Omelette and a Glass of Wine (9 page)

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Rose Barattero is the euphonious name of the proprietress of the Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre in the Ardèche. Slim, elegant, her pretty grey hair in tight curls all over her head, the minuscule red ribbon of the Legion of Honour on her grey dress, Madame Barattero is an impressive little figure as she stands on the terrace of her hotel welcoming her guests as they drive into the main square of the small provincial town whose name she has made famous throughout France.

Here, in this town, in the modest hotel which stands back to back with her own, she was born. Her parents were hotel keepers, her brother inherited, and still runs, the old Hôtel de la Poste. Her sister has a hotel at St-Vallier down on the Rhône. Her husband, a
niçois
, and a relation of the Escoffier family, started his career as an apprentice at the Carlton in London, and was already making a name for himself as a promising chef when she married him and they set up on their own at the Hôtel du Midi.

When M. Barattero died in 1941 the hotel was already celebrated for its cooking. His young widow took over the running of the hotel and the restaurant, putting the kitchen in the charge of a hardworking and modest chef who had started as Barattero’s apprentice. His wife looks after the accounts and the reception work.

During the past fifteen years or so the fame of Barattero’s at Lamastre has spread throughout France; Madame Barattero’s name is among the most respected in the entire French restaurant industry.

In the fiercely competitive world of the French catering business this is no ordinary achievement. Lamastre is a town of little over three thousand inhabitants. It is not on a main road; the country round about, although magnificent and infinitely varied, is not known to tourists in the way in which, let us say, Provence or the château country of the Loire are known, for there is not very much left in the way of architectural or historical interest for the ordinary sightseer. In other words, a place like Barattero’s must rely, not on the local population and the passing tourist, but upon those customers who make the journey to Lamastre expressly for the cooking.

Michelin awards Madame Barattero two stars. Now, although Michelin one-star restaurants are very much on the chancy side, both as regards quality and price, and such of their three-star establishments (there are only eleven in the whole of France) into which I have penetrated, either a little too rarefied in atmosphere for my taste – or, as Raymond Mortimer observed recently of a famous Paris house, the food is too rich and so are the customers – it is rare to find the two-star places at fault. As far as the provinces are concerned these two-star establishments (there are fifty-nine of them in the whole country, about twenty of which are in Paris) offer very remarkable value. I do not mean to suggest that they are places for the impecunious, but rather that while the cooking which they have to offer is unique, the charges compare more than favourably with those prevailing in hundreds of other French establishments where the surroundings vary between the grandiose and the squalid and where the cooking, while probably sound enough, is uneven or without distinction.

I have often heard the criticism that these modest establishments of two-star quality, offering, as most of them do, no more than half a dozen specialities at most, are places whose resources are exhausted after a couple of meals, or alternatively that the accommodation which they have to offer is not up to the standard of the cooking. So tourists make their pilgrimage to eat a meal at a place like the Midi at Lamastre, the Chapon Fin at Thoissey, or the Armes de France at Ammerschwihr and move on without knowing that they could have stayed for several days, not only in comfort and quiet and enjoying a variety of beautifully cooked dishes, but quite
often at considerably reduced prices for pension or half-pension terms.

Early last summer we drove from Lyon down the western bank of the Rhône towards St-Péray, and there turned off up the steep and beautiful road which leads to Lamastre and St-Agrève. We had been warned that the forty-odd kilometres from St-Péray to Lamastre would take us twice as long as we expected because of the sinuous road, so we had allowed plenty of time, and arrived in front of the Hôtel du Midi while the afternoon sun was still shining over the little
place
. Our welcome from Madame Barattero was so warm and the rooms we were shown so airy, light and sympathetically furnished, the bathroom so immense and shining, the little garden below our terrace so pretty and orderly, that we decided there and then to stay several days. We discussed half-pension terms with Madame and then made ourselves scarce until dinner time.

Now it must be explained that chez Barattero there are five special dishes for which the house is renowned. They are
galantine de caneton
, a
pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal
, a
poularde en vessie
, a
saucisse en feuilletage
and a dish of artichoke hearts with a creamy sauce which they call
artichauts Escoffier
. If you were really trying you could, I suppose, taste them all at one meal (indeed four of them figure on the 1,800 franc menu, the most expensive one, the others being 1,600 and 1,200) but we could take our time and enjoy them gradually. We left the choice of our menus to Madame. Indeed, there was little alternative but to do so. For although she does not herself do the cooking Madame has been studying her guests and composing menus for them for thirty-four years and she neither likes being contradicted nor is capable of making a mistake in this respect. She knew without being told that we didn’t want to overload ourselves with food, however delicious; with an unerring touch she provided us night after night with menus which I think it is worth describing if only to demonstrate one or two important points about French restaurant cooking. First, how varied the food can be even in a place where the advertised specialities are very limited; secondly, how well worth while it is eating even the simplest of the routine dishes of French cookery produced in an absolutely first-class manner. (‘One does not come here to eat something as ordinary as
œufs en gelée
,’ the archbishop-like head waiter in a famous Paris restaurant once said to me. He was wrong. Such simple things are the test of a really good establishment.) And thirdly, how very much a good dish gains by being served quite on
its own, without fussy garnish or heaps of vegetables to overfill you and to get in the way of your sauce, to distract from the main flavours of the chicken or the fish and to sicken you of the sight of food long before the end of the meal.

We could have started every meal with soup had we so wished, but in fact we did so only once or twice because they were so good that we should have eaten too much. And the last part of the meal always consisted of a fine platter of cheeses and either strawberries, cherries or an ice, so I will leave those items out of the following account of our menus.

The wines we drank were mostly recent Rhône vintages, the current wines of the house, for many of which, especially the red Hermitages, the Cornas and the Côte Rôtie, I have a particular affection. Among the whites we tried were St-Péray, Chapoutier’s Chante Alouette, Jaboulet’s La Chapelle Hermitage 1950; for those who prefer, and can afford, old burgundies and bordeaux there is a well-stocked cellar of fine vintages.

Tuesday

Galantine de caneton:
The name is misleading to English ears. It is a whole boned duck, its flesh mixed with finely minced pork, truffles, brandy and foie gras, sewn up in the skin of the duck and cooked in the oven; the result resembles a long fat sausage with the feet of the duck protruding at one end. This pâté has a flavour of very great delicacy, and is served sliced and quite unadorned. The lettuce leaves and the little heap of potato salad which, I have an uneasy feeling, would be the inevitable garnish provided by an English restaurateur, is simply unthinkable here.

Sole meunière:
Perfectly cooked whole sole with quantities of hissing and foaming butter. Again, no garnish of any kind, and none needed.

Blettes à la crème au gratin: Blettes
, or chard, that spinach-like vegetable with fleshy white stalks is, to me, only tolerable when cooked by a master hand, but as the Barattero chef has that hand, and makes a particularly excellent cream sauce, all was well.

Wednesday

After an exhausting day’s driving in bad weather, and a good and not expensive lunch at the Cygne (but unsettling contemporary
decor in an old hotel) in the rather depressing town of Le Puy, we returned to dinner at Lamastre.

Potage de légumes:
The routine vegetable soup of the day, but the mixture of carrots, potatoes and other vegetables was so delicate, so buttery, so full of flavour, that this alone would serve to make the reputation of a lesser restaurant. Note: although so full of flavour this soup was quite thin. I think we make our vegetable soups too thick in this country.

Ris de veau à la crème:
I have eaten too many ambitiously conceived but ill-executed dishes of sweetbreads ever again to order them of my own accord, so I was grateful to Madame Barattero for showing me how good they can be when properly done. There were mushrooms in the sauce. Perfect.

Petit pois à la française:
A big bowl of very small fresh peas (even in good restaurants it is rare nowadays not to get
petits pois de conserve)
cooked with little shreds of lettuce but without the little onions usually associated with the
à la française
manner of cooking them. The result was very creamy and good. I doubt if I shall ever again put onions with my peas.

Thursday

Pain d’écrevisses sauce cardinal:
A very remarkable dish. A variety of
quenelle
, but unlike the pasty
quenelles
one eats elsewhere, even in the much cracked-up Lyon restaurants; as light as a puff of air, with the subtle and inimitable flavour of river crayfish permeating both
quenelle
and the rich cream sauce. The garnish of the dish consisted of a few whole scarlet crayfish and crescents of puff pastry.

Poularde en vessie:
A 3-lb Bresse chicken, stuffed with its own liver, a little foie gras and slices of truffle, is tied up inside a pig’s bladder and cooked extremely gently in a marmite of barely simmering water for one and a half hours. As Madame Barattero said, a chicken poached in the ordinary way, however carefully, cannot help but be
‘un peu délavé’
a trifle washed out. By this system, which is an ancient one, the chicken, untouched by the cooking liquid, emerges with all its juices and flavours intact. When it is cold, as it was served to us, these juices formed inside the bladder have solidified to a small amount of clear and delicately flavoured jelly. Madame asserted that nothing was easier to cook than this dish – ‘What do you mean, why can you not get a pig’s bladder in
England? You have pigs, do you not?’ – and upheld her point by adding that the chef’s eight-year old son already knows how to prepare the
poulardes en vessie
. A green salad with cream in the dressing was the only accompaniment to the chicken.

Friday and Saturday

The most important part of Friday’s meal was a sad disappointment. It was a dish of tiny grilled lamb cutlets, obviously beautiful meat, but much too undercooked for our taste.

On Saturday evening, when
épaule d’agneau
was announced, I explained the trouble. The little shoulder appeared cooked to what was, for us, perfection. A beautiful golden brown on the outside and just faintly pink in the middle. It had been preceded by a delicious
omelette aux champignons
and was accompanied by a
gratin
of courgettes and tomatoes, just slightly flavoured with garlic and cooked in butter instead of olive oil as it would have been in Provence. It went admirably with the lamb, and this was a good example of a very nice dinner of quite ordinary French dishes without any particular regional flavour or speciality of the house.

Sunday

Next day was Whitsunday and we stayed in to lunch as well as to dinner, for, as the weekend drew near, we had been observing with fascinated interest the preparations afoot for the large number of customers expected for the
fêtes
. The chef had prepared fifteen of his boned and stuffed ducks and by lunchtime on Sunday dozens of
poulardes
tied up in pig’s bladders and scores of
pain d’écrevisses
were ready, all gently murmuring in their respective copper marmites.

Until now the service at meal times had been performed entirely by Marthe and Marie, the two pretty, expertly trained young girls in black frocks and starched white aprons who also brought our breakfasts and looked after our rooms. Now two waiters and Madame’s sister from St-Vallier appeared upon the scene. There was no bustle and no panic or noise. Everything went like clockwork. And this I think partly explains what must seem a mystery to many visitors: how these unassuming places, in which the hotel part of the business is only incidental, can manage to maintain, day after day, cooking of a quality which simply could not be found in
England and which is rare even in France. The answer is that they are organized and run in a way which a Guards sergeant-major would envy, and are as well equipped to deal with a banquet for three hundred people or a steady stream of holiday visitors as they are to provide comfort and an intimate atmosphere for a handful of regular guests out of season.

From a peaceful Sunday morning gossip in the charming blue and turquoise and cream tiled
charcuterie
run by M. and Madame Montagne (where there is a good restaurant in a French town or village you may be sure that a good
charcuterie
is not far away), I returned to Barattero’s for the promised Sunday feast. Customers were arriving from Valence, from Marseille, from Lyon. A huge shining silver-grey Rolls-Bentley was parked in the square (it was the first English car we had seen). A party of young people flung themselves off their Lambrettas and clattered round a large table. They evidently took the cooking and its reputation for granted, for they hadn’t dressed up or put on Sunday voices as we would have here for such an occasion. It was enjoyable to watch them, and all the other customers who were there simply because they were going to enjoy the food, for there was none of that holy hush which to some of us makes the grander eating places such a sore trial.