An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact soft milk cheese is little more than an extension of junket. (Our word derives from the French jonches or rushes, one of the numerous old French names for freshly made milk cheese drained in rushes or a rush basket.) But whereas junket is made with great rapidity and is eaten almost as soon as the curd has set and without being drained, soft cheese takes longer to turn because less rennet must be used and the milk is barely heated, too much rennet and/or too much heat producing a leathery and acid curd. Once drained, which takes anything from four to eight hours, the cheese can be eaten immediately, with or without the addition of fresh cream; or it can be left draining until it is all but dry, when it can be kept for cooking, or salted and flavoured for consumption as a mild cheese.

  FRESH MILK CHEESE

  To make a good pound of cheese, ingredients are 4 pints of ordinary full cream milk, 2 teaspoons of junket rennet (liquid, not powder) and a little salt. Implements and utensils are a gallon-size pan, a long-handled cooking spoon, a cloth, a colander, a skimmer or flat perforated slice, a 24 to 28 inch square of muslin or cheesecloth, a big basin and a pierced mould.

  Pour the milk into your large pan. Heat it very gradually until it is little more than tepid. Put in the rennet, measuring it carefully and remembering about too much making a tough and acid curd; stir it well into the milk. Cover the pan with a cloth – to prevent steam from condensing on the cover of the pan and falling back on the curd – and the lid, and leave it for two to four hours, until the curd is fairly firm.

  Have ready a colander standing in a deep bowl, and lined with the dampened muslin or cheesecloth. With the skimmer or perforated slice, break up the curd, spoon it into the lined colander. As the whey runs out and the curd sinks, add more, until all the curd is taken from the pan. Knot the corners of the cloth, hang it up on a hook with the basin underneath to catch the whey. Leave it for an hour, until the bulk of the whey has drained off, and transfer the curd, still in its cloth, to the mould. If this is an improvised one such as a pierced cake tin, without feet to raise it from the plate on which it drains, set it in the top of a basin, mixing bowl, saucepan, wide jar, or any vessel in which it will fit without actually resting on the bottom. There must be space underneath for the whey to drain. A curd which has been soaking in its own whey makes an acid cheese (which explains the often sharp taste of Eastern Mediterranean white cheeses which are sometimes stored in whey).

  In about eight to twelve hours the cheese will be firm enough to be turned into a deepish glass dish or large soup plate. Pour fresh cream over the cheese, covering it completely; serve caster sugar separately. Alternatively, having made the cheese as above, leave it draining for an extra six to eight hours. Turn it out on to a plate. Now, and not before, sprinkle it with salt on both sides (a teaspoonful for each side is enough), put it into a clean cloth and leave it draining until it is to be used. For cooking, the cheese should be dry. Any substantial quantity of moisture forced out of the cheese when it is subjected to heat may spoil the consistency of a dish, making it watery. In the case of cream cheese fillings for pies and flans, the risk is that the moisture may sink into the pastry, making it soggy.

  CREAM CHEESE CROÛTONS

  Mash 3 to 4 oz. of soft-curd milk or cream cheese or demi-sel with 4 tablespoons of grated Cheddar, Gruyère, Parmesan, or any other hard cheese you have to hand. Add plenty of freshly milled black pepper and lots of herbs – chopped fresh parsley, or dried basil, or chopped celery leaves. Then stir in one whole well-beaten egg.

  Spread this mixture on not too thick slices of white, brown, or French bread from which you have cut the crusts. There is enough for 12 croûtons. On top of each put little pieces of anchovy fillet (or anchovy paste squeezed from a tube) and/or halved, stoned black olives. Put the croûtons on a baking sheet and cook them near the top of the oven for 15 minutes at gas no. 3, 330°F.

  Incidentally, this cream cheese mixture, spread on little fingers of bread and cooked in just the same way, is extremely good for a cocktail party as a change from those eternal sausages. The egg in the mixture makes it stay put, instead of running all over the place as most cheese mixtures do.

  Nova, October 1965

  Sweet Aristo

  The enormous ridged tomatoes were cored with a little sharp knife, cut round roughly into sections, thrown into a shallow bowl, mixed with thickly sliced raw onions, mild and very sweet. Salt, a sprinkling of olive oil and wine vinegar were the only seasonings.

  In the little white house in the almond and lemon country of South-Eastern Spain where I stayed last summer every midday meal started with the tomato and onion salad. It has no regional or picturesque name. It is just ensalada. In all the restaurants down on the coast they offer you very much the same salad, sometimes with a few olives, cucumber slices and cos lettuce all prettily arranged on a flat dish, a mixture not unlike the salade niçoise of Southern France. I prefer the basic tomato and onion salad. It is so rich in flavour, so sweet, so cool, fresh – and so entirely appropriate to the high summer of the Mediterranean.

  Every day, with the first taste of that lovely fresh salad came also the reminder that the tomato at its best is a luxury and should be treated as such. The trouble is that in England a tomato good enough to be eaten raw and unadorned is becoming a good deal more of a rarity than a ripe avocado, and nearly as elusive as a perfect fresh peach or purple fig. Only during the brief summer season of English out-of-doors tomatoes can we count on a tomato worth eating. Mass-grown Channel Island and Canary tomatoes are a sore disappointment to anyone familiar with native Spanish tomatoes.1 The Spanish growers may be doing their best to provide tomatoes acceptable to the English market but evidently English varieties and the Spanish soil and climatic conditions just don’t suit each other. Dutch tomatoes lack character. French tomatoes we seldom get nowadays. Some five years ago a few growers in the Nîmes district of Southern France made an attempt to raid the English market by cultivating Moneymaker, a favourite high-yield English commercial tomato. The experiment was not an unqualified success. In the summer of 1961 the Board of Trade clamped down on imported tomatoes early in the season. The French growers were landed with hundreds of tons of English-type tomatoes unacceptable in the local cooking and unsuitable for canning or preserving. In the wholesale markets of Provence the customers wouldn’t even take English-type tomatoes as gifts. English importers and wholesalers on the other hand stubbornly refuse to touch either the little pear-shaped Roi Humbert variety of tomatoes grown in Provence and Italy for sauce and for canning, or the big meaty, untidy tomatoes which are so important to Mediterranean cookery for salads and fresh tomato sauces.

  It is the same old story. Whether it’s potatoes or plums, lettuces or leeks, mushrooms or mangoes, the English greengrocery trade is reluctant to handle any produce which does not conform to a given size, a given number to the pound. Five years ago it was announced in a communiqué issued from Agriculture House that tomatoes ‘which are smallish, about 7 to the pound, round, red all over, and firm are the best and command the highest prices’. In other words – in, to be precise, the words of the public relations bureau of the Cucumber and Tomato Marketing Board – the tomato which commands the highest price is an all-purpose (or is it non-purpose?) product; ‘not every mouth’ and I quote ‘can afford to choose caviare instead of kippers or an aristocratic difficult low yielding variety of tomato rather than a less fastidious tomato with a heavy yield.’

  Ah, that difficult, aristocratic, fastidious tomato, what’s the betting that quite a few mouths would go for it were it on offer? (Harbinger and Ailsa Craig are, according to gardeners, the aristocrats of the English tomato world.) The Tomato Marketers might be interested to know that back in the twenties, when grapefruit was making its way in France, so highly reputed an establishment as the old Café de Paris listed that novelty in the special corner of the menu normally reserved for caviare alone. Maybe we should reassess the tomato. These days it is the authenticity of a pr
oduct, not its basic price, which spells luxury.1

  Along with the Israeli melons, the Swaziland avocados, and the Kenya asparagus of present-day classy restaurants there might well be a place for Mediterranean tomatoes. Some four or five years ago one of our gastronomic columnists wrote of a Leicester Square bistro called Chez Solange that an advance telephone call would ensure production of an ‘authentic salade de tomates’. The makings of a quite substantial tomato salad mystique are scattered around waiting to be gathered up by some enterprising buyer who will get the produce flown in from Barcelona or Marseilles, Naples, Valencia or even possibly from Portugal, where the tomatoes are as good and plentiful as anywhere in Mediterranean lands. It was after all from the Portuguese that the French took the hint about the Tightness of fresh tomato sauce with eggs, fish and rice; à la portugaise signifying, in French cookery, a dish in which the tomato figures. And our own early recipes for tomato soups thickened with rice or bread were derived from Portuguese rather than American, French or Italian cookery.

  *

  A world devoid of tomato soup, tomato sauce, tomato ketchup and tomato paste is hard to visualize. Could the tin and processed food industries have got where they have without the benefit of the tomato compounds which colour, flavour, thicken, and conceal so many deficiencies? How did the Italians eat spaghetti before the advent of the tomato? Was there such a thing as a tomato-less Neapolitan pizza? What were English salads like before there were tomatoes to mix with lettuce? Did Provençal cooking exist without tomates provençale, salade niçoise and ratatouille? Then there is that warmed red billiard ball with its skin slit round the middle, so oddly known as a grilled tomato. (I believe the official name for this dish is dressed tomatoes.) Without it could the British landlady’s and railway dining-car breakfast ever have become what it is? How many people would accept baked beans innocent of tomato sauce? And many of us still remember that among the food shortages of the war years and after, the scarcity of fresh tomatoes was a privation on the same level as the lack of lemons, onions and butter.

  Incredible though it now seems, the tomato, brought by the Spaniards from Peru to Spain at the close of the sixteenth century and shortly afterwards planted in France, Portugal, Italy and England, was well known to us as an ornamental plant for two hundred years before its culinary possibilities were perceived. The first English cookery book recipes for tomatoes appear only at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were for ketchup-type sauces. Since the tomato, being a member of the Solanaceae tribe which includes also the poisonous nightshades, was long regarded as a dangerous if not actually deadly fruit (the potato and the aubergine, also of the Solanaceae family, have in their time suffered from the same associations) presumably the mixture of vinegar and spices used in the early sauces were regarded as safety-devices against the possibly toxic effects of the fruit itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, when tomatoes had become an upper-class luxury and tomato soup was well on its way, a new legend had become attached to the tomato. It was reputed to induce cancer. It was also, wrote Miss Anne Buckland, the anthropological scholar and author of an entertaining book called Our Viands (1893), too expensive to be generally popular, and was regarded with suspicion by the poor who ‘despise and dislike it’. Adding that a splendid show of numerous varieties of outdoor tomatoes at the Crystal Palace had recently caused some stir among market gardeners, Miss Buckland remarks that while awaiting cheaper and more plentiful fresh tomatoes ‘the tinned tomatoes from America and France answer fairly well for cooking purposes’.

  In the seventy years which have elapsed since the publication of Miss Buckland’s book the tomato has taken its revenge for three centuries of neglect. What we need now is a tomato antidote or at least a little of the restraint implicit in the observation made in a French book of Dissertations Gastronomiques (1928) by Ernest Verdier, owner of the Maison Dorée, a restaurant celebrated in the Paris of the Belle Epoque. ‘The tomato’, says M. Verdier, ‘imparts its delicious taste, at the same time acid and slightly sweet, to so many sauces and dishes that it can fairly be classed among the best of condiments. Happy are those who understand how to use it judiciously.’ Those of us who remember the food shortages of the war years and after learned the lesson the hard way. Lacking fresh tomatoes and meat we tried to compensate by piling tomato paste into all our stews and soups and sauces. In the end the taste of tinned concentrated tomato became all-pervading and deadly. So, for a start, be miserly about tomato paste in meat sauces for pasta. Used in conjunction with fresh tomatoes a teaspoonful will be enough to give extra colour and body to a sauce for four people. Covered with a sealing layer of olive oil the paste in an opened tin will keep in the refrigerator for a week or more.

  Italian and Bulgarian canned peeled tomatoes are terrific value.1 Used occasionally and in very small quantities they work wonders for chicken and fish stocks and soups, pizza fillings and sauces made from insufficiently ripe tomatoes. Used to excess they become monotonous and sickly. Two to three tablespoons of tinned tomatoes are enough for a sauce made from 2 lb. of the fresh fruit or for 3 pints of stock.

  Cookery book instructions to ‘de-seed’ tomatoes or squeeze out the watery parts before cooking are unrealistic; the water content of tomatoes is 94 per cent and the sole effective way to get rid of it is by evaporation. On the degree of evaporation or reduction to which the tomatoes are subjected the flavour of the sauce very largely depends. A tomato sauce can be completely changed by two or three minutes more or less of reduction or concentration by steady simmering. Demonstration of this point makes an illuminating cookery/chemistry lesson. As for the ideal consistency of a tomato sauce to go with, or to be incorporated in, any given dish, a cookery-student’s thesis could be written on the subject, and for all I know already has been.

  When the potentialities of the tomato were first being explored in the nineteenth century, it was nearly as often used for sweet dishes as for sauces and soups. French cookery books of the period nearly all include recipes for tomato jam. Escoffier gives a couple, and in England an eight-volume Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery, published in 1899, gives a formula for candied tomatoes, several for jam, and another for green tomatoes to be stewed in a sugar syrup and eaten cold with cream. Evidently even tomato soups were heavily sweetened. A booklet put out in 1900 by the Franco-American Food Company of Jersey City made the point that its canned tomato soup was a spiced rather than a sweet one, ‘and our increasing sales of this variety show that it suits the taste of the majority. Sugar could be added “when desired”.’

  Although slightly strange, tomato jam is a most delicate and attractive preserve, with the charm of the unfamiliar. It is worth trying, even if only in a very small quantity.

  *

  First published in Nova, July 1965. The second half of the article reappeared in my Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, 1970, so did the recipes which followed the introductory essay. These I do not repeat here, but my version of Boulestin’s sweet tomato conserve, which I had intended to include in the same book and which is indeed indexed as appearing in it, somehow got away. The recipe is neither long nor complicated. For those who grow their own tomatoes or can buy from the market when the fruit is cheap, here it is:

  TOMATO PRESERVE

  This may sound freakish but is a delicate and beautiful preserve. Evidently it was one of Marcel Boulestin’s favourite sweetmeats; a recipe for tomato jam or preserve appears in every one of his cookery books.

  2 lbs. of very ripe and sweet tomatoes, 2 lbs of sugar, a vanilla bean, ½ pint of water.

  In a wide preserving pan boil the sugar and water to a syrup. Add the tomatoes, skinned and sliced. Boil steadily, stirring fairly often, for about 35 minutes. Put in the vanilla bean (vanilla essence will not do). Cook for approximately 10 to 15 minutes longer or until setting point is reached. Remove the vanilla pod, skim the jam, and let it cool for a few minutes before turning it into small jars.

  Tomato jam is particularly
good when eaten in the French way, as a sweet,1 with fresh cream cheese or plain pouring cream.

  TOMATO HONEY

  This is a recipe I tried in 1973 and found excellent. It is of American origin and comes from Miss Leslie’s Complete Cookery, Philadelphia, 1837.

  ‘To each pound of tomatoes, allow the grated peel of a lemon and six fresh peach leaves. Boil them slowly till they are all to pieces; then squeeze and strain them through a bag. To each pint of liquid allow a pound of loaf-sugar, and the juice of one lemon. Boil them together half an hour, or till they become a thick jelly. Then put it into glasses, and lay double tissue paper closely over the top. It will be scarcely distinguishable from real honey.’

  Be sure to use really juicy tomatoes for this preserve, or the yield of juice will be very small, and at best will not be more than 1 pint from 2½ lb. of fruit. Peach leaves being unavailable in my strip of London back garden, I used instead a few drops of real almond essence, towards the end of the cooking, when the juice and sugar are on the boil.

  Tomato honey is excellent with pork, especially the salted or pickled variety, and goes nicely too with lamb, as a change from redcurrant or mint jelly.

  Escoffier and the canned tomato industry

  It is interesting to learn that Escoffier played an important part in the creation of the canned tomato industry. According to his own testimony, when he was Chef de Cuisine at the Petit Moulin Rouge restaurant in the Champs Elysées in the mid 1870s1 he had had the idea of preserving tomatoes in such a way that they would replace fresh ones at any season. At the time tomato purée for the restaurant was preserved in champagne bottles which were then sterilised (a method which was demonstrated to me by the cook at a pensione in Anacapri where I stayed during the summer of 1952, and which I described in Italian Food. The same method was used by country people in Spain in the 1960s and probably still is. The bottles didn’t have to be champagne bottles. Any wine bottles would do).