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

secret of her omelettes.
    At last, one fine day, a Frenchman called M. Robert Viel, interested in fact rather than surmise, wrote to Madame Poulard, by this time long retired from her arduous labours, and asked her once and for all to clear up the matter. Her reply, published in 1932 in a magazine called La Table , ran as follows:
    6 June 1932
    Monsieur Viel,
    Here is the recipe for the omelette: I break some good eggs in a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it, and I shake it constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you.
    Annette Poulard.
    So much for secrets.
    But, you will say, everyone knows that the success of omelette making starts with the pan and not with the genius of the cook. And a heavy pan with a perfectly flat base is , of course a necessity. And if you are one of those who feel that some special virtue attaches to a venerable black iron pan unwashed for twenty years, then you are probably right to cling to it.
    Cookery does, after all, contain an element of the ritualistic and however clearly one may understand that the reason for not washing and scouring omelette pans is the risk of thereby causing rust spots and scratches which would spoil the surface of the panand cause the eggs to stick, one may still have a superstitious feeling that some magic spell will be broken if water is allowed to approach the precious pan. Soap and water, come not near, come not near our omelette pan … (Personally, I keep my old iron omelette pan, the surface protected by a film of oil, for pancakes, and use an aluminium one for omelettes and wash it up like any other utensil. This is not perversity, but simply the ritual which happens to suit me and my omelettes.)
    As to the omelette itself, it seems to me to be a confection which demands the most straightforward approach. What one wants is the taste of the fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon. And although there are those who maintain that wine and egg dishes don’t go together I must say I do regard a glass or two of wine as not, obviously, essential but at least as an enormous enhancement of the enjoyment of a well-cooked omelette. In any case if it were true that wine and eggs are bad partners, then a good many dishes, and in particular, such sauces as mayonnaise, Hollandaise and Béarnaise would have to be banished from meals designed round a good bottle, and that would surely be absurd. But we are not in any case considering the great occasion menu but the almost primitive and elemental meal evoked by the words: ‘Let’s just have an omelette and a glass of wine.’
    Perhaps first a slice of home-made pâté and a few olives, afterwards a fresh salad and a piece of ripe creamy cheese or some fresh figs or strawberries … How many times have I ordered and enjoyed just such a meal in French country hotels and inns in preference to the set menu of truite meunière, entrecôte, pommes paille and crème caramel which is the French equivalent of the English roast and two veg. and apple tart and no less dull when you have experienced it two or three times.
    There was, no doubt there still is, a small restaurant in Avignon where I used to eat about twice a week, on market days, when I was living in a rickety old house in a crumbling Provençal hill-top village about twenty miles from the city of the Popes. Physically and emotionally worn to tatters by the pandemonium and splendour of the Avignon market, tottering under the weight of the provisions we had bought and agonized at the thought of all the glorious thingswhich we hadn’t or couldn’t, we would make at last for the restaurant