Consuming Interest

Having Crossed the Channel

By ELIZABETH DAVID A REFUGEE from the Willy- Colette menage of the

early 1900s, from what promised to be a long stint of sterile work as Willy's secretary and as yet an- other among the throng of that extraordinary man's unacknowledged collabor- ators, the young Marcel. Boulestin had fled the malicious gossip, the dramas and scandals in which those two now legendary figures were for ever involving each other and their friends. Avoiding the scene which he knew he would provoke should he inform Willy of his decision, Boulestin slipped away from Paris while his em- ployer was absent. Thenceforth he made his life in England.

As the result of two previous visits to London, Boulestin had already gone through a period of serious anglomania which extended even to our food and an attempt to make his father's household in Poitiers appreciate the beauty of mint sauce with mutton. In Paris he bought mince pies and English marmalade, took Colette to tea at the British Dairy, drank whisky instead of wine at a dinner party at Fouquet's, and spent two summer holidays in Dieppe be- cause it was so English. There he made friends with Walter Sickert, William Nicholson, Reggie Turner, Ada Leverson, Marie Tempest and Max Beerbohm, subsequently doing a French trans- lation of The Happy Hypocrite, which was pub- lished in 1904 by the Mercure de France, illus- trated with a caricature of Boulestin by Max (Boulestin had some difficulty in 'persuading the editors of the Mercure that Max Beerbohm actually existed and was not an invention of his own').

It was not until after the 1914 war and nearly five years with the French army—although domiCiled in England for some thirty-five years he never entertained the idea of becoming a naturalised British subject, considering it highly improper for a Frenchman to renounce his coun- try—and following the failure of his London decorating business, which before the war had been successful, that Boulestin turned to cookery. He had been dabbling, in a small way, in picture- dealing, had imported French wallpapers, and fabrics designed by Poiret and Dufy, but could not sell them. During the course of negotiating the sale of some etchings by his friend J. E. Laboureur to Byard, a director of Heinemanns, Boulestin asked casually if a cookery book would be of any interest at that moment. It would, said Byard. On the spot a contract was produced and signed and the advance of £10 paid over.

Boulestin's writing still seems so fresh and original that it comes as a shock to realise that these happenings occurred forty years ago, and that his first book, Simple French Cooking for English Homes, appeared in June, 1923. On the plain white jacket of the little book, and as a frontispiece, was a design, enticing, fresh and lively, by Laboureur. The book, priced at 5s., was reprinted in September of the same year, again in 1924, 1925, 1928, 1930 and 1933. In the meantime Boulestin had writtery cookery articles for the Daily Express, the Morning Post, Vogue,

the Manchester Guardian and the Spectator; in February, 1925, A Second Helping was pub- lished, also with a Laboureur jacket and frontis- piece. A Second Helping is the least successful of Boulestin's books. A certain proportion of 'amusing' recipes and chic remarks—`get your rabbits sent from Dartmoor'—give it a distinctly Vogueish sniff. Later the same year appeared, for .3s. 6d., The Conduct of the Kitchen. In that year also the first Boulestin restaurant was opened in Leicester Square. Again. artists and innovators in the decorating business collaborated with Boule- stin. Allan Walton, the enlightened owner of a prosperous texile firm in the Midlands, produced a friend who produced the capital for the res- taurant, and supplied also the fabrics (he was employing artists of the stature of Cedric Morris, Vanessa Bell and Duncan. Grant to design for him) with which the restaurant was furnished.

In 1930 Boulestin collaborated with Jason Hill on Herbs, Salads and Seasonings, illustrated with unique grate by Cedric Morris. In 1931 came What Shall We Have Today? (5s. and in paper covers 3s.), the most popular perhaps of all the Boulestin books, containing a large and well-balanced selection of recipes, plus a lunch and dinner menu for each month. In 1932 ap- peared three little volumes at 2s. each, dealing with Savouries and Hors-dTEuvre, Eggs and Potatoes, compiled in collaboration with his friend Robin Adair. Reprinted by Heinemanns in 1956, a few copies of these little books are still available at 2s. 6d. each. The staggeringly inappropriate coloured board covers notwith- standing, they are bargains for anyone who has no other Boulestins. In 1934 came Having Crossed the Channel, a light-hearted record of a journey through the Vendee, the Landes, the Bordelais, a pilgrimage back to his native Perigord and into his youth. This little nugget of a book (but all Boulestin books are nuggets) contains some of Boulestin's best writing about his own province and about the food of obscure country inns in a France now for ever vanished.

In 1935 Boulestin's Evening Standard Book of Menus was published by Heinemanns. This book is in its way a tour de force. It contains a lun- cheon and dinner menu for every day of the year, plus every relevant recipe. It was directed at an audience to which a man of lesser wit and native grace might have been tempted to talk down (it has to be remembered that by this time Boulestin and his restaurant had already become almost legendary) and this was a trap into which he was at the same time too subtle and too humane to fall. What he produced was a volume for which he really should have kept his title The Conduct of the Kitchen—a title borrowed, incidentally, from Meredith—and which in content was and remains the only realistic and readable book of its kind ever published in England. Menus past or to come can be the biggest bore on earth. If they do not apply to one's own way of life or taste—and they hardly ever do—one does not want to hear about them. Boulestin's menus applied to everybody, regardless of class or cir- cumstance. One indication of the effect produced by Boulestin's work is that whenever a.second- hand copy of one of his books turns up—and that is not often—one finds it scarred with pencil marks against the recipes which have been cooked by the previous owner and often, slipped somewhere among the pages, is a list of dishes noted for future trial.

* Wholesale reproduction of recipes seems to me an unilluminating way of paying tribute to cookery authors one admires. In Boulestin's case quotation is my only hope of conveying some- thing of the essence of this man's writing, of his intelligence, sense and taste, of his ease of •style, unsnobbish, uneffusive and in a high degree in- spiriting and creative.

The handful of extracts I have chosen to quote are none of them to be found in The Best of Boulestin, the American-selected anthology pub- lished in England by Heinemanns in 1952 and still available at 21s. ;This volume does, indeed, contain many of Boulestin's best recipes, but not a single one of the delicious menus in the compo- sition of which he excelled; and anybody who buys the book should be warned to disregard the announcement on the jacket, which informs us that the book contains a selection of the best recipes of a 'World-Famous Chef.' A chef in the professional sense of the word is just exactly what Boulestin was not and did not aspire to be. The implications of that piece of grandiloquence would not have been at all to his taste, as anyone can see from reading a paragraph or two of any of his books. Boulestin was not out to emulate Escoffier. He was creating something new. One of his first concerns was to rid his cooking and ours of the eternal stock of the professional, the supposed necessity for which opened the way to the universal acceptance of the deadly• bouillon cube:

Do not spoil the special taste of the gravy obtained in the roasting of beef, veal, mutton or pork by adding to it the classical stock which gives to all meats the same deplorable taste of soup. It is obvious that you' cannot out of a joint get the sauceboat full which usually appears on the table.

Simple French Cooking for English Homes.

That was news, and good news. So was Boules- tin's admonition concerning vegetable soups:

The chief thing to remember is that all these soups—unless otherwise specified—must be made with plain water. When made with the addition of stock they lose all character and cease to be what they were intended to be. The fresh pleasant taste is lost owing to the addition of meat stock, and the value of the soup from an economical point of view is also lost.

What Shall We Have Today?

That commodities such as the simplest home- made sardine butter which we had hitherto re- garded as sandwich fillings, egg dishes which belonged to the breakfast table, the night club or the bedsitting-room, and little hot dishes which were ordinary English family supper savouries were valuable assets which could be quite differently deployed and offered as party dishes were ideas which had occurred to few people in pre-Boulestin days. From the Evening Standard Book of Menus come two ideas for September luncheons:

Salad of Tunny Fish and Celery Risotto Milanese Fruit Scrambled Eggs with Haddock Vegetable Salad Creamed Rice

In those days only Boulestin thought of ac- tually inviting people to lunch to eat scrambled eggs. In one of his January menus the same breakfast dish appears as a first course before cold turkey and salad, the meal to be ended with English toasted cheese.

Creme au Lard

Take about a quarter of a pound of grated cheese (gruyere preferably), a tumblerful of fresh cream and one beaten egg. Mix well to- gether, add two or three rashers of bacon crisply fried and broken in very small pieces, till with the mixture little souffld dishes (one for each person) and cook in a moderate oven, about twenty minutes, till it is set and slightly browned.

A Second Helping.

Ah, resourceful Boulestin. This is nothing more than a kind of quiche filling cooked without the pastry, and indeed in several other Boulestin volumes the recipe appears as creme lorraine. A simple and admirable answer to the question of what to have for a hot first dish.

Braised Veal with Carrots

Take a good piece of veal, about three pounds in weight, brown it both sides in butter. Put in a fireproof dish eight carrots cut in round pieces, about half an inch thick, half a dozen small onions, parsley, salt and pepper and a rasher of bacon cut in small pieces, add a tablespoon of water, cover the dish and cook on a slow fire for about three and a half hours. Shake' the dish occasionally, but do not - remove the lid.

The Conduct of 11w Kitchen.

This recipe must have been one of Boulestin's favourites. It appears over and over again in his books. His deliberate omission of detail—it is impossible, he was in the habit of saying, to give precise recipes—would never get by a home eco- nomist, but then if the recipe were processed by a home economist nobody would be moved to get out to the butcher and buy that good piece of veal nor into the kitchen to discover how delicate is the combination of veal, carrots, little onions, a scrap of bacon, seasonings and butter all so slowly and patiently amalgamated—in prac- lice rather more patiently than a modern stove can manage.

It was, I think, Boulestin who introduced the Basque piperade to the English public. A recipe for it or a description of this beguiling dish of peppers, onions, tomatoes and eggs appears in every one of his books, even down to the booklet commissioned from him by the Romary biscuit firm and which sold for 6d. The briefest piperade recipe is the one recorded, in Having Crossed the Channel, as it was shouted out by a tipsy smuggler one morning in a Basque inn on the Bidassoa. 'Vous (rites mire vos piments et vos tomates et volts . . . foutez vos ands dedans' (this was later translated by Adair, not perhaps too happily, as 'shove in your eggs').

A pickled ox-tongue, plain-boiled and served hot with a very smooth purde of white turnips enriched with butter and slices of hard-boiled egg was one of the original and unique speci- alities of the Boulestin restaurant. The recipe, under the name of langtw savoyarde, again appears in several of his books and is to be found in The Best of Boulestin. So is the formula (from The Fine Cooking, Heinemann, 1937) for the famous cheese souffld which so wonderfully conceals melting, whole poached eggs, an old dish of French cookery and one served by Boulestin at a luncheon given at his restaurant

to celebrate the publication by Cassells on Sep- tember 26, 1936, of the autobiography entitled Myself, My Two Countries. On this occasion the souffle was followed by an entrecOte maitre ti'luitel with pomnzes frites (I hear them rustling) and the sweet was crêpes Verlaines, Boulestin's concession to the showmanship which he disliked but knew his English customers de- manded. The wine was a Cheval Blanc 1925 and the sole liqueur was Armagnac. A modest show as press luncheons given by famous res- taurateurs go. At the premises in Southampton Street, Covent Garden, to which the Restaurant Boulestin had by this time moved, there exists still today an establishment which bears Boule- stin's name. Its founder was, I think, the first amateur to venture on a London restaurant and certainly the only one to acquire an international reputation. In East and Endurance, the continua- tion of the autobiography which Boulestin wrote in French under the title of A Londres Naguere and which was published after his death (Home and Van Thal, 1948) in a translation by Robin Adair, he tells how the place was crammed night after night with customers from the Savoy, Ritz and Carlton belt, stage stars, artists, writers, high Bohemia and royalty. His prices were reputed to be the highest in London. And still the restaurant did not pay. Boulestin had found, like many before and since, that in England the price of perfection is too high. During most of the fourteen years that he was running his restaurant he found it necessary to supplement his earnings by articles, books—heaven knows how he found the time to write them—cookery classes and lec- tures. His television demonstrations were the first of their kind.

Boulestin's career as a pioneer of under- stated finesse in the English household and restaurant kitchens came to an end with the 1939 war. He died, aged sixty-five, in German-occu- pied Paris on September 20, 1943.