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

heat up the jam, stir in a little Curaçao, a dash of vanilla essence, some green colouring to cheer it up, and serve it as a sauce with ice-cream. That’s more like it. Charge them 8s.6d. for it, it’s worth it what with all the trouble it gave the cook. And the wine? This is an expensive meal, so the red plonk won’t do. Put a bottle of Château Pont d’Avignon rosé ready in a basket, will you?
    And the English customers will pay £ 3.10s. a head for this version of a meal which in its original form cost about 25s. for two including service. And they will like it, and they will go home and try to reproduce it in their own kitchens – adding of course a little frill here, a trimming there, an extra vegetable, a few mushrooms in the beef stew …
    It does seem to me that with so much talk about art versus fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it which you like, of leaving well alone. This is a prerequisite of any first-class meal (as opposed to one isolated first-class dish) on any level whatsoever; so is the capacity, among the customers if you are a restaurateur and among your friends ifyou are an amateur cook, to appreciate well when it is left alone. It’s a capacity which would make meals a lot cheaper and cooking a great deal easier.
    The Spectator , 7 July 1961
    *
    The London restaurant food described in this article was typical of three or four Belgravia-Knightsbridge-Fulham establishments successful and popular at the time, and subsequently much imitated. Indeed the same type of food, liberally sauced, densely garnished, is to be found in any number of London and provincial restaurants (study the Good Food Guide and you will see what I mean) and in up-market pubs. Prices have changed. The English attitude to eating out has not. Quantity is all .
    As for the genuine Provençal restaurant which triggered off my Spectator article, it was just that–genuine and Provençal. It was in a small Varois town called Rians. Last time I went there, in the late nineteen-sixties, road-widening outside and modernization within had made the place difficult to recognize. We did not stop for a meal. The restaurant is called the Esplanade. It is still listed in the Michelin Guide.
    1973

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine
    Once upon a time there was a celebrated restaurant called the Hôtel de la Tête d’Or on the Mont-St-Michel just off the coast of Normandy. The reputation of this house was built upon one single menu which was served day in day out for year after year. It consisted of an omelette, ham, a fried sole, pré-salé lamb cutlets with potatoes, a roast chicken and salad, and a dessert. Cider and butter were put upon the table and were thrown in with the price of the meal, which was two francs fifty in pre-1914 currency.
    But it wasn’t so much what now appears to us as the almost absurd lavishness of the menu which made Madame Poulard, proprietress of the hotel, celebrated throughout France. It was the exquisite lightness and beauty of the omelettes, cooked by theproprietress herself, which brought tourists flocking to the mère Poulard’s table.
    Quite a few of these customers subsequently attempted to explain the particular magic which Madame Poulard exercised over her eggs and her frying pan in terms of those culinary secrets which are so dear to the hearts of all who believe that cookery consists of a series of conjuring tricks. She mixed water with the eggs, one writer would say, she added cream asserted another, she had a specially made pan said a third, she reared a breed of hens unknown to the rest of France claimed a fourth. Before long, recipes for the omelette de la mère Poulard began to appear in magazines and cookery books. Some of these recipes were very much on the fanciful side. One I have seen even goes so far as to suggest she put foie gras into the omelette. Each writer in turn implied that to him or her alone had Madame Poulard confided the