Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David

have had our bowls of hot ravioles , cooked one minute, according to instructions, in a good chicken broth made from the carcase of a spit-roasted, maize-fed chicken we had a couple of days ago. With fresh brown bread – it always has a good crackly crust – our sarriette -strewn magnane and a nice creamy little St Marcellin, plus a hunk of that excellent tourteau with our coffee, we marvel for the twentieth time in a week that we have such a remarkable choice of provisions here. Pâtés and terrines, large jars of freshly made fish stock, saddle of rabbit rolled and stuffed, ready for roasting or baking, good sausages and cayettes , green with the chard so much loved in Rhône Valley cooking, skilfully cut and enticingly trimmed lamb and beef, all the good things from the bakery, the fresh eggs which really are fresh (one stallholder was apologetic because his were three days old), all play their part in making every meal a treat as well as extraordinarily simple to prepare. And in how many towns of no more than 7,500 inhabitants can one choose, on market day, from about seventy different kinds of cheese, at least sixty-five of them French, the rest Italian, Swiss and Dutch?
    I must add that Lawrence Durrell, who lives not far away, and who I hadn’t seen for a long while, reminded me that many years ago, about 1950, he and I happened to meet in Nîmes and that I complained angrily about the local food, swearing that I wouldnever go back to the region. The area was indeed then very poor. Now the tourists, foreign residents, enterprising wine-growers, motorways, have made it prosperous. Well, there are worse things than words to eat.
    Not surprisingly, with all the good food so easily to hand, we were reluctant to go to restaurants. In three weeks we went to only two. One was the delectable Hièly’s in Avignon, a place I had not had the chance of eating at in over twelve years, and which I found, happily, was still offering fine, honest, generous cooking, lovely house wine (a Châteauneuf du Pape de l’année from a domaine of very high reputation), basketsful of local goats’ milk cheeses and more basketsful of cows’ milk cheeses, sumptuous ices, perfect coffee (at £ 1.00 a tiny cup so it should be but it doesn’t necessarily follow) and impeccable service. One of the luxury dishes, by the way, costing a supplément of 12.00 francs on top of the 180 franc menu, was a saddle of rabbit with morilles in the sauce. In Provence it is quite normal for rabbit to cost more than, say, chicken, and in this case it was without question worth the money. At about £ 50 for the two of us, with ample wine, our lunch at Hièly’s was hardly extortionate. Where in London at that price could you get a comparable meal in a comparably elegant and professional restaurant?
    The second restaurant we visited was out in the country, not far from St André-d’Olérargues. We had been shopping in the Thursday morning market at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon – we wanted more of those little ravioles and had discovered that the lady selling them would be there – and were prevented from crossing the Rhône into Avignon by the lorry drivers blockade which was disrupting traffic that week. Instead we drove to a place with one Michelin star which sounded and indeed had looked promising when we had passed it a few days previously. Settled at our table we discovered that the restaurant was run mainly by the chef’s wife, assisted by another lady who was perhaps her sister, or some other close relative who was for some reason tied to the place in a subservient capacity. The prix fixe menu seemed to offer decent old-fashioned country cooking. So in a way it did, with a respectable terrine of chicken livers followed by oxtail braised with mushrooms, carrots and onions, a plate of gratiné potatoes and leeks on the side. The oxtail had been substituted for some other dish which was finished. When I had started to explain to Madame that we didn’t want