French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [5]
Under such circumstances I have eaten some of the most enjoyable of French country meals; unexacting ones, ordered and served with the minimum of fuss. An omelette, perhaps, followed by the sausages which were a speciality of the local butcher, a vegetable dish and some cheese; or perhaps snails and a homely stew, intended probably for the patron’s own dinner but gracefully surrendered; or a vegetable soup, a slice or two of country-cured ham and a beautiful big green artichoke; and on another occasion, a langouste with a mayonnaise which was among the best I have ever tasted, because of the fine quality of the Provençal olive oil which had gone into it, and which was followed by a dish of tender young string beans of that intense green and delicate flavour which only southern-grown beans seem to acquire.
Surely, then, good food is there for those who look for it; bad food, too, and rather more than there used to be, but if one gets it, one very often has only oneself to blame, for arriving late and tired in some small town, for weakly going into a place obviously unsuitable, for omitting to make friends with the patron before ordering, for mismanagement generally. Such occasions are bound to occur, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. And one of the great points about the cookery of France is that it is so extraordinarily varied. There seems to be an inexhaustible fund of new dishes to be discovered.
Note to 1977 Edition
It is the best part of thirty years since I started amassing the material which eventually turned into this book. It was published in 1960. Over the years, a certain amount of what I wrote about the provinces of France has inevitably passed into history. Nobody would pretend that the deep freeze isn’t everywhere, or that restaurants don’t sometimes serve disgraceful prefabricated sauces and inadmissible travesties of famous dishes. I’m afraid that guidebook promises have made us expect rather too much of French restaurant food.
In the markets, however, all over France, incomparable produce still abounds. Buying food for picnics or to cook in holiday houses is more than ever a joy and an inspiration.
When it comes to using the recipes, my inclination now is to try harder than ever for quality. A little fine olive oil, or true, clear stock, or double cream from Jersey herds, or a few fresh eggs laid by decently-fed, humanely-reared hens go a lot further than twice the amounts of third-rate makeshifts. Sybille Bedford said it all when she wrote that Escoffier’s injunction ‘faites simple’, much invoked since I quoted it in these pages, ‘doesn’t mean faites slapdash’. That goes for our choice of raw materials just as much as for their preparation and cooking.
E.D.
April 1977.
Note to 1983 Edition
IN the six years since I wrote the above note for the 1977 reprint of the hardback edition of this book, the style of French restaurant cooking dubbed nouvelle cuisine has been the subject of scores and scores of newspaper and magazine articles. It has been extravagantly praised and merrily derided. It has been so widely imitatated that one of its most publicised founding fathers, Michel Guérard, has already declared himself fed up with the carbon copies of his dishes to be found in every second and second-rate restaurant in France and has expressed his wish to dissociate himself from the entire movement. Quite a hullabaloo. What is it all about?
In 1960, when this book was first published, it seemed to me that so called cuisine classique with its rigid traditions and immutable rules had already been unrealistic and hopelessly out of date