As I've said before, exams are no reason to eat poorly. In the middle of my own exam period, therefore, here's this week's effort.

What I'm reading [about food] this week: In a Shaker Kitchen: by Norma MacMillan

Shakerism is one of these creeds that I can't quite believe anyone ever invented. The worst part of it all, of course, was the celibacy - I have no objection to religious abstinence, and there are some good reasons why it exists, but it seems more sensible from a keeping the sect extant perspective to cabin the celibacy norm to a priestly class. Still, there's something honorable about staking the life of a whole religion on its continued ability to attact converts. And that sense of simple honor permeates the Shakers wholesome, country fare. No, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Shaker - but eating with them would have been a treat and an honor.

And Norma MacMillian's gentle treatment of these anachronistic wanderers of history only adds to the pleasure of leafing through their recipes. I hadn't previously thought of a double crusted lemon pie, for example, but there's a recipe here. There are rough quick breads, and honey soaked cakes, reminding us of the Shakers reliance on natural ingredients. The sect's flirtation with mandatory vegetarianism is celebrated with a delicious chapter awash in country cheese and cream and vegetables, while meats are treated with care - I can't wait to try chicken breasts in cider sauce with butter roasted apples, for example. As a child, I remember romantically wishing I could have sat at table with the honest country Englishmen James Harriot wrote about in his stories of veterinary practice in the farmland of middle England - to keep pace fork for fork with the kind of doughty men who Harriot describes spending an hour sitting silent as their evening entertainment. I'll never have the chance to do that, even if those people ever existed as Harriot described - but Macmillan's book at least gives us an idea of what they might have eaten. I'm a fan.

Easy Peasy Apple Tart - I was invited to a small shin-dig on Friday night. It was supposed to be more civilized than the usual HLS affair, which tend to run towards alcoholic binges most fraternities only dream of. Anyway, I made an apple tart to take with me by using a narrow sheet of puff pastry, adding 2/3 inch borders of pastry after brushing with egg, and finishing with thinly sliced apples brushed initially with olive oil and sugar. They get honeyed after baking.

Lunch:

Smoked Salmon and Avocado - The supermarkets have recently started selling fillets of smoked salmon at about 3 bucks a pop. They're good, and more substantial than the usual thinly sliced smoked salmon. I top them with a a few slices of ripe avocado for a filling sandwich. The on ly thing missing is a little crisp bacon, but I usually manage to control myself.

Dinner:

Goat Cheese parcels - I've read that a lot of recipes developed because of the cooking utensils people had on hand. If you've never heard of an oven, you're likely to have good stews. Well, my cooking is driven somewhat by the fact that my fridge (and especially) my freezer are exceptionally unreliable; to the extent that the former freezes and the latter defrosts. What that all means is that I wanted to use leftover puff pastry from the apple tart above as soon as possible. The obvious solution is crottins of goat cheese wrapped in the dough, with the cheese left open at top. Just put the cheese in the middle of a pastry square, and pull the sides up around, brush with egg, and you're ready to go.

Shaker Asparagus and Cheese pudding - Just a bread pudding of asparagus and sharp English cheddar cheese, moistened with a mix of full fat milk, cream, eggs, and mustard powder. The pudding puffs up brown and crisp, and is especially good eaten with a thick piece of ham.

As I've said before, exams are no reason to eat poorly. In the middle of my own exam period, therefore, here's this week's effort.

What I'm reading [about food] this week: In a Shaker Kitchen: by Norma MacMillan

Shakerism is one of these creeds that I can't quite believe anyone ever invented. The worst part of it all, of course, was the celibacy - I have no objection to religious abstinence, and there are some good reasons why it exists, but it seems more sensible from a keeping the sect extant perspective to cabin the celibacy norm to a priestly class. Still, there's something honorable about staking the life of a whole religion on its continued ability to attact converts. And that sense of simple honor permeates the Shakers wholesome, country fare. No, I wouldn't have wanted to be a Shaker - but eating with them would have been a treat and an honor.

And Norma MacMillian's gentle treatment of these anachronistic wanderers of history only adds to the pleasure of leafing through their recipes. I hadn't previously thought of a double crusted lemon pie, for example, but there's a recipe here. There are rough quick breads, and honey soaked cakes, reminding us of the Shakers reliance on natural ingredients. The sect's flirtation with mandatory vegetarianism is celebrated with a delicious chapter awash in country cheese and cream and vegetables, while meats are treated with care - I can't wait to try chicken breasts in cider sauce with butter roasted apples, for example. As a child, I remember romantically wishing I could have sat at table with the honest country Englishmen James Harriot wrote about in his stories of veterinary practice in the farmland of middle England - to keep pace fork for fork with the kind of doughty men who Harriot describes spending an hour sitting silent as their evening entertainment. I'll never have the chance to do that, even if those people ever existed as Harriot described - but Macmillan's book at least gives us an idea of what they might have eaten. I'm a fan.

Easy Peasy Apple Tart - I was invited to a small shin-dig on Friday night. It was supposed to be more civilized than the usual HLS affair, which tend to run towards alcoholic binges most fraternities only dream of. Anyway, I made an apple tart to take with me by using a narrow sheet of puff pastry, adding 2/3 inch borders of pastry after brushing with egg, and finishing with thinly sliced apples brushed initially with olive oil and sugar. They get honeyed after baking.

Lunch:

Smoked Salmon and Avocado - The supermarkets have recently started selling fillets of smoked salmon at about 3 bucks a pop. They're good, and more substantial than the usual thinly sliced smoked salmon. I top them with a a few slices of ripe avocado for a filling sandwich. The on ly thing missing is a little crisp bacon, but I usually manage to control myself.

Dinner:

Goat Cheese parcels - I've read that a lot of recipes developed because of the cooking utensils people had on hand. If you've never heard of an oven, you're likely to have good stews. Well, my cooking is driven somewhat by the fact that my fridge (and especially) my freezer are exceptionally unreliable; to the extent that the former freezes and the latter defrosts. What that all means is that I wanted to use leftover puff pastry from the apple tart above as soon as possible. The obvious solution is crottins of goat cheese wrapped in the dough, with the cheese left open at top. Just put the cheese in the middle of a pastry square, and pull the sides up around, brush with egg, and you're ready to go.

Shaker Asparagus and Cheese pudding - Just a bread pudding of asparagus and sharp English cheddar cheese, moistened with a mix of full fat milk, cream, eggs, and mustard powder. The pudding puffs up brown and crisp, and is especially good eaten with a thick piece of ham.

In my recent post on the Academy of the Sierras, I promised an exposé on the fattiness of restaurant food. Here's what I meant:

The problem with restaurants for the person watching their weight is twofold. First, the portions are far too large. Yes, all portions - I'm not just talking about inhuman feed baggeries like The Cheesecake Factory here. Second, a lot of the food is a lot fattier and more caloric than one would expect, given what it looks like. For the average chubby eater who wants to eat something tasty and relatively restrained (that is, they refuse to be corraled by the designated 'low fat' options), restaurants are therefore terrifying obstacle courses. You don't believe me? Well, how about the Chicken Tarragon and Field Greens Sandwich at Au Bon Pain, a nationally growing chain of supposedly artisanal "bakeries". Sounds relatively healthy right - chicken breast, herbs, and greenery? And it should be. But in reality, as you'll see if you click here, the sandwich has an astounding 800 calories and 42 grams of fat. That, you should know, is 240 calories and 12 grams of fat more than a Big Mac, almost twice as many calories and more than twice the fat of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and even beats a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is serious stuff.

The real question, however, is how they managed to make a relatively innocuous sandwich that outrageously fatty. So I set out to make my own the other day, using FoodTV's calorie and fat counter as a guide.

I started by grilling a chicken breast on my cast iron grill, setting off the smoke alarm, and using 141 calories and 3 Grams of fat - I shouldn't even count that much, because Au Bon Pain clearly uses less chicken, but let's go with it. The quarter tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil I brushed on the chicken was more than enough to make it crisp and juicy, and brought me up another 50 calories and 4 grams of fat, rounding up. A quarter of ABP's large foccacia gets me another 2.25 grams of fat and 185 calories. That brings me to a running total of 376 calories and 9.25 grams of fat. The tarragon and the field greens are essentially calorie-less, but let's throw another 50 on for good measure, and we're still at a mere 426. There isn't any cheese in the sandwich (I asked) so all that leaves is mayonnaise. For my sandwich to equal ABP's in fat and calories, I would have to add an astonishing 3 tablespoons of Hellman's (100 calories/11g of fat per tb), way more than I've ever put on a sandwich, and way more than ABP adds. If you added a little mustard and one full tablespoon of mayo instead, you'd still be at about 20 grams of fat, and under 600 calories for a clearly larger sandwich. So how does ABP do it? I haven't the slightest idea.

But what I do know is that that one sandwich contains more than half the fat and a substantial portion of the calories someone should eat in a day. Now, I'm not a calorie counter, usually. Cheeses, cream, great swathes of pork with back fat - I eat them all. But that's because when I cook at home I know exactly how much and what I'm eating, and I have no reason to eat the entire plate if I know I've had enough. But at a restaurant, uninhibited by the need to keep some for tomorrow, encouraged by the sign of roasted chicken and field greens, I'll eat that entire pitifully unsatisfying sandwich, over and over again. And then wonder why the pounds keep coming on and on. In any case, the above is why I don't often go to restaurants, and haven't since I discovered how I personally ought to eat 7 years ago. I don't claim that I've got all the answers - but when people wonder where our obesity problem is coming from, this is at least one source.

The Route des Cassoulets lies in Southwest France, on the wild Basque borders with Spain. It sounds helplessly romantic, like so much in Europe – one imagines that it must be a sort of savage jaunt through hamlets and hills, maybe ending at a ruined castle, or the tattered remains of a saint’s reliquary. But in truth, it’s nothing so elevated. A cassoulet is a stew of white beans and pork, cooked for hours at low heat. And the route des cassoulets isn’t ancient at all, but the recent fruit of a typically French group who calls itself the Universal Academy of Cassoulet, a hikeable road of restaurants who serve the authentic article. Still, I’d like to head down there some time, and take the walk along its 130 miles – I can’t think of a better thematic holiday to obscure the monotony of a chilly fall, or a more sustaining meal for a daily trundle across the rugged foothills of the Pyrenees.

But why all the melodrama about a stew? Well, first, the cassoulet takes a long time to make. Not all of us are required to be as fanatical about it as Anatole France’s favorite cook, a certain Madame Clemence, who kept hers simmering for twenty years consecutively - but even so, the stew takes at least a whole day of effort, and another day of waiting for the beans to soak. The French, like many Europeans, intuitively understand the relationship between effort and respect– I’ve always chuckled derisively about the German habit of deferring to the oldest members of their upper legislative house, but when you see how those ideas ripple through society in dishes like this, I wonder if I’m too quickly dismissive. But cassoulet not only takes effort to make, it’s ancient and venerable as well. We’re not sure for how long people in France have married beans and pork and other ingredients to make a long simmering, unctuous stew (cassoulet is known as “haricot cream” in some parts, and for good reason), but I know that the efforts man has made to make beans taste better are of mythical vintage. Even with all this, had cassoulet been just the work of Languedoc, it might yet have wandered away into the sands of history unlamented. But cassoulet is a deeply local dish, bound to memory by villages and towns, and micro-regions, and the brutal rivalries of trivial men. There’s not one cassoulet, but dozens, and three greats ones that stand above all the rest like so many heads of a declining French culinary Rushmore – the cassoulet de Castelnaudary, with fresh pork, ham, knuckle, and bacon, the cassoulet de Carcassone, with all the above and mutton and partridge, and the cassoulet de Toulouse, with sausage, and preserved goose or duck; and you can taste them all along the route the local cooks have laid out for you.

To me, all that sounds very fine, and delicious. But really, when you think of it, when you put aside my rhapsodies above, the cassoulet is a stew. It might well be, as Richard Olney puts it, a “voluptuous monument to rustic tradition”, but in the end, it’s also just pork and beans. And that’s the real point of all my meanderings above, for we Americans also do pork and beans, and when we let ourselves make the effort, we do it well. No, even our most elaborate version isn’t the masterpiece that they make in fairytale Carcassone, seat of the medieval cathars. But they’re honest, good meals, and before we introduced sugar and molasses into the mix in the mid-19th century, they were every bit a match for the Europeans’ best. This fact has two messages for us – first, we ought not shy away from making cassoulet for ourselves. The meal requires neither wizardry nor decades of mastery, but just some effort. And second, we needn’t be ashamed of our dishes just because they don’t wind their way through enchanted foothills and around ancient villages steeped in local history. Beans and pork are our heritage too. Let’s make the most of them.


Cassoulet

Put a litre of dried white haricot beans in cold water overnight. The next day, put the beans, some salt pork if you have it, some bacon, a carrot, an onion, some cloves, and a bouqet garni (bunch of herbs in a sack) in a pot with enough water to cover. Simmer on very low heat for about an hour (the beans should be squooshable between your fingers).

In another pan, brown 1.5 pounds of pork loin and a pound of lamb (actually, the recipe is for mutton, but lamb will do in these dreary days of agricultural monotony). Add two chopped onions, another bouquet garni, and garlic. Cook with beef broth for an hour, adding occasionally when necessary – you’re trying to make a sort of sauce for use later.

Take the meat from its sauce and add to the beans along with a garlicky sausage and perhaps some confit de canard (preserved duck). Simmer for another hour, together.

Remove the pieces of meat from the beans, and cut into even portions. Line a casserole with a layer of beans, add a layer of meats, some of the sauce made of the broth, good pepper. Repeat until the ingredients are all used, and top the entire cassoulet with white bread crumbs. If you have it, pour a little goose fat over the whole thing.

Cook at very low heat for another two hours or so. The traditional recipes say that you should allow a crust to form and break it with a spoon seven times before you eat. In any case, by the end you should have creamy, incredibly flavorful beans, and tender meat, all topped with pungent sausage. Eat with crusty bread, and if possible, serve in the casserole in which it was cooked.

Pork’n’Beans

Soak beans of your choosing overnight in cold water, which you can reserve if you want. The next day, cook the beans for one hour in different water, which you can also reserve. Place beans in an earthenware casserole with a large amount of salt pork, some of the reserved liquid, a whole onion, and a little dried mustard – the liquid should be enough to just cover. This also is when you add maple syrup or molasses if you want it. Cover, and bake at low heat for 3 hours, adding more liquid as necessary to keep the beans from drying out. Bake for additional half hour, uncovered. Remove the onion before serving with bread (preferably steamed Boston Brown Bread).

Boston Brown Bread

Get a one pound coffee can, wash it well, and butter heavily. Mix 1/3 cup of molasses with about 1 cup of milk or buttermilk. Stir until fully combined. In a different bowl, mix ½ cup of rye flour, ½ cup of whole wheat flour, ½ cup of yellow cornmeal, a little salt, and some baking soda. Add the buttermilk/molasses mix, and half a cup of raisins. You should have a thick batter. Pour the mix into the coffee can.

This can either be baked for an hour and a half, at about 300 degrees, or can be properly steamed in a pot filled somewhat with water for two hours. If you’re steaming, make sure to cover the top with foil

Again, I’m late. No matter – Let’s put it down to end of semester nerves rather than anything else.

What I’m Reading [about food] this week: The Road to Wigan Pier; George Orwell

Not all food reading consists of cookbooks and memoirs. Some of it is a little more socially significant – though with my belief in the foundational import of food to human experience, it pains me to say that. In any case, as World War II drew inevitably closer, George Orwell was commissioned by the so-called “Left Book Club” to write a polemical defense of socialism as the great hope of humanity in the face of German fascism. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, a striking description of the life, and food, of the British working class in the late 1930’s. The book has several astonishing moments - a description of the least expensive diet that could possibly keep someone alive particularly stuck in my mind – I never knew that beef dripping and wholemeal bread went quite so far.


continue reading "What I'm Eating This Week" »




But perhaps the most important thing Orwell says for us today, however distasteful its “class” based snobbery, is his explanation of why people insisted on eating the kind of processed rubbish they ate to their own detriment. As he put it,

“Would it not be better if they [the poor] spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole-meal bread . . . ? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. . . .When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. You want something a little bit “tasty”. . . . White bread and margarine and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread and dripping and cold water”.

What’s striking about Orwell’s observation, of course, is that the same fundamental problem afflicts us today. Yes, the misery of the 1930s is long past, and our world is infinitely richer than the one Orwell describes. But our people still put aside natural and wholesome foods in favor of things that are that “little bit tasty”. It’s still our trendy, richer, populace that poured oat bran into their breakfasts in the 80’s, and embraces the Atkins lunacy today. And we still haven’t been able to persuade people to do otherwise, all the efforts of various zealots aside. One wonders if we’ll ever prevail on this point, or whether a century from now the eating of natural, homemade foods will have retreated ever further into the confines of elite hobby.

Ultimately, Orwell was thankfully wrong when he wrote that “nothing but Socialism can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the present”. Both Nazism and then Communism were thrown back from the gates of civilization’s Vienna despite the dubious aid of the Socialism dream. But devoid of its ideological nonsense, what remains is still a valuable book; and read today, a glorious repudiation to the myth of a zero sum world. I recommend a quick leaf through.


4 pm snack – a lemon-poppy quick bread, with lemon zest. Unfortunately, I ate all of it by yesterday (Wednesday) and was forced to satisfy myself with the new candy bar size Lindt brand dark chocolates I’ve been seeing around.

Lunch:

Pseudo-Japanese soba noodles: This is a really great, quick recipe. Just get some Japanese soba style noodles, boil them in plenty of water, and toss quickly with a little honey, rice wine vingar, and soy sauce. I’d use more of the last, and less of the first, if you see what I mean – otherwise, the noodles sugar overnight. Also, toss in some sliced scallions or green onions while you’re at it.

Rices: I have a great love affair with rice. In part, it’s because of how I was raised; rice is a big deal in a household that eats a lot of middle eastern food. But rice has intrinsic values as well – it’s soft and filling, and serves as a neutral canvas for your best efforts to gussy it up. This week, I used beans and chickpeas (garbonzos) combined with a mix of white and brown rice. Delicious.

Dinner:

½ poussin and potatoes x 2 – okay, so I didn’t actually have a poussin, but a Cornish game hen. Nonetheless, I prefer the British word in this case, even though whether you call it a poussin or a game hen, you basically end up with the same thing - a small, entirely linear, chicken. They make great dinners, though my one complaint is that they don’t produce enough fat to properly roast potatoes. A tin of goose fat would have been a nice addition. But alas – my wallet forbids.

Butternut Squash soup x 2 – what is fall without some kind of squash? Just roast a butternut squash, drop into some chicken broth season with onions fried in butter, and puree the whole affair with a little light cream. You can leave out the cream if you want and add noodles, but in either case the resultant soup should be eaten with crusty bread and gales of freshly ground pepper.

Smoked Salmon - is there a better ready-made meal than a packet of lightly pink smoked salmon? Well, yes - a fresh brie balanced on your lap in a Parisian garden, jabbed with a hastily torn baguette. But failing that, smoked salmon is magnificent. If you insist on strewing a few capers and sliced cornichons on top, you’re welcome to do so – but naturally smoked Scottish salmon needs neither.

What I'm Eating This Week


So, this week's edition is late, largely because I'm lazy. I make no apologies.
What I'm Reading [About Food] this Week - As I intimated earlier, this week's reading selection is Waverly Root's The Food of France, a compact tour around France by province. Compared to the same author's history of American food, this is a much superior book - written with passion, and verve, and the occasional moment of real sentiment. One gets the impression that Root really loves France, even with its idiosyncracies and illogics, in a way he doesn't his native home - that's not a bad thing, but if the last month has taught us anything, it's that connecting with a country that you don't appreciate elementally is hard. That's not at all a problem with Root's work on France.

But the book still has its faults. Most striking, Root doesn't do a great job of telling us what these foods are, what they look like, and why people eat them - rather, he presents an annotated list of things that can be found in each province. That's helpful enough, I suppose, and certainly interesting - but it's not a great way of introducing French food to someone who doesn't already have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The example that jumps out at me is his explanation of the clafoutis, which he tells us is rather like the milliard, which he tells us is a sort of cherry tart. But to call the clafoutis a sort of cherry tart is deeply unhelpful - it's a cherry tart in the way ravioli is a type of pasta. One presented a cherry dessert in Alsace or Auvergne, the places where Root tells us we can find the doughy treat, has no way of knowing from The Food of France whether they're faced by a normal cherry tart, or a mendiant (a cherry tart made of stale bread rather than batter), or a milliard, or a clafoutis, or a cherry flan with dessert rice, and I wish Root had done a better job of it. But enough niggling. Short of dragging my Larousse Gastronomique around France with me, Root's book would be my first choice for a itinerant wander around the ancient country. And that, I think, was the author's goal.


4 p.m snack - I had 4 leftover tangerines from the week before. They weren't very tasty, so I didn't eat them. Boiled for several hours, whizzed into a cream, combined with sugar and walnut meal (The recipe is really for ground almonds, but walnuts do as well), and baked slowly for an hour or so, though, and they make a great syrup doused cake. And anyway, what better than citrus to remind you that winter arriveth?

Dinner:

Yogurt Soup with bourghul meatballs - 2x - I suppose I should explain this; it's odd enough that most people won't have eaten it. Soak bourghul wheat in water for ten minutes, drain, and then mix with ground lamb. Knead together with salt for ten minutes, and then roll into marble sized balls. Drop individually into simmering chicken broth, cook for five minutes, remove, and reserve the broth. In a different pan, combine 32 ounces of yogurt with a beaten egg, heat on a low flame while stirring constantly (otherwise you get scrambled eggs and yogurt. Not ideal.) When the yogurt is smooth, and the egg well incorporated, slowly introduce the chicken broth until you have a soup. Add the meatballs again, add chopped mint, salt, and pepper. Serve. Rice or noodles can be added for a substantial lunch the next day.

Basil grind pasta - 2x? - I didn't plan the second part of the week very carefully because of thanksgiving. If I feel like eating anything but a little hummous on Friday, I'll be surprised. In any case, if I want anything else I'll just grind some basil, salt, and garlic in a mortar and pestle, and then drop it all on some linguine with a bunch of olive oil. Dinner doesn't have to be complicated.

Will and I recently had a pair of posts on the Ortolan, a small apparently delicious French bird eaten whole off the grill. Reading through Waverly Root's The Food of France, which I'll talk about in more length this weekend, I find this additional information on the delicacy:

"South of Bordeaux, the Landes provide a number of typical dishes of their own . . . The region is known for its ortolans, a small bird of the yellowhammer family which is considered the most delicately flavoured of all birds in France, and has provided a household word for the utmost refinement in eating, ortolans sauce blanche, generally used jocularly. Thus a Frenchman reaching the table and finding it set with a particularly economical repast may observe sarcastically: "Eh Bien! Ortolans sauce blanche encore une fois?" (Roughly, "Ortolan again?")
One of the reasons why the ortolan is so prized is that it is not simply shot and served, as are most most wild birds. It is caught during the autumn migrations in traps called matoles, which possess some screening ability that enables them to catch ortolans rather than other birds of the same caliber, and is then caged and fattened on millet . . . Ortolans a la landaise are cooked by an open fire, either spitted or, preferably, each in a little heavy paper box set close to the flame, in which the birds sizzle in their own fat. No other liquid is tolerated, but the guest may be invited to apply salt and pepper to his own taste as the cooking progresses before his eyes. When the bird is done, pick it up in your fingers and eat it without ceremony, as hot as you dare. They are so small you can put away half a dozen of them with ease".

What I'm Eating This Week


I'm pleased to announce a new feature this week, which I've un-inventively titled "What I'm Reading [about food] this week". My goal, you see, is to eventually have the largest private food library in the world, which I've decided to accomplish by adding a book or so to my collection each week through Ebay. Sure, it'll take me a millenia or so to get there, but what's a thousand years between friends?

In any case, the book for this week is Eating in America, by Waverly Root & Richard de Rochemont. I bought it mostly on the basis of the former's reputation for French cookery - for those interested, I'll be discussing Root's contribution to that subject next week. But I also needed a general history of American cooking - I have the odd European tome, but nothing covering home, and I hoped this would fit the bill. Unfortunately, I haven't got much good to say about this piece. Compared to Calvin Trillin's bright, dancing prose in The Tummy Trilogy, a contemporary of Eating in America, Root's work is turgid and uninteresting, progressing in series through an inevitable paean to Native American cooking and the usual denounciations of The Jungle era meatpacking before settling into a repetitive screed against American cooking in the mid-seventies. The entire work, to my mind, is a terrible warning to those contemplating co-authored books, and I was sorely disappointed.

Still, I do like a good gluttony scene, and Eating serves up several memorable ones. My favorite demonstrates what happens when religious leaders stick to the letter rather than spirit of their spiritual admonitions. As most people know, Catholics are meant to eat no meat on Fridays during Lent. The fast is supposed to be particularly strict on Ash Wednesday. But when Cardinal Mercier of Belgium visited New York at the start of Lent in 1919, the Waldorf Astoria served the following meal - I'm not quite sure this is what the Church fathers had in mind:
. . . fish and vegetable hors d'oeuvre, canteloupe filled with fruit salad, potato soup, lobster Thermidor, salmon steaks with mousseline sauce, potato balls, hearts-of-lettuce salad, Port Salut cheese, peach Melba, and petits fours".

As to the my menu for the week, I have to admit to being little inspired this week. Thankfully, there was a large loaf of good bread slowly going stale on my counter, so following my own advice a while back I decided to base my meal around that.

Breakfast:

Steel Cut Irish Oatmeal (the texture differs considerably from the usual Quaker Oats) with Canadian maple syrup.

Lunch:

Cheese & Spinach Triangles x2 - I had some cheese mixture and filo dough left over from last week's cooking, so the obvious answer was to stuff the dough with the cheese and spinach, brush the pastries with olive oil, and let them loose in the oven.

Taboulleh x 3 - I've noticed that people in America make this middle eastern salad with far more bourgul wheat than parsley. That's entirely wrong - taboulleh is a parsley salad, and even if you're making it as a main dish, as here, the bright green herb should still dominate the wheat, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemon.

4 pm snack:

I've been on a blueberry kick recently, perhaps out of nostalgia for the summer, so I made 6 blueberry muffins. Unfortunately, as happens sometimes, I, umm, ate them. As self-punishment I went to the gym for a 3 mile job, skipped my traditional Sunday night pizza slice, and bought a box of Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bars for snacks the rest of the week. The last is by far the worst indignity.

Dinner:

Grey sole with breadcrumbs x 2 - delightful, light, fish topped with a crust of breadcrumbs, pecorini romano, and butter to bind. Served with leftover lentil and spinach soup from last week.

French Toast x 2 - what better use for stale bread than this eggy, syrupy treat?

Pasta with breadcrumbs x 1 - ground breadcrumbs fried in olive oil, enriched by pancetta, and tossed with linguine and more olive oil. Odd as it sounds, breadcrumbs have always been the traditional poor man's substitute for parmesan in Italy, and I think they work rather well.

Huh?

I've visited enough restaurants to know not to be fazed by minor, or even relatively major, imperfections. The terrible secret of the restaurant business, it seems to me, is that most places are bad.

Having said that, though, responding to an order for french fries by prying open a defrosted box of name brand oven chips (available from the local grocer) and putting them in the toaster is new to me. To the staff of "Doghouse" in Harvard Square - my congratulations.

More on the Ortolan


Will's post on the Ortolan piqued my interest, of course. I knew about the bird (it's hard to get through an undergraduate course in early modern food history otherwise), but not that much. So I poked around in my food library this evening for more information.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything about a traditional skillet or pan for the dish. Given that the poor thing is close to extinction and also extremely expensive, I'm not sure how useful a specific way to cook it would be. Still, it's a more interesting white elephant than a melon baller to have around, I suppose. I'd like one too.

I was able to unearth some interesting tidbits about the bird, though, in addition to those Will notes below. First, there are a variety of ways to cook it. My 1964 Larousse Gastronomique says that you can roast it plain, of course, but you can also wrap it in vine leaves and bake, or, most luxuriously, stuff it with a whole truffle and foie gras. Escoffier mentions those more complicated recipes in passing, along with another dish involving an Ortolan and pineapple juice (?), but unsurprisingly notes that the best way by far is the plainest.

I've never seen an ortolan, but from the descriptions I read we're clearly not dealing with something grouse or pheasant sized. Almost every recipe suggests half a dozen ortolans per person, and one particularly enthusiastic chef a full twelve. It's not very surprising, then, that in the 40 years from the 1964 Larousse to the latest edition, the beleagured bird has gone from "quite plentiful" to endangered, nor that the book's coverage has shrunk from almost a full page and nine recipes to a desultory paragraph. Still, I'm perversely glad to report that according to a couple of things I read, the natives of Landes, from where the Ortolan hales, are still somewhat heroically trying to eat the thing into extinction, efforts of the French state regardless.
So there it is, briefly - the short, tasty, sad story of an unfortunate creature - the Ortolan of southern France.

Why I'm Eating this week, III


This is a bumper edition of WIETW, since I've been travelling the last few days, and have had a guest up here for a bit as well. That means I've decided to combine two weeks worth of cooking into one post. The transient nature of the last week or so for me is also reflected in the kinds of things I've been cooking - not as many slow cooking dishes, and more pasta and sandwiches. They're all fine, though.

Breakfast - of course, my usual oatmeal was on offer this week, but I also had rough semolina (not the fine semonlina you get in grocery stores - for this, the local middle east grocery is your destination) briefly fried in butter and then simmered in honey, milk, and cinammon. The Greeks do a version of this with less milk and more butter, which eventually gets molded and cut into brownie sized desserts, but our version at home is like a cereal, and not very sweet.

Lunch:
Avocado Sandwich x 1 - Yes, I'm quite serious. Slices of avocado tucked inside thick cuts of good brown bread, with or without mayo and bacon.
Salmon and Avocado sandwich x 1 - Uncolored salmon thrown naked on my parents' brand new and sadly neglected grill, and then stuffed in a sandwich with crisp bacon, mayo, and the second of the avocados I got for a dollar at the supermarket. If you're feeling ambitious, marinate the salmon in a mix of pure maple syrup and soy sauce for three days before heavily peppering and putting on the grill. I'm not kidding this time either.

Dinner:

Mushroom Burger x 2 - the largest Portabello mushroom in the supermarket stuffed with copious amounts of butter and finely diced garlic. Roast for about ten minutes, and then put in a crusty bun layered with dijon mustard. Rub the top half of the bun in the garlicky, buttery, pan juices before closing up the sandwich.

Shells with Cream and Garlic x 2 - Combines a roast head of garlic with half a cup of heavy cream and thyme to make a rich, extraordinarily flavorful pasta sauce. I (and Nigel Slater, whose book "appetite" reminded me of this recipe) find that shells hold the cream best.

Eggplant parmigiana x 2 - yeah, yeah, it's cliched. It's also good, and can be made almost as well by baking instead of frying the eggplant at the beginning. Tomatoes are pretty much off the market now, so I wouldn't bother making my sauce from scratch - tinned Italian imports will do just as well until spring comes again. Personally, I'm eating mine with chunks of bread, but a traditional side of penne will do as well.

Chicken burgers, "Cordon Blue" (gack) x 2 - I hate the phrase "Cordon Bleu". I'm not sure why, but I think it's because of some really bad French restaurants I went to when I was a kid. In any case, this is just a chicken burger (I'll grind my own meat in the food processor. Who knows what's in the pre-ground stuff, right?) topped with a little canadian bacon and swiss cheese, in a bun with a sauce of fresh tarragon, a little mayo, and dijon mustard (again!).

The Alsatian Trinity

In my mind, Alsatian food is based on the three main ingredients, a holy trinity of bacon, onions, and emmental cheese. I know there's a good case to be made for foie gras, recently illegalized in California. And it's hard to ignore the strong, hoppy, local beer, or one of the hundreds of white wines. I won't even mention sauerkraut, foundation of the greatest Alsatian dish, choucroute garni. But in the end, Alsace is the land of le seigneur cochon, the noble pig. And what lord would comfortable without his chief advisers, onion and cheese? Perish the thought.
When I wanted to write something solely about the food of Alsace, therefore, I thought I would pick recipes based on those ingredients. The following are not only three of my favorite Alsatian foods, but three of my favorite recipes across cuisine. Making one of these will remind you why the cooking of France's eastmost province maintains such a sterling reputation.

Flammekuchen

Flammekuchen is a sort of pizza, topped with bacon, onions, and a sauce of creme fraiche. The slightly fancier version includes a few gratings of strong emmental on top, sizzled dark. The point to remember about flammekuchen, though, is that the base isn't a bread dough, but a pastry.
To put the dough together, mix some flour with a little bit of salt and water, and knead briefly. It should be a relatively soft, but not sticky dough. Roll it out, and then add the butter in one of the two following ways. 1) If you're dealing with high quality European butter, with above 82% butterfat (just check the box), then put the butter between two sheets of cling-film and beat it to a thin sheet. Place the sheet on a third of the dough, fold the rest of the dough over like a letter, roll it out, and then do two more of these folding "turns" (without adding any more butter). If you find the butter breaking through the dough, just refrigerate to re-solidify the butter - it gets real messy if fat is melting everywhere. 2) If you've only got standard issue US butter, just cut little pieces off the stick and dot them around the dough - American butter won't flatten to a sheet without cracking. Then proceed just as above.
It should be noted that in both cases, you don't need that much butter - careful readers will note that this is the same technique that's used for croissants, and that's definitely not what you're after here.
Once the dough has been "turned" three times, put it into the refrigerator to firm up. Meanwhile, make the sauce of a half unit of heavy cream, a half unit of creme fraiche, and an egg per cup or so. Mix throughly.
While all this is happening, thinly slice an onion and fry on very low heat in butter for 40 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool.
Finally, pre-heat your oven. Roll out the dough to an extremely thin sheet (the closer to paper, the better), top with a light layer of creme fraiche sauce, add some bacon lardons, and top with grated cheese. Bake on a sheet in the oven for about ten minutes, until extremely crisp, brown, and delicious.

Coq au Riesling

Fry some bacon in butter or oil until it becomes crispy, and has released much of its fat. Remove the bacon, but not the fat, from the pan. Add your pieces of chicken (ideally, simply a chicken cut into 8 pieces, but you can buy a pre-cut chicken as well), and brown on high heat until well coloured on both sides. They should also release some fat. Once browned, remove them from the pan and let the chicken sit on some paper towels.
Now, add finely diced onions and garlic to the fat in the pan, along with some roughly cut mushrooms (the stronger tasting, the better). Fry on low heat, letting soften without colouring. [It's better to do the mushrooms and the onions seperately, since mushrooms are better cooked on high heat, but I can't always be bothered). Once that's done, use a bit of wine to deglaze the pan (that means put a little wine in the pan and swirl around with a spoon to pick up all those tasty bits stuck to the bottom), return the pieces of chicken, add one bottle of riesling (a white Alsatian wine; I find that gewurtztraminer works just as well), and a litre of chicken stock. Also add some thyme. Let simmer for an hour to cook the chicken until extremely tender. Remove the chicken, and stir in a pint or so of single or double (light or heavy, in US parlance) cream. Simmer for another half an hour, and then return chicken to the pot for five minutes. The stew should be thick and delicious.
Note that this goes really well with white rice, spaetzle, noodles, or even great cuts of crusty bread. It's also even better the next day.

Onion Tart
Make a pastry with one unit of flour and one unit of butter, with a little bit of salt. For those who don't want to use a food processor, the way to do it is to cut the butter into small pieces, add to the flour, and then use two knives to cut the butter into the flour from the center to the edge, one in each hand. Use a little water to make the dough come together if you want, wrap in cling film, and put in the fridge to firm up.

The filling is a little unclear in terms of proportions to me, but I tend to like one unit of cream, one of full fat milk, and two eggs. You can scale that up or down as you like, but that should produce a strong, tasty, tart. You'll need the same kind of caramelized onions as above, and lardons as well.

Roll the dough out into a tart pan, and fill with baking beans or even rice to bake blind - if you don't bake the tart before filling, it'll leak everywhere. Take the tart out just when it goes brown, and let cool. When it's ready to go, add the onion, lardons, and filling to the tart shell, and bake at medium heat for 25 minutes, or until cooked and firm. If you like, add some emmental on top, and place under a grill or salamander for a crisp glaze.

What I'm eating this week, II

I'm having a visitor arrive on Wednesday, so I don't need to plan meals for the entire week. I'm also particularly busy. The end result of all these things is a simple menu for the next few days. For those interested, I've also added a few extra bits this week, including breakfast and snacks.

Breakfast - slow cooked oatmeal (it only take five minutes, folks. Make the effort!) in a mix of milk and cream, topped with great lashings of local honey (thank you Farmer's market!) and a toasted walnut or two.

4 p.m Snack - Chocolate quick bread, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's magisterial "The Bread Bible" - I always have a slice of cake, a bit of quick bread, or a muffin at around 4 pm, sometimes with coffee. All of those are fast and delicious, and this decadent 13 tablespoons of butter disaster is one of the best.

Beet and Goat Cheese "Terrine" - No, it's not really a terrine. But I love beets, and this open sandwich of rough brown bread topped with thick slices of the earthy root and strong goat cheese, broiled just a minute or two in the oven, makes for a tasty dinner.

Spaghetti carbonara - I don't trust American eggs enough to make my carbonara the way Italians do (that is to say, by tipping a golden, fresh, egg into my plate at the last moment), but I do have some pancetta and great parmesan. Solution? An eggy, cheesy, bacon tinged feast.

What I'm eating this week


I've got a queue of food articles I'm working on, but I can't seem to concentrate right now. It might be the football on TV. In the meantime, I thought it would be good if I started posting my weekly menu here on the blog. I've had a lot of back and forth with people about cooking while busy, and I notice that I haven't always done a good job explaining exactly how I cook given my relatively limited time. So after I plan my dinner menu for the week on Saturday, I'll try to post it here.

2 nights - Coq au Vin - I got a free bottle of red wine this week (don't ask!), and I like chicken, so I'm going to put together a chicken stew of mushrooms, bony farm raised poultry, wine, and various herbs. It'll serve for two nights of dinner, with rice the first night and buttery hot noodles the second.

1 night - Mushroom risotto - I also got a bottle of white wine this week. It isn't that great to drink (too fruity a chardonnay), but it should soak nicely into arborio rice. So I'm going to roast some mushrooms in oil and thyme, and add them to risotto made with the wine and some of that wonderful organic boxed chicken stock. Of course, it'll be finished off with butter and imported parmesan.

1 night - Risotto fritters - There ought to be some leftover risotto. After a night in the fridge, I'll form it into small patties, dip in egg and some flour or breadcrumbs, and fry in generous amounts of olive oil.

1 night - Braised endive - This is one of those wonderful but simple country meals the French do so well - all you need to do is put some endive in a thick bottomed pan smeared with butter, and then cook it for 40 minutes on low heat. After some cream and lemon to make a light sauce, you're done. Rice or bread to accompany.

Strasbourg Explored - Day 2

Part II of a hopefully seven part series on my eating holiday in Alsace

I search for Croissants, and am disappointed

I generally don’t take breakfast at hotels, even in France. Indeed, especially in France - It’s much preferable to wander around the streets of the city looking for a croissant, or a warm brioche, or some other tasty morning treat. But as I soon discovered in Alsace, and began to understand this first morning, croissants aren’t a specialty of eastern France. This is true even though the flaky pastry originated in Vienna – far closer to Strasbourg than to Paris. Most astonishing, many Alsatian croissants feature a sickly white sugar topping, which I haven’t even seen among the many perversions we get here in America. It’s just not worth eating, and after chewing unhappily through a doughy over-sweet version of my favorite breakfast this morning, I gave up on any croissant that didn’t look like the ones in Paris. Later, I found out the truth – any boulanger that had the iced topping was a German trained bread-maker, and was much stronger in the rich kugelhopf, an almondy brioche, and in the dark breads that so characterize German baking. But no French baker would ever mark their pride and joy in such a Cainish way – and I was much happier once I figured that out.

The European Parliament Proves its worth

Sated, if discouraged, I thought I would visit the European Parliament on the upper outskirts of Strasbourg. This, after all, was an opportunity to see what promises to be a fledging power at birth. I arrived at the bucolic site, flanked by the lazy arm of the town’s river, only to be entirely puzzled. There was no security around the parliament, or anywhere else, and though I wandered for a full hour around the great cylindrical base of the building, there wasn’t an entrance to be found anywhere. The place couldn’t have been more symbolic of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the current European establishment – a mighty building of soaring ambitions, of words, and doctrines, and agreements, but entirely shut off from humanity and its people. And this is to be the founding myth of European nationhood, the dream of a few lazy bureaucrats? I doubt it very much.

I anger a native

I had heard about a local delicacy known as flammekuchen, but called tarte flambé in French. It’s a pizza like dish featuring a thick crème fraiche sauce topped with caramelized onions and rich lardons, cubes of local bacon. I’ve always cautioned those who think pizza is solely an Italian specialty. Between the pissaladiere of Provence, a tart of olives and anchovies over oil rich dough, and the tarte flambé, France makes a glorious run at her southern neighbors. But the thing that had always puzzled me was that thin crackly tarte flambé dough looked different than pizza in the pictures. I wanted to find out why.
I sat down at a local bistro that had flammekuchen, and minutes later, a fiery hot tart was in front of me. I asked the woman who served it how they had made the dough – “oh, just water, yeast, flour, and salt”, she said. “Like any bread”. I looked unhappily down at the flaky, obviously unleavened tart, arrayed on the traditional wooden platter, and smiled back up at her. “Well. There’s obviously no yeast in this. Are you sure?” She frowned angrily at the silly American, and said, “Yes, of course. What would you know?” I was tempted to answer that I knew enough to recognize dough that didn’t have yeast in it, but I held my tongue – any lingering annoyance on my part was drunk away with a half bottle of terrific local gewurtztraminer wine. But just after I finished eating, I headed straight for the small bookstore I had seen on my way to the restaurant, and checked the recipe. No, it doesn’t have yeast in it – in fact, flammekuchen is a sort of light croissant dough, made by beating fatty European butter to a thin sheet and folding it into a plain dough of flour and water. But I didn’t go back to the restaurant to gloat. There was dinner and dessert to find.

The Story of Porcus

On my way from the train station to the hotel on the first day in Strasbourg, I had walked by an astonishing charcuterie, the window filled with row after row of obviously perfect Alsatian salamis, and sausages, and pates, and all of those stuffed into buttery doughs. But now, I couldn’t remember the name, and I couldn’t remember where it was, and I spent most of the first night dreaming about fatty folds of glistening pork, just out of my reach. Reckless wandering around the streets of Strasbourg didn’t work, and finally I stomped to the front desk of my hotel.

“Listen here”, I said. “There’s a characuterie somewhere. Its name starts with P. It looks delicious, and I have to find it. You’re going to help me”. Whether it the grim, fanatical insistence in my voice, or the ominous rumbling of my stomach, the woman behind the desk kindly pulled over a chair, and handed me a coffee. A few minutes later, the internet had yielded another of its manifold fruits. My elusive goal was appropriately called Porcus, and it was located just behind the Rue des Orfevres. I thanked the bewildered woman, and made off at full speed for the fabled prepared meat dealer. You never know when French shops might close for the night ,or for a break, or, in fact, for the entire summer.

My efforts were worth it, in the end, as I later ate a delicious feuillete de volaille ( a sort of pastry stuffed with meats and vegetables) at home, with its usual accompaniment of cornichons pickles. The Rue des Orfevres, furthermore, had yielded the excellent Patisserie Naegel, clearly the best maker of desserts in Strasbourg, where I found an astonishing tart of figs sitting on a fresh puff pastry. I ate the tarte aux figues wandering absently past the back of the Chateau Rohan, where Marie Antoinette had arrived from Germany to marry the last Bourbon King. By the side of the river, I saw a beggar I had passed by in the morning. He was drunk, unsurprisingly, but he also had a small plate of pate and a couple of olives, with a decent looking nub of bread. Could this be any place but France?

Part I of what I hope will be a seven part post about my eating holiday in Alsace

I grabbed a croissant from Le Fournil de Gare, a small boulanger opposite the Gagny train station. It was warm and yeasty and chewy and buttery. Almost perfect, I thought, as I strode towards the commuter train that would take me to Gare de L'Est and thus to Strasbourg. I needed a holiday, I had decided a few weeks before. Yes, mounds of law school debt awaited me when I returned to the real world . And I hadn't exerted myself that heavily over thirteen weeks of my summer job - apart from a few late nights, the summer associate's lot isn't the harshest even among the cushioned paths of the western elite. But it would have been a shame, I thought, to have been in London, just a few miles from Paris, and to have neglected Europe. And so I booked my tickets on the trans-Channel Eurostar, and imposed myself yet again on the hospitality of my ever-ready uncles in the suburbs of the French capital. It was time to travel.

I spent a long time musing over where to go. France is a diverse country; of sun and of mountains, of plateaus and plains. But as always, my priority was food. And as the Larousse Gastronomique notes, there are few places better blessed with edibles than Alsace, oft-traded between France and Germany, and the better for it. After much thinking, my plan ended up incorporating some of the most interesting places I could find in the eastern province. I would start in the great Alsatian capital of Strasbourg, and then, after a brief stay there, would trek down to the little towns of Obernai and Selestat in the wine-making south. On the way, I'd eat and hike as much as possible, to offset the grosser excesses of my eating with the rough discipline of mountains and forest. If all worked out as planned, it would be a perfect vacation. How could I go wrong?

The Topless Jumble

A short time later, though, I found myself staring not at the glorious foothills of the Vosges, but at a topless woman in Gare de L'est. She wasn't, unfortunately, there in person, but stamped tawdrily on a magazine, with the word “Jeux” or “games” written diagonally across her head. I wondered for a moment what she could mean - I mean, nude games? Eventually, my curiosity overcame any embarrassment I felt at leafing through such a thing in public. I gingerly picked it up, and backed unhappily into a remote corner of the store.
Well, it turned out to be the jumble – the word search, in other words. And it’s not as if the puzzle was particularly connected to the salacious cover – the first word to be found was "pain", or bread. I put the magazine back, unsure of what to make of it. But I do know that if anyone ever asks me to explain France to them from now on, I'll say that they can understand France if they understand the topless jumble. And by the time I thought of that, my train was minutes from leaving.

I scare a woman away. I am not surprised.

The trip from Paris to Strasbourg takes four hours, by Corail rapid train. For some reason, the real speedsters of the French railway, the Trains Grande Vitesse (TGV), haven’t yet made their way to this route. A more cynical person might note that it is telling of something in the French psyche that the TGV have long plied the holiday route to Nice, but still ignore the capital of Europe. But I am not cynical, or at least wasn’t just then.
In any case, I passed the time by alternatively eating and staring out the window at the passing countryside. As to the food, I did well, I think - a baguette stuffed with ham, a blueberry tart, small cornichon pickles, olives, some strong German beer, and a little pate. The only complaint I remember now about the sandwich was that too much butter had been spread on the ham inside, in an obvious effort to obscure the fact that both better ham and bread exists elsewhere. But that niggle didn’t stop me from enjoying myself. In fact, I ate so enthusiastically that the attractive woman sitting next to me moved away when we stopped at Nancy. Maybe I should have talked to her instead of eating, but by the time I thought of it I had got to the tart, and it
was very good indeed.

Zum Zwissell

Clearly, the chief job awaiting me the first night in Strasbourg was to get myself some choucroute garni, the headliner of Alsatian cookery. It’s not complicated, choucroute garni. It’s just some sausages and ham hocks piled on top of relatively humble preserved cabbage, or sauerkraut. But in all cases, choucroute in Alsace is a treat, made with some of the best sausages and smoked meats to be found anywhere. After a good bit of wandering around the great Gutenberg square of Strasbourg, dazzled in the shadow of the extraordinary one-towered cathedral, I found my target – Zum Zwissel, probably the most traditional winstub, or wine restaurant, in Strasbourg. I sat myself down outside in the delightful weather and ate for the next two hours – First a perfect onion tart, studded tastily with small cubes of local bacon (lardons), and topped with a thin layer of emmental, followed by a mighty plate of choucroute garni accompanied by a freshly grated bowl of horseradish to liven it all up. Washed down with almost a litre of the powerful Mutzig beer, I couldn’t really handle dessert, so I satisfied myself with a light sorbet there, and then a pistachio ice cream later. Standing that night in front of the Cathedral to watch the summer’s special light show, I remember noting that this was a great start to the trip. I had tasted the Strasbourg’s most famous export, and I was impressed. But that, surely, was only a start.

Most people don't bother making french fries from scratch at home. Even Nigel Slater, one of my favorite cooks, notes that home frying requires a bit of culinary heroism - especially if you mean to use the crisp, salty, guiltily delicious proceeds in that most british of post-pub delicacies, the chip butty - a startlingly Atkins unfriendly sandwich of mayonnaise, crisp bread, and "chips".
People's reluctance to make fries in this frozen peanut-butter sandwich world of ours doesn't shock me. Who has the time to cook potatoes once in cooler oil to soften them, to remove them all from the oil and to dry them lovingly, and then to expose them again to a now fiery oil to brown and to crisp? Even I can't manage it very often, and I'm obsessed. So how is someone of more sensible appetites to feel, trained by well meaning restaurants to think that fries are a fast food? Who, exactly, is going to make the effort?

That's why I've spent much time thinking about alternatives to canonically double fried fries. Of course, I've mentioned my oven fries before - a potato cut into thirds and baked at high heat in smoking olive oil for an hour. And I've been known to pretend that properly baked potatoes are their fattier cousins on occasion - It's amazing what enough mayonnaise can do. But in the end, only french fries are french fries, and until recently, only the double frying method has done the job.
But just a few days ago, Will reminded me of a particularly tempting tidbit in Jonathan Steingarten's great book, "The Man who Ate Everything". In one chapter, the former lawyer notes that a world class French chef of his acquaintance fries his frites only once, but in cold oil - the extra time the fat takes to come to a boil, presumably, is meant to replicate the first cooler fry of the traditional method. Trying the trick out had long been at the back of my mind, and with a spare week at my parent's house and an outdoor grill and burner at my disposal, I was able to have a real go.

In a way, I'm glad to report that I think the method does work. Especially if you've put the oil in the refrigerator beforehand, you do get brown, crisp, tasty fries, eminently slatherable in coarse salt and strong sauce. There's no drying, or guessing how hot the second fry should be - you just leave the potatoes in the oil, and some twenty minutes later, they'll be done and ready to eat.
But the savings in time, and hassle, and effort, aren't really that material, because the cold oil takes much longer to do the job from tip to tail. So I'm left a little conflicted about Steingarten's advice, about whether it's worth bothering, and about whether this is the answer I've been looking for. In the end, I suppose that whether you adopt one method or the other is a matter of preference, of deciding what kind of work you prefer. I, for one, don't mind the double fry, and I think in the future I'll stick to that.

As for the holy grail of the easy, tasty, french fry, I think I solved the problem as I nibbled absently on one of those small misshapen fries you inevitably get in a large batch. Maybe, in the end, french fries are the kind of things you have to make with friends and family, amicably hunched over the bubbling pot, dish of salt at hand, hungry, and enthusiastic. Maybe like risotto, they're meant to be the food of lazy afternoons, to be done well rather than quickly. And when the need for a quick batch of fries does strike, on a Friday night stagger home, there's always the local McDonald's to provide succor, and to keep you from perverting your own fryer at home. After all, a good cook doesn't always stand on principle - not when sacrilege is so tasty.

Gordon Ramsay

I ate too much this summer. Not just slightly too much, but massively too much - so much that I've spent the last few days claiming, through the unfortunate crumbs of my thousandth croissant, that I'm going to undertake a fruit diet for the rest of August. Given all that gluttony, you wouldn't have thought that the prospect of one or two more restaurants would have excited me particularly. But I managed to gather my battered resources of enthusiasm for Gordon Ramsay's flagship restaurant in Kensington, its trademark purple canopy demurely tucked into an exclusive neighborhood off Royal Hospital Road. Not only is Ramsay famous, mostly for being deeply unpleasant on his eponymous reality show, but his restaurant is one of only two 3 Michelin starred restaurants in London. This would be the clear highlight of the summer, I thought - my first experience with the highest reaches of culinary expertise.
I'm pleased to say that Ramsay is as good as people say he is, and his restaurant is better. The eight course tasting menu, particularly, is a masterpiece of French cookery. Frankly, I wouldn't recommend a restaurant as expensive as Gordon Ramsay if you only got one meal out of your visit. But for me, at least, a meal as great as Ramsay's effort that night gets replayed over and over - like now, as I write this snapshot, and later, as I sit my way through a lesser meal, and perhaps twenty times more, in class, and at home, and in an absent moment six months from now, as I think back to one of the dishes that particularly struck my imagination.
I could begin my description of the food with one of ten dishes, petit fours and amuses bouches included. But the strident foie gras, encircled with deeply aged balsamic vinegar, was really amazing - one of these tastes that reminds you why people like something like foie gras. It's true that the chef has relatively little to do with such a dish, but there's a skill in knowing when you've got your hands on good ingredients too, and just letting people go at them, experience them the way they're supposed to taste. There were two fish dishes I remember particularly too - powerful king scallops layered with black truffle, as if you didn't get the flavorful point - and a masterful halibut layere with what they told me was lettuce sauce, like a sort of loose pesto, but subtler.
Between that, and the pre-dessert of pear soup with ginger foam, one might think that Ramsay had crossed the line between pretentious and merely fancy. But that's the skill of Ramsay I think. He's not blind to the trends infecting the most modern cooking, especially out of New York and Barcelona - the foams, the powders, the bizarre sauces and savoury ice creams. For the most part,he's rejected that gimmicky stuff in favor of the highest execution of the best food. But occasionally, he's adopted a thing or two from the pretentious myriads, a flourish, a technique. Despite what I normally write about such food, I think he's right. Cooking ought not be entirely a static exercise -if that was the case, we'd still be eating mounds of saffron tinged eggs and gold leaf, like our medieval precursors seemed to enjoy. Cooking changes. The role people like Gordon Ramsay play is to distill that change - to sort through the thousands of innovations, to grant their impimatur to the best, and to meld the new foods into traditional cuisine, so that thirty years from now no one would give his food a second, suspicious, glance. That, for example, is precisely why that foam didn't feel out of place just after the most traditional of seared beef, accompanied by minute, perfectly caramelized vegetables - or why a meal involving lettuce sauce went well with a great stalwart of the french dessert table, a magnifcient, dark, tarte tatin - powerful and yet understated. Ramsay's cooking mixes the traditional - the financiers of almond and the magnificent cheese board of some 30 varieties, with the new - petit fours of ice cream, and amuse bouches of butter cornets filled with creme fraiches and caviar- and he does so with skill , and without complication. I can't think of too many better compliments.
But a restaurant of this exalted a reputation and a stratospheric price can't survive merely on food. Bad service would be devastating- not because the food would taste any less excellent, but because there would be something gnawing at the back of your mind. Why is this course slower than the other - why can't they remember who ordered what? Try as I might to conclude otherwise, though, Gordon Ramsay is just about flawless. The service is well coordinated, and led by a frenchman who would be stereotypical if he were only ruder. The wine list, so far as I understood it, is of astounding quality, navigated effortlessly by an expert sommelier. If you've got exceptionally deep pockets, like we seemed to, order a wine with every course - it's an experience I'd love to have again, though you had better be good about holding your drink. Of course, if you do go too far, Gordon Ramsay gives the impression that they wouldn't care - it would be all papered over with class, and perhaps an extra nibble to sop up the spare drink. Because that's simply the kind of place Gordon Ramsay is - just about flawless, and very close to magnificent. I, personally, would have traded the whole summer of eating for another go at their table.

Club Gascon

Club Gascon is reputed to be one of the best "high French" restaurants in London. After having dined there last week, I think they have some case as a matter of food, but their service is diabolical, and I'm not sure about their gimmick either.

You see, Club Gascon purports to do something called "French tapas", trying desperately to hook itself into the all consuming bar snacks craze of the last few years. The chief problem, however, is that French food doesn't work very well as tapas - the whole idea of either Spanish tapas or Middle Eastern mezze is that the meal becomes a communual experience, where people are able to taste a wide range of easily seperable foods. But most high french cuisine isn't like that- and at Club Gascon, it shows. Cassoulet de Toulouse, for example, the famous pigeon, sausage, and bean stew of southwest France, can't be shared properly at all, even if the restaurant does remember (as they did not) to bring extra plates - the stew was well done, unsurprisingly, but what's the point? Similarly, the dish of buttered, truffled pasta was fragrant, rich, and delicious - but how are you supposed to portion it out? Frog's legs are much more easily shared, but I would have traded the decorous foam sauce for more of the tiny, delicate, appendages, while the delicous seared foie gras was much more generously prepared. The only thing that I thought was perfectly designed for sharing were the skewered duck hearts - small, rich, chewy bits of meat layered with a flavorful glaze. That, I think, is as close France, and certainly Club Gascon, gets to tapas.

There were some surprises as well, I'll admit. King scallops are usually served in france with their bright orange coral, it's true - but at Club Gascon you get a cracker flavoured strongly with coral instead. And I have to admit to be a little struck by bacon on top of beef carpaccio - that's not usually what I would expect, or like. But some of the preparations were a little too clever - dark chocolate "bar", for example, turned out to be an entirely unsatisfying centimeter wide strip of chocolate, while the chef tried to get incompetently exotic with a banana crumble obscured by "leaves" made of flour, sugar, and banana. Still, everything was tasty - I just can't say I was completely blown away by any of the cooking. Frankly, you could do a lot worse than ordering two bowls of the cassoulet and another two of their delicious olive oil French fries - tapas concept be damned.

The service, unfortunately, was remarkable - remarkably awful. Waitresses didn't know what either riesling or gewurztraminer was, and when the "sommelier" was called, he suggested a dessert wine. Dessert wine instead of a dry alsation white wine? That's what an expensive French restaurant recommends? Of course, you can't order even inappopropiate dessert wine if no one comes to your table, which was our experience for a half hour at the beginning, and you certainly don't need any wine if there are hour long waits between courses - another fascinating twist thrown into Club Gascon's diabolical efforts to make eating there impossible. The whole experience was summed up by one employee's response when we asked where our second course might be, in the middle of a second interminable wait - "Ah, monsieur", in the french accent of someone imported from France to trick you into thinking she might be a competent waitress, "your food is in the kitchen".

If it had been up to me, that's where it would have stayed.

Last week, I wrote a post about Melton Mowbray Pork Pies. As the intrepid half-dozens who read it will remember, the post discussed the battle between Northern Foods and Dickinson & Morris (or, indeed, Samworth Brothers, the parent) over European protection for "Melton Mowbray Pork Pies". If you want the full story, do read the article.
This morning, I received an email from Gary Johnston, Marketing Director at Pork Farms Bowyers (an affiliate of Northern Foods). He adds some fascinating information to my initial post, and corrects some errors as well.

First, Mr. Johnston notes, Melton Mowbrays (abbreviated MMPP! Don't you love jargon?) have historically been made outside the protected zone -

"Melton Mowbray Pork Pies are a style (premium quality to consumers) and have been produced outside of their "traditional" region for over 100 years. Indeed, during the majority of the last century the volume of the production of these pies was almost entirely made outside this zone. Northern Foods has two sites (in Wiltshire and Shropshire) with rich histories of MMPP production and this PGI application threatens these factories and the associated employment".

And as I guessed, the economic motivations for Dickinson are clear - of course, Mr. Johnston is biased, but I'm sure his figures are near right, and I doubt that D&M would dispute his claim in substance;

"If this application gains approval - and political momentum is driving this - then they will gain a monopoly in this 50 million GBP marketplace".

Finally, and most important, Mr. Johnston reports some good news. Northern Foods has not dropped its legal challenge. Rather, there's been some last minute negotiation in the back room, which I've checked through some news sources. The Government has now agreed to conduct a re-evaluation of its administrative decision.

"[T]he reason that the Judicial Review has been adjourned is not as a result of alterations to the region's boundaries (this ploy was attempted last year). Northern Foods object to the applicatrions whether we have factories within the boundaries or not. Instead, it is because Defra have settled with our lawyers, on the grounds that they will re-assess our objections and make a fresh decision on this application. While this represents a positive move, there remains concerns that the application will still be ratified by our friends in London - romanced by the tale of huntsmen and pig herds. I am glad that you for one have not been so deceived".
I'll keep you everyone updated on this critical (for those of us interested in eating pork pies) story.