Did Mother have some special tricks up her sleeve that turned this simple provender into monuments of good living? If the wise use of dairy foods is an up-the-sleeve trick, then I can say “yes.” And I can add “yes, indeed,” if the way she distributed seasonings and herbs through her succulent sauces and soups, and enhanced their flavors with red and white wines, are tricks. To “boil in salted water” and let it go at that was not her idea of how to prepare food.
The seasonings and herbs, in fact, which give fresh new meanings to plain foods are as much a part of a French home and garden as the flagged walk which leads to the door. Everyone with a patch of ground, no matter how small, has neat rows of parsley, chives, and chervil, bushy clumps of tarragon and thyme, and the pungent odor of drying herbs which permeated our kitchens every year in late summer.
In summer when freshly picked herbs were dropped in the pot the dishes tasted just a little different from those in winter when the dried ones were used. That adds another bit of variation. City housewives without gardens could always find a market that sold herbs—fresh ones in summer, dried ones in winter—because they shopped until they did find one.
Wine which has that quality of making a sauce the perfect complement to a particular food was always at hand, too. Wines, such as the pinard that average Frenchmen drink every day, are so inexpensive that they are as cheap a flavoring as lemon juice in this country. I think that America's good native wine also should be used more in cooking.
During the last thirty odd years visits to my mother's home in France have been infrequent. But each one confirmed my boyhood memories of her cooking, of the food that always looked and smelled so appetizing, that tasted so delicious. Years of preparing, directing and, of course, eating the finest cuisine of my generation seemed only to make me more appreciative of her art. On my last visit I said, “This is the cooking about which Americans should know more,” and I knew then that sometime I would write a book.
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