Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 8

Until I came to France in 1951, my knowledge of French cooking was mainly academic. I had practiced with a passion what could be gleaned from books—Escoffier, in particular. But the rock on which my church was built was the provincial kitchen of my home in Iowa—not too bad a background, inasmuch as I grew up at a time when eggs were still fresh, Jersey milk was unpasteurized and half cream, chickens were from the back yard, packaged cake mixes and frozen foods were unknown, and garden fruits and vegetables were eaten in their proper seasons. Fortunately for me, my mother, who had eight children to raise and little enthusiasm for cooking, was delighted by my willingness to experiment in the kitchen. Pot roasts, sage-and-onion dressing, and angel-food cakes were more in order at that time than the sort of preparations that occupy me now. But even in those early days I learned to rely on Escoffier for inspiration.

My life in France has been more or less equally divided between Clamart, a Parisian suburb, and Solliès-Toucas, a village in the south of France.

In 1953, Clamart was still a provincial town at the edge of a forest to which a handful of Parisians brought their picnic lunches of a summer Sunday. The bordering cafés recalled, in every detail, the guinguettes of impressionist paintings with their cheerful patrons enjoying meals at outdoor tables. The house in which I then let an apartment was surrounded by an unkempt garden and hidden from the street and from neighbors by high stone walls. Although in an advanced state of decay, it was a handsome piece of architecture and, like most nineteenth-century French houses, its cellar was well designed to receive wines, which I began promptly to collect. (After a bit of experimentation, I settled on a formula of bottling three kegs of wine annually—usually a Pouilly-Fumé, a Beaujolais-Villages, and a first-growth Beaujolais—for daily use, and supplementing these by occasional cases of fine Bordeaux and Burgundies.)

In 1961, in love with the light, the landscape, and the odors of Provence, I bought an abandoned property near Solliès-Toucas. The house, perched halfway up a hillside, its only access from below a somewhat precarious footpath (four men and a dolly spent six hours delivering the cookstove while I spent the day running back and forth with bottles of white wine to keep up their spirits), was a total ruin. Stretching above, the several acres of stone-walled terraces planted to olive trees, once meticulously cared for, are grown wild to all those herbs—rosemary, wild thyme and savory, oregano, fennel, lavender, and mint—whose names are poetry and whose mingled perfumes scent the air of Provençal kitchens and hillsides alike.

The definitive move south followed the construction, with the help of my brothers, James and Byron, during the summer of 1964, of the great fireplace that dominates my kitchen and, in part, the pattern of my daily life.

In 1961, Georges Garin, having sold the Hôtel de la Croix Blanche in Nuits-Saint-Georges and having abandoned the kitchens of the Château du Clos Vougeot, opened his own restaurant, Chez Garin, in Paris. A great chef, he surpasses in his culinary knowledge anyone I have ever known, and his appetite and passion for eating are equaled only by my own. My enthusiasm for his cooking and our common passion for discussing anything culinary have cemented a friendship, generously truffled, over the years, by divine and often fantastic meals, in Paris Chez Garin, in Clamart, and in Solliès-Toucas.

Garin’s first visit to Clamart marked the only time that I have ever been terrified by the notion of preparing a meal. To avoid the possi-bility of errors, I opted for simple preparations and fine wines:

A COLD DISH—Artichoke Bottoms with Two Mousses

Château Bouscaut blanc, 1959

A RAPID SAUTE—Ortolans

Château Grand-Mayne, 1955

SALAD

CHEESES

Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, 1947

Tepid Apple Charlotte

Château d’Yquem, 1950

The meal was a success.

Madeleine Decure (who is, alas, no longer) shared with Garin the distinction of having the other most intelligent and analytic palate I have known. She was one of the two founders, in 1947, of the monthly gastronomic review Cuisine et Vins de France. The other was Curnonsky (born Maurice Sailland in Anjou), the remarkable personality who was acclaimed Prince élu des Gastronomes by a jury of professional chefs and gastronomic journalists. His eightieth birthday was celebrated by a now famous meal organized by his eighty preferred Paris restaurants, each of which then reserved with a bronze plaque his preferred table in the restaurant—in perpetuity!

I met Madeleine Decure in 1961 (but not Curnonsky, regrettably; he had died five years earlier) at the same time that I met Odette Kahn, then associate director of the magazine, and the gastronomic journalists Michel Lemonnier and Simon Arbellot. Our meals together, exchanged and re-exchanged, individually and as a group, were punctuated by wine-tasting excursions to all corners of France. Garin, tied to his kitchens, established an annual tradition of inviting us as a group to dinners, at the composition of whose menus I delightedly assisted. Among the preparations—all memorable—were: partridge consommé garnished with tiny partridge mousseline quenelles, whole braised calf’s liver with a truffled cèpe purée, fresh salmon braised in champagne, gratin of crayfish tails, fresh foie gras, roast saddle of venison, and that rarity, a perfect coq au vin, not to mention a repertory of astonishing soufflés—lobster, pike, woodcock, fresh asparagus, wild strawberry, etc.

The last seriously organized meal that I served in Clamart was in the autumn of 1964. The champagne, a Clos des Goisses, dated from nine years earlier. Madeleine and Odette had asked me to present a menu as a regular monthly feature in Cuisine et Vins de France, the recipes for each preparation to be explained in simple and nonprofessional language. The first of my menus to be published in the magazine was the one I served that evening:

Raw Baby Artichokes, Poivrade

Pike Mousseline, Turban of Sole and Salmon Fillets, Nantua Sauce (garnished with a sauté of truffles and crayfish tails and crayfish shells stuffed with pike mousseline) Mercurey blanc, 1962

Boned Stuffed Chicken, Glazed in its Jelly

Pernand-Vergelesses, 1960

Composed Salad

Cheeses

Clos de la Roche, 1955

Pineapple Frangipane Fritters

Château Rieussec, 1947

My menu series in Cuisine et Vins de France was entitled (to my dismay) Un Américain (gourmand) à Paris. The rubric continues.

In the south, my patterns are different from those of Clamart. Friends are not invited to dinner—they come for a few days or a few weeks. Menus tend to be simpler. Living mostly out of doors for well over half the year, one becomes acutely aware of the swift seasonal cycle, and the table follows suit. The shortest days of the year—the gloom of winter and a dormant garden—are soon brightened by banks of yellow mimosa, and narcissus perfumes the air. Truffles turn blackest and richest from this moment, olives are ripe, and the glorious thick, murky, newly pressed olive oil, unsettled and unfiltered, appears. The first simple country wines of the year, slightly green, a tiny edge of fermentation remaining to tickle the tongue, fresh and fruity, are the perfect accompaniment to rough and robust nourishing winter dishes. In no more than a few weeks the almond trees are already in blossom, the first young fava, or broad beans, too delicate to be eaten other than raw, appear on the market, rapidly followed by violet artichokes, sweet white onions and tiny peas. By the end of March the hillsides are scattered with the tender shoots of wild asparagus, the exquisite morel will soon make its brief appearance, wild thyme is in flower, green beans, cherries, strawberries, peaches, follow in rapid succession, the rich, sweet tomato crowns the summer season, oregano must be gathered, and, with tree-ripe figs, wild mushrooms, game birds, green olives, and the reappearance of young artichokes and sea urchins, the plunge is taken into autumn and the shortest days are again in sight. Fish is fresh the year round, and often can be bought alive; snails are gathered, starved, and sacrificed to the courtbouillon, fresh goats’-milk and sheeps’-milk cheeses enrich the cheese platter, and the olives, prepared without chemicals each autumn, garnish the luncheon hors d’oeuvre.

The pages of this book are a loyal reflection of my life in the kitchen and at table over the last twenty years. The seasonal form into which it has been cast emphasizes my intense conviction that, despite midwinter tomatoes, strawberries, asparagus and green beans, and the plethora of “fresh” frozen products on the market, one can only eat marvelously by respecting the seasons; each is sufficiently rich to afford a perfect table the year round, and the excitement of eating a freshly picked fruit or vegetable at the peak of its seasonal richness is forever deadened by the dull and listless year-round ab-sorption of its shadow.

No recipes are given which involve products unavailable in America. Certain American products for which I have a particular affection and which may advantageously be incorporated into French menus (sweet corn, avocados, wild rice, for instance) are not treated, simply because, although the book is essentially a personal gastronomic manifesto, I have preferred that it not stray from traditional French cooking. Some favorite and typically French preparations have been eliminated, victims of the menu formula—for they are nearly all first courses and the presentation of each would have necessitated an accompanying menu, which space did not permit.

Classical appellations have not been tampered with (it would be a pity to deprive Melba of her peaches and ice cream), but, when possible, I have stuck to simple, descriptive titles and have avoided the fanciful.

Emphasis throughout the book has been placed on the importance of “tactile” sense, which I consider to be a sort of convergence of all the senses—the awareness through touching, and also through smelling, hearing, seeing, and tasting that something is “just right”—to know by seeing the progression from the light, swelling foam of an initial boil to a flat surface punctuated by tiny bubbles, by hearing the same progression from a soft, cottony, slurring sound to a series of sharp, staccato explosions, by judging from the degree of syrupiness or the smooth, enveloping consistency on a wooden spoon when a reduction has arrived at the point, a few seconds before which it is too thin, a few seconds after which it will collapse into grease or burn; to know by pinching and judging the resilience of a lamb chop or a roast leg of lamb when to remove it from the heat; to recognize the perfect amber of a caramel the second before it turns burnt and bitter; to feel the right fresh-heavy-cream consistency of a crêpe batter and the point of light but consistent airiness in a mousseline forcemeat that, having absorbed a maximum of cream to be perfect, would risk collapsing through any further addition….

Happily, cooking of quality is, in addition to everything else, an expression of the personality of the cook, and a recipe followed to the letter by two individuals, in each of whom may be a finely developed tactile sense, will produce, thanks to individual sensibilities, two different dishes, both of which may be excellent.