French Provincial Cooking (10 page)

‘The hors-d’œuvre were composed principally of ham, sausage, and galantine; then the
volaille truffée demi-deuil
, the triumph of the house;
quenelles au gratin au beurre d’écrevisses; fonds d’artichauts
with truffled
foie gras,
replaced sometimes, in the season, by game;
la glace pralinée
; dessert; a capital Beaujolais throughout the meal, and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the Clos Saint-Patrice for the game, the artichoke hearts and the cheese.’

The Mère Fillioux always came to her customers’ tables to carve the chickens; she used a little kitchen knife, and two of these knives, it is recounted, lasted her for thirty years, during which time she must have cut up some 500,000 chickens. Once some Americans offered her a thousand francs (a large sum in those days) for her knife. She refused, but after they had gone found, so powerful was the urge to possess this little talisman of good cookery, that they had stolen it.

The Mère Fillioux died in 1925; the restaurant in the rue Duquesne still goes by her name, but her legitimate successor is la Mère Brazier, proprietress of two establishments, one in the rue Royale and the other outside Lyon at the Col de la Luère. La Mère Brazier was once the cook chez la Mère Fillioux, and in her elegant, soberly decorated restaurant of the rue Royale one may eat almost the identical time-honoured menu as it was invented by the Mère Fillioux. There too one may have, unexpectedly perhaps in Lyon, what I do truly believe to be the most delicious and deliciously cooked
sole meunière
I have ever eaten. Ah, if the clients of one or two of those London restaurants specialising in fish dishes could eat a
sole meunière
as cooked at la Mère Brazier’s they would certainly wonder what it was that had been served to them under the same name in London.... Perhaps the Lyonnais have a particular talent for cooking fish, quite apart from the renowned
quenelles,
for I also remember an especially excellent dish of skate with black butter on the menu of one of those rough and noisy but efficiently run little bistros which are typically Lyonnais. On this particular occasion we were sitting at a table next to the one at which the
patron
-cook was entertaining friends, eating his own midday meal and apparently doing the cooking at the same time. One of the great virtues of this little place in the rue Garet was that everything was served sizzling hot. The
raie au beurre noir
came to our table with the butter and the fish fairly bubbling in its own little dish; and I saw that the
patron
, having cooked his own steak, brought it to his table in a covered serving dish, ceremoniously decanted it on to his hot plate, and took the empty dish away to the kitchen before sitting down to his interrupted meal.

This aspect of service in even the humblest of French restaurants is one that I always find attractive. Everything is invariably brought on its own dish and the waiter, having served the customer, leaves the dish on the table for him to help himself to more if he wants it. It is a custom which makes the food much more appetising than does the almost universal English one of serving it straight on the plate, often with vegetables you haven’t ordered and don’t want mixed up with the sauce and the meat.

It was in this same little restaurant that I tasted two dishes of the Lyonnais
cuisine populaire
which, if the truth must be told, I rather preferred to most of the cooking of the high-class restaurants. These were
la salade lyonnaise
(described in the hors-d’œuvre chapter on page 147) and an oddity called
tablier de sapeur
or fireman’s apron. This is an oblong slab of tripe about half an inch thick (previously cooked, of course), coated with egg and breadcrumbs, grilled to a sizzling crispness and served with a
sauce tartare
. No tripe enthusiast, I ordered it simply out of curiosity, and found it really enjoyable.

Another speciality, which appears in the brasseries rather than the restaurants proper, is the
gratinée,
a clear consommé in which a slice of bread sprinkled with cheese is browned in the oven, the whole being finally enriched with a mixture of beaten egg and port—a restorative soup of the same nature as the Parisian
soupe à l’oignon,
in this case without the onion which is generally but wrongly supposed to figure in every Lyonnais dish.

East of the Lyonnais and south of Burgundy lies the Bresse, a district blessed with a rich variety of high-quality raw materials, of which the
poularde de Bresse
is the most celebrated. This country is a tricky subject to write about. The town of Belley in the south-eastern corner of the Bugey district, between the Franche-Comté, the Dauphiné and the Savoie (administratively the Bugey is now part of Franche-Comté, but geographically it is inseparable from the Bresse) was the birthplace of Brillat-Savarin, and around everything to do with the author of the
Physiologie du Goût,
there hangs a kind of aureole, every chicken, every
gratin d’ecrevisses,
every pâté in this district being, in the imagination of a vast number of people, automatically presented, as it were, upon a golden dish. As Maurice des Ombiaux has remarked, people seem to believe that Brillat-Savarin’s recipes partook of the nature of divine revelations, whereas in reality Brillat-Savarin made no claims to being a practising cook, and his recipes, at least to modern readers, appear to be the weakest spots in his book. Apart, however, from observing that indiscriminate adulation and quotation
ad nauseam
of a few aphorisms by people who have probably never read his complete work seldom does any author’s reputation much good, it is not my purpose here to discuss Brillat-Savarin’s great book, which in its form as well as its content became such a landmark in the history of modern gastronomy that it set, and is still setting, the pattern for hundreds of imitators.

My first-hand knowledge of Brillat-Savarin’s country is small, my only gastronomic recollection being of a very excellent but very simple meal, all the more delicious for being somewhat unexpected, in a
café routier
just outside Bourg-en-Bresse. It was in the days before these transport cafés had become well known to tourists, and stopping for petrol before going into Bourg we saw that behind the filling station was a small whitewashed farmhouse advertising accommodation and meals. We were tired after a long day’s driving, and decided there and then to stay instead of battling through the traffic into Bourg.

Our dinner consisted of a small selection of hors-d’œuvre, among which the home-made pâté was unusually good; afterwards we ate a tender chicken roasted in butter, and a salad. The sweet was that wonderfully fresh and innocent-looking cream cheese dish, a
cœur à la crème,
served covered with fresh rich cream. We complimented the
patron
and his wife, a young couple who had not long set up in the restaurant—filling-station business, remarking that the
cœur à la crème
had been particularly delicious. When we came down next morning, after a night of peace and quiet as unexpected, considering we were within a few yards of the main road, as our excellent dinner, we found that the
patronne
had provided more
cœurs à la crème
for our breakfast; and on the table beside the coffee, the croissants, and the butter was a bowl of beautiful fresh wild strawberries. How she had procured them at that hour of the morning I did not ask; but she could not have had them the night before or she would have offered them to us for dinner. Perhaps a passing market van . . . but it did not matter. What mattered was that of such gestures, such imaginative little attentions, are faithful customers and good reputations made. And if that young couple are not now, somewhere in France, the prosperous owners of a successful restaurant I should be very surprised indeed.

Peppers and onions are sizzling gently in a big frying-pan, the goose dripping in which they are cooking giving off its unmistakable smell. A squat, round-bellied earthen pot, blackened with use, containing beans and salt pork and cabbage, seems to be for ever on the simmer. A string of wrinkled, dried, dark red peppers hangs from the ceiling alongside a piece of roughly cut ham; a bunch of little red sausages and a pitcher of yellow wine are on the table. The kitchen of this little peasant farmhouse in the Béarn is small and smoky, by no means the ideal airy, well-ordered, well-scrubbed farmhouse kitchen of one’s imagination; but the pink-washed walls are clean against the faded blue paint of the windows and shutters, and on the shelves of the little larder there are three or four tall glazed earthen jars to bear witness to the careful housekeeping of the farmer’s wife. For these are the pots of
confit
, the goose and pork and duck, salted, cooked, and preserved in their own wax-white fat, which, with the ham and the sausages and the peppers, lie at the base of all the local cookery.

For here, at any rate in the deep country, butter, except for pastry-making, is considered a wretched substitute for the rich fat of the goose (Norman Douglas tells us that goose fat was held by the Greeks to be an aphrodisiac, adding, characteristically, that to him it was an emetic). So whether it is a question of frying eggs, or sausages, or a steak, of cooking a daube of beef, or the heavy thick cabbage and bean soup called
garbure
, into the pan goes the goose fat or the pork lard, to be followed by the onions, the tomatoes, the garlic and the brick red pepper called
piment basquais.
The locally cured ham, the
jambon de Bayonne
or of Orthez will add its salty tang to the mixture, along with a piece of pork either from the salting trough or from the jar of
confit.
The wines of the Béarnais and the Basque country which are drunk with these dishes are topaz or rose-coloured or rich deep red, and have curious names easy to remember but difficult to pronounce—Pacherenc de Vic Bilh, Tadousse-Usseau, Irouléguy, Jurançon, Monein, Saint-Faust, Madiran, Chahakoa, Diusse and Rousselet de Béarn.

There is much talk hereabouts, too, that is to say much talk by writers and gastronomes, of Le Grand Béarnais, the hero-king, Henri IV of Navarre, who figures in all French cookery books as having expressed the pious wish that every family in the land might have a chicken in the pot every Sunday of the year. But although they have good ways of dealing with a boiling fowl in these south-western regions of France, of adding cabbage leaves filled with a savoury stuffing to the vegetables which go into the pot, and serving highly condimented sauces with the chicken, it is chiefly due to perspicacious Parisian restaurateurs that the name of Henri IV is attached to every
poule au pot
and
petite marmite
served to their customers. Neither, alas, did the hero of Arques invent or even know, the Sauce Béarnaise. It was created by a chef, whose name is not recorded, at the Pavillon Henri IV at St. Germain, round about 1830; it rapidly, and justly, became celebrated, and before long entered into the realms of
la cuisine classique
. Count Austin de Croze, the great authority on French provincial cookery and compiler of that wonderful volume of regional recipes,
Les Plats Régionaux de France
, considers, however, that the sauce is in direct descent from the local Béarnais cookery. His own recipe includes a seasoning of the pounded dried red pepper of the country.