Cassoulet Day III
The cassoulet is now reheating and I am thinking of how best to photograph it. Cassoulet is traditionally served in a small earthenware or metal dish, but any dish that fills a bowl to the top makes for a difficult photograph. The result tends to look either like a soup or a dog's dinner. These are not attractive presentations for much the same reason. Food presentation is now veering away a little from the idea of the vertical - which can be attractive and impressive, but is often tedious and difficult to tackle. Trends are more towards interesting horizontal presentations with plenty of color and texture variation, often served on whimsical or unusual plates. One way to serve cassoulet would be to use a four compartment plate, with a piece of duck in one section, a sausage in another, some pork in a third and a small bowl of beans in the fourth. A bit contrary to the spirit of French country cuisine. In the end the cassoulet was eaten enthusiastically, with some (positive) comments that it was not as rich as the one from last year that featured the andouillettes.
The presentation was not too radical, but I did strive to avoid the dog's dinner look.
This method means you don't serve as much of the beans as in the dish approach, but people came back for more beans. It didn't really form much of a crust, but this tends not to happen unless you use breadcrumbs, which the purists deem incorrect. The Tarbais beans have a better texture than Great Northern, but they taste fairly similar. After the extended cooking the beans end up tasting mostly like the rest of the cassoulet. One person said that she thought they could have been a bit mushier. The confit did not dry out and all of the meat was very tender. As always at this point, we have a fair amount left over, mostly beans and liquid. Overall, I would give Mr Bourdain's cassoulet an 8/10.
Food for dogs
We have two dogs in our house, who clearly enjoy their food. They get up in the morning very ready for breakfast. Their dinner is at six thirty and the two of them get pretty anxious about an hour beforehand. They get the same food every mealtime, some sort of brown chunks. This would not just drive me mad with boredom but would cut out a vitally interesting portion of the day. Are we right to assume that dogs wouldn't enjoy variety in their diet? Jeffrey Steingarten writes well about cooking for his dog and the enjoyment they both got out of the process. Yesterday the dogs each got a portion of gravy from the bottom of the bowl of goose fat when I was making the confit. This was greeted with much enthusiasm, but frankly they will both eat pretty much anything, and seem to display almost the same level of interest in whatever is served. I often come across recipes for dog treats and they all seem a bit of a waste of time.
Cats seem to be different. We had one who went into a frenzy if there was smoked salmon being served. Incidentally, note how our labrador is apparently embarrassed by the camera. Part of the attraction of dogs is how they appear to have emotions that are like ours. If this is really true, maybe we should think about giving them a more varied diet.
Pasta with tarragon and basil
Recipe books are full of pasta recipes with a sauce composed of "what is in the cupboard." Here is another that is also extremely quick. Tarragon and basil are excellent when lightly cooked. With fresh pasta you could produce this meal in less than ten minutes.
Handful of fresh tarragon
Handful of fresh basil
I clove of garlic
1/4 cup of good olive oil
Parmesan cheese
I pound of fresh pasta
salt and pepper
Chop the herbs into strips and the garlic into very small pieces. Heat the olive oil in a small pan until hot but not smoking and add the garlic. Immediately take the pan off the heat. Garlic cut into very small pieces will cook almost instantly, and burns very easily. Cook the pasta in rapidly boiling salted water, drain and place in a large pre-warmed bowl. Toss the pasta in half of the garlic oil, and add the herbs and ground pepper. Add enough of the remaining oil slowly while tossing the pasta, until it is lightly coated, but no more. You don't want the pasta sitting in a pool of oil.
Serve in warmed bowls with grated cheese on top.
Cassoulet Day II
Second day with the cassoulet. The Tarbais beans get much larger after the soaking process. Some of them didn't seem to expand at all and resembled a .22 bullet in size and texture, so I sorted through and picked these ones out. The next step involves dumping everything - beans, pork belly, rind, onions and a bouquet garni - into a pot and simmering until the beans are tender. The pale chunk in the middle is a big piece of pork rind. Anthony Bourdain's recipe is a bit confusing. After I took the picture I reread the recipe. It says later to brown the squares of rind, but it never says to cut it up at any stage. Anyway I took the pork rind out at this point and cut it up. The beans took a little longer than one hour to cook. I stopped when they still had a bite to them, and when cool the beans were tender without being mushy. The pot I used is an All-Clad - a Christmas present - with a heavy base, which makes it a lot easier to keep a very slow simmer going. I have found from previous cassoulets that this is the crucial step. If the beans are over-cooked you are going to have a disaster on your hands. Great Northern beans may be slightly more prone to going to a mush than Tarbais.
The next step is browning the sausages in goose fat and then onions, garlic and the pieces of pork rind. This is all blended up together with some more goose fat into a gooey puree.
Now, assembly. I seemed not to have enough beans. I started off with a bottom layer that was too thick and ran out of beans for the top. Undaunted, I di
sassembled everything and started again, which given that everything was now covered with the puree added between layers, was quite messy. The kitchen at this point started to resemble an emergency room - miscellaneous unidentifiable chunks everywhere and a mounting tension in the air. Eventually I got it all together. In fact, if I had more beans I would have had nowhere to put them. Bourdain's assembly method is a little unusual in that he has the duck confit on the top, instead of the sausage. I am a little concerned that they will dry out, as there weren't enough beans to cover the duck entirely. The final result is shown in the picture. Again, equipment is important. I have a huge Le Creuset pot that is really ideal for this kind of project. I was a bit tempted to reverse the order and put sausage on top, but I always try to make a recipe exactly as described on the first occasion, because if you make a change on the first try you don't really know if it is an improvement or not. I love reading the recipe comments on epicurious.com, where people post their variations: "This worked great!!! My husband really liked it. I used red cranberry juice instead of burgundy, and substituted eggplant for the filet mignon. Four stars ****!!". You wonder what the family really thought.
Finally I cooked the cassoulet for one hour at 350F and another hour at 250F. Refrigerated overnight in our chilly garage, it awaits the morrow.
Confit de gésiers II
This morning I finished the gizzard confit broadly following Paula Wolfert. After you rinse off the marinade you cook them very slowly in the goose fat, keeping them completely immersed. She advocates taking an hour to raise the temperature to 190F and then holding it there for another hour. The garlic bulb in the picture is halved and placed under the fat. It is a little difficult to make sure that you have even heat. If you stir them around they tend to come to the surface and then have to be carefully redistributed so that the gizzards are all immersed. The top half of the garlic bulb completely disintegrated into individual cloves (all cut in half). After the cooking the gizzards are removed and you have to purify the fat at a higher temperature to drive off the water. Then the gizzards are stored immersed in the fat. For this I used three spring-closure glass jars, with "Le Parfait" on the lid, one large and two small. They are t
he kind that foie gras is packed in, although I think one of them came with some kind of jam. They should give an air-tight seal. Wolfert adds a layer of lard to the top for long-term storage, but these should be a good substitute. I saved all of the garlic to use as a spread. It is very smooth and almost nutty, with a mild garlic flavor.
This whole process was easy but time-consuming. I managed to get a thin layer of goose fat all over the kitchen counter-tops. The net result is a rather small amount of confit. When I started I thought I had far too much gizzrds, but they seem to reduce down in the process. I tried one and it was quite firm with a pleasant mellow taste, but quite mild. I want to wait to try them for at least a month.
Confit de gésiers
Lunch menus in France often feature a salade composée of confit de gésiers. The gizzards are alone or with duck confit and sometimes cured ham. Alternatively this is labeled salade périgord. (I am not clear what defines a salade périgord but it seems to require walnuts and walnut oil.) I have often bought confit de gésiers in a can at the duty-free on the way home, and they are always good. Last week I saw huge bags of gizzards in the market and this started me thinking. After cooking a goose I have a lot of the fat, so this seems like an opportunity to try making confit de gésiers myself.
None of my cookbooks has a specific recipe for gizzard confit. Google hits are almost all for the salads, and list gésiers as an ingredient. I found a very few recipes for making gizzard confit, but these seemed to aim for a dish to be eaten immediately or a short time afterwards. I want something I can put in my fridge for several months. I then thought of using a standard confit recipe, and turned to Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France, which has authoritative recipes for duck and goose confit. Wolfert simply includes gizzards among a list of duck parts suitable for the confit treatment. Her method is definitely aimed at longer storage.
At the market this morning I asked for duck gizzards, and found out that only chicken ones were available, so bought a pound and a half. They don't look hugely appetizing at this stage, I have to admit. Paula Wolfert calls for a dry marinade of herbs, lots of salt, crushed peppercorns, shallots and herbs. This sits in the fridge until tomorrow, then the action begins.
On a slightly different topic: another dish I never see on US menus is veal sweetbreads. I asked the butcher at the veal stand in the market, and he says they have great difficulty getting them. He had one small one, about three ounces, that he offered to give me. He promised to call around and find out if anyone carries them in any quantity. I don't see why they are common on French menus and practically unobtainable here. I also tried and failed to to find a mail order store advertising veal sweetbreads.
Cassoulet - Day I
A trip to the market this morning to get the rest of what I need for a cassoulet - assembled on the left. At the back of the picture you can see the haricots tarbais, under the herbs is a package of duck confit. Beside the beans is a bowl of goose fat, much more than I will need. Some cassoulet recipes call for mutton as well as pork, but this one uses only pork belly and pork rind. At the market they sell pork belly with the rind attached, which at least guarantees that they are of the same freshness. It takes a bit of time to remove the rind without cutting into the skin or taking lots of pork belly with it. The only task for today is to put the beans to soak under cold water. Not too difficult. Working with pork belly reminds me of that terrific Chinese braised aromoatic pork belly recipe. It is very easy to make and is something that you don't usually find on the American Chinese menu. Not to everyone's taste because of the fat in the pork belly.
Tarbais beans are different from Great Northern beans - larger, flatter and almost rectangular in shape.
The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook
Tomorrow I plan to cook risotto for vegetarian friends. I ate a memorable vegetarian risotto two years ago at the Café Paradiso in Cork, in the south of Ireland. It was cooked exactly the right amount, with a proper bite. The rice concealed small, crisp, asparagus heads and sugar snap peas, and had a full rounded flavor that I had thought impossible without chicken stock. As I left I bought The Café Paradiso Cookbook by Denis Cotter, the founder and chef, which sets out his and his partner Bridget’s ideas about risotto. He discusses in depth the recommended broth, the exact cooking speed and stirring technique, and the desired final consistency. His recipe calls for olive oil and butter in addition to the parmesan cheese at the end, and he garnishes the risotto with basil oil before serving. The recipe isn’t difficult but, like the others in the book, it demands attention to detail. The photography in the book is compelling and attractive, and has some arresting tinted black-and-white restaurant-action shots, as well as high-quality food photographs. Cotter doesn't preach about vegetarianism and he sets out to attract the general, mostly omnivorous, population. His is quite serious cuisine and some of the recipes in the book are involved and time-consuming.
The Café Paradiso has a casual atmosphere but it is has been described as “the best vegetarian restaurant in Europe”. This book shows why.
Denis Cotter has written three more books – all available in the US at Amazon, but you seem to have to go to the Amazon UK site for his original Paradiso Cookbook.
Christmas Wine
A sobering number of wine bottles went out for recycling this morning. The highlights (all consumed on Christmas Day): Veuve Cliquot, 2001, half
Chablis premier cru, Vaillons, Moreau, 2001
Chateau Palmer, Margaux, 1994
Chateau Les Roches de Ferrand, Fronsac, 1985
Chateau Lafaurie-Peyraguey, Sauternes, 1996, half
The Palmer had a splendid, full nose but was more reserved on the palate, with not much tannin evident, and a long, balanced finish. This is a lovely, refined and undramatic wine in excellent condition, with none of the thin shortness you sometimes see during a weak year for lesser wines. It will continue to improve. I was a little concerned because I bought this recently for $49.99 Prices elsewhere for the same year range from $56 at WineZap to a steep €113 at the duty-free in Charles de Gaulle airport. On web sites the prices vary substantially.The Fronsac was feeling tired and old, but so were we when we opened it, and we only had a small amount of the bottle. Today it was a little tawny in color, and showing some acid. Little nose, but smooth and rounded. An obscure wine I have only seen in one store near us, but very good value, selling for around $12.
Le Meurice and L’Ardoise
I have a link to Chez Pim on the right, because this year she pointed me towards two excellent restaurants in Paris, Le Meurice, and L’Ardoise. The first is the 2-star restaurant in the Hotel Meurice, serious French cuisine at its best. The dining-room is spectacular and the service is faultless, but both are over-shadowed by the food. The nine-course menu dégustation (€170) is a virtuoso display by the 35-year old chef Yannick Alléno. It carefully takes you through a series of exquisitely prepared dishes that were each surprising but seemed exactly right at that point in the meal. A single foie gras poached in red wine was the only dish that our daughter passed to her brother. The three-course dessert selection was gorgeously presented and delicious. (Le Meurice has an entertaining web site.)
L’Ardoise comes from the opposite spectrum in cost but is also outstanding in its category. The restaurant is in two stories of an unfancy dining-room, and is somewhat on the tourist track in the 1eme. (The location on rue du Mont-Thabor is just behind the Hotel Meurice). The food is considerably beyond regular bistro fare both in the choices available and the quality. The first time there I ate a starter of marinaded Mediterranean sardines followed by sweetbreads and a potato galette. I have returned several times and have never been disappointed. The prix-fixe menu is €33 which is a complete steal for food of this variety and quality.
Cassoulet
For no obvious reason I have got into the habit of making an annual cassoulet between Christmas and New Year. It takes a bit of time and some diligent shopping, so it fits into the slot when I have some time off work. Cassoulet suits cold weather, although the south-west of France isn’t exactly Bismarck, North Dakota. I would like to say that this annual ritual is greeted with enthusiasm by my family, but it is usually met with “Oh God! Cassoulet again!” I have got progressively more adventurous and maybe I am starting to try everyone’s patience.
For several years I used Julia Child’s recipe, which is innocuous enough, and produces a good result, but doesn’t use duck confit. Last year I tried a recipe from Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of South-West France, which has an excellent chapter devoted to cassoulet. Her Cassoulet in the Style of Toulouse uses andouillettes, which impart a very gamey accent to an already rich dish. The result was too much for some, and those that did eat it did so slowly and thoughtfully, firmly refusing second helpings . This year I will go for something less cutting-edge. I still favor duck confit, although Paula Wolfert quotes Michel Guérard describing this as “a sophistication of dubious value”. Duck confit is getting much easier to obtain and is now behind the butcher’s counter in our local supermarket. I plan to use Anthony Bourdain’s recipe, which is authentic without being over-elaborate. He doesn’t resort to bread crumbs for the crust and he specifies the correct Tarbais beans. His version calls for making your own confit. I have never done this, mostly because it is now easy to buy it and I never seem to have enough duck fat – you need about two cups. Julia Child makes her own sausages to replace Saucisse de Toulouse. I got these and the Tarbais beans from Joie de Vivre, who also distribute cassoulet produced by a Canadian company.
This is next week’s project. I will post photos and the consumer reviews. Photographing cassoulet may be a challenge - the picture of the front of Joie de Vivre's latest catalog features a dish of cassoulet in an unappetizing series of browns.
Vue Restaurant, Hudson, Ohio – Review
I wonder how often a professional reviewer visits a restaurant before writing it up. Several times would be ideal. Otherwise you might judge a restaurant on an off-day. Against that, the same face appearing often might lead to the better service accorded to a regular.
I have eaten at Vue in Hudson six times in the last two months, a combination of business and personal, lunch and dinner, as a guest and a host in parties of up to eight people. Vue has been mostly good, sometimes excellent, but not consistent. The menu is interesting and varied, and the service is attentive without being intrusive. Vue can be expensive but, especially at lunch, doesn’t have to be. The wine list is broad and has tempting selections. They had an excellent 1992 Stags’ Leap Merlot (now, unfortunately, all gone), plus a strong selection of wines by the glass – a very good Barolo and Chateau d’Yquem (at $40, one way of making a meal expensive).
The style is heavily Asian-fusion – sushi nights twice during the week – with a largely fish entrée menu. The excellent sushi/sashimi starter is a meal by itself. A lobster tasting comes in four elegant preparations, including ravioli and a small amount of bisque. A calamari appetizer comes with sauce based on dried cranberries - an improvement on the usual sweet concoctions. The entrées aren’t based on exotic ingredients. Although some work better than others, presentations are inventive. The sushi rolls are large and tend to fall apart. One evening these had been made in advance – the rice was cold and compacted. A salmon dish wrapped in fried pasta was almost too complicated to eat without small pieces of crisp noodle going everywhere. At the most recent visit my daughter’s hazelnut-crusted salmon was slightly over-cooked. My braised short rib on garlic mashed potatoes (an unadventurous choice but suitable for a wintry evening) was simple and balanced. A flounder dish came with scallops and shrimps in a garlic tomato sauce that complemented the robust fish.
The décor is adventurous and inviting, although the dining room is sometimes cold. If you sit close to the entrance you are going to get regular blasts of wintry air when anyone leaves. Did Vue engage an architect from Phoenix? Most evenings have been busy, and although the tables are close together the room is not overly loud.
Plates are elongated or square and silverware has a pleasant heft. Getting huge plates in front of the diners was sometimes a challenge. The longer ones extend like SUVs into neighboring parking slots.
Some things I would prefer to be different. The portions are too large, the endemic problem with the Midwest restaurant. An appetizer should be small and enticing, not a meal in itself. The bread was not very interesting and dry. I have a prejudice against servers introducing themselves. Other things are less a matter of opinion and more poor organization. It is jarring when you order a second bottle of wine to be told that you have just drunk the last one. If you ask for a glass of wine to go with appetizers it should be on the table before the food arrives. Several of these inconsistencies together could produce a seriously bad evening. I have heard some less enthusiastic comments. One friend who lives within walking distance said that it wasn’t worth the journey. Others have been highly enthusiastic, and Vue seems to be consistently quite busy.
Overall this is an ambitious venture that mostly succeeds in what it sets out to do, and with Downtown 140, a welcome addition to the conservative dining choices in the area.
Full disclosure: at my last and sixth visit our party was given a tray of small desserts on the house – more in fact than we could eat. Those portions sizes again.
Monbazillac
I found a bottle of 1989 Monbazillac at my local wine store yesterday. The owner came across it in his cellar recently and put it on display with no price on it. When I asked him how much it was, he said that he didn't know if it was still any good and charged me $9.99 The wine is Domaine de la Brie Basse. I can't find anything about it on the Web. There is a Chateau La Brie, located in Domaine de la Brie, but nothing about a wine of that name. It is a deep, almost orange/yellow color. For $10 it seemed worth a try. The level of the wine is a little low but it is above the shoulders, and being a very sweet wine it should have been able to take care of itself for sixteen years. We will see.
Goose
When I was young(er) our family always had turkey for Christmas, but we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving where we were, so this meant that we were not doomed to turkey more than once a year. Having had our Thanksgiving turkey this year we have to decide what to eat for Christmas dinner. A small and unscientific poll at my office suggests that only a few people endure turkey twice within five weeks. There are many things to be said it. It is difficult to cook without turning the breast into cotton wool just when the legs are done. Its near-spherical shape means that stuffing cooks slowly inside the bird, which according to some is a health hazard. The meat is lean so tends to be a bit dry. Finally, the average turkey is so huge that for all but the largest families there is a daunting pile of leftovers.
There are several popular alternatives to turkey. Ham is a favorite, but it can often be a bit salty. A standing rib roast is also popular but not everyone wants it cooked the same amount. Pheasant is in season now and good for a small group, although they can be tough and full of shot. I have never cooked venison, but I am told it isn’t easy because of the very lean meat . I think of lamb as best in spring, and so not a good winter dish. This is probably completely false, but I remain a bit prejudiced against it for Christmas. There are more exotic options. When we lived in Pittsburgh we used to see elderly Italians buying their traditional Christmas octopus in the city market. Barring all of these, the option that more people should consider is roast goose.
Goose used to be the European Christmas dish. Dickens talks sentimentally about goose in The Christmas Carol. Goose features in Conan Doyle (The Blue Carbuncle describes a valuable gem concealed inside a Christmas goose). The bird has a lot going for it beyond Victorian tradition – generally not a trustworthy guide in matters of food, anyway. A goose isn’t huge, so you aren’t eating it for a week. It cooks reasonably quickly, it doesn’t dry out and it goes well with many different types of stuffing. There are many interesting and reliable recipes for goose in standard cookbooks, and provided you don’t completely overcook it, goose will always taste excellent, albeit a little richer and more filling than turkey. If you are careful you can get a goose to render an impressive amount of useful fat – an excellent medium for sautéing. Any meat left over is very good cold.
Goose has a few drawbacks. A deceptively large bird will feed comparatively few. Don’t plan on seating fourteen unless you have two geese. A goose is more expensive than turkey. (Mine was around $3.60 per pound). It is needs careful cooking to render the fat from the skin and it can be tricky to carve due to its elongated shape. Goose doesn’t pack on the pounds as co-operatively as a young turkey does, so has escaped the mass-production process – but this is another argument in its favor. It seems difficult to get a fresh goose, at least where I live.
You need to plan the meal around the goose. What you eat with it should reflect the fact that goose has a higher proportion of fat than turkey. Goose plus gratin dauphinoise potatoes and chestnuts wrapped in bacon all under hollandaise sauce will induce nausea and will close arteries around the table. Boiled potatoes, slow-cooked red cabbage and green vegetables go well, but I also like a Julia Child’s sausage and apple stuffing recipe, which isn’t exactly low-fat. Sauces should be on the lighter side.
What to drink? Goose goes well with reasonably assertive dry whites, but can handle and justify high-end red.
Phood Phobias
The ultimate food snobbery seems to be the conceit held by some parents that their children have sophisticated tastes in food. ‘Tiffany just loves sushi!” or “Jason can’t bear his duck breast overdone!” Parents project on children – nowhere more so than in the area of culinary refinement. There is a double claim to distinction here. The first is that the household in question maintains a very elevated level of cuisine; the second is that the children of the house recognize and appreciate this. Most of these parents will experience a profound disappointment when their precocious gourmets suddenly turn into monovores.
Children will eat almost anything if exposed to it at an early enough age – they have to survive after all. At a certain point coinciding with increased mobility a sudden conservatism sets in. Some of this is obviously an evolved protection. When babies can walk around they become vulnerable to accidental poisoning. Since equatorial regions contain a variety of deadly fruits and seeds, an unwillingness to eat unfamiliar vegetables would be strongly favored by natural selection. It is a commonplace that vegetables are anathema for all children. Our two teenagers will still not eat any squash, and are notably unenthusiastic about most other vegetables. Their distaste for mushrooms is completely explained by natural selection. Oddly, the general reluctance extends to new foods offered by parents, who presumably are trustworthy and in evolutionary terms are on the children’s side. Most infant palates suddenly become rigidly conservative and not very subtle. Our children, when faced with risotto, would wail “Not sticky rice again!” Their ideal dinner for many years was waffles and a peculiar kind of frozen fruit heated into a viscous sauce. This still creeps on to the menu from time to time when I am out of town. A close relative who is fine cook and keeps a varied and interesting table is forced to make two versions of Bolognese sauce, the one for her children excluding not only chicken liver (understandable) but also carrots. These same children have exquisitely discriminating senses used to detect slight occurrences of any of an extensive list of forbidden ingredients. A dish will be spurned on the suspicion that it contains parmesan cheese, often when it is some distance from the table.
The distaste for new foods usually declines as children grow up. Most adults have some foods they will refuse to eat, probably also a survival instinct. I like to think that my reluctance to eat brains – and I will eat almost anything else – is an ancient protection against BSE. Many adults, though, retain their childish prejudices intact. What you don’t eat by forty you probably will reject forever, and some adults resolutely refuse to try new things. It is often tempting to say, as to a child “How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tasted it?” Frequent traveler in Asia will often be asked how they manage to eat the food. The reply that is it almost always very good is met with scepticism.
Beyond their children's early years if parents make conscious moves to introduce a child to alternative foods an open-minded attitude will gradually develop. These moves include taking children frequently to restaurants, introducing new foods and getting children involved in the process of cooking.
If parents completely skip one class of food they raise an adult who “doesn’t eat” fish/celery/carrots/offal… The prejudice against offal is common since it disappeared from American childhood. I had a boss once, an extremely intelligent and cultivated Frenchman, who would rigorously interrogate a waiter to ensure that no trace of fish appeared in any of his food, yet was completely unable to state when he had ever eaten fish and what his reaction had been. There is seldom logic in this. Another colleague will eat no fish at all, except tuna, cooked fashionably rare, and clams. Some distastes are associated with hardship. An acquaintance of mine served as advance reconnaissance in Vietnam and was forced to eat such a wide range of food as a matter of survival that he is now strictly a meat and potatoes person. In Ireland, shellfish was associated in the minds of older people in the country with lack of alternatives and is known as “famine-food”, a race memory dating back to the 1850s.
French children do seem to have been exposed to a greater range and variety of foods and consequently have fewer blind spots, my former boss notwithstanding.
Few of us can claim to be truly open-minded. I have tried, and been repulsed, by a certain fried insect considered a great delicacy in Venezuela. I would certainly blanch at the live cobra heart that Anthony Bourdain was presented in The Cook’s Tour, but perhaps if it was part of a lucrative television series I might force it past the gag reflex.
Fashion is a powerful opener of the mind. The numerous patrons of sushi bars surely never saw it as a child. Sushi has the virtues of being expensive and fashionable, which kidneys and liver do not share. Many of us were exposed to seriously bad cooking as a child and had to be reintroduced as adults to certain foods prepared correctly. There is some economic and ecological aspect to this since few societies can afford to eat as much meat as often as we do in the developed West. For the consumer a varied diet is definitely thought of as more healthy. The avoidance of embarrassment when traveling in other cultures is a further advantage. Surely the main benefit of being a true omnivore is that life is more interesting and enriching. However, having a family willing to eat many foods doesn’t seem to make it easier to resolve the perennial problem of what to have for dinner.
Why France has the best restaurants
The great strength of the French food scene is its center – the huge section of mid-range restaurants providing a very good, sometimes excellent, meal at a reasonable price. This stratum is mostly absent in the US and the UK. In all three countries there are top-class restaurants - places where you can have a sublime experience, eat inventive and interesting food beautifully presented and elegantly served. For this you will pay a lot of money. A very good meal at a top-flight restaurant may occasionally be good value, but it will always be expensive. Operating such an establishment is difficult, but the market always exists where there is a sufficient concentration of people with abundant disposable income. Richer cities, such as New York and London, can support many such places, each offering a different sumptuous experience. Paris though, is one of a few comparable cities with a wealth of excellent dining options for the less well-heeled.
The ideal mid-range restaurant provides pleasant surroundings, linen, a decent wine list and a short menu consisting of a few well-crafted dishes. We aspire to eat well here for $50 a head, with the option of making things more exotic if we choose. The occasion may call for foie gras at €3 supplementary and a good burgundy, but we can always stick to the €28 prix fixe, boisson compris, and depart contented and replete. Paris provides this experience in bewildering abundance, and this makes it the gastronomic capital of the world, not its starred establishments, unique and memorable though these are.
In the US we have plenty of low-end eateries, ranging from the fast-food joints to places where you can sit down and eat a bit better. They usually have a list of well-advertised indifferent wines and sometimes a full bar. The wait staff consists of cheerful amateurs who will readily sing a birthday song on request but know nothing about the food or how it is prepared. The menu is sometimes very long, portions are huge and you get a doggy-bag for what you can’t eat. These places are open all day, they are clean, friendly and they turn tables many times a night. Most are chains, whose offering of dishes designed in corporate headquarters is the same across the country, and the market is clearly huge. Nobody departs disappointed, since every diner knows exactly what to expect and gets it. The problem is that they aren't very good.
Far above that exist more expensive, formal restaurants covering a vast range of quality. Many are good, a very few are spectacular, some represent value for money but none is inexpensive. The center is entirely missing.
The situation in the United Kingdom is actually less satisfactory, because the low-price eatery is usually much worse than its American equivalent and descends as far as the motorway cafeteria: bacon, chips and beans eaten to the accompaniment of diesel fumes and cigarette smoke. Britain is plentifully supplied with excellent restaurants for the affluent, but few for the thrifty knowledgeable diner.
Why this is the case is not obvious. It may be due to the labor market infrastructure. France has a stratum of serious professional waiters who know their craft. Many of these can manage a room of diners single-handedly or with only one assistant, often finishing or serving individual meals at the table-side. Such a person knows his (or her) wine and can make useful suggestions. He is deft, courteous and seldom indulges in conversation beyond taking your order and “L’assiette est très chaud, m’sieur” when it arrives. He would not dream of telling you what his name was, partly to maintain a professional distance but mostly because he has no time for idle backchat. I also suspect that many of these waiters learned their craft at seriously good establishments. The best restaurants with many servers often have a cadre of younger employees in training. Do these matriculate to running their own brasserie dining rooms? They can’t all become maitre d’s.
Perhaps another reason for this gap in the US is that we haven’t a good network of food distribution, but that is becoming less of a reasonable excuse than it was. Maybe mid-range restaurants wouldn’t thrive because we have no market – our thrifty segment all goes to Applebee’s and the Olive Garden. Maybe the segment will develop - it is hard to tell. However, at this time it would be a brave man who would start a bistro with a set menu at $35 dollars for three courses.
Of course, this segment does exist in the US outside the French bistro culture, in excellent ethnic restaurants on both coasts, and some regional cuisine in the south. Unfortunately such places are not plentiful. Our food culture would be vastly stronger and more interesting if this type of restaurants was everywhere – busy every night, but not so busy that you couldn’t reserve a table by calling the same day. Our low-end would either move up, improve or disappear, our high-end would have to work much harder for its elevated prices, and we would all eat much better.
In the meantime we go to Paris, which isn't so bad.
anthony's bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook
Anthony Bourdain must annoy the hell out of a lot of serious cooks and food authors. He sprung into prominence following Kitchen Confidential, which many restaurant professionals regarded as a sacriligious revelation of the underbelly of the industry. Since then he has another book, A Cook's Tour, accompanying television series and now the Les Halles Cookbook. He also writes thrillers that are better than workmanlike and feature lots of good food description weaved into intricate plots.
It must be jarring to Bourdain's critics that, beneath the bombast and posturing language, this is a serious cookbook with detailed, practical information. The book is well-produced and will surely expand the horizons of most cooks. It opens with some of Bourdain's history at Les Halles and then much useful detail on the basics of buying produce and meat, making stocks, organizing your work, breaking tasks down into simple blocks - the blocking and tackling of cooking and entertaining. He is particularly good on the organization side of cooking. Most amateur cooks produce a good meal but reduce their kitchens in the process to something approaching a battlefield. Bourdain strongly advocates detailed work beforehand, starting with "deep prep", and he makes the point that this can be the more enjoyable and pleasant part of preparing a meal.
The recipes are French bistro classics - covering every category, with a particularly good section on offal. The scope is broad and one could run a complete restaurant menu with many changes out of this one book. Plenty of the recipes are relatively easy, but some will cause almost anyone pause for thought, or at least a lot of planning. Civet of wild boar look fairly straightforward to prepare, but you aren't going to find the ingredients in Safeway. These dishes are the real thing, and bring the perspective of the professional chef. Bourdain is no respecter of persons - he says "fuck the Health Department" on the subject of taking meat out of the fridge well in advance so that it is at room temperature before cooking.
He is a perfectionist but he doesn't always explain why a particularly step is necessary. Many cooks, for example, would roast bones and vegetables together in the oven before making stock. He calls for separate roasting , without saying why this is required.
Although Bourdain is highly opinionated and sometimes annoying, his style takes second place to the food he prepares. He has no Emeril-type cult, and his purpose here is to convey both the knowledge that went into Les Halles and some of his pride both in the restaurant and his craft. He ackowledges as co-authors the owners of Les Halles, and recognizes that the restaurant was essentially their creation.
The photographs are excellent, many focusing on the actions of preparing food and restaurant life, with no glossy food porn. The book ends with a useful section on suppliers, some further reading, a glossary and a copious list of acknowledgements. Finally Bourdain states his creed: "I want to thank anybody who stands behind a stove or in front of a flame anywhere. There is no nobler toil, nor is there a better profession."
Restaurant reviews
One object of this blog is to write reviews of places I have eaten at. Since I travel a fair amount I get to a lot of restaurants in the year, in many countries. Most of these places are ones I will visit only once or very occasionally, so any review is a snap-shot of a single event. A few places I like a lot, or end up going back several times, for whatever reason, I can give a broader picture of.
What is the point of this? There are plenty of restaurant reviews around, and lots of good books. The world doesn't need my thoughts. One reason is that I do spend a lot of time eating out and in some interesting places, so this is a fairly big chunk of my experience. You should write about what you know. I find these kind of write-ups by other people interesting.
A few ground rules: I will restrict myself to meals where I picked up the tab - which is quite often, so shouldn't be a big restriction. (I include meals that I charge to my expenses - which frankly is most). This allows me to be as dispassionate and critical as I wish, or need to be. It seems ungracious to post, even if quite positively, about a meal that someone else treats one to. I also have better information as to what everything costs if I pay myself.
Another rule is that there will be no pictures of the food. In the first place, it is annoying to have people letting off flashes in a restaurant. Secondly, you may be tipping your hand. If I were running a restaurant and saw a customer, eating alone, photographing each dish, I would suspect the imminent publication of the diner's impressions. Most importantly, you have stopped participating and have become a recording bystander.
The other rule is that I will not go back and write about places I visited in the past - to write a useful review of anything, I think, requires that you have relatively recent impressions. This is a bit of a wrench - as I have been to some splendid places that don't meet that criterion.
All that said we will plunge in....
Giovanni's Ristorante, Beachwood, Ohio - Review
Giovanni’s is a well-known Cleveland-area restaurant, with a high-end, solid Italian reputation. It is in a nondescript office building - on the bottom floor – a little hard to find because they have a small sign out front and then you have to go to the back of the building. It seems quite popular and the clientele presumably all know how to get there.
Inside the restaurant is ornately furnished in a traditional style bordering on the old-fashioned. The space is large, divided into several rooms of different sizes. Giovanni's seems generally to do well and is mostly busy. There are a few touches that seem a bit odd – the bar has a silent television in the background, not a very sophisticated note. The tables were a little close together and the ceiling is low, so it was noisier than it had to be, at least on this Saturday night, but the atmosphere can have a church-like hush when it isn't full. I had a reservation for seven o'clock and things seemed to be pretty much in full swing - Cleveland dines on the early side.
The menu is a fairly extensive list of the traditional Italian staples. The appetizers are a little more adventurous than the main courses, but this isn't a place where you can expect cutting-edge cuisine. It is a long menu, with a very short list of daily specials. Main courses include the usual rack of lamb, veal scallopine, a couple of steaks, dover sole, all the usual pastas. Appetizers had calamari steak, snails, carpaccio of eggplant, oysters (daily special), wedding soup, with a good choice of salads. The menu is in Italian with English translation.
The wine list is impressive and roams diligently around the world without any particular bias. I don't see Giovanni's pouring their French wines in the gutter at the urging of Fox News. They have some old Bordeaux - with one selection, a Léoville Barton I think it was, from 1881. (A bit of a gamble at over $900). The list has the typical problem of having a lot of good wine that is too young to drink, especially Bordeaux. They had a 1953 Léoville Las Cases for $160 - good price if it was still drinkable. The few old wines were well-priced, but Bordeaux at ten to fifteen years out was steep and there wasn't much of it. We had a fairly big group, and some people started with a (very good) Chablis by the glass, and then we had Chalone Chardonnay and a Trimbach Riesling with the appetizers followed by a 2000 Vosne-Romanée ($85). The Italian list had a vast array of good selections with many Barolos, Amarones and other staples. Overall the wine wasn't extravagantly priced and there were several things I would fancy trying on another occasion, like a Hermitage and a Cote-Rotie, which seemed good value. There were also plenty of interesting Burgundies, not out of sight. With a smaller group I might have been a bit more adventurous. I didn't try the Riesling but the Chalone and the Vosne-Romanée were both good, the latter taking a bit of time to open up. I asked for a decanter for the second bottle, which I should have thought of doing at first - or the server should have thought of offering. Wine glasses were the same for each wine and were much too small for the Burgundy.
The food wasn't all that interesting, but it was well prepared. M. said that her grouper was over-cooked, but the market segment that Giovanni's targets probably is more comfortable that way. (She also said that the advertised horse-radish crust wasn't detectable). Some of our group said their steaks were a little over-done. I had snails, asparagus salad and veal scallopine. The latter - something I almost never have - was in a rather aggressive sauce. The obvious choice here proved to be a dumb one. Snails were fine - and there weren't too many. The portion size for the other appetizers leaned more towards appetite-deadening.
The presentation was very conventional - no oblong plates here - and the food could have been photographed for the Joy of Cooking.
Service was good - well paced with a slight bias towards the brisk. The white wines didn't arrive until after the appetizers and the red wasn't poured until after we all had our main courses, which is often the case, and annoys me. They handled a large party very fluently - no confusion about who was having what - and there seemed to be plenty of bodies wandering around. Our server was attentive without being instrusive and there was none of the "Hi, my name is Lois...." nonsense. The food came out at almost the same time and nothing seemed to have been standing around under a heat lamp developing a skin. We weren't offered anything other than tap water - which tasted chlorinated and was accompanied by constant topping-up.
Coffee came before desserts. I can't understand why anyone would prefer coffee before having something sweet. Desserts were pretty much what the rest of the menu was like. Cheesecake, mango sorbet, tiramisu, creme brulee - the usual suspects.
The server tacked on a 20% tip automatically, which is a bit rich compared to the usual 18%. There might be two arguments for this. I suppose one is that people may nickel-and-dime them on large parties, the other is the more specious one that large parties are harder to serve and so deserve an automatic high tip. I won't get into a rant about tipping here, but 20% grates.
Giovanni's isn't cheap - the bill was around $120 per person of which around $35 was drink - and it isn't terrific value - although the wine list had some good bargains on it and is fairly priced overall. For this kind of money I look for something considerably more adventurous, or at least have some elements of the meal that were a bit more memorable. For a bigger group it was a safe bet and everyone appeared to enjoy themselves, but I didn't leave thinking about when I was going to come again.
You get the sense that Giovanni's has a regular clientele - the maitre d' seemed to know many people and greeted some in Italian. This group is on the older side - the sensation is not quite as depressing as at a Cleveland Symphony concert where the audience appears to be dying on its feet, but the feeling is similar. However, the risk for Giovanni's might be the same.
The cassoulet is now reheating and I am thinking of how best to photograph it. Cassoulet is traditionally served in a small earthenware or metal dish, but any dish that fills a bowl to the top makes for a difficult photograph. The result tends to look either like a soup or a dog's dinner. These are not attractive presentations for much the same reason. Food presentation is now veering away a little from the idea of the vertical - which can be attractive and impressive, but is often tedious and difficult to tackle. Trends are more towards interesting horizontal presentations with plenty of color and texture variation, often served on whimsical or unusual plates. One way to serve cassoulet would be to use a four compartment plate, with a piece of duck in one section, a sausage in another, some pork in a third and a small bowl of beans in the fourth. A bit contrary to the spirit of French country cuisine. In the end the cassoulet was eaten enthusiastically, with some (positive) comments that it was not as rich as the one from last year that featured the andouillettes. The presentation was not too radical, but I did strive to avoid the dog's dinner look. 
