French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [225]
Stock from mussels: L’œuf du pêcheur, page 189.
Boiled beef: Bœuf en salade, page 147.
Roast beef: Best cold with a potato or other vegetable salad.
Juice or sauce from beef stews: Œufs pochés à l’huguenote, page 190. With pommes mousseline façon provençale, page 272.
Lamb, mutton, pork and veal: With pilaff rice cooked as for the mussel dish on page 320. In salad as for the beef salad, page 147. In stuffed cabbage as on page 252.
Bones and trimmings: For stock or to enrich the haricot bean and lentil dishes described in the chapter on vegetables.
Pork rinds and bones and veal bones: To enrich stews and stocks, especially those destined for jelly.
Ham and tongue: Ham mousse, page 235. Ham with cream sauce, pages 231-3.
Sausages: In omelette campagnarde, page 196.
Kidneys: In omelettes, with pilaff rice, with poached eggs.
Chicken, turkey: Mayonnaise de volaille, page 407. Émincés de volaille, page 406. In salad as for beef salad, page 147. In pilaff. In stuffing for paupiettes de veau, page 376.
Chicken and turkey carcases: In stock for celery soup, page 172. Carrot soup, page 168.
Goose: Rillettes d’oie, page 222. In pilaff.
Duck carcase: For stock for potage de cèpes, page 171, or beetroot consommé, page 380.
Game: As above, and in pilaff.
Potatoes: Sauté à la lyonnaise, page 273.
Choucroute: Soup, page 420.
Rice: In vegetable and fish soups. In stuffing for sweet peppers, page 269, or in tomatoes cooked in the same way.
Very small quantities of chicken, meat or fish: Saucisses de pommes de terre, page 274. Stuffed cabbage, page 252.
I think that any cook, however inexperienced, who cares to start from these few basic ideas, will very soon be able to devise his own dishes using up left-overs to the best advantage.
Les Desserts
Sweet dishes
PLEASE do not look in this chapter for anything but the simplest of creams and pastries, soufflés, ices and fruit dishes. Elaborate pâtisserie and confectionery require practical experience and knowledge of an art quite distinct from that of normal household cookery.
A French housewife, unless either she or her cook is particularly adept at pastry and cakes, is able to order what she requires in this line from that local pâtissier whom she knows to be most skilful and to use only the finest ingredients; she knows that she can rely upon not being let down, and it is no disgrace in France—rather the reverse—to say that you have ordered your gâteau or tarte aux fraises or savarin aux fruits from chez this or that celebrated pâtissier. Here in England, of course, we cannot do that, or at least only in the rarest of cases, for good and conscientious pastry shops are exceedingly few and far between. I know of one or two which have acquired a quite unmerited reputation simply because of the colossal prices they charge. Indeed, the ingredients of good pastries, cakes and petits fours are very expensive, but if one is paying, let us say, fourteen shillings a pound for those little biscuits called florentines, then it is a disillusion to find that the chocolate coating has been made with a cheap and nasty kind of couverture, or that a fifteen-shilling layer cake has been filled with cream made from custard powder or dried egg.
The remedy is to stick to sweet dishes which are simple and can be made at home. Personally, I prefer old-fashioned creams and compôtes and homely fruit tarts to all the shining and glorious confections of the pastry shops, and a straightforward cream ice made with what one knows to be the purest of ingredients is preferable (although the finish may not be very professional looking) to an ice gâteau, sporting five different flavours and a multitude of whirls and twirls and glacé cherries, of which the ingredients are to most people a mystery. Mercifully, perhaps, for if you know what they are, it is unlikely you will buy them.
So most of my sweet recipes are those of very simple French household cooking, recettes de bonne femme, as they say, which is not to imply that they are carelessly concocted or coarsely flavoured but just very