French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [121]
PISSALADIÈRE À LA MÉNAGÈRE
PROVENÇAL ONION PIE WITH YEAST PASTRY
5 oz. plain flour, 1 oz. butter, 1 egg, oz. yeast, salt, a little water.
Cut the butter in little pieces and rub it into the flour. Add a good pinch of salt. Make a well in the centre; put in the egg and the yeast dissolved in about 2 tablespoons of barely tepid water. Mix and knead until the dough comes away clean from the sides of the bowl. Shape into a ball, make a deep cross-cut on the top, put on a floured plate, cover with a floured cloth and leave in a warm place to rise for 2 hours.
For the filling: 1 lb. onions, 2 tomatoes, a dozen anchovy fillets, a dozen small, stoned black olives, pepper, salt and olive oil.
Heat 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy frying pan. Put in the thinly sliced onions and cook them very gently, with the cover on the pan, until they are quite soft and pale golden. They must not fry or turn brown. Add the skinned tomatoes and the seasonings (plus garlic if you like). Continue cooking until tomatoes and onions are amalgamated, and the water from the tomatoes evaporated.
When the dough has risen, sprinkle it with flour and break it down again. Knead once more into a ball, which you place in the centre of an oiled, 8-inch tart tin. With your knuckles press it gently but quickly outwards until it is spread right over the tin and all round the sides. Put in the filling. Make a criss-cross pattern all over the top with the anchovies, then fill in with the olives. Leave to rise another 15 minutes. Then bake in the centre of a pre-heated oven, with the tin standing on a baking sheet, at 400 degrees, Gas No. 6, for 20 minutes, then turn down to 350 deg., Gas No. 4, and cook another 20 minutes.
TARTELETTES À LA PROVENÇALE
A delicious derivation of the pissaladière was once, and perhaps still is, a speciality of a small hotel in the dusty, sleepy little town of St. Rémy, in Provence. It consisted of little open pastry cases with three different varieties of fillings; an onion and black olive mixture like the one described above, one with mushrooms and tomatoes, and the third with prawns and green olives. Those who sometimes feel tempted to put everything from the larder into a pizza or pissaladière may care to take a hint from this. Each of these little tartlets was delicious in its way, but I much doubt if they would have been so good if all the ingredients had been jumbled up together to make one mixture.
FLAN DE POIREAUX À LA BERRICHONNE
CREAM AND LEEK PIE
Line an 8-inch pie tin with crumbly pastry, as for the tarte au fromage, p. 206. Chop the white part of 2 lb. of leeks and let them melt in butter. Add 2 oz. of lean ham cut into dice. Spread this mixture on the pastry.
Beat together 3 egg yolks and pint of cream; season with salt and pepper. Pour this mixture over the leeks, put a few small pieces of butter on the top, and cook in a medium hot oven for 30 to 40 minutes.
Under the name of flamiche or flamique a very similar dish is made in Picardy and other parts of northern France, but does not usually include the ham, more leeks (3 lb.) and less cream ( pint) being used for the filling. Sometimes a bread dough or yeast pastry is used (in this case, reduce the amount of filling by one third, to allow for the rising of the pastry) and sometimes the flamiche is covered over with a lid of pastry so that it becomes more like a pasty.
BOULETTES DE SEMOULE, or PFLÜTTEN
SEMOLINA AND POTATO GNOCCHI
These are a cross, as it were, of semolina and potato gnocchi, the final cooking being