French Provincial Cooking (77 page)

Just before serving, cook 4 or 5 skinned and chopped tomatoes in a little olive oil in a separate pan; when they have turned almost to a purée, season them rather highly and add them to the inkfish mixture. After another minute or two of cooking, the dish is ready. It is best served with plainly cooked rice. Enough for three or four.

One or two small inkfish cooked in this way can be added to the mussel and rice dish described on page 320, and give it a very rich flavour.

Rounds of stewed inkfish are also excellent dipped in frying batter (see page 245) and fried in a deep pan of oil.

‘In France,
Octopus vulgaris
is highly prized for bait, and is also considered very good as food; and in
Life in Normandy
, Vol. I, is the following recipe for cooking it:

‘A dish of cuttlefish is divided in the centre by a slice of toast; on one side of the toast is a mass of cuttlefish stewed with a white sauce; and on the other a pile of them beautifully fried, of a clear even colour, without the slightest appearance of grease. The flour of haricot beans, very finely ground, and which is as good as breadcrumbs, is added.’

M. S. LOVELL:
Edible Mollusks,
1867

 

Lovell seems to be confusing octopus with cuttlefish but then there are those tiny cephalopods called
suppions
which, crisply fried in olive oil, make delicious and quite tender little morsels. Although often referred to as octopus, I think they are, in fact, technically a variety of squid.

Here are the instructions for the preparation of snails, given by Madame Millet-Robinet in
Maison Rustique des Dames
, a book which was enormously popular in the mid-nineteenth century and which, judging from the manner of its arrangement and content, may well have had some influence on our own Mrs. Beeton.

 

‘The first essential is to leave the snails to starve for at least one month, enclosed in some kind of vessel, left in a cool but not damp place. There are cases of accidents having occurred when this precaution has not been taken: the snails, having fed on noxious plants, have caused food poisoning. At the end of this time, the snails are thrown into a cauldron filled with boiling water (to which some add wood ash) and they are cooked for 20 minutes. This done, they are taken from their shells; the little intestine is removed; they are washed in several waters; they are put again into fresh water, salted and boiled for a few minutes, and then they are drained.

‘The snails are then put into a saucepan with butter and a large spoonful of flour; stir them, moisten them with stock, water or white wine; add thyme, bay leaves, salt, pepper, mushrooms if possible, and leave to cook until the snails are tender. You then add the egg yolks, to which a little verjuice (the juice of unripe grapes), lemon juice or vinegar can be added.’

‘The snails are prepared and cooked and drained as above; the shells are carefully cleaned; a stuffing is made as follows: mushrooms, parsley, shallots and garlic are all very finely chopped, seasoned with salt and pepper and mixed with a little breadcrumbs and a sufficient quantity of butter; a little of the stuffing is put into each shell, then the snail, and the shell is filled up with the stuffing; put the snails in a fireproof dish into which a half glass of white wine has been poured, and the dish is put in the oven for a quarter of an hour.’

MADAME MILLET-ROBINET:
Maison Rustique des Dames

Tinned snails of the specially reared variety known as
helix pomatia
or
hélices vigneronnes,
apple or vine snails, consumed and exported by the French in millions, can be served with the stuffing described by Madame Millet-Robinet (pounded walnuts are sometimes added to this kind of stuffing), or in the well-known Burgundian manner with parsley and garlic butter. This is made as follows: chop very finely indeed a handful of the freshest parsley, rinsed and squeezed dry, and the stalks discarded, with a shallot or two. Add a finely pounded clove of garlic, or two if you like. Work this mixture into approximately 7 oz. of very fine unsalted butter, season with pepper, nutmeg and only the smallest pinch of salt, because tinned snails are usually already quite sufficiently salted.

These quantities are enough for 4 dozen snails, and the butter should be made only on the day it is needed, for the garlic and shallots will quickly turn the butter sour. For this reason, snails bought ready filled, although they may be excellent the day they arrive from France, will not be too good if they have been hanging about in the shop.

Put a little knob of the butter in each shell, then the snail, then fill up with more butter, pressing it in so that each shell is crammed as full as it can be. Put the filled shells, open end uppermost, in the dishes specially designed for the purpose (see the drawing on page 329), cover each dish with a buttered paper or piece of foil and put them in a fairly hot oven for 7 to 10 minutes. Take great care, when getting the dishes out of the oven, not to let the snails slip over on their sides, for the hot melted butter will drip out and the snails will be spoilt.

A recently invented system which does away with the necessity for special dishes and tongs is to have minuscule pots, one for each snail, made of coarse brown or grey stoneware. The French name for these little pots is
godets
. They are shown in the drawing on page 329, as are also the special dishes and implements normally required. All can be bought in England. (For shops see page 69.)

The following information about various old country methods of cooking snails comes from M. S. Lovell’s
Edible Mollusks
, already quoted above.

 

‘The inhabitants of Central France use several sauces for snails, and the four principal are the following, according to Dr. Ebrard:

‘L’ayoli,
or
ail-y-oli,
of Languedoc; a paste made with olive oil and pounded garlic.

‛L’aillada,
of Gascony; a most complicated sauce of garlic, onions, chives, leeks, parsley, etc., with spices, cloves and nutmeg, the whole thickened with oil.

‘La limassade
of Provence, called
la vinaigrette
in Paris.

‘La cacalaousada
of Montpellier, composed of flour, ham, sugar, etc. At Bordeaux the
aillada
is softened with a mixture of bread, flour and yolk of egg, boiled with milk.

‘Stuffed snails are also considered very good. A fine stuffing is made with snails previously cooked, fillets of anchovies, nutmeg, spice, fine herbs, and a liaison of yolks of eggs. The snail shells are filled with this stuffing, then placed before the fire, and served
very
hot. In some countries Blainville states that snails are eaten smoked and dried.’

These are the small snails which the country people go out and gather by the basketful after the spring showers. Lovell quotes Dr. Ebrard as saying that this variety, the
helix aspersa
, ‘has a variety of names in France, and in the north it is called
colimaçon, jardinière
and
aspergille
; at Montpellier,
caraguolo
; in Bordelais,
cagouille, limaou
and
limat
; in Provence,
escargot escourgol
; at Avignon,
caragaou
and
contar
;
banarut
at Arles; and
bajaina
at Grasse.’

It is odd that frogs’ legs, which are such delicate little morsels that surely even the most fastidious could not object to them, should inspire such horror in England. Only the green frogs with black markings are considered edible, and the back legs are the only parts ever served. However, it is not much use giving directions as to their cooking, since they are unobtainable in this country (although I see tinned frogs’ legs are being imported). The systems of cooking are, in fact, extremely simple, the frogs’ legs being usually simply floured and
sauté
in butter. They take about 10 to 12 minutes to cook. With the addition of chopped parsley, garlic and lemon juice, they become
grenouilles à la provençale,
and a particularly delicious dish of frogs which I ate at a restaurant in Chagny in the Côte d’Or was called
grenouilles à la bressane
; they were in a butter and cream sauce with a quantity of finely-chopped parsley and a little tarragon.

FRENCH cooks, it is sometimes alleged, have perfected their particular brand of magic with second-class materials because they have no first-class ones. This, of course, is nonsensical. French cooks hold good-quality materials in the highest esteem, and certainly have plenty to work with. But the attitude of a French cook or housewife is extremely realistic. Appreciating the fact that not every fish that comes out of the sea is a sole, and that not even carefully nurtured animals are entirely constructed of prime steaks and cutlets, they have made it their business to know how to present coarser fish, elderly birds and second or third-grade cuts of meat with the identical skill and ceremony accorded to luxury roasts and show-pieces. Thus a number of cheap delicacies have become famous, and have acquired a considerable snob value wherever French cooking is known. Such things as
andouilles
and
andouillettes
(tripe sausages) are notable examples;
bœuf
gros
sel
which is boiled beef from the
pot-au-feu
with coarse salt, pigs’ trotters
à la Ste. Ménéhould, blanquette de veau
,
tendrons de veau,
oxtail stews and calf’s head
vinaigrette
have become specialities of sophisticated restaurants.

Also, a good French butcher takes as much trouble over the cutting, trimming and presentation of his cheap cuts as with the prime joints. Such things as shoulder and breast of lamb, shoulder cuts, skirt and briskets of beef, shins of veal and belly of pork are so neatly prepared that when the housewife buys them she knows exactly what she is getting; there will be no trimming or boning for her to do at home and so no waste, of either time or materials. Beef for braising or for
bœuf mode, bœuf bourguignon
or the
pot-au-feu
will be on display at the butcher’s without her having to order it specially, to have it larded or to explain what is to be done. And this is where we come up against a difficulty when we want to cook French meat dishes in England, for it is not only the meticulous cutting and seaming, trimming and larding and tying which is differently approached in France, but the separation of the carcases into their various cuts is done on a different system, particularly in regard to beef and veal, so that it is not easy to get, in England, the precise equivalent of a French shoulder cut of beef for a
pot-au-feu,
of a leg cut for a
daube
, of a
noix
of veal for roasting, or escalopes for frying. In the meat recipes, therefore, I have tried wherever possible to indicate English equivalents or alternatives to the French cuts.

This, perhaps, is the place to add that although I have included a good many recipes for the cheaper cuts of meat, since I believe that these are the kind of dishes most needed by English housewives today, I have kept recipes for liver, kidneys, sweetbreads and brains down to a minimum. Once cheap delicacies, these things are now almost in the luxury category and, at least as far as sweetbreads and brains are concerned, the fact that they are also tedious to prepare seems to put them rather out of the good value class.

One of the worst stumbling blocks to the buying of meat in England is the insistence upon cuts which can be quickly prepared and cooked. Butchers are inundated with demands for roasting and grilling cuts, of which, after all, there is only a limited quantity in each animal.