Secrets of the 10-minute maestro

Following Edouard de Pomiane's recipes is bound to keep depression at bay, writes Julian Barnes

The Guardian, Saturday March 22 2003

A summer's day in Kent, late morning, many years ago. The heat is rising, the son of the house is practising his tennis serve on windfalls, while his mother, a stylish and ironical woman, sits quietly shelling peas. Guests arrive for lunch; she continues relaxedly pinging peas into a colander, which I find impressive (already, in pre-culinary days, I am exhibiting sympathetic kitchen anxiety). Drinks are served, and unhurriedly she rises and wanders back to the house. We are called to lunch, and I eat an enormous number of peas from a vast bowl. Later, when I help clear to the kitchen, I spot several empty, barely concealed Birds Eye packets. I mention this to my hostess, who doesn't turn a hair. "They never notice," she replies with a smile.

This was my first introduction to the constant quest to combine the virtues of slow food and fast food. Unknown to me, the most famous attempt had already been published - and by a Frenchman (well, a Polish-Frenchman) at that. La Cuisine en Dix Minutes ou l'Adaptation au Rhythme moderne by Edouard de Pomiane came out here in 1948. Had my hostess read it, she might have saved even more time:

PEAS. Buy cooked peas in a tin. A half-pound tin is sufficient for two or three people. Open the tin. Pour the contents into a bowl. Drain off the liquid. There is always too much.

There follow three specific recipes, all coming in at well under the 10-minute mark.

I first heard De Pomiane's name a few years ago, when a friend passed on his recipe for quick tomato soup: halve tomatoes, whack them in a high oven, liquidise. Something must have been lost in transmission, be-cause when I tried it, a whole oven-trayful of tomatoes produced (in more like six times 10 minutes) a small bowl of scarlet detritus, best suited for spreading on toast. Recently I came across a secondhand copy of Cooking in Ten Minutes, an attractive book with woodcuts after Toulouse-Lautrec. I checked the recipe for quick tomato soup. It was not at all as I had been told:

Boil three-quarters of a pint of water in a saucepan and stir in a good soupspoonful of tomato extract. Add two dessertspoonfuls of fine semolina, stirring as you do. Salt. Let it boil for six minutes. Add two ounces of thick cream. Serve.

So much for the oral tradition. Anyway, I tried this version, and it made a bowl of beautifully pink semolina sludge with some indissoluble lumps in the bottom. And the more I browsed through the 300 recipes intended "for the student,/for the midinette, for the clerk, for the artist, for lazy people, poets, men of action, dreamers and scientists", the more it seemed an aromatic trifle very much of its age. The recipe for tomato salad ends: "In the south of France a clove of finely minced garlic is always added. In a temperate climate, however, this is not recommended." Not recommended? Times have changed: it isn't all porridge and brussels sprouts up here in the north any more.

And then there was Monsieur de P's jocose Gallic dedication: "I dedicate this book to Mme X, asking for 10 minutes of her kind attention." 'Allo 'Allo, sacré bleu, zut alors, and all that.

It was at this point that I read Elizabeth David's two essays on the 10-minute maestro in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984). De Pomiane (1875-1964), she told me, was a food scientist and dietician who taught at the Institut Pasteur for half a century; a contrarian and provocateur who found in classic French haute cuisine much that was the oretically and actually indigestible. In ED's incontrovertible opinion, a number of items that the new wave of French chefs in the 1960s and 1970s brought to fame - like Michel Guérard's confiture d'oignons - are actually to be found in De Pomiane.

David also quoted a couple of his non-10-minute recipes. Tomatoes somehow being the theme, I was drawn to Tomates à la Crème, which De Pomiane learned from his Polish mother, and which, according to ED, "taste[s] so startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability, soon find it listed in the guide books as a regional speciality".

You take six tomatoes, halve them, melt a lump of butter, put the tomatoes in a frying pan cut side down, prick their rounded sides, turn over and cook for 10 minutes, turn again (to let the juices run out), turn back up at once, add 3 fl oz double cream, mix, let it all bubble, serve.

I didn't much trust this: the quantity of butter was imprecise, the strength of the gas unspecified. Further, it was mid-February, so the best tomatoes I could find were pale orange, frost-hard, and pretty juice-free inside. I fanatically observed the approximations of De Pomiane's recipe, while chucking in a little salt, pepper and sugar in the tiny hope of not disgracing the kitchen ... and the result was unbelievably good - the method had somehow extracted richness from half a dozen fruits that looked as if they had long ago mislaid their essence.

So then it was off to www.abebooks.com for a copy of Cooking with Pomiane. You can spot immediately what Elizabeth David saw in De Pomiane: they both favour the same sort of French cooking (regional, bourgeois, undoctrinaire) and employ a similar layout and succinctness in their recipes. The main difference is in their tone, which is crucial to a domestic pedant. ED is, to say the least, a little unbending. This (from a recipe for Mushrooms in Cream) is about as chatty as she gets: "My sisters and I had a nanny who used to make these for us over the nursery fire, with mushrooms which we had gathered ourselves in the early morning." Does it make you feel a touch excluded? Here is De Pomiane (New Potatoes with Tarragon): "I used to fancy myself as a botanist, but my illusions were shattered when I asked a charming young saleswoman for seeds of parsley, chervil and tarragon. 'Tarragon does not produce a fertile seed,' she replied. 'If you want a plant, here you are. In three years it will die. Come back again and see me.'"

De Pomiane gives you a recipe for deep-fried chunks of calf's head and then, as if sensing your uncertainty, adds, "Try this, it is really rather good." He advises you to cook soufflé potatoes only for your closest friends: in all likelihood, "either you will spoil the potatoes or you will spend your evening apologising for neglecting your guests". This is Davidism with a human face and a smile of complicity. The moment I realised that De Pomiane was not just sympathetic but deeply on my side came in his recipe for Boeuf à la Ficelle (top rump suspended in boiling water by a string). When it is done, you are told to: "Lift the beef from the saucepan and remove the string. The meat is grey outside and not very appetising. At this moment you may feel a little depressed." Isn't that one of the most heartening and pedant-friendly lines a cook ever wrote? "You may feel a little depressed." Perhaps, as well as cooking time and number of portions, recipes should also carry a Depression Probability rating. From one to five stars - no, better, hangman's nooses.

De Pomiane deserves attention (and reprinting) because his is the sort of brasserie and bistro food it is harder and harder to find in France nowadays. Elizabeth David called one of his recipes - for a mountainous version of cheese on toast - "the best kind of cookery writing", by which she meant that it was "courageous, courteous, adult". She goes on: "It is creative . . . because it invites the reader to use his own critical and inventive faculties, sends him out to make discoveries, form his own opinions, observe things for himself, instead of slavishly accepting what the books tell him."

Well, perhaps. But in truth, the first time I cooked Boeuf à la Ficelle, I slavishly accepted everything Edouard de Pomiane told me; and as a result came out of the experience remarkably undepressed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/22/julianbarnes.houseandgarden

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