French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [3]
But recipes alone are not enough. A flourishing tradition of local cookery implies also genuine local products; the cooks and the housewives must be backed up by the dairy farmers, the pig breeders and pork butchers, the market gardeners and the fruit growers, otherwise regional cookery simply retreats into the realms of folk-lore. France is still largely an agricultural country and the right conditions for the preservation of their traditions still prevail. These traditions are constantly being renewed from within; the professional cooks and the housewives adapt the old methods to changing tastes and altered conditions without thereby standardising all the food; competitions and gastronomic festivals encourage the chefs to develop new dishes based on the old ones but still using the essential ingredients; the tourist organisations work hard to foster their own local products and cookery magazines publicise them in a sane and sober way, so it is not so surprising that the regional cookery of France is a profitable and flourishing industry as well as a beneficent one.
One hears, however, and reads in the newspapers, so many bitter criticisms from English tourists about French food that a few words of warning may not be out of place. Many people who have read of the great regional specialities such as, let us say, the Bouillabaisse and the Estouffat de Bœuf of Provence, the Cassoulet of the Languedoc, the pike with Beurre Blanc of the Loire or the Coq au Vin of Burgundy mistakenly suppose that these dishes are cooked every day by the local housewives and the restaurateurs, and are disappointed and indignant if they are not forthcoming at a few minutes’ notice. This is as absurd as if a Frenchman came here expecting to find plum pudding or Cornish lobsters at every meal and in every wayside café.
The great traditional set pieces are only made by the country people in France for feast days and holidays, wedding celebrations and other special occasions; their day-to-day food will be the simple dishes of ordinary middle-class French cookery, vegetable soups, egg dishes, beefsteaks, veal roasts, mutton ragoûts, sausages, pâtés, and salads; these may well have a regional character owing to some local tradition of seasoning or according to whether olive oil, butter, or pork fat has been used in the cooking; but they will not be the dishes advertised in the travel agencies’ brochures. The restaurateurs do, of course, put these specialities quite frequently on their menus, but not every day, and very often to order only, and the fact that this is so is reassuring to anyone who prefers his food to be freshly cooked rather than dished out of a great pot kept warm over steam for several hours.
Again, there is the seasonal aspect of French cookery; to many tourists French food is known only through summer holidays, and many of the great specialities of regional cooking are then out of season. Although, yielding to a certain extent to public demand, the restaurateurs put on as many of their well-known dishes as they are able, many of these will not be at their best. High summer is not the most propitious moment for freshly made pork products and pâtés: with the best will in the world I do not think one could eat a cassoulet toulousain, a Provençal chou farci or a gratin dauphinois on a hot August day, even if a chef would consent to cook them. Few of the great French cheeses are in prime condition in the late summer, and the price of fresh fish and vegetables rises steeply in the tourist season.
Unfortunately, there are a few restaurateurs in France today willing to barter their birthright of taste,