Omelette and a Glass of Wine (7 page)

Five days later I take another guest to the Beau Geste, today we will try one of the
plats du jour
announced on the slip of paper attached to the yellow menu sheet. M. Pigeon peers round the partition. Yes, the
veau à la fermière
is an escalope in a
sauce au vin
rouge. Il est très bon
. We order it, plus green salads and one portion of pâté
maison
for the more experimental member of the party. The pâté is of M. Pigeon’s own confection. It is not discreditable. The red wine sauce with the escalope is. It is a thick brown paste. A fork would stand upright in it. The escalopes could be veal. They could just as easily be the bedroom slippers I threw away last week. My guest says the green salad is the best she has ever had in a London restaurant. I don’t doubt that she is telling the truth. The coffee is lukewarm. As we are drinking it (it is 2.20 p.m.) M. Pigeon walks through the restaurant in his street clothes. At 2.25 the waiter also leaves. Madame stays behind to collect the
£
2 odd for one portion of pâté, two escalopes, two green salads, two coffees.

Four days later I am to be guest at the Beau Geste. It is Saturday and on Saturdays you can park a car in the street right outside the Beau Geste, a circumstance which naturally entrances my hostess. What for a first dish today? The
rillettes
, are they made by M. Pigeon? The waiter shakes his head. We can’t make out if this means yes, no, or doesn’t know. We will have entrecôtes only, one with tinned pimentos and fried onions, one with a tomato and anchovy garnish; and two green salads. The steaks cost 15s.6d. and 14s.6d. respectively. They are very nice. My hostess is a good cook. She always has a lovely salad with her meals. Nevertheless she says she wishes she could make a salad as good as M. Pigeon’s. As we are finishing our tepid coffee M. Pigeon leaves. On Saturdays midday at the Beau Geste is quite lively. At other tables people are sitting over their factory-made sorbets. Madame attends to them. As she passes our table she looks apprehensive. Perhaps we, or the other customers, may stay too long. She turns out the lights. Possibly the Spanish waiter gets overtime on Saturdays. He remains to collect my hostess’s
£
2 odd for two steaks, two salads, two coffees.

On Tuesday an old friend turns up from the country. She wants me to have lunch with her, and to go shopping afterwards. We will take a bottle of wine round to the Beau Geste and eat quickly. The
plats du jour
today are
potage cultivateur
(that’s an old familiar I haven’t seen on a menu since the days of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway) and
escalope de veau lyonnaise
, and changes her mind when I decide on the Spanish omelette. She says I always get something better than she does. Two omelettes and two green salads then. The Spanish omelettes aren’t too bad. The filling contains tinned
petits pois
, tinned pimientos and nicely cooked potatoes and onions. The omelettes are not at all Spanish but also
they are not at all stodgy. We enjoy them. Good gracious me, says D., this salad is delicious. Her faith returns. Shall we try the orange sorbet? I deflect her to cheese. The Spanish waiter brings the plateau. On it are a half Camembert, a whole new Camembert, a little log-shaped cheese which might be Neufchatel, and a piece of
tome aux raisins
about one inch square. D. says the Camembert looks a bit shrivelled. The waiter says something we take to mean that that is only because it has been in the fridge. We choose the near-Neufchatel. Perhaps we should have plumped for the sorbet. At least it wouldn’t have been any more icy. Today the coffee is not tepid. It is cold. Ten minutes later we get our bill. For two omelettes, two salads, cheese and coffee thirty shillings with tip.

Cherished in our dreams, held close to our hearts in deathless legend is the humble French restaurant, the unpretentious
petit coin pas cher
where one may drop in at any time and be sure always of a friendly welcome, a well-cooked omelette, a good salad, a glass of honest wine. The Beau Geste is the dream made manifest. There are those, and I am one of them, who are so disloyal as to think that thirty shillings for two omelettes, two salads and two coffees accompanied by honest wine of one’s own providing is not all that
pas cher
. Like myself they will probably still go back to the Beau Geste and for the same reasons, which are that if M. Pigeon is a rascal, he is at least a cheery one and certainly has a deft hand with an omelette pan and a tin-opener. That he can get away with his prices is partly our own fault, partly that of the local standards of catering. When the alternative is cold sausage rolls and a glass of warm Spanish Sauterne in the local pub we are pleased to get anything eatable at all for two pounds ten shillings. And M. Pigeon’s brown wallpaper and even the concierge-type blight cast by his wife are still rather more acceptable than the amateur theatricals of the ex-Eighth Army corporal down the road, whose eating establishment is got up to look like the inside of a saddler’s shop and where if you order an omelette as likely as not it will turn up inside a crust of puff pastry, and as for the composition of the dressing on the avocado pear it is a secret, and one you don’t want to penetrate. M. Pigeon is at least not revealing much of a secret when, if you can catch him as he hurries to the pub before closing time, he tells you that his salad dressing is made with arachide oil and malt vinegar. This I have kept from my friends and guests. Where French cooking is concerned they like secrets. They shall have them.

The Spectator
, 6 September 1963

Ladies’ Halves

What on earth comes over wine waiters when they take the orders of a woman entertaining another woman in a restaurant? Twice in one week recently I have dined in different restaurants (not, admittedly, in the expense-account belt of the West End, where women executives have tables and bottles of 1945 Margaux permanently at the ready, or it’s nice to think so, anyway) and with different women friends, on one occasion as the hostess and on the other as the guest. On both occasions, after the regulation lapse of twenty minutes, the wine waiter brought a half-bottle of the wine ordered instead of a whole one. Please don’t think I have anything against half-bottles; on the contrary, I find they have a special charm of their own. There are occasions when a half is what one wants, a half and nothing else, in which case I really don’t believe one has to be a master-woman to be capable of specifying one’s wishes in the matter. I suppose the assumption on the part of wine waiters that women are too frail to consume or too stingy to pay for a whole bottle must be based on some sort of experience, but instead of having to go back to change the order (ten minutes the second time, one is getting edgy by then, and well into the second course; if they held up the food to synchronize with the wine one mightn’t mind so much) he could inquire in the first place, in a discreet way. Or even in an indiscreet way, like the steward on the Edinburgh–London express a few years ago who yelled at me across the rattling crockery and two other bemused passengers, ‘A bottle, madam? A
whole
bottle? Do you know how large a whole bottle is?’

The Spectator
, 13 July 1962

Letting Well Alone

V
ITAMIN H, JAM
reads the last item on the menu of the famous Azanian banquet in
Black Mischief
. I remembered about Seth’s dinner (‘There is the question of food. I have been reading that now it is called Vitamins’) when the proprietor of a village inn in the Var, about twenty-five miles from Aix-en-Provence, brought us bowls of
jam as the final course of our delicious lunch. For the English, it’s always good for a laugh that the French eat jam for pudding – and jam by itself, jam without bread and butter, without toast or teacakes, or cream or even sponge or roly-poly. Just jam, and the point about this jam, and I can’t help how quaint it sounds, was its absolute Tightness on this particular occasion. The meal was faultless of its kind, a roughish country inn kind, beginning with tomato salad with chopped onion, the little black olives of the Nyons district, and home-made pâté – the basic hors-d’œuvre in this part of Provence – each item on its own separate dish, and left on the table so we could help ourselves. It was followed by a
gratin
of courgettes and rice. This dish, new to me, was made with courgettes cooked in butter and sieved, the resulting purée then mixed with béchamel and rice, all turned into a shallow dish and browned in the oven. A mixture with delicate and unexpected flavours. Then came a daube of beef, an excellent one, with an unthickened but short sauce of wine and tomato purée, beautifully scented with bayleaf and thyme, brought to the table, and left on it, in a metal casserole in which it kept sizzling hot. Finally, this famous jam – home-made, of green melons, fresh-tasting, not too sweet, a hint of lemons in the background. The wine was coarse red, by the litre. Even the coffee was drinkable, and the bill was very modest.

The English public must be sick and tired of being told that cooking is an art and that the French are the great exponents of it. Or, alternatively, that cooking is not an art but a question of good basic ingredients, which we have more of and better than anyone else (it’s surprising how many otherwise quite sane English people really believe this) and so QED we also have the best cooking, while the French, poor things, toil away in their kitchens in a desperate effort to disguise what Lady Barnett, in a speech delivered at a caterers’ dinner in the Midlands a few weeks ago, referred to as ‘meat not fit to eat and fish without taste’. I don’t want to enter into this abysmal argument. I just want to describe that same Provençal meal as it would be if one ordered it in a London restaurant. With the exception of the tomato salad, which can’t be made here because tomatoes fit for salad aren’t acceptable to the greengrocery trade, there was nothing about that meal which
couldn’t
be reproduced by a moderately skilful English cook, professional or amateur.

So here we go. A slab of pâté, smelling powerfully of smoked bacon and rosemary, is brought to your table on a teaplate loaded with lettuce leaves; it is covered with a trellis work of radishes or
watercress, interspersed with a tasteful pattern of very large olives, brown rather than black. (Here we can’t get the fine black olives of the Nyonsais, the best in Provence, but Italian, Greek, and North African small black olives are quite easy to come by. Those huge brown ones they sell in delicatessens are bitter and over-salt.) For pretty, as American fashion journalists say, there is a spoonful of tinned red peppers, and a couple of gherkins falling off the overcrowded plate. Now, the gratin of courgettes and rice. Well, that doesn’t contain fish or meat, so it’s not a course by English standards. What about adding a few scampi, or a slice or two of ham, or some little bits of bacon? Or better still, economize on the service or washing up and present it with the meat, plus, naturally, potatoes and a green vegetable. What? The taste of the courgette purée is too fragile to go with that beef and wine? Put plenty of cheese in it then, that’ll pep it up. And anyway that daube, it smells all right and it tastes good but there isn’t quite enough gravy with it. Add a cupful of the chef’s brown sauce to each serving, it’ll make it nice and thick and it’ll look more shiny and stylish on the plate – it’ll be on a plate of course, there’d be chaos if you left a casserole of the stuff on the customers’ tables. And now we get to our Vitamin H. Will the customers stand for jam potted in plastic thimbles like they have on British Railways and at Ye Old Sussex Tea Gardens? Going too far perhaps. Better heat up the jam, stir in a little Curaçao, a dash of vanilla essence, some green colouring to cheer it up, and serve it as a sauce with ice-cream. That’s more like it. Charge them 8s.6d. for it, it’s worth it what with all the trouble it gave the cook. And the wine? This is an expensive meal, so the red plonk won’t do. Put a bottle of Château Pont d’Avignon rosé ready in a basket, will you?

And the English customers will pay
£
3.10s. a head for this version of a meal which in its original form cost about 25s. for two including service. And they will like it, and they will go home and try to reproduce it in their own kitchens – adding of course a little frill here, a trimming there, an extra vegetable, a few mushrooms in the beef stew …

It does seem to me that with so much talk about art versus fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it which you like, of leaving well alone. This is a prerequisite of any first-class meal (as opposed to one isolated first-class dish) on any level whatsoever; so is the capacity, among the customers if you are a restaurateur and among your friends if
you are an amateur cook, to appreciate well when it
is
left alone. It’s a capacity which would make meals a lot cheaper and cooking a great deal easier.

The Spectator
, 7 July 1961