French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [240]
THERE are people who hold that cookery books are unnecessary. These people are usually those who innocently believe cookery to be a matter of a little imagination, common sense, and taste for food, qualities which are, of course, of enormous importance to a cook; but, as Maurice des Ombiaux says, ‘Let us not make any mistake, the taste which one has for good living, however lively it may be, cannot take the place of the technical knowledge, the long habit, the constant practice of the difficult and complicated profession of cookery.’
One certainly cannot learn the technical details of cookery entirely from books; but if the cooks, celebrated and obscure, of the past had believed that written recipes were unnecessary, we should now be in a sad plight indeed. The culinary wisdom and skill of several centuries of practitioners, both professional and amateur, are distilled into the cookery books we now inherit. Speaking for myself, I can only say that, after years of study of many of the books I have listed below—and they represent only a microscopic cross-section of those which have been published during the past two hundred years in France alone—and after many years of constant practical work in the kitchen, I am, I think, just beginning to have some small glimmerings of what the art of cookery really means, of its development in the historical sense and of the causes and effects of things concerned with cookery, and I do not think that any cook, professional or amateur, could honestly claim that he owed nothing to any cookery book. So I have included in my bibliography the titles and authors of many of the great classic French works, particularly those of the nineteenth century, for although they may not be directly relevant to the subject of regional and provincial cookery, they are, indirectly, of the greatest importance. The influence of men like Carême who, it might be said, invented or at least brought to a hitherto unknown peak of perfection the elaborate cooking known as haute cuisine, of Urbain Dubois and Jules Gouffé, of Escoffier and of Prosper Montagné, can scarcely be overestimated. The kind of cookery these men practised may now be out of date but, without it, European cookery would, whether for better or for worse, be something quite other than it is. And in the cases of Escoffier and Montagné, it is a point of considerable interest that, while both of them preached in the highest places of gastronomy of their time, neither of them ever forgot or came to despise the homely cookery of their native provinces which were, respectively, Provence and the Languedoc. Montagné, indeed, did much to popularise the regional cookery of the Languedoc, where for generations his ancestors had been inn-keepers and restaurateurs. Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine, a book for housewives as well as for professionals, contains recipes for many of the famous country dishes of Provence, a part of Escoffier’s work which is often overlooked, at any rate in England, for the book has never, so far as I know, been translated into English.34 It was published only a year before Escoffier’s death in 1935, at the age of 89.
In contrast to these great names, the authors of many of the little volumes dealing with regional cookery are unknown in the world of professional gastronomy. Many of these books are by amateurs. Some of the authors were men of letters who made collections of the recipes of their native provinces as a relaxation from their normal work; often, from the point of view of details, the recipes in these books leave much to be desired, but what they may lack in precision they make up for in their appeal to the imagination and in the feeling they give us of a domestic life now vanished or, at any rate,