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By Root 2289 0

and wagon-lits; Baccarat of the crystal decanters and wine goblets; and on all the postcard stands are crude coloured pictures of a young woman serving a great flat cartwheel of a quiche Lorraine to some rough peasantry seated round a scrubbed farmhouse table. The pink wine of Toul may remind collectors of insignificant information that it was in that city that Claude Gelée, rather better known as le Lorrain, was apprenticed as a pastry cook before he found his real vocation as a painter. Le Lorrain is, in fact, sometimes credited with the invention of puff pastry, but this is perhaps over-enthusiastic on the part of French cookery historians, for surely it was already known to Italian cooks before Lorrain’s time. (He may of course have learnt how to make it in Italy, for he worked as pastry-cook to an Italian landscape painter in Rome.)

In the great covered market place of Nancy there are new sights to be seen. Here are big bowls of pale amber-green and gold choucroute, and stalls bulging with sausages, the special smoked ones to go with the choucroute, and large, coarsely cut, but as it turns out later, most subtly flavoured sausages for boiling (our own sausage manufacturers could learn a thing or two from these Lorraine and Alsatian charcutiers if they cared to do so); smoked fillets and loins of pork, terrines and pâtés of pork, duck, tongue; and deep dishes in which pieces of pork lie embedded in a crystal clear jelly; this turns out to be the famous porcelet en gelée, an elegant brawn of sucking pig which makes a fine horsd’œuvre; then there are trays of highly flavoured salad made from pig’s head, and flat square cuts of streaky bacon smothered in chopped parsley—‘to keep it fresh’—the delicious mild-cured pale pink hams of Luxeuil, strong creamy cheeses called Géromé des Vosges, and others studded with caraway seeds, the Anisé of the Lorraine farmhouses; and —but it is nearly lunchtime, and in a busy provincial town like Nancy it is as well to secure your table soon after midday, and we have already learned from the menu pinned up outside the Restaurant of the Capucin Gourmand that that famous quiche is cooked fresh for every customer, and we shall have to wait at least twenty minutes for it....

Although it is usual to think of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as very similar in character, a distinct change becomes perceptible as one leaves Lorraine and drives down to the wine country of Alsace.

Lorraine, although it was an independent Duchy until it passed to the crown of France on the death of Stanislas, father-in-law of Louis XV and last Duke of Bar and Lorraine, appears to the visitor to be very French. After a few hours in Alsace one begins to feel that France is far away. The people seem to be very quiet, reserved, even wary. It is not surprising when one remembers their history. But one misses the noise, the chatter, the stuffy typical smells of France. There is something disconcertingly Swiss, or is it Austrian, about the apparent calm and neatness of the wine villages, many of them completely destroyed in the last war and now rebuilt. Those that escaped intact, such as Riquewihr, almost unchanged since the sixteenth century, have a curiously unreal air, almost as if they had been put up for a Walt Disney film. But then, as one recognises names such as Ribeauvillé, Bergheim and Mittelwihr which have long been familiar on wine labels, these places come once more into a life of their own.

The cookery here is very interesting, with a variety of traditional dishes remarkable even for a French province. This is partly due, no doubt, to the tenacity with which the people clung to their old customs during the years of German domination, partly also because of the influence of an old-established Jewish colony whose traditional dishes, brought from Poland, Austria, Russia and Germany, have become part of Alsatian cookery. Again, in spite of the devastations of the last two wars, the Alsatians have each time succeeded in rebuilding their towns and villages, re-establishing their industries, agriculture,