Omelette and a Glass of Wine (44 page)

BLETTES À LA CRÈME

This is a very everyday dish in the southern Rhône country. Just how good it is depends mainly upon how much care one takes over the cream sauce. For 1 ½ lb. of
blettes
or
poirée
, the chard which one sees displayed for sale in huge bundles in every market in the southern Rhône country make a cream sauce with 1½ oz. of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour, ⅓ pint of milk, seasonings of salt, pepper and nutmeg and about 3 oz. of double cream.

Melt the butter; then, off the stove, stir in the flour. When it is smooth start adding the warmed milk, little by little. When the mixture looks creamy, return the saucepan to a very low heat, add the rest of the milk. Season lightly with salt, freshly milled pepper and a scrap of nutmeg. Let the sauce almost imperceptibly bubble for fifteen to twenty minutes, stirring frequently.

Now add the cream. The sauce should be very smooth, ivory-coloured and no thicker than cream. You can now if you like add a tablespoon or two of finely grated Gruyère or Parmesan cheese, just as a seasoning. And if your sauce has turned lumpy, press it through a sieve.

Clean the chard, discard the hard leaf stalks
¹
and central veins, cook it in just a very little water, salt it lightly half way through the cooking. Drain it in a colander, press out excess moisture by putting a plate and weight on top. Chop it roughly.

In a
gratin
dish pour a little of your cream sauce. On top put the
chard and cover with the rest of the sauce. The
gratin
dish should be quite full. Spread a few tiny knobs of butter over the surface, heat in a moderate oven, gas no. 4, 350°F., for about 20 minutes, until the sauce is just faintly golden and bubbling.

Of course, all this is a trouble to do, but it makes an excellent and not very expensive first dish for a luncheon for four people. It is one I often serve before a simple meat dish, beef, lamb or veal, which is probably already cooking in the oven before the vegetable dish goes in.

Vogue
, May 1960

1.
Or save them for a separate dish. Cut into inch lengths and gently cooked in olive oil with a little garlic they are rather good.

Oules of Sardines

What put the French fifty years ahead of any other nation when the sardine-canning industry developed in the nineteenth century was a combination of two circumstances; first, the fishermen of southern Brittany had evolved, for their own household consumption, a method of preserving their sardines which produced something more delicate than the primitive dried, salted and pressed fish of ancient Mediterranean tradition; they cooked their sardines in their own plentiful local butter or in olive oil imported from the south, packed them in clay jars called
oules
, and sealed them with more butter or oil. (The system sounds rather like the one used for preserving pork and goose in south-western France.) The delicacy came to be much appreciated by the prosperous shipbuilders and merchants of Nantes, the great trading port of the Loire estuary; and it was a Nantais confectioner, Joseph Colin, who in the early years of the nineteenth century first saw the possibilities of applying to the local method of preserving sardines the tinning process then being developed by a colleague, François Appert, by trade a confectioner-distiller, and by inclination an amateur chemist and scientist whose experiments with the preservation of food in bottles, jars and tins, hermetically sealed and then sterilized at high temperature, heralded the tinned-food era.

By 1824 Joseph Colin had established a sardine-tinning factory in the rue des Salorges at Nantes. The birth of the industry was attended by not unfamiliar wrangles, rivalries and complaints from the public. Colin’s successful methods – he soon discovered that olive oil made the better preserving agent for sardines, and dropped the butter recipe – were almost immediately copied by competitors. In 1830 a Nantais restaurateur called Millet turned his establishment, situated in the heart of the residential quarter of the town, into a sardine-canning factory. The smell of the frying fish outraged the residents. Millet, brought to court in 1835, was forced to move his factory to the outskirts of the town. In 1838 another of Joseph Colin’s rivals had the bright idea of taking into the firm a man who happened also to bear the name Joseph Colin; making him a partner, the firm proceeded to sell their products under precisely the same name as that of the originator. Another lawsuit followed – and put an end to the scandal.

For nearly fifty years sardine canning remained a French monopoly. It was not until the 1880s that competition from Spanish, Portuguese and American tinners, using cheaper processes and inferior grades of fish which were often not even true sardines, began to hit the French producers. By 1912 they felt driven into taking action to protect the industry from misrepresentation.

Sardines as understood in America and Canada were then and are still essentially a tinned product of which no equivalent in a fresh state exists in transatlantic waters; the only concession to exactitude obtained by the French from the American producers was that the place of origin of the tinned fish should be stated on their labels; and so the Americans have American-tinned herrings sold as Maine sardines, Canadian herrings labelled Canadian sardines, Norwegian sprats called Norwegian sardines and sometimes even Norwegian anchovies; so has arisen the confusion in the minds of the public as to whether or not there is actually and in fact any such animal as a sardine.

In England as well as in France matters are otherwise. The action brought in the English courts in 1912 by the French against an English importer selling Norwegian brisling (sprats) as sardines was finally settled in 1914 in favour of the French.

In England from that time on – which was presumably also the moment when the trade name of ‘skippers’ was invented for sprats – a sardine in a tin must be a sardine, and not a sprat or brisling, a herring or sild, a pilchard, an anchovy nor any other of the fish which belong to the same main family of Clupeas, but the
Sardinia pilchardus
or
Clupea pilchardus
Walbaum, the name by which the true sardine is now generally known. But just to add to the confusion there are several sub-divisions of the true sardine; the creature varies in numerous characteristics, as does the herring, according to the waters in which it is found, the food it eats, its degree of maturity. The Cornish pilchard is in fact a sardine, large and old and bearing only a small resemblance in appearance and flavour to the sardine of the Nantais canners, which is essentially a small and immature fish of which there are two main qualities, the finest not more than two years old – the age is indicated by rings on the scales – and measuring not more than seventeen centimetres from head to tail; the second, a year older and somewhat larger. The Portuguese sardine is again another variation, larger still and with one more vertebrae than the Breton sardine.

A director of Philippe et Canaud, the oldest existing and largest-
producing sardine-canning firm of Nantes, had stern words to say about the way the English treat sardines. ‘Our fine sardines,’ he said, ‘should not be cooked. At an English meal I was given
hot
sardines, on cold toast. It was most strange. They were my sardines and I could not recognize them. The taste had become coarse. Perhaps for inferior sardines … but ours are best just as they are. A little cayenne or lemon if you like, and butter with sardines is traditional in France, although they are fat, and do not really need it. But, please, no shock treatment.’

One sympathizes. Shortages and much-advertised cheaper replacements have rather made us forget that best-quality French sardines are products of some delicacy, a treat rather than an everyday commodity. Production is small – about one-fifth of that of Portugal – the process is expensive, the hazards a perpetual worry. A member of the Amieux family and of the famous firm which bears their name told me something about the sardine-canning business. It is chancy, a gamble almost, even after 140 years of existence.

Sardines are migratory fish; their habits are notoriously unpredictable; the catch is seasonal; the factories operate approximately from May to October only; for several years there may be – and have been – shortages; then perhaps suddenly a glut. In a good year the Amieux firm will can up to 30,000 tons; in a poor one output may be as little as 6,000 tons. And since the sardine is one of the most perishable of all fish, depending for its delicacy upon its absolute freshness, the Nantais firms, who all deal in many other products besides sardines, have established special factories on the coast and close to the Breton and Vendéen fishing ports such as Douarnenez, the Ile d’Yeu, the Sables d’Olonne, St-Guénolé, Quiberon, Le Croisic, La Rochelle. Once into port, the sardine fishers rush their catches to auction; 15,000 kilos is the minimum quantity of any use at any one time to the Amieux factories. Raced from auction to factory, the sardines are decapitated and degutted, rinsed, plunged into a mild brine – made with salt from the Breton salt marshes – for anything from a few minutes to half an hour according to size; rinsed again, arranged on great grids, dried briefly in a current of warm air, rapidly fried (no more than a few seconds in the sizzling oil), drained, packed in their tins, covered with fresh olive oil selected by an expert taster for the purpose; the sardines are going to mature in that oil, and acquire some of its flavour; its quality is of prime importance. Finally, as required by French law,
the sealed tins are stamped with code figures which indicate the date of tinning, and then sterilized at a temperature of 112°C.

In essentials, the present-day French process is the same as the one evolved by Joseph Colin, the sardine-tinning pioneer; other and cheaper methods have been tried; some, such as the Portuguese one of steaming instead of frying the sardines, have proved successful and popular; but the French canners consider that for finesse of flavour and texture, the olive-oil-frying system has never been equalled.

Ideally, the Nantais producers say, sardines in olive oil would be kept at least a year before they are passed on to the consumer; and after two years are at their best. Nowadays, though, unless one were to lay down stocks of sardines, one would not get them in this condition. The 1962 season has been a comparatively good one, but it follows five poor sardine years on the Brittany and Vendée coasts; the entire production has been going out to the wholesalers and retailers within months.

Dried and salted sardines were known it seems to the Romans. In the days of the Empire the Sardinians traded their product all over Italy and as far as Gaul. When the sardine fishing industry got under way on the Atlantic coasts of the Vendée and Brittany, round about the sixteenth century, much the same primitive methods of preservation must have been used. Henry IV, the Béarnais who so often crops up in the mythology of French gastronomy, was apparently inordinately fond of salt sardines. By the seventeenth century the French Treasury was already exacting taxes from the sardine industry which included among its activities the sale of by-products such as oil for lamps and for the tanners, obtained from pressed sardines, and manure from the debris of the fish to be salted.

The Spectator
, 12 October 1962

*

As a postscript to
Oules of Sardines,
written twenty-two years ago, I should like to quote from an article entitled
What is a Sardine,
written by Alan Davidson and published by him in
Petits Propos Culinaires
No.
2,
¹
August 1979. The question of the legitimate use of the name sardine and of how widely it may be used had recently been the subject of discussion in the Codex Alimentarius Commission of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
:

‘The starting point of any such discussion must be
the
sardine
, Sardina pilchardus
(Walbaum). Young specimens of the fish are the archetypal sardines. (Older ones, incidentally, are pilchards.) But the name sardine has also been applied for a very long time to two close relations
, Sardinella aurita
and
Sardinella maderensis.
Both of these are in areas where
Sardina pilchardus
is found; and it requires some expert knowledge to tell them apart.’

To summarise the rest of Alan Davidson’s report, the Commission concluded that eighteen other species also qualify as sardines, a conclusion which seems to me a thoroughly confusing one since among the eighteen are
Clupea harengus,
the Atlantic herring
, Sprattus sprattus,
the sprat, and one called
Sardinella longiceps,
which the Indian authorities were seeking to introduce into the already numerous company. Mr Davidson, having eaten
Sardinella longiceps,
whether in or out of a tin he doesn’t say, thought that it had a good claim on the basis ‘of what technical people call its ‘organoleptic’ qualities, by which they mean its appearance, texture, flavour, etc’. The Commission, however, in spite of their findings, decided that any tinned sardine other than
Sardina pilchardus
must be labelled with the name of a country, a geographic area, the species, or the common name of the species, e.g. sprat. So all the Commision’s deliberations bring us back, more or less, to what I wrote all those years ago, and Alan Davidson very rightly comments that while keeping an open mind about the merits of the various species, potential consumers ‘would do well to pay particular attention to the other contents of the can, which will often be of greater importance than any small difference between the qualities of the fish themselves’. Indeed. You may, for example, find tins of sardines in olive oil in France, Spain and other olive growing areas, but, for the English market, it would seem that sardines of whatever variety are more usually canned in groundnut or cotton seed oil, or in tomato sauce.