A Return To Cooking

With his French accent and boyish good looks, Eric Ripert is a favorite on television cooking shows. His food is marvelous. In the end, however, his food is “chefy” relying on a multitude of ingredients. For the home cook, these enormously long recipes can be daunting.

A Return to Cooking is not so much a cookbook as a Broadway production of gastro porn. Ripert travels around, cooking in various “vacation” spots: Sag Harbor, Montauk, Vermont, Napa, the Caribbean. He “vacations” with his family… and a writer (Michael Ruhlman), a painter (Valentino Cortazar) and two photographer (Tammar and Shimon Rothstein) and of course, an unseen crew, not to mention as Ruhlman writes, “And, oh yes, a 125-gram tin of the world’s best caviar and two white truffles each the size of a demented egg and weighing about three ounces.” Don’t try this at home.

No doubt, I promise, the book is beautiful and, yes, you would have given anything to be a part of the crew, but at home, you really don’t want to commit to a grilled cheese with 6 ingredients.

There is one recipe in this book that I adore, and it is well worth the time. Pique (pronounced PEE - kay) is a Puerto Rican hot sauce, that adds sweet heat to many a dish. I love the heat, so add a teaspoon to some mayo, add some to tuna salad, or salad dressing or a meat marinade. Most recipes call for vinegar, so Ripert's "ferment your own in pineapple juice" gives it a unique flavor.

Pique

2 1/2 cups water
6 ounces pineapple skin (from one pineapple)
8 tiny green hot peppers, such as Thai chiles
4 tiny red chiles, such as Thai chilies
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 oregano sprig
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon sugar
Pinch fine sea salt
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or as needed
Special Equipment
Heatproof narrow-necked bottle

Combine the water and pineapple skin in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Take off the heat and infuse for 5 minutes, then strain. Discard the pineapple skin.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Submerge a heatproof bottle in the water to sterilize it. Remove with tongs and let dry on a rack.

Make 1/2 inch slit near the stem in each of the hot peppers. Add the peppers, garlic, oregano, peppercorns, sugar, and salt to the bottle. Cover with the pineapple-infused water. Slowly add the olive oil. The olive oil should completely cover the pique; if it does not, add more to cover.

Leave the bottle open for 1 week on your countertop, covered loosely with cheesecloth. Throughout the week, bubbles will rise to the top. After a week, the bubbles will have subsided. Seal the bottle and refrigerate. Pique should keep for up to a month.

Put up a bottle of pique and those truffles will be the farthest thing from your mind.

Burning Desires

The El Paso Chile Company is aptly titled. They make chili sauces, salsa, dips, margarita mixes and hot stuff of all kinds. Burning Desires is a cookbook by company founder, W. Park Kerr, that puts all those chili concoctions together to highlight barbecue.

A lot of the recipes are for smoked meat, and if you have never smoked dinner on a barbecue before, the instructions are quite good. As might be expected, this book shines with its recipes for sauces, rubs and even drinks.

I am surprised at how much sauces and rubs cost. A friend of mine paid a premium to get a piece salmon with a special “rub.” The rub consisted of a 1/4 cup of brown sugar and some red pepper. Almost anyone would have had those two ingredients in the larder. The total cost of that rub would have been about 35 cents. The cost it added to the salmon was over $4.

Next time you pick up a jar of rub, give a quick look at the ingredients. You might just be surprised at how many of those ingredients you might have sitting on the shelf.

Kerr tells us that this sauce puts to good use for that “homemade” whiskey you might get from your moonshiner friends.

Moonshine Mop

1 cup hot, thick, smokey tomato-based commercial barbecue sauce
1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup bourbon
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce, such as Tabasco

In a storage , stir together the barbecue sauce, ketchup, bourbon, vinegar and hot pepper sauce. Cover and refrigerate, keeps indefinitely.

Alas, I have no moonshiner friends. I need to start hanging out with a better crowd.

The Party Girl Cookbook

Today is Bastille Day. It would be a great time to drag out a thick, classic French cookbook of important historic note. Screw that. I pulled out The Party Girl Cookbook by Nina Lesowitz and Lara Morris Starr.

The Party Girls offer up tons of party ideas. The theme for the Bastille Day party is heady foods. Lettuce heads, artichoke heads, roasted garlic heads, and salmon with heads.

Berets are de rigueur for those who still have heads. Eiffel Towers tchotchke spread about with some Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité banners add to the motif. Throw Edith Piaf on the record player and you are good to go.

Grab a crusty baguette, slice it thin and spread with a head.

Roasted Garlic Heads

4 heads fresh garlic, loose outer skin removed
2 sprigs fresh rosemary
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F. Cut off the stem and the top one fifth of the head of garlic. Place them on a large piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Place the rosemary sprigs across the tops of the cut heads. Drizzle with olive oil. Close up the aluminum foil and seal the edges tightly. Roast for one hour or until garlic is tender. Remove the package from the oven, open carefully, let the contents cool slightly.

Dinner (NOT) at the Bastille

According to Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and her family were well fed during their incarceration at Tuileries Palace. Here is their dinner list:

3 soups
4 entrees
3 roast dishes with three pieces
4 sweet courses
a plate of fancy cakes
3 compotes
3 dishes of fruit
3 loaves of bread with butter
1 bottle of Champagne
1 small carafe of Bordeaux
1 small carafe of Malvoisie
1 small carafe of Madeira
4 cups of coffee.

It sure beats bread and water!


Give a listen to Mireille Mathieu's riveting performance of La Marseillaise.

Greenwich Village Cookbook

When Vivian Kramer was a little girl living in Pennsylvania, she longed to be a “career girl” in New York City and live in Greenwich Village. She accomplished her dream, spending 15 years in the “Village” eating in many of the restaurants. She began collecting recipes from the leading restaurants and in 1969 published Greenwich Village Cookbook. Four hundred recipes from 75 restaurants


This recipe is from Jai-Alai at 82 Bank Street. It was a small Basque restaurant run by Valentin Aguirre, who was the founding father of the New York Basque Center. Aguirre would meet in the basement of a house on Water Street with several other Basque men to discuss their heritage and culture. Thirteen of the men formalized the group in 1913 with a charter drafted by Fiorello La Guardia, who later became Mayor of New York. After operating a boarding house on Cherry Street, Aguirre moved his base of operation to 82 Bank street where he opened Jai-Alai.

Sopa De Ajo con Huevos

4 tablespoons olive oil
8 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 rolls (hard or soft), cut in cubes and toasted
6 cups chicken broth
4 tablespoons grated Muenster cheese
4 eggs

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and sauté the garlic until golden brown. Add the bread cubes, chicken broth, and Muenster cheese and simmer for 10 minutes. Break the eggs into a bowl. (Do not beat.) Carefully drop the eggs into the soup. Boil for 3 to 4 minutes, or until the eggs are poached. Serve at once.

This soup was a favorite among Basque émigré and starving artist alike. Valentin Aguirre died in 1953.

Alexandre Dumas’ Dictionary of Cuisine

“More exciting and thrilling than Monte Cristo or Three Musketeers, ” was the pronouncement upon reading the great novelist, Alexandre Dumas’ Dictionary of Cuisine. I concur, though I do love some lively fencing now and then.

After writing more books than Joyce Carol Oates, Alexandre Dumas set out to write an opus on the thing he loved as much as women -- food. His failing health gave him pause to rethink the enormity of his multi-volume project, settling on a single volume in the form of dictionary with recipes. Wow, a cookbook AND a dictionary, two things I dearly love.

For his "dinner" entry he wrote:

Dinner. A major daily activity, which can be accomplished in worthy fashion only by intelligent people. It is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be diversified, calm conversation. It should sparkle with rubies of the wine between courses, be deliciously suave with the sweetness of dessert, and acquire true profundity with the coffee.

I totally agree. Honey, there are people I would sleep with that I wouldn't eat with! But if they made me turnips and gizzards I might just be persuaded.

Giblets and turnips, two things I dearly love. Am I repeating myself? This is a dish I never thought of, but why not. Chewy bites of giblets cooked with caramelized turnips, thickened with a bit of potato. Sounds like a major activity to me.

Turkey Giblets with Turnips

Take the goblets of 2 turkeys and 4 ounces of bacon cut into little cubes and parboiled to eliminate the salt. Make a light roux and add the bacon pieces; brown them; add you cut up giblets and a bouquet of thyme, bay leaf, and parsley. Cook lightly. Add some water and 1/2 bottle of white wine. Let simmer.
Fry onions and white turnips in a little butter with salt and powdered sugar. When they are golden in color, put them into your ragout, add a few cooked potatoes, mix, skim off the fat well, and serve hot.

We featured another of Dumas' recipes from The Illustrated History of French Cuisine.

Cook Until Done

George Bradshaw was a rather famous short story writer back in the day when short stories were prized by readers and more importantly by magazines who actually paid for them. He began writing about food for Vogue and the Saturday Evening Post. His “consultant” on the recipes was Ruth Norman. Not the Ruth Norman who believed that UFO's were going to land and take her away, but the Ruth Norman who was one of the first people to ever demonstrate “cooking” on television with her cooking-school on CBS. She later partnered with James Beard to form his cooking school.

Bradshaw compared Norman to the great actress Laurette Taylor. He said of her, “with a few casual and apparently unrelated gestures she arranges a masterpiece. While you are still wondering where you put the butter, she has made the hollandaise.

In 1962, their articles were collected into a cookbook entitled Cook Until Done.

"Cook until done", is a famous instruction in many a Southern kitchen -- mix it, put it in a pan, cook 'till done. The thought is if you can cook you will know when ”it” is done. If you can’t cook then why are you in the kitchen?

Bradshaw begins the book with an anecdote about his first culinary success. A girl he knew sent him a large steak from Kansas City. Being unmarried he was unaware of what to do with his kitchen, but undaunted he invited friends over. He made martini’s, put the stove on and around eight he decided to begin cooking the steak.

“So. I opened the door of the broiler and the steak under the gas. I then went into the living room and had a cigarette, or part of one. This would take I should think, about three minutes. I then went back to the kitchen. The entire place was in flames.
Now here is where my recipe becomes a little inexact. I do not know precisely how long that the kitchen was on fire. I did not look at my watch.
But I do know that when things had quieted down enough for me to get the broiler door open, the steak was perfectly done. Charred black on the outside, red rare on the inside, I had never tasted a better.
I suppose the fact that the painters had to be called in the next day to fix up the kitchen does not properly belong in a recipe, but it is something to consider if you are contemplating broiling a steak.”

If burning the kitchen is out of the question, give this a try.

Scallops with Lemon

For four people, get two and a half pounds of sea scallops. This is a surprise, you don’t need bays.
Spread them out on some sort of baking dish – a big Pyrex one is sensible –squeeze over them the juice of two lemons, dot them with butter or a few squirts of olive oil, and grind over them plenty of black pepper. Then let them sit for a couple of hours. This is very necessary.
To cook, put them under the broiler for twelve or fifteen minutes. When they are browned they are done. Poke them or turn them once as they cook. You will be pleased at how good they are.

And if extraterrestrials arrive for dinner, tell them they have the wrong Ruth Norman!

Ten Vineyard Lunch

The raison d’être of the table, after all, is to have a good time.
Richard Olney

Richard Olney was one of the best food writers in America. He was the chief consultant to the Time-Life Good Cook series, which Andrew Knowlton of shaggy hair fame said was the best 28 volume "cookbook" ever. The French Menu Cookbook is one of the classic cookbooks of all time.

Ten Vineyard Lunches is organized as menus from ten areas of France with burgeoning vineyards. Richard Olney always has great foods, but what makes this book truly special is the way he speaks about entertaining.

Here are some of Olney’s observations.

“If everyone, guest and host alike, is not relaxed and happy, the meal is a failure, no matter how perfect the food and the wine.”

“There is nothing formal about my table – unless an array of wine glasses be considered formal –and, because I am most comfortable dressed in rags, that is the way I receive.”

“I don’t much worry about timing – as long as the Champagne glasses are kept filled no one minds lingering before going to the table.”

As someone who dresses in rags and adores a good Krug, I would have to say we would have been soul mates.
This recipe is from a menu for dining in the Loire Valley and it uses my favorite -- pears.

Baked Pears

4 firm eating pears
unsalted butter
2-3 tbsp sugar, or to taste
about 1/3 cup heavy cream

halve the pears, remove the cores, peel and slice lengthwise. Preheat the oven to 400º. Butter a shallow gratin dish and spread the pear slices, over lapping fanwise, over the surface. Sprinkle with sugar, dab over cream and bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the cream is bubbling and the surface lightly colored.

This couldn't be simpler, yet positively elegant -- the Richard Olney way.

Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking

I love this book just for the cover photo. I want all that stuff sitting on a shelf and looking exactly like that. This book is a kind of oversized companion to Great Peasant Dishes of the World. There are hundreds of recipes that are the backbone of the cuisines of countries around the world. When I came across this recipe, I immediately went out and bought some pork.

Pork Stewed in Cumin

Marinade:

1/2 cup white wine
juice of one lemon
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper


2 pounds lean boneless pork, cubed
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 bunch cilantro, chopped
Lemon wedges for garnish
Olives for garnish

1. In a shallow non-metallic bowl, combine the marinade ingredients.
2. Add the pork cubes and stir to coat thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours, turning meat occasionally.
3. Remove marinated pork from a bowl with a slotted spoon. Pat dry. Reserve marinade.
4. Heat the oil in a heavy casserole, add the meat and sauté over moderately high heat until golden brown. Add the marinade. Reduce heat to low, cover and cook until the meat is tender, about 45 minutes. Lower the heat, stir in the cilantro. Mix well and transfer to heated serving platter.
5. Garnish with lemon wedges and olives. Serve with fried potatoes.

The Art of Cuisine

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was an artist…in the kitchen as well as in print.



Toulouse-Lautrec was a party animal who loved food, drink and fast women. The poet Paul Leclercq said of his friend:

“He was a great gourmand. He always carried a little grater and a nutmeg to flavor the glasses of port he drank. He loved to talk about cooking and knew of many rare recipes for making the most standard dishes, for in this, as in all else, Lautrec had a hatred of useless frills. And like a good Southerner, the more he valued straightforward cooking, the more he despised the doubtful and pretentious chemistry of restaurants and palace hotels.”

Who knew Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a Southerner! Perhaps it is the "South" of France, but Southerner still. It was another friend, Maurice Joyant, who is responsible for collecting the recipes that Toulouse-Lautrec invented and gathered from friends and acquaintances. His most valuable contribution to the culinary realm may be his "invention" of the cocktail nosh, for it is Toulouse-Lautrec who is often given credit for originating the fashion of cocktail food.



I don’t know if this would be a good amuse-bouche to have with a lovely chardonnay, but give it try next September.

Stewed Marmots

Having killed some marmots sunning themselves belly up in the sun with their noses in the air one sunrise in September, skin them and carefully put aside the mass of fat which is excellent for rubbing into the bellies of pregnant women, into the knees, ankles, and painful joints of sprains, and into the leather of shoes.
Cut up the marmot and treat it like stewed hare which has a perfume that is unique and wild.

Clearly, this why we like the French. In America we might be tempted to call these little guys groundhogs. How positively unappealing! But "Marmot" it sounds so lovely, even thought the translation from the Old French probably means "mountain mouse." Still mountain mouse verses ground hog -- tough call.

Lest you be running around this sunny September sunrise without a clue -- behold the sunning marmot.

The Potato Book

The Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, New York decided to produce a book as a fund-raiser. Not a terribly unusual thing to do. Bridgehampton was once covered in potato fields, so the idea was to do a potato cookbook filled with recipes and fun potato facts and Myrna David stepped up. The Potato Book was born.

For any other community, such a fundraiser might go unnoticed, but Bridgehampton is a hotbed of writers, artists, restaurants and even Craig Claiborne. And while he didn’t have any children in the Hampton Day School, Truman Capote wrote the introduction. With all this talent, the book was snapped up by a publisher, primarily for the introduction. Capote wrote:

“I live in Sagaponack by the sea. The house, which I love, sits smack in the middle of potato fields. In Fall, when the harvesting is done and the tractors are gone from the fields, I amble out through the empty rows collecting small, sweet, leftover potatoes for my larder.

Imagine a cold October morning, I fill my basket with found potatoes in the field and race to the kitchen to create my one and only most delicious ever potato lunch. The Russian vodka—it must be 80 proof – goes into the icebox to chill. The potatoes into the oven to bake. My breathless friend arrives to share the feast. Out comes the icy vodka. Out comes a bowl of sour cream. Likewise the potatoes, piping hot.

We sit down to sip our drinks. We split open steaming potatoes and put on some sour cream. Now I whisk out the big tin of caviar, which I have forgotten to tell you is the only way I can bear to eat a potato."

Well this is hardly a rousing endorsement of the potato, but then Capote grew up in Alabama so I just love hear him (and when I read this I “hear” his unique voice) using words like “larder’ and “icebox” and I am drawn to his writing.

If you are out in the Hamptons for the summer, you may find the need to cook for a large gathering. Here’s what you need.

Quahog Chowder For 100

1 bushel chowder (Quahog) clams, opened and minced
15 pounds dressed-weight striped bass filets, chunked
1 3/4 gallons clam broth, reserved from steaming open clams (plus one quart)
18 medium-sized onions, minced fine and squeezed
2 pounds salt pork, diced
1/2 pound butter
10 pounds potatoes, pared and diced
3 quarts milk
1 cup Almaden white wine
Thyme, one bunch minced
1 cup chopped fresh parsley

Try out pork, add onions and cook until just slightly brown. Add butter if necessary. Add clam broth. Bring to a boil. Add potatoes; cook until tender. Add fish; cook until half or three-quarters done. Add clams, simmer briefly. Add thyme and parsley. Add milk and wine. Simmer all a while.

In keeping with our transcription of recipes from the book they are in, we left “Try” out the pork. I’m sure this is supposed to be “Fry”. As you can tell, this is a fund-raising cookbook, so there was no trained dietitian or even a trained cook to test the recipes. I am not sure how to tell if bass is “three-quarters done.” Nor am I sure how long, “a while” is. But you get the idea.