French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [23]
For instance, discussions as to the best wine to serve with foie gras are always cropping up amongst connoisseurs and in wine and food magazines; in Alsace there is no question: a Riesling or a Traminer of the country will be placed upon the table almost before you have ordered it. The combination seems to me to be an excellent one, but whether it is the best I am in no position to pronounce. (H. Warner Allen advocates a red wine, finding a Côte Rôtie from the Rhône ideal.)
The foie gras, a slice or two of the whole goose liver, studded with truffles, or else a pâté or a terrine, is served very cold as an hors-d’œuvre, in solitary splendour, and is very expensive even in its home town of Strasbourg. The rest of the meal will be composed with an eye to the continued service of white Alsatian wines. In one very old-established restaurant of Strasbourg, so discreet as to be hardly recognisable as a restaurant until you get the bill, we followed our foie gras, on the advice of the management, with whole baby chickens grilled and coated with breadcrumbs, parsley, chopped hard-boiled egg and noisette butter. A little bowl of caraway seeds came with the Münster, a strong, rich, creamy textured cheese which, at the right stage of ripeness, is one of the great cheeses of France; then there were pancakes stuffed with a Kirsch-flavoured cream. The very fine Mirabelle which was our digestif was served in large wide goblets cooled with ice. But except for the superb foie gras this meal was far outclassed by the beautiful and imaginative cooking provided by M. Gaertner at the Armes de France in the rebuilt village of Ammerschwihr (it was almost totally destroyed in 1944) in the wine country.
I shall not quickly forget my first dinner at Gaertner’s. An onion tart, flat as a plate but still somehow oozing with cream, preceded a subtly flavoured sausage served hot with a mild and creamy horseradish sauce as the only accompaniment, followed by haricots verts fairly saturated in butter; we were then beguiled into eating a sweet called a Vacherin glacé. This turned out to be an awe-inspiring confection of ice-cream, glacé fruits, frozen whipped cream, and meringue, which left me temporarily speechless. But coffee and a glass of very good Kirsch soon put matters right. Indeed no Alsatian meal is complete without a glass of one of the local eaux-de-vie made from fruit for which the country is famous. Apart from the fact that a taste for Framboise, Mirabelle, Kirsch, Quetsch, Prunelle and so on is very easy to acquire, some such digestif after a meal is almost as much a necessity as the wine which is drunk with it.
English visitors are apt to disregard this fact, looking upon the final liqueur as a luxury or a feminine frivolity; but these are not liqueurs at all as we understand the word; they are pure fruit spirits with a powerful bouquet (particularly the Framboise, which has such an overpowering scent of raspberries that the actual taste comes as rather an anti-climax) and a high alcoholic content without being in the least fiery or coarse. Taken in moderation, they are the best possible aids to digestion after a copious meal.
I cannot resist describing one more of the Gaertner dinners, for so often a second meal in a restaurant where the first impressions were good proves to be a disillusion. On this occasion it was the reverse. M. Gaertner’s skill and his creative imagination became even more apparent. His pâté de foie gras and mousse de foies de volaille, smooth, pink, and marbled with green pistachio nuts and black truffles, served on a big, flat dish and surrounded with fine sparkling jelly, were as good and delicate as they looked. The coq au coulis d’écrevisses, a plainly cooked chicken with the palest of rose pink sauces of the most perfect