Week #25 Rustic French

A lot of people think of French food as oh-so posh and la-di-da. Anyone who's dined at a high end French restaurant would be justified in making that assessment, what with the classic plating, pretty garnishes and all the other niceties of haute experience. But then there's rustic French, which is more reflective of the necessity of using everything available and letting nothing go to waste, a legacy of hard times throughout the centuries. French cooks have done such an exemplary job of taking their resources and producing something good, that you're convinced it must be fancy. Americans are wealthy enough (relatively speaking) to chuck out the bones, organs and other odd bits they've grown unaccustomed to eating--or that they connect with lean times. But these are the parts that make some of the best, most satisfying food, and French cooks are masters at utilizing it all.

This is what I kept thinking about as we enjoyed our rustic French dinner recently. I noted throughout the evening that our meal looked like a study of food preservation methods. Since it was late wintertime, this meal reflected what we'd be eating when we're relying on our reserves of food and awaiting the return of springtime and a new growing season.

We had the good fortune to dine with our friends, Bert and Noel, who have spent a considerable amount of time in France for more years than they likely want to admit. Bert knows his way around France--and French cuisine--like he knows his way around his own house, so we went to Cafe des Artistes in Hollywood with our own personal authenticity meter, and we let him order. It was a nibbly night, meaning we enjoyed a succession of appetizers and dishes to share around the table. I'd eat every meal this way if my dinner partners were always amenable. It's a good way to try a lot of dishes, and it's more fun to share and discuss.

 

The house paté and house rillettes were served with onion marmalade and cornichons and lots of toasted baguette slices. Marmalade is a tasty way to preserve onions when you have a bumper crop. Cornichons, of course, are tiny pickled cucumbers. Rillettes and paté represent similar methods of preserving meat for future use, paté by collecting, grinding and seasoning meats, then pressing the mixture into a mold and cooking it.

  

Rillettes is meat cooked slowly in its own fat, then pulverized with some of that fat and seasoned to form a rich spread. It keeps well when you spoon it into ramekins and cover it with a thin layer of fat, which seals out the air. The cornichons and marmalade added the sweet and sour notes that kept these fat-happy meats from being too rich.

  

 This Alsatian tart flambée was made with farm cheese, bacon and onion. Of course, bacon and cheese represent ways of preserving pork and milk for later consumption. My only problem with this tart was that as a Tennessee farm girl, naturally I assume all bacon will be smoked. The French just don't do it this way. Still, it was really good, but if I ever make this tart, the bacon I use will be smoked!

  

No, the French don't call it French onion soup! Soupe a l'oignon gratinée is good way to utilize a surplus of onions once you've made enough marmalade. When you slowly, slowly, slowly cook down those onions, you discover how much water there is in them, and when it's all cooked away, you're left with a little bit of rich, sweet yummy onion confiture. Simmer this with some beef stock, made with those bones you didn't throw away. Ladle it over some stale bread that you didn't throw away just because it was stale (it's good for making croutons, too, by the way), grate some cheese over it (gruyere for authenticity, emmental if you'd rather) and hit it with the heat. Et voila! You have one of the best, most nourishing and satisfying bowls of soup ever.

 

Our concession to France's north African influence was an appetizer of grilled merguez sausages, made of lamb. We dunked them into harrisa, which added a zingy little accent to our French meal. Maybe it's not as ubiquitous as Indian food is in England, but still such dishes are growing in popularity around France.

  

You can't get any more hearty-peasant than cassoulet--duck confit in a pot of beans and veggies with browned crumbs on top. Confit is a method of preserving meat, especially pork, duck and goose, by cooking and storing its own fat--similar to rillettes, except that those pieces of confit are kept whole. This dish and these meat preservation methods originated in the southwest of France. I'm not proud of it, but hey, I snatched that duck leg!

 

When there's good cheese to be had, for me it trumps dessert every time. Goat cheese, bleu and morbier with dried fruits and nuts were the perfect finish to our meal. France boasts several hundred cheeses, so we have our work cut out for us. What a happy chore that would be...

With a meal is this satisfying, accompanied by a generous flow of Cote du Rhone, why would you need fancy presentation and such? I'll take rustic cuisine over haute any day!

Cheese Fell Down . . . Went Boom!

It turns out that success in the water-bath cooking portion of cheese making is crucial in getting the curds to hold together. After 24 hours of pressing--that's 12 hours on one side, flip and 12 hours on the other--when we removed the curds from the mold and attempted to peel away the cheesecloth, the curds crumbled to bits.
So we're back to square one. Buy two more gallons of whole milk and begin again. But that's okay. This is how you learn. Sad to say, but usually your own mistakes will teach you more than the mistakes of others. That's not so bad when you're talking about mistakes in the kitchen, but devastating if you're talking about something like, say, war!

The good news is, that mass of pressed curd tastes yummy. In a scant 24 hours, it has already gained the sharpness of a good cheddar. So we'll enjoy it, crumbled into omelettes and over frittatas. And right off the board, eaten with our fingers.

How many of life's mistakes are this good?

Blessed Are the Cheese Makers

Andy and I bought a cheese making kit yesterday and spent this evening fashioning our inaugural cheese, a farmhouse cheddar.

As we worked, Cosmo and Blaze both danced around under our feet and paraded about the kitchen, meowing their admiration for shared milk and milk products. They got samples all along, just like we did.

As the curds cooked slowly in their water bath--which is pretty tricky for a beginner to manipulate properly--Andy gently broke them up so they didn't turn into an unruly mass. (In case you're wondering, the apron says, "Don't make me poison your food." We don't tend to wear that one when we have company over for dinner.)

Ladling the curds into the cheesecloth for draining. After all these years of using cheesecloth, it's cool finally getting the chance to use it for the purpose for which it was originally created!

Draining the curds to get rid of the extra whey--which we will use to make ricotta. It's great getting a second cheese from this enterprise.

Mixing fine salt into the curds. If you're a seasoned cheese maker, you'll note that these curds are too small. Beginner's mistake--we let the water bath get too warm too fast. We'll see if this affects either flavor or texture in the long run.

The curds in their mold rest under 20 pounds of pressure--actually, a little more. Yes, those are hand weights and a can of tomatoes. It's smart to use what you have on hand before investing in a proper cheese press, just in case you discover you really don't enjoy making cheese.

While the future-cheddar did its initial draining, we simmered the remaining whey, skimmed the second batch of curds and made ricotta from that. The first taste told us it would be great for breakfast, so we mixed in some sugar seasoned with vanilla, cinnamon and cardamom and popped it into the fridge.

Of course, we dirtied up every implement in the kitchen and got in each other's way and probably did at least a dozen things in the least efficient way possible, but that's okay. This is our foray into cheese making. The more you do anything, the better you get at it. And we both feel like this is something we'll want to do again and again and again . . . So eventually, we'll streamline the operation and--we hope--begin producing cheese like pros.

As the mass of curds sits beneath its homemade press overnight, we keep sneaking peeks at it, resting securely in the laundry room, so the cats can't get at it. It's like a first time bread baker admiring the dough as it rises.

Ah, there's such wisdom to be gleaned from The Life of Brian. Andy and I do feel blessed to be trying something new, that promises to yield a tasty and rewarding product in the end. And we feel blessed to be having a good time working on this project together. Yes indeed, blessed are the cheese makers!

We’ll Always Have Paris

As I read the blog of my colleague, Jackie, who just returned from eating her way through Paris (Jackie, I hope you packed your stretchy pants!), I’m recalling my visits there and wishing I’d been blogging in those days.

Well, it’s a toss-up. If I HAD been blogging then, I’d have spent precious time at the computer instead of exploring. But blogging forces you to pay more attention to what you’re seeing, eating and experiencing. Also, you can sit in an Internet café and capture your experiences at the keyboard when your feet have had all of the Louvre or the Great Wall of China or (you fill in the tourist-must-see) they can handle for one day. (Sometimes being in the Internet café becomes the experience itself. Once I was caught in a blackout in one with an array of people from all over the world during a fierce thunderstorm in Siena, Italy. Being inside that stone maze of a town with the thunder rolling through, I felt as if I were a pin in God’s own bowling alley!)

On my most recent trip to Paris, this time with my husband, Andy, we stayed in a great bed and breakfast in Montmartre, in a neighborhood where we lived as temporary locals. We saw tourists and other Americans only when we ventured beyond the few blocks where we bought our groceries and typed our e-mails. The shopkeepers were startled to see us, and many spoke no English at all. But our curiosity about authentic local foods and our willingness to try to communicate in French—as pathetic as we were at it—melted any negative feelings they might have had about tourists. They treated us graciously and with hospitality.

Tomatoes like this will make you want to dodge the supermarket forever after.

“Bonjour! Je voudrais deux baguettes, s’il vous plaît” (pronounced badly) began to come to me easily (In case you have even less French that I do, that’s, “Good morning, I’d like two baguettes, please.”) We shopped for our food the way Parisians do—bread from the boulangerie, cheese from the fromagerie, fruit and veg from the sidewalk stands and sweets from the pâtisserie. This made for great snacking, picnicking and eating at home when we were just too tired to leave the flat after a long day of prowling. Eating this way was also less expensive, but, more importantly, it allowed us to get an idea of how Parisians go about their daily lives.

The street view from our window: the meringue-like basilica of Sacré Coeur and
the intriguing cemetery of Montmartre were a quick stroll away.

While we ate our share of meals out—always looking for places where the locals dined—we took many of our meals in our B&B, a flat we had all to ourselves in one of the many Haussmann-styled buildings that give Paris its seven-stories-with-a-balcony-covered-in-geraniums look. (They don’t call ’em “French doors” for nothing!) Each day while we were out and about, our hostess, Francoise, would sneak in and leave a round of creamy camembert for us in our tiny kitchen, a bottle of wine, or, once she decided she liked us, a jar of her mother’s wonderful homemade strawberry jam.

Our kitchen window offered an array of fresh herbs and
a view of the neighbors’ kitchen windows and THEIR fresh herbs.

Jackie rhapsodizes in her blog about the macarons at Ladurée and Pierre Hermé—and the pictures she took certainly back her up--at least visually. While I haven’t made it to Hermé yet, Ladurée was a revelation in the way Parisians take their time and take their afternoon repast. And yes, I, like many food-obsessed visitors to Paris, have since tried to make macarons, with varying degrees of success.

My first attempt at making macarons—trickier than a soufflé, they are.

And she apologizes for misspellings, since she’s typing on a different keyboard. That’s a travel frustration I find intriguing—what are all those extra characters on the keyboard? And where did they move the @ sign? When you’re blogging or e-mailing from a foreign keyboard, you find yourself fumbling as if you’re back in Typing I class. After awhile, you peck out a hasty “sorry for the typos” and keep right on going, because you’re under the gun, spending both time and money (as in by-the-minute Internet charges) so you don’t want to waste any of either.

So what if it’s been almost two years since our last visit to Paris? There's no blogging statute of limitations, is there? One of the pleasures of travel is that by looking at photos and recounting to others what you did while you were there, you continue revisiting a place for years to come. We'll always have Paris, as Monsieur Rick says. He's right. And so is Hemingway. Paris IS a movable feast, but the urge is strong to return and plunge once more into its sights, sounds, textures, tastes and aromas . . . its Paris-ness!

Where else would you find door handles made of copper pans and lids?

To whet your appetite with great pix and commentary, check out Jackie’s blog, Foodie Reflections. Welcome back, Jackie!

And if you want to see some of our meals and get a feel for our visit, more photos of our trip to Paris are located in the Tours section of my website, Hungry Passport Culinary Adventures. Just click on the Eiffel Tower photo on the right hand side.

Maybe by the time I return they'll have that leaky-sphynx problem taken care of!

Some things are just too odd not to shoot a picture of.
(I just noticed our reflection in the glass in front of this poster!)

Au revoir!