French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [21]
The extreme elegance and aristocratic grace of the Place Stanislas, the beauty of Héré’s columns and arcades, the delicacy and fantasy of Lamour’s black and gilt wrought-iron balconies, and of the grilles and the gates which mark the four entrances to this square make a powerful impact when seen for the first time. As a monument to pure eighteenth-century taste the Place Stanislas must be unique in Europe. It was indeed of Nancy that Maurice Barrès, himself a native of Lorraine, wrote that ‘here remains fixed the brief moment in which our society achieved its point of perfection.’
On our way from the Place Stanislas to the central food market we pass what seems, at least at breakfast time, to be an almost unbroken line of bakeries and pastry shops, wafting infinitely beguiling smells from their warm interiors. In the end, of course, we have not the strength of mind to pass another. As we go in to order our croissants, there in front of us upon the counter and all round the shop are piled hundreds of flat round orange and gilt tins, glinting and shining like little lamps in the pallid sunshine. The tops of the tins are decorated with pictures of the wrought-iron grilles of the Place Stanislas and in gilt lettering bear the words LES BERGAMOTTES DE NANCY. Upon inquiry the assistant tells me that these are little boiled sweets, scented with essence of Bergamot, and are one of the oldest specialities of Nancy. I had heard vaguely of these Bergamottes without having any precise idea as to whether they were a cake, a sweet, or perhaps some sort of candied flower petal, and as I walked away carrying my pretty little tin of childish sweets I thought how often some such trivial little discovery colours and alters in one’s mind the whole aspect of a city or a countryside. On a former occasion it had been the crystallised violets of Toulouse which had caused that remarkable city of ferocious history and dignified rose and ochre buildings to show yet another side of its character; for frivolous little boxes of violettes de Toulouse tied up in pale mauve satin ribbons are displayed amid swirls of violet tulle in every confectioner’s window.
The province of Lorraine is rich in such small associations. The first city you enter driving east from Champagne is Bar-le-Duc, ancient capital of the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine, but more familiar to me as the home of those magically translucent preserves, half-jam, half-jelly, of red currants, white currants or little strawberries, sold in miniature glass jars in luxury Paris grocery stores, and sometimes served at dessert with cream or cream cheese. At the little town of Commercy originated the small, fragile, shell-shaped cakes called madeleines so beloved of French children, and which have become celebrated in French literature because it was the taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea which Proust used as the starting point of his long journey into the past. (How the English madeleine, a sort of castle pudding covered with jam and coconut, with a cherry on the top, came by the same name is something of a mystery.) The name Epinal on a signpost brings back another childish memory, of primitive coloured pictures and sheets of brightly uniformed soldiers, the images d’Epinal which have the same primitive charm as our penny-plain twopencecoloured prints. To Lunéville, where the château was built as a replica, on a small scale, of Versailles, belongs that thick white china sprayed with stylised pink and red roses which is, to me, inseparable from the memory of café au lait in bowls, and croissants, and crisp curls of very white butter on little oval dishes. On the map of Lorraine are also to be found Contrexéville and Vittel of the mineral waters, reminders of countless restaurant cars