Wine and Food, Summer 1964
1. It is difficult enough to lay hands on genuine Swiss Gruyère, let alone the Comtois version; but Bartholdi’s, the Swiss shop at 4 Charlotte Street, London, W.I, can usually supply the authentic Swiss article, and I have bought the delicious Beaufort cheese from Paxton and Whitfields’ in Jermyn Street. Fontina, the Val d’Aosta cheese required for the Piedmontese fonduta, is sometimes to be found at Soho shops such as Lina’s in Brewer Street, and King Bomba’s and Parmigiani Brothers of Old Compton Street.
Having Crossed the Channel
THE WORK OF X. MARCEL BOULESTIN
A refugee from the Colette-Willy ménage of the early nineteen hundreds, from what promised to be a long stint of sterile work as Willy’s secretary and as yet another among the throng of that extraordinary man’s unacknowledged collaborators, the young Marcel Boulestin fled the malicious gossip, the dramas and scandals in which these two now legendary figures were for ever involving each other and their friends. Avoiding the recriminations which he knew would ensue should he inform Willy of his decision, Boulestin slipped away from Paris while his employer was absent. Thenceforth he made his life in England.
As a result of two previous visits to London, Boulestin had already gone through a period of serious anglomania which extended even to our food, and an attempt to make his father’s household in Poitiers appreciate the beauty of mint sauce with mutton, the fascination of Sir Kenelm Digby’s Stuart recipes for hydromel and mead, and the anglo-oriental romance of curry as served at Romano’s. In Paris he bought mince pies and English marmalade, took Colette to tea at the British Dairy, shared a blazing plum pudding with her at Christmas, drank whisky instead of wine at a dinner party at Fouquet’s, spent two summer holidays in Dieppe because it was so English, and there made friends with Walter Sickert, William Nicholson, Reggie Turner, Ada Leverson, Marie Tempest and Max Beerbohm. As a result he did a French translation of The Happy Hypocrite which was published in 1904 by the Mercure de France, illustrated with a caricature of Boulestin by Max (Boulestin had some difficulty in convincing the Mercure’s editor that Max Beerbohm actually existed and was not an invention of his own).
At the time of the Beerbohm translation Boulestin was already a writer and journalist of some experience. Before his Colette-Willy period he had contributed a weekly column of musical criticism to a Bordeaux newspaper. Willy was an astute talent-spotter. The young men who made up his troupe of ghosts were seldom nonentities. I have been told by Mr Gerald Hamilton that Boulestin’s novel called Les Fréquentations de Maurice, published about 1910, is highly entertaining. In France the book had quite a succès de scandale. Dealing with the life of a gigolo it was considered altogether too fast for the English public.
Marcel Boulestin, by Gromaire, London, 1925, reproduced in Myself, My Two Countries
It was not until after the 1914 war and nearly five years with the French army – although domiciled in England for some thirty years he never at any time entertained the idea of becoming a naturalized British subject, considering it highly improper for a Frenchman to renounce his country – and following the failure of his London decorating business, which before the war had been successful, that Boulestin turned to cookery writing.
In the first years of the twenties Boulestin had been dabbling, in a small way, in picture dealing, starting off promisingly with a Modigliani bought in Paris for £12 and sold in London for £90. Returning to interior decorating he imported French wallpapers and fabrics designed by Poiret and Dufy. He found his English customers unready for such innovations. Before long he was broke. During the course of negotiating the sale of some etchings by his friend J. E. Laboureur to Byard, a director of Heinemann’s, Boulestin asked if a cookery book would be of any interest at that moment. It would, said Byard. On the spot a contract was produced and signed. An advance of £10 was paid over.
Boulestin’s writing still seems so fresh and original that it comes as a shock to realize that these happenings occurred over forty years ago, and that his first cookery book Simple French Cooking for English Homes appeared in 1923. On the plain white jacket of the little book, and as a frontispiece, was a design, enticing, fresh and lively, by Laboureur. The book, priced at 5s., was reprinted in September of the same year, again in 1924, 1925, 1928, 1930 and 1933. In the meantime Boulestin had written cookery articles for the Daily Express, the Morning Post, Vogue, the Manchester Guardian and the Spectator; in February 1925 A Second Helping was published, also with a Laboureur jacket and frontispiece. It was uncommon in those days, and still is, for publishers to commission artists of such quality to illustrate cookery books, and a little of the success of Boulestin’s early books must be acknowledged to his publishers who, no doubt under the guidance of their author, produced them in so appropriate a form, in large type, on thick paper: chunky, easy little books to handle, attractively bound. (To the general reader such matters may appear trifling. From the point of view of a book being lastingly used and loved the effect of the Tightness and appropriateness as a whole is enormous.)
A Second Helping is perhaps the least successful of Boulestin’s books. A certain proportion of ‘amusing’ recipes and chic asides ‘get your rabbits sent from Dartmoor’ give it a distinct whiff of the fashion-magazine hostess style. Later the same year appeared, for 3s. 6d., The Conduct of the Kitchen. In that year also the first Boulestin restaurant was opened in Leicester Square. Again, artists and innovators in the decorating business collaborated with Boulestin. Allan Walton, the enlightened owner of a prosperous textile firm in the Midlands, produced a friend who produced the capital for the restaurant, and supplied also the fabrics (he was employing artists of the stature of Cedric Morris, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to design for him) with which the restaurant was furnished.
In 1930 Boulestin collaborated with Jason Hill on Herbs, Salads and Seasonings, illustrated with unique grace by Cedric Morris. In 1931 came What Shall We Have Today? (5s. and in paper covers 3s.), the most popular of all the Boulestin books, containing a large selection of recipes plus a sample luncheon and dinner menu for each month of the year. In 1932, in collaboration with Robin Adair, appeared three little volumes at is. each, dealing with Savouries and Hors-d’Œuvre, Eggs and Potatoes. Reprinted by Heinemann in 1956, these little books are still (or were last year) available at 2s. 6d. each. The grotesquely inappropriate and anti-food coloured board covers have presumably hampered their sales even at what is today a give-away price.
In 1934 came Having Crossed the Channel, a lighthearted record of a journey through the Vendée, the Landes, the Bordelais, a pilgrimage back to his native Périgord and into his youth, a drive across central France, down to the coast, into Italy and Southern Germany and back via Belgium and Holland. This little nugget of a book (but all Boulestin books are nuggets) contains some of Boulestin’s best writing about his own province and about the food of obscure country inns of a type now all but vanished. In this book also are the best illustrations Laboureur ever did for Boulestin, one being of the archetype of the French small-town restaurant, the wide, shuttered window, the tree in a tub on the pavement, the façade which has not changed and which still promises decent and genuine country cooking at modest prices. That you may find neither when you get inside is another matter. The evocation is there.
In 1935 Boulestin’s Evening Standard Book of Menus was published by Heinemann. This book is in its way a tour de force. It contains a luncheon and dinner menu for every day of the year, plus every relevant recipe. It was directed at an audience to which a man of lesser wit and native grace might have been tempted to talk down (it has to be remembered that by this time Boulestin and his restaurant had already become almost legendary) but this was a trap into which he was at the same time too subtle and too naturally courteous to fall. What he produced was a volume for which he really should have kept his title The Conduct of the Kitchen – a title borrowed incidentally from Meredith – because that was just what the book of menus was about: the
logical and orderly conduct of a kitchen as related to daily life and seen not through the medium of a few isolated menus for special occasions, but as part of the natural order of everyday living. Given time, Boulestin could perhaps with his book of menus have opened the door to organized cooking for thousands of young women who in the thirties were finding themselves on their own in flats and bed-sitting rooms knowing nothing more about how to make a meal than that it ought to taste nice and should not be a bore. As things turned out, time was something not just then at our disposal. Very soon we were to be concerned with matters less peaceful than the conduct of our kitchens.
In the summer of 1939 Boulestin left as usual to spend his holidays in the house he had built for himself in the Landes. Caught by the outbreak of war he and Robin Adair lingered, not knowing what to do. Boulestin’s services, offered to the British Ministry of Food and to the Army Quartermaster General, were refused. When France fell Adair was too ill to flee and Boulestin of course stayed with him. Arrested and interned by the Germans, Adair was eventually moved from Bayonne to Fresne. Boulestin went to live in occupied Paris to be near his friend. There, on 22nd September 1943, he died, aged, so Adair tells us, sixty-five.
*
M. André Simon, Boulestin’s compatriot and contemporary, writing two years ago of Boulestin’s rule that all wines young or old, red or white must be served in a decanter, recorded that ‘he never liked the shape and colour of wine bottles standing on the table: they were of the greatest use, of course, but their right place was the cellar or pantry’. ‘He was a born artist,’ says M. Simon of Boulestin, ‘and he was right.’
*
Quotation is my only means of conveying something of that artistry, of the essence of Boulestin’s writing, of his intelligence, sense and taste, of his ease of style, un-scolding, un-pompous, un-sarcastic, ineffusive, and to so high a degree inspiriting and creative.
The handful of extracts, words of kitchen advice, recipes, menus, and descriptive passages I have chosen to quote are none of them to be found in The Best of Boulestin, the American-selected anthology published in England by Heinemann in 1952 and still available at 21s. This volume does indeed contain many of Boulestin’s best recipes, but not one single one of the delicious menus in the composition of which he excelled; and it was a mistake for the editors to suppose that they understood French syntax better than their author. Boulestin was no illiterate peasant: when he called a recipe sauce moutarde he did so because that is correct French. There was no call to make him look like an Anglo-Saxon writing in schoolboy French by altering it to sauce de moutarde. For that matter little seems to have been gained by the translation of gâteau petit duc into Little Duke Cake and crêpes normandes into French pancakes Normande. At any rate anybody who buys The Best of Boulestin should be warned to pay no attention to the announcement on the jacket which informs us that the book contains a selection of the best recipes of a ‘World-Famous Chef’. A chef in the professional sense of the word is just exactly what Boulestin was not and certainly did not pretend to be. The implications of that piece of grandiloquence would not have been at all to his taste, as anyone can see from reading a paragraph or two of any of his books. It would be a mistake for anyone to infer that Boulestin was a man who had no more sense than to attempt amateur cooking in his own restaurant. He hired an experienced French chef (his name was Bigorre. He came from Paillard’s in Paris), but not one who would substitute an arid classicism for personal taste and character in his cooking. Boulestin was not out to emulate Escoffier. He was creating something new, as much in his restaurant as in his cookery writing. In his very first book his admonitions about the indiscriminate use of stock, even of fine stock, were news, and good news:
Do not spoil the special taste of the gravy obtained in the roasting of beef, veal, mutton or pork by adding to it the classical stock which gives to all meats the same deplorable taste of soup. It is obvious that you cannot out of a joint get the sauceboat full which usually appears on the table.
Simple French Cooking for English Homes
The chief thing to remember is that all these soups – unless otherwise specified – must be made with plain water. When made with the addition of stock they lose all character and cease to be what they were intended to be. The fresh pleasant taste is lost owing to the addition of meat stock, and the value of the soup from an economical point of view is also lost.
What Shall We Have Today?
That commodities such as simple sardine or anchovy butter which we had hitherto regarded as sandwich fillings, egg dishes which belonged to the breakfast table, the bed-sitting room or the night club, and little hot dishes which were ordinary English family supper savouries were valuable resources which could be quite differently deployed and offered as party dishes were ideas which had occurred to few people in pre-Boulestin days:
SARDINE BUTTER
‘Take a tin of sardines, carefully remove the skins and bones and pound well. Add same quantity of butter, salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly so that it becomes a smooth paste. Serve very cold. Quite ordinary sardines will do for this.’
The Evening Standard Book of Menus
Boulestin’s idea was that while you were at it you made – as in a great many of his recipes – enough of this mixture (he treats smoked cod’s roe and anchovy fillets in precisely the same manner) for two meals: you serve it as a first course, with toast, for two very differently composed lunches. On a Friday in January it is followed by Irish stew and cheese (not for me, that menu, but Boulestin had something for everybody), on Saturday by cold ham and pressed beef, a hot purée of leeks with croûtons as a separate course, and fruit. On an August Thursday he thinks of it again. It precedes a sauté of liver and bacon, potato croquettes and fruit salad. On the Saturday it is followed by a Spanish omelette, cheese and fruit. And bless him, it is delicious, his sardine butter, and marvellously cheap and quick. You allow, or at any rate, I allow, an ounce of butter per Portuguese sardine. Pack the paste into a little terrine, chill it – and you will never again feel it necessary to go to the delicatessen for bought liver pâté or any such sub-standard hors d’œuvre.
From the same book come these two menus for September luncheons:
Salad of Tunny Fish and Celery
Risotto Milanaise
Fruit
———
Scrambled Eggs with Haddock
Vegetable Salad
Creamed Rice.
In those days only Boulestin thought of actually inviting people to lunch to eat scrambled eggs. It goes without saying that he did not serve scrambled eggs with smoked haddock, he cooked the haddock first, flaked it, and mixed it with the beaten eggs before cooking them. He added a little cream to the finished scrambled eggs and put fried croûtons round them. In January the same breakfast dish appears as a first course before the cold turkey and salad, the meal to be ended with English toasted cheese.
BRAISED VEAL WITH CARROTS
‘Take a good piece of veal, about three pounds in weight, brown it both sides in butter. Put in a fireproof dish eight carrots cut in round pieces, about half an inch thick, half a dozen small onions, parsley, salt and pepper and a rasher of bacon cut in small pieces, add a tablespoon of water, cover the dish and cook on a slow fire for about three and a half hours. Shake the dish occasionally, but do not remove the lid.’
The Conduct of the Kitchen
This recipe must have been one of Boulestin’s favourites. It appears over and over again in his books. His omission of detail was deliberate. It is impossible, he was in the habit of saying, to give precise recipes. And certainly precision – unless carried to the ultimate degree, as in Madame Saint-Ange’s Livre de Cuisine1 or Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking1 – can be more misleading than vagueness. Boulestin was impatient of written detail. When he does specify precise quantities or times he is often wrong. His special gift was to get us on the move, send us out to the butcher to buy that good piece of veal, into the kitchen to
discover how delicate is the combination of veal, carrots, little onions, a scrap of bacon, seasonings and butter all so slowly and carefully amalgamated – and all done with butter and water alone. Three and a half hours for a three-pound piece of veal – and on top of the stove too – is an awful long time. At minimum heat and in a heavy well-closed pot stood on the floor of the oven rather than on a shelf, the timing would be however just about right. Most of us know enough about absentee cooking these days to work out such details for ourselves. Those who do not would I think be well advised to use Boulestin recipes in conjunction with a fully detailed work such as one of those mentioned. Where Boulestin never falters or misleads is in the sureness of his taste and the sobriety of his ingredients even when his recipes are new inventions. Anglophile he may have been. Not so much as he thought he was. His recipes could never be mistaken for anything but the recipes of an educated Frenchman.
It was, I think, Boulestin who introduced the English public to the Basque pipérade. A recipe for it or a description of this beguiling dish of peppers, onions, tomatoes and eggs appears in every one of his books, even down to the booklet commissioned from him by the Romary biscuit firm and which sold for sixpence. The briefest pipérade recipe is the one recorded in Having Crossed the Channel as it was blurted out by a tipsy smuggler one morning in a Basque inn on the Bidassoa. ‘Vous faites cuire vos piments et vos tomates et vous … foutez vos œufs dedans’ (This was later translated by Adair as ‘shove in your eggs’.)
In the same little volume Boulestin gives us an explanation of the old-fashioned French custom of serving a vegetable before the roast – an explanation which contains also some sound gastronomic advice:
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 19
