Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (9 page)

Yet
Brideshead's
initial success was partly due to its very gluttony of prose and content; while the overhang of austerity helped further exoticize the work of voluptuaries such as Lawrence Durrell and Cyril Connolly. Elizabeth David, a young upper-middle-class Englishwoman, had spent the war in Egypt working for the Admiralty and the Ministry of Information, and had known Durrell in his Alexandrian period. Back in Britain during the harsh winter of 1946–7, she found herself in a Ross-on-Wye hotel where the food was “produced with a kind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity's needs.” In response, she started jotting down what was as much a series of aromatic memories as useful advice for embattled British housewives. One such memory was a recipe for stuffing and roasting a whole sheep. At the time, the meat ration consisted of a pound per person per week. It was partly the surreal implausibility of the dish which persuaded the publisher's reader to recommend the work.

A Book of Mediterranean Food
came out in 1950. Forty-two years later, when she died, Elizabeth David—by now “E.D.” even to those who had never met her—was routinely farewelled as the doyenne of food writers; the most important influence on the British kitchen since Mrs. Beeton; the woman who brought the aromatic south to our dank and foggy islands. The legend went like this: poor benighted Brits, mired in snoek and Spam, believing olive oil was something you bought at the chemist's to dewax ears, were hauled into culinary awareness by E. David, whereupon they all started growing their own basil and baking their own bread. In some respects, this legend is accurate. A painter friend, now in his sixties, recalls his mother saying, “Eating for me is like cleaning my teeth”; he now cooks to a standard that E.D. would herself approve. Her writing could be immediately inspiring: my wife recalls reading an E.D. article about breadmaking and setting off at once to scour west London for live yeast. She made her acolytic bread for several months until a gas bill suggested the down-side to home baking for the single person.

At the same time, the story is, of course, more complicated. Just as there was little stuffing of whole sheep in 1950s Britain, so a lot of E.D.'s lauded ingredients were unobtainable to the point of myth. Early readers of Elizabeth David were inevitably indulging in a little light gastroporn. If male adolescents of the time consumed girlie magazines while waiting for the real thing, British domestic cooks had a few panting years to endure before the garlic and basil became available and olive oil was liberated from the chemist's. Between 1950 and 1960, Mrs. David published five classic guides to Mediterranean, Italian, French Country, French Provincial, and Summer cooking; yet her influence didn't really begin to take hold until the Sixties and Seventies. And while her books sold more than a million copies over the years, her sales penetration wasn't necessarily all that broad. People who know about Elizabeth David tend to own four or five of her books, so we might be talking of two hundred thousand households, perhaps fewer. She was much acknowledged in the breach, and her secondary influence was probably greater than her primary one. For instance, she constantly urged the necessity and virtue of using the correct equipment and proper serving dishes, opening her own shop in Chelsea to this purpose: but it was the entrepreneur and style commissar Terence Conran who popularized her ideas.

Another reason for this secondary influence was her absolute refusal to be a public figure. She received many honours, both in Britain and France, but her form of communication was the written word. She belonged much more to the prewar world of Norman Douglas (writer and gastronome, early friend and influence) than to the postwar television world of the personality chef and the décor huckster. Her first and only public interview occurred on television in 1989, when she was seventy-five. It was a coup for the production company, rather like netting J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon; but the result was awkward and at times pitiable. Evelyn Waugh was also spiritually pre-television, but his occasional appearances were compelling, not least for the evident contempt with which he regarded this infantile medium. E.D. had some of the same cornered-badger prickliness, but asserted herself by eva sion, leaving long silences, giving two-word answers, and evincing far less interest in the process, the medium, and the question than in the stuffed courgette in front of her on the plate.

She could be formidable and dismissive in person, permanently banishing those who offended or failed her; and she is often formidable in the text. She writes like a writer—that's to say, as one addressing an equal—rather than as an indulgent instructress jollying along any passing five-thumbed débutant. She is not com-plicit with other people's ignorance. Reading her, you have a strong sense of a person whose cardinal principles were truth and pleasure. This does not make for an easy relationship with those who take truthfulness to be a sign of hauteur and pleasure, a sibling of self-indulgence.

One of the ironies of E.D.'s career was that by the time she was acknowledged as a defining cultural influence she had stopped writing the kind of books which had made her one. Her work had become more scholarly and less frequent; over the last three decades of her life she produced just three grave volumes on bread, spices, and ice. A broader irony was that she encouraged more and more Britons to seek out good food in France (as being the nearest part of the Mediterranean basin) at a time when its national cuisine was passing through one of its worst crises in centuries.

I first noticed that something was up—or potentially up—in about 1980. I was having dinner near the station at Brive-la-Gaillarde. The restaurant, used by commercial travellers and those about to put their car on the overnight motorail to Boulogne, was small and unpretentious; there might have been a timid domestic murderer at the next table, but only Richard Cobb would have spotted him. You can guess the culinary plot: red check tablecloth,
plateau de crudités,
steak with thin-cut jaundiced
frites,
local cheese, then a choice of fruit or
crème caramel.
A bottle of red opened and left on the table. The kind of friendly, reliable place that leaves no special memory. This one did. I was sitting there in genial anticipation of my final French meal of the trip when something awful happened: they brought me an
amuse-gueule.

Nowadays this wouldn't even provoke a pause in the conversation. Then it made my spirits sink. You think this is what you ought to do? You think people will have a lower opinion of you if you fail to offer a dinky
je ne sais quoi
in a flaky-pastry whatsit? My doomy response may have been excessive but was not, in retrospect, inaccurate. The French, for all their reputation as anarchic individualists and committed regionalists, have also been ruthless centralizers and dogged followers of fashion. One minute it's the
amuse-gueule,
next it'll be plates the size of birdbaths, followed by an outbreak of courgette circles topped with hillocks of fake caviare, and before you know where you are the chef at the humble Restaurant de la Gare will be shaking your hand, bugging you for praise, and trying to sell you raspberry vinegar and his book of gastro-wisdom on the way out.

Naturally, I blamed—and continued to blame—
nouvelle cuisine,
its oppressive orthodoxy, and the craven implementation of its supposed principles by chefs whose talents lie elsewhere. (I also blame the languid, preening prose of its long-time propagandists at Gault-Millau. Try this for the opening line of a restaurant write-up: “Artists often feel, at a certain moment in their lives, the need once more to hear the world begin to shake.”) Elizabeth David, of course, saw further. There is nothing wrong, or odd—or, for that matter,
nouvelle
—about
nouvelle cuisine.
The first quotation in the
Oxford English Dictionary
may date only from 1975, but the phrase and the concept both go back to the mid-eighteenth century. As E.D. pointed out,
“Nouvelle cuisine
then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more.” Then as now, new meant healthier and more delicate; then as now, the wiser of the
nouvellistes
admitted that their innovations only worked because they were based on the sound foundation of traditional methods. Like the
nouvelle vague,
twentieth-century
nouvelle cuisine
was a noisy, useful, publicity-driven revolt: one against
le cinéma de papa,
the other against
la cuisine de maman.
Both resulted in a temporary forgetting of just exactly what Maman and Papa did; also, and of how ineluctable genetic inheritance is. Just as Truffaut revered Jean Renoir, Bocuse acknowledged that most of his recipes were adaptations of Alfred Guérot, “one of the great chefs, the most comprehensive chefs of the first half of this century.”

This doesn't mean that damage hasn't been done. Anyone who's eaten through the last few decades in France knows that at the day-to-day level the quality of restaurant cooking has fallen, that pretentious and theoretical food goes largely unpunished, and that generally you will eat better in Italy. Elizabeth David knew better, though, than to blame it all on
nouvelle cuisine.
For her, the decline had already set in by the mid-Sixties. In 1980 she recorded “the melancholy fact that during these [last] fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals, and more expensively—a bad meal is always expensive—than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.” It was partly culinary fashion, but more importantly a loss of technique in the kitchen and changing social habits. Nowadays there are fewer native French in the dining-rooms, and many more uncomplaining foreigners. Employment law has also affected things: the “35-hours” rule may protect sweated labour in a fast-food outlet, but has harmed the small family restaurant.

Four years after E.D.'s death, a group of friends and followers put together a best-of volume, barded with tributes and homages. The oddest comment in the whole book came from Sir Terence Conran, who during that 1989 TV programme had proclaimed, “She writes really beautifully.” After her death, he seems to have changed his mind, snootily referring to “a style that was a curious hybrid of the enthusiastic schoolmistress and the dowager duchess.” Sir Terence—whose Habitat stores E.D. referred to as “Tattycat”—is not a persuasive authority: the prose of his own four-paragraph tribute is both slovenly and egotistical, as studded with “I” as a ham with cloves. E.D. wrote as she cooked: with simplicity, purity, colour, self-effacing authority, and a respect for tradition.

Her instructions are laconic, even impressionistic; they imply a reader-cook skilled in the basics and prepared to vary and improvise according to time and market supply. Most people aren't like this, of course. Many of us cook with a kind of anxious pedantry, convinced that if the exact wording, and the exact spirit behind that wording, isn't followed, then our guests will throw up first their hands and then their stomachs. E.D. herself was not unaware of failure: “In cooking, the possibility of muffing a dish is always with us. Nobody can eliminate that.” But some food writers know better how to predict (often literal) sticking points, and how to mitigate the guilt and self-loathing of failure.

And it's not just the full muff one fears. When you succeed with a dish described by other writers, you feel you have made that dish; when you succeed with E.D., you feel—and this is doubtless an unfair, chippy response to her Olympian standing— that you have made “an E.D. dish,” one, moreover, that she herself would have made just a little bit better. Half-competent amateurs quickly learn not to cook from volumes with full-page gastroporn pix, because their own culinary productions can never attain such lustre. Fortunately, Elizabeth David's books were illustrated with mere black-and-white drawings; but her prose nevertheless predicts a similar gap between her fragrant concoction and your burnt offering.

It is the touch of unthinking imprecision which is so unnerving. The other week, for instance, I had a go at something which looks pretty unmuffable. Page 47, Minestra di Pomidoro, from her
Italian Food
(chosen by Waugh as his Book of the Year in 1954). The recipe consists of three sentences of instruction, followed by three of commentary. Its underlying premise is that you must cook the soup for no longer than ten minutes to ensure that all the initial freshness of the tomatoes is retained. With a confidence verging on the fullish I assembled the necessaries, including homemade chicken stock and fresh basil from the greenhouse.

E.D.'s first sentence reads like this: “Melt 1½ lbs (675g) of chopped and skinned tomatoes in olive oil; add a clove of garlic and some fresh parsley or basil or marjoram.” Simple? Listen: nothing is simple to the Anxious Pedant. The restaurateur Prue Leith once watched a wretched cookery-school pupil (male, of course) deconstruct the following first line of a recipe: “Separate the eggs.” For a thoughtful while he pondered the two eggs placed in front of him, before carefully moving one a few inches to his left and the other a few inches to his right. Satisfied, he went on to the second line of instruction. I feel for this bonehead. And if he is reading this I'm sure he will sympathize with the glossological fever that the first line of Minestra di Pomidoro provoked. The initial problem areas were: (i) “Chopped”: no indication of size of desired dice. (2) “Skinned”: does this naturally imply “deseeded” or did the recipe date from pre-deseeding days? (3) “Olive oil”: how much exactly; or even approximately? (4) “A clove of garlic”: three possible interpretations: (a) popped in whole (unlikely); (b) crushed juicily with the garlic crusher (but would she approve of such an instrument—lots of them don't, do they?);
*
(c) finely chopped. (5) “Parsley or basil or marjoram”: well, which is best, and what difference does it make? She can't be expecting us to exercise our free will, can she?

All this is a normal, indeed ritual, part of cooking, it seems to me. I duly argued myself to various conclusions. (Recipes that blandly lay down probable timings for preparation and cooking should also, if they are being honest, add extra minutes for paralysing fits of indecision.) The tomatoes were chopped, and the oil sizzling, when my understanding thumped belatedly against the first word of the recipe: “Melt.” How could I have missed it until now?
Melt? Melt a tomato?
Even a chopped one? The implausi-bility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you're south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps, the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the Anxious Pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time, I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten-minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe. For several fretful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt.” Then, with a cookish oath, I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them, hurriedly washed up the guilty instrument, and continued to the next stage of the recipe. The soup did, in the end, taste wonderful—even if not quite as wonderful as if E.D. had made it.