Omelette and a Glass of Wine (14 page)

A la marinière

Although I lived all my childhood within a few miles of the sea I don’t think we ever ate shellfish at home. I don’t remember ever seeing a lobster or an oyster until I was grown-up, and as for mussels, I had never heard of them, let alone tasted them, until I
went to stay with a Norman family in a farmhouse at Bièville, a village near Caen.

The cooking at Bièville was done by Marie, a local girl hardly older than I was – about seventeen – and her only assistant in the kitchen was her brother, aged about eight. All our food was delicate and delicious, there was always beautiful butter and fresh bread for breakfast, and at midday simply cooked meat and a separate dish of vegetables from the farm’s kitchen garden. I had become accustomed to good middle-class French cooking in the same family’s Paris household, so none of these things struck me as unusual until, one day, Marie came into the dining-room bearing a big tureen of mussels, cooked in some sort of creamy sauce flecked with parsley and probably other garden herbs as well. The appearance, the smell and the taste of those mussels were to me most fascinating and mysterious. The little black-shelled objects didn’t seem like fish at all, they had the same kind of magical quality as mushrooms, the real field mushrooms which, as children, we had so often brought home for breakfast after a dawn search in the fields round our home in the Sussex Downs. Maybe the cream sauce had something to do with the association of sensation, for we had had a Nannie who always used to cook our breakfast mushrooms over the nursery fire in cream, whisked away no doubt, from the kitchen regions before the cook was up and about. As in most households, Nannie and the cook thoroughly disapproved of each other, and had she known this private cookery was going on upstairs in the nursery, the cook would have made a blistering row. We must have been aware of this, as children always are of tension between grown-ups, because Nannie’s mushrooms had the charm of the forbidden. We must never be caught eating them. So those Norman mussels which reminded me, for whatever reason, of our secret childhood feasts, became for ever endowed with the mystery of far-off and almost unobtainable things. And to this day the first food I ask for when I land in France is a dish of mussels. Before embarking on the ferry to return home I always try to go to a restaurant where I know there will be mussels, sweet, small mussels, so small in fact that you get about seventy or eighty to a portion, and a London housewife would be indignant if she were asked to clean so many. I have seen, in the market at Rouen, the fishwives selling mussels already cleaned in a gigantic whirling machine – but at the Restaurant La Marée, nearby in the place du Marché, I was told that the machine isn’t good enough – the little things must all be cleaned by hand.

The difference between these little mussels of the Norman coast (the best are reputed to come from Yport, although I suspect that a certain quantity are brought over from the English south coast where nobody bothers about them) and the great big Dutch ones we get in London, is just the difference between the field mushrooms of my childhood and today’s cultivated mushrooms – the cultivated ones are easy to get and very nice but they lack magic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make very excellent dishes out of them if you treat them right, and the same applies to urban fishmongers’ mussels – although I must say I try to buy small Welsh or Irish mussels whenever possible, in preference to the huge Dutch ones, which to me seem dry and savourless.

But whichever kind you have, be sure to clean them very meticulously, scraping, scrubbing, bearding and rinsing them in a great deal of cold water and discarding any that are broken or open or abnormally heavy – the latter will probably be full of mud, and one may very well spoil the entire dish.

CROÛTONS À LA MARINIÈRE

For a little first course dish for two people, clean a quart of mussels, put them in a saucepan with a teacup of water and open them over a fairly fast flame. As they open, remove them to a plate, filter the liquid through a muslin, return it to a clean pan, into it put a finely chopped shallot or clove of garlic, a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley and a small glass of white wine.

Let this boil rapidly until reduced by half. Shell the mussels. (All this can be done in advance.)

Just before serving, fry 4 slices of French bread in butter or olive oil and put them in warmed soup plates.

Heat up the mussels in the prepared sauce – this will take just about 1 minute – pour the whole mixture over the croûtons and serve immediately.

House and Garden
, January 1960

Fruits de Mer

Winkles and whelks, cockles and oysters, spider crabs, scallops, shrimps, langoustines, mussels, prawns, the little clams known in France as
palourdes
and in Italy as
vongole
, the big ridged heart-shaped
venus verrucosa
, called by the French
praires
and by Italians
tartufi di mare
– sea truffles – make the open-air market stalls of the Loire estuary port of Nantes a fishy paradise, smelling of iodine, salty, dripping with seaweed and ice.

Of all these small sea-creatures displayed for sale, it is the mussels which interest me most. They are so small that hereabouts a restaurant portion of
moules marinière
must contain seven or eight dozen of the little things. Their shells are so fine they are almost transparent. The mussels themselves are quite unimaginably sweet and fresh. At the restaurant La Sirène in Nantes, an establishment where the cooking is excellently sound and fresh, but which is unaccountably omitted from Michelin, I had an exquisite dish of these little mussels. They are, the proprietress told me, mussels cultivated on those posts called
bouchots
and come from Penesten, on the Morbihan coast of Brittany. They were cooked in their own liquid until they opened; fresh cream was poured over them; they were sprinkled with chopped fresh tarragon; and brought to table piled up in a tureen. Nothing could be simpler; and to us, living so few short miles across the North Sea, not humming birds could appear more magical, nor mandrake root more unlikely.

Mussels we have in plenty, cheap and large. What they make up for in size they tend to lack in flavour and charm. From Holland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and from the west coast our mussels come to London, but the little sweet ones are all left behind in the mussel-beds. If they appeared on the fishmongers’ stalls nobody would want them. Few would believe they were as good as the big ones. Fewer still would want to go to the trouble of cleaning them. Which is shortsighted, because they are cleaner in the first place and easier to deal with than the monsters covered with barnacles and grit which need such endless scrubbing and rinsing, so much so that one wonders if most of the flavour is not washed out of them, a good deal of the grit still remaining. About this point, the late Henri Pellaprat, teaching chef at the Cordon Bleu School in Paris, has an interesting theory. In
Le Poisson dans la Cuisine Française
(Flammarion, 1954), he writes that most people go about the cleaning of mussels in a way calculated to put sand into them rather than to eliminate it; instead, he says, of first scraping them, one should begin by rinsing them in a quantity of cold water, turning them over and over and whirling them around. One by one you then take them out of the water and put them in a colander. Half of them will be clean already; those which are not must be scraped; as each is
done, put it in a bowl, but, and this is the crux of the matter,
without water
. Only when all are cleaned should water be run over the mussels; they should then be kept on the move, the water being changed continually until it is perfectly clear. The explanation given by Pellaprat for this routine is that, put into still water all at once, the mussels start opening; when they close up again, they have imprisoned within their shells the sand already in suspension in the water. In other words, explains M. Pellaprat, the more you keep the mussels moving, the more frightened they are; and the less inclination they will have to open. Ah well, possibly. It is worth paying attention to this theory, but it does mean that the mussels must be prepared only immediately before cooking, which is certainly desirable, but not always practical.

Diminutive size is not necessarily a criterion of flavour in mussels; on the Mediterranean coast, and for that matter in Wales and in the West of Ireland I have had large mussels which were excellent, not as sweet and tender as the little Breton and Norman ones, but full of flavour and with a strong salty tang. It is partly a question, then, of eating them on the spot. But not entirely. Paris is about the same distance from the Breton coast as London is from Cornwall or Conway, and in Paris too one gets delicious mussels. So perhaps it is simply a question of better-organized transport. Last autumn I ate mussels in Paris which tasted just as fresh as those at Nantes – and that was during the freak heatwave of early October.

When it is a question of making the best of what we can get, one dish I had in Paris would be well adapted to London mussels. Medium-sized cooked mussels, on the half-shell (it is of the utmost importance not to over-cook them in the first instance), were spread with a garlic and shallot butter, made in much the same way as for snails or for the Breton
palourdes farcies
(which also, like snails, are sold ready stuffed for cooking on the Nantes fish stalls), and were arranged on snail dishes, the mussels and the butter protected by a layer of breadcrumbs, an addition of fresh, unthickened cream and a sprinkling of coarsely grated Gruyère. Quickly cooked in a hot oven, this is a sizzling, bubbling, richly flavoured dish.

The proprietress of the restaurant, Chez Maria in the rue du Maine, is half-Norman, half-Breton; very likely she is the cousin or the sister-in-law of the lady in charge of the left-luggage office at the Gare Montparnasse who had directed me to the little restaurant; perhaps, arriving by train from her native shores, she never travelled much farther than the station. There are many such people running
just such restaurants or cafés in Paris. Anyone who wants to eat French regional specialities in the capital without paying the high prices of the fashionable Burgundian, Provençal, Auvergnat, Breton, Alsatian or Savoyard restaurants (in which three out of every five people eating are going to write the place up for a guide book or are begging recipes from the understandably blasé owners) could do worse than search round about, or inquire at, the main-line stations serving these provinces. There is always a sprinkling of small places owned by people like Maria; they can afford to provide their clients with a few genuine regional products at reasonable prices because they receive them direct by rail – by-passing the markets, the wholesalers, the double transport bills – from relations who are growers, poultry breeders, charcutiers, wine producers, fish-dealers (Maria had spanking fresh sardines the day I was there, served grilled and with a half-kilo of Breton butter on the table). The cooking in these places, although on the rough side and limited in choice, is likely to have a more authentically country flavour than that in the well-known bistros and restaurants where the proprietor has sophisticated his recipes to suit chic Parisian taste. By this I do not mean that these re-created dishes are necessarily any the worse; they are just more evolved, less innocent. Take, for example, another mussel dish, this one from an elegant, typically Parisian and rather expensive establishment called the Berlioz, in the rue Pergolèse, not a specifically regional restaurant, but one in which a number of provincial dishes are cooked – and well cooked. Here I ordered, from the menu,
moules marinière
. When they came, the mussels were those same delicious little Breton creatures, a great tureen of them. The sauce was yellow, just barely thickened, very light and subtle. It was, the patron told me, the result of mixing the mussel liquid with
sauce hollandaise
. It was delicious. It was perfection. What it was not was the primitive
moules marinière
known in every seaport café and to every housewife around the entire coastline of France.

The Spectator
, 4 January 1963

Waiting for Lunch

On page 96 of
French Country Cooking
is a four line description of
el pa y all
, the French Catalan peasant’s one-time morning meal of a hunk of fresh bread rubbed with garlic and moistened with fruity olive oil. When the book first appeared in 1951, one reviewer remarked rather tartly that she hoped we British would never be reduced to breakfasting off so primitive a dish. I was shaken, not to say shocked – I still am – by the smug expression of British superiority and by the revelation, unconscious, of the reviewer’s innocence. Believing, no doubt, that a breakfast of bacon and eggs, sausages, toast, butter, marmalade and sweetened tea has always been every Englishman’s birthright, she ignored countless generations of farm labourers, mill workers, miners, schoolboys, whose sole sustenance before setting off for a long day’s work was nothing more substantial than a crust of coarse bread or an oatcake broken up in milk, buttermilk, or when times were good, in thin broth, when bad in water. The bread and olive oil of the Southern European peasant was simply the equivalent of those sparse breakfasts of our own ancestors.

Recording some of the older recipes and meals of the country people of rural France was an exercise I had found most stimulating and instructive. There were ideas which often proved helpful in those days of shortages and strict rationing. It was not my intention to imply that we should copy those ideas to the letter – to do so at the time would hardly have been possible – but rather that we should learn from them, adapt them to our own climate and conditions, and perhaps benefit from increased knowledge of other people’s diets and food tastes.

During the twenty-five years odd since the book was first published, we have indeed taken to imported dishes and cookery in a way which in 1951 would have seemed entirely in the realm of fantasy. One obvious example is the Neapolitan pizza – or rather, a tenth-rate imitation of it – now big business and familiar in every commercial deep freeze and take-away shop in the land. And the original pizza, after all, was nothing more complicated than a by-product of the days of household bread-baking, when a few pieces of dough were kept back from the main batch, spread with oil and some kind of savoury mixture – onions usually – baked in the
brick oven after the bread was taken out, and devoured by hungry children and farm workers. That that pizza was not so far removed from the French and Catalan
pa y all
(the cookery of Catalonia was at one time closely related to that of Southern Italy and Sicily) was demonstrated by a recent incident in a very ordinary restaurant in the town of Vendrell, a few miles across the Spanish frontier. Stopping one autumn morning in 1976 for an early lunch, we saw the people at a neighbouring table devouring some very appetizing-looking, aromatically-smelling thick slices of warm bread spread with tomato and oil. We asked for the same. It was, of course a version of
pa y all
. Those slices of garlic-scented oil-saturated bread, just lightly spread with a little cooked tomato turned out to be the best item on the menu. You might think that doesn’t say much for the restaurant’s cooking, and that could be a fair criticism. What was interesting was that, not only were the local people eating it, but that it was also the most expensive dish on the menu. The story is familiar. The necessity of the day-before-yesterday’s peasant has become the prized speciality of today’s middle-class restaurant.