French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [160]
MARCEL BOULESTIN: Myself, My Two Countries, Cassell, 1936
‘Once a year at home we had truffle-day. But that could only take place if the bank account allowed, for Colette used to say: “If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles,” and she declared they should be eaten like potatoes. We waited until, with the coming of the frost, Périgord should send the finest of its mushrooms. It appears that cleaning them is an art and Colette would not entrust the responsibility for this to anyone else. You put half a bottle of dry champagne in a black stew-pan, with some bits of bacon fat lightly browned, salt and pepper. When this mixture boils you throw in the truffles. A divine and slightly suspect odour, like everything that smells really good, floats through the house. Under no pretext must the truffles leave the stew-pan, the scented sauce is served separately, hot in port glasses, and anyone who does not declare himself ready to leave Paradise or Hell for such a treat is not worthy to be born again.’
MAURICE GOUDEKET: Close to Colette
A recipe for a truffle omelette is on page 197, and one for a lovely dish of pork studded with truffles on pages 365-6. Some notes on truffles are on pages 101-3.
Le Poisson
Fish
PROBABLY some of everyone’s most dismal nursery memories are connected with food. One might come to accept the stewed prunes, the hateful greens, even the tapioca pudding, as part of Nannie’s mysterious lore as to what it was necessary to eat in order to survive the perils of childhood. The miseries of fish days were harder to overcome because the food looked so terrifying even before it was on your plate. Egg sauce didn’t do much to compensate for the black skin and monstrous head of boiled cod; fish pudding, a few spiteful bones inevitably lying in wait in that viscous mass, and whitings biting their own tails, were frightening dishes for children, and often painful too. Later came schoolday experiences of limp fried plaice, followed by tinned apricots and custard, of the boiled salt cod which on Fridays so unnervingly replaced the normally delicious food eaten by the family with whom I lived in Paris; of fried eel nauseatingly flavoured with sage and regarded as a treat in a Munich household. None of these dishes did anything to allay the suspicion which I fancy is shared by a good many English people when ‘fish for dinner today’ is announced.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that lobster à l’américaine, or fillets of sole in some rich cream sauce, represent to many Englishmen the very height of sophisticated cookery; with such a dish you know you are safe from lurking bones, from black mackintosh skin, from the empty eye-socket and accusing stare; nothing is there to recall the nursery, the schoolroom or the railway dining-car.
It was not, I think, until my first visit to the Mediterranean that I began to suspect that there might be better ways of eating fish than in these disguised fashions, and to appreciate the beauty of red mullet, bass or sardines brought straight from the sea to the grill and served crackling and golden with no garnish but a lemon. Since those days I have nearly always preferred grilled sole, trout, salmon, mullet, herring or mackerel to any subtle concoction of sole, lobster or turbot with cream, wine, or mushrooms.
So in the recipes in this fish chapter I have concentrated on rather simple dishes. Do not expect to find recipes for chefs’ concoctions of sole with sophisticated cream sauces and complicated garnishes. Such dishes are indeed often delectable, and they make fine backgrounds for the lovely white wines of