French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [30]
Another speciality, which appears in the brasseries rather than the restaurants proper, is the gratinée, a clear consommé in which a slice of bread sprinkled with cheese is browned in the oven, the whole being finally enriched with a mixture of beaten egg and port—a restorative soup of the same nature as the Parisian soupe à l’oignon, in this case without the onion which is generally but wrongly supposed to figure in every Lyonnais dish.
East of the Lyonnais and south of Burgundy lies the Bresse, a district blessed with a rich variety of high-quality raw materials, of which the poularde de Bresse is the most celebrated. This country is a tricky subject to write about. The town of Belley in the south-eastern corner of the Bugey district, between the Franche-Comté, the Dauphiné and the Savoie (administratively the Bugey is now part of Franche-Comté, but geographically it is inseparable from the Bresse) was the birthplace of Brillat-Savarin, and around everything to do with the author of the Physiologie du Goût, there hangs a kind of aureole, every chicken, every gratin d’ecrevisses, every pâté in this district being, in the imagination of a vast number of people, automatically presented, as it were, upon a golden dish. As Maurice des Ombiaux has remarked, people seem to believe that Brillat-Savarin’s recipes partook of the nature of divine revelations, whereas in reality Brillat-Savarin made no claims to being a practising cook, and his recipes, at least to modern readers, appear to be the weakest spots in his book. Apart, however, from observing that indiscriminate adulation and quotation ad nauseam of a few aphorisms by people who have probably never read his complete work seldom does any author’s reputation much good, it is not my purpose here to discuss Brillat-Savarin’s great book, which in its form as well as its content became such a landmark in the history of modern gastronomy that it set, and is still setting, the pattern for hundreds of imitators.
My first-hand knowledge of Brillat-Savarin’s country is small, my only gastronomic recollection being of a very excellent but very simple meal, all the more delicious for being somewhat unexpected, in a café routier just outside Bourg-en-Bresse. It was in the days before these transport cafés had become well known to tourists, and stopping for petrol before going into Bourg we saw that behind the filling station was a small whitewashed farmhouse advertising accommodation and meals. We were tired after a long day’s driving, and decided there and then to stay instead of battling through the traffic into Bourg.
Our dinner consisted of a small selection of hors-d’œuvre, among which the home-made pâté was unusually good; afterwards we ate a tender chicken roasted in butter, and a salad. The sweet was that wonderfully fresh and innocent-looking cream cheese dish, a cœur à la crème, served covered with fresh rich cream. We complimented the patron and his wife, a young couple who had not long set up in the restaurant—filling-station business, remarking that the cœur à la crème had been particularly delicious. When we came down next morning, after a night of peace and quiet as unexpected, considering we were within a few yards of the main road, as our excellent dinner, we found that the patronne had provided more cœurs à la crème for our breakfast; and on the table beside the coffee, the croissants, and the butter was a bowl of beautiful fresh wild strawberries. How she