Not A Cookbook -- A Web Site

As you know, because you know food, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History acquired Julia Child's kitchen and it was a  good thing. After several years, they removed the exhibit and included it a large one; it was literally moved into a larger context -- Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000.  

 Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000 is a must pilgrimage for food lovers, but if you can't make it to D.C., here is the next best thing. The Food exhibit has gone on-line with a great new web site.  Check out Food here.

Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 Redux

In honor of Julia Child's 100th birthday, we are revisiting Mastering The Art of French Cooking. 

I got to spend Julia Child's 90th birthday with her and a few thousands of her closest friends.



In 2009, my friend Ann, signed me up to cook a recipe from Mastering The Art of French Cooking.   Of course, I couldn't cook just one.

Recipe of the Week: Julia Child’s stuffed duck, baked cucumbers, and blackberry flan

Today’s post is the ninth in a series of weekly Julia Child recipes. Kudos to this week’s contributors, project manager Ann Burrola and her friend Lucinda, who not only prepared Pâté de Canard en Croûte (Boned Stuffed Duck Baked in a Pastry Crust), but also made baked cucumbers AND blackberry flan.
 “ the procedure may take 45 minutes the first time because of fright”—Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume I, p.570 
This week’s recipe for the Pâté de Canard en Croûte covers 7 pages in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1. This is certainly not a record for a Julia Child recipe (French bread covers 22 pages) but, based on this alone, the recipe could be considered daunting to any cook. What are we saying? A recipe that requires deboning a duck, preparing stuffing, sewing the stuffing into the duck, making a pastry crust, wrapping the duck in the pastry, and then decorating it with pastry cut-outs, is daunting! However, Julia provides detailed written instructions and clear illustrations so that anyone will know exactly how to accomplish the simplest and most complicated dishes in her cookbooks. “You’ve got all the directions and if you can read, you can cook,” she wrote.

When the call went out to write about cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I signed right up. Then I e-mailed my friend Lucinda and told her “WE” had signed up to cook out of Julia’s book. She wanted to make the most complicated recipe in the book and I wanted to make the easiest one. We made them both and threw in dessert. Since Lucinda blogs, I told her to write the post and I would do the pictures. So here goes…
Lucinda’s Story
When I saw Julie & Julia, someone asked me if I had ever made the stuffed duck. I hadn’t, but thought I might give it a try. “Great,” Ann said, “you make the duck.” Ann didn’t know the recipe is seven pages long, with an eighth page for the farce or forcemeat stuffing.
The recipe has three main components. The farce, which is stuffed into a de-boned duck, which is then wrapped in a crust. I made the forcemeat and the crust and set about to de-bone the duck.


De-boning a duck takes about 45 minutes.


Julia says if you de-bone a lot of them you can cut your time by 25 minutes.


One was enough. Ann timed it. It took 45 minutes.


Once I had the duck de-boned, I stuffed it with the farce.


Then it needed to be sewn up.


At this point, I was really glad that I never went to medical school.


Once the duck is stuffed you brown it.


Then wrap it in a pastry crust.


Of course, Julia wants the crust decorated.
Now the duck goes into an oven for 2 hours and time marches on….
Let’s recap:

• 15 minutes making farce
• 15 minutes for pastry 
• 45 minutes for duck de-boning
• 15 minutes for trussing
• 15 minutes for browning
• 25 minutes for cooling
• 2 hours for baking
• 2 1/2 hours for resting 

About 5 1/2 hours into Pâté de Canard en Crouté, it was time to start the vegetable. Ann peeled, seeded, and cut her cucumbers for her Concombres au Beurre—basically, cukes baked in tons of butter!


In keeping with the “Julia aesthetic“, Ann ventured to Washington's Eastern Market in search of a fromagerie to acquire the proper butter. Sticks of American butter from the Safeway, with their skimpy 80% fat content, would not do. For Julia, we needed a block of European-style butter with its slightly higher fat content.
During all the baking and resting, there was dishwashing, table setting, and gardening. In the garden, I picked some blackberries. Ann said she saw a blackberries recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Let’s make dessert!”
We found the recipe for Clafouti aux Mûres and gathered the ingredients. While the cucumbers baked, we made the batter for the clafouti and got it ready for the oven.
In the movie Julie & Julia, Julie talks about de-boning her duck but she never mentions the presentation. After you bake and cool the duck, you have to carefully cut it out of the crust while leaving the crust in tact. You take the now cooked duck and remove all the trussing string. Then, you re-stuff the duck into the crust for a lovely presentation.


Voilà …


Dinner is served. After dinner is served and the dishes are washed and the trussing needle is stored away and Julie & Julia is gone from the theaters and the DVD grows dusty on a shelf one might ask, “Why take on such an exercise?”
The key to the long-lived appeal of Julia Child was her ability to get us into the kitchen without fear, to move us out of our comfort zone and try something new, and most importantly to have fun. I love a challenge and nothing says “challenge” like ten pages of recipe! Ann wanted to take part in the blog and have fun in the kitchen. What could be more fun than taking plain old salad cucumbers and transforming them into Concombres au Beurre? 
Now when people ask me, “Have you ever made Julia’s stuffed duck?” my reply will be, “But of course.“ When they ask Ann if she actually ever used Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she’ll say, “Sure!”
I may never make Pâté de Canard en Crouté again, but when I see a non-descript salad with slices of cucumber tossed on top I will think of how much better they would be had they been cored and sliced and baked in rich butter the way Julia taught Ann to do it. I will remember the unctuous duck, the succulent cucumbers, the clafouti with blackberries from my garden and the sound the wine glasses made as we toasted Julia.
Do try this at home! 

Of Cabbages and Kings Cookbook

Charlotte Turgeon died last year. I feel we didn’t give her a proper send off at Cookbook Of The Day. I am always fascinated by people who follow the same trajectory in life who end up with one becoming a household name and the other relatively unknown to the general public.

Charlotte Turgeon, though well known in the culinary community, was virtually unknown to the general public. She began her career at Smith College, traveled to France and became enthralled with French food and culture. She in 1949 she published a translation of one of the most famous French cookbooks, Tante Marie’s Kitchen, giving American cooks a trusted collections of French recipes. She was the American editor and translator of Larousse Gastronomique and the Food Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. After traveling the globe with her professor husband, they settled in Massachusetts. Sound a bit familiar?

Charlotte Turgeon’s classmate at Smith was Julia Child.


One of my favorite cookbooks of Charlotte Turgeon’s is Of Cabbages and Kings Cookbook, an ode to the cruciferous vegetable. My copy was in the hands of chef who used several of Turgeon’s recipes extensively, each page permanently folded and the recipes circled.

Two of those recipes are very close to recipes I use quite often, scalloped turnips and bacon cole slaw. Another recipe circled is for a cauliflower salad and since the chef seemed to know my style, I thought I would give this a try.

24 hour Cauliflower Salad

1 head iceberg lettuce
1 head cauliflower (uncooked)
1/2 pound of bacon
1 onion

Dressing:
2 cups mayonnaise
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Tear the lettuce into bite-sized pieces. Break the cauliflower into flowerets and then cut them into slices. Chop the onion.
Fry the bacon until crisp. Drain on paper towels and crumble into bits.
Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and toss to mix evenly.
In a small bowl combine the ingredients for the dressing and stir until blended. Pour over the salad ingredients. Do not mix. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours before serving.

Charlotte Turgeon's New York Times Obituary.

Mastering The Art Of French Cooking

It's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. What else do you want me to say?

Wait, I do have something else to say. Several of my friends at the Smithsonian found themselves with the arduous job of going to Boston and packing up Julia Child's kitchen. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it, right. So Reyna, Paula and Nanci worked on recreating the kitchen and preparing subsequent events.
One such event was Nora Ephron donating several items from Julie and Julia.


The movie created such interest that the Smithsonian blog decided to run a Julia recipe of the week asking for volunteers from the staff to cook and write about a recipe.

My friend Ann immediately volunteered and WE cooked from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ann doesn't cook, so she asked for a simple recipe.

Baked Cucumbers

6 cucumbers about 8 inches long

2 Tb wine vinegar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp sugar
A 2 1/2-quart porcelain or stainless steel bowl


A baking dish 12 inches in diameter and 1 1/2 inches deep
3 Tb melted butter
1/2 tsp dill or basil
3 to 4 Tb minced green onions
1/8 tsp pepper

Peel the cucumbers. Cut in half lengthwise; scrape out the seeds with a spoon. Cut the strips into 2-inch pieces.

Toss the cucumbers in a bowl with the vinegar, salt, and sugar. Let stand for at least 30 minutes or for several hours. Drain. Pat dry with a towel.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Toss the cut cucumbers in the baking dish with the butter, herbs, onions and pepper. Set uncovered in middle level of preheated oven for about 1 hour, tossing 2 or 3 times, until the cucumbers are tender but still bear a suggestion of crispness and texture. They will barely color during cooking.

I cook -- a lot. My other friend, Anne, asked me if I had ever made Pâté de Canard en Crouté, one of Julia's more difficult recipes. I told her no. When I mentioned this to Ann, she said, "Great, you make that."

Read about the duck at the Smithsonian's blog, under Julia Child Recipe of the Week, October 19, 2009.

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Judith Jones is probably the most famous foodie who didn’t spend her life in a kitchen cooking. Well, actually, she spent a lot of time in a kitchen cooking, but her claim to fame in not cooking, but publishing people who did cook. Judith Jones is the editor who brought Madhur Jaffery, Marcella Hazen, Ed Giobbi, and Edna Lewis to the reading public, but there were more.

She brought Elizabeth David to America, a feat that proved to be quite difficult. It seems, Jones wanted the stuffing set to fill zucchini, to fill just the zucchini and not make triple the amount needed. She wanted them to be zucchini and not courgettes, after all, it was America. David didn't see the problem and she knew courgettes were much more pleasant sounding than zucchini. She wrote to Jones:

“Inconsistencies are inevitable in a cookery book and preferable, I think myself, to the absurdities brought about by overzealousness in the matter of liberal renderings.
I don’t think one does any harm in crediting one’s readers with a little imagination and knowledge of their own.”

Is it any wonder I love Elizabeth David! Knopf told Jones to reject the book if David refused her changes, but Jones realized what a wonder it was and she published it with all of Elizabeth David’s “inconsistencies.”

There was someone else she edited … let me think… oh, yes, Julia Child. If you went to the movies this month you know this story by heart.

James Beard, Judith Jones, and Julia Child

Jones was a bit of a cookbook writer on her own (and with her husband, Evan). So when Jones set out to write a biography, it was destined to be a winner. The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food is just that. Part biography, part love story, part cookbook and all totally fascinating.

As for the cookbook part, Judith Jones first tasted this sauce in a bistro on the Left Bank. It was spread on sliced cold meat. She loved it and searched around for a recipe. She never found one she truly liked, so she devised her own.

Sauce Gribiche for Cold Lamb or Other Meats

1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon capers
2 cornichons, chopped in small pieces
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped fine
Freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Mix all the ingredients together. If you’re not using the sauce right away, hold back on the parsley, and mix that in at the last. This is a sauce you have to taste so you can adjust the seasoning to get the balance right. Adjust accordingly to what your palate tells you.

See the movie if you must (you must) and while you are out, pick up a copy of The Tenth Muse.