Free Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David Page B

had failed these kindly and hospitable people and left them with the feeling that we did not appreciate their food.
    It was a long time before I had the courage to set to work on that recipe. When I did, and saw once more the row of little pork noisettes, the bronze and copper lights of the shining sauce, the orderly row of black, rich, wine-soaked prunes on the long white dish, I thought that indeed it had been worth the journey to learn how to make something as beautiful as that. One day, with a better appetite and more stamina, I will go back to that restaurant in Toursand make amends for the evening when justice to their cookery was not done.
    Vogue , November 1958
    This is one of the pieces omitted from French Provincial Cooking because my publishers thought the book was too long, I’m sure they were right. Later the piece appeared in Cyril Ray’s Compleat Imbiber No. 5 under the title The Day that Justice Wasn’t Done. The recipes which accompanied the original Vogue article were for noisettes de porc aux pruneaux, followed by a real collector’s dish , sauce au vin du Médoc. Both were published in French Provincial Cooking. The pork and prune recipe has been one of the most used and most heavily adapted in the whole book. I don’t remember hearing much more of the other one, which was passed on to me by Miss Patricia Green via Madame Bernard, wife of a Médoc wine grower. The dish is essentially a peasant one, and consists of a mixture of meats and furred game: rabbit, hare, stewing beef, pork, or any combination of them, with shallots, a bottle of red wine, carrots, aromatics, the sauce thickened and darkened by the addition of a small amount of plain chocolate. This last ingredient dates the dish back as far as the first half of the eighteenth century or even earlier. It may well have originated in the days when Spanish chocolate makers settled in Bayonne, not after all so far away from the Bordelais .

Eating out in Provincial France 1965–1977
    How is it that French restaurant cooking has so notably, so sadly, deteriorated during the past two or three decades? I think there are several reasons. Among them I would say the main one has a good deal to do with the conservatism of the French themselves in matters of eating. In the vast majority of French restaurants, at no matter what level, the order of the menu has remained unchanged for fifty years. The number of courses and the copiousness of the helpings remain undiminished. What has suffered from shrinkage is the quality of the raw materials, of the cooking skills and also, I would say, the critical faculties of the customers.
    Lest it be thought that I am basing my observations on two or three isolated experiences, or on a restricted category of restaurant, or on the restaurants of one region only, I must make it clear that between 1965 and 1972 I made yearly and often twice-yearly trips to France on business, spending an average of two to three weeks at a time travelling all over the country, staying in different hotels night after night, eating in every type of restaurant from village inns to the occasional two-star or even three-star establishment. On the whole our journeys did not take us to tourist haunts, and certainly never in the tourist season. We kept away from motorways and motels, staying often in the hotels patronized by commercial travellers. During the subsequent three years my visits to France were less frequent and less extended, and being no longer concerned in any business venture I was free to pick and choose hotels and restaurants, and to stay in one place for several days if I felt so inclined. So it is with some experience that I record the melancholy fact that during those fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals in France, and more expensively – a bad meal is always expensive – than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.
    What has dismayed me as much as anything else has been the complacent attitude of