An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  Of the mérou, called in English grouper, in Italy cernia and of which one hears so much from under-water fishermen (they too would perhaps find this book illuminating) Mr Davidson thinks highly, mentioning a sauce to serve with cold poached grouper steaks in which is incorporated some Bresse Bleu. Tantalising, that. Perhaps more details of this recipe will appear in the next edition, for which Mr Davidson is asking from his readers co-operation in the form of corrections, amplifications, authentic Mediterranean recipes.

  The Spectator, 26 April 1963

  Moorish Recipes

  Moorish Recipes, collected and compiled by John, fourth Marquis of Bute, K.T., Oliver & Boyd, 7s. 6d.

  A cookery book concerned more with the authenticity of the dishes than with what the English housewife may make of them is a rarity. Indeed this book was not originally intended for the public at all, and we are fortunate to get it. It is a collector’s find. The technicalities of kuskusu and of that remarkable papery Arab pastry are beautifully propounded. The use and composition of spices is explained; there are English and Arabic indexes.

  I can testify that a Moorish dish of pigeons stuffed with raisins, almonds, cinnamon and sugar and cooked in a quantity of olive oil does wonders with those intractable birds. The fine free style in which the recipes are written and set out is most pleasing, and how elegant are the Moorish cookery pots and serving dishes shown in the illustrations. Some illuminating facts emerge. A plate of honey containing a lump of butter, in which bread is dipped, may be placed upon the table, salt never; it is up to the cook to add salt according to the smell of the dish when it is half cooked. Only one of the fifty-nine recipes contains garlic. Ras el hanoot, literally meaning ‘head of the shop’, is a tantalizing compound of pepper, cinnamon, curry, bird’s tongue, saffron wood (I should like to know more of this) and two kinds of aubergine to be used chiefly in the cooking of game. Anyone who wants to taste locust bread, a delicacy available only when the locusts make their visitation every nine years, may start planning now, for they are due next year.

  The Sunday Times, 1955

  Fine Bouche

  Fine Bouche: A History of the Restaurant in France, by Pierre Andrieu (Cassell, 31s. 6d.).

  Until the second half of the eighteenth century there were no restaurants in France – only taverns, wine shops, cafés, dealers in cooked meat or poultry, pastries, pies and so on. The rules as to what each dealer might sell were clearly defined. Or so it was thought until one Boulanger, a dispenser of high-class restorative broths or restaurants, appeared upon the scene.

  He acquired quite a reputation for the pieds de mouton sauce blanche, with which he provided the customers along with the soups; so his rivals declared that he had no licence to sell cooked meats. An action was brought to restrain him. With resounding publicity the affair ended in victory for Boulanger, and the ancestor of the restaurant was born.

  Some twenty years later, Beauvilliers, ex-Royal cook, opened the Grande Taverne de Londres, and there established the attitude of the successful restaurateur as we know him today. From this point on it would have been of real interest to learn something of how a great restaurant works. But M. Andrieu gives us instead a bewildering chronicle of the vicissitudes of most of the famous restaurants and their owners, waggish tales of private rooms and princely wit.

  We must take M. Andrieu’s word for it that on these high altars of gastronomy the food was never less than superb, the wines perfection, the service faultless, the décor invariably the last word in luxury. But the more modest establishments, both of Paris and the provinces, come out of it more convincingly.

  There is some engaging information in the book, such as the true origin of Homard à l’Américaine, and the fact that Weber’s in the rue Royale made its name by serving Welsh Rabbit, cold roast beef, and marrow bones prepared with English mustard and served with chips.

  The Sunday Times, 4 November 1956

  How Bare is Your Cupboard?

  Pot-Luck Cookery; original cooking with what you have in hand, in the cupboard or refrigerator Beverly Pepper (Faber … Faber, 18s.).

  Pantry Shelf Fishbit: Turnip-Tomato Patty Casserole: Lentil Cheese Cassoulets: Ham-wiches: Fantastic Belgian Meat Balls: Veal-odds-and-ends-Casserole: Salem Fish’n Chutney Tarts: Festa Turkey-nut Logs: Mixed Beet Ring Mould: Gnocchi Semolina (pronounced Knee Oh’-Key): Chocolate Bread Custard: Curried Pea Spoon-fritters. These haunting names are chosen for their sheer vivid descriptiveness from a newly published book dealing with cookery ‘for a roomful of unexpected guests – or perhaps just that awkward moment when the larder seems completely bare’. But not completely bare, as it turns out. Because there is a whole thoughtful chapter telling you how to make out in what might seem to many of us even more awkward moments than having only the ingredients of Knee-Oh’Key to hand; those in fact when there is Nothing in the House but Processed Cheese or even, if you can imagine it, Nothing in the House but Cream-Style Corn, Cream-Style Corn, Nothing in the House but Cream-Style Corn.

  Now, I know as well as anybody that it’s hard work writing cookery books and very easy for others to mock. The author of this work has conscientiously, not to say with almost frenetic zeal, compiled a volume of recipes dealing with what he, or she, thinks you might have in the Cupboard or Refrigerator. No doubt the public at which it was originally directed does have fifteen 2 inch lengths of leftover broccoli or ‘at least’ 1½ cups leftover cooked kidneys, thinly sliced, in its Cupboard or Refrigerator, and it is not for me to quarrel with Mr or Miss Pepper about what should be done in such situations. He or she has done his or her, work with a view to his or her audience which lives, loves, and one must believe, eats, Veal-odds-and-ends-casserole on the other side of the Atlantic. My bone of contention is with her or his English publishers. They’ve got, frankly, a dashed nerve to try and foist this stuff on us without so much as the courtesy of acknowledging where and when it was originally published and with not the slightest apparent attempt to change a single word for the benefit of the English public. And if a reputable firm of publishers can confidently put out a book purporting to be one of technical instruction (which is, after all, what a cookery book is supposed to be) so totally unrelated to life as it is lived in these Islands that it might as well be written in Swahili, hideously produced into the bargain, and at the fancy price of eighteen shillings, then the publishing business can hardly be as pushed as it’s always making out.

  Myself, I’d prefer to spend my eighteen shillings on food. I wouldn’t care to face a roomful of hungry guests with nothing in the house but Pantry shelf fishbits. They might cut up rough. And I don’t know whether, in such an event, one would be entitled to send the bill for damages to the publishers.

  *

  This review was written for The Sunday Times sometime in the summer of 1957, but never published. Recently I unearthed a letter from Leonard Russell, the paper’s then Literary Editor, dated September 18th, 1957, explaining that during his absence on holiday the book in question was recommended, among a number on wine and food, to appear among ‘our gourmet advertisements’ in a special panel. Leonard said he didn’t know how this contretemps happened. ‘But it would have been too absurd to have recommended the book in one issue and to have had you exposing it utterly in the next.’

  Referring to the affair as ‘somebody’s misconceived enterprise’ Leonard said he had asked the Cashier to send me a cheque for seven guineas. Yes, well.

  Chez Gee-Gee

  The Gun Room, the Garrison, the Saddle Room, the Stable; a flavour of far off cantonments and safe frontier wars, a wistful feeling for the rude soldiery, fond memories of childhood loves for girl grooms and stable boys, a heady scent of manure mingled with salmon snatched straight from the tin in the harness room have come seeping these last few months through the restaurant and entertainment-after-dark columns of the weekly magazines.

  If the Minister of Transport1 has his way and succeeds in abolishing the few surviving horse-drawn commercial vehicles i
n the London area then one does not need to be a professional clairvoyant to predict that the disappearance of the last brewers’ drays and costers’ flower carts will intensify our nostalgia for the urban horse and all its manifestations; and that before long half of our Belgravia and Hampstead, South Kensington and Golders Green bistros now called Le Casserole d’Abondance, La Sole Vierge, Au fils de ma Grand-Mère, La Nappe Tachée and La Poubelle will change their names to La Bouche de mon Cheval, Au Sac d’Orge, Le Horse Sexy, The Well-Served Mare, The Bit between the Teeth, the Drench, the Hock’s on the Hoof.

  Tourists will stray into the Cavalry Club supposing it to be a French auberge recently acquired by Harvey’s of Bristol, the Chinese Lily Pond chain will cash in on the boom by translating the Fantang Crispy Noodles on their menus into Eight Precious Mares’ Nest No. 63; Paul Hamlyn alias Books for Pleasure will discover and publish only seventy five years out of date and for only four guineas a 4,000 page encyclopaedia entitled La Cuisine Chevalline illustrated with three hundred full colour reproductions of oil paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings. Three weeks later, broken down into a dozen paperbacks the book will be bought by eight million people. The entire conclave of Rump Rooms and Grill Pans will, as one, turn into Knacker Parlours.

  By then a new wave will be starting, derived from sources more purely domestic than those of the barracks and the nosebag. Mr E. S. Turner’s What the Butler Saw, a book revealing and entertaining in a way quite other than the implication of the title, and Anthony Powell’s wonderful recreation of a pre-1914 upper middle-class military family’s more eccentric and lugubrious servants in The Kindly Ones will surely engender fresh yearnings for a vanished below-stairs world of plain cooks, soldier servants, trays for the governess and the nursery, dressing gongs, and the scrape of Monkey Brand on stone sinks.

  In terms of eating-boutiques and clubs, this will mean establishments called The Scullery, The Flue, The Servants Hall, The Stewed Prune, the Suet Room, Chez Cronin, The Knife Box (a little more moisture in the cabbage would have won Mr Stalleybrass his third star, as one of our earnest eating guides will be writing by 1964), the Dripping Bowl (to do full justice to Mrs Bravo’s cooking you should start with the sophisticatedly served Spotted Dog; but what a pity in a place of this quality to find such a short tinned-soup list), The Batman (this restaurant is something of an enigma. You are served delectable Swiss cuisine in genuine English surroundings. The day I was there the litter bins were quite overflowing. But perhaps on days other than August Bank Holiday they may not be so bustling. Mr Lavender’s early training is revealed by the superb polish on his chocolate éclairs. The coffee is traditionally made with water and coffee but could have been a little drier. The home-made toast was included in the price of this soigné meal, four pounds ten for two.)

  *

  The above was published in the Spectator in December 1962. Some twelve months later Sam White, in his weekly Evening Standard report from Paris, remarked that at least four restaurants with names like The Stables or the Rubbish Bin or The Swill exist in Paris and ‘that it is now without any doubt the definitely established fashionable trend to eat as badly as possible, and as expensively as possible’.

  In London, 1963 saw the opening of restaurants with the selfconsciously down-beat names of La Gaffe and Grumbles, situated respectively in Hampstead and Pimlico. In the summer of 1964, the neighing of The Hungry Horse was heard right down the Fulham Road, and the creature hoofed it straight home into the very first issue of the Daily Telegraph’s colour supplement.

  *

  Carrots a la Kazbek

  It is a bit soon, even now, for the world of paw-paw cocktails, breakfasts on the verandah and Royals alighting on the tarmac to return to us through the names of airport motels and the menus of manor-house country clubs. But it will have its turn (what will the decorators make of the plumed hats?) and when it comes, students will find a great deal of unique material in Sir Harry Luke’s The Tenth Muse, first published in 1954 and now re-issued in a revised edition (Putnam, 25s.). During a lifetime spent – and uncommonly well-spent, one deduces from this book – in the Colonial Service, Sir Harry has collected recipes from British Residencies and Government Houses, from their châtelaines, their cooks – cooks Maltese and Cypriot, Hindu and Persian and Assyrian, cooks Goanese and Polynesian, cooks naval, military and consular, cooks in Union Clubs in South American capitals, cooks of French princes and Brazilian countesses, of Turkish Grand Viziers and Patriarchs of the Syrian Orthodox Church – and in setting down his recipes Sir Harry has acknowledged the source of each and every one; Government House, Springfield, St Kitts; Government House, Fiji; St Anton Palace, Malta; the Goanese cook at the Residency, Bahrein; Government House, Wellington, New Zealand; Count Haupt Pappenheim, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lloyd, the butler at Kent House, Port of Spain.

  Sir Harry must be a gratifying guest. Everything interests him. The wife of the British Resident in Brunei prefers to mix her own curry powders, so off he goes with her to market, noting that she buys, separately and in varying quantities, black pepper, aniseed, cardamom, chillies, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, mace, nutmeg, poppyseed, saffron, tamarind, turmeric … As British Chief Commissioner in the Trans-Caucasian Republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, he attends a banquet (it is 1919) at Novo Bayazid; there he eats a species of salmon trout unique to Lake Sevan and called ishkan, the prince; it is served ‘surrounded by its own amber-coloured caviare, accompanied by a sauce made of the cream of water-buffalo’s milk, mixed with fresh peeled walnuts… with somewhere a touch of horseradish … the dish was subtly and incredibly delicious.’ Delicious it sounds too; so does goose steeped in salt and sugar brine as it is done in the South Swedish province of Scania (recipe from the British Vice-Consul at Malmö); we get enticing information about how medlar and guava jellies to be served with meat and game are vastly improved by the inclusion of a little Worcester Sauce and fresh lemon juice in their composition; and how a lady who lives at Dramia, below the mediaeval castle of Buffavento in Cyprus, uses the leaf of the persica or wild cyclamen instead of vine leaves for her dishes of rice-stuffed dolmas.

  In the sense that they are not technically very expert Sir Harry’s recipes are not for the beginner. Indeed he is himself the very first to warn the reader that he is not a practising or practical cook. In the sense that his descriptions, directions and notes are possessed of the essential quality of arousing the urge to get into the kitchen to cook something new, then they are for everyone, beginners and collectors especially. Sir Harry has the beginner’s enthusiasm and fresh eye, the collector’s madness. One of the things I like best in his book is his own admission to a lifelong pursuit, world-wide and slightly manic, of the strawberry grape. From California to Kenya, from Malta to an English vicarage garden he has carried this particular vine, advocating its cultivation and propagation. Does he know that oddity, one of the sweet syrupy and picturesque Greek confections called ‘spoon jams’, made from the strawberry-grape?

  Few authors are as modest as Sir Harry Luke (naive he is not) and fewer still provide the stimulus, the improbable information, the travellers’ tales, the new visions which to me make his book a true collectors’ piece.

  The Spectator, 7 December 1962

  1. The late Ernest Marples.

  Franglais

  Just two leaves of tarragon, two and no more, are to go into the butter and herb stuffing for a dish called poulet au réveil. ‘I say two leaves only’, wrote Benjamin Renaudet, the author of this lovely recipe, ‘because although they are very small, in adding more the taste of the stuffing might be distorted.’ That is the kind of observation Renaudet makes often in his book. It is called Les Secrets de la Bonne Table, is undated, and is concerned with post-1870, pre-1914 household cookery in the provinces of France. Renaudet’s book is one I have used and quoted often, read over and over again. Even so, it is only recently that I have paid close attention to the handful of English recipes which appear in the book and of which Renaud
et says that they were evolved from notes made on the spot in England.

  Renaudet was a selective collector and meticulous recorder of little-known French provincial recipes. On English cooking his views should therefore be worth hearing. So they are. Noting that the English kitchen ‘in which roast beef plays so important a part’ supplies also some interesting methods of using the left-overs, he gives a recipe for ragoût de bœuf rôti, in English, says M. Renaudet, called roast-beef stew. A French version of cottage pie? Nothing of the kind. It is basically a bœuf miroton, the time-honoured dish of every Frenchwoman who ever had to deal with boiled beef left over from the pot-au-feu. The essential difference is that Renaudet’s recipe calls for roast instead of boiled meat. The sliced beef, re-heated in stock, with bacon, onions, bay leaves and whole small potatoes ‘all as much of a size as possible’ is arranged in a pyramid in the centre of the serving dish, the little potatoes disposed in a circle around the meat. Now if there is anything more typical of an old-fashioned French household dish than Renaudet’s little whole potatoes all of a size and his description of the manner of serving of his roast-beef stew then I should like to hear of it. (In all fairness he does add that in England it is more usual to serve the meat within a border of boiled rice. Was it? Is it?) For the next of the interesting methods with left-overs as promised by M. Renaudet, invention seems to take over and we get pudding de rosbif, or cold beef boiled for three hours in a pudding crust.

  Now we get to our muttons. A gigot bouilli à l’anglaise, it surprises me only mildly by this time to learn from dear M. Renaudet, is ‘très délicat’ and retains ‘tout son jus’. So it may be and so it might had it been or were it ever cooked as M. Renaudet claims it is. He envelops his leg of mutton entirely in a flour-and-water paste two centimetres thick and covering every inch of the joint, shank bone included. The paste-wrapped gigot is then sewn securely in a cloth, lowered into a pan of boiling water and simmered extremely gently – ‘no faster than for our pot-au-feu’ – for five hours. It is at this point that M. Renaudet throws caution as well as the entente cordiale to the winds and suggests that his French readers may prefer to serve a Villeroy or Béarnaise sauce with their gigot instead of the ‘usual English mint or Cumberland sauce’.