Omelette and a Glass of Wine (29 page)

The English public knows little of de Pomiane’s work and it is missing something of great value. Although his
Cooking in Ten Minutes
(Bruno Cassirer, distributed by Faber, 15s.), a lighthearted treatise on how to make the most of charcuterie or delicatessen food – first published in England in 1948 – has proved a great favourite, there exists a much more representative book, a collection of lectures, radio talks, recipes and articles, called
Cooking with Pomiane
(Bruno Cassirer, distributed by Faber, 18s.). It is most adroitly put together and translated into English cookery usage by Mrs Peggie Benton. Published four years ago and still relatively unknown, the book is modest in appearance and in size, its jacket is the reverse of eyecatching, there are no colour photographs, no packaging. It is just a very good and immensely sane book.

The Sunday Times Colour Supplement
, 22 January 1967

*

Many a time, in the years since the explosion of
nouvelle cuisine,
I have wanted to write more of Dr de Pomiane and his unorthodox approach to classic French cookery. I wonder how many of the younger of today’s professional chefs realise that the origins of their great rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s stem, at least in part, from the days of Dr de Pomiane and his protests against illogical and harmful eating habits. At any rate, some of those rebel chefs must surely know, even if they don’t acknowledge as much, that some of their most publicised inventions were not their inventions at all, but were derived, however indirectly, from the Polish and Jewish recipes published or described by Pomiane in his books and radio talks of the 1930s. That
confiture d’oignons,
for instance, for which the recipe appeared in Michel Guérard’s
Cuisine Gourmande
and which has since made the
tour du monde
surely derived from Pomiane’s dish of sweet-sour onions in which the sweetening elements were sultanas and
pain d’épices,
the spiced honey cake of central Europe, and which Pomiane had in turn borrowed from the Jewish cookery of his native Poland
.
¹
True, Guérard uses sugar rather than
pain d’épices,
adds red wine, sherry vinegar, and grenadine syrup ‘to warm up the purple colour’, and suggests that as well as sultanas, prunes or little pieces of dried apricot may be added. Again, Guérard gives a recipe for saddle of hare with hot beetroot which differs only in minor respects from the one Pomiane published two or three times and which I myself used often in the fifties, and eventually quoted, with acknowledgements, in
French Provincial Cooking.
As I mentioned in the
Sunday Times
article, Pomiane was fond of hot beetroot, and used it often, mixing vinegar and cream with it, a very un-French combination, and by no means the only one of his unconventional suggestions in the domain of vegetable cookery to arouse the scorn of reactionaries.

In the days when Pomiane was writing, chefs did not dream of braising vegetables – lettuces, leeks, Belgian endives, for example – without a preliminary blanching. That rule was immutable, and woe betide anyone who disregarded it. Dr de Pomiane bypassed it, and I adopted his method, particularly his recipe for cooking Belgian endives in butter and entirely without a prior water baptism. That sort of unorthodoxy got one into trouble. I have referred, in my Introduction, to the venerable French chef who in the fifties pursued me and my
Sunday Times
cookery articles with a zeal worthy of a Spanish inquisitor. One of his more intemperate outbursts, I recall, concerned a recipe for dipping sliced young fennel bulbs, mushrooms and scallops in batter and deep frying them in oil to make a
fritto misto
in the Italian manner. That idea was already red rag enough to the old gentleman. Worse was my omission of any mention of the essential ordeal by blanching of the vegetables, and of course of the scallops. In those days a French chef simply did not serve vegetables crisp. They
had
to be soft and woolly. (I have remembered for many years the
patronne
of a restaurant in the little Norman port of Barfleur who refused to cook artichokes for dinner that night – it was then 6.30 p.m. – on the grounds that they required two hours boiling. I’m afraid she meant it.) As for the idea that scallops might be cooked in one minute and no more, that old chef was genuinely outraged by it. There was just
one
way he, as a man who had risen to eminence in his profession, had learned to do things. It was the classical French way. There was no other. It did not occur to him that there might be. Today’s chefs have very properly outlawed that preliminary blanching which spelled ruin to so many vegetables – of course there are still those such as celeriac and turnips which may need it – and one of their most fiercely held tenets concerns the brief cooking of fish, in particular of the fragile scallop. Heaven knows it was not before time that reformation in that respect came about. I hope it has penetrated the middle and lower échelons of French restaurant chefs. How many times have I nearly wept at the destruction of delicate little scallops at the hands of ignorant or insensitive chefs?

The uninformed criticism of the narrow-minded, whether it came from members of the cooking profession or from old-fashioned gourmets among his own colleagues, did not worry Dr de Pomiane one jot. His own unorthodox approach extended to his study of historical cookery and even to his choice of words when describing an ancient recipe he wanted to revive. That particular trend, now a flood, was something of a novelty in Pomiane’s day. A sauce he adapted from
Les Dix Livres de Cuisine d’Apicius,
of which a French translation by the cookery historian Bertrand Guégan appearedin 1933, providing the starting point of the new trend, was one containing dates, almonds and a very large amount of chopped parsley. The way Pomiane chose to convey the necessary quantity to his listeners – he must have been a compelling radio talker – and later to his readers was in terms of ‘a bunch as large as a bunch of violets’. Everybody in Paris and indeed in all France knows what a flower seller’s bunch of violets looks like, but whoever heard of such a cookery direction, let alone of a sauce containing a mixture of dates and parsley? To the conventional, whether professional cooks or serious gourmets, this sort of thing was at best perverse and eccentric, at worst a blasphemous crime committed on the sacred body politic of
la cuisine française.
To me, and to the hundreds of ordinary French housewives who listened to his talks and read his books, his ideas and his attitude to cookery were stimulating and liberating. Now that we have become accustomed to reading about, if not to eating, such unconventional combinations of foods as duck
foie gras
with turnips in a sweet-sour sauce composed of wine vinegar, sugar, sherry
and
port, plus the odd 30 grammes of truffles; paupiettes of crayfish garnished with leaves of Brussels sprouts; lobster mould with a sauce of carrots and port blended in turn with a
sauce américaine,
Pomiane’s innovations don’t sound very audacious. Nobody is surprised by the idea of spirals of black Spanish radish, forerunners of the Troisgros
serpentins
de légumes, as part of an hors d’œuvre, or lettuce dressed with orange juice as well as oil and vinegar. Turnip salad with capers is no shock today and raw choucroute salad, an idea Pomiane had picked up in Moscow – buy very fresh choucroûte from the charcutier and stop at the village pump to wash it thoroughly, he told those of his French readers who went in for picnics on canoeing and automobile excursions
¹
–
should be the joy of vegetarians. Even apples filled with honey, spiced with cumin or dried mint and baked in pastry, another adaptation from Apicius, seems timid in comparison with Michel Guérard’s
Ali baba,
two fantasy
babas
made with 120 grammes of mixed candied fruits and sultanas to only 250 grammes of brioche batter. The cooked babas are hollowed out, filled with confectioners’ custard, sugared
, gratinés
in the oven, chilled in the refrigerator, and ultimately served with a
coulis
of raspberries or caramelised peaches. Altogether more of a Second Empire kind of guzzle than a Roman treat, that invention.

A long time ago, in 1956, I published a little review of a new edition of Pomiane’s delightful and much loved
Cooking in Ten Minutes
in my
Sunday Times
cookery column. He wrote me a touching letter of thanks. ‘J’ai été très heureux d’avoir été compris par une si aimable Anglaise’, he said, and ended ‘if you were French I should give you a kiss. But I believe in England that is not done’. If I have really understood Dr de Pomiane aright, I fancy that while an extravaganza such as Maître Guérard’s
Ali Baba
would not have met with his unqualified acclaim, with many of the nouvelle cuisine innovations he would surely have been in sympathy. I think he would have been amused rather than otherwise at finding his own dishes reappearing as specialities of the starry restaurants of the 1970s, and pleased that reforms in the matter of lighter meals and more logical sauce and vegetable cookery which he had preached in the 1930s have at last been put into practice. If there are lapses, obsessions, aberrations – and few would deny that there are – in the practise of the new style chefs, well, Pomiane was a man with a sense of humour and without a sense of self-importance. He would have smiled and said those are the foibles of innovators, they must be excused, and you are not after all obliged to mop up all those pools of
beurre blanc
which appear on your plate in such quantity. Nobody forces you to consume the equivalent of half a dozen eggs at one meal, but it is very easy to do so, so if you have eaten a
mousseline
of scallops, red mullet, and
écrevisses
floating in a lake of
sabayon
sauce, then do not follow it with a honey ice cream or one of those
ali baba
affairs nor with a peach charlotte containing five egg yolks, but rather with a
tarte fine chaude aux pommes acidulées,
which is nothing more outlandish or richer than an old-fashioned apple tart made on a base of puff pastry
.
¹
Come to think of it, myself I would just as soon have a try at Doctor de Pomiane’s honey-filled and cumin-spiced Apician apples. The recipe may be found on p.203 of
Cooking with Pomiane,
of which a paperback version was published by Faber in 1976. If obtaining a copy of either version should entail a search, I do not think anyone will regret the time spent on it.

May 1984

1.
He had made a study of that cookery, published as
Cuisine Juive, Ghetto Modernes
, Albin Michel, 1929.

1.
La Cuisine en plein air
, 1934.

1.
The recipe is to be found in Michel Guérard’s
Cuisine Gourmande.

Table Talk

If we are to believe late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century etiquette writers (which I don’t altogether) this was a period when it was thought gross to talk about food except to your cook, and in bad taste to discuss your host’s wine. What did provide a fruitful source of conversation at dinner was the table setting. No drinks were served before dinner, so some form of ice-breaking equipment in the way of elaborate and festive flower decorations which everybody could remark upon must have been invaluable weapons in the hands of a conscientious hostess.

If we are to believe the cookery contributor (are we to? It’s early to tell yet) to a recent number of one of the fashion monthlies, the wheel has turned just about half-circle and arrived at the point where it is almost essential to talk about the food and drink, because they have been chosen mainly with a view to distracting attention from the table decorations.

The idea is that while your guests are chattering happily away about the fabulous cottage pie, you, the host, are making subtle
changes in the dining-room décor. Cool and fresh it’s to be for the fish, more studied and solid for the main course; for the dessert, fragile and delicate. Skilfully thought out, this writer says, such transformations can be effected
without anybody noticing.
This is splendidly unlike the early thirties, when Lady Mendl published her
Recipes for Successful Dining
. ‘In the year 1929 I used two rock-crystal vases in which were branches of white orchids, but those days are gone I fear for ever, and a few white carnations have to suffice now… at Christmas time 1931 I had a table of gold, hoping that it might in some way draw us all back to the old gold standard again … gold lamé tablecloth, old white Mennecey china, many yellow roses.’

Now Lady Mendl was after all a highly successful professional decorator, and whatever her sumptuous simplicities in the matter of table decoration – a little white Ming rabbit at each guest’s place, a remnant of sixteenth-century French green silk brocade used as a tablecloth, one flawless magnolia on the tea tray (the photograph of her butler carrying this same tray alone makes a copy of the book worth searching for) – she certainly didn’t seriously intend playing them down. Not for her, one feels fairly sure, would have been sables worn as a chemise, nor Savonnerie carpets used as underfelting. Had she arranged for the sets to be changed three times during a dinner party, she would have seen to it that everybody noticed. So, quite certainly, would Mrs Brooks, a journalist of the turn of the century who thought that the flowers, the food and the wine should be chosen to match the hostess’s dress, and her contemporary, Mrs Alfred Praga, who believed, on the contrary, that the hostess’s dress should be chosen to harmonize with the food and décor.