Omelette and a Glass of Wine (6 page)

The lady from Todmorden, I should add, on receiving a letter from me explaining that the titles of my articles were beyond my control, wrote to me again, in a kindly and friendly way. It had never occurred to her, she said, that feature writers did not give their own titles to the articles they wrote. What a worry it must be, she thought, what with possible misprints, etc. to be a writer. If only those were the only hazards of the trade
…

I think it may be of interest to record what my correspondent, a Mrs Dorothy Sutcliffe, had to say about the correct way to produce ‘a heavenly fluffy mound of translucent ambrosia which is obtainable only by using Bramleys (no others will do). Put your sliced apples, about 1 lb, in a pan on a good heat, boil up rapidly with a dessertspoon of water and about 3–4 oz of granulated sugar, stirring as you go, and there you are. Easy as pie’. Mrs Sutcliffe also told me that she ‘would not consider apple Charlotte, apple Betty, Eve’s pudding, or the famous North Country apple pie worth the effort if made with anything other than Bramley apples’. Good Big Bramleys then? But what apple did they use in the North before the birth of the Bramley?

1.
Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme Saint-Ange
(Larousse, 1927).

Crackling

A military gentleman I know who used to run a club once told me that one of his clients was asking for the kind of dishes ‘which are practically burnt, you know.’ After some interrogation I tumbled to what was wanted and it seemed it wasn’t so much a question of the breakfast toast as of that method of cooking which is so typically French, the method whereby gelatinous food such as pigs’ trotters and breast of lamb is coated with breadcrumbs and grilled to a delicious sizzling, crackling crispness, deep golden brown and here and there slightly blackened and scorched. At the same time the meat itself, usually pre-cooked, remains moist and tender.

To achieve the characteristic and alluring stage of doneness in this kind of dish needs a bit of practice and a certain amount of dash. You have to watch the food while it’s under the grill, as if indeed it were toast, and you have to be brave enough to let it go on grilling
until you think you’ve gone just too far – the same applies, incidentally, to the kind of gratin dishes of vegetables or fish in which the top surface is covered with breadcrumbs. For unless the dish has a crisp blistered crust, slightly charred round the edges, it doesn’t quite come off.

One of the breadcrumb-grilled dishes I like best is the one called breast of lamb Ste. Ménéhould. It is very cheap (breast of English lamb was 8d. a pound at Harrods last Saturday – one often finds a cheap cut cheaper and of better quality in a high-class butchery than in a so-called cheap one, and 2½ lb was plenty for four), but I am not pretending it is a dish for ten-minute cooks. It is one for those who have the time and the urge to get real value out of cheap ingredients. First you have to braise or bake the meat in the oven with sliced carrots, an onion or two, a bunch of herbs and, if you like, a little something extra in the way of flavouring such as two or three ounces of a cheap little bit of bacon or salt pork, plus seasonings and about a pint of water. It takes about two and a half to three hours – depending on the quality of the meat – covered, in a slow oven. Then, while the meat is still warm, you slip out the bones, leave the meat to cool, preferably with a weight on it, and then slice it into strips slightly on the bias and about one and a half to two inches wide. Next, spread each strip with a little mustard, paint it with beaten egg (one will be enough for 2½ lb of meat), then coat it with the breadcrumbs, pressing them well down into the meat and round the sides. (I always use breadcrumbs which I’ve made myself from a French loaf, sliced, and dried in the plate drawer underneath the oven. I know people who think this business of making breadcrumbs is a terrible worry, but once the bread is dried it’s a matter of minutes to pound it up with a rolling pin or with a pestle – quicker than doing it in the electric blender.)

All this breadcrumbing finished, you can put the meat on a grid over a baking dish and leave it until you are ready to cook it. Then it goes into a moderate oven for about twenty minutes, because if you put it straight under the grill the outside gets browned before the meat itself is hot. As you transfer the whole lot to the grill pour a very little melted butter over each slice, put them close to the heat, then keep a sharp look-out and turn each piece as the first signs of sizzling and scorching appear.

The plates and dishes should be sizzling too, and some sort of sharp, oil-based sauce – a vinaigrette, a tartare, a mustardy mayonnaise – usually goes with this kind of dish. As a matter of fact it can
be made with a good deal less fiddling about in a way described to me by M. Kaufeler, the head chef at the Dorchester. No need, he said, for the boning and slicing of the meat once it’s cooked. Just grill it whole or in large chunks. He added that in his youth he and his fellow apprentice cooks used to eat this dish frequently. They called it Park Railings. (It’s a system of cooking which evidently engenders picturesque names. Once in a Lyonnais restaurant I had a hefty slab of tripe grilled in this way. It was called Fireman’s Apron and even to a non-tripe-eater was made delicious by the lovely crackling crust.) I tried M. Kaufeler’s method, and although I did not think it as successful as the Ste. Ménéhould one, I found that it did work a treat for the American cut of spare-ribs of pork (not the fore-end joint we call spare-rib, but a belly piece) which Sainsbury’s are now selling at about 2s. a pound. Not much meat on these cuts, but what there is, tender and sweet. It needs less initial cooking time than the lamb – about one hour. It’s the kind of food you have to pick up in your fingers, and I rather like something of this sort for Sunday lunch. The first cooking is light work for Saturday and the breadcrumbing business is a soothing occupation when you’ve had enough of the Sunday papers.

The Spectator
, 11 August 1961

Your Perfected Hostess

Not so long ago it was
quiche lorraine
. You could hardly go out to a cocktail party without somebody tipping you off about the delicious
quiche
they made in the penthouse restaurant of the new block at the far end of the Finchley Road. At the dinner-table grave discussions would arise as to the proper ingredients of a
quiche
and the desirability or otherwise of putting cheese in the filling.

No doubt it was the recipes put out by the public relations departments of our big food firms and taken up by magazines as editorial backing for advertising which in the end put the
quiche
out of business as a talking point.

By the time our aspiring cooks had absorbed instructions to make this French regional dish with a prefabricated pie-shell, a couple of triangles of processed cheese and a tin of evaporated milk, nothing
much of the original remained. The Lorraine part had got away from the
quiche
, and with it its charm and glamour.

A similar fate had already overtaken the Italian
pizza
and the
salade niçoise
, which by the time they’d all finished with it turned out to be nothing more than the time-honoured English mixture of lettuce, tomato, beetroot and hard-boiled eggs. And now it’s the turn of a cold soup called
crème vichyssoise
.

This recipe, as evolved some forty years ago by Louis Diat, the French-born chef of the New York Ritz-Carlton, is, basically, every French housewife’s potato and leek soup, puréed, chilled, enriched with fresh cream and sprinkled with chives. One of our troubles about reproducing this dish here in England is that leeks go out of season about the beginning, if any, of the summer, and don’t normally come into the shops again until the end of it. Which means that if you
must
have vichyssoise during the heat-wave period then it has to come out of a tin. Those people, however, who won’t stoop to tinned soups but still want to be in the swim with their vichyssoise, have taken to using cucumber instead of leeks, and watercress or mint instead of chives – which are hard to come by unless you grow them yourself. The mixture is still thick and rich and cold – and what’s, after all, in a name?

All this seems to be typical of the uneasy phase which English cooking is going through. As soon as any dish with a vaguely romantic-sounding name (you may well ask why anyone should associate Vichy with romance) becomes known you find it’s got befogged by the solemn mystique which can elevate a routine leek and potato soup into what the heroine of a recent upper-class-larks novel refers to as ‘my perfected Vichyssoise’. Then a semi-glamour monthly publishes a recipe in which the original few pence-worth of kitchen garden vegetables are omitted entirely and their place taken by cream of chicken soup and French cream cheese. With astounding rapidity the food processors move in, and launch some even further debased version which in a wink is turning up at banquets and parties and on the menus of provincial hotels.

‘
INGREDIENTS
Skim Milk Powder, Edible Fat, Flour, Gelatine, Super-Glycerinated Fats, Whole Dried Egg, Cayenne Pepper, Lemon, Oil, Edible Colour. Immerse unopened bag in boiling water and simmer for ten minutes.’ So runs the legend on a packet of boil-in-the-bag hollandaise (cut along dotted line and squeeze into sauceboat) garnered from the deep-freeze in a self-service store in the King’s Road, Chelsea.

What I’m waiting for is the day when it’s going to be clever to serve some relaxed English dish like cauliflower cheese. It’ll be fun to watch it going up in the world, and getting into the glossies (pin a gigantic starched linen napkin round the platter) and the sub-Mitford novels (Jean-Pierre’s got a hangover and won’t touch a thing except Fortnum’s tinned cauliflower cheese), thence into the women’s weeklies (Maureen was piping her own very special cheese dip round the cauliflower. The candles were lit …), and eventually through all the inevitable transformations and degradations until, dehydrated, double-quick deep-frozen, reboiled and debagged, it finally reaches the tables of our residential hotels and the trays of forty-guinea-a-week nursing homes.

Punch
, 6 November 1961

Secrets

Paris isn’t the only city where August-stranded inhabitants find themselves bereft of familiar tables to rest their elbows on and nowhere to take the visitors who turn up without warning. In my quarter of London two at least of the better restaurants have been closed for the holidays. Investigation of other local resources has produced the Beau Geste, an establishment situated on the South Kensington-Fulham-Chelsea borders. If this restaurant were listed, which it isn’t, in any of the guide books, I think it would be described as of modest aspect. This means that it doesn’t have a striped awning or canopy over its doorway and is about the equivalent of any of those restaurants in any French town which you notice only because outside you bump into a cut-out figure representing a waiter proffering a
prix-fixe
menu at 8
N.F.
and
poulet rôti cresson
(supp. 4
N.F.
). In France you don’t go into this restaurant but in London
s.w.
3/7/10 you do. Inside you find that the walls of the Beau Geste are papered in vandyke brown. On them hang, here and there, a brass sabot or two and a handful of framed reproductions of sketches of picturesque corners of places which might be Montmartre, St Ives or Florence. There are eight tables. At midday only two of them are set with cloths, but such as they are they are clean, cheap and bright. The Beau Geste is not licensed so you have brought your own wine. The waiter takes it away and
brings it back five minutes later, and the label looks a trifle damp. You ask him what he has done to the wine. He is Spanish, he does not understand. He fetches the proprietor from behind the matchboard partition at the end of the restaurant. M. Pigeon says ah yes, the wine was cold so he has permitted himself to warm it a little. He has been five years with the French navy,
alors vous comprenez madame je connais les vins, moi
. What he doesn’t
connait
is that I like my Beaujolais cold, straight from my cellar.

The hors-d’œuvre announced on the yellow menu sheet of the Beau Geste are
piments vinaigrette, rillettes de Tours, pâté maison, salade niçoise, saucisson de Lyon
, egg mayonnaise. There are omelettes, three or four fish dishes including amazingly enough two scampi variations and
truite meunière
. Meat dishes are entrecôtes and veal escalopes, each in three different ways. There is a good line in tinned vegetables such as
petits pois
and
flageolets
, and the routine
pommes sautées
. There is a
salade verte
and a
salade panachée
– the panache consists of tomatoes quartered
à l’anglaise
– a
plateau de fromages
and for dessert three kinds of ice and two sweet omelettes, jam and flambé.

I have already tried the
piments vinaigrette
. They are tinned, but M. Pigeon makes the best of them with a good dressing, slivers of onion and chopped parsley. Today we will have
saucisson de Lyon
, entrecôte maître d’hôtel and a salad without panache. The
saucisson de Lyon
turns out to be Danish salami. As we are picking at it Mme Pigeon, in hat and mackintosh, walks through the restaurant from the street and disappears behind the partition. She re-emerges with an apron tied round her waist, walks past our table, glances to see what wine we have brought. The entrecôtes appear. They are not the best quality Aberdeen Angus meat but they are well and freshly cooked, hot, and served on hot plates. Our green salads are brought, on flat oval hors-d’œuvre dishes. My guest says the salad is delicious. I think she is being polite, because she is herself an instinctive mixer of exquisite green salads. We drink our tepid coffee. M. Pigeon, dressed in his street clothes, bustles out of the restaurant. Madame comes to collect payment. With the tip about
£
2.10s. Madame says no, no holidays this year. Business has not been famous. It has been a sad summer.