Omelette and a Glass of Wine (11 page)

What has dismayed me as much as anything else has been the complacent attitude of customers and restaurateurs alike. Time and time again we watched the commercial travellers, those
commis voyageurs
of France who are supposed to be so knowledgeable and so critical when it comes to food, swallowing the indifferent stuff put before them without any apparent thought of complaint, criticism or protest. It was we, the traditionally undiscriminating English, who complained when a dish with an honourable regional name turned out to be a disgraceful travesty, when a sauce was indisputably prefabricated, when good fish was wrecked by overcooking – on one notable occasion the beautiful and exceedingly expensive little scallops we had been shown in their natural state were eventually brought to our table fried to cinders, on another some fresh chanterelles were massacred by the same clumsy treatment. Once even a basic
œuf sur le plat
was so badly cooked that it was stuck fast to the dish. (This in a restaurant boasting a Michelin star.) As for the managements of establishments where such things happen, they do not take kindly to criticism. With a shrug indicating that hard-to-please customers are not welcome they return to their television sets. Indeed, the television is another factor which has played its part in the downfall of French restaurant cooking. Come seven o’clock in the evening, the entire staff of many country hotels
is to be found clustered round the box. Arriving travellers are a disturbance and if you have not finished your dinner by nine thirty you are a nuisance. In this same context, how is it, I wonder, that English journalists so often give extravagant praise to the
relais routiers
when, nine times out of ten, not only is the food squalid and the wine lethal, but the television blares so loudly and so incessantly that even were Escoffier himself in the kitchen, it would today be impossible to enjoy a meal in a lorry drivers’ restaurant unless you were very deaf indeed?

On a less pessimistic note, agreeable surprises do sometimes happen. Last year, returning north via the Bordeaux main road, and still depressed by the recollection of an atrocious midday meal, we stopped for a glass of wine in an auberge scarcely a metre off the road. The proprietor was agreeable. His wine was good. There seemed to be evidence of care and conscientious innkeeping. We were so tired and so discouraged after the disgusting lunch that we decided to stay the night. We had rooms at the back, away from the roar of the traffic. Not that they would have earned a quiet sign in the Michelin guide – in my experience a number of hotels which do have such a sign shouldn’t – but the beds were comfortable, the water was hot, the proprietor and his young wife were making a great effort to compensate with welcoming service and decent cooking for the unfortunate situation of their auberge. This is not one of those humble-little-auberge-with-an-unrecognized-genius-in-the-kitchen stories. We didn’t eat anything extraordinary, although I remember excellent local sausages cooked by the patron over an open wood fire, making the whole place smell good. There was even – a great rarity nowadays in France – olive oil for the salad. Although the bill was not exactly small, it was fair. We left at daylight feeling, as travellers should, that we had been welcomed, comforted and cheered on our way. It was a good lesson in how the best hospitality is often to be found in the most unlikely of places, and more unlikely than an inn slap on the Bordeaux-Paris auto-route you could hardly find.

I cannot help wondering how much guide books are to blame for both deteriorating standards of cooking and for arousing exaggerated expectations in the minds of tourists. If the French themselves don’t complain is it because they don’t expect very much and are
therefore not disillusioned? It is not, heaven forbid, that one expects a Gastronomic Experience at every meal – although guide books do rather tend to overdo the promises – but simply that one hopes for honest raw materials, honestly cooked at honest prices. That, of course, is asking a great deal. The Michelin guide seems to think it is supplying the answer with those establishments it lists with a red R, indicating that you may expect a copious five-course meal at a fixed fair price. These are the restaurants I avoid. In my experience their cooking is mediocre and their menus are imitations of the overpowering bourgeois family meals of several generations ago. To be sure, such meals still survive in France. I remember one at a
pension de famille
in a village in the Vosges about 1968 or 1969. With my partner I was on a buying trip. We were making, rather unusually, a Saturday morning visit to a factory, a frying pan factory as it happened. We were invited to lunch in the village by the two brothers who ran the factory. Rather reluctantly we abandoned our plan to escape into the delicious countryside – it was early spring, the hedgerows were white with hawthorn blossom – and have a picnic lunch. We were introduced to the three ladies who ran the
pension
. Two were thin and spinsterish, like post office ladies, the third, a niece, was young and graceful. All were quiet and dignified. First, inevitably in the district, came a
quiche lorraine
. It was about fifteen inches across, served on a handsome, flat earthenware platter, the filling risen like a soufflé, supported only by the thinnest layer of pastry. (Note, by the way, that there was not, and in Lorraine there never is, cheese in the filling; it consists simply and solely of bacon, eggs and cream, and it is always baked in a tart tin, never in one of those hideous crinkly-rimmed china dishes which for reasons unclear to me have become fashionable in England as ‘quiche dishes’.) With the quiche came a salad of crisp little green leaves. These I have never exactly identified, but in the native habitat of the quiche they are its almost obligatory accompaniment, although in classy restaurants this very appropriate and welcome salad is seldom offered. After the quiche came a mighty platter of hot coarse country sausage, poached with vegetables. So far, so good, and it
was
good. Well fed, we sat back, expecting fruit and coffee. Vain expectation. One of the quiet thin ladies came in apologizing because the river trout she had planned to give us next had not after all been forthcoming. So,
les messieurs et dames
would excuse her if we went straight on to the roast. This turned out to be pigeons, in fact braised rather than roasted, served on another of
those spectacular large dishes and surrounded by whole apples, cooked in their skins and by some trick which I have never yet mastered, still rosy red. They were entirely delicious. The pigeons were less interesting. They were followed, with scarcely a pause, by the cheese of the country, a creamy géromé – a milder relation of Münster – flavoured with caraway seeds. Then came another cartwheel of pastry, this time filled with cherries, and served on the huge quiche platter. The brothers now proceeded to drink whisky as a liqueur, while we gratefully enjoyed our coffee (one of our hosts remarking that it was bad for the liver …) and a much-needed digestif of the local kirsch.

Such, not forgetting the missing fish course, was the composition of a real country lunch as taken for granted by the ladies who ran that
pension de famille
in the 1960s. It was not, I think, anything out of the ordinary in the region. It was the normal meal expected by the factory owners when they invited guests to eat with them. The food was good honest food, honestly cooked. There was no pretension and not the least ostentation about it. All the same, what a misguided meal. The quiche and the salad, both of them delicious and combining perfectly, would alone have been enough. The dishes which followed would have made two more meals.

Reflecting on that extraordinary village lunch, I do wonder – not for the first time – whether rather too much is said and written in praise of the delights of bourgeois French family food and its restaurant equivalent. With what joy and gratitude I remember, in contrast, meals in a pretty and elegant country restaurant which represented – alas that it must be written in the past tense – a very different way of French eating, although one owing just as much to tradition as the bucolic feast in the Vosges. La Mère Brazier’s restaurant in Lyon has been famous for decades – I wrote about it in
French Provincial Cooking
– and for many years the same lady had also a lunchtime establishment at the Col de la Luère, a few miles out of the city and high above its notorious fogs and damp. Airy and cool, surrounded by a large garden and much greenery, this was for a time my favourite restaurant in all France. The menu scarcely changed from year to year. With the exception of one dish of fish quenelles with a rather rich sauce, the food was all comparatively plain. There was no showing off, no fireworks. The calm confidence, the certitude that all here would be as it should which one felt upon entering the establishment was somehow communicated to
her customers by Madame Brazier herself, invisible though she was in the kitchen, and by her front-of-the-house staff. Her maître d’hôtel was a charming young woman – her daughter-in-law I believe – whose reassuring welcome to two English travellers arriving on a scorching summer day, hot, flustered, extremely late and despairing of lunch after a prolonged tangle with the Lyon motorway, was beautiful to hear. ‘But sit down. You have plenty of time. Relax. Shall I bring you some cool white wine? When you are a little rested you can order.’

Seasoned travellers in France will appreciate the rarity of our welcome. In nine hundred and ninety-nine restaurants out of a thousand in the French provinces it is useless to arrive for lunch after 1.30. Even less would one expect to find all the dishes on the menu still available and in prime condition. At the Mère Brazier’s the great speciality was her famous
poularde de Bresse
, chicken poached in broth with carrots and leeks – a refined version if you like of the
poule au pot
, the
poule
in the pot being an elderly hen, while the Brazier
poularde
is a young but fully grown chicken, plump and so tender that when she carved it for us, the maître d’hôtel used nothing but an ordinary and rather blunt-looking table knife. This modest little display of showmanship was the sole manifestation of its kind to be seen in this extraordinary restaurant, where everything, the food, the wine, the service, could best be described as of a sumptuous simplicity, but lighthearted and somehow all of a piece. There was a salad, I remember, of artichoke hearts and walnuts, delicate and refreshing. Desserts changed no more than the main dishes. They consisted of
fromage frais à la crème
, an apple tart with pastry as thin as a plate, and the vanilla-flavoured ice cream of the house. I tried this once. It was a beauty. But the soft snowy
fromage frais
with fresh cream poured over it was even better. Whichever sweet one chose, with it there was always offered – and seldom refused – a slice of brioche-like confection, very light and spongey. The Mère Brazier’s wines were the young Chiroubles and Brouillys of the Beaujolais region, and their white equivalents from Mâcon and Pouilly Fuissé. To my mind nothing could be more felicitous, in combination with the food and the surroundings and the general mood of the place, than those fresh, youthful, grapey wines. There was a gaiety and grace about lunches at the Col de la Luère which seemed to me to be most essentially French. The restaurant could have been in no country but France, the cooking practised by Madame Brazier and her
brigade was the cooking of the French provinces at its best and also its most traditional. While there was no concession to passing fad or fashion, there was also a singular lack of pomp, not a hint of the chill solemnity sometimes to be encountered in places where the cooking has a great reputation. Every dish was offered, it is true, with proper ceremony, and a meal was a serious affair, but in a totally unselfconscious way, and with a quite ungrasping attitude.

At the end of our lunch on that particular day (there was a sizeable party of Lyonnais business men treating themselves to a great deal of wine and cognac and to them perhaps we owed the late hour to which the kitchen remained open) Madame Brazier herself, in immaculate whites from head to foot, came into the dining room and sat down with a customer. She wasn’t doing the usual front-of-the-house round, asking for compliments, but as she passed our table I ventured to thank her for the hospitable welcome we had received and for her beautiful food. With a modest smile she said that
en effet
today it had been
pas mauvais
. Her comment reminded me of the anecdote recounted by Henry James concerning the boiled eggs, the bread and the butter he was served for a midday meal at an inn in Bourg-en-Bresse. ‘The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed, and as for the butter
nous sommes en Bresse et le beurre n’est pas mauvais
, the landlady said as she placed the article before me. It was the poetry of butter and I ate a pound or two of it.’ (
A Little Tour of France
, 1900.) There was, it seems to me, a closer affinity than might be thought between Henry James’s boiled eggs and poetry of butter and Madame Brazier’s calm, elegant and seemingly effortless cooking. Poetry was surely the apt word for all the food we had eaten that day at the Col de 1a Luère.

Experiences of such quality are rare anywhere. In France these days they are more likely to be connected with a picnic than with a meal in a restaurant. Picnics in France combine so many joys. First, the buying, to be done as often as possible in a market rather than in shops. At the stalls there is more choice, the produce is fresher and cheaper, buying is quicker, there is the chance of talking to the local people, of finding the country women who have brought in a basket of fresh cheeses, unsalted farm butter, perhaps a few bunches of sorrel, some garden radishes. There is the stimulus of seeing the abundance of produce and its magnificent quality. There is also, unless you are staying in the country on a self-catering basis, the
frustration of not being able to take armfuls of it home to cook for yourself. And yet again it must be asked why do the restaurants nowadays so seldom offer a dish of fresh vegetables on their menus? What has become of the homely vegetable soup which used to appear nightly on all country restaurant and hotel menus?