An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  Recording some of the older recipes and meals of the country people of rural France was an exercise I had found most stimulating and instructive. There were ideas which often proved helpful in those days of shortages and strict rationing. It was not my intention to imply that we should copy those ideas to the letter – to do so at the time would hardly have been possible – but rather that we should learn from them, adapt them to our own climate and conditions, and perhaps benefit from increased knowledge of other people’s diets and food tastes.

  During the twenty-five years odd since the book was first published, we have indeed taken to imported dishes and cookery in a way which in 1951 would have seemed entirely in the realm of fantasy. One obvious example is the Neapolitan pizza – or rather, a tenth-rate imitation of it – now big business and familiar in every commercial deep freeze and take-away shop in the land. And the original pizza, after all, was nothing more complicated than a by-product of the days of household bread-baking, when a few pieces of dough were kept back from the main batch, spread with oil and some kind of savoury mixture – onions usually – baked in the brick oven after the bread was taken out, and devoured by hungry children and farm workers. That that pizza was not so far removed from the French and Catalan pa y all (the cookery of Catalonia was at one time closely related to that of Southern Italy and Sicily) was demonstrated by a recent incident in a very ordinary restaurant in the town of Vendrell, a few miles across the Spanish frontier. Stopping one autumn morning in 1976 for an early lunch, we saw the people at a neighbouring table devouring some very appetizing-looking, aromatically-smelling thick slices of warm bread spread with tomato and oil. We asked for the same. It was, of course a version of pa y all. Those slices of garlic-scented oil-saturated bread, just lightly spread with a little cooked tomato turned out to be the best item on the menu. You might think that doesn’t say much for the restaurant’s cooking, and that could be a fair criticism. What was interesting was that, not only were the local people eating it, but that it was also the most expensive dish on the menu. The story is familiar. The necessity of the day-before-yesterday’s peasant has become the prized speciality of today’s middle-class restaurant.

  I don’t think, however, that el pa y all will ever achieve popularity in England, at any rate not popularity on the scale reached by the pizza. We must be thankful for that, although for reasons rather different from those clearly in the mind of my reviewer of so long ago. As a nation we have a curious distrust of the primitive and simple in food, and so carefree a way with the specialities of other countries that while retaining names, we have no inhibitions about complicating, altering, travestying and degrading the dish itself. It is not difficult to visualize the fate of the pa y all if translated into English restaurant terms. It would become chopped garlic on toast made from factory bread, spread with salad cream and crowned with a pimento-stuffed olive (that is the Catalan part, we should be told). In time, a very short time probably, this creation would find its way into the nation’s deep-freeze. There would be a curry version and a cheese variation and a super gigantic one with bacon, lettuce, onion rings and radishes. Before long it would be more like an imitation Scandinavian open-face sandwich than the Mediterranean agricultural labourer’s early morning breakfast.

  *

  This piece was written in 1978 for a projected revised edition of French Country Cooking which never materialised.

  In March 1984, as I was putting together the articles and essays which make up the present volume, I received a reminder of the pa y all remembered so vividly at Vendrell in 1976. A postcard written from Spain by my friend Gerald Asher, wine merchant and wine writer now resident in San Francisco, informed me that before business meetings on Monday he had been spending a restful weekend at Sitges in Catalonia. ‘Waiting for lunch’, Gerald wrote, ‘one is given a basket of hot grilled bread, a clove of garlic, a tomato, salt and olive oil’

  April 1984

  Para Navidad

  It is the last day of October. Here in the south-eastern corner of Spain the afternoon is hazy and the sun is warm, although not quite what it was a week ago. Then we were eating out-of-doors at midday, and were baked even in our cotton sweaters. The colours of the land are still those of late summer – roan, silver, lilac, and ochre. In the soft light the formation of the rock and the ancient terracing of the hills become clearly visible. In the summer the sun on the limestone-white soil dazzles the eyes, and the greens of June obscure the shapes of the ravines and craggy outcroppings. Now there are signs of autumn on the leaves of some of the almond trees. They have turned a frail, transparent auburn, and this morning when I awoke I devoured two of the very first tangerines of the season. In the dawn their scent was piercing and their taste was sharp. During the night it had rained – not much, nothing like enough to affect the parched soil – but all the same there was a sheen on the rose bricks and grey stones of the courtyard. The immense old terra-cotta oil jar in the centre was freshly washed, and over the mountains a half-rainbow gave a pretty performance as we drank our breakfast coffee.

  At midday we picked small figs, dusty purple and pale jade green. On the skins is a bloom not to be seen on midsummer figs. The taste, too, is quite different. The flesh is a clear garnet red, less rich and more subtle than that of the main-crop fruit, which is of the vernal variety, brilliant green. Some of the figs have split open and are half dried by the sun. In the north we can never taste fruit like this, fruit midway between fresh and dried. It has the same poignancy as the black Valencia grapes still hanging in heavy bunches on the vines. These, too, are in the process of transforming themselves – from fresh grapes to raisins on the stalk as we know them. Here the bunches have been tied up in cotton bags.

  The two ancients who tend the almond trees (this is Valencia almond country, and it has been a bad season. If the rain fails, next year’s crop may prove to be another disaster) and who have known the estate of La Alfarella all their lives, were hoping that the grapes could be cut late and hung in the storeroom until Christmas. Their plans have been foiled by the wasps. This year there has been a fearsome plague of the persistent and destructive brutes. They have bitten their way through the protecting cotton, sucked out the juice of the fruit, and left nothing but husks. Here and there where a bunch has escaped the marauders, we have cut one and brought it back to the house in a basket with the green lemons and some of the wild thyme that has an almost overpowering scent, one that seems to be peculiar to Spanish thyme. It is perhaps fantiful, but it seems to have undertones of aniseed, chamomile, hyssop, lavender.

  My English host, who has re-created this property of La Alfarella out of a ruin and is bringing its land back to life after twenty years of neglect, is at the cooking pots. He seizes on the green lemons and grates the skins of two of them into the meat mixture he is stirring up. He throws in a little of the sun-dried thyme and makes us a beguiling dish of albóndigas, little rissoles fried in olive oil. He fries them skilfully and they emerge with a caramel-brown and gold coating reflecting the glaze of the shallow earthenware sartén, the frying dish in which they have been cooked and brought to the table. All the cooking here is done in the local earthenware pots. Even the water is boiled in them. They are very thick and sturdy, unglazed on the outside, and are used directly over the Butagaz flame, or sometimes on the wood fire in the open hearth. As yet there is no oven. That is one of next year’s projects.

  Surprisingly, in an isolated farmhouse in a country believed by so many people to produce the worst and most repetitive food in Europe, our diet has a good deal of variety, and some of the produce is of a very high quality. I have never eaten such delicate and fine-grained pork meat, and the cured fillet, lomo de cerdo, is by any standard a luxury worth paying for. The chicken and the rabbit that go into the ritual paella cooked in a vast burnished iron pan (only for paella on a big scale and for the frying of tortillas are metal pans used) over a crackling fire are tender, possessed of their true flavours. We have had little red mullet
and fresh sardines a la plancha, grilled on primitive round tin grill plates made sizzling hot on the fire. This is the utensil, common to France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, that also produces the best toast in the world – brittle and black-barred with the marks of the grill.

  To start our midday meal we have, invariably, a tomato and onion salad, a few slices of fresh white cheese, and a dish of olives. The tomatoes are the Mediterranean ridged variety of which I never tire. They are huge, sweet, fleshy, richly red. Here they cut out and discard the central wedge, almost as we core apples, then slice the tomatoes into rough sections. They need no dressing, nothing but salt. With the roughly cut raw onions, sweet as all the vegetables grown in this limestone and clay soil, they make a wonderfully refreshing salad. It has no catchy name. It is just ensalada, and it cannot be reproduced without these sweet Spanish onions and Mediterranean tomatoes.

  In the summer, seventeen-year-old Juanita asked for empty wine bottles to take to her married sister in the village, who would, she explained, preserve the tomatoes for the winter by slicing them, packing them in bottles, and sealing them with olive oil. They would keep for a year or more, Juanita said. Had her sister a bottle we could try? No. There were only two of last year’s vintage left. They were to be kept para Navidad, for Christmas.

  Yesterday in the market there were fresh dates from Elche, the first of the season. They are rather small, treacle-sticky, and come in tortoiseshell-cat colours: black, acorn brown, peeled-chestnut beige; like the lengths of Barcelona corduroy I have bought in the village shop. Inevitably, we were told that the best dates would not be ready until Navidad. That applies to the oranges and the muscatel raisins; and presumably also to the little rosy copper medlars now on sale in the market. They are hot yet ripe enough to eat, so I suppose they are to be kept, like Juanita’s sister’s tomatoes, and the yellow and green Elche melons stored in an esparto basket in the house, for Navidad. We nibble at the candied melon peel in sugar-frosted and lemon-ice-coloured wedges we have bought in the market, and we have already torn open the Christmas-wrapped mazapan (it bears the trade name of El Alce, ‘the elk’; a sad-faced moose with tired hooves and snow on its antlers decorates the paper), which is of a kind I have not before encountered. It is not at all like marzipan. It is very white, in bricks, with a consistency reminiscent of frozen sherbet. It is made of almonds and egg whites, and studded with crystallized fruit. There is the new season’s quince cheese, the carne de membrillo, which we ought to be keeping to take to England for Navidad presents, and with it there is also a peach cheese. How is it that one never hears mention of this beautiful and delicious clear amber sweetmeat?

  There are many more Mediterranean treats, cheap treats of autumn, like the newly brined green olives that the people of all olive-growing countries rightly regard as a delicacy. In Rome, one late October, I remember buying new green olives from a woman who was selling them straight from the barrel she had set up at a street corner. That was twelve years ago. I have never forgotten the fresh flavour of the Roman green olives. The manzanilla variety we have bought here come from Andaluría. They are neither green nor black, but purple, rose, lavender, and brown, picked at varying stages of maturity, and intended for quick home consumption rather than for export. It is the tasting of familiar products at their point of origin (before they are graded, classified, prinked up, and imprisoned in bottles, tins, jars, and packets) that makes them memorable; forever changes their aspect.

  By chance, saffron is another commodity that has acquired a new dimension. It was somewhere on the way up to Córdoba that we saw the first purple patches of autumn-flowering saffron crocuses in bloom. On our return we called on Mercedes, the second village girl who works at La Alfarella, to tell her that we were back. Her father was preparing saffron – picking the orange stigmas one by one from the iridescent mauve flowers heaped up in a shoe box by his side and spreading them carefully on a piece of brown paper to dry. The heap of discarded crocus petals made a splash of intense and pure colour, shining like a pool of quicksilver in the cavernous shadows of the village living room. Every night, during the six-odd weeks that the season lasts, he prepares a boxful of flowers, so his wife told us. The bundle of saffron that she took out of a battered tin, wrapped in a square of paper, and gave to us must represent a fortnight’s work. It is last year’s vintage because there is not yet enough of the new season’s batch to make a respectable offering. It appears to have lost nothing of its penetrating, quite violently acrid-sweet and pungent scent. It is certainly a handsome present that Mercedes’ mother has given us, a rare present, straight from the source, and appropriate for us to take home to England for Navidad.

  An even better one is the rain. At last, now it is real rain that is falling. The ancients have stopped work for the day, and most of the population of the village is gathered in the café. The day the rain comes the village votes its own fiesta day.

  The Spectator, 27 November 1964

  Pizza

  From the stuffy and steaming little bakers’ shops of Naples and Southern Italy, where it still costs a few lire for a portion large enough for a horse, the Pizza Napoletana has travelled the world. In Paris restaurants, in Shaftesbury Avenue milk bars, in South Kensington coffee shops the pizza has become acclimatized. In the latest paperback thriller1 to come my way it figures as a delicate exchange of compliments, a token of esteem, between one hoodlum and another. The cheese-covered pizza arrives from Chicago by hand of hired killer, in a foot square wooden box, packed in dry ice. ‘It’s from Antonio’s Cellar, ready for the oven.’ The gangster is misty-eyed. ‘Damn, this was a sweet thing for Sylvester to do – what a sweet guy.’ He turns to his cook-valet. ‘Get some Chianti tomorrow morning and we’ll have a real Ginny lunch.’

  Whatever there may be about a pizza which tugs at the heartstrings of a big shot of the Philadelphia underworld, to law-abiding British citizens I suspect that its chief charm is that thick layer of sticky melting cheese on the top. Whether it’s on toast, or macaroni, or cauliflower, nearly everyone loves a nice top dressing of chewy bubbling cheese. But for those who may share my preference for one of the many versions of the pizza made without that rubbery cheese, such as the Provençal pissaladière or the beautifully named Ligurian sardenara, here is a recipe. Not for the hefty slab of dough thinly spread with onions or tomatoes and cooked on a huge iron sheet which you buy from the bakeries and which is food only for the really ravenous, but for a more polite, a household or casalinga version. In Italy many such recipes for the pizza have been evolved by chefs and household cooks; they use a basis of simplified brioche dough, or short crumbly pastry, or thin, miniature rounds of enriched bread dough no larger than a coffee saucer.

  SARDENARA CASALINGA

  5 oz plain flour; 1 ½ oz butter; 1 egg; ½ oz yeast; salt; a little water.

  Cut the softened butter in little pieces and rub it into the flour. Add a good pinch of salt. Make a well in the centre, put in the egg and yeast dissolved in about 2 tablespoons of barely tepid water. Mix and knead until the dough comes away clean from the sides of the bowl. Shape into a ball, put on a floured plate, cover with a floured cloth and leave in a warm place to rise for 2 hours.

  For the filling: 1 lb onions; ½ lb tomatoes; a dozen anchovy fillets (in San Remo, home of the sardenara, salted sardines are used); a dozen small, stoned black olives; pepper; salt; dried oregano or basil; and olive oil.

  Heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy frying pan. Put in the thinly sliced onions and cook them very gently, with the cover on the pan, until they are quite soft and pale golden. They must not fry or turn brown. Add the skinned tomatoes, the seasonings (plus garlic if you like) and the basil or oregano. Continue cooking until the tomatoes and onions are amalgamated, and the water from the tomatoes evaporated.

  When the dough has risen sprinkle it with flour and break it down again. Knead once more into a ball, which you place in the centre of an oiled, 8½- to 10-inch (21- to 25-cm) removable-base flan tin. With
your knuckles press it gently but quickly outwards until it is spread right over the tin and all round the sides. Put in the filling. Make a criss-cross pattern over the top with the anchovies, then fill in with the olives. Leave to rise another 15 minutes. Stand the flan tin on a baking sheet and cook in the centre of a pre-heated oven at gas no. 6,400°F, for 20 minutes, then turn down to gas no. 4,3500°F, and cook another 20 minutes.

  Alternative pizza or pissaladière filling: 1 onion; 2 cloves of garlic; 1 lb fresh tomatoes; 4 to 6 Italian tinned tomatoes and their juice; ½ coffee cup olive oil; dried basil or marjoram, seasonings, olives and anchovies.

  A PROVENÇAL PISSALADIÈRE

  This used to be spread with a brined fish product called pissala, peculiar to the Mediterranean coast between Nice and Marseille. It is now a thing of the past, and the pissaladière is made mainly with stewed onions and anchovies. There is also a version in which a tomato sauce figures. This one is excellent.

  It is made as follows: spread the dough, prepared as for Ligurian pizza, with a mixture of 6 tablespoons of the onion and tomato sauce (also made as for the Ligurian version), the contents of a 50-gr tin of anchovy fillets and 2 cloves of garlic pounded up together, almost to a paste. Bake as before. This anchovy-flavoured filling is my own favourite.