French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [226]
In fact, at routine French family meals, fresh fruit after the cheese mostly takes the place of a sweet course but, for more, ceremonial occasions, a fruit tart, a soufflé or a cream of some sort usually appears. Fresh double cream served with sugar is considered more of a sweet in its own right than as an accompaniment to other dishes; and there are numerous little cream cheese confections which are served with sugar and perhaps a fruit purée for dessert. And if you habitually eat the kind of food already described in this book you will not need anything but very light and simple sweet dishes. Heavy puddings and rich cakes would be out of place, as well as being very fattening.
I have not, in this volume, included a separate chapter on preserves, for we have all our English recipes for jams and jellies which are probably most suited to the variety of fruits which are obtainable here; but in this chapter are a few recipes for lesser known preserves, such as peach jam and a high-class red-currant jelly. Incidentally, the famous white- and red-currant preserves of Bar-le-Duc are scarcely for home cooking, for each single currant is pierced by hand with a quill so that, thrown into boili g syrup, they absorb the sugar and when the jam cools the currants swell out again like little bubbles. (This at least used to be the procedure but perhaps by now a mechanical process has been devised for the piercing of the fruit.) The making of marrons glacés has also become very much a commercial affair, for no less than sixteen separate processes are involved before the candied chestnuts are ready for sale. No wonder they are a luxury.
But it would be wrong to give the impression that the art of home preserving is not still practised in France, for if you visit French country houses and farms during the months of July, August and September, you find, at least in those where tradition still prevails, that the careful housewife is busy turning the season’s fruits into conserves, jams, liqueurs and cordials, so that all through the winter there will be greengages, mirabelles, peaches, apricots and dark purple plums for tarts and pastries, and little glasses of fruit brandies to offer to the curé and the neighbours and to the unexpected visitor.
Fruit growing and preserving on a commercial scale is, of course, an important industry in France. In the east the little golden mirabelles, the purple quetsches and the bitter cherries are distilled into the famous eaux de vie, or alcools blancs, of Alsace and Lorraine; in the Dordogne the plums make a powerful and strongly flavoured prune liqueur and greengages are preserved in eau de vie to be served in little glasses as a digestive; walnuts are made into an oil for salads and into a liqueur called brou de noix; big, dark imperial plums are dried on slates or bamboo slats and become the pruneaux de Tours or of Bordeaux which, packed in wide glass jars, find their way into the luxury shops all over the world at Christmas time. Then there are the crystallised apricots and plums and figs of Provence, and the world-famous marrons glacés of the Ardèche, and those soft, melting, stoned and stuffed prunes d’Agen from the Garonne which make such a lovely sweetmeat. And, throughout the districts of the Loire, the Dordogne, the Lot and the Périgord, and in Alsace and Lorraine, there will hardly be a celebration, a wedding feast or a festival at which the dessert does not include some sort of plum or mirabelle tart, made with fresh or dried plums or jam according to the season.
In the Orléans region there is the beautiful cornelian-coloured quince paste called cotignac, which comes packed in little cylinder-shaped chip boxes, in Toulouse the beguiling crystallised violets, in Aix-en-Provence the exquisitely melting little almond cakes called calissons d’Aix. And even in the most unexpected places in France one may find that there is a first-class baker or confectioner. Once, somewhere in some little ugly town in Alsace, I remember an abominable