French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [125]
Another speciality, Madame Montagne told me, her green almond eyes curious that I should want to know all these things, was the pâté made largely with grattons, the little browned scraps which are the residue after the pork fat has been melted down, and which were also the original ingredient of the renowned rillettes de Tours.
And the interesting decoration of the shop? Who had created it? It was designed twenty-five years ago by M. Montagne’s grandfather; the lapis-coloured tiles were really to discourage flies, for it is well known that blue repels them but, using the blue as his starting point, old M. Reymond achieved a most original and oddly beautiful combination, a kind of mosaic of sea colours which turns the charcuterie into a cool and orderly grotto, if such a thing can be imagined, with the rows of hanging sausages and hams for stalactites. The young Montagnes are very go-ahead (the family have been in the charcuterie business for some eighty years) and would like to install a large refrigerated cabinet—but it would mean destroying some of grandpère’s work and that would break the old man’s heart. And I hope that even after he is dead the young couple will leave his shop intact, for it is the work of a man who was an artist in design as well as in charcuterie.
Madame Montagne told me that many foreign customers who come to Lamastre to eat Madame Barattero’s food also come and buy the charcuterie products (once again, the link between the restaurant and the local shopkeepers), Germans, Belgians, Swiss, even Italians. She did not, I think, realise what a compliment this is, for it is not common to find sausages anywhere in Europe as good as those of Italy. And all these visitors would surely be sorry to see the old decoration and the elegant little façade of the shop replaced with gleaming glass and chromium.
Here in England we have nothing quite comparable with the French charcuterie. In the Midlands and the North it is true that there are excellent pork butchers who sell ready-cooked pigs’ trotters, stuffed chines of bacon for slicing cold, a kind of pâté made from pork scraps, very similar to the grattons of French country charcutiers, and cooked shoulder gammon. The majority of us, however, must rely upon the commercial liver pâtés sold in the delicatessen shops, rather bleak cold cuts of beef, ham and pork, central European type boiling sausages made in this country, very expensive imported salame sausages and our own commercial frying or grilling sausages. It is, incidentally, a curious anomaly that while we are willing to pay something like twelve shillings a pound for imported salame sausages, we are unable to face the fact that if we want pure pork sausages for cooking they will cost up to seven shillings a pound, and this makes it difficult to reproduce many of the hot sausage dishes which are such a feature of French cookery and which provide such an excellent solution to the problem of what to serve as a rather substantial hot first course when the rest of the meal is to be comparatively light. Nevertheless there are signs that a renaissance of the English sausage is at hand and so I do not feel that it is quite useless to include in this chapter a few recipes for hot sausage dishes, together with such things as grilled pigs’ trotters, ham in a cream sauce, and other little dishes which, strictly speaking, are meat dishes but which, in French cookery, nearly always precede the main dish, whether it be chicken,