French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [75]
SAUCE RAIFORT À LA CRÈME
HORSERADISH AND CREAM SAUCE
This is the delicious, mild, creamy horseradish sauce which one finds in Alsace, served with a plain poached sausage. The recipe is on page 228.
MARINADE POUR LES GIBIERS
A MARINADE FOR GAME
A coffee-cup, after-dinner size, of olive oil (to provide lubrication for the dry meat), of a bottle of red wine, a sliced onion, 2 teaspoons of crushed coriander seeds for venison, or 1 of juniper berries for hare, a crushed clove of garlic, a sprig of thyme or marjoram, a little ground black pepper. Pour over the venison or hare in a deep china bowl and cover. Leave for 12 hours for a hare, 24 to 36 hours for a 3 lb. piece of venison. Inexpensive port can be used instead of red wine, in which case add a tablespoon of wine or cider vinegar. Dry the meat well before starting to cook it and if it is to stew in its marinade, strain off the herbs, vegetables and spices and add fresh ones.
This is a marinade which is particularly useful for venison or for an old hare, but there are many alternative mixtures. See, for example, the recipes for pork to taste like wild boar on page 364, for the civet de lièvre on page 424 and the stewed venison on page 429.
Les Hors-d’œuvre et les Salades
Hors-d’œuvre and salads
FROM the luxurious pâté of truffled goose or duck liver of Alsace to the homely household terrine de campagne, from the assiette de fruits de mer of the expensive sea-food restaurant to the simple little selection of olives, radishes, butter, sliced sausage and egg mayonnaise of the café routier, an hors-d’œuvre is the almost invariable start to the French midday meal. The English visitor to France cannot fail to observe that the artistry with which the French present their food is nowhere more apparent than in the service of the hors-d’œuvre. So far from appearing contrived, or zealously worked on, each dish looks as if it had been freshly imagined, prepared for the first time, especially for you.
Now, since the main object of an hors-d’œuvre is to provide something beautifully fresh-looking which will at the same time arouse your appetite and put you in good spirits, this point is very important and nothing could be less calculated to have the right effect than the appearance of the little bits of straggling greenery, blobs of mayonnaise and wrinkled radishes which show all too clearly that the food has been over-handled and that it has been standing about for some hours before it was time to serve it. And the place for wilted lettuce leaves is the dustbin, not the hors-d’œuvre dish. What is the matter with a plain, straightforward half avocado pear, a mound of freshly boiled prawns, a few slices of good fresh salame, that they must be arranged on top of these eternal lettuce leaves? I swear I am not exaggerating when I say that in London restaurants I have even had pâté de foie gras served on that weary prop lettuce leaf. . . .
Now here are one or two ideas from France which have struck me as being particularly attractive for the service of an hors-d’œuvre.
To start with the north, where the ingredients obtainable are not so very different from our own, I remember the big airy first floor dining-room of the Hôtel de la Poste at Duclair. At a table overlooking the Seine we sat with a bottle of Muscadet while waiting for luncheon. Presently a rugged earthenware terrine, worn with the patina of years, containing the typical duck pâté of the country, was put upon the table, and with it a mound of rillettes de porc; to be followed at a suitable interval with a number of little dishes containing plain boiled langoustines (we used to know them as Dublin Bay prawns before they turned into Venetian scampi), shrimps also freshly boiled with exactly the right amount of salt; winkles, a cork stuck with pins to extract them from their shells; sardines and anchovies both in their deep square tins to show that they were high-class brands. Then a variety of little salads each