Today’s title is the name of a cookery book published in 1930. It is by Edouard de Pomiane and he’s a bit of a hero and not just to me.
Elizabeth David admired him:
One cookery writer, and one only, could have written the following sentence. “Your bunch of parsley should be a generous one, about the size of a bunch of violets.” His name was Edouard de Pomiane, a man unique among French cookery writers and something of an enfant terrible of French gastronomy. Greatly loved by his public he never hesitated to cast an irreverent eye on tradition when he thought it incompatible with sense. Nor to punctuate, here and there, the over-inflated reputation of an established dish.
I admire him for his attitude. The recipes are a bit much for me: tripe, five ways to cook a calf’s head, and recipes for pigs’ ears, trotters and tails. Proper nose to tail cooking, as Fergus Henderson of St John fame called his 2004 book but a bit too robust for me. What I admire is his idea of getting the job done in ten minutes. Corners have to be cut to speed things up. The tin opener is no stranger to Edouard.
Here is a recipe in the spirit of E de P for tonno e fagioli. You will need a red onion, a red pepper (though green will do), a few cloves of garlic, some parsley, at least one tin of cannellini beans and some tinned tuna chunks (the stuff that looks like cat food) in olive oil. (I, almost, bought a tin of chicken supreme the other day before noticing a picture of a cat on the tin. It probably would have been pretty good with some chopped herbs.)
Get a chopping board and chop up the onion, pepper, garlic and parsley. Tip in the tuna and add the beans after rinsing them. Then add coarsely ground black pepper and salt, drizzle with the best olive oil you can afford and mix it up. I’m a slow chopper and I need to pause for refreshment so it takes a bit longer than ten minutes. I saw a woman on YouTube demonstrating how to cook a Turkish stew called Et Sote. She chopped onions and tomatoes while holding them in her hands, like some people can crack eggs using one hand; impressive but beyond me.
Now back to the tonno; open a bottle of a robust white, maybe something from the Rhone, and serve outdoors, if it’s warm enough, with some crusty baguette and a green salad. Richard Maby makes Lirac Blanc La Fermade and the Wine Society sells his 2014 vintage for just under £9 a bottle. Don’t get Richard Maby confused with Richard Mawbey unless you want a high quality wig instead of a high quality white wine.
Meanwhile, as it is a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, the Talgarth Road leading west out of London to the M4 has been closed as the last crane is dismantled on the site of the new LAMDA theatres and rehearsal studios. The main theatre will be called the Simon Sainsbury Theatre in memory of Simon Sainsbury who died ten years ago. He was a philanthropist in his lifetime and his generosity is being perpetuated.
