Endive
as known at our tables, is of three kinds, one of which may be dismissed with a word. It is the wild endive or succory, called in France Barbe de Capucin, and excellent as a salad in the winter time. The other two kinds are the curly-leaved endive, often called chicory, and the broad-leaved or Batavian endive, always known in France as the escarole. Many persons in England when they eat this last never know that it is endive-it looks so like a cabbage-lettuce.
Endive for garnish. - Boil it like cabbage for twenty-five minutes; cool it, drain it, and press out the water. Then chop it very fine, salt it, and toss it in a stewpan with an ounce of butter and one of flour. Add to it gradually about half a pint of broth, still tossing and stirring. Last of all, finish it with another ounce of butter and some grated nutmeg.
Endive Salad. When the French prepare this salad, they always like to have with it, as what they call fourniture, giving an accessory flavour, a chapon. This is the name English Sauce by which a crust of bread rubbed with garlic is known. The chapon, thrown into the salad and mixed with it vigorously, imparts its garlic flavour to the endive. Many people may not enjoy this garlic. Let them try instead slices of a raw tomato intermingled with the endive. ENGLISH SAUCE--the so-called melted butter, said to be the one English sauce. We might expect the one English sauce to be always made in perfection, and especially as nothing can be more simple. On the contrary, it is proverbial for its villainy and its resemblance to bill-stickers paste, which is the result not only of carelessness but very often of stinginess. People who will go to great expense for fish will, to save twopence-halfpenny, stint the quantity of butter necessary for a good sauce. The sauce is the result of two processes which are quite distinct; and all the many failures of it are due, even where there is no stint of butter, to the fact that as commonly made it is the result of but one process.
Act First. Knead an ounce of fresh butter into a paste with an equal quantity of sifted flour, some salt, nutmeg and mignonette pepper; dilute it with a gill, or even a gill and a half, of warm water; stir it on the fire till it boils; let it boil for three minutes that is, till the flour, is cooked and then pass it through the pointed strainer. This is what many people call melted butter: they think that with the first act there is an end of the business. But even if four times the quantity of butter were used it would not produce a good sauce, for butter cooked in this way loses much of its flavour. The first act makes no melted butter; it only makes a vehicle for the melted butter which is to come.
Act Second. The vehicle being boiling hot, mix in at the last, when the sauce is to be served, three more ounces of butter, stirring it quickly with a wire whisk. This butter is not to be cooked-only melted, as its name indi- Entrées cates; and in order to melt it quickly without cooking it, the butter, which should be of the best, is often divided into small pieces before being thrown in. Take it off the fire in the moment of melting, add to it a few drops of lemon-juice, and serve it at once. Act First may be performed at any time, hours before the sauce, which may be kept hot in the bain marie, is wanted. Act Second is to be deferred till the last moment.
When this sauce is served with asparagus or cauliflower add a tablespoonful of cream to it, and either increase the lemon-juice or use a teaspoonful of white-wine vinegar. ENTRECÔTE-A rib-steak. This is prized in France as next to the fillet-steak. There are good judges in England who declare that the rib-steak of English or Scotch beef is the best of all steaks.
ENTRÉES and ENTREMETS.-Few English people have a clear idea what is the difference between entrées and entremets, and yet upon this hangs the whole significance of the French arrangement of dinner, which has certainly been thought out with great care and with the finest artistic feeling. The same cannot be said of the English dinner: good as it is, the arrangement is not good, and comes down as an evil legacy from ancestors who were undoubtedly giants in their powers of mastication and digestion. It is one of the rules of English life that, after the soup, a dinner must always begin with fish, which is never to appear later on, unless perhaps in the form of crab pie or lobster salad when game fails. The rule, in its first part of ancient standing, belonged also to the old French service of the table; and Carême, when he undertook to rearrange the order of the dinner, did not dare to put it aside for great occasions, though for small dinner parties of six or nine he invariably rejected it. The aphorism of Brillat-Savarin is not to be disputed, that the progression of dishes should be from the more sub- Entrées stantial to the light and delicate. Fish is usually considered more delicate and less substantial than meat; but always in an English dinner it is attacked first, when the appetite is most robust, and it would be an appalling breach of good manners to ask for it in the later stages of the repast, when the appetite is satisfied, declines all serious business, and will only play with food. The theory of the English dinner is that we are to work up by slow degrees to the grand event of the dinner-the Joint. The fish and the side-dishes are but the walk and the canter before the race. This is all very well as a metaphor, but metaphors are misleading. There are two great objections to the system. The first is that it makes no provision for persons of weak digestion, who come faint to a late dinner, who resolve to content themselves with the joint, and who have to wait for it an hour or more while the side-dishes are being devoured. The second is that whereas the order of dishes leads up to the joint, this joint is nearly always a roast, and immediately afterwards the second course begins with another roast-namely of game. These two roasts, one upon the heels of another, are surely a mistake, and extremely inartistic.
The French service of the table, as remodelled by Carême, is better devised, and proceeds upon the principle already mentioned of a progression from the more solid and plain dishes to the lighter and more curious. The dinner has two courses and two only, which are signalised by the two names of entrées and entremets. The first course consists of entrées with a joint to begin with. The second course consists of entremets with a roast to begin with.
First course. The soup is served with the first course, but it is, properly speaking, no part of it, and is rather a natural preface to the whole dinner. We sit down tired, and want a few mouthfuls of something to set us up. We imbibe the soup, our spirits are restored, and we are then ready to begin the dinner in its first course-the entrées. Entrées These are of two kinds, the great and the small. The small ones we all know; the large ones are not always reckoned as such, because they are known by other names-Relevés in French , Removes in English, so called simply because they take the place of the soup tureens. And here the Englishman begins to get confused. These removes or large entrées do not seem to him to have the character of entrées at all.
Perhaps one of them is a fish; probably the other is what the French call an the French call an entrée de broche-what he would call a a joint. One of the removes being a fish, he is willing to discuss it at once, though he would be gravely scandalised at the notion of calling it an entrée-a name which he always associates with made dishes; but the other being a joint, and probably a roasted or brazed one, he thinks it ought to be postponed to the place in the dinner which is especially allotted to the roast, so that he may eat all his roasts together. In the French, or at least in the original idea, the removes are entrées not less than the little dishes which are commonly so called, though it must be allowed that in later practice it is usual to class them as something distinct from entrées. But be the name what it may, if people must have a joint, or remove, or pièce de resistance to fall upon, then the proper place for it, in the French idea, is at the beginning of the first course and not at the end. There are only two limitations as to the nature of these joints , removes or large entrées, and neither of these is very strict.
The first is that to give them the character of an entrée they should be accompanied by a good sauce or dainty vegetable garnish ; the second that they should not include fowl or winged game, which are best reserved for the roast proper.
Second course. As the first course began with substantial and rather plain dishes, the removes, tapering off into the rather plain dishes, the removes, tapering off into the more delicate entrées , it is assumed that the diner is now prepared to run a second race of entremets, beginning with something plain and substantial in the form of a little roast.
Entrées But in France, the word Roast has a wider signification than in England-it includes a Friture. Frying is indeed is indeed but a mode of roasting, and it would be orthodox in France, in France, though not too common, to begin the second course with course with a fried fish. If a choice of several roasts were offered, one of them might well be a fried fish, and the list of roasts in France would include a baked haddock, an eel from , an eel from the spit, and all manner of pies. Try and imagine the countenance of an Englishman aghast at the sight of fried the sight of fried gudgeons offered to him for a roast at the commencement the commencement of the second course. And yet for all depends on the previous selection-fried gudgeons may at this point of the the this point of the dinner be perfectly artistic. There is truly no reason in no reason in the Englishman's hard-and-fast rule of eating fried gudgeons fried gudgeons only at the beginning of dinner. It is to be presumed want to be presumed that when the second course has come most persons most persons want only to nibble : and the French service of the dinner keeps dinner keeps this wish clearly in view and ministers to it. The roast it. The roast to begin with is not too solid, and the entremets in succes- to entremets in succession are as light as possible, confined for the most part the most part to vegetable dishes, delicate pastry, eggs, cakes, creams, tarts, two , creams, tarts, and sweets. By way of example, take the minutes of minutes of two of Carême's dinners-the first for February, the second February, the second for November.
FEVRIER: Menu de six à neuf couverts. . .
Un potage Une grosse pièce Deux entrées Un plat de rôt Deux entremets Pour extra . .
Le potage au céleri.
I.
La pièce de bœuf à la Flamande.
Les papillotes de filets de carpe à la Duxelles.
Les perdreaux à la Périgord.
II.
Le chapon au cresson.
Les œufs à la Dauphine.
La gelée de fraises (conserve).
Les darioles à l'orange.
Epicure Here it is to be observed that the dinner begins with the joint, and that the fish is among the entrées-the game also. NOVEMBRE: Menu de six à neuf couverts.
Un potage • Une grosse pièce Deux entrées Un plat de rôt Deux entremets Pour extra. • Le potage de semoule au consommé.
I.
La pièce de bœuf à la Maréchale.
Les perdreaux à la Périgueux.
Les poulets dépecés à l'Italienne.
II.
Les merlans frits panés à l'Anglaise.
Les épinards au velouté.
La gelée au vin de Madère.
Les manons d'abricots.
Here, again, it will be seen that the grosse pièce, or joint, comes first; and see what the roast is-fried whitings with their tails in their mouths and breadcrumbed after the English fashion.
In 1856 Dubois and Bernard published their great work, La Cuisine Classique, and laid down clearly the law of the French table as regards roasts and joints: and there has been no change since then. They give a list of fortyfive roasts of which nine are different sorts of fishwhitings, cod, smelts, carp, mullets, trout, etc. -to be fried or grilled; all the rest being fowl or game. They point out that in some countries lamb appears among the roasts, but insist that this is an infraction of the good rule that joints of butcher's meat should be eaten at the beginning of dinner-an infraction which would never be tolerated except in a repast without ceremony, what the French call a bourgeois and the English a family dinner.