Food, feuds and baguette stamps
A favourite French cookbook, scratch-and-sniff baguette stamps, and a recipe for the green beans you’ll be cooking all summer long, plus this week’s market haul.
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“A dreary old cliche has it that ‘one should eat to live and not live to eat.’ It is typical that this imbecile concept, a deliberately fruitless paradox born of the puritan mind, should deny sensuous reaction at either pole, and it is fortunate that neither pole really exists, for man is incapable of being either altogether dumbly bestial or altogether dumbly mental.”
Richard Olney in Simple French Food
If you think Elizabeth David sounds terrifying, it can only be because you have yet to discover Richard Olney. Born in Iowa in 1927, he trained as a painter before leaving America for Paris in 1951. There, he befriended James Baldwin and ran with a creative post war crowd that included poet John Ashbery and painter John Craxton. But as an artist, and as someone who had always been interested in food, the light and the larder of the South called. In 1962, he bought a farmhouse and some land in Sollièes-Toucas, near Toulon for £1,000.
There he continued to paint, but soon he began to write, to cook seriously, to collect wine and recipes. He gathered around him other cooks and writers, from Paul and Julia Child, whose own house, La Pitchoune, was only an hour or so away in Placassier, to James Beard, MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David. Scattered around the internet are charming photographs of Olney with Child, him in short shorts feeding her figs, sitting side-by-side on Provenҫal stone steps, arms around each other, against a background of red geraniums. But don’t be fooled. While he adored Elizabeth David and had a warm friendship with Simca Beck, Child’s co-author on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, he could be waspish about his compatriots. The Childs often irritated him, he dismissed MFK Fisher, calling her writing silly and pretentious, and fell out quite spectacularly with James Beard.
In 1983, Olney sued American food writer Richard Nelson for plagiarism, asking for damages of $1,050,000. As Noël Riley Fitch writes in her excellent book. Appetite for Life: The biography of Julia Child:
“Because a recipe is a formula, Julia always believed they could not be copyrighted though she tried to give credit for any original recipe inspiring her own variation. According to Ann Barr and Paul Levy: ‘Julia Child is…generous [about her recipes], and was the first to telephone Nelson to give her support.’…Through the years, they (Simca Beck and Julia Child) recognised their own work in Gourmet and other places. ‘I agree with someone who said that the recipe is only the score (for the music), and each virtuoso interprets it as he sees fit, and according to his own personality.’”
Nelson apparently stole more than fifty recipes, almost forty from Olney’s Simple French Food, some from Child, using their precise turn of phrase, ingredients and method. The scandal arose because Olney sent Beard his manuscript so that he could write a foreword for the book. Beard photocopied the recipes and used them in classes he was teaching with Nelson. Nelson lifted the recipes from the photocopies, thinking he was stealing from Beard, when in fact he was stealing from Olney. Olney settled out of court with Nelson and never spoke to Beard again.
So it is not without some trepidation that I offer you today my own adaptation of Olney’s Haricot Verts à la Paysanne, with the smallest of changes. I add some garlic, which he might, if he were still alive, have considered gauche, and I use thyme in place of oregano because I always have thyme in the garden and struggle to keep oregano alive.
As a PS, when Olney died in 1999, Child took the chance to snipe right back. In his New York Times obituary, she offered this assessment of her frenemy of long standing: “I think he enjoyed being difficult. But on the other hand, he could be absolutely charming if you treated him like the genius he considered himself to be.”
Some books you might like
The French Menu Cookbook, Richard Olney
Simple French Food, Richard Olney
Lulu’s Provenҫal Table, Richard Olney (Lulu Peyraud was Olney’s beloved friend and neighbour for many years.)
Appetite for Life: The biography of Julia Child, Noël Riley Fitch
Provence, 1970: MFK Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste, Luke Barr
A postcard from Marseillan
In May, on the feast day of St-Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and patissiers, the French post office released these stamps featuring a jaunty baguette all tied up in a red, white and blue bow. The stamps are also – a first for France, and who knows where else? – are scratch and sniff with, apparently an aroma of a bakery.
I kept meaning to run over the road to La Poste to buy some, but frankly even after living here for two years I still haven’t worked out when it closes for lunch, half days, holidays, and also standing in queues makes me pray for the sweet release of death. So, after finally having acknowledged that I was never going to the post office, I bought some mail order and they arrived this week. Honestly? No discernible bakery smell, other than perhaps a faint whiff of vanilla, but they are very cute. I wondered, as part of my life goal to spread the baguette love, if some of you would like me to send you a postcard from Marseillan with a baguette stamp? I will send one to the first five people in the comments who’d like one – just send me your address privately. Let me know when they arrive!
Haricot Verts à la Paysanne
Sautéed green beans in tomato sauce
I love green beans and could eat them every day with very little encouragement. This adaptation of Richard Olney’s recipe from Simple French Food is a great favourite of mine and it goes with pretty much anything. If you’re making it for a crowd, you can make it the day before, chill it then warm it through very gently just before serving. I usually make more than I need for one meal as I like it cold too, as a salad. You can use it as the green bean component in your Salade Niҫoise platter, just don’t tell anyone in Provence I told you that. Sometimes I just add some black olives and/or a few anchovies.
In his recipe introduction, Olney says, “The recipe may, depending on personal taste, be simplified by eliminating the tomatoes, or altered by the addition of chopped bacon, by tossing in precooked white beans or sautéed little new potatoes. The butter may be replaced, in part or entirely, by olive oil.”
I feel I need to offer some sort of apology at this point. I always try to tinker with recipes so they require as few pans as possible – I feel the critical gaze of my friend Fi across 1000km as I type this, as we are both very hot on minimal bowls, even fewer pans. But yes, it’s a side dish that requires three pans. I’ve tried streamlining it, combining stages and so on, and it’s just not as good. But honestly, it’s very simple, delicious, and worth the small amount of effort. You need to briefly parboil the beans so they take on just the right amount of colour and sweeten properly in the butter.
And a final word of advice: this is not a dish for those who like their beans squeaky crisp. Save those for another day.
Serves 4, as a generous side dish
60g unsalted butter
1 large onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 bay leaf
2 large, ripe tomatoes, about 700g
3-4 fat garlic cloves, halved, any green germ removed, finely minced
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
½ tsp fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tsp oregano
700g French beans, topped
1 small bunch of parsley, fine stalks and leaves only, about 10g, chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a large, heavy-bottomed sauté pan, warm 30g of the butter over a medium-low heat. Add the onion, bay leaf and a good pinch of salt and fry the onions very gently, stirring from time to time, until very soft, but don’t let them take on any colour. This should take about 20 minute – while this is happening, get on with the rest.
Next, peel the tomatoes. Bring a pan of water to the boil and prepare a bowl of iced water. Cut a cross in the bottom of each tomato and plunge them into the boiling water for 30 seconds, then transfer them to the iced water. The skins should just slip off. Next, halve them, core them and remove the seeds – I am not terribly fastidious about this, just get out as many as you can easily. Chop the tomatoes roughly. Empty the boiling water from the pan and wipe it out. Melt the remaining butter in the pan over a medium heat. Add the chopped tomato, garlic, vinegar, and thyme or oregano, then season well with salt and pepper. Let the sauce blip-blip-blip away, stirring now and again, until it is a thick sauce, and quite dry – be careful not to let it catch on the bottom of the pan, but the moment just before that is what you want.
While the onions and tomatoes are cooking, blanch the beans. Bring a pan of water to the boil and salt the water well. Add the beans and boil for 2 minutes. Place a colander in the sink, drain the beans and refresh them under plenty of cold water.
Raise the temperature under the onions a bit then stir in the beans with a pinch of salt. Toss and stir the beans quite regularly for about 10-15 minutes, until both the onions and the beans have taken on a flash of golden brown – be careful not to let the onions get too dark though. Add the tomatoes and half the parsley and stir everything together for about 5 minutes. Fish out the bay leaf. Taste, add more salt and pepper if it needs it, and sprinkle with the remaining parsley just before serving.
Market haul, 25 June 2024
This week’ market haul comprises: padron peppers, coriander, ham, thirteen eggs, as is traditional, cèpes sausages, onions, garlic, yellow pepper, red pepper, Charentais melon, pave a l’ancienne, half a boule of rye, cucumber, spring onions, lemons tomatoes, apricots, cherries, avocados, green beans, a big wedge of tomme de vache.
i would adore a postcard with a baguette stamp from you!
merci!
deb
Love the post as always. Can I ask what are you going to do with the cheese? Maybe a daft question but was in Monoprix yesterday and bought a piece of Comte. Had it at a party two days previous and enjoyed it so much I had to buy my own piece.