The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season. Richard Olney

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СКАЧАТЬ has nothing at all to do with its preparation—on specific garnishing elements, assume anyone of dozens of names. Color some onions in lard, remove them and fry floured pieces of chuck in their place, return the onions and moisten with water—in short, reduce each element to its simplest (and most economical) possible version, and you have old-fashioned American beef stew (probably English, Dutch, German and Swedish, also). The steps in its preparation are identical to those for boeuf bourguignon, carbonade, sauté de veau Marengo or coq au vin. American scalloped potatoes have much in common with gratin dauphinois, creamed eggs with oeufs à la tripe, pot roast is really boeuf à la mode. And, of course, corned beef and cabbage, boiled dinners, and the endless soups that our grandmothers prepared are to be found in the French cuisine as potées and garbures.

      A menu composed of preparations that are not in themselves French may remain totally French in spirit, for it is the degree to which it is based on a sensuous and aesthetic concept that differentiates a French meal from all others. It may be served under the simplest and most intimate of circumstances, but its formal aspect is respected and its composition—the interrelationships and the progression of courses and wines—is of the greatest importance.

      There exists a bastard cuisine that is too often assumed to be real French cooking. It patterns itself superficially on the classical grande cuisine, but, leaning heavily on the effects of spectacular presentation, it ignores the essential sobriety and integrity of the classic cuisine which becomes its victim. It is not grande cuisine but “Grand Palace” –or international hotel cooking. It has, however, many enthusiasts. Perhaps, having never encountered the genuine, they are nonetheless impressed by the presentation and complication of the false. Tragically, it is responsible for the attitude of those who, confusing Grand Palace with grande cuisine, innocently become detractors of the latter.

      Grand Palace, typically, fails to respect the qualities basic to a product or a preparation. All dishes, for example, are tainted by the same basic sauce (generally a false espagnole made up of bones, carcasses and leftovers, overly thickened with flour or cornstarch, and improperly reduced). Crêpes are presented with flames reaching to the ceiling and served floating pathetically in dark pools of half-burned, indifferent brandy. Calves’ kidneys are brought, half-cooked, to table and toughened in a blaze of that same alcohol. And roasts (which in order to be perfect must be subjected to a continued cooking process, precisely controlled) are half-cooked, cooled, rolled in pastry and rebaked.

      It is interesting—and instructive—to note that in Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire, out of forty-five recipes for roast fillet of beef, not one is served in pastry. The only lamb recipe suffering this treatment is a leg of baby lamb. Because the flesh of baby animals, cooked rare, is indigestible and must be well done, baby lamb is, therefore, not treated in the same manner as a roast of “grass” (older) lamb, mutton, or beef, which should be kept rose or rare throughout, at the same time that it is heated through. Out of fifteen recipes for calves’ kidneys and thirteen for lambs’ kidneys, not one is “flamed.” (One, foreign in origin, requires the addition of a bit of juniper-flavored alcohol which is flamed to rid it of its alcohol before being added to the preparation.) Again, none of Escoffier’s recipes for crêpes are flamed, including crêpes Suzette—whose distinguishing characteristic, after all, is the presence, not of flames, but of tangerine juice. (In the English edition, which has been edited and “arranged by other hands” for another public, crêpes Suzette do receive the flaming treatment.)

      Classical French cooking—that which, from the beginning (not so long ago), made France’s reputation abroad—is naturally eclectic. It was, and is, created by men—professional chefs. It is refined and, in execution, often involved. In the hands of a good, honest chef it can be very good indeed; in the hands of a great chef, it can be sublime.

      The entire concept—of the cooking itself, and of a menu, as we know it today—was formed by Carême (1784-1833), genius, egomaniac and scholar. His life seems like a fantastic parody of the success story. Born into a poor family of twenty-five children, he was, as a child, put into the streets with nothing but his father’s blessing and told to seek his fortune. He never again saw his family. Aide de cuisine at fifteen, head pastry chef for Paris’s leading pastry caterer at seventeen, he spent the rest of his life in the service of “the great.” He was chef to Talleyrand, to England’s Prince Regent, to Czar Alexander I, to the Rothschilds, and during this time he produced the body of technical literature, brilliantly illustrated by himself, which became the basis of all professional training of chefs throughout the nineteenth century. Until Carême, all dishes were placed on the table at the same time; a menu was nothing but a collection of unrelated dishes, more or less elegantly or fantastically dressed, the most sumptuous being placed close to the guests of highest rank. Carême borrowed from the Russians the practice of serving courses separately, so that each, finding its place in a logical sequence, could at the same time be served at its correct temperature.

      The concept of a great meal in France has been tremendously altered since the nineteenth century, when menus sometimes counted twenty or thirty courses and a dozen wines. Around the turn of this century a refining and a simplifying force worked hand in hand. Escoffier was no doubt influential, and his great manual, Le Guide Culinaire, first published in 1902, remains the professional’s standard reference book today. Later, simplification took another leap (though this time, the refining element was less in evidence) when people slowly pulled themselves together again after World War II, not to take up life where it had been left off in 1939, but to plunge into a nervous, active world that occasionally bordered on hysteria. After the war the elaborate leisurely luncheon disappeared, and a simple dinner became the important meal of the day. Today, a meal organized at a great Paris restaurant by the Club des Cent or the Académie des Gastronomes may begin with an hors d’oeuvre or directly with a fish course, followed by meat, cheese and dessert, and accompanied by three wines. Thirty years ago this would have been unthinkable.

      In contrast to grande cuisine are the traditions in regional cooking–as various as the provinces are numerous, but all related in character in the sense that each is the direct outgrowth of the combined wealth or poverty and the specialties of the immediate countryside and the limitations of the kitchens. It is essentially peasant cooking, elaborated by generations of women who were never far from the kitchen and whose imaginations were forced into flower through necessity and limited means.

      Nearly all French country cooking traditions are based on the unique use of the fireplace. Quantities of utensils were designed to be embedded in hot ashes, recipes en papillote were originally conceived to be cooked under hot ashes, and those preparations which, one reads, should cook very slowly and regularly over a period of from eight to ten hours are dishes which at one time were simply embedded in hot ashes in the fireplace the night before and forgotten until it was time to serve them (more often than not, the lid of the utensil was hermetically sealed with a strip of flour-and-water paste). As the fire never went out from autumn until spring, a bed of coals was always ready if there were meats or vegetables to be grilled, and it was merely a question of adding a couple of logs to the fire to produce the heat necessary to turn a roast on a spit before the flames. Rapid gratins and glazes were produced by heating a shovel in the hot coals and then holding it directly over the surface of the dish for a few moments (the ancestor of the “salamander”). Crème brulée, in certain provinces, is still known as crème à la pelle–shovel custard. Slow gratins were made in special dishes designed to be placed on tripods or grills over the coals, their high-sided lids, concave at the top, to be filled with hot coals.

      The only ovens were bread ovens, built behind great fireplaces, the door to the oven opening from the back wall of the fireplace. Enormous, igloo-shaped, lined entirely with refractory bricks, they were heated by beds of coals, constantly renewed inside the ovens over a period of several hours. When the bricks were sufficiently heated, the ovens were then swept clean; they retained sufficient heat for many hours of baking. One generally profited from a bread-baking day to prepare other dishes. Each farm had its СКАЧАТЬ