For many years now I have catered to the haut monde in the great kitchens of Ritz hotels. It has been my privilege to prepare world-famous dishes for world-famous people. Yet never have these years dimmed in the least my memories of the tasty succulent food that was served in my boyhood home—and in thousands of French homes like my own—where even the simplest cooking was fine cooking because it was done with patience and loving care. It was, in fact, in homes such as these that the discerning tastes of France's great chefs—and the famous gourmets who have inspired and honored those chefs—sprouted and flourished.
French cooking, like American, is to an extent regional. Just as in America, different sections take great pride in their specialties. That small province of Le Bourbonnais in the center of France that borders on the Allier River is where my home was, and it was my mother's skillful and discriminating cookery, her unforgettably delicious meals, that were my first inspiration and decided my career.
My mother's kitchen with its well-scoured stone floor, whitewashed walls, and small-paned casement windows was as French as the tricolor that waved over the town hall. It was far, indeed, from the efficient compactness of a modern American kitchen, was not as scientific looking —but oh so cheerful! I remember how the sunshine streamed in through the windows on bright days, marking off big sunny squares on the floor, how the copper pots gleamed, and how, even on dull days, the whiteness of the walls seemed to chase away any gloom. French kitchens like ours had an inviting coziness, a warmth always pungent with tantalizing smells.
The cheeriness of our kitchen was due, however, only in part to the streaming sunshine and the comfortable warmth of the big black stove. More important was the spirit of my smiling, friendly mother who was the queen of this little domain. Pictures of her bustling in her kitchen—her capable hands on the rolling pin flattening out a fat ball of pastry, or carefully skimming the pot-au-feu, or perhaps carrying a soufflé to the table, carrying it so very gently lest its magic puffing collapse too soon—these pictures have been constantly before me. Perhaps my memory now serves me so well because all these kitchen activities were so fascinating to me, were a continual lure. None of the games which we children played in the garden could hold me when my mother called “petit Louis” and I knew that I might help with—or at least watch—some special dish that was under way. Her love of fine food made the daily meal-getting a delight and a challenge, turned us children into little gourmets with our first solid food, and was responsible for my begging to be allowed to go away and serve a chef's apprenticeship.
Our kitchen lacked the vast array of equipment that seems so important today, lacked, for instance, even a meat grinder and an egg beater. Sharp knives minced and chopped to every degree of fineness, wire whips whisked to any desired lightness. Our bowls were the old-fashioned, mustard-colored, earthenware kind and we mixed with wooden spoons. We had relatively few utensils for all the delicious dishes which were turned out. Copper was used for cooking vegetables and sauces, black iron for frying, sautéing, and general cooking, and brown earthenware casseroles, in several shapes and sizes, for soups, stews, and all kinds of baking. Our stove was heated with coal or wood, had no convenient gas cocks or electric switches, and no thermostat to regulate—or thermometer to tell— the oven's heat. Cooking was quickened or delayed by moving the pots nearer or farther from the hot center and the oven was judged by the feel of its heat on the hand—judged, I might add, with great accuracy.
Ours, I know, was a typical French kitchen and the fine cooking that was done in it was typical, too. My mother, like most French women, had learned to cook when a girl by watching her mother, grandmother, aunts, and friends. She was given small tasks at first, then took on more complicated ones until she had trained all her five senses on this very important and, to her, delightful occupation. She learned the feel of foods, such as the lightness of brioche dough when ready for the oven or the resistance meat gives the fork when not quite done; she knew how foods should look, how fine the meat should be chopped for hachis or how coarse the vegetables for hors d'oeuvres; she could tell freshness by smell; and determine the heat of fat by the sputtering sound of chicken or fish frying in it. But above all, she learned to taste with discrimination—that neverending tasting that warned her just when to remove the faggot or advised an extra ten minutes' cooking. Using the senses so constantly makes them keener and keener and I think cannot fail to make a better and better cook. The way, in fact, a French housewife does use her senses instead of depending entirely upon recipes and mechanical aids is, I think, one reason why women like my mother thought of cooking as a creative art, never a tiresome chore.
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!
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.