Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David Read Free Book Online

can’t help how quaint it sounds, was its absolute Tightness on this particular occasion. The meal was faultless of its kind, a roughish country inn kind, beginning with tomato salad with chopped onion, the little black olives of the Nyons district, and home-made pâté – the basic hors-d’œuvre in this part of Provence – each item on its own separate dish, and left on the table so we could help ourselves. It was followed by a gratin of courgettes and rice. This dish, new to me, was made with courgettes cooked in butter and sieved, the resulting purée then mixed with béchamel and rice, all turned into a shallow dish and browned in the oven. A mixture with delicate and unexpected flavours. Then came a daube of beef, an excellent one, with an unthickened but short sauce of wine and tomato purée, beautifully scented with bayleaf and thyme, brought to the table, and left on it, in a metal casserole in which it kept sizzling hot. Finally, this famous jam – home-made, of green melons, fresh-tasting, not too sweet, a hint of lemons in the background. The wine was coarse red, by the litre. Even the coffee was drinkable, and the bill was very modest.
    The English public must be sick and tired of being told that cooking is an art and that the French are the great exponents of it. Or, alternatively, that cooking is not an art but a question of good basic ingredients, which we have more of and better than anyone else (it’s surprising how many otherwise quite sane English people really believe this) and so QED we also have the best cooking, while the French, poor things, toil away in their kitchens in a desperate effort to disguise what Lady Barnett, in a speech delivered at a caterers’ dinner in the Midlands a few weeks ago, referred to as ‘meat not fit to eat and fish without taste’. I don’t want to enter into this abysmal argument. I just want to describe that same Provençal meal as it would be if one ordered it in a London restaurant. With the exception of the tomato salad, which can’t be made here because tomatoes fit for salad aren’t acceptable to the greengrocery trade, there was nothing about that meal which couldn’t be reproduced by a moderately skilful English cook, professional or amateur.
    So here we go. A slab of pâté, smelling powerfully of smoked bacon and rosemary, is brought to your table on a teaplate loaded with lettuce leaves; it is covered with a trellis work of radishes orwatercress, interspersed with a tasteful pattern of very large olives, brown rather than black. (Here we can’t get the fine black olives of the Nyonsais, the best in Provence, but Italian, Greek, and North African small black olives are quite easy to come by. Those huge brown ones they sell in delicatessens are bitter and over-salt.) For pretty, as American fashion journalists say, there is a spoonful of tinned red peppers, and a couple of gherkins falling off the overcrowded plate. Now, the gratin of courgettes and rice. Well, that doesn’t contain fish or meat, so it’s not a course by English standards. What about adding a few scampi, or a slice or two of ham, or some little bits of bacon? Or better still, economize on the service or washing up and present it with the meat, plus, naturally, potatoes and a green vegetable. What? The taste of the courgette purée is too fragile to go with that beef and wine? Put plenty of cheese in it then, that’ll pep it up. And anyway that daube, it smells all right and it tastes good but there isn’t quite enough gravy with it. Add a cupful of the chef’s brown sauce to each serving, it’ll make it nice and thick and it’ll look more shiny and stylish on the plate – it’ll be on a plate of course, there’d be chaos if you left a casserole of the stuff on the customers’ tables. And now we get to our Vitamin H. Will the customers stand for jam potted in plastic thimbles like they have on British Railways and at Ye Old Sussex Tea Gardens? Going too far perhaps. Better