VII
FRENCH SUPREMACY
A GRUMBLER might ask "What's the use trying to learn new things from foreigners when so many of our families can hardly afford to buy the ordinary meats and vegetables for any kind of meal?"
But it is precisely because foodstuffs are becoming expensive that we ought to look to the older and less extravagant nations of Europe for guidance. Our Government has been commendably alert in this matter, doing a most useful service by issuing Farmers' Bulletin 391, which, as previously pointed out, shows how, by expert cooking, the cheaper cuts of meat may be made to yield more nutrition as well as more appetizing flavor than the choicest cuts as at present prepared in American households.
KITCHEN ALCHEMY.
It is to France chiefly that the world owes this invaluable lesson, which gives to those of moderate means many of the advantages of the well-to-do. In that country the humblest peasant family enjoys palatable meals because the cook is an alchemist who knows how to transmute the baser metals into silver and gold.
The secret of this alchemy lies in the use of the stock-pot, which saves for the table a vast amount of animal and vegetable nutriment and flavor such as in American cities and on American farms are wickedly wasted.
It is no consolation to know that the British are almost if not quite as foolishly wasteful as we are. But they are beginning to learn of the French. Sir Henry Thompson's "Food and Feeding" sounded a note which is being listened to more and more attentively. A more recent writer comments instructively on "French Thrift and British Waste":
"In a French household such a thing as waste is almost unknown. The positive waste of odds and ends in this country is simply appalling. Look not only under the vegetable stalls in our streets, but also in almost all dustbins, and you will see as much as, if it had been kept clean, might have given health literally to thousands of people.
"Besides the outside leaves of cabbages and cauliflowers, and the outside layers of onion skin, there are the peelings of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and apples, and the tops of beet-roots and turnips, and the large outside sticks of celery. In France and other countries these go, as a matter of course, into the stock-pot. In England the stock-pot is scarcely used at all among the poorer people. It is not too much to affirm that half a dozen changes in the ways of English poor people, including first and foremost the use of the stock-pot, would increase our national prosperity more than our social reformers dream of."
SEVEN HUNDRED SOUPS.
There are a thousand uses in an intelligently conducted kitchen for the delicious bouillon in the stockpot, redolent of the flavors of diverse vegetables and meats.
Dumas wrote that the French cuisine owes its superiority to the excellence of its bouillon—the product of seven hours of continuous simmering. He knew what he was talking about, for he was almost as far famed for his knowledge of kitchen lore as for his novels; and his "Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine" is one of the monumental contributions to the arts of cooking and eating.
Another Frenchman, Ferdinand Grandi, wrote a book in 1902 entitled "Les 700 Potages, ou l'art de Préparer les Soupes, Consommés, Bisques, Purées, Garbures, Semoules, Légumes, Farineux, Potages de toutes Sortes et de tous les Pays."
Seven hundred soups seems a large order, yet it is possible to prepare not only seven hundred but seven times seven hundred kinds by combining the juices and flavors of diverse meats with those of an endless variety of vegetables. That this is not an exaggeration any one may convince himself by turning over the pages of Baumann's "Meisterwerk der Speisen," which, in its 2016 pages, indicates the nature of about that number of soups.
It must not be inferred from the foregoing remarks about the stockpot that nothing goes into it except odds and ends—peelings and tops of vegetables, bruised bones, trimmings from joints, scraps of poultry or other meat that is left over at table. On the contrary, those who can afford it put in chunks of carefully chosen meats to enrich the bouillon.
For making the national French soup known as pot-au-feu the pieces generally selected are the top round, the shoulder, or the ends of ribs. Preparing the pot-au-feu is not so simple a matter as it may seem. In "L'Art du Bien Manger" we read that the boiling must be done slowly and methodically and that the vegetables to be used must be fresh:
"To make an excellent bouillon, cook, preferably in an earthenware casserole, or, if that is not available, an iron pot; put in the meat, the bones, cold water and salt. Put the pot on the fire, bring it to the boiling point and skim carefully, then after this first skimming add a glass of cold water. Let it boil up again and skim a second time. When the soup begins again to boil slightly slacken the fire, uncover the pot partially and let it simmer gently.
"After three hours' simmering add the vegetables and two pepper-corns. Let this go on simmering two hours more. Color the liquid with a little caramel made from burned sugar. Remove all the fat from the bouillon, put it through a fine sieve and pour it into the soup tureen in which you have placed thin slices of bread which have been browned in the oven. The beef from the stock may be served garnished with the boiled vegetables. (The use of pepper is a matter of taste.)
"The economical side of the pot-au-feu is to furnish soup for two meals. What is left over may be kept in an earthenware jar into which it should be poured through a fine sieve after it has settled somewhat in the soup kettle."
Dumas, who relied for his culinary directions on his friend Vuillemot, of the Tête Noire at St. Cloud, advises that only the freshest and juiciest meat should be used and that it should not be washed, as that would rob it of a portion of its juice. The bones that are added should be broken up well with a mallet as that will result in the gelatine being effectually extracted from them. "Then we place them in a horsehair bag with any scraps of fowl, rabbit, partridge, or roast pigeon which may be found in the larder; in fact, the remains of yesterday's dinner."
As I am not writing a cook book, my main object in presenting these excerpts is to provide an illustration of that use of brains and painstaking care in the kitchen which explains French supremacy in matters gastronomic.
SAVORY SAUCES.
The same traits are abundantly manifested in the making of sauces.
While Dumas attributed the culinary superiority of the French to their bouillon, George H. Ellwanger, who has written an entertaining book on "The Pleasures of the Table," declares that "the supreme triumph of the French cuisine consists in its sauces."
Many of the French gourmets and chefs have held the same view, and undoubtedly more inventive skill has been shown, and more reputations have been made, in the realm of sauces than in any other department of the art of cooking.
Recipes for eighty-one of the best French sauces are given in "L'Art du Bien Manger," and two hundred and forty-six sauces are described in Charles Ranhofer's "The Epicurean." Perhaps the number of possible sauces is not as large as that of the soups; yet there is ample scope still for inventive genius.
Not only men but cities have been made famous by a sauce. In the restaurants of Paris and all over Europe, in fact, Rouen duck is often on the bill of fare. But as Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis says in "The Gourmet's Guide to Europe," "the Rouen duck is not any particular breed of duck, though the good people of Rouen will probably stone you if you assert this. It is simply a roan duck. The rich sauce which forms part of the dish was, however, invented at Rouen."
It was with a duck sauce that one of the French restaurateurs of our time won fame and fortune. For a number of years every American and Englishman in Paris who could afford it, went to the Tour d'Argent to eat a duck as prepared by Frédéric Delair. He used two ducks for each order. One of them, well-cooked, was for the meat, while the other, quite rare (or under-done, as the English say) was put into a silver turnscrew and had all its juices—including that of the liver—squeezed out. These juices make a sauce which I have eaten with enjoyment and impunity; but I have been told by a physician at Lyons that some persons are made ill by it, owing, apparently, to some injurious quality in raw duck-livers.
The "Tour d'Argent" and Frédéric Delair
Most of the Paris restaurants, now that Frédéric is no more, have their silver turnscrew, and they do not feel guilty of plagiarism, for Frédéric did not really originate this trick but adapted it from the practice of French peasants who tried to get as much juice as possible out of their tough and skinny ducks by smashing the carcasses with stones.
Already in the middle ages the saucier, or saucemaker, was the headman in the cuisine of French aristocrats.
The age of Carême (who wrote eloquently and lovingly about sauces) was, as Ellwanger remarks, "the era of quintessences—of the cuisine classique, when chemistry contributed new resources, and fish, meats, and fowls were distilled, in order to add a heightened flavor to the sauces and viands that their etherealized essences were to accentuate. One thinks of Lucullus and Apicius, and of the 'exceeding odoriferous and aromatical vapor' of the ovens of the artist mentioned by Montaigne."
The most common ingredients used to make the savory and appetizing French sauces are the yolks of eggs (raw or cooked), salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes, bouillon, shallots, anchovies, onions, garlic, carrots, olive oil, orange rind, truffles, cream, mushrooms, pickles, wines, meat extracts, cayenne, and diverse aromatic herbs. But the most important of all French sauces is melted French butter—not "kitchen butter," but the fresh, fragrant product of the creamery. With such butter, and plenty of it, gastronomic miracles can be performed.
CARÊME
There is a great deal of local Flavor in French sauces. Blindfold a Parisian gourmet who knows his country, and place before him dishes made after the fashions of different provinces, and he will tell you at once the name of the town they smack of.
The coast towns enjoy special advantages in this respect, as they can use diverse shellfish and other marine creatures peculiar to their region to impart special overtones of flavor, so to speak, to their sauces.
French enthusiasm over sauces reached its climax in the exclamation that with sauce Robert a man might be pardoned for eating his own grandfather!
Brillat-Savarin, like many of his countrymen, went too far when he declared that "poultry is for cookery what canvas is to the painter."
No doubt, many of the sauces served with poultry in French restaurants (each of which has its specialty, as it has in the line of fish sauces) are delicious, yet good chickens, ducks, and turkeys, not to speak of game birds, have flavors of their own which it is a barbarism to disguise even with the noblest of sauces—except once in a while, for the sake of variety. The way to cook any winged creature if you want the most delicious flavor it can yield, is roasting à la broche.
PROFITABLE POULES DE BRESSE.
Of the barbarism just referred to, many Parisian restaurants, I regret to say, are habitually guilty. One evening, at one of the best of them, I was simply dumfounded when a choice poularde, which cost as much as the almost extinct canvasback duck does in New York, was served with—horribile dictu—a sauce made of American canned corn! It was not an attempt to cater to the supposed taste of a New Yorker, for it was a plat du jour, prepared before we arrived and served to others. Had I been the host of the occasion instead of merely a guest I should have taken the head-waiter into a corner and whispered some advice into his ear.
What aggravated the crime was that it was a poularde de Bresse that was thus maltreated.
Many varieties of chickens are raised in France—the poule commune, the race de Houdan, race de la Flèche, race de Crèvecœur, race de Barbezieux, race Caussade, etc., besides imported varieties; but the noblest of them all is the race de la Bresse.
The poulet de Bresse is the most highly esteemed of all domestic birds that are served not only at French dinners, but at the best restaurants and hotels all over Europe. It has a richness of flavor that puts it far above other fowls—as far as its delicious fragrance puts the Gravenstein above all other apples.
In France the poule de Bresse has long been held in highest esteem. Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825: "as to chickens, the finest are those from Bresse, which are as round as an apple." English breeders have recently discovered its superior merits. It promises, the London "Telegraph" remarks, to "become very popular in the near future, and deservedly so, considering the breed's laying and table properties, which have been tested for fully a century across the channel. Bresse is one of the principal towns in the Aisne district, and the breed which bears its name was always cultivated for its white flesh, with delicacy of flavor. Poularde de Bresse usually fetches a higher price than any other fowl in the Paris market." "It behoves our English poultry keepers to use every effort to popularize the Bresse fowl in this country. The specialist club, started some three years since [1909] has already done much.... Mr. G. H. Caple, of Stanton Prior, near Bristol, is honorary secretary, and will give all needful information."
It is to be noted that the Bresse fowl not only "puts on flesh in a wonderful way," but has all the other qualities most desirable in a farmyard bird. Several varieties have flesh as juicy as the Bresse, and almost as delicate in flavor, but there is always some trait or other that puts them at a disadvantage. The Houdan, for instance, is a good bird for the table and a fair layer, but it requires too much attention to be generally profitable. La Flèche provides a tender morsel but flourishes only in dry regions, and the same is true of the Crèvecœur class, which is extremely sensitive to humidity. The Belgian Campine puts on good flesh but not enough of it. The American Wyandotte and the Leghorn are robust, and good layers, but the flesh is inferior in flavor. Much better in this respect are the Plymouth Rocks, but they are poor layers. The Langshans class is good to eat, but does not fatten easily, while the Cochins grow too slowly and their flesh is mediocre as to flavor.
The poule de Bresse has none of these flaws. The black variety is the hardiest of all chickens, flourishing in any climate except the extreme north, and on any soil, dry or humid. As a layer she is among the very best, often winning prizes for size and number of eggs. Though prolific she is not too eager to set, but when she does hatch, she makes a devoted mother. Best of all, the flesh is tender and juicy, there is plenty of it, and in flavor it is beyond compare.
Truly, the poule de Bresse is the chicken for the farm and the market—"c'est la véritable poule de rapport, celle qui convient à la ferme," as a French noted aviculteur remarks.[9]
To my great surprise, in looking over Farmers' Bulletin No. 51 (1907) entitled "Standard Varieties of Chickens," I found no mention of the poule de Bresse in this forty-six-page document, which begins with the statement that there are 104 standard and a large number of nonstandard varieties of chickens raised in this country. Can we afford to be so far behind the French—and the English?
Ungastronomic America confronts us in the statement, in Bulletin 51, that although as a table fowl the Leghorn is only "fairly good," it "holds the same place among poultry that the Jersey holds among cattle. The question of profit in poultry has been decided in favor of the egg-producing breeds."
In a country in which most poultry is spoiled by being put into cold storage undrawn, it is no wonder that the laying capacity of a fowl should alone be deemed worth considering; for, under these conditions, as previously pointed out, breed and feed are of no consequence so far as flavor is concerned. But the time is coming when the American consumer will imperatively demand Flavor in Food; and bountiful harvests will be reaped by farmers who look ahead now and stock their poultry yards with an eye to good and abundant flesh as well as good and abundant eggs. The Bresse race will fill the whole bill. It is best for eggs, best for the table. A Bresse hen will virtually hatch two chicks from one egg.
DIGESTIVE VALUE OF SOUR SALADS.
Salad goes with chicken as the piano goes with a song. To eat lettuce with the cheese, as many Englishmen and not a few Americans do, is preposterously absurd. As for putting sugar on lettuce I cannot write down my opinion, for it is not fit for print. Salad cries for vinegar, as a parched plant cries for rain.
Vinegar is not only agreeable to the senses of taste and smell, and most refreshing, especially in summer, but it plays a very important rôle in the digestion of food.
It has been said that God sent us our food and the devil our cooks. This is not always the case, but the devil certainly inspired the man who taught that, in mixing a salad dressing, the vinegar should be added by a miser.
This maxim, widely accepted, has done a great deal of harm, not only in spoiling many millions of dishes for the palate, but in preventing salads from heading off dyspepsia, with all its evil consequences.
Many physicians have deplored the insufficiency of fat in the average American's diet. Fat is especially important as a source of energy, and also because fat meat is more savory and appetizing than lean meat. Furthermore, physiologists have shown by laboratory experiments that the presence of fat in meat or vegetable dishes makes them yield a larger degree of nutriment (apart from what it contributes itself).
Professor John C. Olsen of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute says that "fats and oils furnish fully half the energy obtained by human beings from their food. Fats also exert a beneficial influence on the digestive process, so that a diet without fat is dry and unpalatable."
The only drawback is that fat makes the food "rich" and difficult of digestion—unless the cook is an artist.
This is why so many persons exclude it from their dietary, at the cost of energy in men and the beauty of health in women.
It is here that salad comes to the rescue. The vinegar in it, if genuine, excites by its fragrance and acidity the digestive glands not only in the mouth and the stomach, but in the pancreas, which acts on all the constituents of food, particularly the fats.
The pancreas is a gland near the stomach; it secretes the juice known as pancreatic and pours it into the duodenum, or small intestine, which—some ten or fifteen feet in length, is folded about it. To prevent intestinal indigestion there must be an abundant flow of pancreatic juice, and this flow is stimulated by the vinegar in the salad we eat and other acids in our food.
On this point the greatest living authority on the subject, Professor Pawlow, makes the following extremely important remarks:
... an acid reaction is not only necessary for an efficient action of the peptic ferment, but is at the same time the strongest excitant of the pancreatic gland. It is even conceivable that the whole digestion may depend upon the stimulating properties of acids, since the pancreatic juice exerts a ferment action upon all the constituents of the food. In this way acids may either assist digestion in the stomach where too little gastric juice is present, or bring about vicarious digestion by the pancreas where it is wholly absent. It is easy, therefore, to understand why the Russian peasant enjoys his kwas with bread. The enormous quantity of starch which he consumes, either as bread or porridge, demands a greater activity upon the part of the pancreatic gland, and this is directly brought about by the acid. Further, in certain affections of the stomach, associated with loss of appetite, we make use of acids, both from instinct as well as medical direction, the explanation being that they excite an increased activity of the pancreatic gland, and thus supplement the weak action of the stomach. It appears to me that a knowledge of the special relations of acids to the pancreas ought to be very useful in medicine, since it brings the gland—a digestive organ at once so powerful and so difficult of access—under the control of the physician.
It is obvious from these disclosures that if every American family followed the French custom of eating a sour salad at least once a day there would be very much less intestinal indigestion, which is even more distressing than indigestion in the stomach.
It is further obvious that Fletcherizing, or "mouth work," alone does not avert indigestion, for saliva has no effect on fats. The pancreas takes care of these, particularly if aided by acid ingredients in our food.
Probably no detail of the French menu is therefore so important to us as the daily sour salad.
An astonishingly small number of American families know what a delicious and hygienically valuable dish salad is with a French dressing of good olive oil and pure, fragrant vinegar.
There is very little nourishment in salad leaves until the oil has been added; and the oil is what we need, with the vinegar to help digest it.
The two words I have just italicized explain why so many Americans imagine they do not like salads with vinegar and oil dressing. Unless the oil is good and the vinegar pure and fragrant such a salad does no good but may do much harm; and it is seldom that one can buy good oil and vinegar in a grocery store.
Of all the food adulterators none are more rascally and abundant than the makers of artificial vinegar. Pure vinegars made of cider, wine, or malt can be sold at a very good profit to the manufacturer and dealer at from ten to twenty cents a quart; but this profit does not satisfy the swinish greed of the adulterators and unscrupulous grocers. By using acetic acid, a by-product of the distillation of deadly wool-alcohol, they can make "vinegar" at a cost of two cents a gallon, or 90 cents a barrel, which retails at over $20.
The pure food law covers this case, but the fines inflicted are so trifling compared with the gains, that the adulterators regard them in the light of a joke and continue their profitable poisoning, though many of them have been before the courts two, three, or four times. Jail is what their crime calls for. This so-called vinegar is in most cases injurious to the health of those who consume it, and by its lack of agreeable fragrance it discourages the healthful practice of eating sour salads.
It is foolish to get vinegar of the nearest corner grocer unless you know he is honest. It is best to buy it in the sealed bottles of firms which have a national or international reputation for fair dealing.
The same caution should be observed in purchasing olive oil. Do not buy it of a grocer who exposes his bottles in the show window. If he does not know that sunlight spoils the best olive oil, he is not likely to know, or care, what the best oil is.
Among the adulterants used to cheapen olive oil small quantities of castor oil, lard oil, fish oil, and even petroleum have been found. More frequent are rapeseed and poppy-seed oil. Peanut oil is much used, but the most frequent adulterant is cottonseed oil, which costs only about one-fifth the price of high-grade olive oil and therefore offers great temptation to the dealer.
Cottonseed oil is not inferior in nutritive value to olive oil, and Dr. Wiley assures us that no objection can be made to it "from any hygienic or dietetic point of view." Of the three million barrels of it produced in this country every year, not less than two-thirds are consumed as food. It is "perfectly satisfactory," the doctor adds, "to those who have not acquired a taste for olive oil."
If you like cottonseed oil there is no reason in the world why you should not pour it into your salad bowl. But if you wish to enjoy the epicurean delights of true salads you must train your sense of smell and learn to distinguish between fragrant oil and cottonseed oil, which, at its worst, has a disagreeable flavor and at its best is practically odorless and tasteless.
It is the fragrance, the Flavor, of olive oil that keeps it in the market, boldly defying its cheap rivals.
A great many Americans who think they do not like olive oil know not what real olive oil is. They have been fooled by the adulterators. They may have been careful to buy bottles labeled "Pure Virgin Olive Oil"; but, as Dr. Wiley says, "this expression upon the label has been found in many instances of olive oil highly adulterated and belonging to the cheapest grade."
There are more than a dozen grades of olive oil. It varies with the locality it is grown in, the care taken in its manufacture, the season, and so on. The first pressing (virgin oil) is the best; the virgin oil of the month of May is finer than any other, and the best oil comes from Italy.
It is worth while to cultivate a "taste" for the finer kinds, for they are the most fragrant and digestible. Such oil is not only a table delicacy second to none, it is also used more and more by doctors for diseases of the stomach and other parts of the digestive tract. For gall stone it is almost a specific.
As a cosmetic, nothing equals olive oil. The beauty of Spanish and Italian women is owing largely to their daily and liberal use of it in salads and cooked foods. It improves the complexion and rounds out the lines of the form.
Eating salad is by far the most agreeable way to take olive oil. There are persons with whom all acids disagree; these unfortunates have to do without the fragrant vinegar; but they can easily learn to like salads with oil and salt alone. The taste is decidedly worth acquiring.
In making the dressing, oil should by all means be applied "by a spendthrift." "Put on as much as you think you can afford," I feel tempted to advise; but, of course, you can get the best results more cheaply by painting each leaf with oil or by thoroughly mixing the leaves with it before putting on the vinegar. Always make sure that there is no water in the bowl and that the leaves are well dried.
In hot weather the vinegar should be put on first, to make the salad more piquant and refreshing. One spoonful of vinegar (pure and fragrant, if you please) to every two of oil is not too much. Let the stirring be done "by a maniac," according to the old maxim, for it is most important.
Salt is a necessary ingredient, and a trifle of cayenne makes the salad more digestible. Black pepper is, to some epicures, an unwelcome intruder, though it is often used even in Paris restaurants, where I now find it necessary to add sans poivre in ordering a salad. Once in a while, for variety's sake, add a little mustard, or rub the inside of the big bowl (it must be big, and Russian lacquer is the best) with garlic. A few tablespoonfuls of meat gravy—particularly chicken gravy (from roast or fricassee) give additional richness and savor to the dressing.
If you can get no pure and fragrant vinegar, by all means use lemon juice as infinitely better than "vinegar" made of acetic acid and water. But if malt, wine or cider vinegar is at hand it is preferable to the lemon, which does not harmonize so well with oil. Lemon is too loud—too self-assertive—like a trombone added to a string quartet.
It is a subtle thing, this gastronomic instrumentation, and there are differences of opinion as in matters musical. There is nothing better than a glass of lemonade—except, perhaps, a glass of limeade;—in very warm weather it is a luxury to suck a lemon like an orange. But if a slice of lemon is put in my tea I lose the delicate aroma of the leaves, which I am after; and so with salads. The fragrance of vinegar is more delicate, and does not overpower the fragrance of the oil. On the other hand, in making mayonnaise, which is also a French dressing, having been invented by the Marshal de Richelieu, and which is often used for green salads as well as for meat and fish salads, lemon is perhaps preferable to vinegar. Apparently the addition of the yolks of raw eggs to the other ingredients prevents the lemon tone from being too loud. With sardines, also, a lemon is all right, because their own flavor is not so weak as to be easily routed.
In remote regions, where pure olive oil cannot be obtained, a very fair substitute for French salad dressing may be provided by following the practice of Belgians and Germans of putting small cubes of fried bacon into the vinegar. Sometimes the vinegar, thus oiled, is heated and then poured over the leaves. That wilts them but makes a piquant dish for a change. In one way or another, have a sour salad with your dinner, especially if it includes fat food, for the reasons given.
ESCAROLE, TOMATOES, ARTICHOKES, ALLIGATOR PEARS.
In nineteen cases out of twenty the salad served in our country is lettuce, and in nine cases out of ten the diner is insulted with huge green leaves fit only for boiled greens or the stock-pot.
Green lettuce is good to eat raw only in its infancy (when two or three inches high) or when it has shot up higher in a few weeks on very rich, moist soil. Much better, however, is head lettuce, with the white inside leaves, crisp and succulent. Even those, unfortunately, are somewhat indigestible to many, unless very carefully chewed.
Those who find lettuce troublesome should by all means try the bleached white hearts of the variety of endive known as escarole (the French call it scarole).
Until a few years ago it was very difficult to find escarole in any American market, and it is not abundant now. In the catalogues of seedsmen who give several pages to the different varieties of lettuce, escarole is disposed of in four or five lines of small type. One catalogue, of the year 1912, referred to it as "unsurpassed for salads;" the others made no comment at all, or spoke of it as "good for soups or greens." As there has been practically no demand for escarole seed, it was lucky to be listed at all.
Some seedsmen, however, when they know of a good thing, try to create a demand for it. Prominent among those is W. Atlee Burpee, of Philadelphia. To him I confided my sorrows over the difficulty of getting good escarole—or often any escarole at all. I called attention to the fact that it is, to say the least, equal in flavor to the best head lettuce, and much easier to assimilate, one member of my household being able to eat it by the bowlful, whereas lettuce invariably gives her indigestion.
It is much easier to raise, also, than lettuce, which is extremely "cranky" in summer. Even in cool Maine lettuce sometimes is wilted by a single hot day, unless cared for like a tender hot-house orchid; whereas escarole has as many lives as a cat. I have often, in thinning out my plants, thrown them away by the dozen, to be roasted by the sun; but if a rain came along in a day or two, they revived, took root unaided, and grew into healthy plants!
A further advantage is that, in rich soil and with plenty of water, a single plant will yield two or three hearts if those of the outside leaves which are not needed for bleaching the center are left on; whereas head lettuce is never of the "cut-and-come-again" kind.
The only trouble with escarole is that it has not been educated. Lettuce has been trained by dozens of experts, the result being a large number of excellent varieties, some with heads as solid as cabbages. My object in writing to Mr. Burpee was to persuade him to give escarole a "college education"—to teach it how to head, and bleach itself, like lettuce.
He promptly replied that he would get seeds abroad of all the different varieties and experiment with them in his Fordhook trial grounds; also, that he would write to Luther Burbank and try to get him interested. Unfortunately Mr. Burbank was too busy with other reforms to take up this plant too; but Mr. Burpee forged ahead, and in November, 1912, he sent me copies of the notes on the varieties of escarole he had sowed—seventeen in all. "One or two of these," he wrote, "seemed to be much better than the Broad Leaved Batavian, but none of them are really self-folding." There seems to be hope in a variety numbered 5131 on his schedule, which is thus described: "Foliage pale yellowish-green, a robust strong grower, averaging twenty inches in diameter, leaves eight inches long by four inches in breadth, plain leaved, but slightly curved, inner leaves being much incurved, giving the impression of its being an excellent strain for bleaching."
Along those lines I have no doubt that a head-escarole will be evolved in a few years, and that the world will be indebted to Mr. Burpee for one more gastronomic delicacy as welcome as his improved head-lettuces, his limas, his stringless pod beans, and his improved melons, cucumbers, squashes, tomatoes, cabbages, and other vegetables. Mr. Burbank wrote to me under date of December 18, 1912: "It is so natural for escarole to spread flat on the ground, that it will take some time and a little pains to make it form a head." Mr. Burpee will take the time and the pains.
The bitter taste of escarole—a mere trace where the plant is well grown—is welcomed by epicures and hardly noticed by others.
The dressing is the same as for lettuce. A combination that cannot be too highly commended is tomatoes with escarole. This mixture is, I think, my favorite of all salads.
So far as tomatoes are concerned, we have nothing to learn from the French. As it is an American plant—its original home being Peru—it is proper that Americans should have a greater number of varieties and improvements than any other country.
The Germans are only just learning to like tomatoes; the English have made more progress in this important branch of gastronomic education; the French revel in the tomato; and in Italian cookery it is an important ingredient; but in the United States tomato-eating amounts to a passion, a frenzy.
In New York every corner grocery, even in the poorer quarters, has its constant supply. Apparently, all classes, rich and poor alike, are bound to have their tomatoes daily, be their price five cents a pound or twenty-five or more. For this astonishing appetite there must be good reasons. The tomato, with its delicate acid flavor is unquestionably most wholesome. Often I walk a mile to bring home the best specimens of this grand appetizer I can find; and in my vegetable garden the patch most carefully enriched and hoed and watered is that where the tomato grows.
To get it at its best you must pick it off the vine and eat it on the spot, without any condiment. It is good in a score of ways—stewed, grilled, as a catsup, even canned—but for table use it is most desirable in the salad bowl, alone or in combination with escarole or lettuce.
It ought to be needless to add that it is much pleasanter to eat, and more digestible, if it is peeled (which is easily done after soaking it a moment in hot water) before slicing; but few cooks will take this extra trouble, slight though it is, unless specially requested.
If we can perhaps give even the French points on tomatoes, they have much to teach us regarding another vegetable which is among salads what diamond-back terrapin and canvasback duck are among meats—the globe artichoke.
Fortunately, unlike turtles and wild ducks, this noble plant is yearly becoming more abundant in our markets. It would be as much in demand as tomatoes were its flavor equally known and the samples on sale as tempting as those served in Paris and London. It is for the consumer to insist on having the best varieties sent from abroad and cultivated at home; but the dealers on their part ought to be alive to the fact that the way to increase sales is to offer the best at the lowest price.
The French artichoke makes a savory vegetable, served hot; but how any one can eat it—or asparagus—hot, when he might have it cold as a salad, with French dressing, is a mystery to me. Of course, it must be boiled, except when very young and tender.
To get the artichoke at its best one must ask for it in a first-class Paris restaurant. The waiter brings a huge specimen in a large plate, removes the inedible "choke" in the center with a movement like that of a dextrous carver (French waiters receive prizes for skill in carving), and there it lies in all its fragrant magnificence.
Rossini objected to the turkey as being a bird too large for one and not large enough for two. Time and again in Paris I have had placed before me an artichoke big enough for two; and since my partner prefers the scales and I the fond, we were both happy though married.
As the scaly leaves of the artichoke must be dipped into the dressing and sucked, it is not for persons who object to using their fingers except to hold knife and fork, any more than are crawfish, or olives, or peaches.
The Moors of Morocco prefer to use their hands for conveying food to the mouth, because, as they sensibly maintain, they know that their hands have been thoroughly cleaned, whereas knife and fork may have been washed carelessly.
The merits of the French artichoke were known in New Orleans long before they were in any of our other cities. In various forms and combinations, it helped to give distinction to the famous local cuisine.
The Frenchman who first ate an artichoke was as bold as the man who ate the first oyster, for the plant looks like a thistle and he ran the risk of being classed with thistle-eating quadrupeds. Compared with the succulent globe of to-day it must have been thin, dry, and tough. Yet, even now, the artichoke is capable of much further improvement. Burbank, if he had time, might put as much meat into the base of each scale as there is now in the bottom, and make the bottom as big as a full-sized turnip.
This suggests one of the many ways in which the study of gastronomy serves as a guide to wealth. A rich harvest is sure to be reaped by those gardeners who will introduce to American markets the best French artichokes, and by the dealers who will encourage their purchase by asking reasonable prices for them. In December, 1912, I asked a dealer in Washington Market, New York, why there were so few artichokes offered for sale. "They are so cheap—we can't get more than 15 cents apiece for them," he replied. That's the American way—at present.
For years importers and dealers have done their best to discourage the growing interest in another delicious basis for salad—the alligator-pear—by charging the most outrageous prices for it—usually twenty to fifty cents apiece, though it can be bought in the West Indies for a penny or two and brought to New York for a cent a pound. Even at such extortionate prices the demand usually exceeds the supply. I often hunt for some all over town and usually end by saying, "What fools these dealers be."
The alligator-pear—or let us call it avocado, please—is one of the Creator's masterpieces—what we would call a stroke of genius had a mortal originated it. But, like other works of genius, it is not appreciated by all—or at once. An American, writing from the West Indies, declared that there the avocado is "ever present and always welcomed." But, he proceeds, it is "a pitfall and a snare, and many a green foreigner has been taken in by the name and afterwards by the pear itself. Such a magnificent specimen of this luscious fruit, the 'pear,' as the one seen in the Jamaica markets causes the hand of the new arrival to go down promptly into his pocket for a penny with which the coveted fruit is secured. Yum, yum! A pear weighing three or four pounds! What a feast! The knife appears, a generous slice is cut out, but when it touches the palate! Yah! It is a flat, flabby, tasteless vegetable (although it grows on a tree), but sliced and eaten with salt at the table it forms a pleasant relish."
Had this man eaten it with French dressing he would have found it a food fit for gods. The avocado was undoubtedly created to serve as a salad. If you cut it in two, lengthwise, and take out the big stone, you have two halves like those of a small melon. The flesh, firm though soft and custardy, has a most exquisite flavor—a faint flavor which, with oil and vinegar makes a symphony of fragrance.
Until a few years ago I myself, misled by poor specimens, groped in utter darkness as to the enchantments of the avocado. It was Hildegarde Hawthorne who, returning from Jamaica, brought us some choice samples. There was joy in the mansion thereat. It was like the discovery of a new song by Schubert or Grieg, or a new painting by Titian.
After writing the above remarks I came across a clipping in which an evident epicure objected to "desecrating" the avocado pear by oil or mayonnaise dressing when served. "Eat it with a spoon slowly," he advises, "to give time for the pleasure it imparts to permeate the very soul, and let who will rail at fate. There are those who give it a slight sprinkling of salt, others who dust it over with a little white pepper, but personally I would as soon think of flavoring my currant jelly with garlic or my chateau Yquem with Trinidad rum."
This sounds plausible, and I admit that a perfect avocado is better without than with vinegar and oil. An imperfect one isn't; and in most cases we have found in our dining-room that the avocado is rather too rich to be eaten without a little acid dressing. It contains seventeen per cent. of oil, and is known in some regions as the "butter fruit."
To return to France. Next to the artichoke and the escarole—which is the better of the two I don't know—the most desirable thing it has given us in the way of salads is the romaine—but how much whiter, crisper and tenderer it is in Paris than what is offered for sale under that name in New York!
Another chance to coin good money, messieurs gardeners! Americans must have the best, and if you don't supply it, a rival will.
The American lobster and shrimp salads cannot be beaten; but we have much to learn of the French and other Europeans as to the endless varieties of green, vegetable, fish and meat salads by way of multiplying the pleasures of the table, and banishing intestinal dyspepsia, for which salads are more remedial than Fletcherizing.
When once the importance of this subject is fully understood, salads will become the principal lunch dishes in American homes and restaurants, especially during the hot months when to be "three miles from a lemon"—or something else that is refreshingly sour—is a hygienic tragedy.
"Fruit salads," when not sour, make desirable desserts. When not sour, such combinations should not be called salads. As a rule sour fruit mixtures seem incongruous to a trained palate.
In these days of Debussyan influences one must be prepared for all sorts of anarchistic combinations of flavors. Personally, I draw the line at the compound of Roquefort cheese and sour salad now placed unblushingly on some American tables. The mixture of these two delicacies is awful. One can easily see how the illegitimate union was suggested by the illogical custom of serving cheese with salad, dressed or undressed—the usual English way.
VEGETABLES AS A SEPARATE COURSE.
The mess just referred to, which would make a Parisian gourmet shudder, is only one illustration of the Anglo-American mistaken policy of serving together foods that are preferable separately. On this point, too, France has an important lesson to teach us, particularly in the serving of vegetables.
The making of a menu requires as much taste and judgment as the arranging of a concert program. Next to variety, contrast is the most important thing to be considered. A vegetable served separately provides some of this needful contrast.
An English epicure declares that the secret of the excellence in French cookery lies in the lavish use of vegetables. "Where we use one kind, French cooks use twenty."
This point was sufficiently dwelt on in the paragraphs relating to the making of savory soups and stews. It illustrates Gallic skill in culinary orchestration. But the French know that at a dinner, as at a concert, a solo piece is desirable, and therefore they always serve one choice vegetable as a separate course.
As a matter of course the vegetable selected for this distinction—be it peas, beans, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, artichoke, carrots, or whatnot—must be particularly fresh and succulent. It must also, like the singer's solo number, have an accompaniment, that is to say an appropriate sauce.
No French cook would spoil the delicate natural flavor of green peas with mint, as the English do. I once asked a waiter in a London restaurant why mint was put with the peas. He promptly replied: "Peas 'ave no flavor, sir!"
In France, butter (French butter) is used as the best accompaniment to a solo vegetable. It makes the string beans and whatever else it goes with more savory, without obliterating their individual flavor, as the mint does in the case of peas.
PARIS RESTAURANTS.
The French have reason to boast that the gastronomic center of the world is in Paris, within a circle intersected by a line drawn from the Place de l'Opéra to the Place Vendôme. In this region there are scores of restaurants of the first rank in which one eats the best soups and stews, the best veal, the best poultry, the best salads and sauces, the best vegetables, the best entrées, the best bread and butter, the best cheeses, to be found anywhere on this big planet of ours. Some persons, for sufficient reasons, prefer English roast meats or German, Swiss, or Austrian pastry, but in the preparation of the foods just named French supremacy is unquestionable.
It takes months—and a big purse—to get an adequate idea of the good things offered at the Paris restaurants. Each has its special dishes and sauces, handed down in some cases from generation to generation. Not to have a unique sauce for sole, or a monopoly in a special kind of soup, would subject an establishment to the danger of being classed as second-rate.
Paris is full of professional epicures—prominent among them are authors and journalists—who frequent certain places for special famous dishes and who quickly resent any deterioration or carelessness on the part of the chef. It is these connoisseurs who are served best; they are willing to give the cook time to prepare a dish scientifically, and they take time to eat it hygienically, that is, with lingering enjoyment of its appetizing flavors.
These gourmets appreciate epicurean subtleties like that practiced by the late Frédéric of the Tour d'Argent, who held that "different kinds of fuel should be used for the roasting of different kinds of meat, believing that the spiced scents of some woods transmitted in the cooking add to the pleasure of eating all kinds of game";—a notion which was acted on by the ancient Romans as well as by Japanese gourmets, and which is also justified by the fact that in the smoking of ham and bacon it makes a decided difference what kind of wood is burned.