French Provincial Cooking (40 page)

Slice the cleaned vegetables and melt them in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large soup-pot. When all the vegetables, including the tomatoes, have softened, put in the fish heads, and the herbs tied together in a bunch. Cover with 3 to 5
pints of water. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring slowly to the boil, and thereafter simmer for 30 to 40 minutes. Strain the broth, and separate as much flesh from the heads and bones as possible. There will be about 2 good cupfuls, and this is set aside for another dish.

For 3 pints of broth, which will amply serve six people, beat 6 egg yolks—these are Durand’s quantities; I find 3 or 4 quite sufficient—with a little lemon juice and a ladle of the hot broth. Add this mixture to the broth in the saucepan and stir until the soup is quite hot and has thickened, but do not let it actually boil. Off the fire, stir in 3 or 4 tablespoons of
aïoli,
which is prepared by pounding a clove or two of garlic in a mortar, stirring an egg yolk with it, and then adding 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil, exactly as for a mayonnaise. Serve your soup as soon as the
aïoli
is added.

I commend this soup without reservation to anyone who likes garlic. For those who do not, the alternative is to cook 2 or 3 tablespoons of rice in the strained broth, then add the egg yolks as above, and a good deal of extra lemon juice. This makes a soup similar to the well-known Greek
avgolémono
(egg and lemon), usually made on a basis of chicken broth.

Having scraped and cleaned about 4 pints of mussels, put them in a saucepan with a couple of chopped shallots, a little garlic and chopped parsley and
pint of water or
pint each of white wine and water. As soon as the mussels have opened take them out, shell them, and filter the liquid which comes from them, together with that left in the saucepan, through a cloth.

Heat a little olive oil or butter in your soup saucepan and in this melt the white part of 2 leeks, a couple of skinned tomatoes and a little piece of garlic, all finely chopped. Make up the filtered mussel liquid to 1
pints with water. Add this to the vegetables in the saucepan. When it comes to the boil throw in 2 tablespoons of rice and boil gently until the rice is cooked. Sieve half the soup or purée it in the electric blender. Mix this with the rest. Heat up, add the mussels, taste for seasoning, and simmer gently for 5 more minutes until the mussels are hot. Enough for four.

A 6 to 8 oz. slice of cod or other white fish,
pint of boiled, unshelled prawns or a small crawfish (
langouste
) tail, a carrot, an onion, a tomato, a small piece of celery, a clove of garlic, a small glass of cider or white wine, 2 heaped dessertspoons of soft white breadcrumbs, herbs and seasonings, nutmeg or mace,
pint of cream.

Shell the prawns, put the white fish, the shells of the prawns, the vegetables, garlic, fresh or dried herbs (fennel, marjoram, parsley), and cider or wine in a saucepan with salt, pepper and 2 pints of water. Simmer for 25 minutes or so. Strain, pressing the fish and vegetables against the sides of the sieve so as to extract the maximum of juice. Into the saucepan put the prawns and breadcrumbs pounded together to a paste with two or three spoonfuls of the stock; gradually add the rest of the stock, and simmer for 15 minutes or so, stirring frequently. Season with pepper and nutmeg, and more salt if necessary. At this stage the soup still looks rather unpromising; but when the cream, boiled a minute or two in a separate pan, is added, all will be well. Before serving, stir in a little very finely cut parsley. Those. who like a thicker, more substantial soup, can add the yolks of 2 eggs, as for the celery soup on page 172. Or the water in which rice has boiled can be used instead of plain water to make the stock.

Peel a 2 lb. slice of pumpkin, throw away the seeds and the cottony centre, cut the flesh into small pieces, salt and pepper them, and put them into a thick saucepan with a stick of celery cut in pieces. Cover them with 1
pints of milk previously boiled, and 1 pint of mild stock or water, and simmer until the pumpkin is quite soft, about 30 minutes. Sieve the mixture; return the purée to a clean pan. Mash or pound in a mortar 4 oz. of peeled prawns or shrimps (buttered shrimps will do), adding a few drops of lemon juice. Dilute with a little of the pumpkin purée, add this mixture to the soup, simmer gently for 10 minutes or so, sieve again if the soup is not quite smooth, taste for seasoning and, when reheating, thin with a little more hot milk or stock if necessary. Immediately before serving stir in a good lump of butter. Ample for six.

Pumpkin is a vegetable which tends to go sour very quickly, so this soup should be used up on the day, or day after, it is made.

‘THEY reckon 685 ways of dressing eggs in the French kitchen; we hope our half-dozen recipes give sufficient variety for the English kitchen.’ Doctor William Kitchiner, who wrote these words in
The Cook’s Oracle
, round about 1821, therewith betrays himself as a pretty smug fellow.

For the life of me I cannot see why, if our neighbours 21 miles across the Channel have 685 ways of cooking eggs, we should have to make do with six. Six recipes would no more than cover the basic ways of egg-cookery common to all countries, but Dr. Kitchiner was certainly right in so far as it is important to understand these methods thoroughly before embarking on the 679 remaining variations.

‘Have ready twelve freshly poached eggs,’ says the cookery book, and with a shudder you turn over the page, knowing that, allowing for disasters, those twelve eggs will probably turn into twenty and that your kitchen will be a charnel house of eggshells and a shambles of running egg yolks. Or ‘shell eight
œufs mollets,
’ they say, ‘lay each in a puff pastry case and mask with an hollandaise sauce. Pour a cordon of melted meat glaze round each egg and brown with a salamander.’ And one begins to agree with old Dr. Kitchiner. For elaborate dishes of this sort are not really to be recommended for household cookery. Leave them to the restaurant kitchens where there is a
chef-pâtissier
to prepare the pastry cases, a larder cook to provide the meat glaze, a sauce cook ready with the hollandaise, and half a dozen kitchen boys to clear away, to say nothing of the waiters ready to rush it from the kitchen to the tables.