An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  It was the early summer of 1956. The calamitous frosts of the previous winter and spring had wrought havoc with the countryside which was fearful to see. The slopes and valleys of the Vaucluse and of all that country east and north-east of Avignon to Cavaillon, Apt, Pernes-les-Fontaines, Le Thor and Carpentras, which was once the papal county of Venaissin, should have been silver and freshly grey-green in the early June sun. The whole landscape was gashed with ugly black wounds. Hundreds of olive trees, withered and blighted by the frosts and the all-blasting mistral winds which followed them, had been cut down or were standing like ancient skeletons in that fertile and beflowered landscape which is the heart and core of Provence. The tall rows of dark cypress trees, windbreaks against the destroying mistral, were unnecessary reminders that life in Provence is not always quite so idyllic as it may look to two English visitors driving one Sunday morning in early June from Malaucène near the foot of the Mont Ventoux toward a village so irresistibly named Beaumes de Venise. For the odd thing was that after we had lost our way three times in the identical piece of country, it dawned upon us that this piece of country was idyllic, almost too good to be true. In this pocket of land apparently untouched by the ravaging winter were no scars, no dead or doomed trees. The olives were bright with life and thick with young leaves. The crippled landscape was here restored and complete.

  It was perhaps the sense of relief that somewhere at least in Provence that year there would be an olive crop and peasant farmers whose livelihoods had not been utterly destroyed that made Beaumes de Venise, when eventually we reached it, rather less interesting than the little piece of country we had passed through on our way. Subsequent inquiries revealed that the olives and the olive oil of Beaumes de Venise have a substantial local reputation; and we did, I remember, remark upon the excellence of the salad and upon an unusual anchovy-flavoured, oil-based sauce offered with the routine Sunday roast chicken that day at lunch. Nothing extraordinary about that. In this region, salads with good olive oil dressings, and mayonnaise sauces tasting perceptibly of fruity oil are, or were in the days before the frost destruction, the rule rather than the exception as they are in Northern France. As for the wine, I do not remember what we drank. Probably it was that reliable wine of Provence restaurants, red Gigondas from the vineyards north of Beaumes on the far side of the Dentelles de Montmirail. The wine we did not drink was, as it turned out, the remarkable one. We did not drink it because we had never heard of it, and if it was on the wine list of the hotel – which according to Michelin it now is – we did not notice it.

  The wine of Beaumes de Venise is a natural sweet golden wine made from muscat grapes with their own appellation of Muscat de Beaumes and unmixed with the Hamburg muscat which coarsens many of the sweet wines of Provence. Nobody, it seems, quite knows when the muscat grapes of Beaumes de Venise were first planted nor how the sweet wine from the vineyards of this tiny area protected by a fold in the hills from the savage north winds acquired its reputation. Certainly that reputation has always been a local one only. There are no more than three or four hectares under vine cultivation, a production of two hundred hectolitres a year and only two growers. From one of these growers, M. Combres, Mr Gerald Asher of the firm of Asher, Storey and Co., 127 Lower Thames Street, ECI, to whose admirable sense of enterprise we already owe the import of so many interesting French regional wines hitherto unknown or unobtainable in this country, has bought the muscat wine of Beaumes de Venise. It is, I believe, the first time this wine has ever been exported. As far as I am concerned its journey was worthwhile.

  The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one, and especially welcome to those who do not or cannot swig brandy or port after a meal. The great dessert wines of Bordeaux and the Rhine are rather beyond the reach of ordinary mortals and are in any case wines which demand a certain ceremony. Your meal has to work up to them. The wine of Beaumes, although so rare, seems somehow more within the scope of the simplest or even of an improvised meal. It retails at about 22s. a bottle, which seems reasonable enough since an opened bottle, securely recorked, appears to remain in good condition for some while. A few days ago I shared with a friend the final glasses from a bottle opened before Christmas. With it we ate a fresh apricot tart. The musky golden wine of Beaumes – according to Mr Asher, and I see no reason to quarrel with his judgement, ‘its bouquet is penetrating and flower-like, its flavour both honey-sweet and tangy’ – and the sweet apricots, vanilla-sugared on crumbly pastry, made an original and entrancing combination of food and wine.

  Why Venise? What balm or balsam in conjunction with what lakes, lagoons, canals? Neither and none. The name Venise, they say, has the same origin as Venaissin and Vénasque, that ancient and rather forlorn little village perched on an escarpment overlooking the twisting road between Carpentras and the Forest of Murs. All, it is supposed, stem from aveniensis or avignonnais. Beaumes is no balm or balsam. In the Provençal language baumo is a grotto. The Vaucluse country is honeycombed with caves and grottoes, many of them used for the cultivation of mushrooms. As a spectacle one set of holes in a rock is, I find, much the same as another. So that day we took it on trust from the Guide Bleu that the cliffs at the back of the village of Beaumes are ‘percées de grottes’. Still, it is not unpleasing to learn that the meaning of baumanière, as in the super-glossy three-star Hostellerie de Baumanière below Les Baux, is really baume a niero, in French grotte à puces, the grotto of the fleas.

  The Spectator, 10 January 1964

  *

  The dessert wine of Beaumes de Venise is now exported in quantity to Britain and the United States. Sometimes I wish it had not become so popular. At any rate I would advise avoidance of the product of that grower who bottles his wine in very fancy cordial bottles.

  A la marinière

  Although I lived all my childhood within a few miles of the sea I don’t think we ever ate shellfish at home. I don’t remember ever seeing a lobster or an oyster until I was grown-up, and as for mussels, I had never heard of them, let alone tasted them, until I went to stay with a Norman family in a farmhouse at Bièville, a village near Caen.

  The cooking at Bièville was done by Marie, a local girl hardly older than I was – about seventeen – and her only assistant in the kitchen was her brother, aged about eight. All our food was delicate and delicious, there was always beautiful butter and fresh bread for breakfast, and at midday simply cooked meat and a separate dish of vegetables from the farm’s kitchen garden. I had become accustomed to good middle-class French cooking in the same family’s Paris household, so none of these things struck me as unusual until, one day, Marie came into the dining-room bearing a big tureen of mussels, cooked in some sort of creamy sauce flecked with parsley and probably other garden herbs as well. The appearance, the smell and the taste of those mussels were to me most fascinating and mysterious. The little black-shelled objects didn’t seem like fish at all, they had the same kind of magical quality as mushrooms, the real field mushrooms which, as children, we had so often brought home for breakfast after a dawn search in the fields round our home in the Sussex Downs. Maybe the cream sauce had something to do with the association of sensation, for we had had a Nannie who always used to cook our breakfast mushrooms over the nursery fire in cream, whisked away no doubt, from the kitchen regions before the cook was up and about. As in most households, Nannie and the cook thoroughly disapproved of each other, and had she known this private cookery was going on upstairs in the nursery, the cook would have made a blistering row. We must have been aware of this, as children always are of tension between grown-ups, because Nannie’s mushrooms had the charm of the forbidden. We must never be caught eating them. So those Norman mussels which reminded me, for whatever reason, of our secret childhood feasts, became for ever endowed with the mystery of far-off and almost unobtainable things. And to this day the first food I ask for when I land in France is a dish of mussels. Before embarking on the ferry to return
home I always try to go to a restaurant where I know there will be mussels, sweet, small mussels, so small in fact that you get about seventy or eighty to a portion, and a London housewife would be indignant if she were asked to clean so many. I have seen, in the market at Rouen, the fishwives selling mussels already cleaned in a gigantic whirling machine – but at the Restaurant La Marée, nearby in the place du Marché, I was told that the machine isn’t good enough – the little things must all be cleaned by hand.

  The difference between these little mussels of the Norman coast (the best are reputed to come from Yport, although I suspect that a certain quantity are brought over from the English south coast where nobody bothers about them) and the great big Dutch ones we get in London, is just the difference between the field mushrooms of my childhood and today’s cultivated mushrooms – the cultivated ones are easy to get and very nice but they lack magic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make very excellent dishes out of them if you treat them right, and the same applies to urban fishmongers’ mussels – although I must say I try to buy small Welsh or Irish mussels whenever possible, in preference to the huge Dutch ones, which to me seem dry and savourless.

  But whichever kind you have, be sure to clean them very meticulously, scraping, scrubbing, bearding and rinsing them in a great deal of cold water and discarding any that are broken or open or abnormally heavy – the latter will probably be full of mud, and one may very well spoil the entire dish.

  CROÛTONS À LA MARINIÈRE

  For a little first course dish for two people, clean a quart of mussels, put them in a saucepan with a teacup of water and open them over a fairly fast flame. As they open, remove them to a plate, filter the liquid through a muslin, return it to a clean pan, into it put a finely chopped shallot or clove of garlic, a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley and a small glass of white wine.

  Let this boil rapidly until reduced by half. Shell the mussels. (All this can be done in advance.)

  Just before serving, fry 4 slices of French bread in butter or olive oil and put them in warmed soup plates.

  Heat up the mussels in the prepared sauce – this will take just about 1 minute – pour the whole mixture over the croûtons and serve immediately.

  House and Garden, January 1960

  Fruits de Mer

  Winkles and whelks, cockles and oysters, spider crabs, scallops, shrimps, langoustines, mussels, prawns, the little clams known in France as palourdes and in Italy as vongole, the big ridged heart-shaped venus verrucosa, called by the French praires and by Italians tartufi di mare – sea truffles – make the open-air market stalls of the Loire estuary port of Nantes a fishy paradise, smelling of iodine, salty, dripping with seaweed and ice.

  Of all these small sea-creatures displayed for sale, it is the mussels which interest me most. They are so small that hereabouts a restaurant portion of moules marinière must contain seven or eight dozen of the little things. Their shells are so fine they are almost transparent. The mussels themselves are quite unimaginably sweet and fresh. At the restaurant La Sirène in Nantes, an establishment where the cooking is excellently sound and fresh, but which is unaccountably omitted from Michelin, I had an exquisite dish of these little mussels. They are, the proprietress told me, mussels cultivated on those posts called bouchots and come from Penesten, on the Morbihan coast of Brittany. They were cooked in their own liquid until they opened; fresh cream was poured over them; they were sprinkled with chopped fresh tarragon; and brought to table piled up in a tureen. Nothing could be simpler; and to us, living so few short miles across the North Sea, not humming birds could appear more magical, nor mandrake root more unlikely.

  Mussels we have in plenty, cheap and large. What they make up for in size they tend to lack in flavour and charm. From Holland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and from the west coast our mussels come to London, but the little sweet ones are all left behind in the mussel-beds. If they appeared on the fishmongers’ stalls nobody would want them. Few would believe they were as good as the big ones. Fewer still would want to go to the trouble of cleaning them. Which is shortsighted, because they are cleaner in the first place and easier to deal with than the monsters covered with barnacles and grit which need such endless scrubbing and rinsing, so much so that one wonders if most of the flavour is not washed out of them, a good deal of the grit still remaining. About this point, the late Henri Pellaprat, teaching chef at the Cordon Bleu School in Paris, has an interesting theory. In Le Poisson dans la Cuisine Française (Flammarion, 1954), he writes that most people go about the cleaning of mussels in a way calculated to put sand into them rather than to eliminate it; instead, he says, of first scraping them, one should begin by rinsing them in a quantity of cold water, turning them over and over and whirling them around. One by one you then take them out of the water and put them in a colander. Half of them will be clean already; those which are not must be scraped; as each is done, put it in a bowl, but, and this is the crux of the matter, without water. Only when all are cleaned should water be run over the mussels; they should then be kept on the move, the water being changed continually until it is perfectly clear. The explanation given by Pellaprat for this routine is that, put into still water all at once, the mussels start opening; when they close up again, they have imprisoned within their shells the sand already in suspension in the water. In other words, explains M. Pellaprat, the more you keep the mussels moving, the more frightened they are; and the less inclination they will have to open. Ah well, possibly. It is worth paying attention to this theory, but it does mean that the mussels must be prepared only immediately before cooking, which is certainly desirable, but not always practical.

  Diminutive size is not necessarily a criterion of flavour in mussels; on the Mediterranean coast, and for that matter in Wales and in the West of Ireland I have had large mussels which were excellent, not as sweet and tender as the little Breton and Norman ones, but full of flavour and with a strong salty tang. It is partly a question, then, of eating them on the spot. But not entirely. Paris is about the same distance from the Breton coast as London is from Cornwall or Conway, and in Paris too one gets delicious mussels. So perhaps it is simply a question of better-organized transport. Last autumn I ate mussels in Paris which tasted just as fresh as those at Nantes – and that was during the freak heatwave of early October.

  When it is a question of making the best of what we can get, one dish I had in Paris would be well adapted to London mussels. Medium-sized cooked mussels, on the half-shell (it is of the utmost importance not to over-cook them in the first instance), were spread with a garlic and shallot butter, made in much the same way as for snails or for the Breton palourdes farcies (which also, like snails, are sold ready stuffed for cooking on the Nantes fish stalls), and were arranged on snail dishes, the mussels and the butter protected by a layer of breadcrumbs, an addition of fresh, unthickened cream and a sprinkling of coarsely grated Gruyère. Quickly cooked in a hot oven, this is a sizzling, bubbling, richly flavoured dish.

  The proprietress of the restaurant, Chez Maria in the rue du Maine, is half-Norman, half-Breton; very likely she is the cousin or the sister-in-law of the lady in charge of the left-luggage office at the Gare Montparnasse who had directed me to the little restaurant; perhaps, arriving by train from her native shores, she never travelled much farther than the station. There are many such people running just such restaurants or cafés in Paris. Anyone who wants to eat French regional specialities in the capital without paying the high prices of the fashionable Burgundian, Provençal, Auvergnat, Breton, Alsatian or Savoyard restaurants (in which three out of every five people eating are going to write the place up for a guide book or are begging recipes from the understandably blasé owners) could do worse than search round about, or inquire at, the main-line stations serving these provinces. There is always a sprinkling of small places owned by people like Maria; they can afford to provide their clients with a few genuine regional products at reasonable prices because they receive them direct by rai
l – by-passing the markets, the wholesalers, the double transport bills – from relations who are growers, poultry breeders, charcutiers, wine producers, fish-dealers (Maria had spanking fresh sardines the day I was there, served grilled and with a half-kilo of Breton butter on the table). The cooking in these places, although on the rough side and limited in choice, is likely to have a more authentically country flavour than that in the well-known bistros and restaurants where the proprietor has sophisticated his recipes to suit chic Parisian taste. By this I do not mean that these re-created dishes are necessarily any the worse; they are just more evolved, less innocent. Take, for example, another mussel dish, this one from an elegant, typically Parisian and rather expensive establishment called the Berlioz, in the rue Pergolèse, not a specifically regional restaurant, but one in which a number of provincial dishes are cooked – and well cooked. Here I ordered, from the menu, moules marinière. When they came, the mussels were those same delicious little Breton creatures, a great tureen of them. The sauce was yellow, just barely thickened, very light and subtle. It was, the patron told me, the result of mixing the mussel liquid with sauce hollandaise. It was delicious. It was perfection. What it was not was the primitive moules marinière known in every seaport café and to every housewife around the entire coastline of France.

  The Spectator, 4 January 1963

  Waiting for Lunch

  On page 96 of French Country Cooking is a four line description of el pa y all, the French Catalan peasant’s one-time morning meal of a hunk of fresh bread rubbed with garlic and moistened with fruity olive oil. When the book first appeared in 1951, one reviewer remarked rather tartly that she hoped we British would never be reduced to breakfasting off so primitive a dish. I was shaken, not to say shocked – I still am – by the smug expression of British superiority and by the revelation, unconscious, of the reviewer’s innocence. Believing, no doubt, that a breakfast of bacon and eggs, sausages, toast, butter, marmalade and sweetened tea has always been every Englishman’s birthright, she ignored countless generations of farm labourers, mill workers, miners, schoolboys, whose sole sustenance before setting off for a long day’s work was nothing more substantial than a crust of coarse bread or an oatcake broken up in milk, buttermilk, or when times were good, in thin broth, when bad in water. The bread and olive oil of the Southern European peasant was simply the equivalent of those sparse breakfasts of our own ancestors.