FRENCH KITCHENS,

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18629, 9 February 1924, Page 6 (Supplement)

FRENCH KITCHENS,

In many ways—comfortable —the French kitchen is inferior to the English. Parisian kitchens are little cupboards in which an English woman could not tarn round. In the country, very often the water is not laid on, and kitchen ranges have but a smsill tank for the hot water. Many cooks will not use gas, and keep to the big charcoal burning blue china stove, which is one of the reasons why their cooking is so good. But, on entering such a kitchen, one is struck at one© by the numbers and variety of tho saucepans which 'line the walls. Each has a very definite use. The French cook knows that milk e&riy acquires a bad taste or smell, and therefore she always boils it in the same earthenware or porcelain sauco pan, where it can stand. These porcelain pans are pretty things with a ring ana a ham la of aluminium. Enamel will do for any kind of cooking for which a quickly obtained _ high temperature is not needed; for, if the enamel is thick, it does not fry properly, aud if it is thin it breaks, and its pi»;os mixed with the food are danger'ma. —remember that oil is as much an acid as vinegar— dissolve '.heap enamel and be unhealthy. For frying fish, the cook uses a thin Iron pan, and for stews she prefers the twohandled "cocotte" or "fait-tout" of castiron. Her pride, however, is in her set of shining copper pans, varying in size from the tiny one to make Dutch sauce to the preserving pan. She uses them for cooking partridges, ducks, etc. The ordinary iron pan she keeps for boiling water *to make coffee "with or for "bain-marie." She has a "braisiere" to braise meat, a holed frying pan to roast chestnuts with, an elongated "poissonniere" to boil fish in, a charcoal-burning Dutch oven for roasting chicken; all kinds of moulds from the savarin, shaped like a ring, to the charlotte and brioche. Of course, she has a big earthenware put. in which she cooks every Saturday the national "pot-au-feu.'' But, funnily enough, she still fights shy of the aluminium saucepans. The French cook has a wonderful regard for her saucepans. Her copper resembles a shining mirror; all her pann must have the outside as clean, as free of scot as the inside. To this end, she washes them apart from the crockery, and scrubs them with ashes and sand. If she goes away for any length of time, she wraps them in paper.