An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  Now it must be explained that chez Barattero there are five special dishes for which the house is renowned. They are galantine de caneton, a pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal, a poularde en vessie, a saucisse en feuilletage and a dish of artichoke hearts with a creamy sauce which they call artichauts Escoffier. If you were really trying you could, I suppose, taste them all at one meal (indeed four of them figure on the 1,800 franc menu, the most expensive one, the others being 1,600 and 1,200) but we could take our time and enjoy them gradually. We left the choice of our menus to Madame. Indeed, there was little alternative but to do so. For although she does not herself do the cooking Madame has been studying her guests and composing menus for them for thirty-four years and she neither likes being contradicted nor is capable of making a mistake in this respect. She knew without being told that we didn’t want to overload ourselves with food, however delicious; with an unerring touch she provided us night after night with menus which I think it is worth describing if only to demonstrate one or two important points about French restaurant cooking. First, how varied the food can be even in a place where the advertised specialities are very limited; secondly, how well worth while it is eating even the simplest of the routine dishes of French cookery produced in an absolutely first-class manner. (‘One does not come here to eat something as ordinary as œufs en gelée,’ the archbishop-like head waiter in a famous Paris restaurant once said to me. He was wrong. Such simple things are the test of a really good establishment.) And thirdly, how very much a good dish gains by being served quite on its own, without fussy garnish or heaps of vegetables to overfill you and to get in the way of your sauce, to distract from the main flavours of the chicken or the fish and to sicken you of the sight of food long before the end of the meal.

  We could have started every meal with soup had we so wished, but in fact we did so only once or twice because they were so good that we should have eaten too much. And the last part of the meal always consisted of a fine platter of cheeses and either strawberries, cherries or an ice, so I will leave those items out of the following account of our menus.

  The wines we drank were mostly recent Rhône vintages, the current wines of the house, for many of which, especially the red Hermitages, the Cornas and the Côte Rôtie, I have a particular affection. Among the whites we tried were St-Péray, Chapoutier’s Chante Alouette, Jaboulet’s La Chapelle Hermitage 1950; for those who prefer, and can afford, old burgundies and bordeaux there is a well-stocked cellar of fine vintages.

  Tuesday

  Galantine de caneton: The name is misleading to English ears. It is a whole boned duck, its flesh mixed with finely minced pork, truffles, brandy and foie gras, sewn up in the skin of the duck and cooked in the oven; the result resembles a long fat sausage with the feet of the duck protruding at one end. This pâté has a flavour of very great delicacy, and is served sliced and quite unadorned. The lettuce leaves and the little heap of potato salad which, I have an uneasy feeling, would be the inevitable garnish provided by an English restaurateur, is simply unthinkable here.

  Sole meunière: Perfectly cooked whole sole with quantities of hissing and foaming butter. Again, no garnish of any kind, and none needed.

  Blettes à la crème au gratin: Blettes, or chard, that spinach-like vegetable with fleshy white stalks is, to me, only tolerable when cooked by a master hand, but as the Barattero chef has that hand, and makes a particularly excellent cream sauce, all was well.

  Wednesday

  After an exhausting day’s driving in bad weather, and a good and not expensive lunch at the Cygne (but unsettling contemporary decor in an old hotel) in the rather depressing town of Le Puy, we returned to dinner at Lamastre.

  Potage de légumes: The routine vegetable soup of the day, but the mixture of carrots, potatoes and other vegetables was so delicate, so buttery, so full of flavour, that this alone would serve to make the reputation of a lesser restaurant. Note: although so full of flavour this soup was quite thin. I think we make our vegetable soups too thick in this country.

  Ris de veau à la crème: I have eaten too many ambitiously conceived but ill-executed dishes of sweetbreads ever again to order them of my own accord, so I was grateful to Madame Barattero for showing me how good they can be when properly done. There were mushrooms in the sauce. Perfect.

  Petit pois à la française: A big bowl of very small fresh peas (even in good restaurants it is rare nowadays not to get petits pois de conserve) cooked with little shreds of lettuce but without the little onions usually associated with the à la française manner of cooking them. The result was very creamy and good. I doubt if I shall ever again put onions with my peas.

  Thursday

  Pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal: A very remarkable dish. A variety of quenelle, but unlike the pasty quenelles one eats elsewhere, even in the much cracked-up Lyon restaurants; as light as a puff of air, with the subtle and inimitable flavour of river crayfish permeating both quenelle and the rich cream sauce. The garnish of the dish consisted of a few whole scarlet crayfish and crescents of puff pastry.

  Poularde en vessie: A 3-lb Bresse chicken, stuffed with its own liver, a little foie gras and slices of truffle, is tied up inside a pig’s bladder and cooked extremely gently in a marmite of barely simmering water for one and a half hours. As Madame Barattero said, a chicken poached in the ordinary way, however carefully, cannot help but be ‘un peu délavé’ a trifle washed out. By this system, which is an ancient one, the chicken, untouched by the cooking liquid, emerges with all its juices and flavours intact. When it is cold, as it was served to us, these juices formed inside the bladder have solidified to a small amount of clear and delicately flavoured jelly. Madame asserted that nothing was easier to cook than this dish – ‘What do you mean, why can you not get a pig’s bladder in England? You have pigs, do you not?’ – and upheld her point by adding that the chef’s eight-year old son already knows how to prepare the poulardes en vessie. A green salad with cream in the dressing was the only accompaniment to the chicken.

  Friday and Saturday

  The most important part of Friday’s meal was a sad disappointment. It was a dish of tiny grilled lamb cutlets, obviously beautiful meat, but much too undercooked for our taste.

  On Saturday evening, when épaule d’agneau was announced, I explained the trouble. The little shoulder appeared cooked to what was, for us, perfection. A beautiful golden brown on the outside and just faintly pink in the middle. It had been preceded by a delicious omelette aux champignons and was accompanied by a gratin of courgettes and tomatoes, just slightly flavoured with garlic and cooked in butter instead of olive oil as it would have been in Provence. It went admirably with the lamb, and this was a good example of a very nice dinner of quite ordinary French dishes without any particular regional flavour or speciality of the house.

  Sunday

  Next day was Whitsunday and we stayed in to lunch as well as to dinner, for, as the weekend drew near, we had been observing with fascinated interest the preparations afoot for the large number of customers expected for the fêtes. The chef had prepared fifteen of his boned and stuffed ducks and by lunchtime on Sunday dozens of poulardes tied up in pig’s bladders and scores of pain d’écrevisses were ready, all gently murmuring in their respective copper marmites.

  Until now the service at meal times had been performed entirely by Marthe and Marie, the two pretty, expertly trained young girls in black frocks and starched white aprons who also brought our breakfasts and looked after our rooms. Now two waiters and Madame’s sister from St-Vallier appeared upon the scene. There was no bustle and no panic or noise. Everything went like clockwork. And this I think partly explains what must seem a mystery to many visitors: how these unassuming places, in which the hotel part of the business is only incidental, can manage to maintain, day after day, cooking of a quality which simply could not be found in England and which is rare even in France. The answer is that they are organized and run in a way which a Guards sergeant-major would envy
, and are as well equipped to deal with a banquet for three hundred people or a steady stream of holiday visitors as they are to provide comfort and an intimate atmosphere for a handful of regular guests out of season.

  From a peaceful Sunday morning gossip in the charming blue and turquoise and cream tiled charcuterie run by M. and Madame Montagne (where there is a good restaurant in a French town or village you may be sure that a good charcuterie is not far away), I returned to Barattero’s for the promised Sunday feast. Customers were arriving from Valence, from Marseille, from Lyon. A huge shining silver-grey Rolls-Bentley was parked in the square (it was the first English car we had seen). A party of young people flung themselves off their Lambrettas and clattered round a large table. They evidently took the cooking and its reputation for granted, for they hadn’t dressed up or put on Sunday voices as we would have here for such an occasion. It was enjoyable to watch them, and all the other customers who were there simply because they were going to enjoy the food, for there was none of that holy hush which to some of us makes the grander eating places such a sore trial.

  This was our luncheon menu:

  Saucisse en feuilletage: This might be called the apotheosis of the sausage roll. A fresh, pure pork sausage (from the Montagne establishment, as I had already learned), coarsely cut and weighing about ¾ lb, is poached and then encased in flaky pastry, baked, and served hot, cut in slices. Both sausage and pastry were first class. A delicious hors-d’œuvre.

  Pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal: This seemed even better, if possible, than the first time we had eaten it, and this is quite a test, for one is inclined to be more critical when tasting a famous dish for the second time. The chef at Barattero’s has been cooking the pain d’écrevisses, and the other specialities of the house, almost every day for some thirty years, but even so I suppose it is possible that they might vary.

  Artichauts Escoffier: I am always in two minds about dishes of this kind. The cream sauce with mushrooms was very light and did not overwhelm the artichoke hearts, but all the same I wonder if they are not better quite plain; at La Mère Brazier’s in Lyon we had had a salad of whole artichoke hearts and lettuce dressed simply with a little oil and lemon, which, in its extreme simplicity, was quite delicious and the best artichoke dish I have ever eaten.

  Poulet rôti: A poulet de grain (the equivalent of a spring chicken) for two people, perfectly roasted in butter, already carved but reconstituted into its original shape, served on a long platter with a nest of miniature pommes rissolées beside it. No other garnish.

  For dinner that evening we tasted again the wonderful duck pâté, to be followed by a little roast gigot and another dish of those tender little petits pois. When we told the waiter how much we had enjoyed the lamb, he replied yes, certainly, it must be a treat to us after the mutton boiled with mint of English cookery. Some very quaint notions of English food are current in France.

  The last customers were only just leaving as we ourselves said goodbye to Madame Barattero after dinner, for we were leaving early next morning. The place had seemed full to us, but it was the time of the Algerian crisis, and had it not been for les évènements, Madame said, there would have been twice as many people. Customers would have come even from Paris. In her long, arduous and successful career as restaurateur and hotel keeper she has learned that you can never be quite sure what to expect, and even with her tremendous experience it is impossible to know how many people to cater for. As she says: ‘Thirty-four years in the hotel business, what a stint, hein?’

  Vogue, September 1958

  *

  Since writing my introductory note to the above I have received reassuring news of the food at the Hôtel du Midi. In June 1983 a reader who had stayed at Lamastre as a result of reading about Madame Barattero in French Provincial Cooking wrote me a charming letter telling me that the dinner had been ‘most delicious’. The first course had been a salade tiède – ‘ce que nous avons ici de la nouvelle cuisine’, she was told – but as you would expect subtle and different, followed by the celebrated pain d’écrevisses (the crayfish now come from Hungary), then there were cheeses, and a chariot de desserts, stylish, original ‘d’un goût très raffiné’. ‘Tout est léger ici’ said the maître d’hôtel. There was an iced soufflé aux marrons, a pistachio sorbet, oranges in grenadine, tuile tulips filled with a cream of strawberries served with a coulis. Bernard, son of maître Perrier, the chef who became Madame Barattero’s partner, and inherited from her the restaurant and hotel, of which he is now in charge, has succeeded his father as chef. It was Bernard, I learned, who had added the delicious desserts. The maître d’hôtel had said that they were the only missing elements in the range of dishes in the old days, and they are Bernard’s contribution. I remember Bernard Perrier as a small boy, and I remember also how Madame Barattero predicted that in time he would follow in his father’s footsteps. It was good to hear that the young man is fulfilling Madame’s prophecy and that the Hôtel du Midi continues to flourish.

  Dishes for Collectors

  A dish of pork and prunes seems a strange one to chase two hundred miles across France, and indeed it was its very oddity that sent me in search of it. The combination of meat with fruit is not only an uncommon one in France, it is one which the French are fond of citing as an example of the barbaric eating habits of other nations, the Germans and the Americans in particular. So to find such a dish in Tours, the very heart of sane and sober French cookery, is surprising, even given the fact that the local prunes are so renowned.

  I knew where we would go to look for the dish because I had seen it on the menu of the Rôtisserie Tourangelle on a previous occasion, when there were so many other interesting specialities that it just hadn’t been possible to get round to the quasi de porc aux pruneaux. But this time I hoped perhaps to find out how the dish was cooked as well as in what manner such a combination had become acceptable to conservative French palates.

  Driving out of Orléans toward Tours I observed for the first time the ominous entry in the new Guide Michelin concerning the Rôtisserie Tourangelle: ‘Déménagement prévu’ it said. Very well, we would get to Tours early, we would enquire upon entering the town whether by some ill-chance the restaurant was at this moment in the throes of house-moving. If so, we would not stay in Tours, but console ourselves by driving on to Langeais, where there was a hotel whose cooking was said to be worth the journey. The evening was to be our last before driving north towards Boulogne, so we specially didn’t want to make a hash of it. But we had plenty of time, the afternoon was fine, the Loire countryside lay before us in all its shining early summer beauty. We dawdled along, making a détour to Chenonceaux on the way.

  So in the end it was after seven o’clock by the time we had battled into the main street of Tours, found the Office of the Syndicat d’Initiative, and made our enquiry. No, said the pretty and efficient young lady in charge, the house-moving of the Rôtisserie Tourangelle had not yet started. All was well. ‘Déménagement prévu, indeed’, said my companion, ‘what a fuss. It’ll be prévu for the next two years’. Fifteen minutes later the car had been manœuvred into the courtyard of the charming Hotel Central, we had booked our room, the luggage was unloaded. As we were about to get into the lift I returned to the desk and asked the lady in charge if she would be so kind as to telephone chez Charvillat and book us a table, for we were already late. As I walked away, I heard her saying into the telephone ‘Comment, vous êtes fermé?’

  Yes, the déménagement had started that day. Closed for a fortnight. Well, it was hardly the fault of the charming girl at the Syndicat, but … anyway, it was now too late to move on to Langeais. We must eat at Tours and make the best of it. By the time I had explained the magnitude of the disaster to Madame at the desk, she and I were both nearly in tears. For she perfectly grasped the situation, and did not think it at all odd that we had driven two hundred miles simply to eat chez Charvillat. But all the restaurants in Tours, she said, were good. We would eat well whe
rever we went. Yes, but would we find that dish of porc aux pruneaux which by this time had become an obsession? And in any case what restaurant could possibly be as nice, as charming, as comfortable, as altogether desirable as that of M. Charvillat?

  Madame spent the next twenty minutes telephoning round Tours on our behalf, and eventually sent us, somewhat consoled, to a well-known restaurant only two minutes walk from the hotel. I wish I could end this story by saying that the place was a find, a dazzling revelation, a dozen times better than the one we had missed. But it was not as dramatic as that. It was indeed a very nice restaurant, the head waiter was friendly, and we settled down to some entirely entrancing white Vouvray while they cooked our alose à l’oseille – shad grilled and served with a sauce in the form of a runny sorrel purée. In this respect at least we had timed things properly, for the shad makes only a short seasonal appearance in the Loire. It was extremely good and nothing like as bony as shad is advertised to be. Then came this restaurant’s version of the famous pork dish, which turned out to be made with little noisettes of meat in a very remarkable sauce and of course we immediately felt reproved for doubting for one moment that an intelligent French cook could make something splendid out of even such lumpish-sounding ingredients as pork and prunes.

  It was worth all the fuss, even for the sauce alone. But, almost inevitably, it was something of an anticlimax. The combination of a long day’s drive, the sampling during the day of the lovely, poetical wines of Pouilly and of Sancerre sur place (and whatever anyone may say, they do taste different on the spot), a hideously ill-advised cream cake at an Orléans patisserie, the alternating emotions of triumph and despair following so rapidly one upon the other, not to mention a very large helping of the shad and sorrel, had wrecked our appetities. By this time it was known throughout the restaurant that some English had arrived especially to eat the porc aux pruneaux. The helpings, consequently, were very large. By the time we had eaten through it and learned how it was cooked, we were near collapse, but the maître-d’hôtel and the patronne were just warming up. If we were interested in local recipes, what about their brochet au beurre blanc and their poulet à l’estragon, and their dodine de canard? To be sure, we should have had that duck as an hors-d’œuvre, but just a slice or two now, to taste, and then at least we would have some local cheeses and a sweet?