French Provincial Cooking (18 page)

The household substitute for this elaborate process is to wrap your meat and game in thinly cut slices of pork fat or unsmoked bacon.

Revenir, Faire
To give vegetables, meat, fish, a brief preliminary cooking in butter or other heated fat until they have taken on a very slight colour. An important process in the making of the majority of French soups, ragoûts, daubes, and in the braising of poultry and meat.

Suer, Faire
Often confused with the above, this means to give a preliminary cooking to a piece of meat or a bird in butter or other fat until beads of juice start to pearl on the surface.

Tomber, Faire
To cook a piece of meat very slowly without other liquid than that produced during cooking by the meat itself. The liquid is then
tombé
, or reduced, to a syrupy consistency. So when instructed to
faire tomber la sauce
it means to reduce it.
Faire tomber à glace
is an expression also used in connection with sliced or chopped onions or shallots cooked in a small amount of liquid and reduced almost to a purée or a state of glaze.

Tremper la soupe
To soak slices of bread in the soup before serving it.

Vanner une sauce
To make a sauce quite smooth by stirring, to prevent a skin forming. If a béchamel or other thickened sauce has to be made in advance spread the surface with little knobs of butter while it is still hot. This will form a film which prevents the formation of a skin.

The technique of using wine in cookery is extremely simple, almost the only rule to remember being that the wine must be
cooked.
As with all rules, there are exceptions, and to these I will return presently, but generally speaking, wine is added to a stew right at the beginning of the cooking, and at the end of the long, slow process of simmering has become transformed into a sort of essence which, combined as it is with the meat juices, and flavoured with vegetables and herbs, forms a richly aromatic sauce. To achieve this end it is not necessary to use large quantities of wine. With the exception of two or three of the recipes in this book, no dish calls for more than one large glass of red or white wine, often less, and of course the wine used is inexpensive table wine or
vin ordinaire;
although those to whom the drinking of wine is a daily occurrence will know that a glass extracted from their bottle of respectable table wine is likely to produce better results in the flavour of the finished dish than will some thin and sour stuff reserved especially for cooking. A friend once reproached me with having withheld from her some secret in the recipe for a beef and wine stew. She had cooked it, she said, exactly as I had told her but the flavour was not as good and rich as mine had been. In a sense she was right to tax me with inaccuracy, for I had forgotten to tell her that that particular day I had used a glass of my good Rhône wine in cooking the dish, and it had made all the difference.

Since practical application is more valuable than detailed instruction in the abstract, it will be more to the point to refer the reader to recipes in which the different systems of adding wine to a dish are fully set out, than to go into lengthy explanations here.

Typical recipes in which wine gently and lengthily cooked is an essential part of the dish are
bœuf à la mode
(page 347) and the various daubes and
estouffats
of beef on pages 339 to 346,
bœuf à la bourguignonne
on page 343, and the
noix de veau a l’alsacienne,
page 371, in which the white wine of the country contributes its subtle flavour to the jellied sauce which will eventually surround the meat.

When wine is added to a quickly cooked dish such as fried steak, chops, veal escalopes or fish steaks, it is also thoroughly cooked, but much more rapidly; as soon as the meat is seized on each side, the wine is poured into the pan and the heat turned up, so that the wine bubbles and reduces, fuses with the juices already in the pan and in a matter of minutes produces a small amount of thick and syrupy sauce. Examples of this system are the
côtes de porc Vallée d’Auge,
page 361, in which cider replaces white wine, and
saumon poêlé au vin blanc,
page 311.

Even simpler are certain fish dishes, such as the grey mullet with black olives on page 289, in which the fish is baked in an open dish in the oven in a little bath of white wine, but this applies only to thick fish which take a little time to cook. If it were a question of sole, which needs only a few minutes’ poaching, the wine in which it has cooked would be subsequently reduced by fast boiling over a high flame, and the resulting essence incorporated into a ready-prepared cream sauce, or thickened with egg yolks and/or cream.

Instances in which wine is
not
cooked are those occasions when Madeira (infinitely superior to sherry for this purpose) is added to a hot consommé or to a clear broth destined for aspic jelly. A very small quantity is added when the consommé is already hot, and, in the case of a jelly, after it has been clarified as explained on page 72. It is all too easy to overdo this final addition of Madeira and to spoil a beautiful consommé by pouring the Madeira straight into it from the bottle instead of measuring out a tablespoonful—and a tablespoonful, or two at the most, is enough for about six cups.

There are other dishes in which a negligible quantity of wine, uncooked, makes all the difference; one example is the
pêches au vin blanc
, page 440, which calls for a soft or sweetish white wine.

The following points with regard to the use of wine in cookery may be useful to the beginner:

 

(1) Many reasons are advanced for cooking with wine—that it helps the flavour of second- and third-grade cuts of meat and elderly boiling fowls, that it breaks down tough fibres and so lessens cooking time, that a wine marinade is a help in preserving meat, fish or game in warm weather or on occasions when you wish to postpone the cooking of a given dish for a day or two. All these reasons hold good but, in the last resort, the best reason for using wine in cooking is
because you like the taste it gives to the finished dish.

(2) Experiment is always worth while. Suppose that you have no bottle of white wine and no Madeira handy but the ingredients of a Martini are in the cupboard. Then try a small quantity of vermouth; or, for that matter, Dubonnet or any of the other apéritif drinks. They are really only fortified wines treated with aromatics; sole cooked in vermouth is a well-known French chefs’ dish; and there are French cooks who prefer to flame their lobster in whisky rather than brandy, presumably because whisky is much more expensive than brandy in France, so that the snob value of the dish is enhanced, and as a matter of fact once the alcohol is burnt out I doubt if many people would know the difference.

(3) This brings us to the question of the flaming, flaring, flambéing or whatever you like to call it, of brandy or other spirits. The spirit or liqueur in question should first be warmed in a soup ladle or in a very small saucepan, otherwise it may not light. Having set a match to it, pour it flaming over your dish of meat, lobster, pancakes or whatever it may be and shake and rotate the pan so that the flames spread. By the time they have died down the alcohol will have burnt away, and with it any excess of butter or trace of greasiness in the sauce will have disappeared. What is left should be a highly concentrated essence which imparts to the food a flavour which nothing else can give. Whether the operation shall be carried out in the kitchen or with a grand flourish at the table is up to everyone to decide for himself. Sometimes, of course, the flaring takes place at the beginning of the cooking, as in the
bœuf à la gardiane,
page 345, so the question does not arise. When it does, I find it preferable that the flaring process should be done in the kitchen, for personally I don’t like the smell of methylated spirits normally used to heat table cookers; sometimes in London and Paris restaurants (you rarely see such a thing in serious French provincial restaurants) the smell becomes so overwhelming that it quite ruins the more attractive but less powerful smells of your food and the bouquet of your wine.

A good example of a dish in which the liqueur, in this case Calvados, is
flambé
is the
escalope Cauchoise
on page 373, and as I have explained, whisky, strange though it may seem, can be used as a substitute for Calvados.

(4) Until you know that you can trust your judgment as to how much brandy or liqueur any given dish will take, it is wisest to stick to the amount prescribed in the recipe. Liqueurs are tricky things, and too much may well spoil a dish, while too little is simply pointless. ‘A spoonful of Kirsch,’ I read in a newspaper article, ‘will improve your fruit salad. The contents of a whole miniature bottle will make it fit for a banquet.’ If a spoonful is enough, why add more? If it is not enough, then why bother with it? Alternatively, how much fruit salad are you going to make for a banquet, and why should you put more Kirsch for a banquet than for a simple dinner party? Mystery. . . . And talking of Kirsch, it is very expensive, but if you are going to buy it, make sure to get Alsatian, Swiss or German Kirschwasser, the true fruit alcohol, rather than the sweetened variety which is just known as Kirsch, and if you ever cook
choucroute
try the recipe on page 420 and see what a really astonishing difference a small glass of Kirschwasser makes to this otherwise rather flat dish.

(5) Don’t overdo the wine and liqueurs in your cooking just because you happen to have plenty to hand.

(6) If you have, say, a glass of red wine left in a bottle, pour it into a small bottle, cork it up and it will keep good for cooking for several days. But do not delay using it for too long, for it will go sour and be useless. White wine kept in the refrigerator appears to keep rather longer than red.

(7) When cooking with cider, always use an enamelled or porcelain-lined pan. Iron or tin will turn the cider black, and your sauce will have a somewhat sinister appearance.

(8) The wine to drink with wine-flavoured dishes is entirely a matter of taste, but the problem usually solves itself quite naturally, for white wine more or less automatically goes with fish (although some experts advocate a sound, but not grand, red wine such as Beaujolais, with salmon) and red wine with beef and game, even when white wine has been used in the cooking. For veal and chicken the choice is again a question of taste, the occasion, the time of year, and of what is available; personally I usually prefer white wines with both these meats, with the exception naturally of a dish like
coq au vin
, which obviously demands a red Burgundy. In France one finds that there are far fewer rules in these matters than are laid down in England, where wine is treated with more reverence because we have less of it.

In France, as far as everyday, rather than high level, great occasion, eating and drinking is concerned, what wine is served with any given dish is largely a matter of what is grown in the district, and whether the production of red or white wines predominates. Thus, in Alsace, where scarcely any red wine is produced, one drinks white wine with all sorts of dishes, even game, usually associated with red wine. Sometimes this is successful, sometimes one begins to long for a change. In the Beaujolais and Lyon the situation is reversed; the local red wines flow more freely than the whites, and it is not uncommon to see them being drunk with those fish
quenelles
which are an inevitable item on the restaurant menus in this part of France.

UNDER the heading of
aromates
come the herbs, flavouring vegetables such as onions, shallots, garlic, carrots and tomatoes, and the spices and sweet flavourings used in French cookery. The following brief list of such ingredients, with their French and English names, gives an idea both of the dishes for which these things are used and the manner of treating them. I have also included in this list various kinds of salt pork and ham, fats, oils, flours, wines and so on, upon the correct use of which depends much of the successful cooking of French dishes. I hope this little glossary may also be useful to those who use French cookery books but are sometimes puzzled by an obscure word or term of cookery.

 

Ail
GARLIC The essential flavouring of the soups, meat and fish dishes, and sauces of Provençal cookery, and possibly to an even greater extent of that of all south-western France—the Béarn, the Pays Basque, the Languedoc, Bordeaux, Poitou and the Roussillon, and to a slightly lesser degree of the country dishes of Burgundy and of the Auvergne. How much garlic goes into a dish is entirely a matter of individual taste, so that while, of course, there cannot be any such thing as an
aïoli
or a
bourride
without garlic, it can, in certain dishes, be just a faint flavouring which would not, perhaps, be recognised by those not in the know but would be missed were it not present. The crushed clove of garlic included in the bouquet for certain meat dishes, such as
bœuf bourguignon,
is a good example of this technique. But garlic can play odd tricks: while a cut clove of garlic rubbed round a salad bowl does not do anything very much, the same treatment of the earthenware dish in which you are going to cook a
gratin dauphinois
(page 211) makes all the difference. The heat of the oven brings out the garlic flavour quite strongly and it communicates itself to the cream in which the potatoes are drenched. Without it, the dish is flat. Again, I have included, for the sake of interest, a recipe for a
poulet sauté dauphinois
(page 401) which calls for cloves of garlic used as if they were miniature potatoes; and a Catalan sauce (page 126) in which the amount of garlic may seem positively savage to some, while to others it would be barely sufficient. A clove of garlic, or one section of a head of garlic, is
une gousse d’ail,
while the plural of garlic heads is
aulx
.