An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  A note: if you don’t make your own bread try white bread from a Greek or Italian bakery. On no account use a factory loaf. I did once, in the interests of discovery. The experiment was expensive (a waste of good raspberries), disastrous and conclusive.

  A MULBERRY AND ALMOND DISH

  Mix 12 oz. to 1 lb. of mulberries cooked with sugar as above with 1 ½ to 2 oz. of fresh soft white breadcrumbs and 1 ½ to 2 oz. of skinned and finely ground almonds.

  Serve chilled, in narrow goblets or white china cups, with a little cream floated on top.

  The mulberry-almond-bread combination is a good one. It was suggested to me by an Italian recipe for a sauce or relish called sapore de morone which appears in Epulario, first published in Venice in 1516. According to Lord Westbury, Handlist of Italian Cookery Books, Florence, 1963, this work, attributed to Giovanni Rosselli, is in reality taken from the same Maestro Martino manuscript used in the earlier and better known De Honesta Voluptate by Bartolomeo Sacchi, printed in Venice in 1475.

  I suspect that the mulberry sauce – we are not told for what manner of meat it was intended – may have originated somewhere in Asia Minor and was perhaps brought to Italy after the Venetian conquest of Constantinople in 1204 A.D. It could equally have come via Persia or Afghanistan where, as in Turkey, the berries of the white or silk mulberry are dried to provide a supply for the winter. In the Epulario sauce the berries – whether white or black we do not know – are uncooked, crushed lightly in a mortar, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg – no sugar – and pressed through a fine cloth sieve together with the pounded almonds and breadcrumbs.

  MULBERRY WATER ICE

  I make this in the same way as a strawberry or raspberry water ice, except that mulberries need no additional lemon or orange juice.

  Make a thickish syrup with 8 oz. each of sugar and water.

  Purée 2 lb. of mulberries in a blender or food processor. Press them through a stainless steel wire sieve.

  Mix the syrup and the mulberry pulp and chill in the refrigerator before turning into a mould, ice trays, or an electric sorbetière to freeze.

  It was from the late Sir Harry Luke, author of that delightful and civilized book The Tenth Muse (Putnam, 1954, and revised edition 1962) that I learned of the beauty of mulberry ices.

  MULBERRIES AS A DESSERT FRUIT

  If you have just a few mulberries, not enough to make a pudding or an ice, arrange them in a little pyramid, if possible on shiny green leaves, on a plain glass compote dish, with a separate bowl of sugar. They are glorious. But beware the juice. It stains.

  Petit Propos Culinaires No. 2, 1979

  Foods of Legend

  Refined or classic French cookery – call it haute cuisine if you must – and French regional, provincial, farmhouse and peasant styles of cookery cannot arbitrarily be isolated and set apart one from the other. All are interdependent and to a certain extent intermixed. Each borrows and learns from the other.

  The transposition of a dish from one category into another happens in many different ways. For the sake of argument, let us say for example that the son of a humble couple in a Provençal village leaves home to train in the catering business. In the course of time he becomes one of the world’s most famous cooks. At the height of his fame and glory he thinks with nostalgia of the rough country food of his childhood. He would like to reproduce for his customers a certain dish of sliced potatoes and artichoke hearts baked with olive oil and garlic and scented with wild thyme. So rustic a dish can hardly, he realizes, be offered to the fine ladies and gentlemen who frequent the elegant restaurant over which he presides. From force of habit he banishes the garlic and adds sliced truffles. It is a period in the history of cooking when the addition of truffles would make a poached mouse or a fricassee of donkey’s ears acceptable to those rich and great ones who flock to eat the creations of this famous chef. They do not know that, for once, they will be eating what is almost a peasant dish. Truffles are one of the natural products of Provence. In a dish of potatoes and artichokes – another of the local products – they are by no means out of place. The olive oil of the country will not however be acceptable to Parisians or to Londoners. Butter must be used instead. Concentrated, clear meat juice, must, it goes without saying, be added. In the classic cooking of professionals meat juice or broth goes with everything, olive oil with nothing save salads, vinaigrette and mayonnaise sauces.

  A poor Provençal family might find their great son’s version of a familiar dish lacking in savour, although in its original form it would have made, with a saucerful of olives and perhaps a dish of fresh figs, an entire meal. To the customers of the Provençal village boy who is now the renowned and glorious Auguste Escoffier, potatoes, artichokes and truffles do not make even one course. They belong with a joint of meat. So Escoffier uses his vegetables as a foundation upon which to bake a choice little cut of spring lamb, a loin or best end of neck. For a festival or a wedding feast a very similar dish, a gigot of mutton on a bed of sliced potatoes, might have been taken by Madame Escoffier senior to the village baker’s oven to cook. It would be no more, and no less, than the ancient gigot boulangère with a midi accent. Madame Escoffier’s son gives it a more elegant name. To honour his compatriot, the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, he calls his creation carré d’agneau Mistral. He publishes the recipe in a book; and another of the myriad village dishes of France has entered the repertory of la cuisine classique.

  Before long, wine scholars and menu compilers are gravely debating the question of which Bordeaux vintage will best harmonize with the lamb, the potatoes and the artichokes, wondering whether the presence of the truffles does not after all call for a burgundy.

  Sometimes the rags to riches progress of a dish is reversed. A Parisian-born chef of the early nineteenth century brings to perfection – or to what at the time is considered perfection – a grandiose dish of sole in a white wine and cream sauce with a ceremonial garnish of freshwater crayfish, fried gudgeons, oysters, mushrooms and prawns impaled on ornamental skewers. The chef in question, who has perhaps first-hand knowledge of Normandy, and obtains his supplies of fish from the Norman coast, calls his creation sole à la normande. The recipe is modified and simplified by succeeding generations of cooks. Some hundred years later the great revival of regional specialities is initiated by a band of patriotic French men of letters fearful that the post-1918 influx of tourists demanding international palace hotel food (it is, alas, le classique which has opened the door to this dreariest of all styles of cooking) wherever they go will end in the annihilation of the typical specialities of the provinces of France. These entirely estimable men, among whom the prime movers are Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff and Count Austin de Croze, set to work compiling their wonderful catalogues and books concerning regional dishes and products, and their guides to the provincial restaurants where such things are served. At the same time the members of this happy band of pioneers do not hesitate to flay, in newspaper and magazine columns, the bad restaurateurs and the hoteliers who pander to ignorant tourists with mass-produced, characterless food.

  One day these gentlemen, visiting a renowned restaurant in Rouen (or was it Caen, Trouville, Honfleur?) enjoy a modernized version of the original sole normande. The patron of the restaurant explains that a garnish of crayfish and oysters only is the right and true traditional one for sole normande. It is not long before this information gets into the newspapers and cookery books. An expert in Norman folklore proceeds to argue that the whole thing is too complicated. Cooks in the households of Norman seaside towns do not, he says, have freshwater crayfish at their disposal. They enrich their sole dishes with mussels and shrimps only; and they cook their fish in locally produced cider, not in expensive white wine imported from other regions.

  It is a matter of months only before a learned historian unearths evidence which proves that the first sole normande was simply a mixture of fish boiled in a bucket of seawater on board the ship which took William of Normandy to Hastings. What
the creation of the Parisian chef (his name is said to have been Philippe, owner of a restaurant in the rue Montorgueil) has lost in splendour it has gained in ancient antecedents and a background which will make a godsend for publicity men, compilers of travel literature, and the experts in picturesque magazine cookery. It is all good publicity for French tourism and the restaurants and hotels of Normandy. What is more, the proprietors of seaside cafés and catering establishments actually take up the recipe and produce their own versions of it. Who can say now that the dish is not, in fact, of ancient Norman lineage?

  Because some local speciality has caught the imagination of tourists, it has, today, almost automatically come to be accepted as a great dish. Overestimation of the merits of a dish which relies purely on local conditions and ingredients for its charm will, in the end, kill it stone-dead. Take, say, from a salade niçoise the little pungent black olives of Provence, the fruity oil in the dressing, the sweet, ripe southern tomatoes, the capers and the brined anchovies which are all characteristic products of the region, and what is left? Little more than an English mixed salad…

  To reproduce French cooking in England with any success at all it is best, I think, to go for dishes with less resounding reputations and less specialized ingredients. This should not be difficult. For every French regional dish of international repute there are a hundred comparatively unknown, equally interesting and more easily adaptable to differing conditions. Here are some recipes for such dishes. I learned about them during the course of visiting various wholesale food markets in France: visits which proved a great deal more instructive than a thousand meals in restaurants, however good, could ever be.

  GRILLADE DES MARINIERS DU RHÔNE

  This is just one version out of the score of recipes for this venerable dish which is not a grill at all and which you will scarcely find nowadays simmering away in the galleys of the great petrol barges which whirl down the Rhône to Marseille. But curiously enough this dish, although made with fresh meat rather than with left-over boiled beef, has much in its flavour and composition which makes it akin to the celebrated miroton, always reputed to be characteristic of the cooking of the Paris concierge.

  Buy about 1 ½ to 2 lb. of a good lean cut of beef – topside is perhaps the best – and cut it into small steaks each weighing about 3 to 4 oz. The other ingredients are about 1 lb. of onions, 1 oz. of butter, 1 heaped teaspoon of flour, 2 or 3 tablespoons of chopped parsley, a clove of garlic, 3 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 of wine vinegar, 4 anchovy fillets, salt, pepper.

  Slice the onions fairly fine. Put a layer of them in a not-too-deep earthenware casserole. On top put two or three of the steaks, sprinkled with salt and pepper. Then a layer of onions, another of meat and so on, finishing with a layer of onions. Work the butter and flour together. Divide it into tiny knobs. Spread them over the top of the onions and round the sides of the casserole. Cover with buttered paper and a lid, and cook in a very slow oven, gas no. 1, 290°F., for about 2 hours.

  Mix the chopped parsley, garlic, olive oil, chopped anchovy fillets and vinegar to make a little vinaigrette sauce. Pour this mixture into the casserole. Replace the paper and the lid and cook another hour.

  As you see, a primitive but excellent way of making a richly flavoured stew with a slightly thickened sauce but without the addition of stock, wine, or even water. The dish can of course be reheated without coming to any harm.

  MUSEAU DE PORC EN SALADE

  Now here is another extremely simple little dish, a dish which anyone who has a helpful butcher can make with very little trouble or expense. I saw it, and tasted it, for the first time, on a charcutier’s stall in the market at Montpellier.

  Ask your butcher to put a boned pig’s cheek into brine for 24 hours. When you get it home, leave it soaking in cold water for an hour. Put it into a pot with an onion, a couple of carrots, 4 peppercorns, a bay leaf and a few parsley stalks. Just cover with fresh cold water and add a tablespoon of wine vinegar. Cook it very gently in a covered pot for about 1½ hours. Take it from the liquid, sprinkle it with oil, press it between two plates and leave it until the next day.

  Cut it, rind included, into the finest possible slices. Mix it with a vinaigrette sauce made with a couple of chopped shallots, a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped parsley, a teaspoon of yellow French mustard, a little salt, 6 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 of wine vinegar. Add, just for the look of the thing, a half tomato, all pulp and seeds discarded, cut into tiny pieces.

  Serve, as part of a mixed hors-d’œuvre, on a flat dish, strewn with more chopped parsley. There will be enough for 6 to 8 people.

  FROMAGE NORMAND

  The old Norman way – or one of the old ways – of making a cream cheese for dessert is to boil a pint of thick cream with a couple of tablespoons of sugar for about 5 minutes. If you like you can add a tablespoon or two of orange flower water. Turn the cream into a big bowl and leave it to get quite cold. You then whip the cream (it is easier if you have left it an hour or two in the refrigerator after cooling) and when it stands in peaks you can turn it in to the muslin or clean napkin with which you have lined an earthenware or metal cheese mould or drainer – which can be improvized by piercing holes in a cheap cake tin or in a tub-shaped carton – and leave it 3 or 4 hours, or overnight.

  To serve you turn it out in to a shallow dish and eat it with sugar and, if you like, strawberry, raspberry, red currant or quince jelly. There will be enough for 6 to 8 helpings.

  The Gourmet,1 1969

  1. Journal of the Department of Hotel and Catering Administration and Technology, Hendon College of Technology.

  The Markets of France: Cavaillon

  It is a Sunday evening in mid-June. The cafés of Cavaillon are crammed. There isn’t an inch to park your car. The noise is tremendous. In the most possible of the hotels – it goes by the name of Toppin – all the rooms are taken by seven o’clock. But the little Auberge La Provençale in the rue Chabran is quite quiet and you can enjoy a good little dinner – nothing spectacular, but genuine and decently cooked food well served – and go to bed early. The chances are you won’t sleep much though, because Monday is the big market day in Cavaillon and soon after midnight the carts and lorries and vans of the big fruit farmers’ co-operatives, of the market gardeners, of the tomato and garlic and onion growers, will start rattling and roaring and rumbling into the great open market in the place du Clos.

  At dawn they will be unloading their melons and asparagus, their strawberries and red currants and cherries, their apricots and peaches and pears and plums, their green almonds, beans, lettuces, shining new white onions, new potatoes, vast bunches of garlic. By six o’clock the ground will be covered with cageots, the chip vegetable and fruit baskets, making a sea of soft colours and shadowy shapes in the dawn light. The air of the Place is filled with the musky scent of those little early Cavaillon melons, and then you become aware of another powerfully conflicting smell – rich, clove-like, spicy. It is the scent of sweet basil, and it is coming from the far end of the market where a solitary wrinkled old man sits on an upturned basket, scores and scores of basil plants ringed all around him like a protective hedge. With a beady eye he watches the drama of the market place. The dealers, exporters and wholesalers walking round inspecting the produce, discussing prices, negotiating; the hangers-on standing about in groups smoking, chatting; the market police and official inspectors strolling round seeing that all is in order.

  On the whole the scene is quiet, quieter at least than you would expect considering that this is one of the most important wholesale fruit and vegetable markets in France, the great distributing centre for the primeurs of the astonishingly fertile and productive areas of the Vaucluse and the Comtat Venaissin. – areas which less than a hundred years ago were desperately poor, inadequately irrigated, isolated for lack of roads and transport, earthquake-stricken, devastated by blights which destroyed the cereal crops and the vines.

  It was with the building of the railways connec
ting Provence with Paris and the north, with Marseille and the ports of the Mediterranean to the south, that the possibilities of the Rhône and Durance valleys for intensive fruit and vegetable cultivation first began to be understood. New methods of irrigation, the planting of fruit trees in large areas where the vines had been stricken, the division of the land into small fields broken with tall cypress hedges as windbreaks against the scourging mistral, the ever-increasing demand in Paris and the big towns of the north for early vegetables, and the tremendous industry of these Provençal cultivators have done the rest. And to such effect that last year eighty thousand kilos of asparagus came into Cavaillon market alone between 15 April and 15 May; in the peak month of July three hundred tons of melons daily; five hundred tons of tomatoes every day in July and August. Altogether some hundred and sixty thousand tons of vegetables and fruit leave Cavaillon every year, about fifty per cent by rail, the rest by road. And Cavaillon, although the most important, is by no means the only big market centre in the neighbourhood. Avignon, Châteaurenard, Bollène, Permis, all dispatch their produce by special trains to the north; vast quantities of fruit are absorbed locally by the jam and fruit preserving industries of Apt and Carpentras; and every little town and village has its own retail vegetable and fruit market, every day in the bigger towns, once or twice a week in less populated places.

  But now seven o’clock strikes in the market at Cavaillon. The lull is over. This is the moment when the goods change hands. Pandemonium breaks loose. The dealers snatch the baskets of produce they have bought and rush them to waiting lorries. A cartload of garlic vanishes from under your nose. A mountain of melons evaporatesinawink. If you try to speak to any body you will be ignored, if you get in the way you’ll be knocked down in the wild scramble to get goods away to Paris, London, Brussels, and all the great centres of northern and eastern France. Suddenly, the market place is deserted.