In contrast to grande cuisine are the traditions in regional cooking–as various as the provinces are numerous, but all related in character in the sense that each is the direct outgrowth of the combined wealth or poverty and the specialties of the immediate countryside and the limitations of the kitchens. It is essentially peasant cooking, elaborated by generations of women who were never far from the kitchen and whose imaginations were forced into flower through necessity and limited means.
Nearly all French country cooking traditions are based on the unique use of the fireplace. Quantities of utensils were designed to be embedded in hot ashes, recipes en papillote were originally conceived to be cooked under hot ashes, and those preparations which, one reads, should cook very slowly and regularly over a period of from eight to ten hours are dishes which at one time were simply embedded in hot ashes in the fireplace the night before and forgotten until it was time to serve them (more often than not, the lid of the utensil was hermetically sealed with a strip of flour-and-water paste). As the fire never went out from autumn until spring, a bed of coals was always ready if there were meats or vegetables to be grilled, and it was merely a question of adding a couple of logs to the fire to produce the heat necessary to turn a roast on a spit before the flames. Rapid gratins and glazes were produced by heating a shovel in the hot coals and then holding it directly over the surface of the dish for a few moments (the ancestor of the “salamander”). Crème brulée, in certain provinces, is still known as crème à la pelle–shovel custard. Slow gratins were made in special dishes designed to be placed on tripods or grills over the coals, their high-sided lids, concave at the top, to be filled with hot coals.
The only ovens were bread ovens, built behind great fireplaces, the door to the oven opening from the back wall of the fireplace. Enormous, igloo-shaped, lined entirely with refractory bricks, they were heated by beds of coals, constantly renewed inside the ovens over a period of several hours. When the bricks were sufficiently heated, the ovens were then swept clean; they retained sufficient heat for many hours of baking. One generally profited from a bread-baking day to prepare other dishes. Each farm had its own oven, but many small villages had a community oven that was heated once a week, to which the entire village brought their risen bread dough and other preparations to be baked.
Today regional recipes have, in large part, passed into the hands of professional cooks, for the provincial housewife, like her American counterpart, now cooks with gas, and her aspirations on the whole separate her from the kitchen. Those few “backward” areas that still cling to old traditions—parts of Auvergne and Brittany, for instance—have, unhappily, never been rich in gastronomic tradition.
The term cuisine bourgeoise nowadays is used to describe a certain kind of preparation. As a rigidly defined element of a way of life it no longer exists as a category apart. It is richer than regional cooking in the sense that it uses more expensive products, yet it is also less imaginative. It is based on stock; hence the kitchens were always full of boiled meats, and it was accepted tradition, even for elegant receptions, to place an enormous platter of boiled meats on the table at the same time as the soup and leave it throughout the entire service. (In restaurants it was the kitchen help who were obliged to nourish themselves daily on boiled meats.) Braised dishes like boeuf à la mode are typical. “Vulgar” ingredients such as variety meats were eschewed. Veal liver and sweetbreads were, however, considered elegant, and, curiously, a stew of calves’ eyes was acceptable. It is, like regional cooking, also a “woman’s cooking” (though it was not the mistress of the house but women cooks. who executed it), and the elaborations were to some extent influenced by la grande cuisine.
MENU COMPOSITION
A perfect meal can be many things—a plate of lentils with a boiled sausage, a green salad, a piece of cheese and a bottle of cool young Beaujolais—or nothing but a composed salad and any light, young wine.
A dinner that begins with a soup and runs through a fish course, an entrée, a sherbet, a roast, salad, cheese and dessert, and that may be accompanied by from three to six wines, presents a special problem of orchestration. The desired result is often difficult to achieve. Each course must provide a happy contrast to the one preceding it; at the same time, the movement through the various courses should be an ascending one from light, delicate and more complex flavors through progressively richer, more full-bodied and simpler flavors. The wines, too, should be flattered by—and should flatter—each accompanying course ‘while relating to each other, as well in a similar kind of progression.
A semiliquid sherbet, more tart than sweet, usually with a champagne base, refreshes the palate halfway through this progression, and a green salad serves the same purpose before relaxing into the cheese course, which will be accompanied by the fullest-bodied of the red wines—and finally the dessert, neither heavy nor cloying and oversweet, but light and delicate, slightly less sweet than the intricate and voluptuous Sauternes that may accompany it.
This is obviously not the only way to conceive a menu. Essentially the only thing to remember is that the palate should be kept fresh, teased, surprised, excited all through a meal. The moment there is danger of fatigue, it must be astonished, or soothed into greater anticipation, until the sublime moment of release when one moves away from the table to relax with coffee and an alcool.
In the past it was de rigueur to begin a luncheon with hors d’oeuvre and a dinner with soup. Today the evening meal of a simple peasant or working-class family habitually consists of soup, with a piece of cheese often the only other element—and a very elegant dinner party, conceived in terms of the old precepts, always begins with a soup. Between these two poles lies most of French eating, and in this realm few rules are left. This may, in a sense, be a liberating force although with it come such misfortunes as the sandwich eaten standing up and cigarettes smoked throughout the meal. But despite the precepts of tradition there should be no fast rules. A meal need not always include a salad or cheeses (although Brillat-Savarin’s famous and foolish maxim, “A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who is missing one eye,” reminds us of the contrary)—or fish or a roast. Certain white wines are splendid with certain cheeses. In that part of the Loire Valley that produces Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, the hard, nutty-flavored little goat cheeses known as crottins de Chavignol are always accompanied by the dry, slightly metallic white wines of the region. In Alsace, Traminer is drunk with Munster cheese, and the Sauternais drink Château d’Yquem with Roquefort—and with foie gras!
In organizing a menu, one must consider its presentation—it is nearly as important to flatter the eye as the palate. Don’t serve tomato sauces in red plates or spinach on a green platter. Never serve a roast’s garnish on the same platter—a good roast is sufficiently handsome to be presented alone, and, should it slip while being carved, artichoke bottoms and stuffed mushrooms should not be there to fly in all directions. Don’t sprinkle large handfuls of parsley indiscriminately over everything. Don’t follow one white-colored sauce by another, or a gratin of fish by a gratin of meat, even though the underlying sauces may be very different in character. Rustic preparations are generally best, and look best, served in the earthenware pots they are cooked in. Elegant preparations should be elegantly presented—on condition that the quality in no way suffers as a result.
A menu must be conceived also in terms of one’s time and work. Never try to serve a meal in which every course requires endless lastminute preparations. When a dish requires the addition of a number of ingredients at different times, combine in advance all those elements that are to be added at the same time. In this way you have only one article to think of rather than five or six, a couple of which might otherwise