Omelette and a Glass of Wine (10 page)

This was our luncheon menu:

Saucisse en feuilletage:
This might be called the apotheosis of the sausage roll. A fresh, pure pork sausage (from the Montagne establishment, as I had already learned), coarsely cut and weighing about ¾ lb, is poached and then encased in flaky pastry, baked, and served hot, cut in slices. Both sausage and pastry were first class. A delicious hors-d’œuvre.

Pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal:
This seemed even better, if possible, than the first time we had eaten it, and this is quite a test, for one is inclined to be more critical when tasting a famous dish for the second time. The chef at Barattero’s has been cooking the
pain d’écrevisses
, and the other specialities of the house, almost every day for some thirty years, but even so I suppose it is possible that they might vary.

Artichauts Escoffier:
I am always in two minds about dishes of this kind. The cream sauce with mushrooms was very light and did not overwhelm the artichoke hearts, but all the same I wonder if they are not better quite plain; at La Mère Brazier’s in Lyon we had had a salad of whole artichoke hearts and lettuce dressed simply
with a little oil and lemon, which, in its extreme simplicity, was quite delicious and the best artichoke dish I have ever eaten.

Poulet rôti:
A
poulet de grain
(the equivalent of a spring chicken) for two people, perfectly roasted in butter, already carved but reconstituted into its original shape, served on a long platter with a nest of miniature
pommes rissolées
beside it. No other garnish.

For dinner that evening we tasted again the wonderful duck pâté, to be followed by a little roast
gigot
and another dish of those tender little
petits pois
. When we told the waiter how much we had enjoyed the lamb, he replied yes, certainly, it must be a treat to us after the mutton boiled with mint of English cookery. Some very quaint notions of English food are current in France.

The last customers were only just leaving as we ourselves said goodbye to Madame Barattero after dinner, for we were leaving early next morning. The place had seemed full to us, but it was the time of the Algerian crisis, and had it not been for
les évènements
, Madame said, there would have been twice as many people. Customers would have come even from Paris. In her long, arduous and successful career as restaurateur and hotel keeper she has learned that you can never be quite sure what to expect, and even with her tremendous experience it is impossible to know how many people to cater for. As she says: ‘Thirty-four years in the hotel business, what a stint, hein?’

Vogue
, September 1958

*

Since writing my introductory note to the above I have received reassuring news of the food at the Hôtel du Midi. In June 1983 a reader who had stayed at Lamastre as a result of reading about Madame Barattero in
French Provincial Cooking
wrote me a charming letter telling me that the dinner had been ‘most delicious’. The first course had been a
salade tiède – ‘ce que nous avons ici de la nouvelle cuisine’,
she was told – but as you would expect subtle and different, followed by the celebrated
pain d’écrevisses
(the crayfish now come from Hungary), then there were cheeses, and a
chariot de desserts,
stylish, original
‘d’un goût très raffiné’. ‘Tout est léger ici’
said the maître d’hôtel. There was an iced
soufflé aux marrons,
a pistachio sorbet, oranges in grenadine
, tuile tulips
filled with a cream of strawberries served with a
coulis.
Bernard, son of maître Perrier, the chef who became Madame
Barattero’s partner, and inherited from her the restaurant and hotel, of which he is now in charge, has succeeded his father as chef. It was Bernard, I learned, who had added the delicious desserts. The maître d’hôtel had said that they were the only missing elements in the range of dishes in the old days, and they are Bernard’s contribution. I remember Bernard Perrier as a small boy, and I remember also how Madame Barattero predicted that in time he would follow in his father’s footsteps. It was good to hear that the young man is fulfilling Madame’s prophecy and that the Hôtel du Midi continues to flourish
.

Dishes for Collectors

A dish of pork and prunes seems a strange one to chase two hundred miles across France, and indeed it was its very oddity that sent me in search of it. The combination of meat with fruit is not only an uncommon one in France, it is one which the French are fond of citing as an example of the barbaric eating habits of other nations, the Germans and the Americans in particular. So to find such a dish in Tours, the very heart of sane and sober French cookery, is surprising, even given the fact that the local prunes are so renowned.

I knew where we would go to look for the dish because I had seen it on the menu of the Rôtisserie Tourangelle on a previous occasion, when there were so many other interesting specialities that it just hadn’t been possible to get round to the
quasi de porc aux pruneaux
. But this time I hoped perhaps to find out how the dish was cooked as well as in what manner such a combination had become acceptable to conservative French palates.

Driving out of Orléans toward Tours I observed for the first time the ominous entry in the new
Guide Michelin
concerning the Rôtisserie Tourangelle: ‘
Déménagement prévu
’ it said. Very well, we would get to Tours early, we would enquire upon entering the town whether by some ill-chance the restaurant was at this moment in the throes of house-moving. If so, we would not stay in Tours, but console ourselves by driving on to Langeais, where there was a hotel whose cooking was said to be worth the journey. The evening was to be our last before driving north towards Boulogne, so we specially didn’t want to make a hash of it. But we had plenty of time,
the afternoon was fine, the Loire countryside lay before us in all its shining early summer beauty. We dawdled along, making a détour to Chenonceaux on the way.

So in the end it was after seven o’clock by the time we had battled into the main street of Tours, found the Office of the Syndicat d’Initiative, and made our enquiry. No, said the pretty and efficient young lady in charge, the house-moving of the Rôtisserie Tourangelle had not yet started. All was well. ‘
Déménagement prévu
, indeed’, said my companion, ‘what a fuss. It’ll be
prévu
for the next two years’. Fifteen minutes later the car had been manœuvred into the courtyard of the charming Hotel Central, we had booked our room, the luggage was unloaded. As we were about to get into the lift I returned to the desk and asked the lady in charge if she would be so kind as to telephone
chez
Charvillat and book us a table, for we were already late. As I walked away, I heard her saying into the telephone ‘
Comment, vous êtes fermé
?’

Yes, the
déménagement
had started that day. Closed for a fortnight. Well, it was hardly the fault of the charming girl at the Syndicat, but … anyway, it was now too late to move on to Langeais. We must eat at Tours and make the best of it. By the time I had explained the magnitude of the disaster to Madame at the desk, she and I were both nearly in tears. For she perfectly grasped the situation, and did not think it at all odd that we had driven two hundred miles simply to eat
chez
Charvillat. But all the restaurants in Tours, she said, were good. We would eat well wherever we went. Yes, but would we find that dish of
porc aux pruneaux
which by this time had become an obsession? And in any case what restaurant could possibly be as nice, as charming, as comfortable, as altogether desirable as that of M. Charvillat?

Madame spent the next twenty minutes telephoning round Tours on our behalf, and eventually sent us, somewhat consoled, to a well-known restaurant only two minutes walk from the hotel. I wish I could end this story by saying that the place was a find, a dazzling revelation, a dozen times better than the one we had missed. But it was not as dramatic as that. It was indeed a very nice restaurant, the head waiter was friendly, and we settled down to some entirely entrancing white Vouvray while they cooked our
alose à l’oseille –
shad grilled and served with a sauce in the form of a runny sorrel purée. In this respect at least we had timed things properly, for the shad makes only a short seasonal appearance in the Loire. It was extremely good and nothing like as bony as shad is
advertised to be. Then came this restaurant’s version of the famous pork dish, which turned out to be made with little noisettes of meat in a very remarkable sauce and of course we immediately felt reproved for doubting for one moment that an intelligent French cook could make something splendid out of even such lumpish-sounding ingredients as pork and prunes.

It
was
worth all the fuss, even for the sauce alone. But, almost inevitably, it was something of an anticlimax. The combination of a long day’s drive, the sampling during the day of the lovely, poetical wines of Pouilly and of Sancerre
sur place
(and whatever anyone may say, they
do
taste different on the spot), a hideously ill-advised cream cake at an Orléans patisserie, the alternating emotions of triumph and despair following so rapidly one upon the other, not to mention a very large helping of the shad and sorrel, had wrecked our appetities. By this time it was known throughout the restaurant that some English had arrived especially to eat the
porc aux pruneaux
. The helpings, consequently, were very large. By the time we had eaten through it and learned how it was cooked, we were near collapse, but the maître-d’hôtel and the patronne were just warming up. If we were interested in local recipes, what about their
brochet au beurre blanc
and their
poulet à l’estragon
, and their
dodine de canard
? To be sure, we should have had that duck as an hors-d’œuvre, but just a slice or two now, to taste, and then at least we would have some local cheeses and a sweet?

Curiosity overcame prudence. We did indeed try their
dodine de canard
, which was not the
daube
of duck in red wine usually associated with this name, but a very rich cold duck galantine, which would have been delicious as an hors-d’œuvre, but after all that pork … Cravenly, we ordered coffee. No salad? No cheese? No dessert?

As we paid our bill, expressed our thanks, and left with the best grace we could muster, I was miserably aware that we had failed these kindly and hospitable people and left them with the feeling that we did not appreciate their food.

It was a long time before I had the courage to set to work on that recipe. When I did, and saw once more the row of little pork noisettes, the bronze and copper lights of the shining sauce, the orderly row of black, rich, wine-soaked prunes on the long white dish, I thought that indeed it had been worth the journey to learn how to make something as beautiful as that. One day, with a better appetite and more stamina, I will go back to that restaurant in Tours
and make amends for the evening when justice to their cookery was not done.

Vogue
, November 1958

This is one of the pieces omitted from
French Provincial Cooking
because my publishers thought the book was too long, I’m sure they were right. Later the piece appeared in Cyril Ray’s
Compleat Imbiber
No. 5 under the title
The Day that Justice Wasn’t Done.
The recipes which accompanied the original
Vogue
article were for
noisettes de porc aux pruneaux,
followed by a real collector’s dish
, sauce au vin du Médoc.
Both were published in
French Provincial Cooking.
The pork and prune recipe has been one of the most used and most heavily adapted in the whole book. I don’t remember hearing much more of the other one, which was passed on to me by Miss Patricia Green via Madame Bernard, wife of a Médoc wine grower. The dish is essentially a peasant one, and consists of a mixture of meats and furred game: rabbit, hare, stewing beef, pork, or any combination of them, with shallots, a bottle of red wine, carrots, aromatics, the sauce thickened and darkened by the addition of a small amount of plain chocolate. This last ingredient dates the dish back as far as the first half of the eighteenth century or even earlier. It may well have originated in the days when Spanish chocolate makers settled in Bayonne, not after all so far away from the Bordelais
.

Eating out in Provincial France 1965–1977

How is it that French restaurant cooking has so notably, so sadly, deteriorated during the past two or three decades? I think there are several reasons. Among them I would say the main one has a good deal to do with the conservatism of the French themselves in matters of eating. In the vast majority of French restaurants, at no matter what level, the order of the menu has remained unchanged for fifty years. The number of courses and the copiousness of the helpings remain undiminished. What has suffered from shrinkage is the quality of the raw materials, of the cooking skills and also, I would say, the critical faculties of the customers.

Lest it be thought that I am basing my observations on two or three isolated experiences, or on a restricted category of restaurant, or on the restaurants of one region only, I must make it clear that between 1965 and 1972 I made yearly and often twice-yearly trips to France on business, spending an average of two to three weeks at a time travelling all over the country, staying in different hotels night after night, eating in every type of restaurant from village inns to the occasional two-star or even three-star establishment. On the whole our journeys did not take us to tourist haunts, and certainly never in the tourist season. We kept away from motorways and motels, staying often in the hotels patronized by commercial travellers. During the subsequent three years my visits to France were less frequent and less extended, and being no longer concerned in any business venture I was free to pick and choose hotels and restaurants, and to stay in one place for several days if I felt so inclined. So it is with some experience that I record the melancholy fact that during those fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals in France, and more expensively – a bad meal is always expensive – than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.