An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  To Escoffier the disadvantage of the bottled purée was that it could only be used for sauces, so he set about evolving a method which would ensure a supply of crushed tomatoes – by which he meant tomates concassées – for any dish which required them whenever the fresh fruit was unobtainable. Having experimented to his own complete satisfaction – he does not say what method he used – he contacted various firms of food manufacturers, among them La Maison Gilbert at Lambesc in the Bouches-du-Rhone, and La Maison Caressa at Nice. Finding that neither firm was interested, and that further attempts to get the idea taken up had failed, Escoffier dropped the matter until after he had taken charge of the Savoy Hotel kitchens. In August one year he spent a few days holiday at Saxon-les-Bains in the Rhône Valley, where he had an interest in a fruit preserving factory. It so happened that the summer was an exceptionally hot one, the yield of tomatoes in the region was unusually high, and ‘taking advantage of this wonderful opportunity, two thousand 2 kilo cans of crushed tomato were manufactured and despatched at once to the Savoy Hotel.’

  Still recounting his own story, Escoffier reported that the following year the factory at Saxon, all set to manufacture a quantity of the canned crushed tomatoes, was obliged to abandon the project because of the loss of the tomato crop owing to periods of intense cold that summer. Escoffier was not the man to let go easily. Returning to the Maison Caressa at Nice, he persuaded the factory which had turned down the project fifteen years earlier to manufacture ‘a certain quantity’ of 2 kilo cans of crushed tomato according to his own specification. The new product was an immense success, its fame spread rapidly, the following year the Maison Caressa canned 60,000 kilos of tomatoes and the director thanked Escoffier – as a friend – for his advice.

  The story of the Escoffier canned crushed tomatoes is told in George Auguste Escoffier by Eugène Herbodeau and Paul Thalamas, published by the Practical Press Ltd, London, 1955 (pp.99–104). The authors do not acknowledge the source of Escoffier’s account, but recount that it was during his days as an army chef de cuisine at the siege of Metz in 1870 that he had first grasped the necessity of improving the techniques of canning food. Again, according to Escoffier himself, a Paris factory, the Maison Fontaine, took up the canned tomato industry, the whole department of the Vaucluse started to specialise in the same business, and it was only after the events recorded by him that Italy and America introduced their own versions of canned tomatoes. Escoffier’s story is entirely credible. He was not one to make exaggerated claims, and scarcely needed to. He was in any case always an innovator. But what happened to the crushed tomatoes which had been such a success? Were they abandoned in favour of whole canned tomatoes?

  1. Written in 1965. Friends living in Spain now (1984) tell me that the old ridged, sweet-tasting tomatoes have all but vanished. You may see them in Spanish still-life paintings, but not in the markets. The so-called beefsteak tomatoes we now buy in England are hot-house grown in Holland, and I believe, in Guernsey.

  1. Was it optimism or naïveté on my part which made me express such a belief? Look at the Chinese gooseberry or Kiwi fruit. It is a pretty colour, but not a very interesting fruit. The moment the French restaurant chefs took it up, it became a luxury, now sells at absurdly inflated prices, and figures in every other new style dessert recipe and often with duck, with game birds, even with fish. It is not its merit which dictates its presence in those dishes. It is its known high price. The same could be said of the out of season imported asparagus three pieces of which appear in every salade tiède and on every plate of noisettes d’agneau au sabayon de poireaux.

  1. In 196 5 Bulgarian canned tomatoes were easily available, but it is now many years since I have seen them in English shops.

  1. See Letting Well Alone, p. 46 and Foods of Legend, p. 249.

  1. Escoffier remained at this restaurant from 1873 to 1878.

  English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes

  In the late forties and the early fifties, every new member of the Wine and Food Society received, together with a copy of the current number of the Society’s quarterly magazine and a membership card, a pamphlet entitled Pottery, or Home Made Potted Foods, Meat and Fish Pastes, Savoury Butters and Others. The little booklet was a Wine and Food Society publication, the author’s name was concealed under the whimsical pseudonym of ‘A Potter’, and the date was 1946.

  The Wine and Food Society’s propaganda in favour of homemade potted meats and fish was premature. In those days of rationing and imitation food we associated fish paste and potted meat with the fearful compounds of soya bean flour, dried egg and dehydrated onions bashed up with snoek or Spam which were cheerfully known as ‘mock crab paste’ and ‘meat spread’. By 1954, when fourteen years of rationing came to an end none of us wanted to hear another word of the makeshift cooking which potted meats and fish pastes seemed to imply.

  It was not until ten years later that we began to see that in fact these very English store-cupboard provisions, so far from being suited to the cheese-paring methods necessitated by desperate shortages, demand first-class basic ingredients and a liberal hand with butter. It is indeed essential to understand that the whole success of the recipes described in this booklet depends upon these factors, and upon the correct balance of the ingredients.

  Hungry as we are today for the luxury; of authenticity and for visual elegance, we find that the Potter’s work makes enticing reading: ‘How delicious to a schoolboy’s healthy appetite sixty years ago, was a potted meat at breakfast in my grandmother’s old Wiltshire home. Neat little white pots, with a crust of yellow butter suggesting the spicy treat beneath, beef, ham or tongue, handiwork of the second or third kitchenmaid…’

  The Potter whose grandmother employed the second and third kitchenmaids in question was, M. André Simon tells me, Major Matthew Connolly (father of Mr Cyril Connolly); and with his felicitous evocation of a mid-Victorian country breakfast table and those second and third kitchenmaids pounding away at the ham and tongue for potting he makes a number of points, most relevant of which concerns the kitchenmaids. What but the return of these handmaidens to our kitchens in the re-incarnated form of electric mixers, blenders and beaters1 has made the revival of one of our most characteristic national delicacies a feasible proposition? Then, the neat little white pots, the crust of yellow butter, there is something fundamentally and uniquely English in the picture evoked by Major Connolly. It is a picture which belongs as much to the world of Beatrix Potter (Major Connolly would no doubt have appreciated the coincidental pun) as to that of the military gentleman from Bath, making it doubly an insult that the mass-produced pastes and sandwich spreads of the factories should go by the honourable names of potted meat, potted ham, tongue, lobster, salmon, shrimp and the rest. Potted shrimps alone remain as the sole representative of these products to retain something of its original nature, although a few smoked haddock pastes are beginning to appear on London restaurant menus. These are usually somewhat absurdly listed as haddock pâté, or pâré de haddock fumé, In an expensive Chelsea restaurant I have even seen – and eaten – a mixture called rillettes écossaises or ‘pâté of Arbroath smokies with whisky’. The dish was good, but to label such a mixture rillettes when this is a word applicable exclusively to potted fat pork, or pork with goose or rabbit, does seem to touch the fringe of restaurateur’s lunacy. For that matter, I find it sad that Arbroath smokies, the most delicate, expensive and rare of all the smoked haddock tribe, should be subjected to such treatment. Simply heated through in the oven with fresh butter, smokies are to me one of the most exquisite of our national specialities.

  That crust of yellow butter so important to the true English potted meats and pastes as opposed to the Franglais and the factory-produced versions, does perhaps need a little more explanation than the late Major Connolly, who refers to it throughout his little work as ‘melted butter’, thought necessary to clarify. Clarified in fact is what it is, or should be, that butter. And since for the successful confection and st
orage of many, although not all, potted meats and fish, clarified butter is a necessary adjunct, it seems only fair to warn readers that the process does involve a little bother, although a trifling one compared to the services rendered by a supply of this highly satisfactory sealing, mixing, and incidentally, frying ingredient.

  Storage of Potted Foods

  Concerning the keeping qualities of home-potted foods, there are some essential points to make. First, all juices and liquid which come from fish or meat to be potted, whether especially cooked for the purpose or whether left-over from a joint, must be drained off before the food is pounded or packed up for potting. Because stock or gravy from salmon, game or beef, let us say, happens to look rich and taste delicious, that does not mean it will not go bad if it separates from the meat or fish in question and settles to the bottom of the pot. We all know what happens when jellied gravy and sediment is left at the bottom of a bowl of dripping or lard.

  It is also important to eliminate as far as possible any air pockets in pots of meat and fish. This means that the pots must be packed very full and the contents pressed and pressed until they are as tightly packed as possible.

  Finally, make sure that the layer of melted clarified butter with which the pots are covered is sufficiently thick to seal the contents completely. Given these conditions there is no reason why potted meat and fish should not keep, in a correctly ventilated larder, for several weeks. ‘Game to be sent to distant places’, wrote Meg Dods, long before the advent of the refrigerator ‘and potted without cutting up the birds will keep for a month.’ Once broached, the contents of a pot should be stored in the refrigerator and quickly consumed. For this reason, potted meats and fish are essentially delicacies to be packed into small pots. Failing the old-fashioned neat white pots described by Major Connolly use miniature white china soufflé dishes or ramekins, small straight-sided glass jars, foie gras or pâté terrines, or white, covered pots such as those associated with Gentleman’s Relish – still a favourite fish paste. Apart from the dimensions and shape of the pot, an important point to remember is that whatever the colour or decoration on the outside of the pots or jars used for potted meats, the inside should be of a pale colour and preferably white, so that the delicate creams and pinks of the contents with their layer of yellow butter look fresh and appetizing against their background.

  When and How to Serve Potted Foods and Pastes

  ‘A noble breakfast,’ says George Borrow of the morning meal offered him at an inn at Bala in North Wales, ‘there was tea and coffee, a goodly white loaf and butter, there were a couple of eggs and two mutton chops – there was boiled and pickled salmon – fried trout … also potted trout and potted shrimps …’ A few weeks later he returns in search of more country delicacies. He is not disappointed. ‘What a breakfast! Pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; dish of plain shrimps; tin of sardines; beautiful beef-steak; eggs, muffins, large loaf, and butter, not forgetting capital tea…’

  George Borrow was writing of Wild Wales in the eighteen-fifties. When you come to analyse his splendid breakfasts you find that with slight changes he might almost be describing a nineteen-sixties, chop-house revival period, West End restaurant lunch. The potted shrimps, the trout, the steak, the pot of hare (now the chef’s terrine de lièvre), the mutton chops (now lamb cutlets), the salmon, now smoked rather than pickled, are very much with us still. The March of Progress has alas transformed the goodly white bread into that unique substance, restaurateur’s toast, while tea and coffee are replaced by gin-and-tonic or a bottle of white wine, and for my part I would say none the worse for that. Tea with a fish breakfast or coffee with beefsteaks have never been my own great favourites in the game of what to drink with what.

  Here we are then with plenty of ideas for an easy and simple English lunch; potted tongue or game followed by a simple hot egg dish; or smoked salmon paste with butter and brown bread to precede grilled lamb chops, or oven-baked sole, or fillet steak if you are rich. For a high-tea or supper meal spread smoked haddock paste on fingers of hot toast and arrange them in a circle around a dish of scrambled eggs. For cocktail parties, use smoked salmon butter, fresh salmon paste, sardine or tunny fish butter, potted cheese, as fillings for the smallest of small sandwiches. Fish, meat and cheese pastes do not combine successfully with vol-au-vent cases, pastry or biscuits, but in sandwiches or spread on fingers of coarse brown bread they will be greeted as a blessed change from sticky canapés and messy dips. Stir a spoonful or two of potted crab or lobster (minus the butter covering) into fresh cream for eggs en cocotte, into a béchamel sauce to go over poached eggs or a gratin of sole fillets. And as Mrs Johnstone, alias Meg Dods, author of the admirable Housewife’s Manual of 1826 wrote, ‘What is left of the clarified butter (from potted lobster or crab) will be very relishing for sauces’ while ‘any butter from potted tongue or chicken remaining uneaten will afterwards be useful for frying meat and for pastry for pies’.

  Recipes

  CLARIFIED BUTTER

  In a large frying or sauté pan put a slab of butter (I use a good quality butter and find that it pays to prepare 2 lb. at a time since it keeps almost indefinitely and is immeasurably superior to fresh butter for frying bread, croquettes, rissoles, fish cakes, veal escalopes, fish à la meunière and a score of other tricky cooking jobs). Let the butter melt over very gentle heat. It must not brown, but should be left to bubble for a few seconds before being removed from the heat and left to settle.

  Have ready a piece of butter muslin wrung out in warm water, doubled, and laid in a sieve standing over the bowl or deep wide jar in which the butter is to be stored. Filter the butter while it is still warm. For storage keep the jar, covered, in the refrigerator.

  The object of clarifying butter is to rid it of water, buttermilk sediment, salt and any foreign matter which (a) for purposes of frying cause the butter to blacken and burn, and (b) render it susceptible to eventual rancidity. The clarification process also expels air and causes the butter to solidify as it cools, making it a highly effective sealing material. In French cookery clarified beef suet, pigs’ lard and goose fat are used in precisely the same way to seal pâtés and home-preserved pork and goose. These are the famous confits which are the French equivalents of our eighteenth and nineteenth century potted meat, game and poultry. The delicious pork and goose rillettes and rillons of Western France are also close relations of English potted meats – in other words cooked and shredded or pounded meat packed into pots after cooking, as opposed to the pâtés and terrines which are made from raw ingredients cooked directly in the pots or the crust in which they are to be stored and served.

  POTTED TONGUE

  To my mind this is the best and most subtle of all English potted meat inventions. My recipe is adapted from John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery published in 1783. Farley was master of the London Tavern, and an unusually lucid writer. One deduces that the cold table at the London Tavern must have been exceptionally good, for all Farley’s sideboard dishes, cold pies, hams, spiced beef joints and potted meats are thought out with much care, are set down in detail and show a delicate and educated taste.

  Ingredients and proportions for potted tongue are ½ lb. each of cooked, brined and/or smoked ox tongue and clarified butter, a salt-spoonful of ground mace, a turn or two of black or white pepper from the mill.

  Chop the tongue and, with 5 oz. (weighed after clarifying) of the butter, reduce it to a paste in the blender or liquidizer, season it, pack it tightly down into a pot or pots, smooth over the top, cover, and leave in the refrigerator until very firm. Melt the remaining 3 oz. of clarified butter and pour it, tepid, over the tongue paste, so that it sets in a sealing layer about one eighth of an inch thick. When completely cold, cover the pot with foil or greaseproof paper. The amount given will fill one ¾ to 1 pint shallow soufflé dish, although I prefer to pack my potted tongue in two or three smaller containers. Venison can be potted in the same way as tongue, and makes one of the best of all
sandwich fillings. Salt beef makes another excellent potted meat.

  TO POT HAM WITH CHICKENS

  Readers interested in more than the bare formula of a dish will appreciate the charming, simple and well explained recipe below. Apart from the eighteenth-century country house atmosphere evoked by the writing, we get also a very clear picture of the manner in which these potted meats were presented and a substantial hint as to the devising of other permutations and combinations of poultry, game and meat for potting:

  ‘Take as much lean of boiled ham as you please, and half the quantity of fat, cut it as thin as possible, beat it very fine in a mortar, with a little oiled butter, beaten mace, pepper and salt, pot part of it into a china pot, then beat the white part of a fowl with a very little seasoning; it is to qualify the ham, put a lay of chicken, then one of ham, then chicken at the top, press it hard down, and when it is cold, pour clarified butter over it; when you send it to the table cut out a thin slice in the form of half a diamond, and lay it round the edge of your pot.’

  Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper, 1769

  POTTED CHICKEN LIVERS

  This is a recipe which produces a rich, smooth and gamey-flavoured mixture, rather like a very expensive French pâté, at a fraction of the price and with very little fuss.