The Cooking of Provincial France/Recipes [antikvár]

Introduction: Welcome to the Qountry %gchens of (prance The title of tiiis book about the food and cooking of the French provinces has words in it with many connotations. Plainly it is about French cooking. But to nine out of ten of us "French cooking" means an elaborate and expensive way of complicating or at least masking foods with sauces, which rightly but sometimes impatiently are referred to as french sauces. (When I stopped in Scotland with my young children after a long stay in Provence, elderly and rather insular friends exclaimed in wonder at how well we seemed to be, "in spite of those dreadful thick rich concoctions covering everything and making one bilious, not to mention gouty.") Unfortunately "French cooking" can also mean mediocre or poor or dishonest cooking, served with pomp in pretentious restaurants everywhere, including the city of Paris itself There is, of course, another side to the cooking of France. What is called haute, or grande, cuisine may be one of modern man's nearest approaches to pure bliss. Every dish must be prepared with skill and artistry by cooks trained for years in the great tradition of blending, balancing and transforming such plain ingredients as butter and eggs and fresh herbs into masterpieces of subtlety. Final proof of this control is that the dish must always be as good as it was the time before, exactly as a fine actor will always come on stage in Scene Two with the same heart-rending sob. Where the master chefs began French provincial cooking means something quite different from grande cuisine. First it must be made clear that the word provincial, in this context, does not mean countrified, rude, narrow, limited, oafish, intolerant or bumpkinish—connotations fastened in our minds by only one facet of the term. It means simply the cooking that springs from the regional areas called provinces for many hundreds of years in the highly diversified country known as France. Grande cuisine owes a great deal to true provincial cooking, but has very little in common with it. It is true that most of the great chefs have come from villages in the provinces. They have learned how to be deft and knowing with the trout from their native streams, the cream from their pastured cows. Then they have gone on to the kitchens of famous and fabulous and above all very rich people, where infinite variety must provide the spice of life, and where truffles and caviar grow on bushes. Such people must be ready at all rimes to feed their guests in myriad courses and with unlimited supplies of the rare, the ostentatious.