Omelette and a Glass of Wine

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, briefly, 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.