French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [2]
The book exudes an atmosphere of provincial life which appears orderly and calm whatever ferocious dramas may be seething below the surface. Here you find the lawyer’s wife at work preparing her special noisettes d’agneau for a dinner party; a great-aunt of one of the author’s friends serves the same soup her mother served to Madame Récamier when she came to dinner; the farmer’s wife gathers mushrooms to garnish the chicken she is cooking for her husband when he comes in with friends from a day’s shooting; a senator’s cook proves to a sceptical company that an old hen can be made into a dish fit for a gourmet; the author’s great-uncle at last discloses his recipe for the liqueur he makes every year and keeps locked in his linen-cupboard.
The ravages of two world wars, the astronomical rises in the cost of living, and the great changes brought about by modern methods of transport and food preservation have not destroyed those traditions of French provincial cookery. In one way indeed these circumstances have oddly combined to preserve them. After the 1914 war patriotic Frenchmen began to feel that the unprecedented influx of foreign tourists hurrying through the country in fast cars, Riviera or Biarritz bound, not caring what they ate or drank so long as they were not delayed on their way, was threatening the character of their cookery far more than had the shortages and privations of war. Soon, they felt, the old inns and country restaurants would disappear and there would be only modern hotels serving mass-produced, impersonal food which could be put before the customers at a moment’s notice, devoured, paid for, and instantly forgotten. It was at this time that a number of gourmets and gastronomically-minded men of letters set about collecting and publicising the local recipes of each province in France.
At the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1924 there was, for the first time, a culinary section devoted to regional cookery. Under the direction of Edouard Rouzier, proprietor of the celebrated Rôtisserie Périgourdine, a series of regional dinners were organised and proved an immense success. Subsequently Marcel Rouff and Maurice-Edmond Sailland (who, under the pen-name of Curnonsky, came to be known throughout France as the ‘Prince of Gastronomes’) together published a series of guides to regional eating and drinking, not hesitating to criticise the pretentious, the dull, or the over-expensive meal when they encountered it. About the same time Count Austin de Croze compiled a book listing the products, the dishes, the cheeses and wines of every province, followed in 1929 by a closely-packed volume of recipes called Les Plats Régionaux de France. Before long regional cookery became fashionable. There had, of course, previously been a few restaurants in Paris specialising in the food and wines of the native province of the proprietors, but they were little known except to the habitués of the quarter and to provincials exiled in Paris. These regional restaurants now began to multiply and become smart. Today one could eat some different provincial speciality in Paris restaurants every day for weeks on end.
Country and seaside restaurateurs also began to realise the possibilities of attracting tourists by advertising some famous local dish on their menus. Often such dishes derive from peasant and farmhouse cookery and depend rather upon some typical product of the region such as a cheese or ham, mountain mutton or river fish, chestnuts, walnuts,