A Few More Notes from Paris

Found myself giving a friend advice on where to go in Paris the other day, so I thought I’d augment my recent notes a bit.

L’Ami Jean - Still one of my favorite places in Paris for straight ahead great food in a raucous atmosphere. It’s the kind of place where strangers are likely to lean across the table and offer you a taste.  I’ve never had anything there that I didn’t love.

Minipalais - It’s almost impossible to find a great place to eat on Sunday night in Paris.  I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than this rather grand room, where the service is wonderful and the food appealing.  Eric Frechon, of the Bristol, is the consulting chef, and the food is fresh and modern. Meals begin with giant popovers, and the charcuterie plate is swell.  Open every day, which is unusual.

Huiterie Regis - Just about everyone’s favorite place for oysters in Paris.  It’s small, and there’s always a wait.  It’s worth it.

Le Baratin - Raquel Carena cooks simple, personal, rustic food in a small Belleville restaurant. There’s a reason why everyone loves this restaurant.

Chez Robert et Louise - I’ve been going to this restaurant since the sixties (the first time I ate there Jeanne Moreau was at the next table), and it reminds me very much of the way Paris used to be.  The food is inexpensive and almost brutally rustic. Robert was a butcher, and he cooked all his meat right in the fire; they still do. 

Chartier - An old bouillon, a working man’s restaurant, that is the picture-perfect turn of the century bistrot. The food isn't fabulous, but it is absolutely classic and extremely inexpensive. If you loved Midnight in Paris, you'll love it; it's like walking into history.  No reservations.  I try to stop in every time I’m in Paris.

Finally, notes from the morning that Nancy Silverton and I spent with Meg Zimbeck, who leads wonderful food tours of Paris. I’d recommend these to anyone; in a very intense two hours we worked our way through Androuet and Barthelemy, and discovered a few cheeses that were completely new to me.  We also, I might add, indulged in the single best Brie (de Meaux)I’ve ever had; it was creamy with those lingering hints of forest and mushroooms. Afterward, Meg emailed me these notes.  

 

Goat

• Le Bambois (Bambois is the name of the farm): a ten day-old chèvre frais with a wet, ricotta-like texture (Alsace)

• Rove de Garrigues (Rove is the breed of goat with very low production): the smaller button with a clay-like texture and citrusy nose, 2 weeks old (Provence)
• Saint-Nicolas: the small bar-shaped chèvre which Nancy described as "nutty" and which can also taste of lavender or thyme depending on the goat's diet. Produced in an orthodox abbey in Languedoc, and just under three weeks old (Languedoc-Roussillon).

• Bethmale du chèvre: an eight-month goat which is created in the Pyrenees and then transferred at three months to a special aging cellar in the Auvergne (central) region inside an old train tunnel (Pyrenees). Bethmale is usually a cow's milk cheese, so this one is unusual.
• Reblochon du chèvre: similar to the AOC Reblochon which is made from cow's milk, this one is made with goat. We tasted it last and it wasn't our favorite (Savoie, near lake Geneva).

 Sheep

• Ossau-Iraty at 17 months (purchased at Androuet) produced by the laiterie (milk cooperative) Agour, awarded the title "meilleur fromage du monde" last month in the World Cheese Awards against 2700 competing cheeses (Basque Pyrenees)
• Ossau Iraty at 30 months (purchased at Barthélémy) - very rare to find one at this age. The Trader Joe's version (they sell one) is 4 months old and most Parisian fromageries sell it at 12-14 months (Basque Pyrenees).
• Roquefort from Monsieur Carles, producer, aged for 3 months in the Cambalou caves beneath the village of Roquefort (southwest France)
• Fleur du Maquis aux Herbes aged for three months with a covering of herbs and chili (Corsica)

Cow

• Brie de Meaux: can taste of buttered mushrooms and oysters; uses rennet to separate curds and whey, aged 6-8 weeks (Ile-de-France, near Paris)
• Brie de Melun: tastes sharper, more metallic & salty than the Brie de Meaux (which is made 15km away); uses lactic fermentation (slower separation over time in controlled conditions) to separate curds and whey, then aged 8-10 weeks. (Ile-de-France, near Paris)
• Saint-Marcellin: the runny, sour, and floral cow's milk cheese. It's not always quite so liquid - the woman at Barthelemy described it as "à cuillèur" - to be eaten with a spoon. It's normally 2-6 weeks old and this would be closer to six weeks. (Rhône-Alps, near Lyon) 
• Comté at 12 & 36 months - the younger cheese is good for grating/cooking or fondue, the older one is more crystallized and concentrated, better for tasting on its own (Jura, eastern France).
• Bleu d'Auvergne: the much more affordable and milder flavored blue that's often used here in salads, aged 2-3 months (Auvergne, central France)

 Pastries tasted today (from Hugo & Victor, Pierre Hermé)

• Tarte aux fruits de passion, éclair au chocolat (H&V)

• Baba au rhum infiniment vanille et macaron Ispahan (PH)

 Other addresses discussed

• Du Pain et des Idées - Christophe Vasseur's adorable bakery near the Canal Saint-Martin, selling the "pain des amis" that they serve at Frenchie
• Le Bonbon au Palais - a candy store with hundreds of artisanal confections from every region
• 134 RdT - one of my favorite baguettes in the northern Marais, across the street from Jacques Genin chocolate/pastry

 

 

Notes from Paris and London

Walking down the rue Mouffetard in the early Paris morning is a completely sensual experience.  This time of year the street is perfumed with strawberries and the fat white asparagus are everywhere, poking up with a curiously aggressive air. Meanwhile the cauliflower curl shyly into their protective green leaves, as if reluctant to emerge and face the sassy herbs in their bold bunches.

You pass Androuet and the doors burst open, sending the scent of ripe cheese dancing out into the street. Farther up, at the Fournil du Mouffetard, people are lining up for buttery croissants and proud pouffs of brioche.  You go on, to the fish market, where the shrimp line up in a dozen different sizes, and great floppy turbots practically beg you to take them home.

Such wonderful abundance. And yet....   When I look back at the meals that we ate last week, it’s London that I remember with the greatest fondness. 

In Paris we ate fabulously at L’Arpege, where Alain Passard, a vegetable magician, manages to make meat seem redundant. I remember every bite there with complete clarity.  We began with gorgeous vegetable sushi, the rice draped with a thin slice of turnip, fresh horseradish and chervil.


An intense broth of smoked root vegetables, almost medicinal in its clarity, offered four tiny ravioli, each containing a different vegetable puree.  A thick fennel and garlic veloutee came topped with a whoosh of speck-infused milk, so rich it was almost impossible to believe the waitress when she insisted that it was not whipped cream.  A sweet onion gratin, the color of marigolds, had the haunting taste of candied lemon threaded through it like a musical note.  "Merguez” of vegetables was peppered with the taste of harissa to create an improbably imposter that resembled the real thing.  White asparagus, the fattest that I’d seen, were dotted with an unfamiliar spice that had the bite of Sichuan peppercorn and the taste of grapefruit.  And that was just the starters: it was a stunning meal.

So was the meal at Frenchie, where we ate silken smoked trout with cucumbers and the best sweetbreads I’ve ever encountered, each one so soft and tender it was like biting into clouds.  There was fabulous foie gras.  And Fera, a freshwater whitefish from Lake Genva, delicate and perfumed. The sommelier, Laura Vidal, was wonderful, the place intimate, fun - and inexpensive.

There were other great meals in Paris too.  We had  beautiful dinner at the elegant and extremely trendy Spring where a young American chef, Daniel Rose, is doing us proud. We spent an extremely fun night at Minipalais, a big beautiful room filled with chic people and enormously likable food.  Dinners there begin with enormous popovers and  terrific charcuterie and go on to a menu of pick hits of everybody's favorite dishes. 

But there were many disappointments.  The biggest was Le Comptoir, which I’ve always loved. This time, however, we were treated to a sloppy meal of overcooked chicken, watery pommes purees, and one of the saddest salads I’ve seen in Paris.  “What happened here?” I found myself asking, as I thought back to the meals we had in London.

The answer, I think, is that too many Paris restaurants are resting on their laurels, as if they’re so convinced of their own superiority that they aren’t trying very hard.  Meanwhile London is still striving, still excited about food, still thinking of how to do everything better. Strange that the croissants we ate at Ottolenghi beat anything we had in Paris - and on a rainy day!

I think back to lunch at Quo Vadis - an old-fashioned place where Jeremy Lee (who was at Blueprint Cafe), is pumping out simple food with enthusiasm and energy.  We began with spears of asparagus, each wrapped in a crisp sheet of brik pastry and dusted with parmesan. Warm and extremely sexy, I could have eaten them forever. But I stopped when great piles of langoustines arrived (with wonderful mayonnaise), and platters of oysters, fragile as orchids with an elusively coppery tang.  Rabbit and chicken pie made me think how well the wealthy in Charles Dickens’ novels must have been eating, and a grilled mackerel made me remember the pure pleasure of simply cooked food. 

And that is, for the most part, the strength of the new English cooking. Almost everywhere we went they were serving local farm food.  We had piles of Jersey Royals - little steamed potatoes served with butter, and English asparagus, buttered cabbage, lovely little peas.  Fluffy salads of tender greens.  Simply grilled fish - turbot, mackerel - or hefty chops of farm-raised pork.

But the two most memorable moments?  A thrilling dinner at Dinner, Heston Blumenthal’s new restaurant overlooking Regent’s Park.  We ate at ten, our sixth meal of a very long day, and I walked in with no appetite at all.  But the service was spectacular, and the food so exciting that at one in the morning, all torpor vanished, I was tucking into roasted pineapples with great joy.  Blumenthal has researched English food of the past to create an edible history lesson; many of the dishes sound both strange and awful, but every single bite was a revelation. 

Beneath it’s disguise this “meat fruit,” this little tangerine, turned out to be an airy chicken liver mousse. “Salmagundy” paired intensely tasty little rounds of chicken “oysters” with tiny disks of bone marrow making the textures shoot through your mouth like rockets. Buttered crab came with a a long rectangle of bread that looked modest. Then you took a bite and tasted roe, becoming aware that it was a kind of shellfish pain perdu, and totally delectable.  The vegetarian braised celery with smoked confit cauliflower and apple? It turned out to be a rather royal relative of  macaroni and cheese.

Desert was tipsy cake made with roasted pineapple that brought the meal to an end with astonishingly alcoholic intensity. We went out into the rain to strolled slowly through wet deserted streets, intoxicated with London.

It was still raining the next morning, and we ran through the raindrops to the Towpath Cafe, which sits on the edge of a hidden canal in Islington.  It’s a casual little outdoor cafe, more Spain or Italy than England, but if there’s a more perfect place to sip a cup of coffee, I have yet to find it.  I sat there, wrapped in a blanket, watching the ducks paddling on the canal. And as I ate a tender little omelet dotted with ramps, this is what I was thinking: “I could sit here quite happily for the rest of my life.”

A Perfect Meal

“I also stubbornly maintain that the only real way to cook lobsters is in three or four inches of sea water, in a covered kettle, for about twelve minutes (pound and a quarter lobsters being the ideal size).  You then drape these dazzling creatures over the rocks until they cool off a bit, tear them apart with the bare hands, dip each piece in melted butter and guzzle. There should be from two to six lobsters per person.  While the lobsters cook and cool off, two dry martinis should be served.  Nothing whatever else should be served- we are eating all the lobster we want, we are not fooling around with salad, or strawberry shortcake or even coffee. All you need are the martinis, plenty of lobsters, millions of paper napkins and a view.”

 Avis DeVoto to Julia Child, 1952

 

 

 

Old Fashioned Lemon Pudding Cake

Part cake, part souffle, a little bit pudding: this is one of those magical classic recipes.  It’s not original - you can find dozens very much like it in old cookbooks. My mother used to make it from a mix, which says a lot about her because it’s so easy to make from scratch.

What's different abou t my version? I love the taste of lemon, so t's a bit  tangier than most.

Grate the zest from two large lemons, then squeeze the juice.  You should have about half a cup. 

Separate three large eggs. Add the lemon juice and zest to the yolks, then whisk in a cup and a third of milk. Slowly add a half cup of sugar, a dash of salt, and a quarter cup of flour. If you’ve used good eggs it will glow with color.

Beat the whites until they hold soft peaks.  Whisk in a quarter cup of sugar, and beat until the whites turn sleekly glossy and hold a stiff peak when you pull the mixer from the bowl. Whisk a quarter of the whites into the yolk mixture, then gently fold in the rest of the whites. 

Preheat the oven to 350.  Boil some water in a kettle.  You’re going to bake this in a water bath, so you’ll want a large square or rectangular baking dish that is large enough to hold your pie plate and leave a bit of room around it.  Set the empty pan in the oven, put the pudding cake in the center, and carefully pour boiling water all around it, about halfway up, being careful not to splash any into the cake itself. 

Bake for about 45 minutes, until it is puffed and golden.  Remove from the water bath and cool on a rack.  This is best served warm, and you should eat it all; by day two lemon pudding cake loses much of its luster.

 

Sorrento Lemon Tart

Lemons make me happy; they always have. I may run out of milk, eggs and coffee, but I am never without lemons. When I am feeling sad I'll open the refrigerator, reach for a lemon and run my fingers across the peel for the pure pleasure of the scent. It always improves my mood.

The lemon I don't like has never been grown, but the lemons from Sorrento are in a class by themselves. Something about the soil in that part of Italy makes lemons juicier and more fragrant than the ones we grow here. Their skin contains more aromatic oil as well. They are truly a joy to work with. They make fantastic lemonade, their candied peels are spectacular, and they're essential if you're making Limoncello. And in a tart... well, try it. 

This one, with its perfect balance of sweet and tart, is wonderful made with ordinary lemons.  Made with Sorrentos, however, it becomes truly extraordinary.

Begin by making the tart shell. If you have some nuts on hand – I like cashews in this crust but almonds or hazelnuts are also excellent – carefully toast a handful, then grind them up with 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup confectioners sugar and a pinch of salt. Cut half a stick of cold butter into the mixture with two knives, then stir in 3 tablespoons of olive oil and an egg yolk.  Press the mixture gently into a 9 inch tart shell with a removable bottom. Chill if you have time; if not, bake in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes and allow to cool. 

 To make the filling, grate the zest from one lemon.  Then squeeze 4 lemons and mix the juice with the zest, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 teaspoons cornstarch, 2 whole large eggs plus 2 large yolks. Whisk over medium heat until the mixture begins to boil; keep whisking for a couple more minutes.  Remove from the heat, add ¾ of a stick of butter, cut into pieces, and whisk the mixture until the butter has vanished.  Spread into the tart shell, allow to cool, then chill for at least 2 hours.

 

 

My Favorite Pork Stew

This recipe is one of my favorites.  It’s from Tender at the Bone and I make it all the time.  These days I use more garlic than I used to, and I treat the cilantro as if it were parsley, sauteeing it with the onions. And I sometimes use fresh roma tomatoes instead of canned, although the canned aren't a bad idea. 

The one thing I would emphasize is that you should cut your own pork off of a single piece of shoulder, rather than using what the butchers call "pork for stew,"  which tend to be a mishmash of cuts that all cook differently. 

If you can think of some way to improve it, be my guest.  But I've been making it for 30 years......

 Pork, Tomatillo and Dark Beer Stew 

Remove the papery husk from a pound of tomatillos and quarter them.  Put them in a pot with a bottle of dark beer, 12 ounces of fresh orange juice and a 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes (drained)  and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, simmering until the tomatillos are soft, (fifteen minutes to half an hour - the timing on this doesn’t much matter).

Meanwhile cut two pounds of pork shoulder into hefty cubes, dry them well, and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. Heat about a quarter cup of oil - I use grapeseed but anything will do - in a sturdy casserole or dutch oven and throw in 10 cloves of whole peeled garlic, turning to coat with the oil.  Add the pork, in batches, browning  well on all sides. When all the pork has browned, add 2 large chopped onions, and a bunch of cilantro, chopped to the pan, stirring and scraping up all the delicious little pork bits.  Add 2 chopped jalapenos (more if you like your food really spicy), and put the pork back into the pot.  Stir in the tomatillo mixture, bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and either cook it at a slow burble on top of the stove or put the pot it into a 300 degree oven for about two hours.

Mash the soft garlic cloves into the stew and add a cup and a half of cooked black beans.  Allow them to warm up in the stew for about ten minutes. Taste for seasoning.

The stew is now ready.  It will be even more delicious if you allow it to rest in the refrigerator for a day or two so that the flavors have a chance to get to know each other better.  Reheat gently on top of the stove. 

I serve it with a dollop of lime sour cream (a cup of sour cream into which I’ve stirred the juice of a lime). 

 

The Most Beautiful Dish

He calls it "The Ugly Stuff," but when Michael Cimarusti's plate arrived last night at Providence, my first impulse was to try and pin it to my jacket like a beautiful brooch. An insane tangle of abalone, uni, geoduck and caviars, it came garnished with little blue borage flowers and a handful of sprightly herbs. What you can't see: a custardy layer of  lightly smoked sauce.  (It was not, however the most delicous dish: that honor went to the sea urchin and eggs, a dish so intense, so nuanced, so  decadently delicious that each tiny bite seemed like its own little universe.) 

The Most Decadent Breakfast

Walking down Fairfax in the absurd sunshine of an LA winter, we happened upon a food truck.  I am incapable of passing one without stopping for a bite, but this one called out to me with a particularly loud voice.  It wasn't the name - Eggslut - but the description of their signature dish: A coddled egg on top of potato puree with gray sea salt and chives.

A well-coddled egg is a beautiful thing, and when the chef said, "This will take a while; we coddle them to order," I was hooked.

As anyone would be.  This is a perfect way to start the day - a tender egg, held together with no more than a wish, on top of buttery pureed potatoes.  The crunch of salt, the snappy bite of chives. Heaven in a spoon. And so rich it made three of us deliriously happy for the rest of the day.

 

What I Said Last Night at the Good Food Awards

I made these remarks off the top of my head, and I forgot to say some of this.  So here's the keynote address as I meant to deliver it. I wish I could include what everybody else said, because the speeches - from farmers, charcutiers, pickle-makers, cheese-makers, beer brewers, chocolatiers, distillers and preservers were heartfelt and truly interesting. This artisanal food movement is truly changing the way that we eat.

Good Food Awards Talk

Most of you are too young to remember an America with awful food. An America where every strawberry was like cotton, where every salad was made with iceberg lettuce and had a sweet orange dressing called “French,” an America where good coffee was unknown, bread was white, and cheese was imported from France.  So you don’t also have the joy of remembering the little moments when it changed.  I want to tell you about what those moments were for me.

The first was a summer in the late seventies when I walked into the Cheese Board in Berkeley and someone said, “taste this.”  It was a fresh goat cheese - soft, rich, fluffy, and I loved it.  “Where in Franc is it from?” I asked.  

“A little place called Santa Rosa,” was the reply. I spent an entire summer living on that first American goat cheese - and then I decided I had to go meet Laurie Chenel, the woman who was making it.

The second moment was when Larry Forgione opened An American Place restaurant in NY in the early 80s. One day he came into the dining room shaking something in a jar. “What are you doing?” I asked.  

 “Whipping cream for the strawberry shortcake,” he said.  I was stunned.  I had no idea that you cream could be so rich that you could whip it with a few shakes of a jar. It was, for me one of those lightbulb moments when you realize how much the raw products matter.

But the most important moment for me was when I was working on a piece for California  magazine called "Artists of the Earth,   “They are,” I wrote, “perfectionists who work very hard not because they expect to get rich but simply because they expect to get the best.  We are finally recognizing that the people who have made our food the finest in the worl are some of California’s most valuable resources. "

For this piece I interviewed a group of people who were leading what was then called “the California Food Revolution - people like Paul Johnson who was changing the way fish was sold, and Frank Dal Porto who was growing pigs and lambs for Chez Panisse. (Incidentally, he told me, off the record, that he thought Alice was crazy; he couldn’t understand why she’d pay the same for a 30 pound lamb as for a hundred pound one, but if she was buying he was willing to sell.)  And Billy Marinelli who was touting West Coast oysters to a world obsessed with Blue Points.

But the real aha moment came at the Chino Ranch in Rancho Sta. Fe.  I went down there with Alice, and we spent two days in the fields, exploring the most beautiful produce I’d ever seen in my life. I remember standing there eating raw corn so wonderful I wondered why anyone would ever cook it.  And then, just before we left, we went out and picked strawberries for that night’s dinner at Chez Paniss.

We each carried a flat onto the plane - one of those little planes that flits between San Diego and Oakland. And the scent of those berries rose up and spiraled through the plane, reminding people of the way things used to be. You ahve to remember that this was a time before farmer’s markets, a time when people had forgotten what a real strawberry tasted like. And one by one they came over to where we were sitting, begging for a tsate.  “Just one berry,” people would plead, “I’d forgotten that’s what strawberries were like.”  As I watched Alice giving away that night’s dessert to the people on the plane, I said to myself _ this is why things in America are going to change. When people realize what we have lost, they will want to get it back.

But still, I never imagined that we would come so far, or so fast.  Back then you could hardly manage to eke out an article on the artistans; there just weren’t enough of them. Today you could fill an encyclopedia.  People like you are out there growing and baking and preserving.  While the rest of the world is slowly losing its heritage, we Americans are reclaiming ours.  Artisans like you have made American food the best in the world.  In my book you’re not just artisans of the earth - you’re heroes.  And I want to thank you - so much. 

 

 

 

 

 

A Truly Strange Butterscotch Cake Pudding

Leafing through vintage cookbooks this afternoon, I came upon this recipe from Favorite Recipes of Colfax Country Club Women, and I just couldn't believe it could possibly work. No eggs, almost no shortening.... it's such a strange recipe that I just had to try it.

To my surprise, it works just fine - although next time I'll add some nuts.  It is very sweet. And very simple. And it would make any child deliriously happy. 

 For the Syrup

1 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon butter

11/2 cups boiling water

 Add the brown sugar and butter to the boiling water, stirring until the sugar dissovles.  Bring the mixture to a boil again, reduce heat and simmer for about 10 minutes, or until the syrup coats a spoon. Cool.

 For the Cake

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon butter at room temperature

1 cup flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

1/2 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine sugar, butter, flour and baking powder in a bowl.  Stir in some of the milk, then slowly add remaining milk. Beat only until smooth. Fold in the spices and raisins.

Pour the cooled syrup into a greased loaf pan.  Spoon the batter into the center of the syrup and bake for 35 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.  Let cool for 15 minutes, then invert onto a serving dish.  Serve with unsweetened whipped cream.