given a small piece of land, the French countryman will prefer to plant vegetables rather than flowers. The sight of leeks growing in a modest front garden may invite the foreign visitor to smile at such true French pragmatism, but it is only the result of a long history of social order…. Every Frenchman knows that passionate and constant work in the well-groomed kitchen garden will feed his family throughout the year.
Furthermore, in most American gardening households it is the gardener who sets the tune and the cook who must dance to it—one day dealing with a plethora of Kentucky Wonders and on the next a glut of summer squash. No wonder tomatoes and sweet corn are our favorite garden produce—vegetables on which almost everyone delights in gorging. In France, the gardener almost alwaysis the cook, and it is the garden that is made to dance the jig.
The French are masters of the intensive gardening technique whereby what is to be eaten is always crowding on the heels of what is being eaten now—bean rows, for instance, taking over the pea patch, and bell peppers going in where the carrots have come out. More interesting still is the way certain plants provide food from the moment their sprouts start to appear: overplant your peas and you have lots of tiny, tender pea shoots; onion plants first offer up slender, chivelike spears, then small green onions, and, finally, the mature onions themselves. All this from a plot that is, by American standards, surprisingly small. As Tilleray explains—
A family of four might require a space of only nine feet by twelve feet to provide leeks, tomatoes, beans, herbs, cabbages, radishes, and lettuces on a seasonal basis, [as well as] potatoes, onions, and winter squashes to be stored in a cool place and used as needed.
The relationship between the gardener/cook and thepotager is both intimate and spontaneous, especially if, as is ideal, the plot lies just outside the kitchen door. In the morning, when the cook steps out to snip some calendula, nasturtiums, or sweet peas, she sees what is ripe and ready to eat, and these observations nudge themselves into the day’s menu. Later, she will return to fill herpanier with fennel, eggplant, some tomatoes, and a handful of herbs. If it is late spring, she might also pick some strawberries; if it is summer, a fat Charentais melon. And so it goes, all through the spring, the summer, the fall, and well into the winter months. Because, as the proverb says …
NOTHING ISHUNGRIER
THAN ANEMPTYPOT.
But the French cook, as frugal as she may be, requires that each dish shall be itself, with its full aroma, its full essence, its own character. She knows, by long experience, that poverty does not prevent the exercise of skill: it sets the latter off against the former—it replaces money by intelligence.
— Frederic Marshall,French Home Life (1873)
In his meditation on our subject inFigues sans barbarie (1991), the noted French chef Alain Senderens argues that whereas the cooking of the skewer or the spit epitomizes the masculine domain of display (the successful hunter, the dispenser of bounty), the cooking of the pot sympot on the fire bolizes the feminine domain of the kitchen, family economy, and, by extension, the civilizing process itself:
By boiling in water in a vessel, man brought food from the realm of nature to that of culture. Preparing food in this way leads to a genuine transformation of a raw ingredient, since boiling yields food that is usually very thoroughly cooked. From this instant, cooking came to indicate the cultural, intellectual, and technological level of a society.
Although you have to admire the ability of the French male to use the praising of women as a way to praise himself, this seems more clever than true—especially when you consider that in Frenchle pot is masculine, whilela broche, the spit, is feminine.
It is probably no more intellectually sound to approach this duality—the roasted versus the boiled—as a matter of temperament rather than of gender, but it is curious that the wordpot —unlike, say,marmite, daubière, poêlon, cocotte, bassine, ortoupin —has a stubborn, even cloddish, bluntness to it. It strikes one, that is, as coming not from the part of the French character that derives from the Lat-inate, Mediterranean south but from the part that has its origins in the dark and tribal north.
Etymologists commonly trace the wordpot from the Latinpotare, “to drink”—from which comes the nounpotus, which means “a drink” and, by association, both a drunkard and the tankard that got him into that condition. This use of the word, although now obsolete, is a venerable part of the English language, but the Reverend Walter W. Skeat, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University, thought that the wordpot, meaning “a cooking vessel,” came from another source. In hisEtymological Dictionary of the English Language (1898), he wrote, “This is one of the homely Celtic words: Irishpota, potadh, a pot, vessel; Gaelicpoit; Welshpot; Bretonpôd. ”
Whether this is literally true we shall probably never know, but as an insight it is rich with suggestiveness. As it happens, none of the Spanish or Italian words for that vessel are related topot. The Celts, however, not only do use it but have a cuisine based on its use. To think of Irish, Welsh, or Scottish dishes is most likely to think of something cooked in a pot, whether it is stew, porridge, boiled potatoes, cabbage, or soda bread. The center of the Celtic cottage is a fireplace, and in the center of the fireplace sits a pot.
The English, of course, don’t think much of the Celts, whereas the French have always romanticized them. It is as if the particular temperament the cooking of the pot represents has been stripped by the English of all its admirable qualities and by the French of all its less savory ones. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of opposite perspectives on the same qualities. Here, I think of a comment made by Norman Doug-las inSiren Lands:
Bouillabaisse is only good because it is made by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.
This, depending on how you look at it, can be read as either a high compliment or a rather devastating insult, since who is to say that they neverhave cared to try? Certainly, such suspicions about the French have fueled English humor over the centuries.40
Not all Englishmen have felt this way, of course. There has always been a minority that has looked longingly at the French way of managing the things of the kitchen. I think especially of John Evelyn’s gentle, touching sentence in the preface to hisAcetaria , “I content myself with an humble Cottage, and a Simple Potagere”; and of that king of the Francophiles Ford Madox Ford, who wrote of Gringoire, the protagonist of one of his later novels,No Enemy (1929), and a thinly disguised stand-in for himself:
But only Mme. Sélysette who had accompanied him into his English wilds from the distant South could have told you whether Gringoire was as economical in his cuisine as he professed to be. For he swore that the saviour of society would be the good but excellently economical cook…. How Gringoire proposed to save the world by intensive kitchen gardening and exquisite but economical cookery may appear hereafter.
And the letters Ford wrote to his lover, Stella Bowen, from the rural laborer’s cottage in Sussex to which he retreated after the war are a veritable paean to thepotager:
The beans flowered today—& I like their scent best of all scents—& an orange tree appeared, and the borage & thyme & sweet marjoram are all hard at work growing & there will be oceans & oceans of vegetables & eggs & things.
In his plot he had put—besides the beans—peas, radishes, carrots, onions, lettuce, beets, marrows, fennel, parsley, cress, mint, sage, and spinach, and he wanted more.
I have planted many gardens in my life, but none of them has ever resembled a realpotager . The reason is that to manage one properly, you have to work like the devil. Intensive gardening is just what it sounds like—there’s always something to be rooted out and discarded and fresh seedlings to be planted in its place. The plot needs to be watered and weeded, the vegetables need to be picked and eaten, that day, every day.
And not just one vegetable either. To the French gardener/cook, the fact that today the garden has provided
a cabbage, a turnip, and a leek or two, as well as celery, green beans, peas, white haricot beans, and potatoes, comes as good news. It means that a heartypotée lorraine, complete with pig’s tail, saltback, and a chunk of pickled pork, will soon be bubbling in the pot. Chances are, however, that such vegetable-laden fare will seem a tempting notion to me maybe once or twice a year, and then in the middle of winter. On the whole, when it comes to vegetables, I want “or or or or,” not “and and and and.”
Here, then, is the paradox. What John Evelyn’s “humble cottage and simple potagere” calls to my mind is something peaceful and quiet, an image of a little house with flowers in every room and a bowl of fresh-picked tomatoes on the kitchen table. For me,pot, potage, potager is the litany of a quiet life, the slow time of the countryside—a respite from the battle fatigue brought on by the hurlyburly of today. For the French, many of whom still nurture their rural roots, however far they may have moved away from them, there is certainly this aspect, too. But the phrase coheres around a hunger for a sort of eating that I, in my heart of hearts, have no real comprehension of nor appetite for.
A WELL-SEASONEDPOTNEEDS NOMEAT
TOMAKE THEBROTHTASTEGOOD.
It is a fact that great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and ferocious than other men.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau,E´mile (1762)
The French would be the best cooks in Europe if they had got any butcher’s meat.
— Walter Bagehot,Biographical Studies (1880)
When it comes to meat, it is the French who are pragmatic and the British wildly idealistic. The French eat as much meat as anyone; their failure from the Anglo-Saxon perspective is in not regarding the idea of it with proper deference. To eat frogs’ legs or horse meat (as the French still do) is to treat meat-eating with insufficient seriousness—in fact, it seems to treat it almost as if it were a joke. A cuisine with real respect for meat constantly strives to serve the best meat in the best way possible—not to toss in a chunk of this and a chunk of that and a chunk of something else, depending on what is on hand or cheap at the market that day.
In American cooking, too, it is the meat that is always put first. The question “What’s for dinner?” is really asking “Whatmeat are we having for dinner?”—and if the answer includes specific cuts that are to be grilled or roasted, we are all the happier.
The pot, by its very nature, can only blur such distinctions. In this regard, it is like the stomach: it doesn’t worship meat, it merely digests it. Hence, from the French perspective, it civilizes it. More important, it civilizesus.
One of my earliest serious efforts as a cook was to make a classic French dish calledgigot d’agneau à la sept heures —leg of lamb cooked for seven hours. If you aren’t familiar with this dish, the meat is roasted for about an hour and then cooked for six hours more in a bath of herb-and-garlic-suffused white wine. The result, I was promised, would be lamb as I had never tasted it before, so tender and succulent it could be eaten with a spoon.
This image swept away all before it—until, at the end of cooking, I opened the heavy, blue-enameled Le Creuset casserole … and anticipation gave way to a mixture of rage and grief. I had transformed something from which I could have carved and eaten thick slices of pink, juicy meat edged with crispy fat into a huge gray lambpot roast. I don’t remember how it tasted, how spoon-tender it was or wasn’t, only that I ate it with actual tears in my eyes. I was poor then, and that leg of lamb was so very, very expensive.
The truth is, I just didn’t get it—a realization that now comes as no surprise. You can master countless recipes for French dishes and still have not a clue as to what French cooking really is. It’s exactly like the language: it’s hard enough to speak it like a native, but not nearly as hard as it is tounderstand it like one.
Take this business of meat. The Anglo-American pursuit of it is really about the pursuit of status. There are only so many prime cuts around, so every time you eat one you confirm your place in the hierarchy—and not only the social hierarchy. When I was a child, my parents would often eat steak, while we kids were fed hamburgers. Weliked hamburgers, but the point wasn’t the meal but the message. To this day, the sight of a porterhouse or strip steak in the butcher’s case fills me with powerful feelings of covetousness and deprivation—not such a bad way, perhaps, to describe what it is like to live in a meat-obsessed culture.
As I discovered with my leg of lamb, the pot inverts the conventional hierarchy. In it, the cheapest cut works the best. The pot offers the cook the safest form of subversion, thumbing its nose at the establishment not by revolting against it but by living well despite it, and that same inversion is bestowed on the family as well. Even if Papa claims the largest pieces of meat for himself, they have already surrendered most of their flavor and nutrition to the broth. Everybody gets their share.
In other words, whereas a piece of grilled meat represents the last bastion of the rights of the individual, the cooking pot is the paternal protector and arbiter of the family and the family appetite. Listen to Jane Grigson writing inGood Things about pot-au-feu, literally “pot-on-the-fire,” the most majestic of all French boiled meals:
Many Frenchmen, it seems, have a button labelled pot-au-feu. Press it, and you’ll be swamped with nostalgia—cosy kitchen, fire on the hearth, pot bubbling as it hangs from the pot crane, mother flinging in vegetables, the pervading smell, the wonderful beef, wonderful mother, those were the days.
Going home: that is what the romance of the bubbling pot is all about. What it promises is that within its depths what has been lost and missed is still there, decades of simmering having mellowed out any lingering bitterness or regret. Instead, it has been refined into something richly and subtly delicious—the taste of not only your own childhood but that of your father and of your father’s father.
At least, such is the myth. In reality, of course, such a pottage, no matter the quality of its original ingredients, would have soon cooked down into a sourish, flat-flavored mush. De Groot knew this, too. His dish is no more suited for eternal cooking than is any other pottage. He surely was also aware that this story was a trope already worn to tatters by French food writers, however unfamiliar it might have been on this side of the Atlantic. Was he himself still susceptible to its spell? Or did he hope that it would touch the imagination of American readers wholly unaware of the resonance to be found in an old cooking pot?
Perhaps it was a bit of all these things, tinged with regret for the passing, in France as everywhere else, of that emblematic center of kitchen life. Even those with the most modest of incomes can now afford a more up-to-datebatterie de cuisine —tossing the old clay and cast-iron pots, along with all the memories that have soaked into their pores, on the rubbish heap. As for those that have replaced them …
NOTHING IS ASLOST IN THEKITCHEN
AS ANEWPOT.
POT-AU-FEU
You have to be at least 30 years old to enjoy Pot-au-Feu. Before reaching this prophetic age, you cannot appreciate good things. You may consider the pot-au-feu commonplace, and as you do with its old pal, boiled beef, scorn it. This is a terrible mistake, but it is rectified as the years pass by. There is nothing better than a well made pot-au-feu when cooks deign to give it all their attention and care.
— Marthe Daudet,Les bons plats de France (1919)
For the French, pot-au-feu is many things before it is a recipe: an eating experience, a philosophy of cooking, a spiritual restorative, an exercise in nostalgia. It offers the chance to sustain a state of pious innocence pot on the fire while gorging with gluttonous abandon, since to feast on the food that ordinarily provides basic sustenance is to feel prodded by the hunger of poverty, the knowledge that such a feast is merely a moment’s release from a lifetime of fasting.
Our own American boiled dinner of corned beef, turnips, potatoes, and cabbage springs from similar origins, and, if properly prepared, is quite equal to it in deliciousness, especially if made (as we do) with a good c
ut of braising beef instead of commercial, mass-produced corned beef. Unsurprisingly, then, Matt and I found ourselves more interested in a version of pot-au-feu that might be made with other vegetables and prepared in another way than one that essentially replicated a dish with which we were already intimately familiar.
Wean a pot-au-feu away from the caloric density that once served as itsraison d’être, and what remains is the deliciousness of a homemade, deeply flavored beef broth—and the vegetables that have been gently simmered in it. Such a pot-au-feu, we felt, would work best if the fla-vor of the vegetables were not allowed to dominate the dish, and so, essentially, we turned the traditional version on its head. The recipe that follows is selective rather than inclusive, market rather than garden-oriented, and, especially, geared to make less rather than more.
Even today, most pot-au-feu recipes call for two or more cuts of beef in order to achieve a broth with rich flavor and gelatinous depth. In the beginning, this is how we made ours, until we discovered that a top blade roast by itself produced just this sort of broth and—unlike many pot-roast cuts, no matter how long you cook them—was amazingly tender as well.
POSTMODERN POT-AU-FEU
[serves 4 to 6]
To make this dish, 3 pieces of cooking equipment are all but essential: an instant-read meat thermometer, a heat diffuser, and a heavy covered pot about 5 or 6 inches deep and 8 or 9 inches wide. This is a two-day recipe, so plan accordingly.
DAY ONE:
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