French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [54]
Estragon TARRAGON An aromatic herb very typical of French cooking. A little goes a long way but its affinity with chicken is remarkable, and a few leaves steeped for a short while in a consommé and in clarified broth destined for aspic jelly make the whole difference to the finished dish. Tarragon is an essential flavouring in sauce béarnaise, sauce verte, and Montpellier butter and also goes into the fines herbes mixture for omelettes, into salads, sole dishes, and cream soups. The best tarragon vinegar, which makes all the difference to salad dressings, is made by steeping whole sprigs of the fresh herb in bottles of wine vinegar or Orléans vinegar. (The latter is also wine vinegar, the Orléans process of distilling it being somewhat different from that used for other wine vinegars.) For the tarragon vinegar of commerce, the herbs are removed after a short period of steeping, and the vinegar filtered. If made at home, leave the whole branches of tarragon in the bottles until the vinegar is all used up. The flavour will be much finer. If you are buying tarragon plants for the garden, make sure to get the variety known as True French. The kind called Russian tarragon has no scent and a rather acrid flavour.
Farigoule The Provençal name for wild thyme.
Fécule de pommes de terre POTATO FLOUR, POTATO STARCH Used for thickening soups and sauces.
Fenouil FENNEL The dried stalks and branches of the common wild fennel are used in Provençal cookery for the famous grillade au fenouil (page 286) and for flavouring court-bouillons in which fish is to be cooked. The little feathery leaves, in their fresh state, can be chopped up to flavour sauces and salads for those who like the pronounced aniseed flavour. The bulbous leaf stem of the cultivated Florentine fennel is eaten raw, like celery, or sliced up, dressed with oil, lemon and salt to make an hors d’œuvre. It can also be cooked in much the same way as celery, partly boiled, cut in half and finished in butter with a sprinkling of cheese.
Fennel seeds, which taste very similar to caraway seeds, are used as a flavouring for sausages and stuffings in Italian cookery. The common fennel is very easy to cultivate in English gardens, although the Florentine variety (there is a drawing of it on page 129) rarely grows successfully in England.
Fines herbes Unless otherwise specified, this means a mixture of parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon, most commonly used for flavouring omelettes but also for grilled fish and chicken. At one time fines herbes meant mushrooms and shallots, but nowadays this mixture is called a duxelles.
Fournitures Salad greens and fresh herbs, which include sorrel, chervil, chives, cress, etc.
Frigolet Another Provençal name for wild thyme. Also a local liqueur.
Fromage CHEESE Swiss and French Gruyère and Emmenthal cheeses and imported Parmesan are the ones most frequently used in French cookery, although certain local dishes are naturally made with the particular cheese product of the region; there are, for example, several regional dishes in the Auvergne made from the excellent local Cantal or from Tomme de Cantal, which is a fresh unfermented cheese. Soft cream cheeses, of which there are scores of different varieties, are much used for sweet dishes.
Froment, Farine de Fine wheat flour. Also called faŕine de gruau.
Genièvre JUNIPER The dried berries (baies de genièvre) have a warm, pungent flavour and an aromatic scent, and are used in the mountainous districts of central and eastern France, in Provence and in Corsica, for flavouring the stuffings or sauces for small game birds and for pâtés; an excellent flavouring also for pork and venison. The appearance of juniper berries in a list of ingredients often puzzles English people, which is odd considering that they constitute one of the main flavouring