Omelette and a Glass of Wine (34 page)

Italian and Bulgarian canned peeled tomatoes are terrific value.
¹
Used occasionally and in very small quantities they work wonders for chicken and fish stocks and soups, pizza fillings and sauces made from insufficiently ripe tomatoes. Used to excess they become monotonous and sickly. Two to three tablespoons of tinned tomatoes are enough for a sauce made from 2 lb. of the fresh fruit or for 3 pints of stock.

Cookery book instructions to ‘de-seed’ tomatoes or squeeze out the watery parts before cooking are unrealistic; the water content of tomatoes is 94 per cent and the sole effective way to get rid of it is by evaporation. On the degree of evaporation or reduction to which the tomatoes are subjected the flavour of the sauce very largely depends. A tomato sauce can be completely changed by two or three minutes more or less of reduction or concentration by steady simmering. Demonstration of this point makes an illuminating cookery/chemistry lesson. As for the ideal consistency of a tomato sauce to go with, or to be incorporated in, any given dish, a cookery-student’s thesis could be written on the subject, and for all I know already has been.

When the potentialities of the tomato were first being explored in the nineteenth century, it was nearly as often used for sweet dishes as for sauces and soups. French cookery books of the period nearly all include recipes for tomato jam. Escoffier gives a couple, and in England an eight-volume
Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery
, published in 1899, gives a formula for candied tomatoes, several for jam, and another for green tomatoes to be stewed in a sugar syrup and eaten cold with cream. Evidently even tomato soups were heavily sweetened. A booklet put out in 1900 by the Franco-American Food Company of Jersey City made the point that its canned tomato soup was a spiced rather than a sweet one, ‘and our increasing sales of this variety show that it suits the taste of the majority. Sugar could be added “when desired”.’

Although slightly strange, tomato jam is a most delicate and attractive preserve, with the charm of the unfamiliar. It is worth trying, even if only in a very small quantity.

*

First published in
Nova,
July 1965. The second half of the article reappeared in my
Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English
Kitchen,
1970, so did the recipes which followed the introductory essay. These I do not repeat here, but my version of Boulestin’s sweet tomato conserve, which I had intended to include in the same book and which is indeed indexed as appearing in it, somehow got away. The recipe is neither long nor complicated. For those who grow their own tomatoes or can buy from the market when the fruit is cheap, here it is
:

TOMATO PRESERVE

This may sound freakish but is a delicate and beautiful preserve. Evidently it was one of Marcel Boulestin’s favourite sweetmeats; a recipe for tomato jam or preserve appears in every one of his cookery books.

2 lbs. of very ripe and sweet tomatoes, 2 lbs of sugar, a vanilla bean, ½ pint of water.

In a wide preserving pan boil the sugar and water to a syrup. Add the tomatoes, skinned and sliced. Boil steadily, stirring fairly often, for about 35 minutes. Put in the vanilla bean (vanilla essence will not do). Cook for approximately 10 to 15 minutes longer or until setting point is reached. Remove the vanilla pod, skim the jam, and let it cool for a few minutes before turning it into small jars.

Tomato jam is particularly good when eaten in the French way, as a sweet,
¹
with fresh cream cheese or plain pouring cream.

TOMATO HONEY

This is a recipe I tried in 1973 and found excellent. It is of American origin and comes from
Miss Leslie’s Complete Cookery
, Philadelphia, 1837.

‘To each pound of tomatoes, allow the grated peel of a lemon and six fresh peach leaves. Boil them slowly till they are all to pieces; then squeeze and strain them through a bag. To each pint of liquid allow a pound of loaf-sugar, and the juice of one lemon. Boil them together half an hour, or till they become a thick jelly. Then put it into glasses, and lay double tissue paper closely over the top. It will be scarcely distinguishable from real honey.’

Be sure to use really juicy tomatoes for this preserve, or the yield of juice will be very small, and at best will not be more than 1 pint from 2½ lb. of fruit. Peach leaves being unavailable in my strip of London back garden, I used instead a few drops of real almond
essence, towards the end of the cooking, when the juice and sugar are on the boil.

Tomato honey is excellent with pork, especially the salted or pickled variety, and goes nicely too with lamb, as a change from redcurrant or mint jelly.

Escoffier and the canned tomato industry

It is interesting to learn that Escoffier played an important part in the creation of the canned tomato industry. According to his own testimony, when he was Chef de Cuisine at the Petit Moulin Rouge restaurant in the Champs Elysées in the mid 1870s
¹
he had had the idea of preserving tomatoes in such a way that they would replace fresh ones at any season. At the time tomato purée for the restaurant was preserved in champagne bottles which were then sterilised (a method which was demonstrated to me by the cook at a
pensione
in Anacapri where I stayed during the summer of 1952, and which I described in
Italian Food.
The same method was used by country people in Spain in the 1960s and probably still is. The bottles didn’t have to be champagne bottles. Any wine bottles would do).

To Escoffier the disadvantage of the bottled purée was that it could only be used for sauces, so he set about evolving a method which would ensure a supply of crushed tomatoes – by which he meant
tomates concassées –
for any dish which required them whenever the fresh fruit was unobtainable. Having experimented to his own complete satisfaction – he does not say what method he used – he contacted various firms of food manufacturers, among them La Maison Gilbert at Lambesc in the Bouches-du-Rhone, and La Maison Caressa at Nice. Finding that neither firm was interested, and that further attempts to get the idea taken up had failed, Escoffier dropped the matter until after he had taken charge of the Savoy Hotel kitchens. In August one year he spent a few days holiday at Saxon-les-Bains in the Rhône Valley, where he had an interest in a fruit preserving factory. It so happened that the summer was an exceptionally hot one, the yield of tomatoes in the region was unusually high, and ‘taking advantage of this wonderful opportunity, two thousand
2
kilo cans of crushed tomato were manufactured and despatched at once to the Savoy Hotel.
’

Still recounting his own story, Escoffier reported that the following year the factory at Saxon, all set to manufacture a quantity of the canned crushed tomatoes, was obliged to abandon the project because of the loss of the tomato crop owing to periods of intense cold that summer. Escoffier was not the man to let go easily. Returning to the Maison Caressa at Nice, he persuaded the factory which had turned down the project fifteen years earlier to manufacture ‘a certain quantity’ of 2 kilo cans of crushed tomato according to his own specification. The new product was an immense success, its fame spread rapidly, the following year the Maison Caressa canned 60,000 kilos of tomatoes and the director thanked Escoffier – as a friend – for his advice.

The story of the Escoffier canned crushed tomatoes is told in
George Auguste Escoffier
by Eugène Herbodeau and Paul Thalamas, published by the Practical Press Ltd, London, 1955 (pp.99–104). The authors do not acknowledge the source of Escoffier’s account, but recount that it was during his days as an army chef de cuisine at the siege of Metz in 1870 that he had first grasped the necessity of improving the techniques of canning food. Again, according to Escoffier himself, a Paris factory, the Maison Fontaine, took up the canned tomato industry, the whole department of the Vaucluse started to specialise in the same business, and it was only after the events recorded by him that Italy and America introduced their own versions of canned tomatoes. Escoffier’s story is entirely credible. He was not one to make exaggerated claims, and scarcely needed to. He was in any case always an innovator. But what happened to the crushed tomatoes which had been such a success? Were they abandoned in favour of whole canned tomatoes?

1.
Written in 1965. Friends living in Spain now (1984) tell me that the old ridged, sweet-tasting tomatoes have all but vanished. You may see them in Spanish still-life paintings, but not in the markets. The so-called beefsteak tomatoes we now buy in England are hot-house grown in Holland, and I believe, in Guernsey.

1.
Was it optimism or naïveté on my part which made me express such a belief? Look at the Chinese gooseberry or Kiwi fruit. It is a pretty colour, but not a very interesting fruit. The moment the French restaurant chefs took it up, it became a luxury, now sells at absurdly inflated prices, and figures in every other new style dessert recipe and often with duck, with game birds, even with fish. It is not its merit which dictates its presence in those dishes. It is its known high price. The same could be said of the out of season imported asparagus three pieces of which appear in every
salade tiède
and on every plate of
noisettes d’agneau au sabayon de poireaux.

1.
In 196 5 Bulgarian canned tomatoes were easily available, but it is now many years since I have seen them in English shops.

1.
See
Letting Well Alone
, p. 46 and
Foods of Legend
, p. 249.

1.
Escoffier remained at this restaurant from 1873 to 1878.

English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes

In the late forties and the early fifties, every new member of the Wine and Food Society received, together with a copy of the current number of the Society’s quarterly magazine and a membership card, a pamphlet entitled
Pottery
, or
Home Made Potted Foods, Meat and Fish Pastes, Savoury Butters and Others.
The little booklet was a Wine and Food Society publication, the author’s name was concealed under the whimsical pseudonym of ‘A Potter’, and the date was 1946.

The Wine and Food Society’s propaganda in favour of homemade potted meats and fish was premature. In those days of rationing and imitation food we associated fish paste and potted meat with the fearful compounds of soya bean flour, dried egg and dehydrated onions bashed up with snoek or Spam which were cheerfully known as ‘mock crab paste’ and ‘meat spread’. By 1954, when fourteen years of rationing came to an end none of us wanted to hear another word of the makeshift cooking which potted meats and fish pastes seemed to imply.

It was not until ten years later that we began to see that in fact these very English store-cupboard provisions, so far from being suited to the cheese-paring methods necessitated by desperate
shortages, demand first-class basic ingredients and a liberal hand with butter. It is indeed essential to understand that the whole success of the recipes described in this booklet depends upon these factors, and upon the correct balance of the ingredients.

Hungry as we are today for the luxury; of authenticity and for visual elegance, we find that the Potter’s work makes enticing reading: ‘How delicious to a schoolboy’s healthy appetite sixty years ago, was a potted meat at breakfast in my grandmother’s old Wiltshire home. Neat little white pots, with a crust of yellow butter suggesting the spicy treat beneath, beef, ham or tongue, handiwork of the second or third kitchenmaid…’

The Potter whose grandmother employed the second and third kitchenmaids in question was, M. André Simon tells me, Major Matthew Connolly (father of Mr Cyril Connolly); and with his felicitous evocation of a mid-Victorian country breakfast table and those second and third kitchenmaids pounding away at the ham and tongue for potting he makes a number of points, most relevant of which concerns the kitchenmaids. What but the return of these handmaidens to our kitchens in the re-incarnated form of electric mixers, blenders and beaters
¹
has made the revival of one of our most characteristic national delicacies a feasible proposition? Then, the neat little white pots, the crust of yellow butter, there is something fundamentally and uniquely English in the picture evoked by Major Connolly. It is a picture which belongs as much to the world of Beatrix Potter (Major Connolly would no doubt have appreciated the coincidental pun) as to that of the military gentleman from Bath, making it doubly an insult that the mass-produced pastes and sandwich spreads of the factories should go by the honourable names of potted meat, potted ham, tongue, lobster, salmon, shrimp and the rest. Potted shrimps alone remain as the sole representative of these products to retain something of its original nature, although a few smoked haddock pastes are beginning to appear on London restaurant menus. These are usually somewhat absurdly listed as haddock pâté, or pâré de haddock fumé, In an expensive Chelsea restaurant I have even seen – and eaten – a mixture called
rillettes écossaises
or ‘pâté of Arbroath smokies with whisky’. The dish was good, but to label such a mixture
rillettes
when this is a word applicable exclusively to potted fat pork, or pork with goose or rabbit, does seem to touch the fringe of restaurateur’s lunacy. For that matter, I find it sad that Arbroath smokies, the most delicate, expensive and rare of all the smoked haddock tribe, should be subjected to such treatment. Simply heated through in the oven with fresh butter, smokies are to me one of the most exquisite of our national specialities.