An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  We had at Aurillac, where we avoided the two main hotels, a delicious meal in a quite ordinary inn full of market people. Trout was on the menu, done in a rather unusual way, and a cabbage which was almost a revelation, firm, white, and beautifully seasoned; the meat was well-flavoured and tender, and the cheese perfection.

  … There they still serve the vegetable course before the roast. This is constantly done, especially in small, old-fashioned towns; but the foreigner must not think that this is provincial lack of knowledge.

  It is simply due to the fact that these little hotels have remained faithful to habits dating from 1840 or so. In those days dinners were much longer, and there was always an entrée and a roast. It became the rule to serve the vegetable – a fairly plain dish – as a pleasant change after the usually rich taste of the entrée, as a kind of diversion after the sauce, and, so to speak, to clean the palate for the roast to come, the roast being always (it still is) accompanied by a green salad.

  Having Crossed the Channel1

  As can be seen even from these brief extracts Boulestin did not by any means invariably advocate traditional French bourgeois or regional cooking. He was nothing if not open-minded, adapting English ingredients to his own purposes and forever exercising his gift for fantasy. A dish he calls Maltese curry – an unlikely and most interesting mixture of onions, tomatoes and fruit with eggs mixed in at the end of the cooking, rather in the pipérade manner – was another recipe he repeated in several of his books. It is given in The Best of Boulestin and was a feature of his restaurant menu. Another of his favourites seems to have been a tomato jam; this he uses for a sweet called Peaches Barbara with cream and kirschwasser and pistachio nuts. One may and one does read plenty of freakish recipes in cookery books. To dismiss them out of hand is a sign either of defective knowledge or lack of imagination on the reader’s part or of the author’s incapacity to convince. In the case of writers whose taste is to be trusted the very oddness of a recipe often means that here is something worth special investigation. It turns out that the tomato jam has great finesse of flavour and emerges as a most beautiful translucent cornelian-red preserve, delicious for a jam served in the French manner as a sweet with plain cream or fresh cream cheese. Fantasies these little dishes may be. Again we see that in their subtlety and the manner in which they are presented they are still French fantasies.

  One indication of the effect produced by Boulestin’s recipes is that whenever a second-hand copy of one of his books turns up – and that is not often – one finds it scarred with pencil marks against the recipes which have been cooked by the previous owner and often, slipped somewhere among the pages, a list of dishes noted for future trial. One I commend to your attention is a mousse de laitues, a kind of soufflé of cooked lettuces, given in The Finer Cooking and reproduced in The Best of Boulestin. Another is a pickled oxtongue, plain-boiled and served hot with a very smooth purée of white turnips enriched with butter and slices of hard-boiled egg. This was one of the original and unique specialities of the Boulestin restaurant. The recipe which, under the name of langue savoyarde again appears in several of his books, is to be found in The Best of Boulestin. So is the formula for the famous cheese soufflé which so wonderfully conceals melting whole poached eggs, an old dish of French cookery and one served by Boulestin at a luncheon given at his restaurant to celebrate the publication by Cassells on 26 September 1936, of the autobiography entitled Myself, My Two Countries. An uncommonly good lunch it must have been that day. The wine was a Cheval Blanc 1925 and the sole liqueur was Armagnac. A modest show as press luncheons given by famous restaurateurs go. So was the luncheon given at Boulestin’s by a party of American journalists in honour of M. Aristide Briand. Somehow Boulestin contrived to persuade these gentlemen that the great statesman, surfeited with political banquets and pompous food, would appreciate something simple and at least one dish and one wine from his native Nantais country. Where today, one wonders, would a visiting celebrity be allowed so unceremonial a ceremonial meal, and one with so much character? Less than perfect, such a meal could indeed be a memorable flop. That Boulestin recorded the menu and the occasion indicates, one deduces, that it was no such thing:

  Hors d’Œuvre

  Omelette au crabe

  Chou farci

  Fromages et Fruits

  Vins:

  Muscadet 1928

  Château Gruaud Larose 1923

  The Finer Cooking1

  At the premises in Southampton Street, Covent Garden, to which the Boulestin Restaurant moved from Leicester Square there exists still today an establishment which bears Boulestin’s name. The Dufy panels and some of the original decorations still exist. Its founder, was, I think, the first amateur to venture on a London restaurant and certainly the only one to acquire an international reputation for his food. In Ease and Endurance,2 the continuation of the autobiography which Boulestin wrote in French under the title of A Londres Naguère and which was published after his death in a somewhat harum-scarum translation by Robin Adair (at one point Adair has Boulestin exploring the Cecil Hotel in a taxi), he tells how the place was crammed night after night with customers from the Savoy, Ritz and Carlton belt, stage stars, artists, writers, royalty and High Bohemia. His prices were reputed to be the highest in London. And still the restaurant did not pay. Boulestin had found, like so many before and since, that in England the price of perfection is too high. During most of the fourteen years that he was running his restaurant he found it necessary to supplement his earnings by articles, books – heaven knows how he found the time to write them – cookery classes, lectures and the television demonstrations which were the first of their kind.

  A 1936 menu for the Boulestin restaurant in London, in the possession of the author

  *

  One final passage from Myself, My Two Countries vividly evokes the influences which formed Boulestin’s tastes in food and implanted in him that feeling for the authenticity which alone is true luxury. Here he remembers the kitchen quarters of his grandmother’s house at St Aulaye in the Périgord:

  In the store room next to the kitchen were a long table and shelves always covered with all sorts of provisions; large earthenware jars full of confits of pork and goose, a small barrel where vinegar slowly matured, a bowl where honey oozed out of the comb, jams, preserves of sorrel and of tomatoes, and odd bottles with grapes and cherries marinating in brandy; next to the table a weighing machine on which I used to stand at regular intervals; sacks of haricot beans, of potatoes; eggs, each one carefully dated in pencil.

  And there were the baskets of fruit, perfect small melons, late plums, under-ripe medlars waiting to soften, peaches, pears hollowed out by a bird or a wasp, figs that had fallen of their own accord, all the fruits of September naturally ripe and sometimes still warm from the sun. Everything in profusion. It is no doubt the remembrance of these early days which makes me despise and dislike all primeurs, the fruit artificially grown, gathered too early and expensively sent, wrapped in cotton wool, to ‘smart’ restaurants.

  The garden could hardly be called a garden; it was large, wild and not too well kept. There were fruit trees amongst the flowers, here a pear tree, there a currant bush, so that one could either smell a rose, crush a verbena, or eat a fruit; there were borders of box, but also of sorrel and chibol; and the stiff battalion of leeks, shallots, and garlic, the delicate pale-green foliage of the carrot, the aggressive steel-grey leaves of the artichokes, the rows of lettuce which always ran to seed too quickly.

  Wine and Food, Spring 1965

  1. Flammarion 1927: an English translation of this marvellous cookery book was planned ca. 1965 but did not come to fruition.

  2. Cassell, London, 1963, Knopf, New York, 1961.

  1. Heinemann, 1937.

  1. Cassels.

  2. Home and Van Thal, 1948.

  Pomiane, Master of the Unsacrosanct

  ‘Art demands an impeccable technique; science a little understanding.’ Today the mention o
f art in connection with cookery is taken for pretension. Science and cookery make a combination even more suspect. Because he was a scientist by profession, making no claims to being an artist, Docteur de Pomiane’s observation was a statement of belief, made in all humility. Vainglory is totally missing from de Pomiane’s work. He knew that the attainment of impeccable technique meant a lifetime – in de Pomiane’s case an exceptionally long one – of experiment and discipline. Out of it all he appears to have extracted, and given, an uncommon amount of pleasure.

  Docteur Edouard de Pomiane’s real name was Edouard Pozerski. He was of purely Polish origin, the son of emigrés who had fled Poland and settled in Paris after the Revolution of 1863. Born and brought up in Montmartre, he was educated at the Ecole Polonaise – an establishment described by Henri Babinski, another celebrated Franco-Polish cookery writer, as one of ferocious austerity – and subsequently at the Lycée Condorcet. Pomiane chose for his career the study of biology, specialising in food chemistry and dietetics. Before long he had invented a new science called Gastrotechnology, which he defined simply as the scientific explanation of accepted principles of cookery. For a half-century – interrupted only by his war service from 1914 to 1918 – de Pomiane also made cookery and cookery writing his hobby and second profession. After his retirement from the Institut Pasteur, where he lectured for some 50 years, he devoted himself entirely to his cookery studies. He was 89 when he died in January 1964.

  De Pomiane’s output was immense – some dozen cookery books, countless scores of articles, broadcasts, lectures. In France his books were best-sellers; among French cookery writers his place is one very much apart.

  Many before him had attempted to explain cookery in scientific terms and had succeeded only in turning both science and cookery into the deadliest of bores.

  De Pomiane was the first writer to propound such happenings as the fusion of egg yolks and olive oil in a mayonnaise, the sizzling of a potato chip when plunged into fat for deep-frying, in language so straightforward, so graphic, that even the least scientifically minded could grasp the principles instead of simply learning the rules. In cooking, the possibility of muffing a dish is always with us. Nobody can eliminate that. What de Pomiane did by explaining the cause, was to banish the fear of failure.

  Adored by his public and his pupils, feared by the phoney, derided by the reactionary, de Pomiane’s irreverent attitude to established tradition, his independence of mind backed up by scientific training, earned him the reputation of being something of a Candide, a provocative rebel disturbing the grave conclaves of French gastronomes, questioning the holy rites of the ‘white-vestured officiating priests’ of classical French cookery. It was understandable that not all his colleagues appreciated de Pomiane’s particular brand of irony:

  ‘As to the fish, everyone agrees that it must be served between the soup and the meat. The sacred position of the fish before the meat course implies that one must eat fish and meat. Now such a meal, as any dietician will tell you, is far too rich in nitrogenous substances, since fish has just as much assimilable albumen as meat, and contains a great deal more phosphorus …’ Good for Dr de Pomiane. Too bad for us that so few of his readers – or listeners – paid attention to his liberating words.

  It does, on any count, seem extraordinary that thirty years after de Pomiane’s heyday, the dispiriting progress from soup to fish, from fish to meat and on, remorselessly on, to salad, cheese, a piece of pastry, a crème caramel or an ice cream, still constitutes the standard menu throughout the entire French-influenced world of hotels and catering establishments.

  Reading some of de Pomiane’s neat menus (from 365 Menus, 365 Recettes, Albin Michel 1938) it is so easy to see how little effort is required to transform the dull, overcharged, stereotyped meal into one with a fresh emphasis and a proper balance:

  Tomates à la crème

  Côtelettes de porc

  Purée de farine de marrons

  Salade de mâche à la betterave

  Poires

  An unambitious enough menu – and what a delicious surprise it would be to encounter such a meal at any one of those country town Hôtels des Voyageurs, du Commerce, du Lion d’Or, to which my own business affairs in France now take me. In these establishments, where one stays because there is no choice, the food is of a mediocrity, a predictability redeemed for me only by the good bread, the fresh eggs in the omelettes, the still relatively civilised presentation – which in Paris is becoming rare – the soup brought to table in a tureen, the hors d’œuvre on the familiar, plain little white dishes, the salad in a simple glass bowl. If it all tasted as beguiling as it looks, every dish would be a feast. Two courses out of the whole menu would be more than enough.

  Edouard de Pomiane, courtesy of Bruno Cassirer (Publishers) Ltd

  Now that little meal of de Pomiane’s is a feast, as a whole entity. It is also a real lesson in how to avoid the obvious without being freakish, how to start with the stimulus of a hot vegetable dish, how to vary the eternal purée of potatoes with your meat (lacking chestnut flour we could try instead a purée of lentils or split peas), how to follow it with a fresh, bright, unexpected salad (that excellent mixture of corn salad and beetroot – how often does one meet with it nowadays?) and since by that time most people would have had enough without embarking on cheese, de Pomiane is brave enough to leave it out. How much harm has that tyrannical maxim of Brillat Savarin’s about a meal without cheese done to all our waistlines and our digestions?

  For a hot first dish, de Pomiane’s recipe for tomates à la crème is worth knowing. His method makes tomatoes taste so startingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability, soon find it listed in the guide books as a regional speciality. De Pomiane himself said the recipe came from his Polish mother. That would not prevent anyone from calling it what he pleases:

  TOMATES À LA CRÈME

  ‘Take six tomatoes. Cut them in halves. In your frying pan melt a lump of butter. Put in the tomatoes, cut side downwards, with a sharply-pointed knife puncturing here and there the rounded sides of the tomatoes. Let them heat for five minutes. Turn them over. Cook them for another ten minutes. Turn them again. The juices run out and spread into the pan. Once more turn the tomatoes cut side upwards. Around them put 80 grammes (3 oz. near enough) of thick cream. Mix it with the juices. As soon as it bubbles, slip the tomatoes and all their sauce on to a hot dish. Serve instantly, very hot.’

  The faults of the orthodox menu were by no means the only facet of so-called classic French cooking upon which de Pomiane turned his analytical intelligence. Recipes accepted as great and sacrosanct are not always compatible with sense. Dr de Pomiane’s radar eye saw through them: ‘Homard à l’américaine is a cacophony … it offends a basic principle of taste.’ I rather wish he had gone to work on some of the astonishing things Escoffier and his contemporaries did to fruit. Choice pears masked with chocolate sauce and cream, beautiful fresh peaches smothered in raspberry purée and set around with vanilla ice seem to me offences to nature, let alone to art or basic principles. How very rum that people still write of these inventions with breathless awe.

  De Pomiane, however, was a man too civilised, too subtle, to labour his points. He passes speedily from the absurdities of haute cuisine to the shortcomings of folk cookery, and deals a swift right and left to those writers whose reverent genuflections before the glory and wonder of every least piece of peasant cookery-lore make much journalistic cookery writing so tedious. By the simple device of warning his readers to expect the worst, de Pomiane gets his message across. From a village baker-woman of venerable age, he obtains an ancestral recipe for a cherry tart made on a basis of butter-enriched bread dough. He passes on the recipe, modified to suit himself, and carrying with it the characteristically deflating note:

  ‘When you open the oven door you will have a shock. It is not a pretty sight. The edges of the tart are slightly burnt and the top l
ayer of cherries blackened in places … It will be received without much enthusiasm for, frankly, it is not too prepossessing.

  ‘Don’t be discouraged. Cut the first slice and the juice will run out. Now try it. A surprise. The pastry is neither crisp nor soggy, and just tinged with cherry juice. The cherries have kept all their flavour and the juice is not sticky – just pure cherry juice. They had some good ideas in 1865.’

  Of a dish from the Swiss mountains, Dr de Pomiane observes that it is ‘a peasant dish, rustic and vigorous. It is not everybody’s taste. But one can improve upon it. Let us get to work.’ This same recipe provides an instructive example of the way in which Dr de Pomiane thinks we should go to work improving a primitive dish to our own taste while preserving its character intact. Enthusiastic beginners might add olives, parsley, red peppers. Dr Pomiane is scarcely that simple. The school-trained professional might be tempted to super-impose cream, wine, mushrooms, upon his rough and rustic dish. That is not de Pomiane’s way. His way is the way of the artist; of the man who can add one sure touch, one only, and thereby create an effect of the pre-ordained, the inevitable, the entirely right and proper:

  TRANCHES AU FROMAGE

  ‘Black bread – a huge slice weighing 5 to 7 oz., French mustard, 8 oz. Gruyère.

  ‘The slice of bread should be as big as a dessert plate and nearly 1 inch thick. Spread it with a layer of French mustard and cover the whole surface of the bread with strips of cheese about ½ in. thick. Put the slice of bread on a fireproof dish and under the grill. The cheese softens and turns golden brown. Just before it begins to run, remove the dish and carry it to the table. Sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Cut the slice in four and put it on to four hot plates. Pour out the white wine and taste your cheese slice. In the mountains this would seem delicious. Here it is all wrong. But you can put it right. Over each slice pour some melted butter. A mountaineer from the Valais would be shocked, but my friends are enthusiastic, and that is good enough for me.’