French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [89]
Madame Seignobos, who wrote these words some fifty years ago in a book called Comment on Forme une Cuisinière, was probably referring to trained cooks, and does not mention those other happy-go-lucky ones who tell you, not without pride, ‘of course I never follow a recipe, I just improvise as I go along. A little bit of this, a spoonful of that . . . it’s much more fun really.’ Well, it may be more fun for the cook, but is seldom so diverting for the people who have to eat his products, because those people who have a sure enough touch to invent successfully in the kitchen without years of experience behind them are very rare indeed. The fortunate ones gifted with that touch are those who will also probably have the restraint to leave well alone when they have hit on something good; the ones who can’t resist a different little piece of embroidery every time they cook a dish will end by inducing a mood of gloomy apprehension in their families and guests. The domain of soup-making is one which comes in for more than its fair share of attention from the ‘creative’ cook, a saucepan of innocent-looking soup being a natural magnet to the inventive, and to those who pride themselves on their gifts for inspired improvisation.
I remember when I was very young being advised by the gastronomic authority among my contemporaries to take pretty well everything in the larder, including the remains of the salad (if I remember rightly some left-over soused herring was also included), tip it into a pan, add some water, and in due course, he said, some soup would emerge. I very soon learnt, from the results obtained by this method, that the soup-pot cannot be treated as though it were a dustbin. That lesson was elementary enough. The ones that are harder to assimilate are, first, in regard to the wisdom or otherwise of mixing too many ingredients, however good, to make one soup; the likelihood is that they will cancel each other out, so that although your soup may be a concentrated essence of good and nourishing ingredients it will not taste of anything in particular. Secondly, one has to learn in the end that the creative urge in the matter of embellishments is best kept under control. If your soup is already very good of its kind, possessed of its own true taste, will it not perhaps be spoilt by the addition of a few chopped olives, of a little piece of diced sausage, of a spoonful of paprika pepper? These are matters which everyone must decide for himself.
I know that many people think that their guests will find a simple vegetable soup dull, and so attempt to dress it up in some ‘original’ way. I don’t think myself that a well-made vegetable soup, tasting fresh and buttery, and properly seasoned, is ever dull (I am talking about home-made soups).
In her beautiful book about Mexico The Sudden View,13 Sybille Bedford mentions ‘a cream of vegetable soup which would have done honour to a household in the French Provinces before the war of 1870.’ The phrase reminded me of the lovely soups made by Léontine, the cook of whose food I have already written in the pages about Paris household cookery in the introductory chapters to this book. These soups were anything but dull. They certainly were not complicated or expensive either: they belonged neither to haute cuisine nor to robust peasant cooking. They were, as befitted the household of a middle-class Norman family, in the direct line of French bourgeois and provincial cookery. Of course I did not know this at the time and did not think about it, I just enjoyed Léontine’s delicious vegetable purées without the faintest idea why they were so good, but looking back now I remember how delicate and fresh they were, and I think they must have been the kind of soups Sybille Bedford had in mind when she wrote those lines.
Again, I remember the ordinary everyday soup of