French Provincial Cooking (105 page)

A French housewife, unless either she or her cook is particularly adept at pastry and cakes, is able to order what she requires in this line from that local
pâtissier
whom she knows to be most skilful and to use only the finest ingredients; she knows that she can rely upon not being let down, and it is no disgrace in France—rather the reverse—to say that you have ordered your
gâteau
or
tarte aux fraises
or
savarin aux fruits
from chez this or that celebrated
pâtissier
. Here in England, of course, we cannot do that, or at least only in the rarest of cases, for good and conscientious pastry shops are exceedingly few and far between. I know of one or two which have acquired a quite unmerited reputation simply because of the colossal prices they charge. Indeed, the ingredients of good pastries, cakes and
petits fours
are very expensive, but if one is paying, let us say, fourteen shillings a pound for those little biscuits called
florentines,
then it is a disillusion to find that the chocolate coating has been made with a cheap and nasty kind of
couverture,
or that a fifteen-shilling layer cake has been filled with cream made from custard powder or dried egg.

The remedy is to stick to sweet dishes which are simple and can be made at home. Personally, I prefer old-fashioned creams and compôtes and homely fruit tarts to all the shining and glorious confections of the pastry shops, and a straightforward cream ice made with what one knows to be the purest of ingredients is preferable (although the finish may not be very professional looking) to an ice
gâteau,
sporting five different flavours and a multitude of whirls and twirls and glacé cherries, of which the ingredients are to most people a mystery. Mercifully, perhaps, for if you know what they are, it is unlikely you will buy them.

So most of my sweet recipes are those of very simple French household cooking,
recettes de bonne femme,
as they say, which is not to imply that they are carelessly concocted or coarsely flavoured but just very straightforward in conception and very restrained in decoration.

In fact, at routine French family meals, fresh fruit after the cheese mostly takes the place of a sweet course but, for more, ceremonial occasions, a fruit tart, a soufflé or a cream of some sort usually appears. Fresh double cream served with sugar is considered more of a sweet in its own right than as an accompaniment to other dishes; and there are numerous little cream cheese confections which are served with sugar and perhaps a fruit purée for dessert. And if you habitually eat the kind of food already described in this book you will not need anything but very light and simple sweet dishes. Heavy puddings and rich cakes would be out of place, as well as being very fattening.

I have not, in this volume, included a separate chapter on preserves, for we have all our English recipes for jams and jellies which are probably most suited to the variety of fruits which are obtainable here; but in this chapter are a few recipes for lesser known preserves, such as peach jam and a high-class red-currant jelly. Incidentally, the famous white- and red-currant preserves of Bar-le-Duc are scarcely for home cooking, for each single currant is pierced by hand with a quill so that, thrown into boili g syrup, they absorb the sugar and when the jam cools the currants swell out again like little bubbles. (This at least used to be the procedure but perhaps by now a mechanical process has been devised for the piercing of the fruit.) The making of
marrons glacés
has also become very much a commercial affair, for no less than sixteen separate processes are involved before the candied chestnuts are ready for sale. No wonder they are a luxury.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that the art of home preserving is not still practised in France, for if you visit French country houses and farms during the months of July, August and September, you find, at least in those where tradition still prevails, that the careful housewife is busy turning the season’s fruits into conserves, jams, liqueurs and cordials, so that all through the winter there will be greengages, mirabelles, peaches, apricots and dark purple plums for tarts and pastries, and little glasses of fruit brandies to offer to the
curé
and the neighbours and to the unexpected visitor.

Fruit growing and preserving on a commercial scale is, of course, an important industry in France. In the east the little golden mirabelles, the purple quetsches and the bitter cherries are distilled into the famous
eaux de vie,
or
alcools blancs,
of Alsace and Lorraine; in the Dordogne the plums make a powerful and strongly flavoured prune liqueur and greengages are preserved in
eau de vie
to be served in little glasses as a digestive; walnuts are made into an oil for salads and into a liqueur called
brou de noix;
big, dark imperial plums are dried on slates or bamboo slats and become the
pruneaux de Tours
or of Bordeaux which, packed in wide glass jars, find their way into the luxury shops all over the world at Christmas time. Then there are the crystallised apricots and plums and figs of Provence, and the world-famous
marrons glacés
of the Ardèche, and those soft, melting, stoned and stuffed
prunes d’Agen
from the Garonne which make such a lovely sweetmeat. And, throughout the districts of the Loire, the Dordogne, the Lot and the Périgord, and in Alsace and Lorraine, there will hardly be a celebration, a wedding feast or a festival at which the dessert does not include some sort of plum or mirabelle tart, made with fresh or dried plums or jam according to the season.

In the Orléans region there is the beautiful cornelian-coloured quince paste called
cotignac,
which comes packed in little cylinder-shaped chip boxes, in Toulouse the beguiling crystallised violets, in Aix-en-Provence the exquisitely melting little almond cakes called
calissons d’Aix.
And even in the most unexpected places in France one may find that there is a first-class baker or confectioner. Once, somewhere in some little ugly town in Alsace, I remember an abominable dinner consisting of a packet
pot-au-feu
(yes) and an unspeakably greasy
choucroute
; uncomfortable beds, cold water, deafening noise. But when our coffee came in the morning, and it certainly was welcome, it was accompanied by what I think were the best
croissants
I have ever eaten and some mirabelle jam so perfect as to be a revelation of what jam can be.

The beautiful, aromatically-scented little golden fruit which is the apricot is one which I bracket with the fig as being the most elusive and most rare to find in perfect condition. To the fortunate it occurs every now and again to bite into the sweet purple flesh of a fig as it is ready to crack through its bright green skin or to pick the perfect ripe apricot warm from the sun. Then one sniffs and eats and is thankful that one should have been so favoured by Providence. There were just such apricots, I remember, in a garden at St. Rémy, in Provence. The meal in the hotel had been indifferent and the wine one of those pink Provençal ones which one drinks because one is very thirsty after a dusty drive. But the apricots made up for everything. And there was one summer in the Béarnais when there were two of the country’s products which seemed, day after long summer day, to be always perfect. They were the potatoes and the apricots.

When the apricots are less than perfect (and how can they be otherwise when they reach our markets from so far away, from South Africa and Spain, from Italy and Provence?) then they can be cooked and still made quite delicious. But my recipes are for very easy homely dishes, for to me they seem to suit apricots better than the elaborate confections dabbed about with cream which so many cooks are inspired to concoct the minute they set eyes on this beautiful golden fruit. In fact, I cannot remember ever having seen, in France, the elaborate apricot
gâteaux
so popular here, although I suppose perhaps they do exist.

Wipe the fruit with a soft damp cloth, make an incision along the natural division with a fruit knife and arrange them in a pyramid in a baking dish. For 2 lb. of fruit add 6 tablespoons of vanilla sugar (see page 100), or of ordinary white sugar plus a vanilla pod. It is astonishing how the vanilla flavour enhances that of the apricots. Moisten with 6 tablespoons of water, although if the fruit is very ripe less will be needed. Bake uncovered in a low oven for about one hour, until the apricots are soft. They should, however, retain their shape and the cooking time depends a good deal upon the condition of the fruit. Serve them hot, with slices of bread steeped in milk, then in beaten egg, fried in butter, and sprinkled with sugar.

For more extravagant occasions, 2 or 3 tablespoons of Alsatian or Swiss Kirsch can replace some of the water. This fruit alcohol is one which goes remarkably well with apricots, but a little goes a long way.

Spread plenty of butter on fairly thin slices of day-old bread. Arrange them on a well-buttered baking sheet. On each slice put 3 apricot halves, stones removed. Fill the cavities with vanilla sugar or plain white sugar, and press the fruit well down into the bread. Bake at a rather slow temperature, Gas No. 3, 330 deg. F, but near the top of the oven. In about 40 minutes the bread will be crisp, the apricots soft and with a nice coating of almost caramelised sugar. Serve them straight away.

For 2 lb. of apricots put about
lb. of white sugar, a vanilla pod and about
pint of water into a saucepan. When the sugar has dissolved, put in the apricots, halved and stoned. Poach them gently and don’t let them get too soft. Remove them from the liquid and reduce this to a fairly thick syrup by fast boiling. Take out the vanilla pod, pour the syrup over the apricots and serve them very cold with cream if you like, but for me it detracts from the flavour of the apricots.

This must be one of the best known of all French fruit dishes. Banal though it may sound, it is one which always pleases, and especially when it comes at the end of a meal which has been composed of rather rich food.

If you have bought a pineapple with a fine and well-shaped tuft of leaves, one decorative way of serving it is as follows: cut off the leaf end quite straight and with a good margin of the fruit adhering to it, so that it will stand level on a dish. Slice and peel the rest of the fruit, and cut out the centre cores if they are very hard. (It is easy to do this with an apple corer.) Arrange them in a circle on a flat round or oval dish. Sprinkle them with soft white sugar and a little Alsatian or Swiss Kirsch; about 2 tablespoons to a fair-sized pineapple is enough.

In the centre of the dish stand the top slice with the leaves.

Usually I only find bananas acceptable when they are fried as a vegetable, or cooked in butter and rum for a sweet, but it must be admitted that the Kirsch in this recipe of Edmond Richardin’s works wonders with the raw fruit.

Cut your bananas into rounds, sprinkle them with white sugar, add a coffee-spoon of matured Kirsch and a tablespoon of thick fresh cream for each banana. Mix carefully so that each round is well coated with the delicious mixture.

Shelled and skinned chestnuts (see page 263) are simmered gently in water with a little sugar and a vanilla pod until they are quite tender, but the greatest care must be taken to see that they do not break up. Leave them to cool in their syrup, then put half a dozen or so into a wine-glass for each person, with a very little of the syrup. Pour a couple of tablespoons of Alsatian or Swiss Kirsch into each.