French Provincial Cooking (63 page)

This is one of the best possible ways of cooking onions in the winter when the oven is, in any case, turned on for the cooking of a stew or some other long-cooked dish. The onions can be served as a first course, or as a separate vegetable after the meat. Red Spanish onions will take a good deal longer to cook than the mild white kind.

In principle, sorrel is cleaned and cooked in exactly the same way as spinach but, as it is of a rather different consistency, melting and softening much more quickly, it can be cooked simply in butter without any water at all, and then chopped or sieved to make a purée. Or if there is only a small quantity, it can be cut into the thinnest of ribbons (
chiffonnade
) before cooking.

Most people prefer the acid flavour softened with cream or eggs (it makes a delicious filling for an omelette) and a small proportion of sorrel added to a lentil or potato or haricot bean soup makes an admirable mixture. In fact sorrel enters into a very large number of refreshing French country soups, giving a flavour for which there is no quite satisfactory substitute, although watercress can very successfully be used as an
alternative
in many soups and sauces in which sorrel appears.

A purée of sorrel is also the old-fashioned accompaniment of a
fricandeau
and other veal dishes, and of one or two fishes, notably shad (
alose
) and hake (
colin
). Allow
lb. sorrel per person.

For 1 lb. of sorrel, washed and drained, melt 1
oz. of butter in a thick saucepan; cook the sorrel in this with a little salt until it is soft. Sieve it or chop it finely. Return it to the saucepan and let it dry out a little over very gentle heat. Stir in 3 or 4 tablespoons of creamy béchamel, or
sauce à la crème
(page 115).

Fresh thick cream can be used instead of the cream sauce, but the acid in the sorrel tends to curdle the cream so it is wisest to stir a teaspoon of flour into it and to heat it up until it boils, and then stir it into the purée. Beaten yolks of egg can also be used to bind a sorrel purée.

Excellent with veal and with white fish.

The great difference between the way peas are served in French and English cookery respectively is that while we cook ours so that each pea is, so to speak, separate (and very often a separate bullet), the French cook them so that they are bound together with a sauce, although that sauce usually consists only of butter.

But to cook English peas
à la française,
that is to say, entirely in butter with lettuce heart and tiny onions, is only possible when the youngest, smallest, tenderest, garden peas are available. When they are full grown, although still young, a compromise between the English and French methods produces excellent results.

For 3 lb. of peas, freshly shelled, shred 1 small cabbage lettuce heart; put this with the peas, a little salt and a lump of sugar, in sufficient boiling water just to cover the peas. Cook uncovered until they are barely tender. Drain them. Return them to the rinsed saucepan with a large lump of butter—
lb. is by no means too much—and let the peas and lettuce stew gently in this butter for a few minutes. The result will be a dish of peas with the most delicate flavour and a sauce of an almost creamy consistency. It is, of course, a dish to be served on its own, so you need about 3 lb. of peas for four people.

French and Belgian tinned
petits pois
are excellent when fresh ones cannot be obtained. They were, I believe, one of the first vegetables ever to be preserved by the tinning method and those made by a firm at Nantes in Britanny very quickly became famous. No green colouring matter is ever put with French or Belgian tinned peas, for if it were nobody would buy them. In England, I am told by grocers and the canning firms, people would not buy them without the green colouring. But judging by the number of people willing to pay high prices for the French and Belgian varieties, there should surely be a market, even if a limited one, for home-grown peas preserved without colouring matter.

Probably the best way to serve tinned
petits pois
is to drain off all but a small amount of the existing liquid, heat the peas in what is left and, when it has evaporated, add a large lump of butter, shaking the pan until it has melted. Some brands of tinned peas need extra seasoning in the way of sugar and salt; others are already sufficiently seasoned.

Leeks are tiresome to clean, but once ready they seldom need more than 10 minutes’ cooking. Trim off all the coarse green part of the leaves, the outside covering of the white part and the root. Cut all the leeks to approximately the same length. Make a cross-cut on the top of each. Hold them under a running cold tap for a few seconds, then turn them upside down and shake them. Leave them, heads downward, in a jug or saucepan of fresh cold water for half an hour before cooking them. Any grit left in the leeks will by then have seeped out or become apparent in little dark patches under the outer leaves. If it is difficult to get at, make a little slit along the leek and rinse it again.

On page 209 is a recipe for a leek pie, and three soups in which leeks are the characteristic and indispensable flavouring are in the soup chapter. For vegetable dishes allow a minimum of
lb. leeks per person.

2 lb. leeks, 2 tomatoes, 2 cloves of garlic, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper.

In a frying-pan warm about 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Put in the cleaned leeks, laying them side by side. As soon as the oil starts bubbling turn the leeks over. Sprinkle with salt and cayenne pepper. Cook half a minute, then turn down the flame, cover the pan and cook slowly for about 7 minutes for small leeks, 9 or 10 for large ones. Test by putting a skewer into the root end of the leek, which is the toughest part. Take out the leeks and put them in a long dish. Into the oil in the pan throw the 2 tomatoes, skinned and chopped, the chopped garlic (more or less according to taste) and a little chopped parsley. Cook fairly fast for about 2 minutes but don’t let the oil burn. Pour this mixture over the leeks, squeeze a little lemon juice over and serve hot.

Cooked in this way the leeks, instead of having that seaweed-like look and texture which they acquire from being overcooked in water, retain a certain crispness and all their flavour. Served cold, this dish also makes a good hors-d’œuvre.

Unexpectedly, perhaps, when wine is to be used in the cooking of leeks, the French always use red rather than white wine.

Choose small leeks, all of a size. Having cut them down almost to the white part and cleaned them thoroughly, put them side by side in a frying-pan in which you have heated 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil. As soon as they have taken colour on one side, turn them over. Season with very little salt. Pour over them, for 1 lb. of leeks, a wineglass of red wine (look out for the spluttering), let it bubble, add 2 tablespoons of good meat stock, or water if no stock is available, cover the pan and cook at a moderate pace for 7 to 10 minutes, turning the leeks over once during the process. They are done when a skewer pierces the root end quite easily. Put the leeks on a shallow oval dish, cook the sauce another few seconds until reduced and pour it over the leeks.

Serve hot as a separate vegetable course, or cold as an hors-d’œuvre. This is an example of a dish for which one would not buy wine specially, but which is delicious if you happen to have a glass to spare. It is a dish of particularly beautiful appearance, with the green of the leeks and the dark purple of the wine sauce.

Stuffed sweet peppers, whether in France, Italy, England or anywhere else, very often become a very heavy and stodgy dish. The common mistake is to cram the peppers too full with too solid and rich a mixture.

This recipe, said to be of Corsican origin, makes a good dish to serve as a hot first course, and shows how small a quantity of stuffing is necessary for peppers.

Ingredients are 4 large red or green sweet peppers, 1 teacup of rice, olive oil, lemon juice, 2 to 3 tablespoons of finely-chopped parsley mixed with a little marjoram or wild thyme, salt and freshly-milled pepper. Boil the rice, keeping it a little undercooked. Drain and season it; stir in the parsley mixture, some lemon juice and a little olive oil. Cut the peppers in half lengthways. Remove all the core and seeds and rinse the peppers under running cold water to make sure that no single seed is left. Put 2 tablespoons of the rice mixture into each half pepper; pour a film of olive oil into a shallow baking dish, put in the stuffed peppers, cover them and cook in a gentle oven, Gas No. 3, 330 deg. F., for about an hour. From time to time baste the peppers with the oil in the dish, adding more if necessary. The rice should remain moist, and no hard crust should form on the top. There should be ample for four.

The dish is usually served hot but is also good cold as an hors-d’œuvre.

Cut a slice from the stalk ends of two sweet red or green peppers; extract the cores and seeds. Rinse the peppers to get rid of any lurking seeds; cut them in narrow strips; fry them gently in a little olive oil in a covered pan for 10 minutes; add a sliced clove of garlic, 1
lb. of skinned and chopped tomatoes, several dried basil leaves, salt and pepper. Cook until the whole mixture is a fairly thick purée. Enough for three or four.