French Provincial Cooking (112 page)

This method makes a rather extravagant but very delicious preserve. Unfortunately it tends to form a skin of mould within a very short time, but this does not affect the rest of the jam, some of which I have kept for nearly a year, even in a damp house. As an alternative, here is a second method, less extravagant and just as good in its way, although sweeter and more of a true jam than the above.

Prepare the peaches as above; when they are skinned, stoned and halved weigh them and put them with an equal weight of loaf sugar in a china bowl. Leave for several hours, or overnight. Put them in a preserving pan without water and bring slowly to the boil. Boil until the syrup sets when tested on a plate. Put into pots and seal while warm.

A recipe from the Dordogne. Small purple plums or greengages (
Reines-Claudes
) can be used for this preserve, which is served mainly as a kind of dessert and liqueur combined—3 or 4 of the plums or greengages in a small thick wine-glass, with a little of the brandy in which they have been preserved.

Buy the fruit slightly under-ripe. Leave the stalks on and pierce each plum through to the stone with a skewer in three or four places, and leave in a bowl of cold water until all are ready. Bring a pan of water to the boil, put in the greengages and, as soon as the water comes up to a fast boil again, remove the fruit with a perforated spoon to a large china bowl. For each pound of fruit, measure a pound of white sugar and a wine-glass (somewhat under
pint) of water. Boil together to the pearl stage (i.e. until the syrup is bubbling with little beads), throw in the fruit, leave until it comes to the boil again, then immediately return it to the bowl and pour the syrup over the fruit.

Leave for 24 hours and next day pour off the syrup, bring it to the boil, put in the fruit, bring it once more to the boil, and again put the fruit in the bowl and pour the syrup over, having carefully skimmed it.

After another 24 hours remove the fruit to large glass or stone jars. Boil the syrup until it has thickened somewhat. Filter through a cloth and, when cold, mix with it half a bottle of brandy or pure white spirit to every 3 lb. of fruit used. Stopper the jars, or tie down with several layers of paper, and leave it for at least a month before opening it.

Unlikely though it may sound, vodka can be used instead of brandy, and because it is a colourless spirit produces a preserve of better appearance than does brandy coloured with caramel. If you like a preserve with a more powerful flavour of spirits use a half-bottle to every two pounds of fruit instead of to every three.

THERE are people who hold that cookery books are unnecessary. These people are usually those who innocently believe cookery to be a matter of a little imagination, common sense, and taste for food, qualities which are, of course, of enormous importance to a cook; but, as Maurice des Ombiaux says, ‘Let us not make any mistake, the taste which one has for good living, however lively it may be, cannot take the place of the technical knowledge, the long habit, the constant practice of the difficult and complicated profession of cookery.’

One certainly cannot learn the technical details of cookery entirely from books; but if the cooks, celebrated and obscure, of the past had believed that written recipes were unnecessary, we should now be in a sad plight indeed. The culinary wisdom and skill of several centuries of practitioners, both professional and amateur, are distilled into the cookery books we now inherit. Speaking for myself, I can only say that, after years of study of many of the books I have listed below—and they represent only a microscopic cross-section of those which have been published during the past two hundred years in France alone—and after many years of constant practical work in the kitchen, I am, I think, just beginning to have some small glimmerings of what the art of cookery really means, of its development in the historical sense and of the causes and effects of things concerned with cookery, and I do not think that any cook, professional or amateur, could honestly claim that he owed nothing to any cookery book. So I have included in my bibliography the titles and authors of many of the great classic French works, particularly those of the nineteenth century, for although they may not be directly relevant to the subject of regional and provincial cookery, they are, indirectly, of the greatest importance. The influence of men like Carême who, it might be said, invented or at least brought to a hitherto unknown peak of perfection the elaborate cooking known as
haute cuisine
, of Urbain Dubois and Jules Gouffé, of Escoffier and of Prosper Montagné, can scarcely be overestimated. The kind of cookery these men practised may now be out of date but, without it, European cookery would, whether for better or for worse, be something quite other than it is. And in the cases of Escoffier and Montagné, it is a point of considerable interest that, while both of them preached in the highest places of gastronomy of their time, neither of them ever forgot or came to despise the homely cookery of their native provinces which were, respectively, Provence and the Languedoc. Montagné, indeed, did much to popularise the regional cookery of the Languedoc, where for generations his ancestors had been inn-keepers and restaurateurs. Escoffier’s
Ma Cuisine
, a book for housewives as well as for professionals, contains recipes for many of the famous country dishes of Provence, a part of Escoffier’s work which is often overlooked, at any rate in England, for the book has never, so far as I know, been translated into English.
³⁴
It was published only a year before Escoffier’s death in 1935, at the age of 89.

In contrast to these great names, the authors of many of the little volumes dealing with regional cookery are unknown in the world of professional gastronomy. Many of these books are by amateurs. Some of the authors were men of letters who made collections of the recipes of their native provinces as a relaxation from their normal work; often, from the point of view of details, the recipes in these books leave much to be desired, but what they may lack in precision they make up for in their appeal to the imagination and in the feeling they give us of a domestic life now vanished or, at any rate, vanishing. I do not think there is one of these books, entirely lacking in pretension though they are, which does not provide us with some precious piece of culinary wisdom without which we should be the poorer. To posterity these historians of family life and of household cookery in France have rendered services beyond price.

THIS bibliography is arranged in chronological order under the following headings: French cookery and other books of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; English translations of French cookery books; English cookery and other books referred to in the text of this volume; Periodicals, French and English; Guide books, French and English; Bibliographies.

Les Dons de Comus
. Marin, à Paris, chez la Veuve Pissot, 1742 (first published 1739).

La Cuisinière Bourgeoise
. Menon, à Paris, chez Guillyn, Quai des Augustins, 1746. This book was continuously reprinted and widely plagiarised during the two hundred years following its original publication.

Le Ménage des Champs et le Jardinier Français.
Louis Liger, à Paris, chez Michel David, 1711.

Almanach des Gourmands
. Grimod de la Reynière. Paris, chez Maradan, 8 vols., 1803-1812.

Le Cuisinier Royal
. Viard et Fouret, Paris, Dupont, Corbet, 13th edition, 1828. This book first appeared in 1806 with the title
Le Cuisinier Impérial.
For the 9th edition, 1817, ‘Impérial’ was changed to ‘Royal’; for the 22nd edition, 1853, the title was again changed, this time to
Cuisinier National.
In 1854 it once more became the
Cuisinier Impérial.

La Nouvelle Cuisinière Bourgeoise
. Par l’Auteur du Parfait Cuisinier. 3rd edition, 1816.

La Cuisinière de la Campagne et de la Ville ou la Nouvelle Cuisine Économique.
L. E. Audot, 84th edition. Mise au courant du Progrès annuel, Paris, Librairie Audot, 62 rue des Écoles, 1906. This book was first published in 1818 without the name of the author.

Le Cuisinier Parisien
. B. Albert, Paris, Dufour et Cie, 3rd edition, 1825.

La Physiologie du Goût.
Jean-Anthelme de Brillat-Savarin; first published in Paris by A. Sauteret et Cie, 1826.

Le Cuisinier Durand.
Durand. Imprimerie P. Durand-Belle, Nîmes, 1830.

L’Art de la Cuisine Française aux XIX
^e
Siècle
. A. Carême, Paris, l’Auteur, 5 vols., 1835. The two final volumes of this work were completed by Plumerey after Carême’s death in his fiftieth year in 1833.

Néo-Physiologie du Goût par Ordre Alphabétique: Dictionnaire Général de la Cuisine Française Ancienne et Moderne ainsi que de l’Office et de la Pharmacie domestique.
Paris, Henri Plon, Imprimeur-Éditeur, rue Garancière 10, 1886. In the preface of this work, the reader is told that the three collaborators are, firstly, ‘a lady of good repute who has no children, who is no longer young, and who has not very much with which to occupy herself; secondly, her doctor, one of the cleverest of German medical men, who wishes, from philanthropic motives, to accord a system of hygiene with that of French cookery; thirdly, her cook, not the least intelligent of the three, who is tormented by the desire to speak the truth about the science which he professes.’ Vicaire, however, says that the book was the work of M. Maurice Cousin, comte de Courchamps, a man whose reputation as a gourmet was very distinguished. The book was first published in 1839 and reappeared in 1853 and in 1866. A number of the recipes contained in it are claimed in the preface to be from unpublished papers of Grimod de la Reynière.

La Cuisinière des Cuisinières de la Ville et de la Campagne.
Revue par Mozard, ex-chef d’office, 1840.

La Cuisinière du Haut-Rhin
. Seconde edition, traduite de la 6
^e
édition allemande, Mulhouse, 1842.

Science du Bien Vivre.
Paul Ben et A.D., Paris, Martinon, 1844.

La Maison Rustique des Dames.
Madame Millet-Robinet, 18th edition
circa
1880, Paris, Librairie Agricole de la Maison Rustique (first published 1845).

Le Cuisinier Européen.
Jules Breteuil, Paris, Garnier Frères, 1860.

Le Livre de Cuisine
. Jules Gouffé, Ancien Officier de Bouche du Jockey-Club de Paris. Comprenant la cuisine de menage et la grande cuisine. 4th edition, Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1877 (first published 1867).

Les 366 Menus de Baron Brisse
. Baron Brisse, Paris, 2nd edition, Donnaud, 1875. First published circa 1867.

Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine
. Alexandre Dumas, Paris, Alphonse Lemerre, 1873.

La Bonne Cuisine Française, Manuel Guide pour la Ville et la Campagne.
E. Dumont, Paris, Degorce-Cadot, 1889. First published 1873.

Les Hostelleries et Taverniers de Nancy
. Jules Renauld, Nancy, Lucien Wiener, 1875.

Cuisine du Midi et du Nord.
Revue, corrigée et augmentée par C. Durand, petit-fils de l’auteur. Paris, Garnier Frères, 1877. A revised edition (the 9th) of the original
Cuisinier Durand
of 1830.

Le Cuisinier à la Bonne Franquette.
Mique Grandchamp, Annecy, Depollier et Cie, 1884.

100 Manières d’Accommoder et de Manger les Œufs.
Alfred Suzanne, Paris, I. Frank. 1885.

La Cuisine de nos Pères. L’Art d’Accommoder le Gibier Suivant
les
Principes de Vatel et des Grands Officiers de Bouche.
Paris, Librairie Illustrée, 1886.

L’Estomac de Paris.
A. Coffignon, Paris, Librairie Illustrée, 1887.

L’École des Cuisinières.
Urbain Dubois, Paris, E. Dentu, 6th edition, 1887.

La Cuisine de nos Pères. L’Art d’Accommoder le Poisson Suivant les Principes de Vatel et des Grand Officiers de Bouche.
Paris, Librairie Illustrée, 1888.