An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Read online

  An Omelette

  and a Glass of Wine

  Other books by Elizabeth David published by Grub Street

  Elizabeth David Classics: Mediterranean Food,

  French Country Cooking and Summer Cooking

  Three works in one omnibus hardback edition

  Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen

  French Provincial Cooking

  Elizabeth David

  An Omelette

  and a Glass of Wine

  GRUB STREET · LONDON

  This edition published in 2009 by

  Grub Street

  4 Rainham Close

  London

  SW11 6SS

  Email: [email protected] [email protected]

  Web: www.grubstreet.co.uk

  Reprinted 2005, 2008, 2011, 2013

  Copyright this edition © Grub Street 2009

  Text copyright © Elizabeth David, 1952, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973, 1979, 1980, 1984, 2009

  Drawings by Marie Alix for 107 Recettes de Curiosités Culinaires

  Edited by Paul Poiret, published by Henri Jouquières et Cie, Paris 1928

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-906502-35-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed and bound in India by

  Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.

  FOR

  ANTHONY AND CELIA DENNEY

  WITH LOVE

  Contents

  Introduction

  John Wesley’s Eye

  Fast and Fresh

  The True Emulsion

  Lucky Dip

  Summer Holidays

  Big Bad Bramleys

  Crackling

  Your Perfected Hostess

  Secrets

  Ladies’ Halves

  Letting Well Alone

  An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

  Chez Barattero

  Dishes for Collectors

  Eating out in Provincial France 1965–1977

  Confort anglais, French fare

  Roustidou

  Golden Delicious

  A la marinière

  Fruits de mer

  Waiting for Lunch

  Para Navidad

  Pizza

  Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wines

  Bruscandoli

  Mafalda, Giovanna, Giulia

  Have It Your Way

  South Wind through the Kitchen

  The Englishman’s Food

  Home Baked Bread

  West Points

  If You Care to Eat Shark

  Moorish Recipes

  Fine Bouche

  How Bare is Your Cupboard?

  Chez Gee-Gee

  Franglais

  Exigez le véritable Cheddar français

  Having Crossed the Channel

  Pomiane, Master of the Unsacrosanct

  Table Talk

  Whisky in the Kitchen

  A Gourmet in Edwardian London

  I’ll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon

  Pleasing Cheeses

  Sweet Aristo

  English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes

  Syllabubs and Fruit Fools

  Operation Mulberry

  Foods of Legend

  The Markets of France: Cavaillon

  Yvetot

  Montepellier

  Martigues

  Valence

  Oules of Sardines

  Trufflesville Regis

  The Magpie System

  Traditional Christmas Dishes

  Welsh Doubles

  Too Many Cooks

  Isabella Beeton and her Book

  Index

  Illustrations

  Elizabeth David in her kitchen, by John Ward, R.A.

  Madame Barattero and her chef Monsieur Perrier outside the Hôtel du Midi

  La Mère Brazier

  Norman Douglas

  Marcel Boulestin by Gromaire, London, 1925

  A 1936 menu for the Boulestin restaurant in London

  Edouard de Pomiane

  Colonel Newnham-Davis

  Lady Llanover, by Mornewick

  Introduction

  In thirty five years of writing about food and cookery I have contributed articles to a very various collection of publications. From the Sunday Times to Nova, from Vogue to the Spectator, from the long defunct travel magazine Go to Cyril Ray’s Compleat Imbiber, Peter Dominic’s Wine Mine and quite a few others, I have put together the present volume. The bulk of the articles included were written during the decade between 1955 when I joined the Sunday Times as cookery contributor and 1965 when I launched my kitchen shop. For several of those years I was contributing a monthly article apiece to Vogue and House and Garden as well as a fortnightly one to the Sunday Times, and in 1960 had published French Provincial Cooking. In 1961, freed from the Sunday Times and the monthly stints for the Condé Nast magazines, I worked for a time for the moribund Sunday Dispatch and wrote my first contribution for the Spectator and, unexpectedly perhaps, thoroughly enjoyed writing for both publications. What matters is sympathetic editors who know how to get the best out of their contributors, and in that respect I have been, albeit with one or two notable exceptions, very fortunate.

  It was the Spectator’s editors who liberated me from the strait-jacket of the conventional cookery article as decreed by custom. The old routine had been to open with a short introductory piece relevant to the products of the season, or to one particular type of dish, let us say soufflés, omelettes, rice dishes – the very first cookery article I ever wrote was for Harper’s Bazaar and was called Rice Again – or it might deal with the cookery of a specific region of France, or of Italy, or perhaps it would be a little moan about the poor quality of our potatoes, or about not being able to buy courgettes. Whatever it was, once the opening piece was dutifully concluded, you filled the rest of your space with appropriate recipes and that was that. Sometimes the formula reminded me of English musical comedy. The recipes were the turns, the songs and dances, the introductory pieces the spoken dialogue which kept the flimsy plot moving. It was all very stilted. When in 1956 I was recruited by Audrey Withers, editor of Vogue, to write for the Condé Nast magazines, I made a bid to break away from the idiotic convention by planning, for House and Garden, a series on English cookery writers of the past. Kicking off with Eliza Acton – in those days not many people knew about her wonderful book, first published in 1845,1 and even Longmans, her own publishers, had never heard of her – I followed up with Colonel Kenney Herbert, the Victorian officer who in his retirement opened a cookery school in Sloane Street, and copies of whose books on what in his opinion were the proper food and cooking for the British in India are today much sought after. In 1984 the subject is popular enough, but in 1956 the editors of House and Garden didn’t take to the Colonel or the parade-ground tones in which he denounced the kitchens and cooks of the Raj. House and Garden readers, they said, wanted recipes, not history. It was back to the outdated formula.

  For the temporary setback I made up during my years at the Spectator. They were stimulating years for me. Well, look at the company I found myself in. Katharine Whitehorn, Cyril Ray, Bernard Levin calling himself Taper, Alan Brien, Jean Robertson contributing a weekly piece under the pseudonym of Leslie Adrian. Brian Inglis was my first editor, succeeded by Iain Hamilton, in whose time most of my Spectator pieces were written, and at the end, briefl
y, the lamented Ian McLeod. If life as a contributor to the Sunday Times had been bumpy, and it had been made so by the late Ernestine Carter, editor of the fashion pages, always appropriately ready with her cutting-out shears when it came to my cookery pieces, at the Spectator, the co-operation, support and on occasions most beneficial editing by Cyril Ray and Katharine Whitehorn, were compensation for the years of Mrs Carter’s busy scissors. As can be seen from the selection of articles I have chosen to reprint (others have already been incorporated into books, some simply weren’t good enough to reproduce, some, including the historical ones, will eventually appear in another volume) my subjects were in the main topical, and ranged all over the place, from reviews of eccentric books such as Sir Harry Luke’s The Tenth Muse and Alan Davidson’s very singular first version of Mediterranean Seafood, then entitled Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean, a stencilled production sold for the benefit of the Tunisian Red Crescent – no doubt copies are now collectors’ items – to harmless fun at the expense of restaurant guides and the baiting of public relations persons who made imbecile suggestions to the effect that two tins of tomato juice packed in a basket tied with red ribbons would make a nice neighbourly Christmas gift. Sometimes my fortnightly column would deal with an event such as a delicatessen exhibition, an encounter with some delicious and hitherto unknown wine or with a particularly awful restaurant, or even just with a glut of apples. Topics such as the well-known British disregard for the authenticity of other peoples’ and indeed our own culinary specialities preoccupied me a good deal, as how should they not? It has to be remembered that it was only in 1954 that we had been freed from food rationing. The national fling with abundance didn’t occur overnight, and it didn’t by any means coincide with an instant disappearance of all the ghastly synthetic foodstuffs and ignoble substitutes to which as a nation we had become acclimatised during the war years and after. On the contrary, once entrenched, those boil-in-the-bag sauces I wrote about in a little article for Punch, included in the present collection, and other such expedients of scarcity, whether of ingredients, time, technical accomplishment, or simply of knowledge, are still with us today, and given the microwave’s magic button, likely to remain so. I think that blithe acceptance of travesty in the matter of imported specialities, whether it be the pizza, the quiche, or the newest invention of M. Michel Guérard, is deep within our national temperament. This characteristic I examined in an article about mayonnaise entitled The True Emulsion. It reappears here without comment. It needs none.

  Every now and again, during my joyous Spectator years, there would be a threat of trouble. Once Messrs Walls cut up a bit rough when I reported that, proffered a slice of their packaged chicken and veal pie, my cat had waved a disdainful tail and walked off. When I pointed out that cats were habitually more fastidious than humans, but like humans variable in their tastes, everyone calmed down. On another occasion I quoted a wartime recipe for a corned beef pudding contributed by a famous Mayfair restaurant to a Kitchen Front-type collection published in 1942. The enraged wife of the owner of the restaurant wrote defying me to prove that the recipe had ever existed. That was unwise of her. Chapter and verse were there, in print. If the recipe had been libel in the first place why had she and her husband not done something about it sooner? Then there was the time I criticised a terrible restaurant owned by Lyons. The trouble was that the owners weren’t owning up to owning it, and I had rumbled them, hardly a great feat of detection. My punishment was to return to the same restaurant for dinner with one of the directors, or was it their public relations officer? A genial host, but he couldn’t make the food any better. However, the evening was nothing like the ordeal I had suffered after publishing a derogatory article about British sausages in the Sunday Times. A guided tour of the Walls factory had been followed, first by lunch with the directors – we ate sausages, of course, but at least I wasn’t eating my words – and during the ensuing weeks by a bombardment of sample after sample of their products. No doubt the public relations people at Walls were just doing their jobs. They can’t really have thought that a few free sausages were going to convert me into a Walls sausage enthusiast.

  It must have been at about this time that a fellow guest at a small private dinner party given by a wine merchant friend at Prunier’s restaurant leant across the table and said to me, ‘It must be awful to be you. Always criticising everything, enjoying nothing.’ Well, if a food writer does not exercise his or her critical faculties to a high degree and with a backing of informed experience, he or she is not doing his or her job. He or she is a sham or, as would be said nowadays, a pseud. What, I wonder, would the person who made that remark to me have had to say if our host had not troubled to choose his wines with as much critical care as indeed Madame Prunier had exercised in the choice of her menu? Does a theatre critic offer his readers indiscriminate praise of every play or of the performances of every actor he has seen during the week, a music critic of every concert or opera he has attended? To be attacked for declining to say, whether in private or in public, that in the world of gastronomy, French, English, or any other, all was always for the best, and that that world was the best of all possible ones, seemed to me illogical, ignorant and thoroughly philistine. But lest it be assumed by anyone taking a superficial look at the essays assembled in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine that these consist wholly of carping criticism and unconstructive send-ups, I should point out here that, on the contrary, the majority of them are about benefits and pleasures, about good food, good wine, good cookery books. Those pleasures I did my best to express to my readers in lively terms. A delightful meal in a modest restaurant deep in Provence was the subject of one of my very early articles for the Spectator. True enough, I finished the piece with a plea to British restaurateurs of similar scope to refrain from the addition of redundant elements to every one of their dishes, to leave well alone if and when well was what they could do. Governessy, if you like, but at the time it was something which really did need saying. It still does, although quite frequently in a reverse sense. Today’s young restaurant chefs, amateurs usually, tend to imagine that they can with impunity take some recently evolved style moderne recipe, omit one of only two key components, and with a flourish present a customer with nothing more than one and a half mushrooms and one small croûton in the centre of a vast expanse of otherwise empty plate. The descriptions of the mushroom as ‘wild’, and of the croûton as ‘le brioche de notre pâtissier’ do nothing to mitigate the ludicrous effect of the presentation, particularly when you know perfectly well that the ‘wild’ mushrooms have been brought by lorry from Rungis market, to where they had been conveyed in the first place from a Dutch mushroom farm, and that ‘notre pâtissier’ is a Camden Town bakery. It is the kind of place where if you read salade de foie de volaille on the menu, it isn’t due to a fault of written French but is the literal truth, salad of one chicken liver. The London style moderne restaurants become ever more reminiscent of that old music hall song in which the chorus line was something about one meat ball.

  To return to the France of the old style 1960s, about four years after that Provence excursion of Letting Well Alone, a primitive but strikingly enjoyable lunch in an indescribably scruffy café somewhere close to the Loire was the starting point for a Nova story called Pleasing Cheeses. In those days so agreeable a surprise meal had already become a very exceptional happening in the French provinces. Could it ever happen again?

  In February 1962, for the tenth anniversary of the death of Norman Douglas, I wrote about the times I had first met him in 1939, in Antibes, and again twelve years later in Capri. It was then 1951, the last year of his life. The piece had been very difficult to write, but appreciative letters from some of Norman’s old friends were gratifying. Later, I expanded the original article, and that second version, taken from another publication,1 reappears here. In the autumn of 1962, with assistance from a delightful lady at the French Embassy called Mademoiselle Bologna, I arranged a visit to
Nantes to meet some of the people involved in the sardine industry and to find out how the sardine got into the tin. I had always wanted to know, and now I do. Spectator readers were pleased and interested, even the one who took the trouble to write from Canada saying that I wrote like a hairdresser – I had used that furiously disputed word firstly instead of first1 – and he remained dear modom mine sincerely. A by-product of my Nantes visit was the discovery of the beauty of the fish in the market there and of the towering heaps of tiny, sweet, briefly cooked mussels to be found in the humbler restaurants of the city. So Fruits de Mer came out of Nantes as well as Oules of Sardines. The following autumn, 1963, after a disruptive illness, I went on a short trip to Turin and Alba, to see an exhausting exhibition of Piedmontese baroque at Stupinigi, the former palace of the royal house of Savoy, and more enjoyably, to eat white truffles and fonduta, white truffles with risotto, white truffles and scrambled eggs, white truffles spread on bread and butter. My article, Trufflesville Regis, was written rather hurriedly for the Spectator, and contained any number of Italian spelling mistakes. Nobody complained except the Italian friend I had been with on the trip. In due course she corrected them for me, and a second version of the article was published by Cyril Ray in his Compleat Imbiber. That is the one which appears here. Another happy autumnal article, Para Navidad, emerged from South East Spain in November 1964.

  I suspect that there will be a few readers who will think what a lovely time I had going on all those trips with everything paid for by the paper. So I did have a lovely time, but nothing was paid for by anyone other than myself. It was only in one or two of my Vogue years that I had been allowed the princely sum of £100 by Condé Nast to cover expenses, hotels, restaurant meals, petrol, when I went on the occasional ten to fourteen day trip to France. During my Spectator period I didn’t ask for expenses and didn’t expect them. The pay was nothing to sing about either but because I retained all my copyrights, as indeed I have done ever since I started in journalism,2 I was able to republish my articles in other forms and publications and thus earn the extra money which would eventually cover my expenses on trips such as the Trufflesville one. Many of my Vogue contributions published between 1956 and 1959, as also some of my Sunday Times articles, were eventually incorporated into French Provincial Cooking and earned their pay that way.