French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [31]
South-Western France: The Béarnais and the Basque Country
Peppers and onions are sizzling gently in a big frying-pan, the goose dripping in which they are cooking giving off its unmistakable smell. A squat, round-bellied earthen pot, blackened with use, containing beans and salt pork and cabbage, seems to be for ever on the simmer. A string of wrinkled, dried, dark red peppers hangs from the ceiling alongside a piece of roughly cut ham; a bunch of little red sausages and a pitcher of yellow wine are on the table. The kitchen of this little peasant farmhouse in the Béarn is small and smoky, by no means the ideal airy, well-ordered, well-scrubbed farmhouse kitchen of one’s imagination; but the pink-washed walls are clean against the faded blue paint of the windows and shutters, and on the shelves of the little larder there are three or four tall glazed earthen jars to bear witness to the careful housekeeping of the farmer’s wife. For these are the pots of confit, the goose and pork and duck, salted, cooked, and preserved in their own wax-white fat, which, with the ham and the sausages and the peppers, lie at the base of all the local cookery.
For here, at any rate in the deep country, butter, except for pastry-making, is considered a wretched substitute for the rich fat of the goose (Norman Douglas tells us that goose fat was held by the Greeks to be an aphrodisiac, adding, characteristically, that to him it was an emetic). So whether it is a question of frying eggs, or sausages, or a steak, of cooking a daube of beef, or the heavy thick cabbage and bean soup called garbure, into the pan goes the goose fat or the pork lard, to be followed by the onions, the tomatoes, the garlic and the brick red pepper called piment basquais. The locally cured ham, the jambon de Bayonne or of Orthez will add its salty tang to the mixture, along with a piece of pork either from the salting trough or from the jar of confit. The wines of the Béarnais and the Basque country which are drunk with these dishes are topaz or rose-coloured or rich deep red, and have curious names easy to remember but difficult to pronounce—Pacherenc de Vic Bilh, Tadousse-Usseau, Irouléguy, Jurançon, Monein, Saint-Faust, Madiran, Chahakoa, Diusse and Rousselet de Béarn.
There is much talk hereabouts, too, that is to say much talk by writers and gastronomes, of Le Grand Béarnais, the hero-king, Henri IV of Navarre, who figures in all French cookery books as having expressed the pious wish that every family in the land might have a chicken in the pot every Sunday of the year. But although they have good ways of dealing with a boiling fowl in these south-western regions of France, of adding cabbage leaves filled with a savoury stuffing to the vegetables which go into the pot, and serving highly condimented sauces with the chicken, it is chiefly due to perspicacious Parisian restaurateurs that the name of Henri IV is attached to every poule au pot and petite marmite served to their customers. Neither, alas, did the hero of Arques invent or even know, the Sauce Béarnaise. It was created by a chef, whose name is not recorded, at the Pavillon Henri IV at St. Germain, round about 1830; it rapidly, and justly, became celebrated, and before long entered into the realms of la cuisine classique. Count Austin de Croze, the great authority on French provincial cookery and compiler of that wonderful volume of regional recipes, Les Plats Régionaux de France, considers, however, that the sauce is in direct descent from the local Béarnais cookery. His own recipe includes a seasoning of the pounded