Ode to a Farmhouse

A farmhouse of white clapboard and black shutters

Had porches with scrolled rails and spindle posts

And in the shade of eaves or leaves of trees

Adirondack chairs reclined in the grass

Where we sipped hot coffee or chilled rosé

While lazy dogs lay sprawled at slippered feet

Lilacs or hyacinths scented the air

In those rooms where jam-jar vases were placed

On holidays, we roasted or braised game

With aromatic herbs and vegetables

We gathered around the long farm table

Set with chipped china and well-worn linens

Fireplaces played as stage sets for portraits

The mantels displayed tarnished silver frames

The knotty pine floors were mostly concealed

With threadbare, flat-weave, Persian kilim rugs

Upholstered furniture wore slipcovers

To guard against dog hair and muddy paws

A battered Louis Vuitton trunk rested

Next to a down comforter–topped mattress

On which English literature was stacked

Including Ms. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Meals at Monticello

Meals at Monticello began a long way from the dining room. The gardens, which were excavated and tended by slaves, were Jefferson’s research laboratory. He cultivated many varieties of plants from seeds he brought back from Europe. As the United States Minister to France, he spent much time in Paris. He was so enamored of the cuisine there that he took his slave, James Hemings, “for the particular purpose of learning French cookery.”

In the kitchen, James Hemings and other slaves prepared dishes at Jefferson’s command. A “stew stove” was built and used by those slaves for braising vegetables and meat by inserting charcoal beneath openings on top.

Other advanced technology for the time included refrigeration. Jefferson had icehouses constructed by slave labor that provided ice for a refrigerator insulated with cloth and rabbit skins.

When the food finally arrived in the house, carried by slaves through an underground passageway, it was placed on shelving attached to a revolving door so that the servants would not be seen in the dining room. The very people who raised, harvested, butchered, prepared, and delivered the meal were invisible to guests.

Piece de Resistance

Finally, after seven months of waiting, the La Cornue range is now cooking with gas in our renovated kitchen (see my posts “Kitchen Renovation” and “A Clean Slate”).

Real Ratatouille

If you read Dirt or listened to the audiobook, you learned how to make real French ratatouille. The process requires you to cook individual ingredients, and then combine at the end for a sort of vegetable stew when hot or relish when cold.

One preparation involves cooking each element separately and to great lengths. Joel Robuchon said:

The secret of a good ratatouille is to cook the vegetables separately so each will taste truly of itself.

As Bill Buford says, it is the taste of a French summer. The recipe comes from Michel Richard, who said his mother served it hot with a roasted chicken the first night and cold as leftovers for the rest of the week.

Shallots, zucchini, eggplant, roasted red peppers (see my post “Roasted Red Peppers”), and tomatoes in equal quantities are needed. The tomatoes must be blanched and skinned first, seeded and roasted slowly with a sprinkle of salt and sugar until dehydrated and “jammy.” Each element is roughly chopped and sauteed separately in olive oil and seasoned with salt. Some garlic, to taste, is added to the shallots. When all parts have been cooked to their respective doneness, they are stirred into one pot with shots of red wine vinegar to taste.

The Dirt

Read the dirt on learning French cuisine in Lyon by a New Yorker writer, who is candid and comic. Even better, listen to the audiobook, which is narrated by the animated author himself.

Restaurant Work

…by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economised. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a mass of other Work has accumulated, and then do it all together, in frantic haste. The result is that at meal-times everyone is doing two men’s work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel except foutre. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say “cuising like a scullion”? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.)

Excerpt from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

The Kitchen

The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and plongeurs [dishwashers] clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously, “Ça marche deux œufs brouillés! Ça marche un Chateau-briand aux pommes sautées!” except when he broke off to curse at a plongeur.

Excerpt from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Cook Your Goose

 

Use Gordon Ramsay’s roasted goose recipe:

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2428/gordons-christmas-roast-goose-

Truc (Tip): It tells how to render the fat to use for roasting tasty potatoes and other vegetables as well.

Double Vision

Brussels sprouts have me seeing double. They can be served shredded as a salad with shaved parmesan or caramelized in bacon fat with a sprinkling of crispy lardons.

For the first preparation, keep the stems on raw sprouts to get a good grip, and slice thin on a mandoline, using the safety grip that comes with it. Toss with a vinaigrette (see my post “A Simple Vinaigrette”), and use a vegetable peeler to shave parmesan on top.

To caramelize, cut thick bacon into lardons and brown in a cast-iron skillet, rendering the fat. Remove lardons to drain on paper, and turn off heat. Preheat oven to 400. Trim the stems of the sprouts and cut in half lengthwise (make sure they are dry). Stir around in pan to coat with bacon fat, and arrange cut side down. Place in oven until tender and brown on bottom. Garnish with lardons, and season if necessary.

Searing Steak

This is how a cote de boeuf is seared in a restaurant:

We let it dry out for 8 days in our walk-in; the meat loses a bit of weight and gets a darker red color. We stop it just before any funkiness, as I prefer a clean beef flavor.

Then when service approaches, we take the steak out and let it rest at room temperature for at least 2 hours; cooking it directly from the fridge would for sure stress the meat.

The oven is turned to 500F.

At pick up, we salt it first and give a sear to color it; we are careful to not flame our pan. If you see a cook on TV with a huge flame in the pan, it means he/she is not in control, God bless their souls, but he/she is just molesting that steak, so always a nice sear but nothing too brown and absolutely not black.

When this is done, we put our cote de boeuf in the oven upright, yes always upright; the bone up, trust me, is the only way to get a steak of that size perfect.

Now that it is upright in the oven, we cook it for exactly 14 minutes for perfect French medium-rare—anything over is not molestation but murder.

We take it out of the oven, put a good piece of butter on it and cover with foil resting on a rack for a good 10 minutes—this is a must.

Now time to pick up the steak again, we sear a second time. Add a good amount of butter with some thyme, some cloves of garlic still in the jacket, and keep the butter always bubbling. Baste the beef over and over; we control the color of our butter with a spray of water, so it never burns, and drizzle it on the steak.

Truc (Tip): In a restaurant, a steak might be accompanied by a Bearnaise sauce, which is complicated. A blue cheese sauce is much easier to make. Melt crumbled Roquefort, gorgonzola, or any other fromage bleu into some heavy cream until thick, and season.

Spring a Leek

 

The tender bulb of a baby leek can be left intact, and not chopped; and even the green leaves are edible. When the leek is fully grown, fibers prevent preparations of the whole leek and the green part must be discarded (or used in stocks). Buy them the size of a full-grown scallion or green onion.

The mild onion flavor pairs well with beef, and this is a simple sauce: Trim baby leeks of the roots and only the ends of the leaves and blanch in salted water, shocking in iced water (to keep the greenness). Sautée a shallot in 30 grams of butter until soft, splash in a little dry vermouth or white wine, and add 120 grams of heavy cream. Place leeks in sauce, season, and simmer until tender. For presentation, top with the seared steak of your choice.

The Lusty Truffle

What would Pepe le Pew think of the Perigord truffle, which is described like this:

The classic black truffle smells of lust: soil, mold, garlic, sweat, ripe mushrooms, hazelnuts, sweet onions, an animal in heat.