French Provincial Cooking Read Online Free

be described as ‘the greatest’. What I do know is that the chefs of the nouvelle cuisine school are not playing to the customers. So long as they pay for it, the customers may take or leave what the chefs give the waiters to put in front of them. The chefs are playing to, by, and for themselves.
    In July 1981 Susan Lee, a writer on the Wall Street Journal , had a ball telling her readers about the aberrations, exaggerations and insufficiencies of nouvelle cuisine and its rapid spread throughout the United States. A recent reaction from the French nation against the novelty of yesteryear was also reported by Miss Lee. I can’t say that I saw any such reaction myself that same summer when I was in France, but if the ‘newly appointed cuisine de terre ’—the French usually, I think, say cuisine de terroir, cooking smacking of the soil—‘and big brimming bowls of hearty coarse food’ reported by Miss Lee have this year become a reality, that would be the most natural reaction in the world. But of course those brimming bowls will contain food cooked in new combinations according to recipes newly evolved, and presented in ways fresh to the eye. To quote Philéas Gilbert, author of that very fine book La Cuisine de Tous les Mois, published in 1893, ‘in the cottage as in the château (for which we should now read château-hotel) we need novelty to stimulate our appetites. Cookery cannot and must not live on its past glories ... it must continually modernise according to circumstances’.
     
    Meanwhile, back so to say in our own kitchens, we have most of us to some extent been influenced by a variety of new trends, of which current French restaurant cooking is only one. Let us, for example, not forget that without the French invention of the robot-coupe , known generically as the food processor, nouvelle cuisine simply would not have come into being. Some years ago, dining in a London restaurant at the time much praised for its new style food, one of my fellow guests was Julia Child. When the charmingly solemn young maître-d’hotel had come to the end of his recitation of the content and style of each dish on the menu, Julia remarked, and it was a simple statement with no trace of criticism, ‘Oh I see, cuisinart cooking’. Cuisinart, I should explain, is the name by which Americans know the robot-coupe . Well, Julia wasn’t far wrong. About seven dishes out of ten on that restaurant menu could not have been created without the food processor. The light purées, the fluffy sauces and the fish mousselines so loved by today’s restaurateurs can also be achieved at home more or less by pressing a button. ‘Now mince, chop or process everything—pan juices, chicken, spinach, bread, flavourings, eggs, together’ is the kind of cooking direction one may read any day in newspaper and magazine articles, and it is indeed a marvel that the food processor does all the mincing, chopping, puréeing and blending, without a thought of all that hard pounding of the past. But let’s not treat the food processor as though it were a waste-disposal unit. Bland, monotonous and in the end characterless food from the processor could all too easily become the new plague.
     
    E.D. August 1983.

Foreword
    WHAT a privilege for us to have this new edition of Elizabeth David, England’s most loved and distinguished food writer. She was here in print in the 1950s, with her first books, and although certain of our well-traveled cognoscenti were admirers, the general American public was not ready for her. She wrote about the glorious food of the Mediterranean, and the French provinces, and Italy, but those were faraway places. You had to go by ship, and it took several days to get there and several days to get back. Besides, we were still a mostly meat-and-potatoes culture, with cake-mix cakes and their mile-high white coconut frostings. I well remember a typical dessert of the fifties—a jellied molded object somewhat in the shape of an