French Provincial Cooking (79 page)

PIERRE HUGUENIN:
Les Meilleures Recettes de ma Pauvre Mère,
1936

There must be scores of different recipes for daubes in Provence alone, as well as all those which have been borrowed from Provence by other regions, for a daube of beef is essentially a country housewife’s dish. In some daubes the meat is cut up, in others it is cooked in the piece; what goes in apart from the meat is largely a matter of what is available, and the way it is served is again a question of local taste.

This is an easy recipe, but it has all the rich savour of these slowly-cooked wine-flavoured stews. The pot to cook it in may be earthenware, cast iron, or a copper or aluminium oven pot of about 2 pints capacity, wide rather than deep.

The ingredients are 2 lb. of top rump of beef, about 6 oz. of unsmoked streaky bacon or salt pork, about 3 oz. of fresh pork rinds, 2 onions, 2 carrots, 2 tomatoes, 2 cloves of garlic, a bouquet of thyme, bayleaf, parsley and a little strip of orange peel, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, a glass (4 fl. oz.) of red wine, seasoning.

Have the meat cut into squares about the size of half a postcard and about
inch thick. Buy the bacon or salt pork in the piece and cut it into small cubes.

Scrape and slice the carrots on the cross; peel and slice the onions. Cut the rinds, which should have scarcely any fat adhering to them and are there to give body as well as savour to the stew, into little squares. Skin and slice the tomatoes.

In the bottom of the pot put the olive oil, then the bacon, then the vegetables and half the pork rinds. Arrange the meat carefully on top, the slices overlapping each other. Bury the garlic cloves, flattened with a knife, and the bouquet, in the centre. Cover with the rest of the pork rinds. With the pan uncovered. start the cooking on a moderate heat on top of the stove.

After about 10 minutes, put the wine into another saucepan; bring it to a fast boil; set light to it; rotate the pan so that the flames spread. When they have died down pour the wine bubbling over the meat. Cover the pot with greaseproof paper or foil, and a well-fitting lid. Transfer to a very slow oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F., and leave for 2
hours.

To serve, arrange the meat with the bacon and the little pieces of rind on a hot dish; pour off some of the fat from the sauce, extract the bouquet, and pour the sauce round the meat. If you can, keep the dish hot over a spirit lamp after it is brought to table. At the serving stage, a
persillade
of finely-chopped garlic and parsley, with perhaps an anchovy and a few capers, can be sprinkled over the top. Or stoned black olives can be added to the stew half an hour before the end of the cooking time.

Although in Italy pasta is never served with a meat dish, in Provence it quite often is. The cooked and drained noodles, or whatever pasta you have chosen, are mixed with some of the gravy from the stew, and in this case the fat is not removed from the gravy, because it lubricates the pasta. Sometimes this
macaronade
, as it is called, is served first, to be followed by the meat.

Nowadays, since rice has been successfully cultivated in the reclaimed areas of the Camargue, it is also quite usual to find a dish of rice, often flavoured with saffron, served with a meat stew.

This daube is a useful dish for those who have to get a dinner ready when they get home from the office. It can be cooked for 1
hours the previous evening and finished on the night itself. Provided they have not been overcooked to start with, these beef and wine stews are all the better for a second or even third heating up. The amounts I have given are the smallest quantities in which it is worth cooking such a stew, and will serve four or five people, but of course they can be doubled or even trebled for a large party; if the meat is piled up in layers in a deep pan it will naturally need longer cooking than if it is spread out in a shallow one.

From a little book of New Orleans cookery published under the name of Madame Bégué, who many years ago had a restaurant in that city of traditional good cooking, comes an interesting variation on the Provençal daube of beef, adapted by the Creole cooks to accord with the ingredients available locally. The meat is studded with olives and cooked with rum instead of wine; and the curious point is that although the result is a very rich-tasting dish I think few people would be able to detect the presence of the rum, or to say in what precise way the stew differs from the French original.

2
to 3 lb. topside or round of beef in one piece, a dozen pimento-stuffed olives,
lb. of salt streaky pork or bacon, a large onion, 4 or 5 tomatoes, bouquet of herbs, butter or dripping, half a teacup of rum, salt and pepper, garlic.

Trim excess fat from the meat, and make a double row of deep incisions on each side; in these stick the olives, each one cut in half lengthways. Tie the meat into a good oblong shape. Slice the onion and let it take colour in a little butter or dripping heated in an earthenware or other stewing-pot of about 2 pints capacity. Put in the salt pork cut in cubes, and when the fat from this starts to run put in the meat and let it brown a little on each side. Now heat the rum, set light to it and pour it flaming over the meat. Shake and rotate the pan until the flames die down, then add the tomatoes, skinned and roughly chopped, a clove or two of garlic crushed with a knife, the bouquet of herbs (bayleaf, fresh parsley, a sprig of thyme and dried basil if you have it) tied with a thread, a very little salt and quite a lot of freshly-milled pepper. Cover with a sheet of greaseproof paper or foil and a lid. Cook in a very slow oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F., for about 3 hours.

Remove the bouquet before serving and crush the tomatoes into the sauce with a wooden spoon. The sauce will be rather rich and highly flavoured, and the best accompaniment is either a dish of plain rice or, in the Provençal fashion, some plainly boiled noodles mixed with a little of the juice from the meat.

In the original recipe, which I have adapted somewhat because of its vagueness as to cooking methods, the meat is larded with the salt pork as well as the olives, but to my taste this tends to make the meat over-salted.

Although at a first glance readers may find it curious that this recipe, and two or three others which do not belong strictly to metropolitan France, should be included in this book, these recipes seem to me to be of great interest as showing the way in which French cooks develop their dishes in different countries. At home they tend to be extremely conservative and would very likely be horrified at the idea of using rum instead of wine in a stew or of serving a leek and potato soup iced with cream as did Louis Diat when he turned
potage bonne femme
into
vichyssoise glacée
; but when they settle abroad they soon realise that if they are going to be well fed they must also be flexible in the matter of adapting local ingredients new to them. Wherever the French have settled or French chefs have been employed one finds interesting variations on the old regional dishes of France itself.

A fine large piece of topside or top rump of beef is required for this dish, and it is not worth attempting with less than 4 to 5 lb. The other ingredients are a little pork or goose dripping or oil, carrots, onions, garlic, half a bottle of red wine, brandy if possible, a big faggot of aromatic herbs including bay leaves, thyme and parsley, about 1 lb. of streaky salt pork and 2 pigs’ trotters.

Have your beef rolled and tied in a good shape; melt the dripping in a heavy pot which has a well-fitting lid; put in the meat, surround it with 2 large sliced onions, 4 or 5 carrots, a couple of cloves of garlic. Start off over a gentle flame for 15 minutes, and when the fat is running and the onions beginning to colour, pour in 4 oz. (8 tablespoons) of brandy; let it bubble; add the wine; put in the salt pork, the trotters (split) and the bouquet, and a very little salt. Cover the pot, transfer to the lowest possible oven, and there leave it for about 7 or 8 hours.