French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [11]
It works both ways. A rosbif in Paris is not English roast beef; what the French eat and drink at le goûter would puzzle and infuriate an English nanny invited to tea. In France it is mildly surprising to find that any cooked ham goes by the name of jambon d’York, and that, all unbeknown to us, one of the most highly esteemed English cheeses is called le Chester. But this is quite encouraging to us, who are often mocked by the French, however amiably, for our misconceptions about their food, and scoffed at by our own catering profession, some eminent members of which are fond of claiming that English stomachs are fit only to digest roast meat, boiled vegetables, and fried fish. But then all of us nowadays, except perhaps these curiously bigoted members of the catering profession, have travelled a little, and on visits abroad have acquired tastes which, so far from disagreeing with us, have become a part of our daily lives.
Not that we all return from France so converted as the bus conductor who, a Soho shopkeeper tells me, comes in regularly once a week for two dozen snails, nor even so well informed as the barrow boy who asked me, when I was buying aubergines and peppers, if I was ‘going to make a nice ratatouille, dear?’ But when we say to friends, ‘we’ll just have an omelette and a salad and a piece of cheese,’ what we mean is ‘we won’t make any fuss, but what we have will be well chosen, will make a satisfying meal and will go nicely with a glass of wine’; without our even knowing it, a little piece of French wisdom in the matter of eating has rubbed off on to ourselves.
It is when it comes to cooking of a slightly more elevated kind than the simple omelette and salad that we go astray. We get self-conscious, try too hard, and the result is perhaps a failure. Now, any woman, or man, who is capable of cooking a good English roast with potatoes, is a good enough cook, given a little encouragement, to produce something rather more imaginative. If a dish does not turn out to be quite as it was at the remembered auberge in Normandy, or at the restaurant on the banks of the Loire, is this a matter for despair? Because it is different, as by force of circumstance it must be, it is not necessarily worse. It is for us to exercise our common sense in selecting what is within our powers, in taking what suits us from the immense variety of dishes which France has to offer, and to learn how to make them our own (within limits, of course—you can’t cook up a sole and a piece of hake and a couple of tomatoes and call it a bouillabaisse). But there is one mistake we nearly all make when first attempting French cookery. We make it too complicated. A galaxy of seasonings, oceans of wine and cream, thick sauces and a mass of garnishes are alien to the whole spirit of French cookery. Does a Paris milliner put lace trimmings on a fur hat?
Well then, here is the advice of Escoffier, one of those extremely rare great chefs whose work, although the longest and most brilliant period of his career was spent outside his own country, is as respected there as it is in England. And two of the most valuable words he ever wrote were these: Faites Simple.
What a Frenchman intends these words to mean may not be quite the same as what an English cook would understand by them. They mean, I think, the avoidance of all unnecessary complication and elaboration: they do not mean skimping the work or the basic ingredients, throwing together a dish anyhow and hoping for the best. That is the crude rather than the simple approach. To prove the point, try simplifying a recipe which calls for rather a lot of ingredients down to the barest essentials. You may well find that the dish is more pleasing in its primitive form, and then you will know that your recipe was too fanciful.