French Provincial Cooking (28 page)

It may be hard to believe, but a purée of green gooseberries, barely sweetened, with the same additions of cream and stock, is almost indistinguishable from a sorrel purée.

On page 38 I have quoted Escoffier’s recipe for this sauce as he noted it down after a visit to the Haute Savoie. The sauce was served, he records, with an
ombre-chevalier,
the excellent freshwater fish from the Lac du Bourget, cooked in white wine from his host’s vineyards and left to cool in its cooking liquid. But it is so original and delicious that it seems a pity to confine it to partnership with a rare fish. I have often served it with cold salmon trout and have come to the conclusion that it is an even better sauce for this lovely and delicate fish than the more usual
sauce verte.

To make the sauce for three or four people, use 2 oz. shelled and skinned walnuts and 2 tablespoons of freshly and finely grated horseradish (see page 97), a teaspoon of sugar, a little salt, the juice of half a lemon, and
pint of thick cream.

To skin the walnuts, pour boiling water over them and rub off the skins as soon as they are cool enough to handle. It is a tedious operation but, having compared the sauce made with unskinned walnuts to the original version, there is no question but that the latter is very much finer. It is an example of how a short cut in cooking can be taken only to the detriment of the final result.

Having skinned the walnuts, then, chop them finely. Stir them very lightly into the cream and add the horseradish. Add the seasonings, and lastly the lemon juice.

This is the delicious, mild, creamy horseradish sauce which one finds in Alsace, served with a plain poached sausage. The recipe is on page 228.

A coffee-cup, after-dinner size, of olive oil (to provide lubrication for the dry meat),
of a bottle of red wine, a sliced onion, 2 teaspoons of crushed coriander seeds for venison, or 1 of juniper berries for hare, a crushed clove of garlic, a sprig of thyme or marjoram, a little ground black pepper. Pour over the venison or hare in a deep china bowl and cover. Leave for 12 hours for a hare, 24 to 36 hours for a 3 lb. piece of venison. Inexpensive port can be used instead of red wine, in which case add a tablespoon of wine or cider vinegar. Dry the meat well before starting to cook it and if it is to stew in its marinade, strain off the herbs, vegetables and spices and add fresh ones.

This is a marinade which is particularly useful for venison or for an old hare, but there are many alternative mixtures. See, for example, the recipes for pork to taste like wild boar on page 364, for the
civet de lièvre
on page 424 and the stewed venison on page 429.

FROM the luxurious pâté of truffled goose or duck liver of Alsace to the homely household
terrine de campagne,
from the
assiette de fruits de mer
of the expensive sea-food restaurant to the simple little selection of olives, radishes, butter, sliced sausage and egg mayonnaise of the
café routier,
an hors-d’œuvre is the almost invariable start to the French midday meal. The English visitor to France cannot fail to observe that the artistry with which the French present their food is nowhere more apparent than in the service of the hors-d’œuvre. So far from appearing contrived, or zealously worked on, each dish looks as if it had been freshly imagined, prepared for the first time, especially for you.

Now, since the main object of an hors-d’œuvre is to provide something beautifully fresh-looking which will at the same time arouse your appetite and put you in good spirits, this point is very important and nothing could be less calculated to have the right effect than the appearance of the little bits of straggling greenery, blobs of mayonnaise and wrinkled radishes which show all too clearly that the food has been over-handled and that it has been standing about for some hours before it was time to serve it. And the place for wilted lettuce leaves is the dustbin, not the hors-d’œuvre dish. What is the matter with a plain, straightforward half avocado pear, a mound of freshly boiled prawns, a few slices of good fresh salame, that they must be arranged on top of these eternal lettuce leaves? I swear I am not exaggerating when I say that in London restaurants I have even had
pâté de foie gras
served on that weary prop lettuce leaf. . . .

Now here are one or two ideas from France which have struck me as being particularly attractive for the service of an hors-d’œuvre.

To start with the north, where the ingredients obtainable are not so very different from our own, I remember the big airy first floor dining-room of the Hôtel de la Poste at Duclair. At a table overlooking the Seine we sat with a bottle of Muscadet while waiting for luncheon. Presently a rugged earthenware terrine, worn with the patina of years, containing the typical duck pâté of the country, was put upon the table, and with it a mound of
rillettes de porc;
to be followed at a suitable interval with a number of little dishes containing plain boiled
langoustines
(we used to know them as Dublin Bay prawns before they turned into Venetian
scampi
), shrimps also freshly boiled with exactly the right amount of salt; winkles, a cork stuck with pins to extract them from their shells; sardines and anchovies both in their deep square tins to show that they were high-class brands. Then a variety of little salads each with a different seasoning, and forming, in white-lined brown dishes, a wonderfully imaginative-looking array, although in fact there was nothing very startling.

There were thinly sliced cucumbers, little mushrooms in a red-gold sauce, tomatoes, cauliflower vinaigrette, carrots grated almost to a purée (delicious, this one), herring fillets. The colours were skilfully blended but sober. The pale rose-pinks of the
langoustines,
the pebbly black of the winkles, the different browns of the anchovies and herrings and the dishes themselves, the muted greens of the cucumber and cauliflower, the creams and greys of shrimps and mushrooms contrasted with the splash of red tomatoes, the glowing orange of the carrots, and yellow mayonnaise shining in a separate bowl. Each of these things was differently, and very sparingly, seasoned. Each had its own taste and was firm and fresh. The shrimps and the
langoustines
smelt of the sea. And with the exception of the duck pâté there was nothing in the least complicated. It was all a question of taste, care, and the watchful supervision of the proprietor. And although there was such a large selection, larger probably than one would want to serve at home, it had no resemblance at all to one of those trolleys loaded with a tray of sixty dishes which may look very varied but in fact all taste the same, and which almost certainly indicate that the rest of your meal is going to be indifferent.

This is what food connoisseurs condemn when they say that a mixed hors-d’œuvre is not only unnecessary but positively detrimental to the enjoyment of a good meal; on the other hand a nicely presented and well-composed hors-d’œuvre does much to reassure the guests as to the quality of the rest of the cooking, and to put them in the right frame of mind to enjoy it.

I vividly remember, for instance, the occasion when, having stopped for petrol at a filling station at Remoulins near the Pont du Gard, we decided to go into the café attached to it, and have a glass of wine. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning but for some reason we were very hungry. The place was empty, but we asked if we could have some bread, butter and sausage. Seeing that we were English, the old lady in charge tried to give us a ham sandwich, and when we politely but firmly declined this treat she went in search of the
patron
to ask what she should give us.

He was an intelligent and alert young man who understood at once what we wanted. In a few minutes he reappeared and set before us a big rectangular platter in the centre of which were thick slices of home-made pork and liver pâté, and on either side fine slices of the local raw ham and sausage; these were flanked with black olives, green olives, freshly washed radishes still retaining some of their green leaves, and butter.

By the time we had consumed these things, with wine and good fresh bread, we realised that this was no ordinary
café routier.
The patron was pleased when we complimented him on his pâté and told us that many of his customers came to him specially for it. It was now nearly midday and the place was fast filling up with these customers. They were lorry drivers, on their way from Sète, on the coast, up through France with their immense tanker lorries loaded with Algerian wine. The noise and bustle and friendly atmosphere soon made us realise that this must be the most popular place in the neighbourhood. We stayed, of course, for lunch. Chance having brought us there it would have been absurd to stick to our original plans of driving on to some star restaurant or other where we probably wouldn’t have eaten so well (my travels in France are studded with memories of the places to which I have taken a fancy but where I could not stop—the café at Silléry where the still champagne was so good, the restaurant at Bray-sur-Seine where we had a late breakfast of raw country ham, beautiful butter and fresh thin
baguettes
of bread, and longed to stay for lunch—inflexible planning is the enemy of good eating). But here at Remoulins we stayed, and enjoyed a good sound lunch, unusually well-presented for a
café routier.

We came back the next night for a specially ordered dinner of Provençal dishes, for the proprietor was a Marseillais and his wife the daughter of the owners of the house, which had been converted from a farm to a restaurant-filling station. The young man was a cook of rare quality, and the dinner he prepared to order put to shame the world-famous Provençal three-star establishment where we had dined a day or two previously. But had it not been for the appearance of the delicious hors-d’œuvre, which was so exactly the right food at the right moment, we should have had our drink and paid our bill and gone on our way not knowing. . . .

Even simpler in composition was another hors-d’œuvre which was served us at a hotel at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. It consisted simply of a very large round dish, quite flat, completely covered with overlapping circles of thinly sliced
saucisson d’Arles;
in the centre was a cluster of shining little black olives. Nothing much, indeed, but the visual appeal of that plate of fresh country produce was so potent that we felt we were seeing, and tasting, Arles sausage and black olives for the very first time.

So you see one does not need caviar and oysters or truffled
foie gras
and smoked salmon or even pâtés and terrines and lobster cocktails to make a beautiful first course. One needs imagination and taste and a sense of moderation; one must be able to resist the temptation to overdo it and unbalance the whole meal by offering such a spread that the dishes to follow don’t stand a chance; one must remember that eggs and vegetables with oil and mayonnaise drâtessings, and pés with their strong flavours and fat content and their accompaniments of bread or toast are very filling but not quite satisfactory to make a meal off; so the different components of an hors-d’œuvre must be chosen with great care if they are to fulfil their function of serving as appetisers rather than appetite killers.