Art demands an impeccable technique; science a little understanding." Today the mention of art in connection with cookery is taken for pretension. Science and cookery make a combination even more suspect. Because he was a scientist by profession, making no claims to being an artist, Docteur Édouard de Pomiane's observation was a statement of belief, made in all humility. Vainglory is totally missing from de Pomiane's work. He knew that the attainment of impeccable technique meant a lifetime—in de Pomiane's case an exceptionally long one—of experiment and discipline. Out of it all he appears to have extracted, and given, an uncommon amount of pleasure.
Docteur Édouard de Pomiane's real name was Édouard Pozerski. He was of purely Polish origin, the son of ÉmigrÉs who had fled Poland and settled in Paris after the revolution of 1863. Born and brought up in Montmartre, he was educated at the École Polonaise and subsequently at the LycÉe Condorcet. (The École Polonaise was described by Henri Babinski, another celebrated Franco-Polish cookery writer, as an establishment of ferocious austerity. Babinski was the real name of Ali-Bab, author of that immense and remarkable volume Gastronomie Pratique.) De Pomiane chose for his career the study of biology, specializing in food chemistry and dietetics. Before long he had invented a new science called gastrotechnology, which he defined simply as the scientific explanation of accepted principles of cookery. For a half century—interrupted only by his war service from 1914 to 1918—de Pomiane also made cookery and cookery writing his hobby and second profession. After his retirement from the Institut Pasteur, where he lectured for some 50 years, he devoted himself entirely to his cookery studies. He was 89 when he died, in January 1964.
De Pomiane's output was immense—some dozen cookery books, countless scores of articles, broadcasts, lectures. In France his books were best-sellers; among French cookery writers his place is one very much apart.
Many before him had attempted to explain cookery in scientific terms and had succeeded only in turning both science and cookery into the deadliest of bores. De Pomiane was the first writer to propound such happenings as the fusion of egg yolks and olive oil in a mayonnaise, the sizzling of a potato chip when plunged into fat for deep-frying, in language so straightforward, so graphic, that even the least scientifically minded could grasp the principles instead of simply learning the rules. In cooking, the possibility of muffing a dish is always with us. Nobody can eliminate that. What de Pomiane did by explaining the cause was to banish the fear of failure.
Adored by his public and his pupils, feared by the phony, derided by the reactionary, de Pomiane's irreverent attitude to established tradition, his independence of mind backed up by scientific training, earned him the reputation of being something of a Candide, a provocative rebel disturbing the grave conclaves of French gastronomes, questioning the holy rites of the "white-vestured officiating priests" of classical French cookery. It was understandable that not all his colleagues appreciated de Pomiane's particular brand of irony:
"As to fish, everyone agrees that it must be served between the soup and the meat. The sacred position of the fish before the meat course implies one must eat fish and meat. Now such a meal, as any dietician will tell you, is far too rich in nitrogenous substances, since fish has just as much assimilable albumen as meat, and contains a great deal more phosphorus."
Good for Dr. de Pomiane. Too bad for us that so few of his readers—or listeners—paid attention to his liberating words.
It does, on any count, seem extraordinary that 30 years after de Pomiane's heyday, the dispiriting progress from soup to fish, from fish to meat, and on, remorselessly on, to salad, cheese, a piece of pastry, a crème caramel or an ice cream, still constitutes the standard menu throughout the entire French-influenced world of hotels and catering establishments.
Reading some of de Pomiane's neat little menus (from 365 Menus, 365 Recettes), it is so easy to see how little effort is required to transform the dull, overcharged, stereotyped meal into one with a fresh emphasis and a better balance:
Tomates à la crème
Côtelettes de porc
Purée de farine de marrons
Salade de mâche à la betterave
Poires
An unambitious enough menu—and what a delicious surprise it would be to encounter such a meal at any one of those country town Hôtels des Voyageurs, du Commerce, du Lion d'Or, to which my own business affairs in France now take me. In these establishments, where one stays because there is no choice, the food is of a mediocrity, a predictability redeemed for me only by the good bread, the fresh eggs in the omelets, the still relatively civilized presentation, which in Paris is becoming rare—the soup brought to the table in a tureen, the hors d'oeuvre on the familiar, plain little white dishes, the salad in a simple glass bowl. If it all tasted as beguiling as it looks, every dish would be a feast. Two courses out of the whole menu would be more than enough.
Now that little meal of de Pomiane's is a feast, as a whole entity. It is also a real lesson in how to avoid the obvious without being freakish, how to start with the stimulus of a hot vegetable dish, how to vary the eternal purÉe of potatoes with your meat (lacking chestnut flour we could try instead a purÉe of lentils or split peas), how to follow it with a fresh, bright, unexpected salad (that excellent mixture of corn salad and beets—how often does one meet with it nowadays?), and since by that time most people would have had enough without embarking on cheese, de Pomiane is brave enough to leave it out. How much harm has that tyrannical maxim of Brillat-Savarin's about a meal without cheese done to all our waistlines and our digestions?
For a hot first dish, de Pomiane's recipe for tomates à la crème is worth knowing. His method makes tomatoes taste so startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability, soon find it listed in the guidebooks as a regional specialty. De Pomiane himself said the recipe came from his Polish mother. That would not prevent anyone from calling it what he pleases:
"Tomates à la Crème"
Take six tomatoes. Cut them in halves. In your frying pan melt a lump of butter. Put in the tomatoes, cut side downward, with a sharply pointed knife puncturing here and there the rounded sides of the tomatoes. Let them heat for five minutes. Turn them over. Sprinkle them with salt. Cook them for another 10 minutes. Turn them again. The juices run out and spread into the pan. Once more turn the tomatoes cut side upward. Around them put 80 grams (3 ounces near enough) of thick cream. Mix it with the juices. As soon as it bubbles, slip the tomatoes and all their sauces onto a hot dish. Serve instantly, very hot."
The faults of the orthodox menu were by no means the only facet of so-called classic French cooking upon which de Pomiane turned his analytic intelligence. Recipes accepted as great and sacrosanct are not always compatible with sense. Dr. de Pomiane's radar eye saw through them. "Homard à l'amÉricaine is a cacophony ... it offends a basic principle of taste." I rather wish he had gone to work on some of the astonishing things Escoffier and his contemporaries did to fruit: choice pears masked with chocolate sauce and cream, beautiful fresh peaches smothered in raspberry purÉe and set around with vanilla ice seem to me offenses to nature, let alone to art or basic principles. How very odd that people still write of these inventions with breathless awe.
De Pomiane, however, was a man too civilized, too subtle, to labor his points. He passes speedily from the absurdities of haute cuisine to the shortcomings of folk cookery, and deals a swift right and left to those writers whose reverent genuflections before the glory and wonder of every least piece of peasant cookery lore make much journalistic cookery writing so tedious. By the simple device of warning his readers to expect the worst, de Pomiane gets his message across. From a village baker-woman of venerable age, he obtains an ancestral recipe for a cherry tart made on the basis of a butter-enriched bread dough. He passes on the recipe, modified to suit himself, and carrying with it the characteristically deflating note: "When you open the oven door you will have a shock. It is not a pretty sight. The edges of the tart are slightly burnt and the top layer of cherries blackened in some places … It will be received without much enthusiasm for, frankly, it is not too prepossessing!
"Don't be discouraged. Cut the first slice and the juice will run out. Now try it. What a surprise! The pastry is neither crisp nor soggy, and just tinged with cherry juice. The cherries have kept all their flavor and the juice is not sticky—just pure cherry juice. They had some good ideas in 1865!"
Of a dish from the Swiss mountains, Dr. de Pomiane observes that it is "a peasant dish, rustic and vigorous. It is not everybody's taste. But one can improve upon it. Let us get to work." This same recipe provides an instructive example of the way in which Dr. de Pomiane thinks we should go to work improving a primitive dish to our own taste while preserving its character intact. Enthusiastic beginners might add olives, parsley, red peppers. Dr. de Pomiane is scarcely that simple. The school-trained professional might be tempted to superimpose cream, wine, mushrooms, upon his rough and rustic dish. That is not de Pomiane's way. His way is the way of the artist, of the man who can add one sure touch, one only, and thereby create an effect of the preordained, the inevitable, the entirely right and proper:
"Tranches au Fromage"
Black bread—a huge slice weighing 5 to 7 ounces, French mustard, 8 ounces Gruyère.
The slice of bread should be as big as a dessert plate and nearly 1 inch thick. Spread it with a thick layer of French mustard, then cover the whole surface of the bread with strips of cheese about inch thick. Put the slice of bread on a fireproof dish and under the grill. The cheese softens and turns golden brown. Just before it begins to run, remove the dish and carry it to the table. Sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Cut the slice in four and put it onto four hot plates. Pour out the white wine and taste your cheese slice. In the mountains this would seem delicious, but here it is all wrong. But you can put it right. Over each slice pour some melted butter. A mountaineer from the Valais would be shocked, but my friends are enthusiastic, and that is good enough for me."
This is the best kind of cookery writing. It is courageous, courteous, adult. It is creative in the true sense of that ill-used word, creative because it invites the reader to use his own critical and inventive faculties, sends him out to make discoveries, form his own opinions, observe things for himself, instead of slavishly accepting what the books tell him. That little trick, for example, of spreading the mustard on the bread underneath the cheese in de Pomiane's Swiss mountain dish is, for those who notice such things, worth a volume of admonition. So is the little tomato recipe quoted here. You may not realize it the first time you cook the dish. What you discover after trying it twice is that you have learned an uncommon little piece of cookery skill. How many people can fry tomatoes—and without peeling them—so that they do not stick to the pan? You have learned also how to make the simplest, freshest little cream sauce merely by pouring cream into a frying pan. And, I should add, this is a method of making something worthwhile even with such second-rate tomatoes as normally come our way.
All de Pomiane's vegetable dishes are interesting, freshly observed. He is particularly fond of hot beets, recommending them as an accompaniment to roast saddle of hare—a delicious combination. It was especially in his original approach to vegetables and sauces that de Pomiane provoked the criticism of hidebound French professional chefs. Perhaps they were not aware that in this respect de Pomiane was simply harking back to his Polish origins, thereby refreshing French cookery in the perfectly traditional way. De Pomiane gives, incidentally, the only way (the nonorthodox way) to braise Belgian endive with success—no water, no blanching, just butter and slow cooking.
The public knows little of de Pomiane's work and it is missing something of great value. Although his Cooking in Ten Minutes, a lighthearted treatise on how to make the most of charcuterie or delicatessen food—first published in England in 1948—has proved a great favorite, there exists a much more representative book—a collection of lectures, radio talks, recipes, and articles—called Cooking with Pomiane. It is most adroitly put together and translated into English cookery usage by Mrs. Peggie Benton. Published eight years ago and still relatively unknown, the book is modest in appearance and in size, its jacket is the reverse of eye-catching, there are no color photographs, no packaging. It is just a very good and immensely sane book.