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By Root 2190 0

their savings were spent in buying out the owner of the bistro, which has since been much enlarged. But the beginnings were hard: “Two daughters in one year,” the Mère Fillioux would recount, “and the bills to pay at the end of every month.” The only customers were the builders employed upon the construction of the new quarter, and a few privileged beings whom the hostess consented to serve. You could get a copious meal for three francs fifty. With the Père Fillioux, wearing the eternal silk cap of the old silk dyers, with the faithful Mélie who waited at table, and later with her daughters, the Mère Françoise worked hard to establish the reputation of her restaurant. Little by little she unified the type of her meals, and the menu of her luncheons is now known in the four corners of the world.

‘The hors-d’œuvre were composed principally of ham, sausage, and galantine; then the volaille truffée demi-deuil, the triumph of the house; quenelles au gratin au beurre d’écrevisses; fonds d’artichauts with truffled foie gras, replaced sometimes, in the season, by game; la glace pralinée; dessert; a capital Beaujolais throughout the meal, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the Clos Saint-Patrice for the game, the artichoke hearts and the cheese.’

The Mère Fillioux always came to her customers’ tables to carve the chickens; she used a little kitchen knife, and two of these knives, it is recounted, lasted her for thirty years, during which time she must have cut up some 500,000 chickens. Once some Americans offered her a thousand francs (a large sum in those days) for her knife. She refused, but after they had gone found, so powerful was the urge to possess this little talisman of good cookery, that they had stolen it.

The Mère Fillioux died in 1925; the restaurant in the rue Duquesne still goes by her name, but her legitimate successor is la Mère Brazier, proprietress of two establishments, one in the rue Royale and the other outside Lyon at the Col de la Luère. La Mère Brazier was once the cook chez la Mère Fillioux, and in her elegant, soberly decorated restaurant of the rue Royale one may eat almost the identical time-honoured menu as it was invented by the Mère Fillioux. There too one may have, unexpectedly perhaps in Lyon, what I do truly believe to be the most delicious and deliciously cooked sole meunière I have ever eaten. Ah, if the clients of one or two of those London restaurants specialising in fish dishes could eat a sole meunière as cooked at la Mère Brazier’s they would certainly wonder what it was that had been served to them under the same name in London.... Perhaps the Lyonnais have a particular talent for cooking fish, quite apart from the renowned quenelles, for I also remember an especially excellent dish of skate with black butter on the menu of one of those rough and noisy but efficiently run little bistros which are typically Lyonnais. On this particular occasion we were sitting at a table next to the one at which the patron-cook was entertaining friends, eating his own midday meal and apparently doing the cooking at the same time. One of the great virtues of this little place in the rue Garet was that everything was served sizzling hot. The raie au beurre noir came to our table with the butter and the fish fairly bubbling in its own little dish; and I saw that the patron, having cooked his own steak, brought it to his table in a covered serving dish, ceremoniously decanted it on to his hot plate, and took the empty dish away to the kitchen before sitting down to his interrupted meal.

This aspect of service in even the humblest of French restaurants is one that I always find attractive. Everything is invariably brought on its own dish and the waiter, having served the customer, leaves the dish on the table for him to help himself to more if he wants it. It is a custom which makes the food much more appetising than does the almost universal English one of serving it straight on the plate, often with vegetables you haven’t ordered and don’t want mixed up with the sauce and the meat.

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