Curiosity overcame prudence. We did indeed try their dodine de canard, which was not the daube of duck in red wine usually associated with this name, but a very rich cold duck galantine, which would have been delicious as an hors-d’œuvre, but after all that pork … Cravenly, we ordered coffee. No salad? No cheese? No dessert?
As we paid our bill, expressed our thanks, and left with the best grace we could muster, I was miserably aware that we had failed these kindly and hospitable people and left them with the feeling that we did not appreciate their food.
It was a long time before I had the courage to set to work on that recipe. When I did, and saw once more the row of little pork noisettes, the bronze and copper lights of the shining sauce, the orderly row of black, rich, wine-soaked prunes on the long white dish, I thought that indeed it had been worth the journey to learn how to make something as beautiful as that. One day, with a better appetite and more stamina, I will go back to that restaurant in Tours and make amends for the evening when justice to their cookery was not done.
Vogue, November 1958
This is one of the pieces omitted from French Provincial Cooking because my publishers thought the book was too long, I’m sure they were right. Later the piece appeared in Cyril Ray’s Compleat Imbiber No. 5 under the title The Day that Justice Wasn’t Done. The recipes which accompanied the original Vogue article were for noisettes de porc aux pruneaux, followed by a real collector’s dish, sauce au vin du Médoc. Both were published in French Provincial Cooking. The pork and prune recipe has been one of the most used and most heavily adapted in the whole book. I don’t remember hearing much more of the other one, which was passed on to me by Miss Patricia Green via Madame Bernard, wife of a Médoc wine grower. The dish is essentially a peasant one, and consists of a mixture of meats and furred game: rabbit, hare, stewing beef, pork, or any combination of them, with shallots, a bottle of red wine, carrots, aromatics, the sauce thickened and darkened by the addition of a small amount of plain chocolate. This last ingredient dates the dish back as far as the first half of the eighteenth century or even earlier. It may well have originated in the days when Spanish chocolate makers settled in Bayonne, not after all so far away from the Bordelais.
Eating out in Provincial France 1965–1977
How is it that French restaurant cooking has so notably, so sadly, deteriorated during the past two or three decades? I think there are several reasons. Among them I would say the main one has a good deal to do with the conservatism of the French themselves in matters of eating. In the vast majority of French restaurants, at no matter what level, the order of the menu has remained unchanged for fifty years. The number of courses and the copiousness of the helpings remain undiminished. What has suffered from shrinkage is the quality of the raw materials, of the cooking skills and also, I would say, the critical faculties of the customers.
Lest it be thought that I am basing my observations on two or three isolated experiences, or on a restricted category of restaurant, or on the restaurants of one region only, I must make it clear that between 1965 and 1972 I made yearly and often twice-yearly trips to France on business, spending an average of two to three weeks at a time travelling all over the country, staying in different hotels night after night, eating in every type of restaurant from village inns to the occasional two-star or even three-star establishment. On the whole our journeys did not take us to tourist haunts, and certainly never in the tourist season. We kept away from motorways and motels, staying often in the hotels patronized by commercial travellers. During the subsequent three years my visits to France were less frequent and less extended, and being no longer concerned in any business venture I was free to pick and choose hotels and restaurants, and to stay in one place for several days if I felt so inclined. So it is with some experience that I record the melancholy fact that during those fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals in France, and more expensively – a bad meal is always expensive – than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.
What has dismayed me as much as anything else has been the complacent attitude of customers and restaurateurs alike. Time and time again we watched the commercial travellers, those commis voyageurs of France who are supposed to be so knowledgeable and so critical when it comes to food, swallowing the indifferent stuff put before them without any apparent thought of complaint, criticism or protest. It was we, the traditionally undiscriminating English, who complained when a dish with an honourable regional name turned out to be a disgraceful travesty, when a sauce was indisputably prefabricated, when good fish was wrecked by overcooking – on one notable occasion the beautiful and exceedingly expensive little scallops we had been shown in their natural state were eventually brought to our table fried to cinders, on another some fresh chanterelles were massacred by the same clumsy treatment. Once even a basic œuf sur le plat was so badly cooked that it was stuck fast to the dish. (This in a restaurant boasting a Michelin star.) As for the managements of establishments where such things happen, they do not take kindly to criticism. With a shrug indicating that hard-to-please customers are not welcome they return to their television sets. Indeed, the television is another factor which has played its part in the downfall of French restaurant cooking. Come seven o’clock in the evening, the entire staff of many country hotels is to be found clustered round the box. Arriving travellers are a disturbance and if you have not finished your dinner by nine thirty you are a nuisance. In this same context, how is it, I wonder, that English journalists so often give extravagant praise to the relais routiers when, nine times out of ten, not only is the food squalid and the wine lethal, but the television blares so loudly and so incessantly that even were Escoffier himself in the kitchen, it would today be impossible to enjoy a meal in a lorry drivers’ restaurant unless you were very deaf indeed?
On a less pessimistic note, agreeable surprises do sometimes happen. Last year, returning north via the Bordeaux main road, and still depressed by the recollection of an atrocious midday meal, we stopped for a glass of wine in an auberge scarcely a metre off the road. The proprietor was agreeable. His wine was good. There seemed to be evidence of care and conscientious innkeeping. We were so tired and so discouraged after the disgusting lunch that we decided to stay the night. We had rooms at the back, away from the roar of the traffic. Not that they would have earned a quiet sign in the Michelin guide – in my experience a number of hotels which do have such a sign shouldn’t – but the beds were comfortable, the water was hot, the proprietor and his young wife were making a great effort to compensate with welcoming service and decent cooking for the unfortunate situation of their auberge. This is not one of those humble-little-auberge-with-an-unrecognized-genius-in-the-kitchen stories. We didn’t eat anything extraordinary, although I remember excellent local sausages cooked by the patron over an open wood fire, making the whole place smell good. There was even – a great rarity nowadays in France – olive oil for the salad. Although the bill was not exactly small, it was fair. We left at daylight feeling, as travellers should, that we had been welcomed, comforted and cheered on our way. It was a good lesson in how the best hospitality is often to be found in the most unlikely of places, and more unlikely than an inn slap on the Bordeaux-Paris auto-route you could hardly find.
I cannot help wondering how much guide books are to blame for both deteriorating standards of cooking and for arousing exaggerated expectations in the minds of tourists. If the French themselves don’t complain is it because they don’t expect very much and are therefore not disillusioned? It is not, heaven forbid, that one expects a Gastronomic Experience at every meal – although guide books do rather tend to overdo the promises – but simply that one hopes for honest raw materials, honestly cooked at honest prices. That, of course, is asking a great deal. The Michelin guide seems to think it is supplying the answer with those establishments it lists with a red R, indicating that you may expect a copious five-course meal at a fixed fair price. These are the restaurants I avoid. In my exp
erience their cooking is mediocre and their menus are imitations of the overpowering bourgeois family meals of several generations ago. To be sure, such meals still survive in France. I remember one at a pension de famille in a village in the Vosges about 1968 or 1969. With my partner I was on a buying trip. We were making, rather unusually, a Saturday morning visit to a factory, a frying pan factory as it happened. We were invited to lunch in the village by the two brothers who ran the factory. Rather reluctantly we abandoned our plan to escape into the delicious countryside – it was early spring, the hedgerows were white with hawthorn blossom – and have a picnic lunch. We were introduced to the three ladies who ran the pension. Two were thin and spinsterish, like post office ladies, the third, a niece, was young and graceful. All were quiet and dignified. First, inevitably in the district, came a quiche lorraine. It was about fifteen inches across, served on a handsome, flat earthenware platter, the filling risen like a soufflé, supported only by the thinnest layer of pastry. (Note, by the way, that there was not, and in Lorraine there never is, cheese in the filling; it consists simply and solely of bacon, eggs and cream, and it is always baked in a tart tin, never in one of those hideous crinkly-rimmed china dishes which for reasons unclear to me have become fashionable in England as ‘quiche dishes’.) With the quiche came a salad of crisp little green leaves. These I have never exactly identified, but in the native habitat of the quiche they are its almost obligatory accompaniment, although in classy restaurants this very appropriate and welcome salad is seldom offered. After the quiche came a mighty platter of hot coarse country sausage, poached with vegetables. So far, so good, and it was good. Well fed, we sat back, expecting fruit and coffee. Vain expectation. One of the quiet thin ladies came in apologizing because the river trout she had planned to give us next had not after all been forthcoming. So, les messieurs et dames would excuse her if we went straight on to the roast. This turned out to be pigeons, in fact braised rather than roasted, served on another of those spectacular large dishes and surrounded by whole apples, cooked in their skins and by some trick which I have never yet mastered, still rosy red. They were entirely delicious. The pigeons were less interesting. They were followed, with scarcely a pause, by the cheese of the country, a creamy géromé – a milder relation of Münster – flavoured with caraway seeds. Then came another cartwheel of pastry, this time filled with cherries, and served on the huge quiche platter. The brothers now proceeded to drink whisky as a liqueur, while we gratefully enjoyed our coffee (one of our hosts remarking that it was bad for the liver …) and a much-needed digestif of the local kirsch.
Such, not forgetting the missing fish course, was the composition of a real country lunch as taken for granted by the ladies who ran that pension de famille in the 1960s. It was not, I think, anything out of the ordinary in the region. It was the normal meal expected by the factory owners when they invited guests to eat with them. The food was good honest food, honestly cooked. There was no pretension and not the least ostentation about it. All the same, what a misguided meal. The quiche and the salad, both of them delicious and combining perfectly, would alone have been enough. The dishes which followed would have made two more meals.
Reflecting on that extraordinary village lunch, I do wonder – not for the first time – whether rather too much is said and written in praise of the delights of bourgeois French family food and its restaurant equivalent. With what joy and gratitude I remember, in contrast, meals in a pretty and elegant country restaurant which represented – alas that it must be written in the past tense – a very different way of French eating, although one owing just as much to tradition as the bucolic feast in the Vosges. La Mère Brazier’s restaurant in Lyon has been famous for decades – I wrote about it in French Provincial Cooking – and for many years the same lady had also a lunchtime establishment at the Col de la Luère, a few miles out of the city and high above its notorious fogs and damp. Airy and cool, surrounded by a large garden and much greenery, this was for a time my favourite restaurant in all France. The menu scarcely changed from year to year. With the exception of one dish of fish quenelles with a rather rich sauce, the food was all comparatively plain. There was no showing off, no fireworks. The calm confidence, the certitude that all here would be as it should which one felt upon entering the establishment was somehow communicated to her customers by Madame Brazier herself, invisible though she was in the kitchen, and by her front-of-the-house staff. Her maître d’hôtel was a charming young woman – her daughter-in-law I believe – whose reassuring welcome to two English travellers arriving on a scorching summer day, hot, flustered, extremely late and despairing of lunch after a prolonged tangle with the Lyon motorway, was beautiful to hear. ‘But sit down. You have plenty of time. Relax. Shall I bring you some cool white wine? When you are a little rested you can order.’
Seasoned travellers in France will appreciate the rarity of our welcome. In nine hundred and ninety-nine restaurants out of a thousand in the French provinces it is useless to arrive for lunch after 1.30. Even less would one expect to find all the dishes on the menu still available and in prime condition. At the Mère Brazier’s the great speciality was her famous poularde de Bresse, chicken poached in broth with carrots and leeks – a refined version if you like of the poule au pot, the poule in the pot being an elderly hen, while the Brazier poularde is a young but fully grown chicken, plump and so tender that when she carved it for us, the maître d’hôtel used nothing but an ordinary and rather blunt-looking table knife. This modest little display of showmanship was the sole manifestation of its kind to be seen in this extraordinary restaurant, where everything, the food, the wine, the service, could best be described as of a sumptuous simplicity, but lighthearted and somehow all of a piece. There was a salad, I remember, of artichoke hearts and walnuts, delicate and refreshing. Desserts changed no more than the main dishes. They consisted of fromage frais à la crème, an apple tart with pastry as thin as a plate, and the vanilla-flavoured ice cream of the house. I tried this once. It was a beauty. But the soft snowy fromage frais with fresh cream poured over it was even better. Whichever sweet one chose, with it there was always offered – and seldom refused – a slice of brioche-like confection, very light and spongey. The Mère Brazier’s wines were the young Chiroubles and Brouillys of the Beaujolais region, and their white equivalents from Mâcon and Pouilly Fuissé. To my mind nothing could be more felicitous, in combination with the food and the surroundings and the general mood of the place, than those fresh, youthful, grapey wines. There was a gaiety and grace about lunches at the Col de la Luère which seemed to me to be most essentially French. The restaurant could have been in no country but France, the cooking practised by Madame Brazier and her brigade was the cooking of the French provinces at its best and also its most traditional. While there was no concession to passing fad or fashion, there was also a singular lack of pomp, not a hint of the chill solemnity sometimes to be encountered in places where the cooking has a great reputation. Every dish was offered, it is true, with proper ceremony, and a meal was a serious affair, but in a totally unselfconscious way, and with a quite ungrasping attitude.
At the end of our lunch on that particular day (there was a sizeable party of Lyonnais business men treating themselves to a great deal of wine and cognac and to them perhaps we owed the late hour to which the kitchen remained open) Madame Brazier herself, in immaculate whites from head to foot, came into the dining room and sat down with a customer. She wasn’t doing the usual front-of-the-house round, asking for compliments, but as she passed our table I ventured to thank her for the hospitable welcome we had received and for her beautiful food. With a modest smile she said that en effet today it had been pas mauvais. Her comment reminded me of the anecdote recounted by Henry James concerning the boiled eggs, the bread and the butter he was served for a midday meal at an inn in Bourg-en-Bresse. ‘The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed, and as for the butter nous sommes en Bresse et le beurre n’est pas mauv
ais, the landlady said as she placed the article before me. It was the poetry of butter and I ate a pound or two of it.’ (A Little Tour of France, 1900.) There was, it seems to me, a closer affinity than might be thought between Henry James’s boiled eggs and poetry of butter and Madame Brazier’s calm, elegant and seemingly effortless cooking. Poetry was surely the apt word for all the food we had eaten that day at the Col de 1a Luère.
Experiences of such quality are rare anywhere. In France these days they are more likely to be connected with a picnic than with a meal in a restaurant. Picnics in France combine so many joys. First, the buying, to be done as often as possible in a market rather than in shops. At the stalls there is more choice, the produce is fresher and cheaper, buying is quicker, there is the chance of talking to the local people, of finding the country women who have brought in a basket of fresh cheeses, unsalted farm butter, perhaps a few bunches of sorrel, some garden radishes. There is the stimulus of seeing the abundance of produce and its magnificent quality. There is also, unless you are staying in the country on a self-catering basis, the frustration of not being able to take armfuls of it home to cook for yourself. And yet again it must be asked why do the restaurants nowadays so seldom offer a dish of fresh vegetables on their menus? What has become of the homely vegetable soup which used to appear nightly on all country restaurant and hotel menus?
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 8
