An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  La Mère Brazier, from a photograph in the author’s possession

  Now, for the pleasure of buying bread. I look, usually, for a bakery selling the big round loaves called miches or boules or just pains de campagne. Those have more character, a more interesting flavour and stay fresher much longer than baguettes and ficelles and all the rest of the tribe of long loaves. Enticing though these look and smell as they come out of the oven, I find them lacking in savour, although they certainly still compare pretty well with the factory bread which is our own national shame.

  When lunchtime approaches, the question is are we near a river or lake? If so, shall we be able to reach its banks? For the ideal picnic there has to be water, and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, that it is rare not to be able to find some delicious spot where you can sit by the water, watch dragonflies and listen to the birds or to the beguiling sound of a fast-flowing stream. As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt, and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant. During one golden September in the valleys of the Corrèze, the Dordogne and the Lot, I enjoyed just such picnics, day after blazing day. The tomatoes that year and in that region were so rich and ripe and fragrant that I shall forever remember their savour. Then, one day in a pastry shop in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, we bought a tarte aux mirabelles made with yeast pastry. Those little round golden plums of early autumn on their light brioche-like base made an unexpected and memorable end to our outdoor feast. Another year it was Normandy, early autumn again, and daily picnics in the magnificent forests of Mortagne, Brotonne and Bellême, in clearings where foxgloves grew high amid the bracken, and water was always within sight. Once or twice we sat by the banks of the Seine, looking at landscapes and riverscapes which Corot had surely painted.

  Petits Propos Culinaires 4, 1980

  Confort anglais, French fare

  This is a 1984 postscript to my 1977 Eating out in Provincial France, and is more about eating in than eating out. How gloriously different a matter is French food when you can buy and cook it yourself from that offered at the restaurant meals imposed when you stay in hotels, was brought home to me most forcibly in the early months of 1984. With a friend I was lent, by another and mutual friend, a charming town house in the little south western city of Uzès. With high ceilings, tall windows, comfortable bedrooms, a bathroom for each, blessedly hot water, central heating, simple and appropriate furniture, good lighting, a large kitchen, electric kettles wherever needed, shelves filled with weeks and weeks of reading, plus all the necessary maps and guide books, the whole place was the most engaging possible blend of traditional French building with unaggressive modern English comforts.

  Two minutes walk from the house was one of those small town casinos, emporiums of modest size and indeed modest content, but efficiently run, open long hours of every day and providing many of the necessities of life, from butter to electric light bulbs, mineral water to toilet paper, a selection of wines, spirits and liqueurs, adequate cheeses, vegetables, fruit and salad stuffs. Next door to this general shop was a Prisunic, another small fairyland offering everything from drinking glasses and crockery to gaudy scarves, cheap envelopes and childrens’ exercise books. Across the road were the food shops, a butcher, a charcuterie, a greengrocery, the market place, the Crédit Lyonnais. Three doors down from the house a fine small bakery provided fresh bread six days a week. As well as everyday baguettes and other white loaves, we had a choice of four or five different varieties of brown bread, including rye and pain biologique, France’s version of the loaf made from organically grown whole wheat, in this case a very great improvement on the equivalent product of the English health food shop. As well as good bread the little bakery offered takeaway temptations such as flaky pastry turnovers filled with brandade de morue, the creamed salt cod of the region, and an old-fashioned provençal pissaladière baked in rectangular iron trays and sold by the slice. They call it pizza now. People have forgotten the old name, and will tell you it comes from Italy. I can tell them it comes from no nearer Italy than Marseille where I used to buy it when I lived on a boat tied up in the Vieux Port. That was 1939, before the war started. I used to go ashore every morning and walk up a narrow street to a bakery to buy my pissaladière fresh out of the oven. It was a treat to find my anchovy-and-tomato-spread pissaladière once again in Uzès, and even handier to the house than the Marseille bakery had been to my boat.

  Market day at Uzès is Saturday morning. It was February when I was there, not the most propitious time of year for fresh produce, and on the first Saturday of my stay the mistral was blowing so ferociously that it was difficult to stand up. Even the hardy stall-holders were shivering and anxious to pack up and climb into the shelter of their vans. Nevertheless, even on a day like that we could buy quite a good variety of vegetables and salads. Among the greatest pleasures, as always in France, were the good creamy-fleshed firm potatoes. For the thousandth time, why, why, why, I ask, do we, the English, the pioneers of European potato cultivation, now grow such uninteresting potatoes, while the French, who refused to touch them until the Revolution and Parmentier forced them into a reconsideration of the ill-used tuber, and quickly making up for that lost time, took to growing delicate, waxy yellow potatoes, and to making them into wonderful dishes like pommes Anna and gratin dauphinois, not to mention quite everyday potato salads, no easy matter to achieve with our own all-purpose collapsible English spuds. Then, even in February, there were little round, crisp, bronze-flecked, frilly lettuces, baskets of mesclun or mixed salad greens, great floppy bunches of chard, leaf artichokes, trombone-shaped pumpkins which make admirable soup, fat fleshy red peppers, new laid eggs, eight or nine varieties of olives in basins and barrels, thick honey and clear honey, in a variety of colours, in jars and in the comb, and honey soap in golden chunks, bouquets of mixed fresh flowers, tulips, dark purple anemones, marigolds. And then cheeses, cheeses. There are the locally made goats’ milk cheeses called pélardons, small round and flattish and to be bought in various stages of maturity. Is it for immediate consumption, do you wish to keep it a few days, is it for toasting, roasting, grilling? Try the magnane à la sarriette, another goat cheese, strewn with the savory leaves they call poivre d’âne across the Rhône in Provence. Or how about the St Marcellin? Or the fresh ewes’ milk cheeses? ‘They are my own’ says the lady on the stall. We buy two. They are delicious, but they are horribly expensive, as anyone who has a taste for roquefort well knows. Given the very small yield of milk, about ½ litre per milking, all ewes’ milk cheese is a luxury. Here we are not all that far from the place where that great and glorious roquefort is produced and matured, and in Uzès market, from another cheese stall, we have our pick of three or four grades. Within two or three minutes we have spent £7.00 and have not yet bought our parmesan or gruyère for grating on to the delicate little ravioles we have bought from the goat cheese lady. They are tiny, these ravioles, filled with a mixture of parsley and comté, the gruyère-like cheese of Franche Comté. They take one minute to cook, warns the lady. She imports them from the other side of the Rhône, from Royans near Romans in the Drôme where ravioles have long been a local speciality.

  By now we have nearly finished our shopping. We have bought as much as we can carry. But we spend another pound’s worth of francs on one of the goat cheese lady’s specialities, one of her own. It is something she calls a tourte à la crème, or tourteau. It is a light, puffy, yeast-leavened tourte, round, like an outsize bun, with a layer of subtly flavoured sweet, creamy cream cheese in the centre, and with a characteristically blackened top. It is deliberate, this charred top, and traditional, says the lady. (She turns out to be Finnish, this lady, her husband is Belgian, and everything she sells is of very high quality.)

  Lunch is going to be a feast. Our red peppers are to be impaled on the electric spit and roasted until
their skins are charred as black as the top of the tourteau. Then we shall peel them, cut them in strips, dress them with the good olive oil we have bought direct from the little oil mill at Bédarrides on the Tarascon road out of Fontvieille. Over them we strew chopped parsley and garlic and leave them to mature in their dressing. We shall eat them after we have had our bowls of hot ravioles, cooked one minute, according to instructions, in a good chicken broth made from the carcase of a spit-roasted, maize-fed chicken we had a couple of days ago. With fresh brown bread – it always has a good crackly crust – our sarriette-strewn magnane and a nice creamy little St Marcellin, plus a hunk of that excellent tourteau with our coffee, we marvel for the twentieth time in a week that we have such a remarkable choice of provisions here. Pâtés and terrines, large jars of freshly made fish stock, saddle of rabbit rolled and stuffed, ready for roasting or baking, good sausages and cayettes, green with the chard so much loved in Rhône Valley cooking, skilfully cut and enticingly trimmed lamb and beef, all the good things from the bakery, the fresh eggs which really are fresh (one stallholder was apologetic because his were three days old), all play their part in making every meal a treat as well as extraordinarily simple to prepare. And in how many towns of no more than 7,500 inhabitants can one choose, on market day, from about seventy different kinds of cheese, at least sixty-five of them French, the rest Italian, Swiss and Dutch?

  I must add that Lawrence Durrell, who lives not far away, and who I hadn’t seen for a long while, reminded me that many years ago, about 1950, he and I happened to meet in Nîmes and that I complained angrily about the local food, swearing that I would never go back to the region. The area was indeed then very poor. Now the tourists, foreign residents, enterprising wine-growers, motorways, have made it prosperous. Well, there are worse things than words to eat.

  Not surprisingly, with all the good food so easily to hand, we were reluctant to go to restaurants. In three weeks we went to only two. One was the delectable Hièly’s in Avignon, a place I had not had the chance of eating at in over twelve years, and which I found, happily, was still offering fine, honest, generous cooking, lovely house wine (a Châteauneuf du Pape de l’année from a domaine of very high reputation), basketsful of local goats’ milk cheeses and more basketsful of cows’ milk cheeses, sumptuous ices, perfect coffee (at £1.00 a tiny cup so it should be but it doesn’t necessarily follow) and impeccable service. One of the luxury dishes, by the way, costing a supplément of 12.00 francs on top of the 180 franc menu, was a saddle of rabbit with morilles in the sauce. In Provence it is quite normal for rabbit to cost more than, say, chicken, and in this case it was without question worth the money. At about £50 for the two of us, with ample wine, our lunch at Hièly’s was hardly extortionate. Where in London at that price could you get a comparable meal in a comparably elegant and professional restaurant?

  The second restaurant we visited was out in the country, not far from St André-d’Olérargues. We had been shopping in the Thursday morning market at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon – we wanted more of those little ravioles and had discovered that the lady selling them would be there – and were prevented from crossing the Rhône into Avignon by the lorry drivers blockade which was disrupting traffic that week. Instead we drove to a place with one Michelin star which sounded and indeed had looked promising when we had passed it a few days previously. Settled at our table we discovered that the restaurant was run mainly by the chef’s wife, assisted by another lady who was perhaps her sister, or some other close relative who was for some reason tied to the place in a subservient capacity. The prix fixe menu seemed to offer decent old-fashioned country cooking. So in a way it did, with a respectable terrine of chicken livers followed by oxtail braised with mushrooms, carrots and onions, a plate of gratiné potatoes and leeks on the side. The oxtail had been substituted for some other dish which was finished. When I had started to explain to Madame that we didn’t want the alternative côte de bœuf either with or without a supplementary price the lady interrupted me. ‘You surely don’t imagine I can afford to give you côte de bœuf on the fourteen franc menu’ she snapped. It wasn’t a propitious beginning, but the oxtail was well cooked and so were the vegetables. No complaints. But then we were offered a choice of three fourth-rate commercial cheeses or a dessert of œufs à la neige smothered in caramel – a recent development, that tacky caramel, I believe, and one which quite wrecks the innocence of a dish which should be frail and pale as a narcissus, just white meringue and creamy yellow crème anglaise. Alternatives were a bought-in gâteau and a tatty-looking apple tart. Turning her back to our table Madame stood over the trolley carefully measuring out the portions of whatever it was we had chosen. Coffee was mediocre. The two women, unprepossessing in their worn tweed skirts and draggy woolies, were anxious to clear away. The chef, who had spent most of the lunch hour sitting at a table reading the paper and smoking, now disappeared, making no attempt to ask the customers if all had been well. Our bill, with a bottle of undistinguished Gigondas, was just half what we had paid at Hièly. Had we enjoyed our lunch half as much as the one at Hièly we should still have had no-cause for complaint. Alas, we had not enjoyed it at all. The grasping attitude, the general shabbiness, the brainless parsimony displayed by Madame, the dispirited and dispiriting service, the dreary bread, the absence of a house wine – always a bad sign in a starred restaurant – all added up to yet another of those dozens of unsolved Michelin mysteries of my past travels in France. There was something about the people and the place and the ambiance which took me back to the London of 1963, the Profumo summer, the couple and the restaurant I described in the article called Secrets in the present volume. Any restaurant which reminded me so strikingly of that one certainly has no business whatever having a Michelin star. We were lucky that we could shrug off the dispiriting experience, climb back into the car, remember that in the back of it we had a lot of good things bought at Villeneueve that morning, that we had a kitchen to cook and eat them in, that we needn’t ever go to another restaurant again for the rest of our stay unless we chose to do so. But I still wonder what the Michelin organisation thinks it is doing. Hièly in Avignon very properly has, and for many years has had, two stars. One star is gravely and grossly overdoing it for a great many of the establishments to which Michelin awards them, and of all the faults which turn me off a restaurant – surely I cannot be alone in this – meanness is just about the most unacceptable. If the Michelin inspectors didn’t notice that defect, not to mention others, in the restaurant in question I don’t think they can have visited it for a very long time.

  The above was written in the early summer of 1984, while this collection of articles was in preparation. In 1985 I again spent several weeks at Uzès, staying in the same welcoming house, again feasting on the beautiful cheeses and fresh produce to be bought on market days, once more enjoying a fine meal at Hièly, but not this time venturing into any local country restaurant. The Michelin Guide however had obviously revisited the establishment near St André-d’Olérargues, and, not before time, had withdrawn its star.

  February 1986

  Roustidou

  With the exception of ordinary cafés and the relais routiers, where you get ordinaries by the litre, few restaurants or hotels in Provence now offer much alternative to fancy-bottled Provençal wines at prices comparing unfavourably with what one would pay for much more classy Alsace, Loire or Beaujolais wines if one were travelling in these districts. One can’t have everything, and for me Provence has more than most other provinces of France, so one doesn’t complain, and what the local wines may lack in distinction is partly made up for, at least in retrospect, by the evocativeness of their names and the coaxing messages which some of the proprietors send out with – not in – their bottles. In my notebooks of recent Provençal journeys I find Chante-Gorge, Rocmaure, Domaine de l’Aumérade, Castel Roubine, Domaine de Lacroix, Tavel Réserve de St-Estello (‘Pour épousailles et fiançailles, Rien qui ne vaille Ce bon vin vieux, Béni de Dieu’
), Bouquet de Provence, Blanc Coquillages, Château de Fontcreuse, Clos Mireille, Petit Duc, Prince d’Orange, Côtes du Ventoux 1956 (‘Au Pied du Mt Ventoux Je suis né et j’ai vieilli pour vous’), Clos de les Dames de Baux, Roustidou (now there’s a good name for a carafe wine; it tasted uncommonly like Algerian, and made a splendid picnic drink), Château de Beaulieu, Château Rayas, Château Roubaud (a trusty friend, that one), Côtes de Provence BIG, Gigondas Pierre Amadieu (the one I go for when it’s on the list), Chante-Perdrix Cornas 1955, red, ravishing with a grilled chicken at the restaurant David (no relation) at Roussillon in the Vaucluse. Cornas is on the west bank of the Rhône near St-Péray and opposite Valence, so it is still a long way north of Provence, but it is round about here, at least if one drives down N8 instead of the terrifying N7, that one begins to sense the Midi; and like the Hermitage from Tain on the other bank, the wines of Cornas and the Côte Rôtie are always associated in my mind with Provence and on my table, when I can get them, with Provençal food.

  The Spectator, 13 July 1962

  Golden Delicious

  As Sunday lunches go in the village hotels of the Vaucluse department of Provence, the meal we had in the Hostellerie du Château at Beaumes de Venise was far from a bad one. Memorable it was not, except for two points neither of them relevant to the cooking and one of which has only now, seven years later, become manifest.