FRENCH COOKING IN WAR TIME
There is no more Belgium to go to.
So I am in France now.
But War-Correspondents are not wanted here. They are driven out wherever
discovered. I shall not stay long.
All my time is taken up in running about getting papers; my bag is
getting out of shape; it bulges with the Laisser Passers, and Sauf
Conduits that one has to fight so hard to get.
However, to be among French-speaking people again is a great joy.
And to-day in Dunkirk it has refreshed and consoled me greatly to see
Madame Piers cooking.
The old Frenchwoman moved about her tiny kitchen,--her infinitesimally
tiny kitchen,--and I watched her from my point of observation, seated on
a tiny chair, at a tiny table, squeezed up into a tiny corner.
It really was the smallest kitchen I'd ever seen, No, you couldn't have
swung a cat in it--you really couldn't.
And no one but a thrifty French housewife could have contrived to get
that wee round table and little chair into that tiny angle.
Yet I felt very cosy and comfortable there, and the old grey-haired
French mother, preparing supper for her household, and for any soldier
who might be passing by, seemed perfectly satisfied with her cramped
surroundings, and kept begging me graciously to remain where I was,
drinking the hot tea she had just made for me, while my boots (that were
always wet out there) dried under her big charcoal stove. And always she
smiled away; and I smiled too. Who could help it?
She and her kitchen were the most charming study imaginable.
Every now and then her fine, old, brown, thin, wrinkled hand would reach
over my head for a pot, or a brush, or a pan, from the wall behind, or
the shelf above me, while the other hand would stir or shake something
over the wee gas-ring or the charcoal stove. For so small was the
kitchen that by stretching she could reach at the same time to the wall
on either side.
Then she began to pick over a pile of rough-looking green stuff, very
much like that we in England should contemptuously call weeds.
Pick, pick, pick!
A diamond merchant with his jewels could not have been more careful,
more delicate, more, watchful. And as I thought that, it suddenly came
over me that to this old, careful, thrifty Frenchwoman those weedy
greens were not weeds at all, but were really as precious as diamonds,
for she was a Frenchwoman, clever and disciplined in the art of thrift,
and they represented the most important thing in all the world
to-day--food.
Food means life.
Food means victory.
Food means the end of the War, and PEACE.
You could read all that in her black, intelligent eyes.
Then I began to sit up and watch her more closely still.
When she had picked off all those little hard leaves, she cracked up the
bare, harsh stalks into pieces an inch long, and flung them all, leaves
and stalks, into a saucepan of boiling water, which she presently pushed
aside to let simmer away gently for ten minutes or so.
Meanwhile she is carefully peeling a hard-boiled egg, taking the shell
off in two pieces, and shredding up the white on a little white saucer,
never losing a crumb of it even.
An egg! Why waste an egg like that? But indeed, she is not going to
waste it. She is using the yolk to make mayonnaise sauce, and the white
is for decoration later on. With all her thrift she must have things
pretty. Her cheap dishes must have an air of finish, an artistic touch;
and she knows, and acts up to the fact, that the yellow and white egg is
not wasted, but returns a hundred per cent., because it is going to make
her supper look a hundred times more important than it really is.
Now she takes the greens from the saucepan, drains them, and puts them
into a little frying-pan on the big stove; and she peppers and salts
them, and turns them about, and leaves them with a little smile.
She always has that little smile for everything, and I think that goes
into the flavour somehow!
And now she pours the water the greens were boiled in, into that big
soup-pot on the big stove, and gives the soup a friendly stir just to
shew that she hasn't forgotten it.
She opens the cupboard, and brings out every little or big bit of bread
left over from lunch and breakfast, and she shapes them a little with
her sharp old knife, and she hurries them all into the big pot, putting
the lid down quickly so that even the steam doesn't get out and get
wasted!
Now she takes the greens off the fire, and puts them into a dear little
round white china dish, and leaves them to get cold.
She opens her cupboard again and brings out a piece of cold veal cutlet
and a piece of cold steak left over from luncheon yesterday, and to-day
also. What is she going to do with these? She is going to make them our
special dish for supper. She begins to shred them up with her old sharp
blade--shreds them up finely, not mincing, not chopping, but shredding
the particles apart--and into them she shreds a little cold ham and
onion, and then she flavours it well with salt and pepper. Then she
piles this all on a dish and covers it with golden mayonnaise, and
criss-crosses it with long red wires of beetroot.
The greens are cold now, and she dresses them. She oils them, and
vinegars them, and pats and arranges them, and decorates them with the
white of the chopped egg and thin little slices of tomato.
"Voilà! The salad!" she says, with her flash of a smile.
Salad for five people--a beautiful, tasty, green, melting, delicious
salad that might have been made of young asparagus tips! And what did it
cost? One farthing, plus the labour and care and affection and time that
the old woman put into the making of it--plus, in other words, her
thrift!
Now she must empty my tea-pot.
Does she turn it upside down over a bucket of rubbish as they do in
England, leaving the tea-leaves to go to the dustman when he calls on
Friday?
She would think that an absolutely wicked thing to do if she had ever
heard of such proceedings, but she has not.
She drains every drop of tea into a jug, puts a lid on it, and places it
away in her safe; then she empties the tea-leaves into a yellow
earthenware basin, and puts a plate over them, and puts them up on a
shelf.
I begin to say to myself, with quite an excited feeling, "Shall I ever
see her throw anything away?"
Potatoes next.
Ah! Now there'll be peelings, and those she'll have to throw away.
Not a bit of it!
There are only the very thinnest, filmiest scrapings of dark down off
this old dear's potatoes. And suddenly I think of poor dear England,
where our potato skins are so thick that a tradition has grown from
them, and the maids throw them over their shoulders and see what letter
they make on the floor, and that will be the first letter of _his_ name!
Laughing, I tell of this tradition to my old Frenchwoman.
And what do you think she answers?
"The skin must be very thick not to break," she says solemnly. "But then
you English are all so rich!"
Are we?
Or are we simply--what?
Is it that, bluntly put, we are lazy?
After the fall of Antwerp, when a million people had fled into Holland,
I saw ladies in furs and jewels holding up beseeching, imploring hands
to the kindly but bewildered Dutch folk asking for bread--just bread! It
was a terrible sight! But shall we, too, be begging for bread some day?
Shall we, too, be longing for the pieces we threw away? Who knows?
Finally we sat down to an exquisite supper.
First, there was croûte au pot--the nicest soup in the world, said a
King of France, and full of nourishment.
Then there was a small slice each of tender, juicy boiled beef out of
the big soup-pot, never betraying for a minute that that beautiful soup
had been made from it.
With that beef went the potatoes sautée in butter, and sprinkled with
chopped green.
After that came the chicken mayonnaise and salad of asparagus tips
(otherwise cold scraps and weeds).
There are five of us to supper in that little room behind the milliner's
shop--an invalided Belgian officer; a little woman from Malines looking
after her wounded husband in hospital here; Mdlle. Alice, the daughter,
who keeps the millinery shop in the front room; the old mother, a high
lace collar on now, and her grey hair curled and coiffured; and myself.
The mother waits on us, slipping in and out like a cat, and we eat till
there is nothing left to want, and nothing left to eat. And then we have
coffee--such coffee!
Which reminds me that I quite forgot to say I caught the old lady
putting the shells of the hard-boiled egg into the coffee-pot!
And that is French cooking in War time!
[Illustration: Permit du Dunkirque.]