An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  The suggestion that Cumberland sauce (no mention of caper sauce) goes with boiled mutton does rather confirm my suspicion that Renaudet was borrowing at least some of his English cookery lore not from the ‘Mrs Holly of Blackheath’ or the ‘Mrs Allingham of Turtle Cottage near Oakham in the Rutland’, the ladies to whom he attributes some quite plausible English recipes, but from Alfred Suzanne, author of La Cuisine Anglaise, published in 1898 and still freely quoted as a responsible French authority on English cookery.

  At any rate Renaudet gives, in a footnote, a recipe for Cumberland sauce which is certainly Suzanne’s, and one for which we have cause to be grateful, even if we do not eat it with boiled mutton. (It is curious that this sauce, originally German, appears to have entered the English kitchen via three French chefs – Alexis Soyer, Alfred Suzanne and Auguste Escoffier.) Other aspects of Suzanne’s book are less enchanting. ‘All fruits are made into pies’… plum cakes are as French as possible and English in name only… plum pudding is the English national dessert … bacon is an unbeatable English speciality… it is cooked in the following way. Cut it into thin slices like veal birds, then split them on small skewers and grill them over a hot fire or in a very hot oven. Serve on toast… ‘Haddock; this smoked fish is very common in England. The English bake or boil it and fill it with a forcemeat called veal stuffing.’

  Two of M. Suzanne’s employers were the then Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Wilton. Making every allowance for aristocratic eccentricity, it is still hard to envisage those Victorian noblemen eating breakfast bacon dished up in genteel little rolls, demanding that their smoked haddock be stuffed and boiled, and ordering plum pudding every other day for luncheon. If, in the 1960s, Suzanne’s book is still the only one on English cooking available to French gastronomic researchers (the English dishes in Flammarion’s recently translated and loudly trumpeted Art of Cookery are all based on Suzanne) then it would seem to be high time for somebody to provide them with an authoritative exposition of the subject.

  It is not so much that anyone would want to convert the French to English food – although there are those timid souls who transport their own English bread across the Channel, and many more who are horribly disillusioned when they order roast beef in France and find it cooked to a rare red rather than to English Sunday lunch grey – as that it would be so interesting to see what French housewives would evolve from authentic English recipes. We should see our own cooking with fresh eyes. We should also see, I think, that the Englishness of many of our dishes lies not so much in the basic treatment of the raw materials as in the finishing touches and presentation of the dish.

  Those whole small potatoes for example, of Renaudet’s – unless we were making super-human efforts to be French, we should never incorporate them in the dish with the meat. We should have them boiled separately and served separately, and probably there would be cauliflower or sprouts and green peas as well, whereas a Frenchwoman, however English she wanted to pretend to be, would find it going too much against the grain to provide three boiled vegetables with one meat dish, let alone offer a steak and kidney pudding – a dish which much fascinates French cooks – accompanied by mashed potatoes and a boiled pease pudding. This classic combination is offered, so I learn, at Flanagan’s restaurant in Baker Street. Perhaps this would be the place to take French visitors in search of authentic English food, although it must be said that I have myself always found it safe enough to take Paris friends to London-French restaurants. Whatever the efforts made by the proprietors and cooks to produce true French cooking, nothing will persuade my French friends that what they are eating is anything but typically English. They might be right.

  It is no doubt our taste for extraneous unrelated flourishes and garnishes which to the French makes our attempts at their cooking amusing, original (inattendu I think is the correct word), and characteristically English.

  It must have been a French cook more observant than his contemporary Alfred Suzanne but still not quite observant enough, who decided that to please the English gentlemen of the Turf who frequented the old Café Weber, originally the Taverne Anglaise, in the rue Royale, he would add a flourish or two to the grilled marrow bones which were one of the specialities (others were cold roast beef, York ham, and Welsh Rabbit), on which Weber’s reputation was founded. By serving English mustard and chips with their marrow bones, Weber’s were no doubt making a graceful concession to English taste. Which only goes to show, marrow bones being one of the rare dishes that no Englishman would want chips with, how difficult it is to get quite precisely under the skin of another country’s cookery.

  The Spectator, 22 February 1965

  Exigez le véritable Cheddar français

  ‘The Comté

  ‘Privileged heir of the Gruyère’s great and noble family, it is made in the Franche-Comté and its surroundings. The paste is coloured like pale yellow ivory, when it is cut, holes appear well shared exactly, like a hazelnut, sometimes, at most, like a cherry.’

  ‘The Beaufort

  This Gruyère is made in the high alpine mountains, the paste is soft and supple, the cut shows not any hole like butter.’

  ‘The Emmental

  This Gruyère, from the Savoy is like a settler who knew to put himself forward leaving off the East countries for other lands. The mosaic of the cut looks like a great distribution of attractive holes.

  ‘As soon as one enters “Jura” and the whole region centred on this French Department, one is aware of the respect which is due to French Gruyère cheese. Public opinion has long remained wrongfully ignorant of what the French Gruyère cheeses really are.’

  The above extracts are from a leaflet issued for the American and English markets by the French manufacturers of Le Creuset fondue sets. Under the signature of Raymond Oliver, the Parisian gastronomic publicist and owner of the Grand Véfour restaurant in the Palais Royal, is appended the information that ‘you will always find your dairyman has one of the great vintages of French Gruyère’.

  This instructive leaflet also supplies three recipes for fondue, one to be made with Emmental, one with Comté, one with Beaufort. None of the versions differs in any notable respect from the rustic Swiss cheese fondue. That famous dish of cheese stewed with white wine and flavoured very expensively, but very necessarily, with kirsch, has of late years received so much publicity that you can find a recipe for it in almost any cookery book or magazine you pick up. What to me seems surprising is that M. Oliver, who presumably supplied the recipes for the Le Creuset leaflet, does not give what is said to be the old and traditional fondue of Franche-Comté, a dish in every respect superior to its primitive Swiss counterpart, having both greater finesse of flavour and texture and far less brutally indigestible qualities.

  Like Brillat-Savarin’s famous fondue and the fonduta of Piedmont, the fondue of Franche-Comté is really a cream of eggs and cheese (not, be it noted, scrambled eggs and cheese) and has been rejected, I fancy, as being unauthentic either because it is more difficult to cook correctly than the Swiss version or because it is the cheese purveyors rather than the egg-marketeers who have been on the job. Since Raymond Oliver’s assertion to the effect that your dairyman always has one of the great vintages of French Gruyère1 cannot be said to apply to any of my dairymen both the questions of authenticity and of relative skill with the fondue set are academic.

  All the same, just for the record, here is the version of the fondue of Franche-Comté given by Pierre Dupin in Les Secrets de la Cuisine Comtoise (Ed. Nourry, Paris, 1927).

  FONDUE DE FRANCHE-COMTÉ

  ‘Into a saucepan you pour 2 decilitres (approximately 7 fluid oz.) of white wine, you add a large clove of garlic, chopped, and you boil the wine until it is reduced by half and the garlic is cooked. Strain the wine and leave it to cool.

  ‘In a bowl mix 10 well-beaten eggs with 60 gr. (2 oz.) of Gruyère cut into very tiny pieces, 60 gr. of butter, pepper and a little salt. You add the wine, and mix it with the eggs and cheese, p
our the mixture into a flameproof casserole and put it to cook immediately, but you do not leave it for an instant: you stir ceaselessly until you have a homogenous cream, and you serve it sizzling in the recipient in which it has cooked.’

  Well, that is the authentic recipe. One of them anyhow. At a period when I kept house in France and could lay hands on the Gruyère of the Comté I used on occasion to cook a similar version. When it comes off it is a very fine dish indeed. But in addition to great patience it does demand a little advance planning; the business of adding the already garlic-flavoured and cooked but cooled wine to the cheese and eggs and putting the whole mixture together into the cooking pot is important. Then, as M. Dupin stresses more than once in his book, all types of genuine Gruyère cheese should be cut into little pieces for cooking, never on any account grated, a procedure which causes it to form sticky masses rather than the long creamy threads which constitute one of its essential characteristics – a characteristic considered especially important when it comes to the soupe au fromage of the eastern French provinces, that same soup which, transmogrified into the onion soup of the Paris all-night bistros, has now found its way into packets labelled la soupe au fromage instantanée. (Ingredients: dehydrated Gruyère cheese, potato-starch, spices, salt.) Which would seem to reduce the whole matter of authenticity to the level of farce. If the word Gruyère on the packet can induce people to buy the product in question (I have tasted it; and it seems only fair to say that of its kind it is of a matchless ignobility) then it becomes clear that it is a too innocent belief in authenticity and the efficacy of the ancient formula which has made us such easy victims of the purveyors of the farmyard-fresh Surrey chicken from the battery house, the mountain-brook trout from the breeding tank, via the deep-freeze, the hedgerow-ripened blackberry pie-filling out of the cardboard box.

  When the original ingredients of a dish become obsolete or so debased as to be unrecognizable radical change is preferable to make-believe replacements. By accepting changes and variations on the ancient recipes we can achieve a different kind of authenticity, one which has at least some semblance of reality. In the matter of genuine Gruyère, for example, a great deal sold in this country turns out, on close inspection, to be German Emmental. This is a cheese which is expensive, smells of drains – it is marketed in wrapped wedges so you do not find this out until you get it home – and in consistence is more suitable for mending tyres than for the cooking pot. (One longs for the Germans to give up trying to make facsimiles of other people’s cheeses. They are terrible duffers at it. It is, I am told, German settlers in County Wexford who are responsible for the Irish Brie called St Edi now being peddled in this country; the assault of its ammoniac smell brought back to me with terrible force a twenty-two-year-old memory of the Camembert of war-time Egypt which, I now realize, could have been none other than the handiwork of a German fifth column active in Alexandria.)

  Among newly-invented cheese dishes which seem to me worth a trial are a French Welsh Rabbit and an Anglo-Irish fondue. These recipes are being currently hawked around by, respectively, the publicity agents of Guinness and of the Trappist monks who own the Port-du-Salut cheese factory in North-Western France. Recipes disseminated by such bodies–one does appreciate that in the case of the Trappists a spokesman is essential – are bound to be suspect, but not all the public relations cookery experts are as cruelly anti-humanitarian as the lady who publicized the traditional Welsh trifle for St David’s Day to be made with one tin of fruit salad and one packet of Birds Pineapple Instant Whip, a leek confected from angelica, piped cream, cocoa powder and desiccated coconut adding the finishing festive touches. Insults so ferocious as the recipe for Sussex Layer Pancakes – why pick on Sussex? Was it directed at the restaurants of Chichester or Glyndebourne? – calling for two 16-oz. cans of spaghetti in tomato sauce, 9 oz. of plain flour and 6 oz. of shredded suet (put about by the Atora Suet Bureau) are also uncommon.

  Even the recipe for George Washington’s mother’s gingerbread allegedly found ‘in an old worn cookery book’ dated 1784, of which the first item on the list of ingredients is ½ cup of margarine, could be said to be honest in the sense that it is candidly admitted that margarine is what is actually now used in the kitchens at Claverton Manor, the American Museum near Bath where both the gingerbread and the leaflet giving the recipe are purveyed to the public. After all, one feels, Mrs Washington was surely a thrifty housewife; had the invention of margarine occurred a century sooner than it did, no doubt she would have taken advantage of the development. And we must not forget that it is to a Public Relations expert that we owe the invention of traditional Irish coffee laced with Irish whiskey, which nobody will deny is a very great improvement on Irish coffee tout court.

  I have not, by the way, yet tried the Guinness fondue recipe, but I do know from past experience that stout is an excellent and enriching alternative to wine for a number of meat and game dishes. Why not also for cheese?

  CHEESE AND GUINNESS FONDUE (makes one pint)

  2 lb. grated Cheddar cheese; ν pint Guinness (good measure); 6–8 teaspoons Worcestershire Sauce; salt; pepper; Cayenne pepper; 1 level tablespoon cornflour.

  Put grated cheese into a 7-inch fondue dish or enamelled iron casserole and melt gently, stirring continuously. Add remaining ingredients and stir until the fondue thickens slightly.

  For dipping use chunks of French bread or toast.

  Note

  If a normal 7-inch or bigger dish is used, one pint of fondue is the right quantity. For half the quantity, a smaller dish must be used.

  Canadian Black Diamond Cheddar (the straightforward one, not the wine-cured variety) is without question by far the best Cheddar now generally available to the British public. There is also the point that it has in fact so excellent a flavour that I doubt if a fondue made with it would need 6 to 8 teaspoons (which is an awful lot) of Worcestershire sauce. It might even not need the Guinness. Then there is the matter of the French Cheddar (not to be confused with an unidentified English cheese known for generations to the French public as Chester) now being made down at Castres in the Tarn department of the Languedoc. I do not know if Guinness is imported by the French on anything like the scale on which Scotch whisky pours into France. If not, this recipe, plus French Cheddar – by no means an uninteresting cheese (French Dairy Farmers Ltd, 17 Bentinck Street, W.1 are importing it into England) – should help; and a new French regional dish will have come into being.

  For that matter, why not a Scottish fondue made with the Orkney Cheddar distributed under the auspices of the North of Scotland Milk Marketing Board? For eating purposes Orkney Cheddar is pretty soapy and bears no resemblance whatever to a cheese actually brought from the Orkneys which I once tasted in the house of Edinburgh friends of mine. Still, in the cooking pot, and enlivened let’s say with a dash of Cutty Sark or Christopher’s Finest Old Scotch, I don’t see why it shouldn’t make out pretty well.

  As for Welsh Rabbit, over the years it seems to have evolved from primitive toasted cheese into a dish not all that different from the fondues of France and Switzerland. An authentic Welsh version was, according to Lady Llanover’s Good Cookery (1867) once upon a time made with ewe’s milk cheese (Lady Llanover lived in Monmouthshire for about ninety years), now presumably obsolete. Double Gloucester and new Lancashire are the more conventionally accepted cheeses – vintages which your dairyman can usually supply – for toasting or for English Welsh Rabbit.

  FRENCH WELSH RABBIT

  (Recipe by the Comtesse Mapie de Toulouse-Lautrec for a leaflet publicizing Port-Salut cheese.)

  ‘For 2 people: 2 large slices of bread, 4 oz. of Port-Salut, 1 large glass of beer, ½ a glass of kirsch, 2 oz. of butter, Cayenne pepper.

  ‘Melt the butter in a frying pan and put the bread slices in it so that they are golden coloured on both sides. In a large saucepan, pour the beer that you warm for 5 minutes. Then add the Port-Salut, minced as thinly as possible, the kirsch and a pinch of Cayenne pepper. St
ir with a wooden spoon until the cheese is quite melted. Put the bread slices in an oven dish, buttered beforehand, cover them with cheese cream and leave in the oven to brown.’

  A mixture of beer and kirsch? H’m. Not quite as Cambrian as the Pineapple Instant Whip. But perhaps the Comtesse’s fried bread is better than the toast which traditionally accompanies Welsh Rabbit. And, in passing, it is worth noting that French (I have not tried the Danish imitation) Port-Salut makes an excellent cooking cheese with a low melting point, which means that it turns creamy but not rubbery. The other day I put it into a fondue made according to the Franche-Comté method. It gave the dish a very subtle flavour, that Port-Salut. There is, of course, no temptation to take the quick way out by grating it. You can’t grate Port-Salut. And myself, I do not find the creamy threads formed by melting Gruyère all that beguiling. In my experience creamy threads are all too often elastic bands with knots in.

  Dutch Gouda, by the way, makes just as good Welsh Rabbit as French Port-Salut; and there is always Caerphilly from Somerset, not to mention the Caerphilly (it may, I think, have now vanished) made by Irish nuns – not I fancy in this case German parachutists. It was a delicious cheese, as good as the true Glamorgan Caerphilly used to be.