Omelette and a Glass of Wine (24 page)

*

The above was published in the
Spectator
in December 1962. Some twelve months later Sam White, in his weekly
Evening Standard
report from Paris, remarked that at least four restaurants with names like The Stables or the Rubbish Bin or The Swill exist in Paris and ‘that it is now without any doubt the definitely established fashionable trend to eat as badly as possible, and as expensively as possible
’.

In London, 1963 saw the opening of restaurants with the selfconsciously down-beat names of
La Gaffe
and
Grumbles,
situated respectively in Hampstead and Pimlico. In the summer of 1964, the neighing of The
Hungry Horse
was heard right down the Fulham Road, and the creature hoofed it straight home into the very first issue of the Daily Telegraph’s colour supplement
.

*

Carrots a la Kazbek

It is a bit soon, even now, for the world of paw-paw cocktails, breakfasts on the verandah and Royals alighting on the tarmac to return to us through the names of airport motels and the menus of manor-house country clubs. But it will have its turn (what will the decorators make of the plumed hats?) and when it comes, students will find a great deal of unique material in Sir Harry Luke’s
The Tenth Muse
, first published in 1954 and now re-issued in a revised edition (Putnam, 25s.). During a lifetime spent – and uncommonly well-spent, one deduces from this book – in the Colonial Service, Sir Harry has collected recipes from British Residencies and Government Houses, from their châtelaines, their cooks – cooks Maltese and Cypriot, Hindu and Persian and Assyrian, cooks Goanese and Polynesian, cooks naval, military and consular, cooks in Union Clubs in South American capitals, cooks of French princes and Brazilian countesses, of Turkish Grand Viziers and Patriarchs of the Syrian Orthodox Church – and in setting down his recipes Sir Harry has acknowledged the source of each and every one; Government House, Springfield, St Kitts; Government House, Fiji; St Anton Palace, Malta; the Goanese cook at the Residency, Bahrein; Government House, Wellington, New Zealand; Count Haupt Pappenheim, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lloyd, the butler at Kent House, Port of Spain.

Sir Harry must be a gratifying guest. Everything interests him. The wife of the British Resident in Brunei prefers to mix her own curry powders, so off he goes with her to market, noting that she buys, separately and in varying quantities, black pepper, aniseed, cardamom, chillies, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, mace, nutmeg, poppyseed, saffron, tamarind, turmeric … As British Chief Commissioner in the Trans-Caucasian Republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, he attends a banquet (it is 1919) at Novo Bayazid; there he eats a species of salmon trout unique to Lake Sevan and called
ishkan
, the prince; it is served ‘surrounded by its own amber-coloured caviare, accompanied by a sauce made of the cream of water-buffalo’s milk, mixed with
fresh
peeled walnuts… with somewhere a touch of horseradish … the dish was subtly and incredibly delicious.’ Delicious it sounds too; so does goose steeped in salt and sugar brine as it is done in the South Swedish province of Scania (recipe from the British Vice-Consul at Malmö); we get enticing information about how medlar and guava jellies to be
served with meat and game are vastly improved by the inclusion of a little Worcester Sauce and fresh lemon juice in their composition; and how a lady who lives at Dramia, below the mediaeval castle of Buffavento in Cyprus, uses the leaf of the
persica
or wild cyclamen instead of vine leaves for her dishes of rice-stuffed dolmas.

In the sense that they are not technically very expert Sir Harry’s recipes are not for the beginner. Indeed he is himself the very first to warn the reader that he is not a practising or practical cook. In the sense that his descriptions, directions and notes are possessed of the essential quality of arousing the urge to get into the kitchen to cook something new, then they are for everyone, beginners and collectors especially. Sir Harry has the beginner’s enthusiasm and fresh eye, the collector’s madness. One of the things I like best in his book is his own admission to a lifelong pursuit, world-wide and slightly manic, of the strawberry grape. From California to Kenya, from Malta to an English vicarage garden he has carried this particular vine, advocating its cultivation and propagation. Does he know that oddity, one of the sweet syrupy and picturesque Greek confections called ‘spoon jams’, made from the strawberry-grape?

Few authors are as modest as Sir Harry Luke (naive he is not) and fewer still provide the stimulus, the improbable information, the travellers’ tales, the new visions which to me make his book a true collectors’ piece.

The Spectator
, 7 December 1962

1.
The late Ernest Marples.

Franglais

Just two leaves of tarragon, two and no more, are to go into the butter and herb stuffing for a dish called
poulet au réveil
. ‘I say two leaves only’, wrote Benjamin Renaudet, the author of this lovely recipe, ‘because although they are very small, in adding more the taste of the stuffing might be distorted.’ That is the kind of observation Renaudet makes often in his book. It is called
Les Secrets de la Bonne Table
, is undated, and is concerned with post-1870, pre-1914 household cookery in the provinces of France. Renaudet’s book is one I have used and quoted often, read over and over again. Even so, it is only recently that I have paid close attention to the handful of English recipes which appear in the book and of which Renaudet says that they were evolved from notes made on the spot in England.

Renaudet was a selective collector and meticulous recorder of little-known French provincial recipes. On English cooking his views should therefore be worth hearing. So they are. Noting that the English kitchen ‘in which roast beef plays so important a part’ supplies also some interesting methods of using the left-overs, he gives a recipe for
ragoût de bœuf rôti
, in English, says M. Renaudet, called roast-beef stew. A French version of cottage pie? Nothing of the kind. It is basically a
bœuf miroton
, the time-honoured dish of every Frenchwoman who ever had to deal with boiled beef left over from the
pot-au-feu.
The essential difference is that Renaudet’s recipe calls for roast instead of boiled meat. The sliced beef, re-heated in stock, with bacon, onions, bay leaves and whole small potatoes ‘all as much of a size as possible’ is arranged in a pyramid in the centre of the serving dish, the little potatoes disposed in a circle around the meat. Now if there is anything more typical of an old-fashioned French household dish than Renaudet’s little whole potatoes all of a size and his description of the manner of serving of his roast-beef stew then I should like to hear of it. (In all fairness he does add that in England it is more usual to serve the meat within a border of boiled rice. Was it? Is it?) For the next of the interesting methods with left-overs as promised by M. Renaudet, invention seems to take over and we get
pudding de rosbif
, or cold beef boiled for three hours in a pudding crust.

Now we get to our muttons. A
gigot bouilli à l’anglaise
, it
surprises me only mildly by this time to learn from dear M. Renaudet, is ‘très délicat’ and retains ‘tout son jus’. So it may be and so it might had it been or were it ever cooked as M. Renaudet claims it is. He envelops his leg of mutton entirely in a flour-and-water paste two centimetres thick and covering every inch of the joint, shank bone included. The paste-wrapped gigot is then sewn securely in a cloth, lowered into a pan of
boiling
water and simmered extremely gently – ‘no faster than for our
pot-au-feu
’ – for five hours. It is at this point that M. Renaudet throws caution as well as the entente cordiale to the winds and suggests that his French readers may prefer to serve a Villeroy or Béarnaise sauce with their
gigot
instead of the ‘usual English mint or Cumberland sauce’.

The suggestion that Cumberland sauce (no mention of caper sauce) goes with boiled mutton does rather confirm my suspicion that Renaudet was borrowing at least some of his English cookery lore not from the ‘Mrs Holly of Blackheath’ or the ‘Mrs Allingham of Turtle Cottage near Oakham in the Rutland’, the ladies to whom he attributes some quite plausible English recipes, but from Alfred Suzanne, author of
La Cuisine Anglaise
, published in 1898 and still freely quoted as a responsible French authority on English cookery.

At any rate Renaudet gives, in a footnote, a recipe for Cumberland sauce which is certainly Suzanne’s, and one for which we have cause to be grateful, even if we do not eat it with boiled mutton. (It is curious that this sauce, originally German, appears to have entered the English kitchen via three French chefs – Alexis Soyer, Alfred Suzanne and Auguste Escoffier.) Other aspects of Suzanne’s book are less enchanting. ‘All fruits are made into pies’… plum cakes are as French as possible and English in name only… plum pudding is the English national dessert … bacon is an unbeatable English speciality… it is cooked in the following way. Cut it into thin slices like veal birds, then split them on small skewers and grill them over a hot fire or in a very hot oven. Serve on toast… ‘Haddock; this smoked fish is very common in England. The English bake or boil it and fill it with a forcemeat called veal stuffing.’

Two of M. Suzanne’s employers were the then Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Wilton. Making every allowance for aristocratic eccentricity, it is still hard to envisage those Victorian noblemen eating breakfast bacon dished up in genteel little rolls, demanding that their smoked haddock be stuffed and boiled, and ordering plum pudding every other day for luncheon. If, in the 1960s, Suzanne’s book is still the only one on English cooking available to
French gastronomic researchers (the English dishes in Flammarion’s recently translated and loudly trumpeted
Art of Cookery
are all based on Suzanne) then it would seem to be high time for somebody to provide them with an authoritative exposition of the subject.

It is not so much that anyone would want to convert the French to English food – although there are those timid souls who transport their own English bread across the Channel, and many more who are horribly disillusioned when they order roast beef in France and find it cooked to a rare red rather than to English Sunday lunch grey – as that it would be so interesting to see what French housewives would evolve from authentic English recipes. We should see our own cooking with fresh eyes. We should also see, I think, that the Englishness of many of our dishes lies not so much in the basic treatment of the raw materials as in the finishing touches and presentation of the dish.

Those whole small potatoes for example, of Renaudet’s – unless we were making super-human efforts to be French, we should never incorporate them in the dish with the meat. We should have them boiled separately and served separately, and probably there would be cauliflower or sprouts and green peas as well, whereas a Frenchwoman, however English she wanted to pretend to be, would find it going too much against the grain to provide three boiled vegetables with one meat dish, let alone offer a steak and kidney pudding – a dish which much fascinates French cooks – accompanied by mashed potatoes and a boiled pease pudding. This classic combination is offered, so I learn, at Flanagan’s restaurant in Baker Street. Perhaps this would be the place to take French visitors in search of authentic English food, although it must be said that I have myself always found it safe enough to take Paris friends to London-French restaurants. Whatever the efforts made by the proprietors and cooks to produce true French cooking, nothing will persuade my French friends that what they are eating is anything but typically English. They might be right.

It is no doubt our taste for extraneous unrelated flourishes and garnishes which to the French makes our attempts at their cooking amusing, original (
inattendu
I think is the correct word), and characteristically English.