French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [17]
To the traveller as yet unacquainted with Norman cookery an impression that perhaps the inhabitants live on duck pâté and tripes à la mode de Caen might arouse a faint feeling of apprehension as he walks round a big Norman town such as Rouen. Every two yards there seems to be a charcuterie, its windows fairly bursting with all the terrines and galantines, the pâtés and ballotines, all made of duck; and the butchers as well as the charcutiers display earthenware bowls of ready-cooked tripe, very inviting looking in its savoury bronze jelly. But neither duck nor tripe, he feels, is quite the dish for every day. There is no need to worry. Take a look round the market in the morning and the spectacle is thoroughly reassuring. The fish is particularly beautiful in its pale, translucent northern way. Delicate rose pink langoustines lie next to miniature scallops in their red-brown shells; great fierce skate and sleek soles are flanked by striped iridescent mackerel, pearly little smelts, and baskets of very small, very black mussels. Here and there an angry-looking red gurnet waits for a customer near a mass of sprawling crabs and a heap of little grey shrimps. Everywhere there is ice and seaweed and a fresh sea smell.
Outside, the vegetable stalls are piled high with Breton artichokes, perfectly round with tightly closed leaves; long, clean, shining leeks; and fluffy green-white cauliflowers. At the next stall an old country woman is displaying carefully bunched salad herbs, chives, chervil, sorrel, radishes and lettuces. So far, it could well be the central market of any one of a score of French towns. But when you get to the dairy stalls, then you know you could only be in the astonishingly productive province of Normandy, where you buy the butter of Isigny and of Gournay carved off a great block, where bowls of thick white cream and the cheeses of Camembert, Livarot, Neufchâtel, Pont l’Evêque, Rouy, Isigny and a dozen other districts ooze with all the richness of the Norman pastures.
How deeply our own roots are in Normandy quickly becomes apparent to the English traveller. The churches, the old timbered houses, the quiet villages, the fruit orchards, the willows hanging over the streams, are familiar. But not the cooking (although I have heard tell of two country dishes which, in effect, must be almost identical with our own rice pudding and apple dumplings, but have never come across them). It is indeed curious that, with such similar pasture lands, we should never have taken to the manufacture of anything like the soft rich cheeses of the Normans, while they have apparently never attempted to make anything in the manner of Cheddar or Gloucester. And while we on the whole prefer to eat our butter with bread and our cream with fruit, the use of these two ingredients in Norman cooking is almost excessively lavish, both of them appearing to possess qualities which make them turn to the consistency of a sauce with very little effort on the part of the cook. When you get melted butter with a trout in Normandy it is difficult to believe that it is not cream. When a chicken or vegetables are served with a cream sauce it is most likely pure cream, unthickened with egg-yolks or flour, although it may well be enriched with Calvados, the cider brandy of Normandy. The quality of this famous Calvados varies enormously (the most reputed comes from the Vallée d’Auge, one of the chief cider districts) and it is rare to come across a really fine old Calvados except in private houses; perhaps in any case it is an acquired taste. In cooking, however, even a comparatively immature Calvados gives to sauces a characteristic flavour which cannot be imitated with any other brandy or spirit, and which I find very delicious, especially with pork and veal. Cider is of course also used in Norman cookery, although not perhaps to the extent generally supposed, and rarely in restaurants, where chefs consider that white wine gives a more delicate flavour and