3 posts tagged “french food”
Next weekend is Memorial Day Weekend; many of the local wineries offer tours, tastings, and events for all three days. The Willamette Valley makes some awfully nice (and expensive) wines and the winery open house events draw some impressive crowds.
We've got friends who own and operate a boutique winery in the hills west of town. A couple of times I ended up helping out with their Memorial Day Weekend Open House in the role of "snacks girl"; it was my job to replenish the trays of artisan cheeses and pate and the baskets of bread and strawberries and generally keep things tidied up. I enjoyed it very much.
One year (probably about 2002 or 2003) our friends got together with the owners of two small wineries and planned a joint post-Open House celebration for themselves and their employees, volunteers and friends. They rented out what was then a little French bistro only a few blocks from our house (it's now a barbecue joint, Salem not having appreciated French food) and commissioned the owner/chef to prepare a fantastic meal. On the grace of my three or four hours of labor with the snacks, Mike and I were lucky enough to be invited.
The result was the kind of meal that I'd only read about. Bernard planned and executed a menu that took full advantage of spring delicacies and local products, and his cooking was as superb as it always was. For me, the real charm of the dinner lay partly in the element of surprise ("What will he bring out to the table next?"), in the chance to taste foods known to me only from Peter Mayle books about France, and the chance to sit at a long table full of Wine People. Wine People, we learned, know how to party.
The winemakers and their hangers-on came to the table laden with bottles: some of their own wines, of course, but also treasured specimens picked up while traveling. Throughout the meal, in addition to the very good wines supplied by the restaurant, we would hear cries of, "Oh, we must open this next! I picked it up in ________ last year and I've been waiting for the right crowd!" And another cork would be pulled with a resounding pop, and another fantastic wine would be poured into myriad glasses for us all to sample.
There were many courses and there were many glasses on the table, but the dinner had little if any formality. Conversation was loud and jovial. Total strangers sipped out of each others' glasses to get a quick taste. The guests passed around the food themselves as much of the meal was served family-style. Bernard himself came out of the kitchen between courses and plopped down onto a chair to eat and drink with us and tell a quick story or two.
Mike and I sat with our hosts and with the other friends who had served as volunteers at their winery that weekend. I was on the end of our delegation and so was next to some young women from one of the other two wineries. They weren't really Wine People themselves, just friendly faces who'd been drafted to help out just like I'd been drafted. They found some of the food alarming, especially the first courses, so I found myself on the happy receiving end of extra foie gras and extra pan-fried sweetbreads. Oh, darn.
I remember that even with all the hungry mouths and with all of the wine going 'round the table, there was still way too much food. Bernard and his one assistant packed it up into takeout containers and it presumably went home with the owners of the three wineries.
After we got home, I wrote down everything we had eaten, and I've kept it ever since. Here at last, for those friends who've been hearing me tell the story for years, is the complete menu.
Plate of charcuterie (Bayonne ham, country pork pate, rilletes de porc), cornichons, and olives
Cream of carrot soup
Fried sweetbreads and slices of warm foie gras
Puff pastry baskets filled with shrimp, crab and monkfish in a cream sauce
Main course: braised game hens with wild mushrooms, mashed potatoes with garlic and olive oil, tomatoes Provencale
Steamed asparagus
Salade vert with vinaigrette, accompanied by toasted baguette slices with chevre
Lemon tart, assorted imported cheeses
Coffee and cappuccino
I ate that dinner as if in a dream. I know I'll never eat another meal quite like it... the restaurant is gone, and economic times are more difficult, even for Wine People. That was not an inexpensive party. And I haven't had the opportunity to be "snacks girl" for the last few years.
Sometimes, if there is perfection, once is enough.
A good friend gave me a copy of "Julie and Julia" for my birthday this past July. I'm not going to review the book; there are plenty of reviews out there already. Besides, since Julie Powell's original cooking project started as a blog, there's something weirdly recursive about discussing it on another blog.
If you're not familiar with the premise, first hit the link and become informed. I'll wait...
Anyway, it took me a while to get around to reading it, but then I zoomed through it in just a few days. And I laughed my ass off. The best part is that she's NOT a genius cook or a Martha Stewart type. There are mishaps and disasters galore. There are temper tantrums. And best of all, there are all sorts of supporting characters who drop in and eat her food, both the failures and the successes.
Since I too love to cook fussy, obsessive, old-fashioned French dishes, and I too have a small cast of eccentric supporting characters who drop in from time to time and help me cook and/or eat (some of whom are Neighbors here), I've been inspired to do a few complicated recipes for some recent Sunday dinners. One time, Katr came over and we cooked a Provencal dish with only a recipe in French and a two-line description in "A Year in Provence" (which should be required reading for All Serious Lovers of Food) as our references. I'll tell you more about that some other time. But on a particular weekend a couple of weeks ago, I decided I was going to make a dish that I'd wanted to make for years: Turkey Orloff, and serve it to some friends.
Turkey Orloff is Julia Child's modernized (as of the 1970s), streamlined (well, relatively speaking), somewhat reduced-calorie (in the way that TIllamook French Vanilla has fewer calories than Haagen-Daaz) version of Veal Orloff. Veal Orloff is a fiendishly complicated, expensive, baroque, fat-laden relic of the haute cuisine. Julie Powell makes it during her year of recipes, and remarks that even dried-out overcooked veal tastes great if you drown it in enough rich sauce.
I was already familiar with the Turkey Orloff version and decided that it would suit my particular idiom a little better. I hadn't made it before, but I've read the recipe (in "Julia Child and Company") a zillion times. I started by buying everything the day before, and then got up early on Sunday to start cooking. And it literally took me all day...
The dish is turkey cutlets (you could use veal or pork) pounded thin, floured, sauteed, and then layered in a huge baking dish with a stuffing that the French call soubise. Soubise is basically a small amount of rice baked slowly with a ton of onions and some butter. Yum. Then, for this dish, the soubise is mixed with duxelles. Hey, another French vocabulary word, kids! Duxelles refers to mushrooms, chopped very fine and cooked slowly in butter. So the turkey is layered with this soubise-duxelles stuffing (this was a gloriously messy undertaking) and then finally a nice thick veloute sauce enriched with cheese is poured all over every nook and cranny and grated cheese is sprinkled on top. Veloute? Like a white sauce, only made with stock (and a little cream in this case), the stock being made earlier in the day from the turkey bones and scraps....
Whew. Speaking of recursion. Each part of this dish is dependent on some other sub-recipe made earlier, and that's why it takes all day.
But it was the veloute sauce that was my downfall, literally. Every other component was finished and ready for assembly. I had two cups of turkey stock, plus a reserve cup in case the sauce was too thick. I put the measuring cup with the lukewarm reserved stock on the corner of my breadboard/kitchen island, so that I could reach it if I needed it. Somehow, I managed to bump the island hard enough to send the measuring cup flying through the air, pouring stock all over my floor.
I used a few choice words, and my husband came in to see what the ruckus was. I had him stir the veloute while I grabbed the mop. Even after mopping there was still a film of stock on the tile floor, so I went to get a towel to polish it clean enough to be safe. Coming back into the kitchen, I of course slipped and fell, hard, catching my left upper arm on the corner of my vintage electric range. More choice words, as I was certain that I had ripped my arm open and would be spending the rest of the day at the hospital waiting for stitches (or cajoling one of my partners to sew me up). When I finally looked, it wasn't so bad; I had a nice long shallow scrape that was bleeding a bit, and a lot of bruising.
I pulled myself back together, completed the sauce (thinning it with milk, my reserve stock no longer being available), put the whole #*$&^#* dish together, and started the accompanying rice. Thankfully, about that time Katr showed up unannounced (she can smell good food from the nearby train station when she's returning from getaways to Eugene) and I put her to work helping me. The couple that was joining us for dinner showed up. I mixed drinks for everyone and fled briefly to a hot bubble bath, martini in hand, while the Turkey Orloff cooked.
And you know what? It was damn good. Almost worth the pain. But last week, when I was asking Mike what he wanted for dinner, he said, "Something simple". I asked him what he meant by that; then answered my own question while he was thinking.
"Something without six different sauces and me slipping on the floor?"
A couple of years ago I spotted Glorious French Food at our local small independent bookstore (now, alas, defunct). I snapped it up without much internal debate and bought it.
I've got more than a few cookbooks around, although I have a designated amount of shelf space that they may occupy and I do my best to enforce the boundaries. If a book sits on the shelf without being used, if after my initial read-through I never refer to it again, if it doesn't reinforce my sense of joy in the kitchen, then it goes in the give-away pile. My previous references for French cooking have been Julia Child (The French Chef companion volume as well as assorted recipes from some of her other cookbooks), an old Sunset cookbook titled Country French Cooking that I gave away when I realized I had learned everything it had to teach me, and the Time/Life Foods of the World Series volumes on Provincial French Cooking (by the peerless M. F. K. Fisher) and Classic French Cooking.
While these books all helped me get a start on the basics, they never really taught me the why of French cuisine. Why does one put pearl onions, bacon, and mushrooms in Beef Burgundy? Why is a classic Quiche Lorraine such a sublime creation, while a cheap deli quiche full of soggy broccoli is usually so very bad? Which ingredients are crucial to a dish and define it as that dish, and which can be toyed with, substituted for, or completely ignored?
Peterson writes for the right-brained cook. He tries to equip his readers with basic techniques and categories of food that can be generalized, expanded and varied as desired. After some introductory pages regarding common ingredients and techniques, he gets down to business. Each chapter is named after an archetypal French dish: cassoulet, onion soup, sole meuniere, creme caramel, and so forth. He gives us the background of the dish and its history, and tells how to prepare the best possible versions of these dishes that he has found... with special attention to the differences between French and American ingredients as well as kitchens. He also takes moderns tastes into account; he honors traditional dishes but recognizes that the great masters of classic French cooking lived in a very different world than we do today.
After the chapter-defining recipes, he gives recipes for related dishes. It's sort of like shopping for books on Amazon: "Readers who bought ___ also bought ____!" In other words, once you master a basic technique such as gently braising a cheap cut of beef with red wine and onions, you can expand the method to suit other meats using other flavorings and accompaniments. Once you can make a Quiche Lorraine, you can not only experiment with other flavor accents for a basic quiche (knowing that vegetables such as broccoli will turn grey and watery and are best left for some other use) but use a similar technique with bread dough rolled very thin and topped with leeks and cream. The chapters on desserts have a hypnotic fascination for me, with their progression from crepe to clafouti to savarin.
When I cook from this volume, I feel free to be less than perfect, less than dogmatic. I still know that it's a sin to overcook seafood, that cheap cuts of meat need long slow cooking, that seasonings must be used with an understanding of how the flavors will marry... but I know that if I can't find the exact item specified in a recipe, that there's a good chance I can work around it or find something else that will be just as good, if not better.
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