Letting Well Alone
By ELIZABETH DAVID
'VITAMIN H, JAM' reads the last item on the menu of the famous Azanian banquet in Black Mischief. I remembered about Seth's dinner (There is the question of food. I have been reading that now it is called Vitamins') When the proprietor of a village inn in the Var, about twenty-five miles from Aix-en-Provence, brought us bowls of jam as the final course of our delicious lunch. For the English, it's always good for a laugh that the French eat jam for pudding—and jam by itself, jam without bread and butter, without toast or teacakes or cream or even sponge or roly-poly. Just jam, and the Point about this jam, and I can't help how quaint it sounds, was its absolute rightness on this particular occasiod. The meal was faultless of its kind, a roughish country-inn kind, beginning with tomato salad with chopped "ion, the little black olives of the Nyons dis- trict and home-made pâté—the basic hors- d'ceuvre in this part of Provence—each item on its own separate dish, and left on the table so we could help ourselves. It was followed by a gratin of courgettes and rice. This dish, new to me, was made with courgettes gently stewed in butter and sieved, the resulting purée then mixed with bdchamel and cooked rice, all turned into a shallow dish and browned in the oven. A mixture With delicate and unexpected flavours. Then Came a daube of beef, an excellent one, with an tinthickened but short sauce of wine and tomato purée, beautifully scented with bayleaf c tilel thyme, brought to the table, and left on it, a metal casserole in which it kept sizzling
hot. I
. FinallY, this famous jam—home-made, of green le melon, fresh-tasting, not too sweet, a hint of 'O lemons in the background. The wine was coarse red ill , by the litre. Even the coffee was drinkable, (I and the bill was very modest. . The English public must be sick and tired of , being told that cooking is an art and that the I'l ., I rench are the great exponents of it. Or, alter- nativelY, that cooking is not an art but a question ' of good basic ingredients, which we have more of and better than anyone else (it's surprising how many otherwise quite sane English people really believe this) and so QED we also have the hest cooking, while the French, poor things, toil awaY in their kitchens in a desperate effort to disguise their ingredients. I don't want to enter into this abysmal argument. I just want to Ilescribe that same Provençal meal as it would 2e if one ordered it in a London restaurant. ‘Vith the exception of the tomato salad, which c,in't be made here because tomatoes fit for Isalad aren't acceptable to the greengrocery trade, there was nothing about that meal which cr.ouldn't be reproduced by a moderately skilful -,nsglish cook, professional or amateur. ,11..0 here we go. A slab of pâté, smelling power- ,10 Ily of smoked bacon and rosemary, is brought I_ Your table on a teaplate loaded with lettuce jr. lcd ves; it is covered with a trellis work of i radishes or watercress, interspersed with a taste- ful pattern of very large olives, brown rather than black (we can't get the best black olives, but good Italian, Greek and North African small black olives are available).
Now, the gratin of courgettes and rice. Well, that doesn't contain fish or meat, so it's not a course by English standards. What about adding a few scampi, or a slice or two of ham, or some little bits of bacon? Or better still, economise on the waiting and the washing up and serve it with the meat, plus, naturally, potatoes and a green vege- table. What? The taste of the courgette purée is too fragile to go with that beef and wine? Put plenty of cheese in it then, that'll pep it up And anyway that daube—there isn't enough gravy with it. Add a cupful of the chef's brown sauce to each serving, it'll make it nice and thick and it'll look more shiny and stylish on the plate— it'll be on a plate, of course, there'd be chaos if you left a whole casserole of the stuff on the customers' tables. And now we get to our Vita- min H. Will the customers stand for jam potted in plastic thimbles like they have on British Railways and at Ye Olde Sussex Tea Gardens? Going too far perhaps. Better heat up the jam, stir in a little curagao, a dash of vanilla essence, some green colouring to cheer it up, and serve it as a sauce with ice-cream. That's more like it. Charge them 8s. 6d. for it, it's worth it what with all the trouble it gave the cook. And the wine? This is an expensive meal, so the cheap red plonk will never do: a bottle of the Château Pont d'Avignon rosé in a basket, please.
And the English customers will pay £3 10s. a head for this version of a meal which in its original form cost about 25s. for two including wine, coffee and service. And they will like it, and they will go home and try to reproduce it in their own kitchens—adding, of course, a little something of their own devising, a frill here, a trimming there, an extra vegetable, a few mush- rooms in the beef stew. . . .
It does seem to me that with so much talk about art versus fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, of leaving well alone. This is a pre- requisite of any first-class meal (as opposed to one isolated first-class dish) on any level what- soever; so is the capacity, among the customers if you are a restaurateur and among your friends if you are an amateur cook, to appreciate well when it is left alone. It's a capacity which would make meals a lot cheaper, and cooking a very great deal easier.
'incidentally, your eyes are like limpid pools.'
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