French Provincial Cooking (32 page)

More than once I have heard English people express astonishment and disapproval of the fact that all they get in France when they ask for a green salad is ‘plain lettuce with oil and vinegar.’ But to a Frenchman that is what a green salad means; and it is served with or after the roast. The English type of mixed salad, with tomato and beetroot and cucumber added, would be served, if at all, as an hors-d’œuvre, like the
salade niçoise.
And it would still be dressed with oil and vinegar, not mayonnaise or salad cream.

In south-western France walnut oil, although it is now becoming rather rare, is often used instead of olive oil; it has a rather powerful and strange flavour and is not to everybody’s taste, but those who like it like it very much indeed. Walnut oil (
huile de noix
) is occasionally to be found at Roche, the French shop in Old Compton Street, Soho, but it is even more expensive than the best olive oil.

For those who like a garlic-flavoured salad without actually having to swallow whole hunks of the bulb, this is a good method. The
chapon
is a large piece of bread or toast well rubbed on both sides with a cut clove of garlic, and sprinkled with oil. This is placed in the bowl underneath the lettuce and mixed into the salad with the dressing at the last minute. When everyone has helped himself to salad, the
chapon
is divided up and served to the more avid garlic eaters.

In France dandelion is specially cultivated under cover for picking in winter and spring. Occasionally both winter and summer varieties can be found in shops such as Roche in Old Compton Street, specialising in French vegetables. One of the best ways of eating it is to fry a few little cubes of streaky bacon until the fat runs, pour this hot over the prepared dandelion (1 lb. is ample for four or five people) in the salad bowl, quickly add 2 or 3 tablespoons of wine vinegar to the fat in the frying pan, let it bubble, then pour this, too, over the salad. Mix well and eat it quickly. This is a good country way of dealing with any rather tough-leaved and bitter salad such as curly and Batavian endives, called
endive frisée
and
scarole
respectively.

This salad was chosen by Curnonsky one year when several of the contributors of
Cuisine et Vins de France,
the magazine which he founded, chose their ideal Christmas Eve menu. Curnonsky’s chosen dishes were
pâté de foie gras de Strasbourg en croûte,
Belon oysters, a truffled goose with chestnut stuffing, the
angevin
salad, cheeses and fruit.

The salad consists simply of a few leaves of green stuff (lettuce or curly endive or dandelion) and little cubes of Gruyère cheese, the salad seasoned with savory and dressed with olive oil and no more than a suspicion of vinegar.

It is simple, interesting and good.

Having discarded the outside leaves of the long smooth Belgian endives, also sometimes called chicory or witloof, wipe the endives clean with a cloth (do not wash them), cut the root end off with a silver knife, then cut the endives across into half-inch chunks. Mix them well with a dressing of olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice.

A few thin rounds of red or green sweet pepper or some well-seasoned beetroot both go well with endive, the latter being almost a routine French winter salad.

An admirable winter salad to serve either after a chicken or meat dish or at Christmas with your turkey. The diced beetroot is dressed with a highly seasoned oil and vinegar dressing, a scrap of garlic, chopped parsley. The celery, cut into julienne strips, is separately seasoned with oil, salt and lemon, and piled lightly on top of the beetroot just before serving.

The success of this dish lies in the cooking of the rice to the right degree and in the seasoning, which must be done while it is still hot.

For four people cook 8 oz. of good quality rice, whether round or long-grained is not of great importance, in plenty of boiling salted water. Add a piece of lemon, which helps to keep the rice snow white. For most rice 12 minutes after the water comes back to the boil will be enough, but this is impossible to say exactly, because rice differs so very much in quality, and there are the factors of the amount of water, the size of the saucepan and so on to take into consideration. At any rate, the rice should not be very soft, rather it should have a bite to it. Drain it in a colander, and immediately mix with it any extra salt needed, quite a generous grating of nutmeg, about 4 tablespoons of olive oil and 2 teaspoons of tarragon vinegar.

The tomatoes should be prepared beforehand: 4 or 5 large, ripe, red ones should be skinned (to do this dip them in boiling water), sliced into rounds, and left on a plate sprinkled with salt and pepper. Place them on top of the rice. Over them sprinkle some very finely chopped chives or tarragon or, when neither of these is available, parsley. Sometimes, when they are in season, some thin rounds of raw green peppers may appear in the salad. It goes beautifully with cold veal or chicken or with hard-boiled eggs for an improvised meal, but in the Paris household of which I have written in the introductory chapters we always had it by itself, instead of a vegetable course.

Since those days I have learnt that this is a speciality of Poitou, but why this should be so I do not quite know, unless it is a legacy from the Spaniards. In fact, rice salad is not a common dish in France, although one does sometimes come across it in the south, where it is liable to contain shell fish or olives and sweet peppers as well as tomatoes. Whatever its origin it has always seemed to me a first-class salad.

I have already told the story of la Mère Fillioux and the dishes which made her restaurant famous in Lyon and all over the world. One of these dishes consisted of
fonds d’artichauts
with
foie gras,
and is also served as one of the specialities at la Mère Brazier’s in Lyon. (Madame Brazier was once the cook at la Mère Fillioux’.) So when I saw a dish of artichoke hearts listed on the menu at la Mère Brazier’s I supposed that it would be the renowned
foie gras
affair. Coming towards the end of an already copious menu consisting of
saucisson en brioche, sole meunière
and
poularde demi-deuil
I was wondering how on earth I could manage an artichoke heart topped with a slice of
foie gras,
a combination which, famous though it may be, does not seem to me an altogether happy one. But when the dish came it proved to be a perfectly simple and straightforward salad, exactly what was needed to refresh the palate after the meal we had had. In fact it was one of the most delicious salads I have ever eaten, and one of the best possible ways of appreciating the subtle, elusive flavour of the globe artichoke.

One fine large artichoke must be allowed for each person. The artichokes are prepared as explained on page 138-9, but it is easier to leave the chokes and scoop them out after cooking, in boiling, salted and slightly acidulated water for 25 to 40 minutes; while still warm season them with a dressing of olive oil, salt, and a little lemon juice or very good tarragon vinegar. The artichokes thus prepared are placed on top of a salad of lettuce hearts, mixed at the last moment with the same dressing and arranged on a flat dish rather than in a salad bowl.

Cook about 1
lb. of waxy potatoes in their skins, keeping them firm. Cut a large celery heart into julienne strips, and keep them in cold water until they are needed. Peel the potatoes while they are still warm, cut also into strips, and mix them in a bowl with the drained celery. Season plentifully with salt, freshly ground pepper, and not more than 2 tablespoons of very good white wine vinegar. Shortly before serving whip about 6 oz. of very fresh cream, adding gradually the juice of half a lemon; if the cream thickens too quickly add a few drops of milk. Season with salt and pepper and fold the cream lightly into the salad. Over the top sprinkle about 4 oz. of cooked ham cut in little strips and mixed with a little chopped parsley. This salad was at one time a speciality of the Hôtel de la Couronne in Rouen (
cauchoise
means that it is called after the district of Caux in Normandy), and a truffle or two would be chopped with the ham to enrich the dish. It is a salad to serve after something light, such as an omelette or a grilled sole, but if the cream is omitted and the mixture dressed with oil instead, it makes a good hors-d’œuvre.

‘The making of a good soup is quite an art, and many otherwise clever cooks do not possess the
tour de main
necessary to its successful preparation. Either they over-complicate the composition of the dish, or they attach only minor importance to it, reserving their talents for the meal itself, and so it frequently happens that the soup does not correspond in quality to the rest of the dishes; nevertheless, the quality of the soup should foretell that of the entire meal.’

Madame Seignobos, who wrote these words some fifty years ago in a book called
Comment on Forme une Cuisinière,
was probably referring to trained cooks, and does not mention those other happy-go-lucky ones who tell you, not without pride, ‘of course I never follow a recipe, I just improvise as I go along. A little bit of this, a spoonful of that . . . it’s much more fun really.’ Well, it may be more fun for the cook, but is seldom so diverting for the people who have to eat his products, because those people who have a sure enough touch to invent successfully in the kitchen without years of experience behind them are very rare indeed. The fortunate ones gifted with that touch are those who will also probably have the restraint to leave well alone when they
have
hit on something good; the ones who can’t resist a different little piece of embroidery every time they cook a dish will end by inducing a mood of gloomy apprehension in their families and guests. The domain of soup-making is one which comes in for more than its fair share of attention from the ‘creative’ cook, a saucepan of innocent-looking soup being a natural magnet to the inventive, and to those who pride themselves on their gifts for inspired improvisation.

I remember when I was very young being advised by the gastronomic authority among my contemporaries to take pretty well everything in the larder, including the remains of the salad (if I remember rightly some left-over soused herring was also included), tip it into a pan, add some water, and in due course, he said, some soup would emerge. I very soon learnt, from the results obtained by this method, that the soup-pot cannot be treated as though it were a dustbin. That lesson was elementary enough. The ones that are harder to assimilate are, first, in regard to the wisdom or otherwise of mixing too many ingredients, however good, to make one soup; the likelihood is that they will cancel each other out, so that although your soup may be a concentrated essence of good and nourishing ingredients it will not taste of anything in particular. Secondly, one has to learn in the end that the creative urge in the matter of embellishments is best kept under control. If your soup is already very good of its kind, possessed of its own true taste, will it not perhaps be spoilt by the addition of a few chopped olives, of a little piece of diced sausage, of a spoonful of paprika pepper? These are matters which everyone must decide for himself.

I know that many people think that their guests will find a simple vegetable soup dull, and so attempt to dress it up in some ‘original’ way. I don’t think myself that a well-made vegetable soup, tasting fresh and buttery, and properly seasoned, is ever dull (I am talking about home-made soups).