French Provincial Cooking (33 page)

In her beautiful book about Mexico
The Sudden View,
¹³
Sybille Bedford mentions ‘a cream of vegetable soup which would have done honour to a household in the French Provinces before the war of 1870.’ The phrase reminded me of the lovely soups made by Léontine, the cook of whose food I have already written in the pages about Paris household cookery in the introductory chapters to this book. These soups were anything but dull. They certainly were not complicated or expensive either: they belonged neither to
haute cuisine
nor to robust peasant cooking. They were, as befitted the household of a middle-class Norman family, in the direct line of French bourgeois and provincial cookery. Of course I did not know this at the time and did not think about it, I just enjoyed Léontine’s delicious vegetable purées without the faintest idea why they were so good, but looking back now I remember how delicate and fresh they were, and I think they must have been the kind of soups Sybille Bedford had in mind when she wrote those lines.

Again, I remember the ordinary everyday soup of a provincial restaurant which has been famous for thirty years for its half-dozen rather grand specialities. These were, and are, beautiful dishes cooked and served to perfection, but the vegetable soups, made for the staff as well as for the customers, had just as much finesse in a different way. Composed of cheap vegetables such as carrots, potatoes and leeks, enriched with good butter and cream and faintly flavoured with parsley or chervil, made into purées of about the consistency of thin cream (I think we often make our cream soups too thick, too porridgy, in England, although I have heard people complain that French soups are too thin), they were soups which embodied so much of the charm, the flavours and scents of a country house kitchen garden that every evening while I stayed in that little hotel it was a struggle not to accept second or even third helpings of soup and so risk having no appetite left for the dishes to follow.

This is one of the dangers of a good soup. No doubt because the tin and the package have become so universal, people are astonished by the true flavours of a well-balanced home-made soup and demand more helpings if only to make sure that their noses and palates are not deceiving them. So it is always best to announce, as soon as the soup is served, what dishes are to follow, and not to go in for any false modesty in this respect. ‘But there’s nothing, absolutely nothing else coming’ means, to the initiated, that there are going to be five courses of rather filling food. But it is kinder to guests to say so in a rather more direct manner.

The soup recipes in this book are mainly of the simple variety I have described. They are, on the whole, the kind most suitable to conditions in England. The ingredients are easily found; they are neither complicated nor costly. For those which require stock, I have described in detail how the best kind of meat broth, that from the
pot-au-feu,
is made. Not that one has to go through this performance every time one wants a little stock; but I do think it is essential that the principle should be understood. Once anybody has got the idea of a properly made broth into their heads, it is unlikely they will ever again resort to the hit and miss methods of the ‘bundle it all into the stock-pot’ school.

As far as the peasant and farmhouse soups, the
garbures
and the
potées
of traditional regional cookery go, I have only included one or two of these. In their way they are admirable, but heavy mixtures of pork and cabbage, beans and sausages and bread, constitute almost a whole meal in themselves, to be enjoyed by people who work hard all day in the open air; and I hope readers will excuse me for referring them to another volume,
French Country Cooking,
¹⁴
for recipes for this type of soup.

One more point. Although it is not necessary to know a great number of soups, it is highly desirable to have at least one well-tried recipe for every season of the year, and then one will not be led into the expense of buying out of season vegetables or into the error of unnecessary substitution. For example, the potato and tomato soup on page 167, which is one of my favourites, also demands leeks. On several occasions I have tried, when leeks were out of season, using onions instead. Those who had not already eaten it cooked with leeks were probably unaware that anything was wrong, but I was myself quite conscious of the fact that the soup was not absolutely as it should have been. So I have given up trying to make the soup in the summer when no leeks are to be had; and serve instead a cream of fresh green peas, or the delicious
potage Crécy,
or the very light tomato soup described on page 173. If one is going to the trouble of preparing home-made soups one might as well have each one as good as possible of its kind.

No mystery attaches to the making of a
pot-au-feu
so long as it is understood that it is two dishes, first a beef broth which may be thickened with rice or pasta or served as a clear consommé and, secondly, the boiled beef which has itself contributed the major part of its savour to the broth. Most cooks and housewives know that the making of a good broth entails care both in the selection of meat and vegetables and in the very slow cooking, but often suppose that the French
pot-au-feu
holds some other special secret which eludes them. This is understandable, because recipes for
pot-au-feu
are apt to make such heavy weather out of a very simple process. Lengthy explanations in chemical terms and paragraphs of quotation from Brillat Savarin jumbled up with romantic folklore about generations of French housewives conjuring magic out of their venerable earthenware pots cause the English reader, who tends to be more interested in the hows than the whys of cookery, to abandon the whole mystery and revert to his own methods, right or wrong.

Another possible reason for the rejection of the French method is that when in England we wish to eat boiled beef, the preference goes to salted silverside or brisket which, properly prepared and cooked, is after all one of our best culinary assets, and superior in many ways to an ordinary piece of beef boiled in the
pot-au-feu.
On the other hand it is obvious that stock from salt beef is no use for consommés or sauces, whereas in the case of the
pot-au-feu
the broth, apart from its qualities as a soup, plays an important part in enriching the dishes and sauces of French household cookery, giving them savour and body and taking the place of that indeterminate liquid from the stock-pot, the making of which at one time was thought to be the height of good management in an English kitchen. The editors of the 1891
Mrs. Beeton
(not Mrs. Beeton herself) told their readers that ‘everything in the way of meat, bones, gravies and flavourings that would otherwise be wasted should go into the stock-pot, ‘shankbone of mutton, gravy left when the half-eaten leg was moved to another dish, trimmings of beefsteak that went into a pie, remains of gravies, bacon rinds and bones, poultry giblets, bones of roast meat, scraps of vegetables . . . nothing is too insignificant to be useful . . . such a pot in most houses should be always on the fire.’ Such instruction was the absolute negation of the principles of good cookery. All these miscellaneous leavings could not produce a stock with a true, fresh flavour, nor could it ever be clear and limpid because all the bacon bones and thickened gravies would cloud it, even if the cook were to stand all day over the pot skimming it; twice-cooked vegetables contribute nothing to a stock; nor would it have any strength because there is no raw, fresh meat to give out its juices and flavour. The gospel of the everlasting stock-pot (with a tap like a tea urn so that you could draw off the requisite amount of the fluid when required) is, I think, no longer preached or believed—many of us found out during rationing what a thankless task it was trying to coax stock out of skin and bone and scraps—and in fact I have only referred to it in order to highlight the difference between this fictional, or dustbin method, and the proper system of obtaining good broth.

 

Briefly, the cuts of meat which are most satisfactory from the points of view of both
bouillon
and
bouilli,
as the beef is called in its cooked state, are the forequarter flank (
plat de côtes
)
¹⁵
which is relatively cheap, a good shape, and emerges reasonably moist even after lengthy cooking, and if this is considered too fat, then a cut from the thick flank called in French the
tranche grasse
which corresponds to top rump in English terms; alternatively, a piece of silverside (
gîte à la noix
), or a cut from the shoulder near the blade-bone, known in French as the
paleron,
but of which there is no precise English equivalent. Shin, because of its gelatinous qualities, is good for the
bouillon
but produces an indifferent
bouilli
and is in any case not sufficient in itself alone to produce a good
bouillon
Some cooks advocate the use of equal proportions of two different cuts, such as silverside and shin, which is a good plan for a big
pot-au feu,
but less successful for a modest family one, because a piece of meat weighing anything less than 2 lb. will cook too quickly and will hardly emerge in a presentable condition.

In addition to the main piece of meat the
pot-au-feu
is improved by a piece of knuckle of veal, both meat and bone, to give body and a gelatinous quality; a beef marrow bone to provide marrow to spread on the baked bread which is served with the broth; the giblets of one or two fowls for flavour; and a piece of ox liver to promote clarity in the broth. Some families like to enrich their
pot-au-feu
with an ox-tail, which can be used later for another meal.

 

Onions, leeks, carrots, a very small proportion of turnip, celery and parsnip, plus grilled tomatoes and, when they are available, a few pea-pods dried in the oven to give colour. The usual bouquet. Cabbage in the
pot-au-feu
is frequently encountered in France, but in my opinion utterly wrecks it. If cabbage is to be served with the meat, then extract some of the broth when the time comes and cook the cabbage in it separately.

 

The pot, or marmite, is usually a tall straight-sided or slightly bulbous stock-pot made of earthenware, copper, enamelled iron, or heavy aluminium. Having had occasion to use all four, as well as an English ‘round pot’ or stock-pot made of cast iron lined with vitreous enamel, I cannot say that any one produces a better
pot-au feu
than the other, although the enamelled ones are the easiest to clean. Many English households do not possess even one pot of the requisite capacity (ideally, two gallons) so it does not seem relevant to lay down rules as to which it should be. French cooks disagree fiercely on the subject, conservative housewives swearing by the efficacy of their earthenware marmites, and professional cooks advocating copper (so long as the tin lining is in mint condition) and condemning earthenware on the grounds that eventually it acquires an ineradicable smell of stale fat which communicates itself to the broth cooked in it. (See the drawings of stock-pots on pages 64 and 153.)

 

4 lb. of forequarter flank of beef or of one of the other cuts mentioned above, or alternatively 2 lb. of one of these and 2 lb. of shin, or even of or cheek, which is a bargain as prices go nowadays, and can be turned into delicious salad. A piece of knuckle of veal weighing about 2 lb. including bone. Optionally, a beef marrow bone, sawn into short lengths, chicken giblets, and 6 oz. of ox liver in one piece; and possibly an ox-tail cut into the usual lengths.

4 large leeks, 4 large carrots, 2 large onions, a very small turnip, a little piece of parsnip, 1 stalk of celery with its leaves, 2 tomatoes, 4 to 6 dried pea-pods if available, a bouquet consisting of 2 bayleaves, 2 or 3 sprigs of parsley and thyme, 1 tablespoon of coarse salt. The proportion of water is 2 pints per pound of meat, so for this quantity allow 8 pints. Some cooks allow extra for the bones, but the result is rather too thin a broth.

 

Tie the meat into a good shape. Wrap the pieces of marrow bone tightly in a muslin and tie with string so that the marrow cannot fall out. If ox-tail is being used, steep it in cold water for a couple of hours to let the blood soak out. Trim and wash the leeks and tie them in a bundle, with the stick of celery. Scrub the carrots. Peel the turnip and parsnip. Cut the tomatoes in halves and grill them. Wash the onions, but do not peel them unless they look gritty, because the skins help to colour the broth. The traditional clove stuck in the onions does not seem to me to be necessary. Prepare the bouquet and tie up the dried pea-pods with it.

 

Put the beef and veal, and the giblets if they are being used, into the pot. Pour over the water. Bring extremely slowly to simmering point; when the scum starts rising skim it off. Presently it will get much thicker, and will go on rising for about 15 minutes while the water simmers gently. It is important to remove all this scum as long as it is a brownish-grey colour and thick, otherwise the broth will never be clear. When the scum turns to a thin white foam it can be left, as this will disperse of its own accord. Now put in the vegetables, the bouquet and the salt. Put the lid on the pot, but tilt it so that steam can escape. Allow to barely simmer, to tremble or shudder rather, in the centre of the pot only, for 3
hours, keeping the heat absolutely regular. Now put in the parcelled-up marrow bone and the piece of liver and cook for another 30 minutes to an hour.