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By Root 2225 0

serious dishes are being prepared. Now, in spite of all that grave gastronomes are in the habit of saying about the pernicious custom of starting off a meal with a lot of little oddments and titbits, it is nevertheless a fact that the quality of a restaurant may very largely be judged by the way in which the hors d’œuvre are planned and presented. At Nénette’s they bring you quantities of little prawns, freshly boiled, with just the right amount of salt, and a most stimulating smell of the sea into the bargain, heaped up in a big yellow bowl; another bowl filled with green olives; good salty bread; and a positive monolith of butter, towering up from a wooden board. These things are put upon the table, and you help yourself, shelling your prawns, biting into your olives, enjoying the first draught of your wine. Gradually you take in your surroundings: the light and sunny dining-room, neither too big nor too small, the comfortably worn flowered wallpaper, the country flowers on the tables, and the shady garden which you can see through the open window at the far end of the dining-room.

You settle in, realising that you are in a serious restaurant, and a serious provincial restaurant at that. You have no anxiety about the meal to come, and you are quite right. For any international Palace Hotel or expense-account restaurant can serve you oysters and foie gras, smoked salmon and caviar, in the very pink of condition (this is a question of good buying and has nothing to do with the chefs) and still follow them up with the deadliest of dull dinners. But the eye which picked out those bowls, the taste which decreed what was to go into them, and the hand which carved that butter into its meticuously studied carelessness of shape are scarcely likely to falter when it comes to the silver sea-bass roasted over a vinewood fire, the langouste in its tomato and brandy and garlic-scented sauce, the salad dressed with the fruity olive oil of Provence. Upon this last point, however, one must not enlarge too much. For we are at Montpellier, and as Madame Nénette observed, in tones of only very mild reproof, in answer to my question about her lobster dish, ‘Ah, nous ne sommes pas en Provence, Madame, ici c’est le Languedoc.’ So Madame Nénette’s lobster or, rather, crawfish dish is her own special version of langouste à /a sètoise or civet de langouste, a dish quite remarkably similar to the famous homard à l’américaine. Now the port of Sète in the Languedoc was the birthplace of the chef Pierre Fraisse, who is said to have originated this famous dish, and one way and another it seems fairly obvious that, with its tomato and oil and garlic, it was adapted from the methods traditional to the fishermen of Sète and, indeed, of the whole Mediterranean coast, and never had much to do either with America or with Armorique (the old name for Brittany), where they had no oil, no tomatoes and precious little cognac; but after the 1914 war patriotic Frenchmen decided that it was absurd that a famous French dish should be attributed to America, so they came to the conclusion that the name was due to a spelling mistake, and did not stop to think of the more rational explanation that the dish was a typically Mediterranean one. Fraisse, the Sétois chef who first put the dish upon his menu in his Paris restaurant (Noël Peters in the Passage des Princes) had spent some years in America (these facts are all on record and can be read in M. Robert Courtine’s book, Le Plus Doux des Péchés,4) and the whole thing seems to be explained. This comfortable theory, however, is swiftly demolished by Pierre Andrieu in Fine Bouche (Cassell, 1956) who says that although Fraisse may have been the originator of the name, he certainly did not create the dish, which was well known under the name of homard Bonnefoy, at the restaurant of that name, before 1870. He quotes Philéas Gilbert as saying that the dish was originally known as langouste niçoise. So we are back to the Mediterranean origin of the dish.

Whichever came first, the Sétois and Provençal versions of the dish are