Wisdom Well Done

I was well into the recipe for Daube de boeuf provençale (perhaps while browning two pounds of top rump cut into squares “about the size of half a postcard”) when I became aware of the absence of Elizabeth David’s voice.

My discovery of this missing piece of informed articulation may have occurred while I was cutting the pork rinds —“which should scarcely have any fat adhering to them”— into little squares. Maybe I was peeling and slicing two onions when I noticed something gone astray.

Whatever the trigger, my epiphany was the result of French Provincial Cooking. That’s because David’s cookbooks are revealing of her in an elliptical kind of way, which suits me. I work through recipes no less elliptically. I circle through them, on the lookout for ingredients I don’t like. Or can’t afford. Or that need to be set on fire. I seldom read a recipe from start to finish until I’ve read parts of it several times.

In the same non-linear fashion, I happened upon the character of Elizabeth David. My sense of what kind of person she was (she died in 1992 at the age of seventy-eight) is based almost entirely on her cookbooks, but I’ll bet I’m not far wrong. I take her to be curious and practical, unimpressed with ostentation, and respectful of tradition. Not inclined to suffer fools but not boastful of her own expertise. A good listener to those she chooses to listen to. A snob — but not about social connections or celebrity. The aristocracy she embraced was a hierarchy, mostly female, of experience, knowledge, and taste. The wisdom she valued was drawn from a much deeper well than Debrett’s or the Forbes 500.

Wondering about Elizabeth David is always a descant to the central melody of her recipes. This daube — a dish “all the better for a second or even third heating up”— is no exception. I wondered, while searching for the “6 oz. of unsmoked streaky bacon” at the bottom of my grocery bag, what she was like. To know, I mean. Because if you are at all curious about what constitutes good cooking, it’s fun to be in the company of someone whose senses are so precisely tuned. Only a high level of refinement would insist that the red wine (four fluid ounces) be set on fire. When the flames “have died down pour the wine bubbling over the meat.”

Not what I did. I poured the wine, un‑lit and un-bubbling, over the meat. I prefer to have nothing to do with fires in kitchens if I can help it. In my defence, I dutifully followed her instruction to use a respectable wine. Not “some thin and sour stuff reserved especially for cooking.” And because the pot would be at “Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F” for two and a half hours anyway, I figured nobody would notice that my mid-price Baco noir was neither flamed, flared, nor flambéed. David, I have no doubt, would beg to differ.

She was inclined to provide a recipe’s ingredients in paragraphs, as if in a story: elements of memoir, not shopping guide. Here is her sturdy character as I skip ahead to two cloves of garlic —“flattened with a knife”— and there is her practicality when I go back to the start of the recipe and the pot “of about 2 pints capacity, wide rather than deep.” The author emerges in much the roundabout way that my grasp of a recipe’s objective emerges. That’s why I knew about the skinned tomato slices and the orange peel and the anchovy before being entirely clear on what a daube is.

David’s great archive — one she drew on for inspiration and instruction — was the generational wisdom, largely matriarchal, of European cooking, mostly Mediterranean. Her early mission in England, not unlike Julia Child’s in America, was to bring “traditional good cooking” to stodgy postwar kitchens.

She was a woman of strong opinions. (Don’t get her started on garlic presses.) She made it her business to inform culinary morons (moi) about dishes such as Daube de boeuf provençale. And if you’re wondering, it’s a slowly cooked, wine-flavoured stew. A southern French cousin of the more famous Boeuf à la bourguignonne. “Stoned black olives can be added to the stew half an hour before the end of the cooking time.”

Daube de boeuf provençale is what David called “a country housewife’s dish.” But don’t misunderstand. This was high praise from a writer, traveller, gastronome, and recipe researcher who held the genius of “ordinary” cooking in the greatest esteem. “Mrs. David,” the publisher of her 1955 volume Summer Cooking informed us, “has lived and kept house in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India, learning the local dishes and cooking them in her own kitchens.”

The recipe for Daube de boeuf provençale is found on page 339 of the marinade-spattered hardcover copy of French Provincial Cooking that my wife inherited from her mother and that her mother inherited from her friend Hazel — exactly the female-to-female, kitchen-to-kitchen transmission of recipes that Elizabeth David respected. It’s a remoulade-sprayed, dog-eared first edition from 1960, which speaks to how eagerly people who were interested in learning about good traditional cooking (Hazel, apparently) awaited her latest.

David’s books are full of references to older cookbooks. My mother-in-law’s falls open to a quotation from Pierre Huguenin’s Les Meilleures Recettes de ma pauvre mère. (Could there be a better title?) “It was a daube, which since midday had been murmuring gently on the stove, giving out sweet smells which brought tears to your eyes,” it reads. “Thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, spices, the wine of the marinade and the fumet of the meat were becoming transformed.”

Elizabeth David made such transformation her recurrent subject: humble ingredients made extraordinary by paying attention to the wisdom and experience of generations of “country housewives.” And it may have been when I paused to wonder what a persillade is (there are things she expects you to know) that I became aware of the absence of her voice.

Not her solo voice. That’s not missing. That voice — the one encountered in the eight books that she published during her lifetime — is as clear as ever. Her first cookbook, A Book of Mediterranean Food, was published when she was in her thirties, but even then, her voice had the crisp, slightly impatient intelligence of an older woman. And if you don’t know what a persillade is, you can look it up.

Daube de boeuf is the very opposite of fast food, cooked all afternoon at a medium-low simmer, infusing modest country kitchens with the rich savour of Sunday dinners to be served after vespers — by country housewives. Don’t forget the country housewives. They’re the ones who stood at their kitchen doors, arms akimbo, guardians of the traditions within. Disdainful of “showy food,” they daily honoured “taste, moderation and simplicity” on their wooden cutting boards, in their earthenware pots. If you were smart, you paid attention to country housewives. They knew what they were talking about.

Elizabeth David’s voice was part of a formidable collective of knowledgeable, mildly terrifying older women who once, it seems to me, played a much larger role in public discourse than today. They existed (in my imagination, but I think in the imaginations of many) as a kind of disembodied, multi-jurisdictional senate: arbiters of the true versus the bogus, the good versus the less than good, the necessary versus the elaborate, the important versus the silly, the smart versus the stupid. My personal pantheon would include a few grade school teachers. We’ll have no more of that silliness, young man. Betsey Trotwood, in David Copperfield. P. L. Travers, Dorothy Sayers, Rachel Carson, Flannery O’Connor, Doris Lessing, Mavis Gallant. My great-aunt.

I have no idea what David’s political views were, but I suspect (based on her egalitarian attitude toward serving a daube with rice or even pasta) she wouldn’t be impressed with the faux everything of Mar-a-Lago. “Faites simple” was the advice of the great chef Auguste Escoffier — a directive that David took to mean avoiding unnecessary elaboration. Not exactly the motto of you-know-who. And that may have been what made me wonder if I wasn’t so much cooking a daube as searching for something lost.

It may have been while slicing two carrots “on the cross” that I realized how much I missed those voices. The absence of their confident, no-nonsense distinction between the worthless and the worthwhile is a gap in contemporary discourse I find troubling. The smart alecks they’d have sent to the cloakroom have taken over the class. As but one example: the uncompromising beam of certainty that would accompany Elizabeth David’s assessment of an overly sauced entrée in a foolishly expensive restaurant is the kind of social energy that humankind can’t afford to unplug. Not now. It is wisdom we need more than ever. But if only we knew its source. You don’t suppose it has anything to do with country housewives, do you? “At the serving stage, a persillade of finely-chopped garlic and parsley, with perhaps an anchovy and a few capers, can be sprinkled over the top.”