Foods in season, foods native to the Bourbonnais countryside, were all my mother had to work with. Such simple foods! But when she had cooked and seasoned and sauced them—as she did to perfection—any gourmet would have thrilled to sit at our table.
I see in every American market the same fruits and vegetables, the same meat and fish that filled our country market baskets. That is, with a few exceptions—veal, for example, because no veal has quite the same whiteness and delicacy of French veal. But, on the other hand, we were not lucky enough to have the profusion of out-of-season foods that appear so regularly in American markets, nor the canned and packaged goods that make cooking almost child's play.
Mother's cookery skill and thrift started with her marketing. Not a sou left her purse for anything second rate. With her keen eyes and sensitive fingers she judged the plumpness of this, the firmness of that, the crispness of something else. I can't imagine her marketing by phone—even if she had had one to use. Nor can I picture her wasting any of the food she bought so carefully. The waste common in this country would have left her completely bewildered. To spend precious francs and sous for food and then throw half of it in the refuse pail! She would have been as apt to have thrown the actual coins there—which, after all, is not much more foolish!
I admit that we Bourbonnais may have been a bit lavish—although not wasteful—with dairy foods because milk and cream, butter, cheese, and eggs were plentiful. But they were used carefully and regularly, rather than extravagantly. There is a difference. Never, for example, at the end of a heavy meal would great spoonfuls of shipped cream be ladled over a rich dessert. On the other hand, never were the few spoonfuls of cream, needed to bring a soup or a sauce to a final point of delectability, left out. And to risk a poor result by being stingy with butter or eggs would have seemed the strangest kind of economy in our home.
Now nutritionists tell me that dairy foods are one of the best and least expensive ways of obtaining vital nutrients—a better and cheaper way than getting them in pills. They say, too, that to throw away food that can be used in the soup pot or salad bowl is to throw away health. My mother would have understood them.
In the France that I knew, butter was an indispensable stable in cooking—was used by even the poorest families. I say “in cooking” because few people ate it on bread at the table, and I, for one, still prefer my bread plain. But cream soups and sauces never lacked its fine rich flavor and the only pastry in which anything but butter was used was the pastry for meat pies. In summer, butter was plentiful and cheap, and enough was preserved for the winter months.
One way of preparing it for storage was to melt it very slowly, to avoid scorching, and pour off the clear melted fat into crocks which, when well covered, were stored n the cold cellar. (The residue in the pan was browned just the least bit and spread on bread for us children to eat with milk for a between-meal snack—and how we loved its salty taste!) This particular butter was used for cooking vegetables and fish, for sauce Meunière or wherever melted butter was required.
The other way of preparing butter for storage was to knead out all the drops of liquid in it and then to wash it well and continue kneading so that every trace of buttermilk that might have remained was completely removed. A little vinegar was then put in the bottom of a crock, and a layer—about an inch—of butter spread over it, more vinegar and another layer of butter, and so on until the crock was filled, ending with a layer of vinegar. It was pressed down firmly, covered closely, and stored in the cellar. At any time a portion could be spooned out and washed with fresh water. This particular butter was reserved for making cream soups and sauces, for pastries and other delicacies.
We expected to—had to, in fact—depend upon fresh foods that were in season. Consequently, we enjoyed all the more the special bounty of each season as it rolled around. But we did preserve some perishables for winter use, salting vegetables like green beans and drying fruits like plums and cherries. I remember so vividly when I was a little fellow visiting my grandparents' farm in summer during the fruit-drying. Above and in back of the kitchen fireplace they had a very large brick oven which was heated by burning the wood right inside it. When the oven was hot enough the ashes were scraped out. Then the bread and tarts were put in and baked in the heat thrown out by the bricks. When they were done and the oven was cooling off, the big straw trays of fruit that had started to dry in the bright sun outside were put in the oven to finish. The door, a heavy iron affair, was always left swinging open. Little rascals like myself would wait until Grandmother was out of sight and the crawl into the dark cavern, redolent with the smells of freshly baked bread and drying fruit, and crouching there on the warm bricks would stuff ourselves with fruit—until discovered!
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