French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [124]
I cannot say that Lamastre in the Ardèche is typical of any small French provincial town, for it has been made famous throughout France by Madame Barattero and the lovely food she has been serving there for thirty years at the Hôtel du Midi. Neither can it be suggested that Madame Barattero relies upon the local charcutier, for, first by her husband and, after he died, by her chef, the same few beautiful and high-class dishes have been produced almost every day of those thirty years. But the first-class charcutier is there all right and works in co-operation with the hotel, supplying it with at least one of its renowned specialities, a sausage which the Barattero chef cooks and presents wrapped in the lightest and most melting of puff pastries. . . .
Into Montagne’s beautiful blue and cream tiled shop, hidden away in a narrow, unprepossessing street in Lamastre, I strolled, therefore, one Whitsunday morning to see what might be going on while all the housewives and restaurateurs in the town would be busy preparing their Sunday midday feast.
Besides the sausages and the hams, the pâtés and the local Ardéchois specialities called jambonnettes, cayettes and rosettes (unexpectedly, this is a salame type of sausage also popular in Lyon but better made here, I thought—it is identifiable by the coarse-meshed net in which it is presented for sale), there were all sorts of special things for the fêtes. There were trays of snails, their, shells almost bursting with fresh-looking parsley butter, and Sunday hors-d’œuvre of cones of raw ham alternating with little chicken liver pâtés moulded in sparkling aspic jelly, all arranged by Madame Montagne herself on long narrow-plated dishes and ready to take away. There was a huge supply of quenelles de brochet (you can’t get away from them in these parts) and in the magnificent butcher’s block of smooth scrubbed wood was a tank-sized two-handled pan of pale orange-coloured sauce full of chopped olives, to serve with the quenelles. Beside it was one of those monolithic loaves of butter which never fail to have their effect upon English eyes accustomed to seeing only little half-pound slabs in paper wrappings.
There was a steady stream of customers making last-minute purchases for their Sunday lunches. One woman came in with her saucepan and took away her sauce in it, all ready to put upon the stove and to serve with her quenelles. For another, Madame Montagne swiftly cut half a pound of jambon du pays in the requisite postcard-thin slices. (The French don’t always take sufficient care about this point. I have seen the otherwise excellent jambon d’Auvergne absolutely murdered by being slashed into doorsteps.) A small boy had been sent by his mother to buy an extra chicken to roast. There was none left. What about some sausages instead? The cooking sausages from chez Montagne are the very ones which go into the feuilletage at Barattero’s, and, as we were to discover presently, made those of Lyon appear very coarse in comparison. And in between serving her customers, Madame Montagne told me how the jambonnettes are cut from the knuckle end of a ham, boned, stuffed with fresh pork meat and sewn up into a fat little cushion shape, how the rosette is called after the particular kind of sausage skin in which it is encased, a thick and fat skin which, during the curing process, nourishes the meat inside and gives it its characteristically fresh and moist quality; how a mixture of leg and shoulder meat is used for this kind of sausage and how it is the favourite charcuterie speciality of the Ardèche, so that out of every four pigs killed the legs of two only are made into hams, the others, and the shoulders, being used for rosettes; how the fresh dry air up here at Lamastre