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

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      Today regional recipes have, in large part, passed into the hands of professional cooks, for the provincial housewife, like her American counterpart, now cooks with gas, and her aspirations on the whole separate her from the kitchen. Those few “backward” areas that still cling to old traditions—parts of Auvergne and Brittany, for instance—have, unhappily, never been rich in gastronomic tradition.

      The term cuisine bourgeoise nowadays is used to describe a certain kind of preparation. As a rigidly defined element of a way of life it no longer exists as a category apart. It is richer than regional cooking in the sense that it uses more expensive products, yet it is also less imaginative. It is based on stock; hence the kitchens were always full of boiled meats, and it was accepted tradition, even for elegant receptions, to place an enormous platter of boiled meats on the table at the same time as the soup and leave it throughout the entire service. (In restaurants it was the kitchen help who were obliged to nourish themselves daily on boiled meats.) Braised dishes like boeuf à la mode are typical. “Vulgar” ingredients such as variety meats were eschewed. Veal liver and sweetbreads were, however, considered elegant, and, curiously, a stew of calves’ eyes was acceptable. It is, like regional cooking, also a “woman’s cooking” (though it was not the mistress of the house but women cooks. who executed it), and the elaborations were to some extent influenced by la grande cuisine.

      MENU COMPOSITION

      A perfect meal can be many things—a plate of lentils with a boiled sausage, a green salad, a piece of cheese and a bottle of cool young Beaujolais—or nothing but a composed salad and any light, young wine.

      A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entrée, a sherbet, a roast, salad, cheese and dessert, and that may be accompanied by from three to six wines, presents a special problem of orchestration. The desired result is often difficult to achieve. Each course must provide a happy contrast to the one preceding it; at the same time, the movement through the various courses should be an ascending one from light, delicate and more complex flavors through progressively richer, more full-bodied and simpler flavors. The wines, too, should be flattered by—and should flatter—each accompanying course ‘while relating to each other, as well in a similar kind of progression.

      A semiliquid sherbet, more tart than sweet, usually with a champagne base, refreshes the palate halfway through this progression, and a green salad serves the same purpose before relaxing into the cheese course, which will be accompanied by the fullest-bodied of the red wines—and finally the dessert, neither heavy nor cloying and oversweet, but light and delicate, slightly less sweet than the intricate and voluptuous Sauternes that may accompany it.

      This is obviously not the only way to conceive a menu. Essentially the only thing to remember is that the palate should be kept fresh, teased, surprised, excited all through a meal. The moment there is danger of fatigue, it must be astonished, or soothed into greater anticipation, until the sublime moment of release when one moves away from the table to relax with coffee and an alcool.

      In the past it was de rigueur to begin a luncheon with hors d’oeuvre and a dinner with soup. Today the evening meal of a simple peasant or working-class family habitually consists of soup, with a piece of cheese often the only other element—and a very elegant dinner party, conceived in terms of the old precepts, always begins with a soup. Between these two poles lies most of French eating, and in this realm few rules are left. This may, in a sense, be a liberating force although with it come such misfortunes as the sandwich eaten standing up and cigarettes smoked throughout the meal. But despite the precepts of tradition there should be no fast rules. A meal need not always include a salad or cheeses (although Brillat-Savarin’s famous and foolish maxim, “A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who is missing one eye,” reminds us of the contrary)—or fish or a roast. Certain white wines are splendid with certain cheeses. In that part of the Loire Valley that produces Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, the hard, nutty-flavored little goat cheeses known as crottins de Chavignol are always accompanied by the dry, slightly metallic white wines of the region. In Alsace, Traminer is drunk with Munster cheese, and the Sauternais drink Château d’Yquem with Roquefort—and with foie gras!

      In organizing a menu, one must consider its presentation—it is nearly as important to flatter the eye as the palate. Don’t serve tomato sauces in red plates or spinach on a green platter. Never serve a roast’s garnish on the same platter—a good roast is sufficiently handsome to be presented alone, and, should it slip while being carved, artichoke bottoms and stuffed mushrooms should not be there to fly in all directions. Don’t sprinkle large handfuls of parsley indiscriminately over everything. Don’t follow one white-colored sauce by another, or a gratin of fish by a gratin of meat, even though the underlying sauces may be very different in character. Rustic preparations are generally best, and look best, served in the earthenware pots they are cooked in. Elegant preparations should be elegantly presented—on condition that the quality in no way suffers as a result.

      A menu must be conceived also in terms of one’s time and work. Never try to serve a meal in which every course requires endless lastminute preparations. When a dish requires the addition of a number of ingredients at different times, combine in advance all those elements that are to be added at the same time. In this way you have only one article to think of rather than five or six, a couple of which might otherwise be forgotten in last-minute confusion. Many dishes are at least as good reheated—prepare these the preceding day. Others can be cooked ahead of time except for finishing the sauce. Think everything out ahead of time. When preparing something that is new to you, don’t read over the instructions once; memorize them in advance before attacking.

      Most important, of course, is the organization of a menu in terms of what may be called a “gastronomic aesthetic.” Whether a meal begins with an hors d’oeuvre or a soup (except for the potées or garbures that are entire meals in themselves), this course must be conceived to heighten—not quench—the appetite. It should be light of body and not overabundant. From that point on, the movement should be from fish or other white delicacies, such as brains or sweetbreads, into meats, and from light meats into dark meats, from light butter or cream sauces into rich dark sauces drawn from stocks and red wines. By this I do not mean to suggest that a dark meat may not be prepared in cream or a fish in red wine, but I do think that it would be a mistake to include these two preparations in the same menu. In the last century it was not unusual to serve fish after meats and chicken after game. To most people today this would seem outlandish.

      Repetition should be avoided in a menu. The French claim that the truffle alone may be respectably allowed to appear in more than one dish at the same meal. Though that seems like nonsense, if there are mushrooms in the fish sauce, don’t garnish the meat with mushrooms; if one of the main dishes is rich in cream, don’t serve a dessert based on whipped cream; nor a custard sauce with the dessert if another sauce is thickened with egg yolks. Don’t serve rice with the fish and potatoes with the meat, or watercress with the roast and a green salad after. Don’t serve a gratin based on Swiss cheese and include the same cheese on the cheese platter.

      The juxtaposition of cold and hot, crisp and creamy, rough and smooth, sauced and dry, should be considered. Rare venison accompanied by poivrade sauce, which requires hours, if not days, of preparation, is sublime.

      On the whole, it seems to me best for a simple meal to contain only one sauce, and for a more complex menu to be limited to two, which should be very different in character, or perhaps three if one includes a sauced dessert.

      The cheese course I think of largely as an excuse (and a good one) to drink another wine. In France, if one serves a single cheese, it is invariably a Camembert. I prefer to serve a cheese platter that may include a fresh goat-type cheese, a Swiss Gruyère, a СКАЧАТЬ