At eight o’clock you emerge from the café where you have had your breakfast coffee and croissant. The market place is, to put it mildly, astir once more. It is surrounded by vans and lorries disgorging cheap dresses and overalls, plastic kitchenware, shoes and scarves and bales of cotton, piles of plates and jugs, nails and screws and knives, farm implements and packets of seeds, cartons of dried-up-looking biscuits and trays of chemically-coloured sweets.
You dive down a side street where you have spied a festoon of pretty cotton squares, and there, under gaudy painted colonnades, lilac and orange, cinnamon and lemon and rose, in patterns more typical of Marseille or the Levant than of Cavaillon, the retail market stalls are already doing business. The displays seem rather tame after the wholesale market and there is not a melon to be seen. It is too early in the season, they are still too expensive for the housewives of Cavaillon. Five thousand francs a kilo they were fetching today, and a week later in London shops 12s. 6d. each for little tiny ones. But the street opposite the painted colonnades leads into the square where more and more food stalls are opening and the housewives are already busy marketing. Here you can buy everything for a picnic lunch. Beautiful sprawling ripe tomatpes, a Banon cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves, Arles sausages, pâté, black olives, butter cut from a towering monolith, apricots, cherries.
It is still early and you can drive out towards Apt and branch off across the Lubéron. The roads are sinuous but almost empty, and they will take you through some of the most beautiful country in Provence. Perched on the hillsides are typical old Provençal villages, some, like Oppède-le-Vieux, crumbling, haunted, half-deserted, others like Bonnieux with a flourishing modern village built below the old one, and up beyond Apt, through the dramatic stretch of ochre-mining country, the strange red-gold village of Roussillon appears to be toppling precariously on the edge of a craggy cliff. Round about here, the network of caves under the ochreous rocks has been turned into vast champignonnières, and at the modest little Restaurant David (no relation) you can eat the local cultivated mushrooms cooked à la crème or à la provençale with, naturally, olive oit, parsley and garlic. And the Rose d’Or, a little hotel opened only a few weeks ago, promises a welcome alternative to the establishments of Apt, Aix and Cavaillon.
POT-AU-FEU PROVENÇAL
A simple pot-au-feu is typical of the real old Provençal cooking of the days before Provençal specialities became chic restaurant food and got fussed up and transferred into goodness knows what fantasies. Even an inexperienced cook can make a pot-au-feu in its basic form. And with a little extra trouble it can be turned into a splendid party dish – not for a grand formal party to be sure, or even a buffet party, but the sort of meal for intimate friends when you can put all the food on a huge scrubbed kitchen table and everyone sits round and helps themselves. It is a heartening sight, evocative of all the sun and bright colours of Provence; it is economical because it is one of those composite dishes which you gradually build up, to which you can make additions or subtractions and for which the planning of the colours, flavours, extra salads, vegetables, sauces, becomes perfectly intoxicating – but steady, keep a hold, or you’ll find you’ve made enough food for thirty, and you’ll have to order another case of wine and invite twenty more guests …
For the basic pot-au-feu, then, you need 2½ lb. approximately of flank of beef, 2½ lb. of shoulder, middle neck or breast of lamb (it is the lamb which gives it its essentially Provençal character), 1 lb. of shin of veal. All these meats are best cooked with bone. The flavouring vegetables are 2 each of large carrots, leeks, onions and tomatoes; a bouquet of herbs consisting of parsley stalks, a piece of celery, a bay leaf and a crushed clove of garlic all tied together; 1 tablespoon of salt. If the pot-au-feu is for a special occasion you include as well a boiling chicken, but since so many kitchens aren’t equipped with a soup pot large enough to hold a chicken at the same time as all the meat, this may have to be cooked separately.
Tie the beef and lamb into compact rolls or squares so that they retain their shape during cooking and will be easy to cut. Put them with the veal bone, and the chicken if there is room, into your biggest soup pot and cover with 4 or 5 pints of water. Bring gently to simmering point. As the grey scum rises, skim it off. When the scum becomes white and foamy, stop skimming. Put in the vegetables, the bouquet, the salt. At this stage you can add a glass of white wine if you have it to spare. Cover the pot. Cook at very low heat either on top of the stove or in the oven for 3 to 4 hours, until the chicken and meat are very tender. Take out the chicken and meat, put them in a deep dish and sprinkle them with olive oil and salt while they are still hot. The vegetables will be cooked to rags and can be discarded. Strain the stock into a bowl.
Next day, remove the fat from the stock (keep it for frying bread, potatoes, etc.) and if you have not already cooked the chicken, simmer it, with its giblets and feet, in the stock for about 3 hours. Or if you are using a roaster instead of a boiler, 45 to 50 minutes will cook it. As a matter of fact, although it is an extra extravagance from the point of view of fuel, the chicken will be very much nicer cooked the same day as it is to be eaten, before it has had time to harden up.
To serve the meat, you cut it all from the bones, slice it in very fine thin pieces, and keeping the beef, lamb and veal separate, sprinkle each with more oil, chopped parsley, shallots. Arrange them with the jointed chicken, all on one huge dish.
In bowls all round you have some or all of the following: a salad of chick peas, an aïoli, black olives, capers (these are the four typical, native Provençal dishes), a spicy tomato sauce, a grated carrot salad, a Jerusalem artichoke salad, potatoes, beetroot, celery, sweet red peppers, gherkins, hard-boiled eggs – it depends what is available, how many people you have to feed, on your own and your guests’ tastes. And for a first course all you will need is either the broth from the pot-au-feu, which will have a very fine flavour and which you can thicken if you like with a little rice – there should be enough for seven or eight people – or perhaps a dish of mussels, or a light fish soup.
SALADE DE POIS CHICHES
Chick peas are those knobbly corn-yellow peas rather the shape of nasturtium seeds, which the Spanish call garbanzos and the Italians ceci. At one time they were very much cultivated in Provence and are still popular there. In England they can be bought in Soho shops; they make delicious soups and salads.
Soak ½ lb. of chick peas overnight in plenty of cold water into which you stir a tablespoon of flour. Next day put them in a saucepan with the same water, plus a half teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Simmer them for an hour. Skim and strain them. Rinse out the saucepan, fill it with 3 pints of fresh water, bring to the boil, add a tablespoon of salt, put in the chick peas and simmer another 1 to 2 hours, until the peas are perfectly tender and the skins beginning to break.
Strain them (keep the liquid – it will make a good basis for a vegetable soup), put them in a bowl and while still hot stir in plenty of olive oil, sliced onion, garlic, parsley, and a little vinegar. If you can’t get chick peas, the same sort of salad can be made with haricot beans.
AÏOLI
Most readers will probably already be familiar with the famous garlic mayonnaise of Provence, so just as a reminder you will need, for eight people, a minimum of 2 large cloves of garlic – but more if you have avid garlic-eaters to entertain – 2 egg yolks, at least a half-pint of good olive oil, salt, lemon juice.
You first pound the garlic to a mash, then stir in the yolks, add a little salt, then the oil, exactly as for a mayonnaise. Lastly, the lemon juice. This beautiful golden ointment-like sauce is really the pivot and raison d’être of the whole affair, so you need plenty of it.
THE OLIVES AND CAPERS
The black olives of Provence are small, wrinkled, salty; all the tang of the South is in them. If you can’t buy these little black olives in Soho, at least avoid the great brownish ones sold in most delicatessen stores; they really haven’t anything of the same character. But
there are two bottled brands (Sharwood’s and Noel’s) which are quite good.
As for capers, another typical product of Provence (the best are the non-pareilles from the Var and the Bouches du Rhône), buy the finest French ones. Simply serve them in tiny bowls or hors-d’œuvre dishes, or pile up little mounds of them beside the sliced lamb and beef.
COULIS DE TOMATES À LA MOUTARDE
This is really an alternative to the aïoli, in case you have anti-garlic guests. But it is an excellent sauce in its own right, hot with a boiled chicken, beef, lamb and fish, or cold as in the present case. Ingredients are 2 lb. of tomatoes, a small onion, 1 clove of garlic, 1 carrot, a little piece of celery top, half a dozen parsley stalks, a teaspoon of dried basil, a dessertspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 4 teaspoons of yellow Dijon mustard.
Heat the oil in a wide shallow pan, put in the sliced onion, carrot, chopped celery and parsley stalks. After two or three minutes add the sliced tomatoes, garlic, basil and salt. Cook gently, uncovered, stirring from time to time, for about half an hour, until most of the moisture has evaporated and the tomatoes are in a pulp. Sieve the mixture in a food mill. Taste for seasoning – it may need sugar – then stir in, a little at a time, the mustard.
Vogue, January 1960
The Markets of France: Yvetot
Duclair is a little town on a loop of the Seine twenty kilometres outside Rouen towards Dieppe. It is not particularly picturesque and the main road and the ferry over the Seine make it noisy. But I always try to stay the night there on my way down through France and on the way back again because of the Hôtel de la Poste where the Swiss proprietor and his pretty Norman wife provide such a warm welcome and such good food. Their big airy dining-room overlooks the river, their delicious pâté of Rouen duckling cooked with port is brought to table in the gigantic old terrines in which it has been baked, their hors-d’œuvres are always fresh, well chosen, original and beautifully served, ducks and chickens are roasted on a spit in the old Norman fireplace in the kitchen.
And if you happen to arrive on a Monday evening you could see a typical Norman market, both wholesale and retail, at Duclair early on Tuesday morning. It is as good a way as any to the beginnings of an understanding and appreciation of any French province, to see the local markets in action, to watch the produce unloaded from the carts and vans, to hear the talk of the farmers and buyers in the cafés after the main business has been transacted. And to us, whose country markets are rapidly vanishing, the extraordinary activity and the variety of foodstuffs on sale in a little town of only three thousands inhabitants like Duclair, so few miles away from Dover, has a particular fascination.
One could almost go over there to do one’s weekly marketing–or on into Rouen, where the big market day is also on Tuesday, and from where you could bring home butter made from unpasteurized cream, great bowls of tripes à la mode, and duck pâtés, and baskets full of big round Breton artichokes for a tenth of the price we have to pay here. And Norman cheeses too: genuine Pont-l’Evèque made on the farms of the Pays d’Auge from milk still warm from the cows; Livarot, that powerful and marvellous cheese which has been made in the district since the thirteenth century; even a good Norman Camembert can be found if you look. But progress is on the march in Normandy, and in a big way. It won’t be long before cheeses such as these become rarities. More and more of the farms are going over to pasteurized milk, their produce is sent to the co-operatives, the butter and the cheese no longer have the characteristic ripe flavours one used to expect. On the whole, though, the Norman producers are acting with sense and foresight over the development of their dairy industry. They are frankly calling their new cheeses by new brand names, making them in different shapes and original packings, selling them on their own merits rather than attempting to pass them off as the great traditional products of an unmechanized and unstandardized age.
There are, of course, big areas of Normandy where the farmers are still producing milk, butter, cream and cheeses by the old methods. The outlet for these products are the local wholesale markets.
The great centre of the rich Pays d’Auge, also cider and Calvados country, is Vimoutiers, only a few kilometres from the cheese villages of both Camembert and Livarot. The big butter market is on Monday afternoons. The centre of the Bray district is Gournay, where over a hundred years ago Petit Suisse cream cheeses were evolved by a farmer’s wife and a Swiss herdsman. There are now almost a dozen different varieties of these cream cheeses, and the Gervais factory, at Fernères, absorbs something like 50,000 gallons of milk daily for the demi-sel and other fresh cheeses.
Yvetot is the great butter market of the Caux country and provides a sight worth seeing if you happen to be in the district on a Wednesday morning. Out of the vans are coming huge cones of butter fresh from the farms. It is made from ripened, unpasteurized cream, and divided into loaves of 35 or 70 kilos each; they are wrapped in crisp white cloths or in polythene wrappings and stacked in huge baskets or wire carriers. Each parcel of butter is tasted with a long scoop and then re-weighed before a buyer will accept it. On the long rows of stalls are ranged all sorts of fresh farm products – eggs, vegetables, salads, churns of cream, live chickens and ducks – brown Rouen ducks, black Muscovy ducks, white Pekin ducks, turkeys, baby chicks; one old woman has just one basket of produce for sale – eggs, a few fresh peas, and a bunch of green turnip-tops. But even this little collection of cottage garden produce won’t change hands without some stern bargaining.
As for the farm butter, it is being borne away by the purchasers in the great baskets which look as if they might have been used by the Scarlet Pimpernel to smuggle refugee aristos out of Paris. Tomorrow this butter will be enriching many a roast chicken, thousands of omelettes and cakes and pastries, filling the kitchens of France with the incomparable scent of butter gently sizzling in a frying pan…
And indeed it is high time to think about lunch. There is Tôtes not far away on the Dieppe road, and the famous old Hôtel des Cygnes where Guy de Maupassant wrote Boule de Suif and where the proprietor appears the very embodiment of Norman robustness. At the Marée in the market place of Rouen there are delicious fish dishes, excellent food at the Beffroy in the rue du Beffroy, all the more unexpected because the place looks too like Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe to be true. But perhaps it is better to avoid Rouen, the midday traffic going in and coming out is too much of a worry. Better to drive a bit farther, down in to lower Normandy and the beautiful Vallée d’Auge, past old Norman farms and manors, through country thick with apple trees, and pastures so opulent and green that unless you have seen some of the raw, rebuilt little towns, it is hard to believe in the terrible devastation of only fifteen years ago.
At Orbec, twenty kilometres from Lisieux, is the Caneton, a restaurant which you know is going to be good as soon as you enter its doors – the smell is so appetizing – but it is small and not exactly unknown, so it is prudent to telephone for a table in advance. The menu gastronomique at the Caneton is generous and good value for 1800 francs, but a trifle fussy and rich, and a better choice for my taste is the plat du jour, with perhaps a duck liver pâté, or local charcuterie, to start with, which is what you see the inhabitants eating.
Vogue, February 1960
The Markets of France: Montpellier
‘Buy a pound of choucroûte from a village charcutier. As you pass the municipal pump, pause a moment…’
Any English cookery writer who published a recipe opening with these words would be thought distinctly out of touch. The evocative sentence comes in fact from a little book called La Cuisine en Plein Air by that most adorable of French gastronomes, Dr Edouard de Pomiane. The little volume, which deals with cooking out of doors for motorists, cyclists, campers, walkers, and fishermen has never been translated into English and wouldn’t be of much practical use to us if it were, because the majority of the recipes are based on the products to be bought at the ‘village charcutier’, an institution which doesn’t exist in the British
Isles.
It is only when one has haunted the markets of France and the food shops in the country towns and villages, watched the housewives doing their shopping, listened to them discussing their purchases at the pâtisseries and the charcuteries that one realizes how much less they are tied to their kitchens than we had always been led to suppose.
The point is that in France no shame is attached to buying ready-prepared food because most of it is of high quality. The housewives and small restaurateurs who rely upon the professional skill of charcutiers and pâtissiers for a part of their supplies see to it that the pâtés and sausages, the little salads for hors-d’œuvre, the galantines and terrines and fish quenelles, the hams and tongues and pies, pastries and fruit flans, the petits fours and the croissants maintain high standards of freshness and excellence, and that any popular regional speciality of the district continues to be cooked with the right and proper traditional ingredients, even if the methods have been speeded up by the introduction of modern machinery.
Here in England we find little in our local delicatessen shop – the only approximation we have to the charcutier who sells many ready-prepared foods besides pork butchers’ products – but mass-produced sausages, pork pies and fish cakes off a conveyor belt, piled slices of pale pink and blood-red flannel which pass respectively for cooked ham and tongue, bottles of pickled onions and jars of red cabbage in vinegar, possibly a potato salad dressed with synthetic mayonnaise and, with luck, some herrings in brine. In any French town of any size at all we find perhaps three or four rival charcutiers displaying trays of shining olives, black and green, large and small, pickled gherkins, capers, home-made mayonnaise, grated carrot salad, shredded celeriac in rémoulade sauce, several sorts of tomato salad, sweet-sour onions, champignons à la Grecque, ox or pig’s muzzle finely sliced and dressed with a vinaigrette sauce and fresh parsley, a salad of mussels, another of cervelas sausage; several kinds of pork pâté; sausages for grilling, sausages for boiling, sausages for hors-d’œuvre, flat sausages called crépinettes for baking or frying, salt pork to enrich stews and soups and vegetable dishes, pigs’ trotters ready cooked and bread-crumbed, so that all you need to do is to take them home and grill them; cooked ham, raw ham, a galantine of tongue, cold pork and veal roasts, boned stuffed ducks and chickens… So it isn’t difficult for the housewife in a hurry to buy a little selection, however modest, of these things from the charcuterie, and plus her own imagination and something she has perhaps already in the larder to serve an appetizing and fresh little mixed hors-d’œuvre.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 30