French Provincial Cooking (49 page)

A GREAT deal is said and written about the innate cooking skill of every French housewife and every
patron-chef
of every other auberge, restaurant and transport café in the land. While not wishing in any way to belittle the culinary talents so lavishly bestowed by Providence upon the French, and so brilliantly cultivated by them, it should be observed that both housewife and restaurateur frequently lean heavily upon their local
charcutiers
and
pâtissiers
. If a housewife has but little time for cooking, she is able to rely upon the terrines and pâtés, the sausages, the hams and all the miscellaneous pork products of the
charcutier
, to make a quick midday meal for her family or a first course for her lunch party. If the talents of her cook do not lie in the direction of pastry-making, she can with perfect confidence order a
vol-au-vent
to fill with a rich creamy sea-food mixture, or a cake, a handsome fruit flan or a
savarin
to serve as dessert, while she and her cook concentrate upon the meat, the fish and the vegetables.

The reputation of many a small restaurateur has been built upon the products of the local
charcutier
. A careful look at the details of restaurant specialities given in the Michelin and other guides shows that not a few of them owe their star to some kind of sausage, or pâté,
andouillette
or
pieds de porc truffés.
Ten to one you will find that not far away from that restaurant is a first-class pork butcher. Or it may be that the pork butcher himself has gone into the restaurant business as an outlet for his products. In fact, this is partly the reason that the English tourist often finds that the one-star restaurant is a disappointment, for the rest of the cooking is not always up to the standard of the
charcuterie.

 

I cannot say that Lamastre in the Ardèche is typical of any small French provincial town, for it has been made famous throughout France by Madame Barattero and the lovely food she has been serving there for thirty years at the Hôtel du Midi. Neither can it be suggested that Madame Barattero relies upon the local
charcutier
, for, first by her husband and, after he died, by her chef, the same few beautiful and high-class dishes have been produced almost every day of those thirty years. But the first-class
charcutier
is there all right and works in co-operation with the hotel, supplying it with at least one of its renowned specialities, a sausage which the Barattero chef cooks and presents wrapped in the lightest and most melting of puff pastries. . . .

Into Montagne’s beautiful blue and cream tiled shop, hidden away in a narrow, unprepossessing street in Lamastre, I strolled, therefore, one Whitsunday morning to see what might be going on while all the housewives and restaurateurs in the town would be busy preparing their Sunday midday feast.

Besides the sausages and the hams, the pâtés and the local Ardéchois specialities called
jambonnettes
,
cayettes
and
rosettes
(unexpectedly, this is a salame type of sausage also popular in Lyon but better made here, I thought—it is identifiable by the coarse-meshed net in which it is presented for sale), there were all sorts of special things for the fêtes. There were trays of snails, their, shells almost bursting with fresh-looking parsley butter, and Sunday hors-d’œuvre of cones of raw ham alternating with little chicken liver pâtés moulded in sparkling aspic jelly, all arranged by Madame Montagne herself on long narrow-plated dishes and ready to take away. There was a huge supply of
quenelles de brochet
(you can’t get away from them in these parts) and in the magnificent butcher’s block of smooth scrubbed wood was a tank-sized two-handled pan of pale orange-coloured sauce full of chopped olives, to serve with the
quenelles
. Beside it was one of those monolithic loaves of butter which never fail to have their effect upon English eyes accustomed to seeing only little half-pound slabs in paper wrappings.

There was a steady stream of customers making last-minute purchases for their Sunday lunches. One woman came in with her saucepan and took away her sauce in it, all ready to put upon the stove and to serve with her
quenelles.
For another, Madame Montagne swiftly cut half a pound of
jambon du pays
in the requisite postcard-thin slices. (The French don’t always take sufficient care about this point. I have seen the otherwise excellent
jambon d’Auvergne
absolutely murdered by being slashed into doorsteps.) A small boy had been sent by his mother to buy an extra chicken to roast. There was none left. What about some sausages instead? The cooking sausages from chez Montagne are the very ones which go into the
feuilletage
at Barattero’s, and, as we were to discover presently, made those of Lyon appear very coarse in comparison. And in between serving her customers, Madame Montagne told me how the
jambonnettes
are cut from the knuckle end of a ham, boned, stuffed with fresh pork meat and sewn up into a fat little cushion shape, how the
rosette
is called after the particular kind of sausage skin in which it is encased, a thick and fat skin which, during the curing process, nourishes the meat inside and gives it its characteristically fresh and moist quality; how a mixture of leg and shoulder meat is used for this kind of sausage and how it is the favourite
charcuterie
speciality of the Ardèche, so that out of every four pigs killed the legs of two only are made into hams, the others, and the shoulders, being used for
rosettes
; how the fresh dry air up here at Lamastre is more propitious for the manufacture of sausages than the notorious fog and damp of Lyon; how they do not care here for that ancient traditional
saucisse aux herbes
which is still made down on the Rhône, but how the same sort of mixture of pork with cabbage, spinach and
blettes
is made into
cayettes
. These resemble rather large rissoles, cooked in the oven, all browned and very appetising-looking in serried rows on their baking trays. Madame Montagne said she didn’t think I’d like them, but they have a not unattractive, coarse flavour which collectors of genuinely rustic dishes would appreciate.

Another speciality, Madame Montagne told me, her green almond eyes curious that I should want to know all these things, was the pâté made largely with
grattons
, the little browned scraps which are the residue after the pork fat has been melted down, and which were also the original ingredient of the renowned
rillettes de Tours.

And the interesting decoration of the shop? Who had created it? It was designed twenty-five years ago by M. Montagne’s grandfather; the lapis-coloured tiles were really to discourage flies, for it is well known that blue repels them but, using the blue as his starting point, old M. Reymond achieved a most original and oddly beautiful combination, a kind of mosaic of sea colours which turns the
charcuterie
into a cool and orderly grotto, if such a thing can be imagined, with the rows of hanging sausages and hams for stalactites. The young Montagnes are very go-ahead (the family have been in the
charcuterie
business for some eighty years) and would like to install a large refrigerated cabinet—but it would mean destroying some of
grandpère
’s work and that would break the old man’s heart. And I hope that even after he is dead the young couple will leave his shop intact, for it is the work of a man who was an artist in design as well as in
charcuterie.

Madame Montagne told me that many foreign customers who come to Lamastre to eat Madame Barattero’s food also come and buy the
charcuterie
products (once again, the link between the restaurant and the local shopkeepers), Germans, Belgians, Swiss, even Italians. She did not, I think, realise what a compliment this is, for it is not common to find sausages anywhere in Europe as good as those of Italy. And all these visitors would surely be sorry to see the old decoration and the elegant little façade of the shop replaced with gleaming glass and chromium.

Here in England we have nothing quite comparable with the French
charcuterie.
In the Midlands and the North it is true that there are excellent pork butchers who sell ready-cooked pigs’ trotters, stuffed chines of bacon for slicing cold, a kind of pâté made from pork scraps, very similar to the
grattons
of French country
charcutiers
, and cooked shoulder gammon. The majority of us, however, must rely upon the commercial liver pâtés sold in the delicatessen shops, rather bleak cold cuts of beef, ham and pork, central European type boiling sausages made in this country, very expensive imported salame sausages and our own commercial frying or grilling sausages. It is, incidentally, a curious anomaly that while we are willing to pay something like twelve shillings a pound for imported salame sausages, we are unable to face the fact that if we want pure pork sausages for cooking they will cost up to seven shillings a pound, and this makes it difficult to reproduce many of the hot sausage dishes which are such a feature of French cookery and which provide such an excellent solution to the problem of what to serve as a rather substantial hot first course when the rest of the meal is to be comparatively light. Nevertheless there are signs that a renaissance of the English sausage is at hand and so I do not feel that it is quite useless to include in this chapter a few recipes for hot sausage dishes, together with such things as grilled pigs’ trotters, ham in a cream sauce, and other little dishes which, strictly speaking, are meat dishes but which, in French cookery, nearly always precede the main dish, whether it be chicken, fish, game or another meat course. Most of these dishes can naturally be adapted to form the chief dish at the midday meal.

As for pâtés and terrines, with the exception of the incomparable
pâté de foie gras
, bought pâtés in England are seldom very satisfactory, and it is not difficult to make your own. If you have no earthenware or fireproof porcelain terrines in which to cook them, this need be no deterrent. For a very small cost enamelled baking tins in all sizes, fireproof glass dishes, or even oblong loaf tins can be bought, and these serve just as well. They don’t look quite so nice on the table, but the pâtés can be turned out on to a dish and sliced for serving.

There is a tendency among English restaurant cooks to put far too much bacon in their pâtés. No doubt this is a legacy of the days of rationing, when bacon was easier to come by than fresh pork. Nowadays there is no need and no reason for it.

This is the sort of pâté you get in French restaurants under the alternative names of
pâté maison
or
terrine du chef
.

The ingredients are 1 lb. each of fat pork (belly) and lean veal,
lb. of pig’s liver, an after-dinner coffee-cup of dry white wine, 2 tablespoons of brandy, a clove of garlic, half a dozen each of black peppercorns and juniper berries, a
teaspoon of ground mace, 4 oz. of fat bacon or, better still, if your butcher will provide it, of either flare fat, or back fat, which is the pork fat often used for wrapping round birds for roasting.

An obliging butcher will usually mince for you the pork, veal and liver, provided he is given due notice. It saves a great deal of time, and I always believe in making my dealers work for me if they will.

To the minced meats, all thoroughly blended, add 2 oz. of the fat bacon or pork fat cut in thin, irregular little dice, the seasonings chopped and blended (half a dessertspoon of salt will be sufficient), and the wine and brandy. Mix very thoroughly and, if there is time, leave to stand for an hour or two before cooking, so that the flavours penetrate the meat. Turn into one large 2-pint capacity terrine, or into 2 or 3 smaller ones, about 2 to 2
inches deep. Cut the remaining fat or bacon into thin strips and arrange it across the top of the pâté. Place the terrines in a baking tin filled with water and cook, uncovered, in a slow oven, Gas No. 2, 310 deg. F. for 1
to 1
hours. The pâtés are cooked when they begin to come away from the sides of the dish.