering under the weight of the provisions we had bought and agonized at the thought of all the glorious things which we hadn’t or couldn’t, we would make at last for the restaurant Molière to be rested and restored.

  It was a totally unpretentious little place and the proprietors had always been angelically kind, welcoming and generous. They purveyed some particularly delicious marc de Champagne and were always treating us to a glass or two after lunch so that by the time we piled into the bus which was to take us home we were more than well prepared to face once more the rigours of our mistral-torn village. But even more powerful a draw than the marc was the delicious cheese omelette which was the Molière’s best speciality. The recipe was given to me by the proprietress whose name I have most ungratefully forgotten, but whose omelette, were there any justice in the world, would be as celebrated as that of Madame Poulard. Here it is.

  OMELETTE MOLIÈRE

  Beat one tablespoon of finely grated Parmesan with 3 eggs and a little pepper.

  Warm the pan a minute over the fire. Put in half an oz of butter. Turn up
the flame. When the butter bubbles and is about to change colour, pour in the eggs.

  Add one tablespoon of very fresh Gruyère cut into little dice, and one tablespoon of thick fresh cream. Tip the pan towards you, easing some of the mixture from the far edge into the middle. Then tip the pan away from you again, filling the empty space with some of the still liquid eggs. By the time you have done this twice, the Gruyère will have started to melt and your omelette is ready. Fold it over in three with a fork or palette knife, and slide it on to the warmed omelette dish. Serve it instantly.

  With our meals in Avignon we generally drank local wine, pink or red, which was nothing much to write home about (the wine of our own village was notable though: the worst I have ever consistently had to drink) but what I would choose nowadays if I had the chance would be a deliciously scented Alsatian Traminer or a white burgundy such as the lovely Meursault – Genevrières of 1955, or a Loire wine, perhaps Sancerre or a Pouilly Fumé – anyway, you see what I mean. I like white wines with all cheese dishes, and especially when the cheese in question is Gruyère. No doubt this is only a passing phase, because as a wine drinker but not a wine expert one’s tastes are constantly changing. But one of the main points about the enjoyment of food and wine seems to me to lie in having what you want when you want it and in the particular combination you fancy.

  T. B. Layton’s Besides, September–December 1959

  Chez Barattero

  From 1956 to 1961 I contributed a monthly cookery article to London Vogue.In those days cookery writers were very minor fry. Expenses were perks paid to photographers, fashion editors and other such exalted personages. Foreign currency allowances were severely restricted, so cookery contributors didn’t come in for subsidised jaunts to Paris or marathons round three star eating cathedrals. They were supposed to supply their articles out of some inexhaustible well of knowledge and their ingredients out of their own funds. At a monthly fee of £20 an article (increased at some stage, I think, to £25) it was quite a struggle to keep up the flow of properly tested recipes, backed up with informative background material, local colour and general chatter. So it was with gratitude that one year I accepted an offer from my editor, the original and enlightened Audrey Withers, to go on the occasional trip to France, provided with £100 from Condé Nast to help cover restaurant meals, hotels, petrol and so on. To be sure, £100 wasn’t exactly princely even in those days, but it was double the ordinary currency allowance, and even though those trips were very much France on a shoestring, the knowledge I derived from them was valuable. In French provincial restaurants at that time local and regional dishes weren’t always double-priced on a ‘menu touristique’. Some, incredible as it now seems, would be listed as a matter of course on the everyday menus of quite ordinary restaurants. Asked nicely, a patron might come up with a speciality based, say, on some local farmhouse pork product, or on a cheese peculiar to the immediate district, perhaps an omelette of the chef’s own devising, or a simple fish dish with an uncommon sauce. It was for ideas and stimulus that I was looking, not restaurant set pieces.

  On one trip, however, I came to make the acquaintance of Madame Barattero and her Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre in the Ardèche. Now, a hotel with a Michelin two-star restaurant attached might not seem exactly the appropriate choice for people on a restricted budget. As things turned out, that particular two-star restaurant-hotel proved, in the long run, very much cheaper, infinitely better value, and far more rewarding than most of the technically cheap places we’d found. Staying at Lamastre on half-pension terms was restful and comfortable. Every day we drove out to the countryside, usually taking a picnic, or lunching at a small town or village restaurant. In the evening we were provided by Madame Barattero with a delicious dinner made up of quite simple dishes geared to the price charged to pensionnaires. Prime ingredients and skilled cooking were, however, very much included in our en pension terms. That lesson was a valuable one, and seemed well worth passing on to my readers.

  Madame Barattero and her chef Monsieur Verrier outside the Hôtel du Midi, photograph by Anthony Denney, C1959

  My account of the Hôtel du Midi was published in Vogue in September 1958. I should add that while much of the material published in Vogue as a result of my trips to France in the fifties was incorporated in French Provincial Cooking, this was one of several articles which got away. There did not seem to be a place for it in the book, and in fact it was, in its day, unique for a Vogue food article in that it included no recipes. It was, again, Audrey Withers who took the decision to publish an article quite unorthodox by the rules prevailing at the time. I appreciated her imaginative gesture. With Madame Barattero I remained on friendly terms for many years, receiving a moving welcome every time I visited her hotel. Two years ago, after a brief retirement, Madame Barattero died. Her declining years had been clouded by increasing deafness, by the withdrawal of one of her Michelin stars, and I believe other untoward happenings. The restaurant of the Hôtel du Midi is now in the hands of the same chef who was in charge of the kitchens all those years ago, and who had long since become a partner in the business. I have not visited Lamastre for several years now, so cannot express any opinion on the cooking. I am glad though to be able to republish my article, as a tribute to Madame Barattero’s memory.

  *

  Rose Barattero is the euphonious name of the proprietress of the Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre in the Ardèche. Slim, elegant, her pretty grey hair in tight curls all over her head, the minuscule red ribbon of the Legion of Honour on her grey dress, Madame Barattero is an impressive little figure as she stands on the terrace of her hotel welcoming her guests as they drive into the main square of the small provincial town whose name she has made famous throughout France.

  Here, in this town, in the modest hotel which stands back to back with her own, she was born. Her parents were hotel keepers, her brother inherited, and still runs, the old Hôtel de la Poste. Her sister has a hotel at St-Vallier down on the Rhône. Her husband, a niçois, and a relation of the Escoffier family, started his career as an apprentice at the Carlton in London, and was already making a name for himself as a promising chef when she married him and they set up on their own at the Hôtel du Midi.

  When M. Barattero died in 1941 the hotel was already celebrated for its cooking. His young widow took over the running of the hotel and the restaurant, putting the kitchen in the charge of a hardworking and modest chef who had started as Barattero’s apprentice. His wife looks after the accounts and the reception work.

  During the past fifteen years or so the fame of Barattero’s at Lamastre has spread throughout France; Madame Barattero’s name is among the most respected in the entire French restaurant industry.

  In the fiercely competitive world of the French catering business this is no ordinary achievement. Lamastre is a town of little over three thousand inhabitants. It is not on a main road; the country round about, although magnificent and infinitely varied, is not known to tourists in the way in which, let us say, Provence or the château country of the Loire are known, for there is not very much left in the way of architectural or historical interest for the ordinary sightseer. In other words, a place like Barattero’s must rely, not on the local population and the passing tourist, but upon those customers who make the journey to Lamastre expressly for the cooking.

  Michelin awards Madame Barattero two stars. Now, although Michelin one-star restaurants are very much on the chancy side, both as regards quality and price, and such of their three-star establishments (there are only eleven in the whole of France) into which I have penetrated, either a little too rarefied in atmosphere for my taste – or, as Raymond Mortimer observed recently of a famous Paris house, the food is too rich and so are the customers – it is rare to find the two-star places at fault. As far as the provinces are concerned these two-star establishments (there are fifty-nine of them in the whole country, about twenty of which are in Paris) offer very remarkable value. I do not mean to suggest that they are places for t
he impecunious, but rather that while the cooking which they have to offer is unique, the charges compare more than favourably with those prevailing in hundreds of other French establishments where the surroundings vary between the grandiose and the squalid and where the cooking, while probably sound enough, is uneven or without distinction.

  I have often heard the criticism that these modest establishments of two-star quality, offering, as most of them do, no more than half a dozen specialities at most, are places whose resources are exhausted after a couple of meals, or alternatively that the accommodation which they have to offer is not up to the standard of the cooking. So tourists make their pilgrimage to eat a meal at a place like the Midi at Lamastre, the Chapon Fin at Thoissey, or the Armes de France at Ammerschwihr and move on without knowing that they could have stayed for several days, not only in comfort and quiet and enjoying a variety of beautifully cooked dishes, but quite often at considerably reduced prices for pension or half-pension terms.

  Early last summer we drove from Lyon down the western bank of the Rhône towards St-Péray, and there turned off up the steep and beautiful road which leads to Lamastre and St-Agrève. We had been warned that the forty-odd kilometres from St-Péray to Lamastre would take us twice as long as we expected because of the sinuous road, so we had allowed plenty of time, and arrived in front of the Hôtel du Midi while the afternoon sun was still shining over the little place. Our welcome from Madame Barattero was so warm and the rooms we were shown so airy, light and sympathetically furnished, the bathroom so immense and shining, the little garden below our terrace so pretty and orderly, that we decided there and then to stay several days. We discussed half-pension terms with Madame and then made ourselves scarce until dinner time.