ANOTHER CRACK AT CREVECCEUR
SIR,—Anne-Marie Crevecceug misunderstands my ob- jections to her beginning a reeipe for sauce poivrade with 'one ounce of margarine.' I did not write, as she suggests I did, of insults to the palate : that would have been nonsense, for I do not believe that any palate could tell the difference between one ounce of margarine and one ounce of butter, masked in a sharp sauce. (But many digestions could: margarine may be as. nutritious as butter, and even taste the same, but it is harder to digest, whether cooked or not. This is not only my own, war-time, experience : I know of elderly people who have suddenly been relieved of a lifetime's dyspepsia, by discovering, and very strictly acting upon, this simple fact.)
What I mentioned specifically in my letter were : (a) that we know what butter is, but not what goes into margarine, for its makers will not tell us; (h) English cooking habits. There is a differ- ence between beginning a recipe with margarine, leaving it to the intelligence of the reader to use'butter instead, which is Madame Creveczur's professed method, and giving the classic recipe, with its proper ingredients, and leaving iP to the reader to make an inferior version out of sub- stitutes if he wishes. My objection to the former is that if you allow margarine into the kitchen to play a .small part in a sauce in which it will never he noticed, before long there will he cooks who have persuaded themselves that it would never be noticed in a sauce hollandaise, either, or in pastry. And if this is really what is happening in France, as Madame Crevecceur tells us, then I am not surprised at the present state of that unhappy country.
In the same issue of the Spectator as Madame Crevecceur's letter there is an article by John Berger on the coloured photographic reproductions of paint- ings: 'the more accurate the reproduction the greater the danger that it will be considered an end-product in itself, so that the original painting is finally thought of as a kind of prototype . . . this view 'of visual art would finally destroy its very roots.' For 'repro- duction' read 'margarine% for 'original painting' read 'butter': does Madame Crevecceur want to destroy the art of cooking at its very roots?—Yours faithfully,
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