French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [33]
With all this, the Bordelais can afford to play a few tricks now and again with their combinations of food and wine. As a curiosity, the menu of a dinner given at Château Margaux in 1957 in honour of a famous English wine shipper is a good example of this somewhat casual attitude. In the opinion of another highly distinguished wine merchant, to start off a meal with the very rich 1952 Château Climens was ‘somewhat overdoing the salmon,’ the rest of the meal was really two meals, the mixture of Burgundies and Bordeaux wines was an atrocity, and the whole arrangement was 'CHAOS.’
Here is the menu drawn up by the Académie du Vin de Bordeaux. The mixture of Burgundy and Bordeaux wines is explained by the fact that Burgundian wine growers were associated with those of the Bordelais on this occasion:
‘Château Climens 1952 (Barsac), après le consommé en tasse, avec le saumon de l’Ardour Aurore—La Tâche du Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1948—Hospices de Beaune, Volnay—Santenots, Cuvée Jehan de Massol 1929, avec le poulet Bercy—Château Canon 1945 (St. Emilion) et Château Pétrus 1945 (Pomerol), avec le Mignon de bœuf à la Neva—Château Haut-Brion 1934 (Graves) et Château Margaux 1929 (Médoc), avec le plateau des fromages—Château La Tour Blanche 1949 (Sauternes), avec la glace Napolitaine et les petits fours.’
And as a contrast here is a dinner given at Château Lafite Rothschild in 1951:
À Lafite Rothschild
Le Cornet de Jambon Lesparrain
Le Foie Gras d’Aquitaine
Le Baron de Pauillac
et les Primeurs d’Eysines
Salade Médocaine
Le Fromage du Palais Subtil
La Frangipane Pipetière
Les Fruits
LES VINS
Châteaux Grand Listrac 1945
Châteaux Grand Saint-Estèphe 1947
La Rose, Pauillac 1942
Château Latour 1946
Château Montbrun 1945
Château Kirwan 1943
Château Haut-Brion 1943
Château Cantemerle 1937
Château Lafite-Rothschild 1934 en Magnums
South-Western France: The Périgord
It is a remarkable fact that the two writers who have had the most profound influence upon the English attitude to food and wine in the twentieth century have both been Frenchmen writing in English. (I am not forgetting Escoffier, whose influence was very great, but his books were written in French and the English translations were, and remain, a good deal short of perfection.)
How M. André Simon and M. Marcel Boulestin, arriving in England as they both did, the former in 1894 and Boulestin about 1910, speaking little or no English, almost immediately settled down to assimilate themselves into English life and before long to write and publish books in the English language is something of a phenomenon.
André Simon’s work is justly famous; he has had a long and fruitful working life, but Boulestin died untimely during the 1939 war and all his books, with the exception of an anthology compiled after his death, are out of print. But the influence exercised by Boulestin, both by his books and through the restaurant which he founded, went very deep, if not sufficiently wide.
All this is not entirely irrelevant to the wonderful province of France which is the Périgord, the country of Montaigne, the country of painted caves and romanesque cathedrals, the country of black truffles and Roquefort cheese and walnut oil, of pigs and geese, and an immensely rich tradition of cookery, the country through which flow the Dordogne, the Lot and the Garonne, the country where the names of half the towns and villages end in that short, sharp yet infinitely evocative syllable ac—Souillac, Moissac, Capdenac, Figeac, Bergerac, Monbazillac, Montignac, Marcillac—the country which, with the Bordelais, formed the ancient territory of Guyenne which in 1154 Eleanor of Aquitaine brought as dowry to the Plantagenets and which for three hundred years remained a dominion of the English crown. And this was Marcel Boulestin’s native