French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [28]
The pig in all its forms plays a large part in the cookery of Lyon, grilled pigs’ trotters in particular appearing on every menu in almost every restaurant. At one at least of the better-known ones the proprietress is said to accept only trotters from the fore-legs, for they are smaller and more tender than those from the hind-legs. Certainly the pigs’ trotters in this establishment were exceptionally good, so perhaps the story is true. But the fact is that pigs’ trotters and sausages, steak and large quantities of potatoes, boiled chicken, pike quenelles and crayfish in one form or another soon become monotonous, however well cooked. And those pike quenelles, for instance—it is in fact rare to get them as they should really be. Making these quenelles is a lengthy and tedious business, involving much pounding and sieving of the flesh of the pike, blending it with a panade, cream, white of egg and so on; the paste thus obtained should be either moulded in a tablespoon or rolled into a sausage shape and gently poached, when it swells and puffs up, and should be so light that it resembles a soufflé without a soufflé case. Served in a delicately flavoured and creamy river crayfish sauce these quenelles de brochet can be, as I remember tasting them years ago for the first time in a Mâcon restaurant, a dish of great charm. Nowadays they are made on a commercial scale, the pounding and sieving being presumably done by machine, with a larger proportion of flour added in order to enable the quenelles to keep their shape when moulded, and to stand up to being set out on the counters and displayed in the windows for sale. This variety of quenelle tends to be stodgy, nothing much more in fact than a glorified fish-cake, poached instead of fried, so that one should be very cautious about ordering quenelles de brochet in any but those restaurants with the very highest reputation to maintain. Even then . . . odious though comparisons may be, I cannot help saying that anyone curious to know what a quenelle in all its glory is like will find it, if they happen to be travelling south, worth while making the détour from Valence across the Rhône, and forty kilometres up the winding road into the hills to Lamastre, to eat the extraordinary pain d’écrevisses at Madame Barattero’s Hôtel du Midi, a restaurant where all the specialities are of a most remarkable finesse.
The world-wide fame of Lyonnais cooking is largely due to a whole generation of women restaurateurs who flourished during the early years of the twentieth century, of whom the most celebrated was the Mère Fillioux. The story of the Mère Fillioux is so typical of the success of so many French provincial restaurateurs that it is worth recording. In the words of Mathieu Varille, author of La Cuisine Lyonnaise (1928): ‘In the category of restaurants marchands de vin that of la Mère Fillioux must be placed in the first rank. She has now entered into history through the great door of the kitchen. It is only right that her famous doings should be recounted here, to serve as an example to future generations.
‘Françoise Fayolle was born, as were also her five sisters, at Cuenlhat, in the Puy de Dôme. Quite young, she found employment in the house of a general at Grenoble but was not happy there. She came to Lyon and went into the service of Gaston Eymard, director of the Insurance Company La France, and one of the town’s greatest gastronomes. In ten years she learned all that she needed to know about the culinary arts. At this time she made the acquaintance of Louis Fillioux, whose father owned, in the rue Duquesne, a very modest apartment house, of which the ground floor was occupied by a bistro. Françoise Fayolle married Louis Fillioux;