French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [10]
Another example: she goes deeply into the details of preparing and cooking sweetbreads, and beef à la mode. You can’t go wrong with directions like these. She has a most perceptive discussion on the major brown sauces. In a mass-cooking restaurant they all tend to taste somewhat the same, whatever their name, because they are all made from the same general base. In contrast, the good small country restaurant and the French household cook make small quantities with fresh ingredients supplied by the elements of the main dish. This ensures that the sauce is an integral part of the whole, an extension of flavor rather than a largely unrelated new element.
“We all know how to make parsley butter,” she notes. “But do we always do it really well?” Then she tells us how to take 2 ounces of butter and a tablespoon and half a finely minced parsley (this is the only way to measure parsley—it has to be finely minced) and blend them thoroughly in a bowl rinsed in hot water, adding a few drops of lemon juice. You chill it. Then she gives examples of its use: “New potatoes or carrots with a little of this butter melting among them are exquisite,” she writes, adding that it is equally fine with boiled white beans or with lentils.
Well, I could go on endlessly, quoting the whole book, which of course is hardly necessary, since here it is. I have loved going through French Provincial Cooking again, and admiring it as a timeless treasure. I envy those of you plunging into it for the first time.
Julia Child
Cambridge, Massachusetts
July 1998
French Cooking in England
WHEN Curnonsky, the famous French gastronome and writer, who died in 1956 at the age of 83, describes the four distinct types of French cookery ‘La Haute Cuisine, la cuisine Bourgeoise, la cuisine Régionale, et la cuisine Improvisée’ he might perhaps also have mentioned that other well-known branch of French cooking, la cuisine À LA française, or French food as understood and cooked by foreigners all over the world. As a Frenchman, perhaps he did not think this cooking worth consideration, but certainly he would not have sought to deny the fascination and the influence which French cookery exercises upon civilised people in all parts of the world.
With la haute cuisine I am not here concerned. Although at its best it is professional cooking by chefs of the very highest achievement, many sins have been committed in its name; and for financial and economic reasons it is becoming rare, even in France. The feeling of our time is for simpler food, simply presented; not that this is necessarily easier to achieve than haute cuisine; it demands less time and expense, but if anything a more genuine feeling for cookery and a truer taste. It is the kind of cooking which, once more, was meant by Curnonsky when he repeated, over and over again, that good cooking was achieved when ‘ingredients taste of what they are.’
The principle is the one upon which English cookery also is based. Fundamentally, then, there is little in the French system which need inspire us with awe of the unknown; no basis for talk of mysterious ‘secrets,’ nor for easy jibes about poor materials masked with complicated sauces. There is one factor, though, that has to be remembered. A country’s national food appears completely authentic only in that country. It is a curious fact that French dishes cooked by a Pole or a Chinaman in France are liable to seem more genuinely French than the same dishes cooked by a French cook in England, Germany, Italy, Poland or New York. The climate, the