Provencal cuisine

The Qualities of a Good Menu

The Menu should always be as short as circumstances allow: this is again an essential obligation. Gone are the days when the value of a meal was measured by the number of dishes it consisted of; where the guests did not have too much of an entire afternoon and the evening that followed it to complete a dinner.

We have tried, it is true, to reconcile the menus which are too long and the time which is too short nowadays assigned to the normal duration of a meal; We sometimes succeeded by organizing an ultra-fast service. But this only resulted in a completely inappropriate and ridiculous result: the guests did not have time to touch the dishes served to them. One of the servants had barely placed the garnished plate in front of a guest when another appeared behind the first and took it away. Politeness and the consideration due to the guests should have led to the rejection of a practice that we were sorry to see in use in environments where its admission should never have been tolerated.

We will therefore lay down, as a general rule whose strict observation will become more and more necessary every day, that: where time is limited, the Menu must also be limited. It is a hundred times preferable to serve a very short Menu, but well balanced and perfectly executed, which the guests can enjoy without haste, rather than to parade before them, as if to repeat for them the torture of Tantalus, a long a host of dishes that they won't have time to touch.

This rule having been established, we will have no difficulty in recognizing that its application is not imposed in such an absolute manner in all cases. But it will have to be all the more strictly observed as it involves serving connoisseurs and as the dinner will involve less pomp.

Indeed, where conventions and etiquette have a role to play, that of cooking diminishes. This is why neither the diplomatic dinners, too ceremonious; nor are large political or business dinners, where concerns foreign to gastronomy absorb the minds of the guests, favorable to good food, so much so that they are assumed to be served.

In reality, the only feasts which allow a perfect gastronomic achievement are those in which only a limited number of selected guests take part, sympathetic to each other, happy to find themselves gathered together and freed from all constraints. On such occasions, a special atmosphere is created, made up of trust, mutual sympathy, real intimacy, and this atmosphere is the only one which can give rise to the happy dispositions essential to the appreciation of a loved one among the guests. delicate and chosen.

It is especially in these intimate meals that the number of dishes must not be exaggerated and must be resolutely sacrificed to their finesse and quality. On such occasions a cook loving his lot, careful and experienced, having no that a limited number of guests to serve and a relatively short Menu can bring the maximum care and attention to its execution, and he will be all the more encouraged to surpass himself as he is certain to see his work appreciated.

Even when these exceptionally favorable conditions are not all met; even in the ordinary circumstances of life, there is no doubt that a light and short Menu will be better appreciated by the guests than one that is too busy, and this for another very important reason.
Everyone can convince themselves, by calling on their own experience, that the meals of which we keep the most pleasant memories are those at the end of which we leave the table having exactly satisfied the appetite without overloading the stomach.

If we go beyond this critical point, which inevitably happens with a menu that is too abundant, the feeling. of well-being which must be the consequence of a reasonable meal gives way to embarrassment, to a vague uneasiness, and this unpleasant impression persists long enough to partially erase the pleasure that one must legitimately expect from ingestion of a good meal.

These disadvantages are much more noticeable nowadays, where an overly active life does not allow us to devote to the pleasures of the table the long hours that our fathers were accustomed to devoting to them; not to mention that their stomachs were much less sensitive than ours and their digestive capacities singularly more developed.

Our intellectual faculties subjected to intensive work, overworked, overexcited, have a very clear tendency to progress at the expense of the organs which govern the purely physiological actions of our being and in particular digestion.

In this sort of struggle between the digestive functions and the intellectual functions, the latter will sooner or later manage to triumph thanks to the increasingly severe training to which the brain is subjected due to the harsh necessities of existence.

From then on, a gradual change will inevitably be necessary in the human diet. Assuming that the same quantity of active nutritional principles is still necessary for our great-nephews, they will have to seek them in food largely freed from inert and unusable materials, in a more concentrated diet, made possible and necessary by a modification of the capacity of the organs for nutrition.

This conclusion, consistent with both experimentally established facts and predictions based on irrefutable physiological laws, leads us to consider the reduction in the volume of meals as one of the inevitable necessities of the future and constitutes one more argument, in at the same time as a new justification of our opinion, in favor of rather short Menus.

A. Escoffier.