French Provincial Cooking (115 page)

What to Eat and Drink in France
. Austin de Croze. (Translation by the author
of Le Trésor Gastronomique de France
.) London, Frederick Warne, 1931.

Le Trésor Gastronomique de France. Repertoire complet des specialités gourmandes des trente-deux provinces de France
. Austin de Croze, Paris, Librairie Delagrave, 1933. First published 1929.

Bibliotheca Gastronomica. A Catalogue of Books and Documents on Gastronomy
. Compiled and annotated by André L. Simon, President of the Wine and Food Society. London, The Wine and Food Society, 1953.

Bibliographie Gastronomique.
G. Vicaire. First published 1890. Second edition published by Derek Verschoyle, Academic and Bibliographical Publications Ltd., London, 1954. Now distributed by André Deutsch, 12-14 Carlisle Street, London, W.1.

Traité Pratique de Panification Française et Parisienne
. E. Dufour, boulanger, 1935. Fourth edition (revised and brought up to date)circa 1947. Published and sold by the author, Emile Dufour, Villeneuve-les-Bordes, Seine-et-Marne, France. Present edition (1957) printed by the S.G.I.C. 71 rue de Rennes, Paris. A valuable treatise, by a professional baker, on the constituents, the mixing, leavening, kneading, baking and sale of French household and fancy bread, croissants and brioches. Useful illustrations of bakery equipment and processes of bread mixing and baking.

A Book of Mediterranean Food.
Elizabeth David. John Lehmann 1950. Penguin edition (revised) 1955. 2nd Penguin edition (re-revised) 1965. John Lehmann edition (revised as for 1955 Penguin edition) issued by Macdonald, 1958.

French Country Cooking.
Elizabeth David. John Lehmann 1951. Penguin edition (revised) 1959. John Lehmann edition (revised) issued by Macdonald 1958.

Le Poisson dans la Cuisine Française.
H-P Pellaprat Flammarion 1954. La Cuisine Familiale. H-P Pellaprat. Flammarion. 1955. Pellaprat was one of the great teaching chefs of the 20th century. These two volumes are concerned with family and household cooking rather than with the
grande cuisine
for which Pellaprat is better known. Both books contain instructive and authentic illustrations.

Boulangerie d’Aujourdhui.
Félix Urbain-Dubois, avec la collaboration de Louis Champeault, Professeur à l’École de Boulangerie des Grands Moulins de Paris. Éditions Joinville, 48 rue Monsieur le Prince, Paris 6ième. Third edition 1956. Explains the technical processes of French bread making, plain and fancy. Includes cake and pastry recipes and a few French regional bakery specialities. For the same subject see also Emile Dufour’s book (1935) noted above.

Traditional Recipes of the Provinces of France.
Edited by Curnonsky. W. H. Allen 1961.

Translation in one volume, and including the original colour photographs, of the regional recipes from
Recettes et Paysages de France
(see page 468).

Larousse Gastronomique.
English translation and adaptation of Prosper Montagné’s great work of reference. Paul Hamlyn 1962.

Some of the original text has been modified, cut, or replaced with new material. The new English colour photographs lack the authenticity of the French originals. On the whole however the transposition into English of this very complex work has been creditably accomplished.

Cooking with Pomiane
. Translated and adapted by Peggie Benton from Dr. Edouard de Pomiane’s
Radio Cuisine books.
Faber & Faber 1962.

Dr. de Pomiane’s recipes have been admirably transposed into English usage and the spirit of his writing accurately conveyed by Peggie Benton. An entrancing book to read, and to cook from a highly instructive and successful one.

Meat at any Price
. Translation and adaptation by Peggie Benton of
Viande à Tous Prix
by Ninette Lyon. Faber & Faber 1963. Recipes sketchy, but Mrs. Benton’s explanations concerning the comparative French and English joints of meat and her notes on the cheaper cuts and ways of cooking them are valuable.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. Vol. 1. Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, Julia Child. Cassell & Co. 1963 (original American edition, Knopf 1961). Penguin edition 1966.

A very remarkable work indeed, dealing mainly with the finer French cooking. The techniques explained, and more authentically and fully explained than in any previous cookery book in the English language, are applicable to all French cooking of whatever category. The book is illustrated with instructive line drawings. An important reference book for every serious cook, amateur or professional.

La Cuisine Provençale de Tradition Populaire
. René Jouveau. Éditions du Message Berne 1963.

The author of this very interesting book is the son of Maurice Jouveau, one of the successors of Frédéric Mistral as leader of the Félibrige writers of the Provençal revival movement.

René Jouveau has concerned himself mainly with the food and the cooking, the wines, the produce, and the traditional festival customs of the country people of Provence in the 19th century. In a sense the book could be described as the kitchen supplement to the work of the Félibrige writers, for René Jouveau has researched into the composition of almost every dish mentioned, and into the origins of every piece of ancient food lore recorded by Mistral and his circle of Provençal poets and writers.

Odeurs de Forêt et Fumets de Table
. Charles Forot. Frontispice de Jean Chièze. Imprimerie Volle. Privas. 1963. Recollections of pre-1914 peasant and farmhouse cooking and gastronomy in the Vivarais and the Ardèche, with special reference to the works of Olivier de Serres, father of modern French horticulture and famous native son of the Ardèche. Some beautiful and unique recipes embodied in the text.

Cinq Mille Ans À Table
. Georges et Germaine Blond. 483 pp. Publisher and printer not disclosed. Undated. Circa 1965. A luxuriously produced and well written although necessarily sketchy history of food and cookery with special reference to the origins and evolution of the famous dishes of France. Illustrated with scores of high quality black and white reproductions, imaginatively chosen, of contemporary paintings, engravings, drawings, book illustrations, tapestries, frescoes. Particularly interesting as an indication of the tremendous appeal to generations of French artists of cooking pots, kitchens, and all aspects of the pleasures of the table.

Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery
. Jane Grigson. Michael Joseph, 1967. Penguin edition 1970. Also published as
The Art of Charcuterie
, Knopf, New York, 1967. A valuable work on the salting, curing and cooking of pork and other meats, as practised in French households as well as by professional
charcutiers.
Authentic recipes, a practical approach and good writing.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Vol. 2. Julia Child and Simone Beck. Michael Joseph, 1977 (original American edition, Knopf, 1970). The authors have carried their method of giving recipes in meticulous detail even further than in the first volume (see p. 474) of this remarkable work. For those who want to attempt the baking of various types of French bread, brioches, and croissants there are some fifty pages, with detailed explanatory drawings, devoted to this subject.

Good Things.
Jane Grigson. Michael Joseph, 1971. Penguin edition 1973. While not exclusively dealing with French cookery or French ingredients, the book offers many interesting and lesser known French country recipes.

Mediterranean Seafood
. Alan Davidson. Penguin, 1972. One of the most remarkable works on fish and fish cookery ever to appear in the English language. A reference book of great fascination, with recipes, some very rare, from all countries bordering the Mediterranean. There are clear line drawings of every fish, mollusc, and crustacean mentioned, with a description, and names given in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Tunisian.

La Cuisine du Compté de Nice
. Jacques Médecin. Julliard 1972.

Les Recettes de la Table Niçoise.
Raymond Aimisen, André Martin. Librairie Istra, Societe Alsacienne d’édition et de diffusion, 19 rue de l’ail, Strasbourg 1972.

A CHARMING young woman in eighteenth-century dress stands over a stove, sauté pan in hand. Behind her in the open fireplace something is cooking in a tall covered marmite set on a low trivet, on the table is a skinned fowl, on the alert at the cook’s feet sits the inevitable kitchen cat. Under the engraving the caption announces
Tous les ans nouvelle cuisine
,
car tous les ans changent
les
goûts.
The artist is Hubert François Gravelot, the date 1759. At the period
nouvelle cuisine
was in the news. The previous year, a third edition of François Marin’s
Les Dons de Comus,
one of the most influential cookery books of eighteenth-century France, had appeared.
Nouvelle cuisine
then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more. ‘The old cooking,
l’ancienne cuisine’
, wrote Marin in his reworked preface, ‘is that which the French made fashionable throughout Europe and which, not thirty years ago, was in almost general usage. Modern cooking, established on the foundations of the old, with less show and fewer encumbrances, although with just as much variety, is simpler, cleaner, more delicate, and perhaps even more accomplished.’ The old cooking was highly complex and infinitely intricate; modern cuisine is a kind of Chemistry. ‘The science of the Cook consists in the breaking down, rendering digestible & quintessentialising
³⁵
of foods; in the extraction of the nutritious but light juices; in blending and so combining them that no single element dominates yet each one makes its presence felt. In short to impart to them that Unity which Artists give to their colours. . . .’ It could almost be the voice of Prosper Montagné, of Fernand Point, of Michel Guérard.

Like today’s author-chefs, Marin was a professional cook. So was his contemporary, Menon, author of several fashionable works including
La Nouvelle Cuisine avec de nouveaux menus
etc. published in 1742, and the phenomenally successful
La Cuisinière Bourgeoise
of 1746, continuously in print for over a century, and again reprinted in 1981. These two men, and others whose works appeared anonymously—an unimaginable publishing event today—were the Guérards, the Vergés, the Troisgros, of the age of Louis XV. They wrote in strikingly similar terms of the newer, healthier, more delicate cuisine practised by themselves, and in the same vein made their admissions that successful innovation is based on a sound foundation of traditional methods. Marin remarked that as he was writing for everybody he must include a recipe for the pressed extracts of half-raw beef and mutton regarded as the basis of the
ancienne cuisine Gauloise
. So too do our present
nouvelle cuisine
chefs give their formulas for the concentrated
fonds blancs
and
fonds brun
which are the sauce foundations of Escoffier’s day, even if in practice some of them—Guérard and Vergé—evidently prefer bouillon cubes. Should that preference be regarded as a logical progression from the bad old days of the
ancienne cuisine
and its pressed meat juices? Or is it, on the contrary, an illogicality incompatible with the obsessive insistence, characteristic of all today’s
nouvelle
chefs, on the impeccable freshness and first-rate quality of every ingredient which passes through their kitchen doors? It’s quite a puzzle to decide. Fortunately, as Roger Verge obligingly remarks—and I would suggest his book is the best one to start with for anyone new to this
nouvelle
style of our time—a recipe is not meant to be followed exactly and cooking is a matter of interpretation. Reject what displeases you. Make the best use of the good ideas. There is much to learn from the four books listed below. The fads and foibles, sometimes exasperating, may be excused as those of innovators. They need not be imitated. No doubt tomorrow’s
moderne
or
nouvelle
school is already forming up, preparing to denounce the excesses and the faults of today’s professionals.

In that context, Kingsley Amis, in a review of a recent book on British restaurant cooking
³⁶
remarked that when he goes out to eat he wants properly cooked food, not a history lesson. It would be hard to disagree with him. All the same, even a brief study of French culinary history does help us to an understanding of the ever-evolving styles of French professional cooking, and goes far to put the quirks and the pretensions of our present
nouvelle cuisine
chefs into perspective. It is not quite a case of
tous les ans changent les goûts
, but French food fads certainly do come in waves. One of the eighteenth-century
nouvelle
cooks, Menon, was over-addicted to chives and shallots; Marin’s quintessences became a subject for public mockery; in 1765 Voltaire complained of the excessive use of morels and mushrooms and said he found the fashionable essence of ham detestable.

In today’s
nouvelle cuisine
it’s chervil and sorrel all the way, raspberry vinegar on every restaurant kitchen shelf, and of course truffles by the basketful and larders bursting with
foie gras.
Paul Bocuse, whose book is about updated
cuisine
classique
rather than
nouvelle cuisine
is addicted mainly to his own renown but also to conspicuous waste (see below), and truffle consommé served under a pastry crust. What will be next year’s fad? Little carrot-shaped white turnips are becoming popular, and deservedly so. Hurry on the day they reappear in England. John Evelyn, after all, had them in his garden three hundred years ago. Why did they disappear? Celeriac is on the way up. The Troisgros call it
céléri boule
and serve it with a saute of duck
foie gras
. I don’t know how you’d cut celeriac in the shape and size of garlic cloves, but that’s what the Troisgros say. Guérard has his own ideas on celeriac. He makes it into a purée with rice and is so delighted with his invention that he tells us, pofaced, that his purée has
une saveur impertinente et presque exotique.
Bravo, M. Guérard. If that hasn’t already in France changed the image of celeriac as something that only comes in matchsticks with mayonnaise, then the French have lost their capacity for grasping at a wayward novelty and transforming it into high fashion.