French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [32]
As far as the true regional dishes are concerned, Basque and Béarnais cooking is easier to follow in manner than to the letter; when you have goose fat saved from the Christmas bird, try using it as a basis for these dishes. It gives an entirely characteristic flavour. When there is none, or if you feel as Norman Douglas did about it, then substitute pork lard or olive oil; all but the most rabid of French regionalists will tell you that there is no call to be more royalist than the king in these matters. Use the red peppers, the spiced Spanish-type sausages when they are obtainable, the salt pork, the ham, the wine, the garlic, the onions. Something of the highly individual character of this local cookery, part Spanish, part traditionally Gascon, with affinities to the cooking of Provence and even to that of parts of Italy, will still emerge. These dishes may not be for every day. But then once again it was Norman Douglas who said, ‘Who wants a dish for every day?’
On the Basque and the Bordelais coasts there is naturally a great tradition of fish cookery, and here olive oil comes into its own again, for the oniony fish stew called Ttoro, or Tioro, for the little squid called chipirones, stewed with their own ink for sauce, for fresh sardines plainly fried, and prawns, langoustines, and mussels cooked with rice and peppers in the manner of the Spanish paëlla. Oysters, raw and ice cold, are often accompanied by sizzling hot little spicy sausages called lou-kenkas, which have some resemblance to the chorizos of Spain. Inland, there is particularly fine river trout from the streams called gaves in the Béarn, and in the strange bleak country of the Landes there are ortolans and wild doves, delicious birds unknown to the English kitchen; and there are duck livers cooked with grapes, and goose liver pâtés with as great a reputation as those of the Périgord and Alsace.
South-Western France: The Bordelais
About the traditional cookery of the Bordelais, Count Austin de Croze expresses the view that it is only in England that the ancient dishes have been preserved, a circumstance due presumably to the long British occupation of this part of the country in Plantagenet times. As examples he cites the English love of ‘ginger, and of rudimentary accords and discords’ in their cookery.
One of the few ancient dishes still current in the Bordelais is the tourin, an excellent onion soup with several variations, and the custom of pouring a glass of wine into the garbure as the amount in your plate diminishes also still survives. The custom is known as faire chabrot, and is, or was, common to all Gascony and south-western France. Other old dishes cited by Count de Croze are those filling peasant maize meal cakes and galettes (maize is extensively grown in south-western France and is used among other things for cramming the geese in order to fatten their livers) called millias and milliassou, and an estouffade de Lesparre, a beautifully enticing name, but a dish I have never yet come across. What we now know as ‘the beautiful, good, refined Bordelais cuisine,’ says Count de Croze, ‘dates from the time when Louis (the architect, Victor Louis) built lovely Château Margaux with its Greek temple façade, and the theatre of which Bordeaux is so justly proud. The famous—and sumptuous—lamproie aux poireaux et au vin rouge dates, at the earliest, from the time of Montesquieu.’ Two other Bordeaux dishes universally known are cèpes à la Bordelaise, the rich mixture of cèpes or boletus cooked in olive oil with garlic and parsley, and entrecôte marchand de vins (the old Bordeaux recipes for these dishes will be found on pages 249 and 337). From what period these dishes date I do not know, but properly done both have the savour and pungency of genuine country food.
The Bordelais are, no doubt, able to console themselves for their upstart cookery, dating back no farther than the end of the eighteenth century; they have the wherewithal, with the greatest wine production of any district in France, with the greatest