In my teens, I taught myself to cook using a battered copy of Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking and followed up with the writings of Anne Willan, Mireille Johnson, Jenny Baker and Richard Olney’s Simple French Food as the children came along. I already had quite a few American and Mexican cookbooks but some ancient prejudice kept whispering that until I had mastered the basics of French cooking, I had no business regarding myself as a formed -and informed- cook. Living in a small village, I roped in the mobile librarian and she began to recommend other less well-known authors whilst encouraging me to read recipes in the original French. One of her recommendations found its way onto my own library of cookbooks when she decommissioned it from her shelves and sold the book to me for 20p. This was Geraldene Holt’s French Country Kitchen and it soon became part of my culinary motherboard. Holt’s ability to marry traditional regional French recipes with her own inventions, the latter inspired by the Midi and its ingredients and techniques, encouraged me to stray from the strict edicts of la cuisine Française but only after I had grasped its tenets.
I used to spend part of the summer in Brittany, either on holiday with my warring parents or staying as a houseguest of Caroline, whom I met on a Brittany Ferry crossing to St Malo. Caroline lived near Paimpol, a small fishing town where locals gathered shellfish from the salt flats where we also learned to windsurf. The dark grey mud teemed with oyster shells, tiny fish-eye-sized cockles and turgid winkles, all of which we were instructed to gather after our planche á voile lessons finished. Watched by the sheep (known as agneau pré-salé) who grazed the halophytic grasses nearby, we’d plunge knee-deep into the sludgy, muddy rivulets.
It was Caroline who introduced me to globe artichokes and tried not to laugh at the baffled expression on my face as her family sat around the table, small wicker baskets clamped between their knees to catch the discarded leaves after they had dragged the soft lump of flesh that clung to the base of each leaf with their teeth.
So passionate about artichokes were they that their garden contained at least six varieties mulched with seaweed from the local saltmarsh, their tender new shoots banked with mounds of silky silt. Finest of all were the Fiesole artichokes with leaves of the deepest wine which kept their colour and required only the lightest of steams to bring out their metallic fruitiness. Bred from the Violetta de Provence, a lighter purple variety native to southern France, the Fiesoles were delicate enough to be eaten whole with butter, lemon juice and salt or a walnut and garlic sauce, similar to Holt’s extremely versatile aillade Toulousaine. How a sauce in the style of Toulouse got to NE Brittany, I did not ask but when I first made Holt’s version, it transported me right back there.
These last few years have seen me drift away from French country food. I have always been a keen cook of regional American food; preparing Creole, and Cajun feasts kept me in touch with my classical French roots in a manner of speaking. Faites Simple! means eliminating the superfluous, that is all. The Louisianian insistence upon a mastery of the roux with its precise steps and equally passionate debates over the rightness of technique and the importance of culinary building blocks fed my need for order in the kitchen and helped me cope when I spent three years working weekends and evenings in a rural pub as their cook when I was a post-graduate student.
The same need for order and rule applies to my love of Mexican cuisine, forged from my years living there as a child and a keen observation of local cooks whenever I could escape school. Holt’s French Country Kitchen has a recipe for dindonneau à l’ail en chemise (turkey with whole cloves of garlic), which, on first reading, has little in common with the turkey-based meals I ate as a kid. Where was the marigold-infused flesh, the layered and complex molés flavoured with ancho, pumpkin, nuts, pastilla and mulato chillies, the penetrating chocolate or anise? But Holt’s version and the stuffed turkey called pavo relleno I ate in Saltillo were both basted in butter and the picadillo stuffing was made with garlic-infused beef and funnily enough, the Breton turkeys (and chickens) I ate on holiday were sometimes fed on spicy -scented marigold petals- as they do in Mexico. The flesh of these birds were tinted the colours of Kahlo’s hair in her Self Portrait In A Landscape With The Sun Going Down. The circle of my eating life continued.
| miss the precise adherence to rules as old as their families, although I can recall their kitchen voices with their slightly nasalized Tregerieg-Breton vowels in an instant. Caroline’s family bought their Kouign Amann from the local patisserie because the French are sensible and have no embarrassment about not making their own cakes, although they retain the right to have many opinions about their technical execution. A patissière will be chosen according to something as fundamental as the angle of the curve on a croissant and this choice will not be questioned, even two generations of custom later, but when you eat it, you can sense the rightness of their choice. “C’est decide" you will be told should you dare to enquire.
Holt points out that the French have no need for the dizzying helter-skelter search for new flavour combinations. This doesn’t mean their cuisine is mired in the historical doldrums, though, unable and unwilling to change. It does innovate and refine, but these changes are considered and less driven by a desperate need to innovate for the sake of page views and Instagram likes or to Be The First. Holt is confident in her experiments but is clear that progress and posterity can only be judged in hindsight which, to me, sounds terribly French. Her food respects terroir and local habits (courgettes served with sorrel grown in the same garden; a salpicon for roast lamb that is based upon a friend’s recipe, which itself reflects a different regional store cupboard) but it is also glut-friendly and tolerant of other larders in other lands where the sunshine is less and the frost more frequent.
So…..Tête de veau, boeuf bourguignon, carbonade flammade, cassoulet, salade Lyonnaise, omelette Ardéchoise, and a glorious pintadeau aux figues are all chalked up on my imaginary menu de l’autumn et de l’ hiver. I want my kitchen filled with the scent of gentle braises as they putter away in their casserole dish and the fridge stocked with what my friend’s mother called ‘difficult cuts’; the cheeks, tails and muscled rumps of animals which all call for careful prep and low and slow cooking. (If anyone can point me to an East Anglian supplier of cow heels I'd be very grateful.)
Lastly- and funnily enough- tête de veau was threatened as a punishment meal for a wanton young man called Spider in another of my teenage reads, Scruples. Its author, Judith Krantz, wrote of a young Parisienne transplanted to New York City in the seventies. It was one of those sex ‘n shopping airport novels I devoured greedily, especially the descriptions of Valentine’s cooking because she too preferred French country-style food and frequently made it for her neighbour across the hall whose life of penury meant decent food was scarce. Spider baulked at the thought of tête de veau. I would not.
More books for your shelf:
Cajun chef Isaac Toups 'Chasing The Gator' is blooming marvellous. His restaurant, Toups South, is attached to the Southern Museum of Food and Drink and there I had the best bbq octopus dish of my life served with roasted lemon, a potent beef jus, tasso, and cheddar grits. Also, sourdough biscuits with crab fat butter ffs.
James Villas was a devotee of French food in both its classical and cuisine de pays forms. He wrote so beautifully about his first encounters, travelling through France on his way to Grenoble as a Fullbright Scholar in his memoir, 'Between Bites' and he is also the author of The French Country Kitchen. I found a copy of the latter at the Lavenham church bookstall which is an amazing source of classic, retro, and niche cookbooks should you be in the vicinity. (Look in the boxes of books underneath the trestle tables; they're hidden by curtains but that's where treasures can be found.)
MFK Fisher's Two Towns in Provence tends to get overlooked in the (perfectly justified) adoration of her other food writing. Don't you make my mistake.
In her memoir, Where Shall We Go For Dinner, Tamsin Day-Lewis follows in the footsteps of Elizabeth David and eats at Le Garet. "Huge pelts of calves liver . . . the raie which was "exactly as Mrs David described," "the tablier de sapeur or fireman's apron of tripe coated with egg and breadcrumbs." She follows this by devouring the towering menu at Paul Bocuse's temple of gastronomy, The House of Bocuse. You will need to take Gaviscon before reading this chapter and to cope with some of the (albeit glorious) name-dropping.