lostpastremembered

Game of the Goose Meatballs, 3 Different Ways

2012-01-26T06:06:00.000-08:00

Game of the Goose, American,1851 Strong Museum

For good society is but a game,

'The royal game of Goose,' as I may say,

Where every body has some separate aim,

An end to answer, or a plan to lay

Lord Byron, Don Juan 1819

For another meeting of 5 Star Foodie Makeover group, the topic is meatballs and I thought I would think outside the beef, veal & pork box and play with goose.

hosted by 5 Star Foodie & Lazaro Cooks!

As I searched for some goose images for the post, I found an intriguing game that I had to share with you –– Game of the Goose. A roll of the dice takes you further on the board if you hit a goose image on your throw. I'd never heard of it, but as you can see Lord Byron referenced it most deftly in his poem, Don Juan. It was a popular game for a very long time and the game boards are just fabulous.

Game of the Goose, 1598

The game has been played for at least hundreds of years but its roots go back to the 2nd Millenium BC's Phaistos Disc, nearly as far back in history as the meatball itself!

Jeu de l'oie

Enough about games, we're here to talk about meatballs! It doesn’t take a food historian to figure that there have been meatballs since the dawn of forever. I am sure they evolved when some canny cook, faced with unchewably tough meat, chopped it or smashed it, rolled it and stuck it on a stick to roast. I imagine the concept was well received and the rest is, well, history. I checked the 4000 year-old Yale clay tablets and couldn’t find them there (although only a few tablets have survived… the meatball chapter could have been broken) but they are all over Apicius and in the Baghdad cookbook going back around 1500 years. Meatballs are all over the cuisines of the European and English Renaissance, in India, the Middleast and Africa. You name the place… there are meatballs. Meatballs aren’t just for your tomato-sauced spaghetti either, there are a million different kinds made from just about anything.

Interestingly enough, Apicius (you can read about it HERE) is full of meatball recipes and many of them are made with fowl. There is a whole chapter devoted to ‘minces”. Apicius even uses the technique of adding softened bread to the mix, albeit soaked in wine rather than milk.

The Food Timeline interpreted a line in Apicius to mean that with ground meat peacock is the best, followed by rabbit, lobster, chicken and pig, in that order (when I read it, I wasn’t so sure it only meant ground meat… but that’s me). There are indeed meatball recipes for all of them (come on, don’t lobster meatballs sound interesting?). No goose perhaps, but peacock is a flavor-cousin. I was going to make goose meatballs.

Embden Goose

I posed this concept to Jim Schlitz when I saw him a few weeks ago on his visit to NYC. He is the owner of Schiltz Goose Farm in South Dakota. He sent me a 10-pound package of trimmings to make into ground goose meat. I separated out the skin, divided the meat and fat up to get the right proportion, cut it into chunks, and froze it up for an hour and then put it through the meat grinder twice (large and small disk in the Kitchenaid—but you can use your food processor and pulse it to grind). About 7 ½ pounds of the trimmings gave me 3 pounds 9 ounces of meat. What happened to the other 2 ½? Petunia, the St. Bernard, ate 2 ½ pounds of raw goose!! She is so in the doghouse for stealing the meat off the kitchen table –– gives you an idea how good the goose is!

I looked to a favorite source for how best to work with ground goose. Hank Shaw at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is a wizard with goose and game (you need to buy his indispensible book Hunt, Gather, Cook –– I use it all the time when I’m doing game). His goose sausage had lovely spicing, with wine, 5 spice, sage and juniper and he had actually made duck meatballs… I thought I would use some of his methods. I used a combination of meat and goose fat (and rendered the leftovers for more delicious goose fat for my freezer). I then combined it with a little ground pork to make my meatballs. Another thing that I wanted to use, based on old Apicius sauce, was fig. I had just used a little fig jam in a sauce for a beef stew and found the result a delight… and we all know how good those meatballs are at Ikea with lingonberry. Meatballs really go well with a bit of sweet fruit with them!

If you make these with ground chicken or turkey they are easy as could be. If you grind the meat… it’s a recipe that takes time, but isn’t hard. The glaze is delicious.

You can serve them over noodles or as an appetizer on a skewer or with toothpicks. They were also great on focaccia with a little St. Andre cheese.

Game of the Goose Meatballs serves 4

1 pound of goose or duck (2/3 meat, 1/3 fat –either what comes with the meat or with added pork fat if you don’t have enough) - get your goose from Schiltz Goose Farm , best on the planet

OR, the easy way –– use ground chicken or turkey thigh meat as is

¼ lb ground pork

3 T port or madeira

1 T Cognac or Armagnac

1 clove garlic, minced or put through a press.

½ t nutmeg

¼ c mixed fresh herbs (thyme, marjoram, sage, rosemary, parsley), chopped

½ t 5-spice powder

1 t crushed juniper berries, chopped

1 t green peppercorns, chopped

2 t black pepper

2 t salt or to taste

2 T fig jam (or chop and soak 1 or 2 dried figs in port or madeira for a few hours until softened)

1/3 c hot milk

1 cup bread cubes, without crusts

1 egg

2 T olive oil

Cream Sauce (optional)

1 ½ c warm stock

3 T flour

¼ c cream

salt to taste

½ t pepper

¼ t nutmeg

½ t thyme

2 T madeira or sherry

Cut the meat and fat into chunks and freeze 1 hour. Put through the meat grinder twice, large and small disk or pulse a few times in a processor till ground fairly fine. Skip this step if you are using ground chicken or turkey thigh meat.

Put the bread in the milk and let sit till bread becomes like a paste. Whip up the eggs and add the liquors and the bread. Combine the rest of the ingredients and mix well, then mix with the meats. Put the mixture in the food processor and process a few pulses… it will look a bit messy, but don’t worry. Put back in the fridge to chill… this also makes the flavors come together.

After an hour, make into meatballs and put back in the fridge. Warm the oil in a large skillet and brown the meatballs on all sides over a medium flame. Cook the meatballs till done and remove from the pan.

While the meatballs are cooking make the glaze.

If you want to serve with the cream sauce, pour off most of the fat from the pan and sprinkle the flour in the pan. Slowly add the stock and stir as it thickens to a paste, stirring all the while. Keep adding stock, stirring all the while till you have a good sauce, add the cream and taste for seasoning.

Roll the meatballs in the glaze to warm and coat. Serve with the cream sauce on the plate if you would like, or toss the cream sauce with fresh noodles or serve as an hors d’oeurvre with toothpicks or as a snack on bread with a little St Andre cheese, warmed for a melting minute in a toaster oven.

Glaze

4 c unsalted chicken stock, reduced to 1 cup

2 -3 T fig jam to taste (or chop and soak 2 dried figs in port or madeira for a few hours)

s & p to taste

1 T madeira

Take the reduced chicken stock and add the fig and madeira, s & p to taste. Warm up all the ingredients (if you want to be fancy, you can strain it at this point). Roll the meatballs in it to glaze.

Meatballs on pasta with the cream sauce

Meatballs on warm focaccia with melted St. Andre cheese - perfect for the Superbowl!

Deborah over at A Doctor's Kitchen has created Trufflehead, an iPhone/iPad healthy cooking app for cooks of all levels. It’s packed with over 260 full-flavored recipes, as well as 170 step-specific technique demos, ingredient and equipment IDs, selection and storage info, and “Priority Organics” labeling of ingredients best purchase in organic form. Check out the Trufflehead video on YouTube. I gave it to a young friend who is just learning how to cook and she was crazy about it.. especially all the tutorials on how to prep things, chop things... well it's great. I like the shopping list you can make up and send out to whoever is running a shopping errand for you... check it out!

Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday

Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and Crêpes Suzette

2012-01-19T04:50:00.000-08:00

Picture from Downton Abbey

I am hooked on the PBS series, Downton Abbey and have been since it premiered last year. What’s not to love? It has great drama, wonderful actors and it’s shot in one of the great houses of England. For an hour on Sunday, the present fades away and it’s 1914 (and if you've missed them, you can watch them all on PBS.org).

Gosford Park

Downton Abbey flowed from the golden pen (keyboard?) of Julian Fellowes who also wrote the sparkling, Oscar-winning script for Gosford Park in 2001–– a deliciously detailed story about a house party murder mystery set in 1932, filmed mostly at real locations in Wrotham Park and Syon House, and directed by Robert Altman. After a long if quiet career as a character actor, Fellowes has hit his stride later in life as the consummate creator of dramas about the aristocracy and their servants in a changing cultural climate.

Julian Fellowes

Fellowes said in a Daily Mail piece that he was approached in 2009 to do a series that would “revisit Gosford Park territory” after the film was such a hit. He wasn’t keen on the idea at the beginning, worrying “it would be like trying to make lightning strike twice in the same place’, but then embraced the challenge. Interestingly, he had been reading about American heiresses coming to England at the time and began by imagining a single character and her story ––a rich American heiress marrying into a title –– the rest of the script fell into place.

Downton Abbey is shot at the magnificent Highclere Castle in Hampshire England, home (since 1679) of the Carnarvon family. It currently houses the 8^th Earl, George Herbert. Although there has been a structure there since the middle ages, the better part of the current house was completely remodeled in the 19^th century in the Jacobean style.

The heiress that helped the Carnarvon family at the end of the 19^th century was not American but rather a beautiful and diminutive Englishwoman, Almina Wombwell, referred to as a “pocket Venus”, who married the 5^th Earl. He was the famous Lord Carnarvon that financed Egyptologist Howard Carter’s digging about in The Valley of Kings that led to the sensational discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.

Almina was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothchild who brought a £500,000 dowry from her “godfather Alfred” to sweeten the pot for Carnarvon undertaking a socially dangerous union. She wasn’t officially illegitimate ––she was christened Wombwell after the scamp her French mother had married –– but she was spurned by most of society. Lord Carnarvon was not deterred, he had his own demons to contend with, not the least of which were crushing sporting debts that the marriage erased. She showed her gratitude by underwriting his Egyptian digs. Although not American, she was certainly an outsider and you could say she was one of the more highly colored inspirations for the Wisconsin heiress that was to become Lady Cora (according to Fellowes there were 350 American heiresses that saved British royalty from ruin in the 19^th Century –– the NYT's has a great story about Edith Wharton and this trend).

Photos of house from Highclere Castle site

It seems that the series came just in time to save the current Lord Carnarvon from a distasteful sale of some of his land for a housing development to pay for £12 million in necessary repairs (I read that most of the upstairs rooms were in a terrible state of decay with mold and leaks undermining the structure of the house –– the photos were disturbing). Andrew Lloyd Webber also offered to buy the Highclere to house his massive art collection after hearing it was in tough straights ... an offer that mightily insulted Lord Carnavon.

Only the grand rooms downstairs have been well maintained. Downton Abbey has proved to be a windfall for the Earl who’s not only reaped location fees, he’s also seen an explosion in tourism at the house. Downton has saved Highclere. Bravo!

It’s not just the Highclere Castle location that makes the series so richly textured. Fellowes has been a stickler on the use of correct props, dressing and service for the series –– he has a gimlet eye for the minutia of this stately, structured world. Production also had an historical expert on hand named Alistair Bruce to answer any questions about protocol that came up, from seating to eating –– like would asparagus be eaten with the fingers? Answer? Bruce was unavailable as cameras were about to roll so they chopped them to look like green beans so as not to make an incorrect choice. Even the menus were written out in French, as would have been the fashion (although, if one dish wasn’t translatable then the whole menu would have been in English –– wonder who downstairs was writing the French?).

I think one of the reasons the show is so addictive is that not a hair is out of place in the recreation of WWI England so you feel as if you are truly there.

Pictures that follow are from Downton Abbey

Most of the silver and glassware used are antiques from the period around the WWI or earlier… some things were borrowed from Highclere. The dishes are Spode and the fictional crest of Earl of Grantham was created by the art director Charmian Woods and applied to each and every plate by the art department.

The table settings and floral arrangements were created from historical images. The use of greens placed directly on the table rather that big tall arrangements must have made the film crew terribly happy… nothing to get in the way for shooting!

Still, there was much to be done by the crew with all the table service and matching and endless replacements of the food that was served and eaten over and over again during the course of filming.

Actors are always reminded not to eat too much in their first take. After 12 hours of shooting the same scene, they will have to eat the same food through all the takes ––singles, doubles, wides and reverses.

I remember as a kid being endlessly fascinated at the way servants held the silver trays and covered dishes and the guests helped themselves with such grace with double spoons or large forks and such… one waiter with the fish, another following with the sauce… remarkable man power involved in serving a meal!

Things were different for the downstairs scenes. The kitchen area is an impeccably outfitted set on a London stage and not at Highclere since the old kitchen didn’t exist any longer (the remarkable call board was custom made by the last remaining craftsman specializing in this old fashioned contraption… and it actually worked). It was mentioned in a Daily Mail article that shooting would often involve an actor leaving the kitchen set holding a tray of food and delivering it to the dining room at Highclere 2 weeks later. It made for nerve-wracking continuity matching.

I loved this photo of crew fussing over the actors and the set and the food plates covered with foil to keep
them from congealing (and keep wardrobe sleeves out of the sauce).

Fellowes said that recipes for all the food all came from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management . Although published in the 1860’s, the book was widely reprinted and altered to account for changes in style and equipment (gas stoves, for instance) and was still very popular in the early 20^th century. It is entirely possible that Downton’s cook, Mrs. Patmore, had this book as a reference on that shelf above the desk.

I was looking for things to make when I watched the first show of the second season. When a new maid told the downstairs staff she longed to try the Crêpes Suzette they were serving at a Grantham dinner that evening (very much an upstair’s treat), it seemed an invitation to make the dish. What happened with the cheeky maid’s request to have the Lord and Ladies’ leftover crêpes made me smile –– the maid didn’t get her wish because she had ticked off the cook, Mrs. Patmore.

Rather than give the leftover pancake (crêpe) to the maid…

Mrs. Patmore gives it to the master’s dog, Isis (who was called Pharoah earlier)

Crêpes Suzette, at least according to one version of its history, was a favorite of soon to be King Edward VII of England (because Victoria lived so long, he was only king from 1902 to his death in 1910).

Henri Charpentier preparing Crêpes Suzette

Henri Charpentier (1880-1961), in his very charming autobiography, Life a la Henri: Being the Memories of Henri Charpentier (a great favorite of Alice Waters) tells of the near disaster that created the dessert that earlier had just been crepes in orange sauce when he worked at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1895. While preparing the simpler dish for Edward, he mistakenly lit up the liquors while warming them. It made for a dramatic presentation and improved the flavor instead of ruining it. Charpentier recalled, “It was, I thought, the most delicious medley of sweet flavors I had ever tasted. I still think so. That accident of the flame was precisely what was needed to bring all those various instruments into one harmony of taste . . . He [Edward] ate the pancakes with a fork; but he used a spoon to capture the remaining syrup.” His version of the legend has the dessert named in honor of Edward’s niece, Princess Suzanne who accompanied him at this momentous luncheon. “Thus was born and baptized this confection, one taste of which, I really believe, would reform a cannibal into a civilized gentleman. The next day I received a present from the Prince, a jeweled ring, a panama hat and a cane.” Priceless.

Although there is another candidate for the creator of the dish (an actress named Suzette had to serve pre-prepared crêpes on stage and lit them up for extra drama and to warm the cold crêpes for her fellow cast members who had to eat them), I like this story best.

It would only be right, given its connection to a recent English King, that it would be a favorite at Downton. The recipe is not in Mrs. Beeton’s original book that I have (it was written 30 years before the dessert arrived on the scene) so I used Henri’s original recipe.

The way Charpentier’s version differs from modern versions is that he uses 3 liqueurs, Maraschino, Kirsch and Curaçao instead of today’s standard Grand Marnier and no additional orange juice... it also uses buckets of butter! It does not use the citrus sugar method that I remember from the first time I had it, with the maître d’ rubbing cubes of sugar on the lemons and oranges and using the cubes… it was almost as fun to watch as a kid as the flaming part. It is meant to impress.

It is quite easy to make most of it ahead and finish it a minute before serving. I thought a few orange suprêmes would be a welcome addition to this great classic and you can whip up a batch and share it with your friends watching the show together with a glass of bubbly!

These crêpes are very eggy... don't get me wrong, they are delicious in the sauce but not what many are used to. I enclose a less eggy recipe just in case. There is also a lot of sauce, so be generous with it! The dish is insanely luxurious with all the butter and liquor... you can see why someone would long to try it after catching the scent of it wafting from the dining room... it is intoxicating... the scent of aristocracy.

Crêpes Suzette for 2, original recipe

Crêpes, original recipe (makes 4 good size crêpes)

3 eggs

2 T flour

1 T water

1 T milk

pinch of salt

1-2 T butter

Stir to the consistency of thick olive oil and let rest for 30 minutes to an hour (modern change, I put all the ingredients in a blender and mix then strain the batter and use it after it rests 15 minutes).

For the first crepe, generously coat the pan with butter… but do not puddle it… too much butter makes bad crepes. After that, add a smear of butter for each crepe (I often use a stick of butter and paint the pan with it). Make crepes using all the batter and fold each one twice, forming a wedge shape and reserve.

Crepes with less egg

¾ c milk

2 eggs

½ c flour

¼ t salt

Put everything in the blender and blend. Strain into a bowl and cover for 15 -30 minutes then continue with the instructions above.

Sauce

Piece of lemon peel the size of the ball of your thumb, cut in thin strips

Piece of orange peel the size of the ball of your thumb, cut in thin strips

OR use a micro plane and grate the zest into the sugar (which is what I did)

2 T vanilla sugar (you can make this by scraping a pinch of vanilla off the pod into the sugar or stir a drop of vanilla into sugar)

Combine and let sit 2 days (I am not sure this is really necessary, I think you can use it soon after making it)

¼ lb butter

5 oz. (he calls for 5 ponies) of an equal blend of maraschino, curaçao and kirshwasser (if you don’t have them all, you can use just Curaçao or Grand Marnier or Cointreau or Triple Sec which are all orange-flavored like curaçao)

suprêmes of 1 blood orange (skinless, membraneless segments cut away from the orange -I threw the juice that collect from doing it into the butter)

orange zest for decoration (optional)

Melt butter. When it bubbles, add 3 ponies of liqueur blend, light on fire –– there will be a LOT of fire (it will go up about 6”) so pay attention, have a lid handy just in case. I didn’t need it but good to have to be on the safe side… don’t have anything flammable hanging around it!!!

As the fire goes out, add the vanilla sugar and stir till it is melted. Add the crepes and turn them ‘deftly’ in the hot sauce. Then add 2 more ponies of mixed liqueurs, flame again and serve. I had trouble with the second light. Might be good to light the alcohol in a small skillet and pour or at least warm the alcohol to get the vapors going. Place the crepes on the plate, toss the suprêmes and zest on top and pour the sauce over all.

**I want to mention I got most of my information from a series of articles in the Daily Mail and ITV… bravo for their great research. Also, if you want to learn more, Fellowes’ niece Jessica has written a companion book to the series that has most of this information and much more in The World of Downton Abbey.

Harry Luke –– World Traveling, Copeaux Favorite (Gorgonzola Bacon Crisps) and Pineapple Mousse

2012-01-12T08:24:00.000-08:00

Harry Luke with Edward, Prince of Wales, 1925, Sierra Leone

Sir Harry Luke was born Harry Lukach in London in 1884. His father was Austro-Hungarian and his mother was Polish nobility.

After education at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, he went on to an illustrious career in the Foreign Service that took him from Barbados to Cyprus to Georgia and Armenia, then to Jerusalem/Palestine, Sierra Leone, Malta, Fiji and the Caribbean with others in between. He died in Cyprus in 1969.

Luke with Hashimite Dynasty, Jerusalem, 1929 (Luke is right of center with his son)

His friend, the author Lawrence Durrell said of Harry in Bitter Lemons (his book on his time in Cyprus), “ Sir Harry Luke, whose gentleness, and magnanimity of soul were married to a mind far reaching and acute, who was fantastically erudite without being bookish, and whose life had been one of travel and adventure…” The Dictionary of National Biography said his diplomatic mission “sprang…from conscience and culture… combined with a prismatic cosmopolitanism.”

Harry Luke in Jerusalem, 1924 (standing 3^rd from right)

During his life he wrote many books on the countries he was posted to, bartered many treaties and ate many meals. All the while he took notes about the foods he ate (lucky for us) and in 1954 wrote a book called The Tenth Muse (its introduction supplied most of the information about Luke).

I found 10^th Muse last year reading An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by British food goddess, Elizabeth David. She loved it and recommended it highly. I can see why. It has 400 recipes from great cooks all over the world and some fine tales. The 10^th Muse, by the way, is Nectambrosia –– a muse invented by Sir Harry to overcome the lapse of the Greeks. They neglected to include food’s muse with those for drama, dancing and poetry and the rest, can you imagine?

David said “During a lifetime spent –– and uncommonly well spent, one deduces from the book – in the Colonial Service, Sir Harry has collected recipes from the British Residencies and Government Houses, from their chatelaines, their cooks –– cooks Maltese and Cypriot, Hindu and Persian and Assyrian, cooks Goanese and Polynesian, cooks naval, military and consular, cooks in Union Clubs in South American capitals, cooks of French Princes and Brazilian countesses, of Turkish Grand Viziers and Patriarchs of the Syrian Orthodox Church –– and in setting down his recipes, Sir Harry has acknowledged the source of each and every one …. Few authors… provide the stimulus, the improbable information, the traveller’s tales, the new visions which to me makes the book a true collector’s piece.”

Luke with Queen Salote, Tonga, 1938

Luke began his love affair with food as a child when his parents took him along on their frequent trips to Europe. It was from those trips he remembers Sunday lunches at Voisin on the Rue St-Honoré (headed by legendary chef Choron). It made such an impression on child Harry, that he recalls the meal perfectly –– petite marmite, chateaubriand with a “pyramid of butter and chopped parsley on top”, sauce Bearnaise, pommes soufflés followed by perfect brie, toasted pain de ménage and Cuisse-Madame pears. No wonder that he was bitten by the travel bug ––with such experiences to inspire him so early in life.

Luke dined on peacocks, ostriches, armadillos, iguanas and very delicious smoked reindeer tongue as well as politely partaking of what most of us would consider unsavory or even inedible dishes like sea-slug broth in the South Pacific or a dish made from the brown and green milt of the mbalolo (an 18” clear sea-worm in Fiji) that is considered delicious by the natives.

He also regales his readers with stories of grand feasts that most of us can’t even dream of and exotic meals that were delicious to the point of rapture.

He talks about the height of subtlety in the famous “State Soup of the Hapsburgs” served (from the time of Charles V to that of Franz Joseph) in small white and gold cups… entire herd’s worth of animal bits were reduced and reduced again, clarified with egg white, ground meat and liver and finished with the flesh of flocks of many different fowls… wild and domestic. It took 48 hours and 10 people to make it and served 1000 to 2500 people.

Melek Taus, Peacock Angel of the Yezidi –– not the Devil!

He ate with Yezidis (mistakenly known as Devil worshippers because of a bad translation) in a palace outside of Mosul (that had excellent, sophisticated cuisine), and shared delectable food with Dervishes in Turkey with gorgeous meat patties, stuffed vegetables and honeyed desserts served on tinned copper plates.

He gave thanks to his own cooks in all the places he had lived –– a nice touch and appropriate since he did not cook himself. He did take great pains to give proper instruction to his staff in his many kitchens all over the world –– he was proud of his ability to speak the language of the kitchen well. I imagine that’s where the collection of cookbooks and recipes came in.

I always love finding out what cookbooks people own, and Luke didn’t disappoint. I found a whole new selection I had never heard of, yippee! He revealed that the first cookbook he ever owned was Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen (for cooking vegetables) by Janet Ross of the Villa of Poggio Gherardo (where some of the Decameron tales were told and where young Luke met Ms Ross in her 80’s). He also praised French Dishes for English Tables by Berjane, The Cordon Bleu Cookbook by Dione Lucas, Wiener Küche by Hess and Recipes from Vienna by Bac and mentioned Elizabeth David fondly.

He didn’t forget American food in his list and cited The United States Regional Cookbook by Berolzheimer and Steiff’s Eat Drink and be Merry in Maryland as favorites. He also kept a private stock of recipes –– each one attached to the person/place he had gotten it from like taste postcards.

He recounts extravagant meals –– a perfect “dîner de circonstance” with British royalty in France just before the outbreak of WWII that had the most remarkable wines on the planet and all manner of quail, duck, truffles and a dessert called “ La Mousse Glaceé Singapour” that sounds terribly exotic.

Life Magazine August 15 1938

Trinity College, Oxford

After all these travels, or maybe because of them, one of his favorite meals was a 1959 meal at his old school, Trinity College, Oxford. Everything from the oysters to the trout, hams and chickens were divinely English and of the best quality… washed down by good solid wines from a well-tended cellar.

Menu 1959 Domus Dinner, Trinity College, Oxford

White Burgundy

Corton Charlemagne

1951 Huitres Naturel

Tortue Claire

Moselle:

Zeltinger Himmelreich

1949 Truite Saumoneé a la Colbert

(Breaded and fried with Maitre d’Hotel butter)

Claret

Ch. Cheval Blanc

1947 Poulet Sauté Hongroise

(Chicken with a paprika cream sauce)

Petits Pois au Beurre

Pommes de Terre Duchess

(purée of potato with egg, piped and baked)

Champagne

Pommery & Greno

1949 Jambon de York Braisé

Ananas Georgette

Copeaux Favorite

Port

Warre 1920

Madeira Dessert

Bual 1849

Cognac

Fine Old Demelle’s

High Table Trinity College, Oxford

Although there are recipes in the book for everything from erdapfelschmarn to fezanjan, I decided to make 2 things from that Oxford dinner… Copeaux Favorite (gorgonzola with bacon in puff pastry sticks)… which is just an indecent idea… and Ananas Georgette (pineapple and Bavarian cream with cherry/maraschino jelly) I did attempt to add pineapple purée to the Bavoroise but did not like the result and it would not set... best to keep them separate (I found out afterward an enzyme in the pineapple is the culprit... stops the gelatin from setting unless the pineapple has been cooked). It was traditionally served with the Bavaroise spooned into a hollowed out pineapple shell, maraschino jelly on the top and the crown of the pineapple replaced... I chose to do it this way. To get the mold to hold I had to freeze it... which was quite good actually, but not the way it was done.

I may add that the paprika sauce Hongroise is brilliant and delicious… made it for a veal chop HERE and was mad for it… would be fabulous with chicken… I can see why he loved this dinner.

Because of my wonderful samples of old Madeiras from Rare Wine Company, I had a few swallows of a D'Oliveira Malvesia from 1900... about the same relative age as Luke's 1849 would have been at his dinner... I wanted to see what it would have been like with the Copeaux Favorite. Fabulous... since the samples are given to me use to experiment with food are small (they are valuable wines, after all) I rarely drink them... it was a great pleasure to do so!! The pastries were excellent with one of Rare Wine's well-priced blends from the Historic Series as well. Savories and madeiras are a great combination coming back into fashion these days.

Oh yes, Luke also had a very interesting drink section in the book… with things like Mosul Mist (brandy and crème de menthe) or a regimental punch of the Royal Irish Fusiliers called a Barrosa Cup (brandy, peach brandy, cherry whiskey, kimmel, rind of lemon and peel of cucumber, brown curacao, maraschino, sherry, bitter almond, sugar and champagne that he swears doesn’t give you a hangover). What caught my eye was a fairly simple 18^th-century drink served in Barbados… a Sangaree that I will share with you. It's kind of like a madeira scented lime drink... very lovely.

Copeaux Favorite, makes 8

1/3 pound of gorgonzola or Stilton

8 pieces of bacon, sliced in half length-wise

8 pieces of puff pastry, 2 1/2" x 6-8” (make it wider if you want more cheese!)

1 egg, beaten

Cook the bacon in the microwave in paper towel for 2 minutes or until crisp. Remove and lay on fresh towels… cool.

Put out your pastry on a piece of parchment on a sheet pan. Paint the pastry lightly with the egg. and Lay the bacon down and press into the dough, crumble cheese on ½ the dough then fold the pastry over to make a long cigar shape. Use a fork to press the edges together firmly to create a seal. Brush the pastries with egg and put in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 425º. Remove the pastries and put into the oven for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375ºfor 7 to 10 minutes or until they are nicely browned and remove.

Ananas Georgette

1 recipe for maraschino jelly
1 recipe for Creme Bavoraise
1 c sliced fresh pineapple

Pour gelatin into a mold and chill for an hour. Pour crème bavarois into a mold and chill them both.

Unmold and serve with slices of pineapple

Maraschino Cherry Jelly

2/3 to 3/4 c Sour Cherry Juice

3 to 4 T Maraschino liqueur

2 oz sugar

juice of ½ lemon

1 ½ t gelatin (add a little more if you want it very stiff)

Make the jelly as strongly flavored with maraschino as you would like. Combine all the ingredients and soak the gelatin in them for 1/2 an hour. Gently bring to a boil and pour into you molds. This makes a stiff jelly that will be firm in a mold and not spread everywhere. If you want a looser jelly, use a little less gelatin.

Crème Bavoroise (based on Michael Symon's recipe)

1 c cream + 2 T

2 T milk

1 t vanilla

3 egg yolks

2 T sugar

gelatin

1 c plus 2 T cream, whipped

Dissolve the gelatin in 2 T milk. Boil the cream and set aside. Whip the yolks and sugar till golden. Add the hot cream and whip. Put back in the pot and stir until it reaches 170º. Remove from the heat and add the vanilla and the gelatin. Stir well to blend and strain. Put the mixture in a container
over a bowl of ice and chill. When cooled, add the whipped cream –– folding it in gently. It takes 4 hours to set (if you don't try to put pineapple in it!... you can see the delicious if creamy result).

Sangaree

1 sherry glass of Madeira ( I used Rare Wine Co.'s NY Malmsey)

½ pint water

juice of 1 lime (reserve slice for garnish)

pinch of nutmeg

sugar to taste (I used 1 1/2 t.)

ice.

Mix it all up and serve in a long glass over ice.

Thanks again to my friend Linda at Statewide Marble in Jersey City for the gorgeous piece of stone!

Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday!

The Rainbow Room and Lobster Newberg

2012-01-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

Rainbow Room Interior

The 3rd Monday of January may be the saddest day of the year, but I always feel a little blue the week after New Years–– it’s such a comedown after the non-stop festivities and fabulous food.

My remedy? I think a virtual visit to the Never-Never Land of 30’s nightclubs (inspired by hours of watching The Thin Man series I wrote about HERE) will do the trick nicely… champagne glass in hand, of course. For Nick and Nora, the party lasted all year –– seems like a splendid idea to me.

The menu that caught my eye last week was one from the Georges Lang collection (Lang was the late, great NY restaurateur who left a massive book and menu collection now at NYU’s Fales Cooking Library), a 1934 beauty from New York’s Rainbow Room.

I began at a favorite site called The Bowery Boys and read up on a little history about the place (that is undergoing renovation and not open at the moment) and ended up finding many great books and articles on its history.

John Rockefeller Jr. (known as “Junior” in the family) envisioned the concept of Rockefeller Center before the depression struck, but built it after it hit. Although some would have given up on the idea of a building a gigantic complex (the largest private building in modern times) in the midst of a horrific economic downturn, this just strengthened the resolve of Rockefeller who saw it as a way to give hope and good jobs to thousands of workers in New York City (I read 75,000 jobs came from the project, bankrolled by Rockefeller –– we need more like him today!).

The lead architect for the complex was Raymond Hood who died in 1934.
Edward Durell Stone designed the exterior of Radio City Music Hall (completed in 1932) .

Radio City Music Hall

Donald Deskey decorated the interior of Radio City (he was chosen by Abby Rockefeller, who had a brilliant eye for talent).

Even the bathrooms are fabulous

The Rainbow Room opened in 1934, on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building (now the GE Building).

Early Advertising

The Streamline Moderne architect of The Rainbow Room was Jacques Carlu, but the interior design of the club was by Swiss-born Elena Bachman Schmidt (a protégé of the famous Elsie de Wolfe ). Elena was aided by Vincent Minnelli who took a break from his set design work at Radio City Music Hall to act as a color consultant in the great and glorious Art Deco style with a dance floor made of 360 glass blocks and 2600 colored lights that rotated and changed color (a color organ synchronized the lights with music from a custom-made pipe organ according to NYCago). I think atmosphere is a secret ingredient in great dinners, don't you?

It was originally a white tie joint that brought in high society patrons, but it segued into more egalitarian tuxedos as the 30’s waned. Until its closing 2 years ago, plain old jackets and ties were acceptable –– although prices were insane, New Years a few years ago was $1600 a couple under the management of the Cipriani organization!

View from 65th Floor.

I recall, the few times that I went there, the wine prices were as high as the real estate … but the view… well it was something.

1940’s Rainbow Room

Everybody went when it opened… Noel Coward was one of its first patrons and a slew of Hollywood and Broadway’s biggest names would enjoy the sounds of Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Guy Lombardo, Louis Armstrong and Tony Bennett among others over its long history.

The menu was for supper that was served from 10 pm to 2 or 3am, a more substantial dinner menu came earlier, 6:30 to 10 pm. Dancing and organ music played from opening to closing. It was a nightclub after all.

Even the humble ashtray was divine

Although huge fancy menus had taken quite a tumble from fashion with the double whammy of Prohibition and The Depression, The Rainbow Room had a few Gilded Age favorites. Chicken a la King, turtle soup and rarebits were there as were soufflés and Baked Alaska. Beluga caviar was the first thing on the menu ––there was a whole section on Chafing Dishes.

It wasn’t hard to figure what I would make. I’ve wanted to do Lobster Newberg for a long time, ever since I was reminded it of it when I researched Delmonicos. The dish was originally named Wenberg after the patron who made it for Delmonico in a “blazer” (or chafing dish as we know it today), and it was a huge hit in the 1870’s. Then he ticked off the management who renamed it Newberg in an anagrammatic pique, and Newberg it has remained.

Lobster Newberg was listed in the Chafing Dish section of the Rainbow Room menu as it should be. Chafing dishes were a great way to serve delicately sauced dishes and had the added drama of flaming table service on flashy carts … they had been popular for generations in New York restaurants and clubs… a little after-theater theater!

Although Snails Chablisienne looked awfully good (an Escoffier standard with meat reduction, shallots, wine and butter), and Frog’s Legs and Oysters Poulette was an interesting old standby (with a creamy mushroom sauce), Newberg was the one for me.

Lobster Newberg is great because it is a breeze to make and rich as could be with a dark luxurious texture. The reduced madeira in the creamy egg sauce is beyond perfect. Harry Luke (wonderful gastronome that I will write about next week) said Lobster Newberg was “the most perfect synthesis of ambrosial flavours I ever tasted.” Amen to that.

Please forget all the sad, gloopy, rubber-lobster versions you may have had in bad restaurants… they are no relation to this baby. I went back to the original and used the Delmonicos recipe (with a bit of truffle inspired by Oscar of the Waldorf's recipe I found if you care to do it that way). I would say this is an appetizer, but you could make the pastry bigger and just cut 2 and make this a dinner portion for 2 with a salad… it is VERY rich! Or you could do it old school with a chafing dish and toast points as a regal treat for a small party).

Dr. Lostpast gave it an A+… a designation he has only given a handful of dishes on the blog. It’s just the thing to flush away the January blues and make you feel like a swell, swilling champagne on the 65th floor with the pulsating deco dance floor doing its thing. 2012 is looking better already.

Lobster Newberg in Puff Pastry Shells

2-4 smallish lobster tails (depending on size) raw or 1 lobster gently cooked (Kill it by slicing behind it's head, put it in rapidly boiling water and then turn it down... high heat makes for chewy lobster) with meat removed
1 T truffle butter (or butter and ½ t truffle oil)
pinch cayenne pepper

¼ c madeira (Boston Bual or NY Malmsy from Rare Wine Company)

1 c cream
3 egg yolks (I must say, I splurged on the pastured eggs and the yolks were insanely yellow)
1 T great madeira (I used a Barbeito Malvasia Madeira Favilla Viera, 1920 from Rare Wine Co ) (optional)
s & p to taste
few sprigs marjoram
4 pieces puff pastry (2 ½ x 4”) or use toast points as was done in the 1930’s

Preheat your oven to 425º and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. I removed a larger sheet of pastry that I had in the freezer and cut a piece with a pizza cutter and put the rest back in the freezer. I left it out for a few minutes and then cut it with a very sharp knife into the individual pieces. Make sure that you re-cut the edges, if you don’t the pastry won’t rise properly (you can see in the picture, I missed an edge!). Place your puff pastry rectangles on the sheet and cut smaller rectangles within, leaving about ½” around… don’t remove the cut piece. Be careful not to go all the way down to the bottom. Cover with another sheet of parchment paper and bake for 10 minutes. Remove the top sheet and turn down to 375º, turn the pan around and cook 7-10 minutes or until lightly browned.

If you have small lobster tails, use poultry shears to cut the tail and carefully remove the meat in one piece. Then slice it into pieces following the lines in the lobster. If you have a whole lobster, remove the meat from the shell and cut into bite size pieces.

Sauté the lobster pieces gently in the butter and cayenne and remove (high heat makes the lobster rubbery). Add the madeira and reduce till thickened slightly and remove from the heat. Whisk together the egg and cream and add to the slightly cooled pan.

It is critical that you warm it gently and do not let it get above 160º. It will be thick and rich. Strain it through a sieve just to be sure there are no lumps hiding in the thick sauce.
Return the lobster to the pan and warm with the sauce… VERY Gently. If you have a good madeira, add it now, add salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle with marjoram.

Remove the top pieces from the pastry and pull out any damp bits so you have a nice box. Place the lobster inside and pour sauce over. Serve immediately and be instantly seduced. Give praise to the lobster gods for the great bounty of the sea.

Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday!

A Nick and Nora Charles New Year –– 30’s Style: Filet Mignon with Marchand de Vin Sauce… and Martinis!

2011-12-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I thought of old movies as a vital part of my education. From them, I learned of possibilities that a girl from a small-town in the Midwest might never have known. The flickering images on the screen were my window to worlds past, both real and imaginary.

Oh yes, later I was to find some of the things that I aspired to were impossible (the man of my dreams, Errol Flynn, was already dead by the time I discovered him …drat) or improbable (living in a castle…not yet!).

I wasn’t terribly impressed with life as it was. I hated cartoons and kid’s movies. I was a chubby bookworm and the grownups in my constellation seemed dull as could be to my eyes… always talking about bridge or fishing, droning on about grownup responsibilities or arguing grownup arguments. BLEH. Where was the fun, the glamor, the romance??

Then I saw The Thin Man. I wanted the life of Nick and Nora Charles when I grew up –- full of teasing fun and sparkling repartee. They were my ideal couple. Years ago, I was at a party with my ex and someone said our banter reminded them of Nick and Nora… he groaned and I beamed. You could have told me I was a dead-ringer for Venus herself and I wouldn’t have been more thrilled.

I read that WS Van Dyke (nicknamed “one-shot Woody” for his speed shooting a film) made The Thin Man in 16 days. The script (written in only 3 weeks) was based on the popular book by Dashiell Hammet. It wasn’t originally meant for Bill and Myrna –– just Bill (based on his success playing gentleman detective Philo Vance). Woody pushed for Myrna Loy against the wishes of MGM’s higher powers –– the rest is history.

Silent era Loy

Hard to believe now, but it was a tough sell. Loy had only recently moved from playing a silent villain to a leading heroine. Although she came from Montana, her remarkable almond eyes cast her in a slew of films as an oriental temptress (even though Loy is a German/French name… no where near the orient!).

Evidently Van Dyke fought for his star team after working with them on Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable. “Melodrama” was a modest film and there had been no expectations for much success with it but it became hugely popular and it brightened the star power of Loy and Powell as it further established Gable as a bankable leading man.

Although their onscreen roles in Manhattan Melodrama were straight and somewhat somber, everyone, especially Van Dyke, was enchanted by the Powell/Loy off-screen banter. It was light, fast and sophisticated badinage. This made Van Dyke want them for The Thin Man and he even had the writers (a married couple, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich) make script changes to accommodate their style. The film is very different from the book and their changes made the film sparkle… van Dyke had requested that the writers play up the vivacious couple and play down the twisty plot.

They became everyone’s archetypal perfect couple –– sexy and teasing, warm and loving without being saccharine. Loy was the perfect wife ––more sassy and strong than the ideal stolid or syrupy wives of the past. I read in Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood that an MGM writer had written: “Myrna Loy and William Powell are the ham and eggs, the peaches and cream the salt and pepper of the movies. They go together as naturally as night and day.” Best of all they had fun, really had fun together onscreen and off (although they were never an “item” off-screen they were life-long friends). That meant scenes in a lot of restaurants, clubs, bars and private dinners –– and drinking ––they drank a lot (the second film in the Thin Man series made in 1936 came after censors infested Hollywood and the drinking in Thin Man films had to be toned down from then on to comply with their often quaint and curious moral code).

When I wanted to make a New Years party based on Nick and Nora’s dinners, I was met with a surprise dead end. The famous New Year’s dinner in the second film in 1936, After the Thin Man (there were 5 in the series from 1934 to 47) doesn’t really happen…well, it does, but off-camera. They go into dinner …but the next time you see the cast, the men are snoring over brandies and the women are in a separate room with their coffees and gossip… no food in sight.

The film is full of parties with VAST quantities of cocktails both at home and in bars and clubs.

They show the kitchen in full swing MAKING the food… but that’s as far as it goes.

New Years at a Chinese Restaurant found napkins but nary a morsel to be had (save by one of the Chinese owners picking at rice with chopsticks in his office).

Nick does begin making Nora scrambled eggs in the middle of the night, but they don’t get to eat them.

They do eat breakfast together at 6:30 pm after a long sleep but no dinner… certainly not a bash (I think I saw scrambled eggs and kippers but I can’t be sure)… frustrating.

I decided to go to the original 1934 The Thin Man for dinner, I remembered it as great fun ––the mystery unraveled as the courses were served –– perfect.

James Wong Howe behind the camera, van Dyke leaning over the stars

You really had to pay attention to get the food they were eating. I even went to the original script to see if there were any clues in the stage/scene directions that are invisible in the film (and can be completely disregarded when shooting commences or followed like a bible). Nuts are mentioned (they are a holdover from the 19^th century when they started a meal with crudité and nuts):

Nora

“Serve the nuts - I mean, serve the guests the nuts.”

The original script has the character Tanner eating soup… but it wasn’t on the table when it was filmed:

“(but poor Tanner, thinking that Nick

is naming him as the man, spills his

soup over everything. Everybody

turns and looks suspiciously at him.

Nick sees that he has startled him and

apologizes)”

Of course, the famous “serve the fish line”…

Nick

“And the murderer is right here in this room

to-night... he's sitting at this table.”

(to waiter)

“You may serve the fish.”

Powell adlibs to Cesar Romero’s character (the exchange wasn’t in the original script),

Nick

“You're not eating.

Don't you care for oysters?”

You see Powell with peas on his fork.

And it looks like Myrna had fish on her plate with those peas but I can’t be sure…

I tried to channel Nick Charles’ detective skills to come up with what they were eating. In fact, they never get any farther than fish because murder was the main course!

It proved to be a mystery I couldn’t solve.

Why let that stop me! We’ll just say my dinner is inspired by Nick and Nora’s dinner. I figured that I could invent a main course that could have been waiting in the kitchen… up to my imagination, and in a way that makes it better.

I got to see menus of 30’s New York thanks to the astonishing menu collection of Henry Voigt (he has a great blog too, The American Menu). I wrote him, asking for 1934-ish NYC Hotel menus and voilà, there they were, and that’s no easy task… I looked on my own for quite a while and came up with very little.

Mr. Voigt said “Menus from the 1920s and 30s are surprisingly difficult to find when compared to those from earlier periods in the century. The onset of Prohibition, and later the Great Depression, helped accelerate a general decline in dining standards at the high-end. More people were eating out than ever before, but the menus from the ethnic restaurants, diners, and other less expensive places that were then popular were less memorable, causing fewer of them to be saved as mementos. Some of the new types of eateries like the speakeasies and cafeterias often did not even have menus.”

What he sent me were treasures… a time capsule of what a sophisticated NY couple staying at the Hotel Normandie would be noshing on New Years in the early 30’s.

There was a supper menu from the Carlyle Hotel, a dinner menu from the Hotel Lucerne on 79^th Street and then a real New Years menu from the Park Central Hotel, problem solved.

So I decided to make a few things from the menu…

The essence of chicken with profiterole is really easy to do if you have a profiterole or 2 in your freezer. Otherwise, make them and freeze them –– they are great to have around. I discovered that profiteroles were originally baked in the coals and put in soups hundreds of years ago, so this is not a new idea. The soup takes just a short time to reduce and you have a very rich delicious broth… adding the foie gras makes it super special… something Norah would have liked.

The Filet Mignon with Sauce Marchand du Vin, Mignonette potatoes (essentially fat fries) and peas are on the menu. I think it’s what Nick might have ordered being a tough guy.

Sauce Marchand has different styles, from a southern version that is quite complicated with ham among many other ingredients to one French version I saw that was only red wine and shallots. I’m going to do an in-between version with reduced stock and butter… it’s still pretty easy and very good and using duck fat to make the mignonettes works remarkably well… you will enjoy them… peas are a simple side.

And, I had to add this Nick and Nora's Hangover Hash. You make it from the dinner left-overs, pop a poached egg on top and all your troubles are over.

But before dinner, drinks. It is Nick and Nora Charles, after all.

Honestly, Nick and Nora Charles are not so much about food as they are about drinks. Rye, scotch and martinis… they drink gallons of martinis. Although the book was written during Prohibition (and opens in a 51^st Street speakeasy and not a snazzy hotel bar), the film is set in 1934. Prohibition had just been repealed so the film shows the characters newly released from 13 years of bad booze and illegal basement clubs. Happy days were here again and they were going to celebrate every chance they had. Even so, the Production Code's stuffed shirts received a boatload of complaints about the extravagant (ok, excessive) alcohol consumption in the first film.

Elegantly-attired Loy’s famous entrance in The Thin Man is a pratfall:

Yes, that's Myrna face down

... followed by 6 martinis in quick succession and a killer hangover that rates an icebag hat the next day. Hysterically funny to all but the censors… they were not amused.

I went to a drink expert, my friend David Solmonson at 12 Bottle Bar, to get the skinny on a Nick and Nora martini… because they were a bit different that they are now… and were served in smaller glasses. Perhaps incorrectly, in Thin Man, Nick advises that a martini is best “shaken to waltz time.”

“Origins: Martinis were invented around 1890, once vermouth started to catch on. The Manhattan came first, then the Martini (origin of name open for debate).

A 1900’s Martini would have been ½ gin, ½ vermouth. Orange bitters were typically added."

Solmonson continued, "A 1930’s Dry Martini was 2/3 gin, 1/3 dry vermouth. Medium and Sweet versions existed too. Bitters (orange or Angostura, with orange preferred) available upon request. The hallmark books for the period would have been “The Savoy Cocktail Book” and “Barflies and Cocktails”. Both feature the 2/3 gin, 1/3 dry vermouth Dry Martini. Gin should be London Dry." [**I used Noilly Prat in the photo… it’s what I had on hand, and it made a golden martini!]

"A modern Dry Martini, by comparison, is 5 to 7 parts gin to 1 part vermouth.

Martinis are properly served stirred for 30 secs – not shaken – and “up” (strained) into a cocktail glass. A proper 30’s size is 2oz gin to 1oz vermouth. After stirring, you should have a 4oz drink. The most appropriate garnish is a twist of lemon peel, which is expressed over the top of the drink – and maybe rubbed over the rim – then discarded

(not inserted). If olives are requested, then should be served in a container alongside the drink [Nick has put an olive in his glass in the movie].

Noilly Prat was once the gold standard for dry vermouths, but they changed the recipe a few years back. I prefer Dolin.

Here’s my perfect Dry Martini:

2.5 oz Old Raj Blue Label Gin 0.5 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth

Pre-chill glass and mixing glass. Add ingredients, then ice. Stir for 30 secs. Strain into chilled glass. Twist lemon peel over the top and quickly wipe along the rim with minimal pressure.

Serve with green Spanish olives stuffed with sardines and some lemon zest. Squeeze lemon juice over olives.

Deliver on silver tray atop Wire-Haired Fox Terrier and enjoy in the company of one of the silver screen’s most beautiful women.”

Essence of Chicken en tasse aux Profiteroles with Foie Gras for 2

4 cups strong, homemade chicken stock (it must be unsalted or it will be dreadful)

1 c white wine

2 profiteroles

2 cubes foie gras (available at D'Artagnan and a great deal!)

Reduce the wine and stock by half... add salt at this point to taste. Warm the profiteroles. Fry your cubes of foie gras and place in the warm profiteroles on the soup you have poured into soup cups and serve.

Filet Mignon of Beef Sauté Marchand de Vin for 2

2 c strong stock

1 c red wine

1 shallot, diced

1 clove garlic, diced

1 T cognac

2 filet mignon

salt and pepper

4T butter

Reduce the stock and red wine to a glaze over low heat… this will take at least ½ an hour.

Preheat oven to 400º

Rub the filets with salt and pepper. Melt 2 T of butter in the skillet and brown all sides of the meat in a cast iron skillet.

Put the steaks in the oven for 5-10 minutes depending on thickness and what degree of doneness you prefer.

Remove the meat from the oven and place on a plate, covered. Melt the rest of the butter in the pan and soften the shallot and garlic. Add the reduced wine stock and cognac and blend. Pour over the steak on each plate. Serve with Mignonette Potatoes and buttered peas.

Mignonette Potatoes

2 M potatoes, peeled and sliced into thick fries

1 Qt duck fat or oil

Heat the oil to 300º. Put the potatoes in and cook till nearly done but not brown. Remove from the oil and let rest and cool for 10 minutes or so. Bring the fat up to a higher heat and put the potatoes back in to brown. This will take very little time so keep watching. They are great dunked in the wine sauce.

Nick and Nora's Hangover Hash for 2

leftover potato scraps from trimming up the mignonette potatoes or 1 m potato
1 small onion chopped
1 T butter.

leftover marchand de vin sauce (or reduce a cup of stock with 1/2 c red wine)
1/4 c stock
2 T heavy cream
1 t fresh, 1/2 t dried thyme

leftover Filet (one or 2 slices will do) cut into small pieces (or use a bit of steak, brown it off and cube it)

leftover peas, brussel sprouts 1/4 - 1/2 a cup whatever you have around.

2 poached eggs

Saute the potato and onion in butter till browned and softened. Add the sauce, stock and cream.

Warm the beef and peas and serve with poached eggs on top and a sprinkle of coarse sea salt.

An Elizabethan Christmas, Boar/Pork Tenderloin en Brioche and Chestnut Ice Cream Puffs with Blackberry Sauce

2011-12-21T16:45:00.000-08:00

Armada Portrait (1588), Gower

A few weeks ago, I discovered that the first thing Elizabeth the First ate after her fleet defeated the Spanish Armada (against all odds in the "mini-ice age" Fall of 1588) was a goose, and to celebrate that miracle on the following Christmas, she fed the Royal Navy goose in thanks (as well she should since late payment’s starvation and illness took many more than the battle had) and encouraged the rest of her subjects to eat it as well in honor of the battle (I wrote about goose HERE).

That got me to thinking about the way Christmas was celebrated before Christmas trees and many of the traditions we take for granted today. What I found out was fun and came mostly from a book by W.F. Dawson from 1902 entitled Christmas, Its Origins and Associations. It’s a good free read online for the holiday season.

In it I found out about the Yule log and the tradition of keeping it burning through the whole of the holiday season (quite a feat!) and saving a last bit of it for the next year’s Yule fire for luck.

So now is come our joyful'st feast,

Let every man be jolly.

Each room with ivy leaves is drest,

And every post with holly.

Though some churls at our mirth repine,

Round your foreheads garlands twine,

Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,

And let us all be merry.

George Wither (1588-1667)

I read that before the Christmas tree was introduced in the 19^th century, holly and ivy were the decorations of choice (as they were some of the only things still green at that time of year).

I read in the Food Timeline that Elizabeth 1^st invented the gingerbread man and had likenesses of guests made up as cookies and given to them (although it was quite different from our ginger bread cookies, being made with crumbs –– not flour, sugar, honey, ginger and cloves and colored with ‘saunders’ which is sandalwood!).

All that I read reminded me why I love Elizabeth the 1^st … she was quite a dame. To rally the troops before the Armada struck it was good queen Bess who said:

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

It made me remember her magnificent “Golden Speech”, given November 20, 1601 as an early Christmas present to her subjects, in which she tells her people of her devotion to THEM and her honor to lead them (she uses the “royal we” and “our” for our "I" and "me" and my at the beginning when speaking as monarch):

from the Golden Speech

“… I do assure you there is no prince that loves his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love. For I do esteem it more than any treasure or riches; for that we know how to prize, but love and thanks I count invaluable. And, though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my Crown, that I have reigned with your loves. This makes me that I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people….

To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King or royal authority of a Queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend his kingdom as I said from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.”

And lead them she did, thinking of rich and poor in her kingdom during the Christmas season.

Christmas is my name, far have I gone,

Have I gone, have I gone, have I gone, without regard,

Whereas great men by flocks there be flown,

There be flown, there be flown, there be flown, to London-ward;

Where they in pomp and pleasure do waste

That which Christmas was wonted to feast, Welladay!

Houses where music was wont for to ring

Nothing but bats and owlets do sing.

Welladay! Welladay! Welladay! where should I stay?

When fashion dictated that the lords and ladies of Norfolk and Suffolk should come to London to lavishly celebrate the holiday –– spending all their money and not providing holiday cheer for the poor (who relied on their Christmas beneficence for what little generous provisioning they were to see in a year), Elizabeth thought this was wrong and did something about it. She enjoined the lords and ladies “to repair to their counties, and there to keep hospitality amongst their neighbors” before Christmas, not after all their money was spent, and to do the celebrating and spending at home.

Christmas spirit returned to the land:

'Who feasts the poor, a true reward shall find,

Or helps the old, the feeble, lame, and blind.'"

"All you that to feasting and mirth are inclined,

Come, here is good news for to pleasure your mind;

Old Christmas is come for to keep open house,

He scorns to be guilty of starving a mouse;

Then come, boys, and welcome, for diet the chief,

Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd pies, and roast beef."

It is from this spirit of cheer and generosity that an old standard flows

Good husband and housewife, now chiefly be glad,  

Things handsome to have, as they ought to be had.  

They both do provide, against Christmas do come,  

To welcome their neighbors, good cheer to have some.  

Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall,  

Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal.  

Beef, mutton, and pork, and good pies of the best,  

Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest,  

Cheese, apples and nuts, and good carols to hear,  

As then in the country is counted good cheer.  

What cost to good husband, is any of this?  

Good household provision only it is:  

Of other the like, I do leave out a many,  

That costeth the husband never a penny.

A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry 1557

Thomas Tusser (1515-80)

The food sounds delicious –– and not too far removed from our own holiday menus, even if a little heavy in the meat department. From looking at Tusser’s poem and menus from the 15^th century onward, I felt compelled to do some kind of “Braun” for a holiday dish. Braun (or brawne or brawn) at that time meant mostly boar, sometimes pig but essentially meat, The word, according to Wiktionary, comes from the old French braon meaning slice of meat, fleshy part, buttock or from the Frankish brādon from Brādo meaning roast meat, ham which is related to the German braten, meaning roast.

Braun was much mentioned on holiday tables and for celebrations like the Bishop’s funeral feast in 1424. I endeavored to find a recipe to my liking and settled on an Elizabethan recipe from The Good Housewife’s Jewel, 1596 by Richard Dawson (written for a middle class household). The brawne recipe involved a whole boar, wrapped in hemp cloth, boiled with willow and given a long ‘souse’ in ale, salt and water –– that was too much. Right above it was a ‘pigge’ recipe that caught my eye –– that was the one for me. Some of my best recipes come from detours, and this was a good one.

I decided to have a little fun and encase it in brioche since I had lovely boar tenderloins from D’Artagnan (and not a giant hunk of meat) and Elizabethans were always putting meat in crusts so it’s not far from the spirit of the times (brioche is famously stuffed with garlic sausage in the classic version of the dish). The spicing is actually quite modern and not as extreme as many recipes of the period… perhaps because the book wasn’t for a royal household where expensive spices were de rigueur. I finished it with a take on Lumbard mustard from Forme of Cury, a 1390 cookbook.

And since it’s the holidays and the season for sharing, I also will give you a new favorite. Chestnut Armagnac ice cream on little “prophitroles” (puffs) with a blackberry sauce ––even those little puffs have a history, mentioned in Brandt’s Ship of Fools in 1494 above.

I tossed in caramel “flakes” to get you in the mood for a great holiday (one cup of sugar, slowly melted and drizzled on a silpat). This dessert is brilliant because you can make everything days ahead and then put them together when you want them…. Just warm up the puffs and you are good to go!

To sowse a pigge

Take White Wine and a little sweete broth, and halfe a score Nutmegs cut in quarters, then take Rosemarye, Bayes, Time, and sweet Margerum, and let them boyle altogether, skimme them very clean, and when they be boyled, put them into an earthen pan and the sirrope also, and when you serue them, a quarter in a dish, and the Bayes, and nutmegs on the top.

Braun (boar or pork tenderloin)

2 Boar tenderloins from D'Artagnan (or pork)

1 t salt

1 T pepper

1 T lard or olive oil

2 c chicken stock

1 c white wine

a few cloves

3 bay leaves

handful of fresh marjoram, rosemary and thyme

1 cracked nutmeg

Rub the meat with salt and pepper. Sauté the meat in the fat till browned. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook over a low flame for an hour. Remove and cool. Refrigerate for a few days.

Remove from the liquid and dry to use with the brioche. Reduce the liquid till thickened to serve with the meat.

Braun en Brioche (recipe from The Good Housewife’s Jewel, brioche based on a NYT Recipe)

1/4 cup warm milk (110 to 115 degrees

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 package dry yeast

1 1/2 sticks sweet butter

3 cups flour

3/4 teaspoons salt

4 large eggs

1 egg yolk

boar (you can get it HERE from D”Artagnan) or pork tenderloin, 2 or 3 pieces around 7” or 5” long depending on diameter

1 egg, beaten, for coating dough

Combine sugar and warm milk in small dish and slowly stir in yeast. Mash yeast well if it forms lumps. Set mixture aside in warm place for 5 minutes; it should foam.

In food processor or mixer combine flour, salt and butter, blending well. Add eggs, 2 at a time, incorporating well before adding next 2. Add yoke and process until dough is elastic and smooth; it should pull away from beater in one piece. Some processors will not have enough power to finish job; if so remove and knead by hand on lightly floured surface.

Place dough in greased bowl, cover with damp cloth and let rise in warm place (80 to 90 degrees) for 2 hours or until it doubles in bulk. Punch down and knead for several minutes in bowl and form ball about size of softball.

If dough is difficult to work with, place in freezer for 5 minutes.

If you are not using right away, dough can be stored, covered, in refrigerator for day… that’s what I did.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Cut dough ball in half and roll out each half into roughly 10-by-5-inch rectangles (If your tenderloin is slender, you may want to make 3 of these so the bread to meat ratio is less- the pictures show the 2 style with good deal of bread). Coat both dough ball and sausage with beaten egg, then sprinkle flour over dough to form ''glue'' that will hold sausage in place.

Lay tenderloins on dough rectangles and bring up sides of dough to seal them, forming seams on top. Seal edges. Place rolls on buttered sheets of aluminum foil. Wrap foil around rolls same way dough was sealed, forming seam on top. They should be wrapped loosely to allow for expansion.

Place rolls on baking sheet, seam side down, and let them rise for 1/2 hour (I did it for and hour for refrigerated dough). Bake 35 minutes, rotating about every 12 minutes so sausage doesn't sink to one side. After 35 minutes, open foil, wash rolls with beaten egg mixture again and cook 10 minutes more or until golden. Let them cool somewhat before slicing and serving.

Serve with mustard sauce and spoon the reduced liquid left over from cooking the meat on the meat or on the side. I think this is best served fresh from the oven but reheats well in the microwave in slices. Brioche can dry out quickly so take care how you store it. I popped one in the freezer to use on Christmas, and will see how that works when I reheat the whole thing!

YIELD 4 to 6 servings

Lumbard Mustard from Forme of Cury

Take mustard seed and wasishe it & drye it in a n ovene, grynde it drye, Farse it thurgh a farse. Clarifyie hony with wyne & vynegur & stere it wl togedrer and make it thikke ynoz. & whan ou wilt spend erof make it thynne with wyne.

¼ c mustard seed, toasted VERY gently for a few moments and then crushed in a mortar

2 T honey

2 T vinegar

2 T wine

½ c water

pinch salt

Cook the mustard with the honey, vinegar and wine VERY gently until the mixture becomes softened… you may want to add more water. Add salt to taste.

****My mustard wasn’t fresh… so check yours. I wasn’t happy with the result. I have made mustard before from my own home-grown seeds and it was great (even if the process of sorting the seeds was hellish), so advice? If you taste the seeds and they don’t taste sharp and bright like mustard… use the simple version.

Simple Version of Lombard Mustard

½ cup grainy mustard

1 T white wine

2 t vinegar (only if it needs it)

1 T honey

Combine and you’re done.

Chestnut Armagnac Ice Cream (makes around 3 cups)—enough to fill 8-12 puffs

1 c chestnuts, cooked and shelled (D'Artagnan has lovely chestnuts, already roasted and ready to go)

½ c sugar 3 T water

1 c cream

1 c milk

4 egg yolks

1 T sugar

1 t vanilla

3 T Armagnac

Melt the sugar and water with the chestnuts and cook till the sugar caramelizes a little.

Pour in the cream and blend. Puree the chestnuts with the cream and syrup.

Pour through a sieve and rub and press to get out all the chestnut puree, toss what’s left (or nibble on it… very tasty). Add the milk to this.

Beat the yolks and the 1 T sugar till golden. Combine with the chestnut mixture and heat to 170º slowly till it thickens slightly… never ever let it boil. Remove from the heat and strain. Add the vanilla and Armagnac and chill. Put in Ice cream machine and process.

This is where I sing the praises of Simac. After years of struggling with put-in-the-freezer ice cream makers, I got a 20-odd year old Simac Italian Ice Cream Maker. They are classics and often go for hundreds… even though they are vintage. They work like a dream… big as a Mini-Cooper and weigh nearly as much. I got lucky and got one for a song on EBAY. Ice cream in 20 minutes… chilling to finished product. It’s my favorite thing this year. Needless to say, I have been making a lot of ice
cream!

** If you want to make the ice cream in a hurry, only do the first step, using only 1/4 c of sugar in the caramel with the chestnuts if you do. You can buy a pint of premium vanilla ice cream and let it soften enough to stir it. Then you can puree the chestnuts with the syrup and and the armagnac and add that to the purchased ice cream, skipping all of the making-of-the-ice-cream-base steps. Then refreeze the ice cream.

I often make lemon ice cream this way... just squeeze the juice of a lemon or 2 into the vanilla and refreeze. Incredibly refreshing and takes no time at all.

Pate a Choux, basic recipe  from Michael Ruhlmann (this makes 12 or so…)

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup butter (1/2 stick)

1/2 cup flour

1/8 t salt

1/2 cup eggs (2 large eggs)

1. Bring the water and butter to a simmer over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium, add the flour and stir rapidly. The flour will absorb the water quickly and a dough will form and pull away from the sides. Keep stirring to continue cooking the flour and cook off some of the water, another minute or two… it will stick to the side of the pan… this is ok. Transfer the paste to the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (I found the whisk attachment worked better) or to a bowl if you're using a hand mixer and begin mixing to cool the dough a little. (If you want to mix the eggs directly into the dough in the pot, let it cool slightly, 4 or 5 minutes,  or cool off the pan itself by running cold water over its base if you  will be mixing the eggs in that pot. You don’t want to cook the eggs  too quickly.)

2. Add the eggs one at a time mixing rapidly until each is combined into the paste. The paste will go from shiny to furry, slippery to sticky as the egg is incorporated. The pâte a choux can be cooked immediately at this point or refrigerated for up to a day until ready to use.

Spoon or pipe it onto a baking sheet (see above, remember to press the peaks down with a moistened finger, they can burn) and bake in a hot oven (425 for 10 minutes, 350 for another half hour or so –– do check, if you are going to freeze and reheat you don’t want them too brown to begin with). Poke each one with a knife to let out steam and allow to cool on a rack. They freeze beautifully and reheat easily in a toaster oven or oven so you can make quick ice cream sandwiches with the leftovers whenever you want. I put them in the toaster oven and hit toast M and they are perfect, straight from the freezer. I would think an oven at 350º for 5-10 minutes would work as well

Blackberry Sauce

2 pints blackberries

¼ c maple syrup

1 T sugar

1 t lemon juice

pinch of allspice

2 T St. Germain Liqueur or cassis (optional)

Cook the berries with the maple syrup and sugar and lemon and allspice till berries are softened.

Remove from heat and put through a food mill or rub through a strainer to get rid of the seeds but get as much of the fruit as possible. Reduce if not thick enough and toss in the liqueur.

Put a tablespoon or 2 of the blackberry sauce on a plate. Put a good size scoop of ice cream in the puff and set on the plate… you can use a little cream and make a design on the blackberry sauce. Add the caramel ‘flake’ if you would like.

Murri and the Original Merguez (Mirkås) Sausage (Before the Discovery of the New World!)

2011-12-15T04:59:00.000-08:00

Byzantine mosaic

When I think Byzantine, I think of sad-faced saints, their heads always circled by a hovering nimbus –– many, many mosaics ––

and gold, lots and lots of gold.

Hagia Sophia

Interior Hagia Sophia

I also think of the great domed Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now Istanbul) –– it’s the alpha and omega (τὸ Α καὶ τὸ Ω) of Byzantine culture –– and full of, yes, you guessed it –– gold and mosaics and sad faced saints.

Constantine, Mosaic from 1000

The Byzantine Empire covered a remarkable 1000 years from the 4^th century to 1453. It was a continuation of the Roman Empire since Byzantium was conquered by Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great (the first emperor who converted to Christianity) in 334 and was built on 7 hills like Rome (although Constantine first called it New Rome). The seat of power was centered in Constantinople (formerly called Byzantium) rather than Rome, and it was a Christian rather than a pagan empire. It was most powerful before the 1^st millennium but its stretch was considerable in the arts, architecture and politics (and is still stretching in a popular video game set in 16th c. Constantinople, Assassin's Creed!). It was known as the Empire of the Greeks.

Emperor Justinian, San Vitale, Ravenna

My favorite Byzantine character was The Emperor Justinian, son of a Illerian peasant (in what was formerly Yugoslavia).

12^th Century Manasses Chronicle, depicting construction of Hagia Sophia (between 1533-37)

He was the man behind the building of the Hagia Sophia (meaning Holy Wisdom in Greek) –– one of the most magnificent structures of the Middle Ages (and the largest cathedral in the world until the 16^th century) that he had designed by a physicist and a mathematician –– a stroke of genius that may account for its extraordinary curves and angles and the play of light from the windows. The fortress-like exterior doesn’t prepare you for the surprise of the wonders within.

Constantinople, 1576

Justinian also re-wrote Roman law (Codex Iustinianus or Corpus Juris Civilis) and had the plague that wiped out a quarter of Europe named after him (The Plague of Justinian). The plague also took out 40% of the population of Constantinople leaving his seat of power battered (it was thought the plague came over with Egyptian grain that was needed to feed the enormous city).

Theodora from the Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna

Justinian was an original leader for his times. Since he wasn’t an insider, he assembled a court of worthy men of talent and vision. Some say he rewarded men for their gifts, not their pedigree (his wife Theodora was a former courtesan –– brilliant in her own right, and brave… she faced down a rebellion when Justinian was going to throw in the towel, but also very very vengeful). Justinian was also involved in a lot of fighting –– that was one of his many downsides (that and clawing taxes from a populous devastated by the plague to pay for his wars –– not nice).

Procopius, a contemporary of Justinian, thought he was an inept rapacious mess and his wife a monster, and wrote a book about it, Secret History of the Court of Justinian. Decide for yourself, history is all about interpretation (was Procopius a disgruntled fellow who was getting back at Justinian for imagined slights or a beacon of truth?). Justinian did have that church built to replace one that had been destroyed in ferocious battle (there’s a great book on this called Byzantium by Robin Cormack full of AMAZING pictures) and for that alone he should be lauded.

Constantinople

How did they eat?

Byzantine cuisine was a merger of Greek and Roman traditions but because of the size of the empire, it absorbed others as well and was richer for it. The upper classes ate a healthy diet of salads and grains and eggs and were famous for ‘sphoungata’ –– a kind of spongy omelette. They ate a lot of chicken and fish, a little pork and very little lamb and beef. The first mention of caviar comes from Byzantium. It seems they did boil things … a lot. Wikipedia quoted a pejorative Byzantine expression: “the lazy cook prepares everything by boiling”, well at least the bad cooks did. Judging by food descriptions of the day, the rich had a varied and delicious diet. If the recipes of Anthimus (the Byzantine physician exiled to the court of King Theodoric and compiler of the what has become known as the 1^st French Cookbook, De Observatione Ciborum) are any indicator of his native cuisine –– the court of Justinian ate well indeed.

Pompeiian Mosaic of a “flower of garum”

They used Garum as a major condiment (the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce). But there was another that came up, influenced by middle-eastern and Spainish cuisine… Murri.

I began Lostpastremembered 2 years ago but before that I was a serious food history nerd (ok, I’ve always been a bit of a nerd). I love looking things up, following quirky paths and making discoveries about what most people would consider weird ingredients. It was and is great fun for me.

Murri from Old Roman Bottle

A few years ago, I read an article about this sauce called murri. I can’t remember the article that brought me to it but the idea of an ancient salt sauce that was neither soy nor fish appealed to me in a big way and the ingredients were a compelling combination of grains, spices and even fruit, I found and saved the recipe. I made my first batch nearly a year and a half ago and it keeps getting better with age (I keep it in the fridge, fyi). Then I tried a more ancient version from 13^th century Baghdad that involved rotting barley –– that became an interesting science experiment full of molds and fungus. I found that by heating it I had done wrong (killed all the happy bugs, said Charles Perry) but the result is still delicious a year later (it also has a wonderful complex flavor).

happy mold, with grape leaves instead of fig….

With my stock getting low, I made the 2011 batch. The Byzantine murri came out a little lighter this time around since I didn’t brown the toast as much as I had before. My efforts at the rotting barley this summer (2011) failed and turned into a gluey pink rotten mess (it should smell like a forest floor, not like the reek oozing from a NYC garbage truck). The 2^nd batch turned black and had a bit of bitterness to it… completely different from the 2010 version… the jury is still out on that one.

I guess what I’m telling you is, Byzantine Murri is a sure thing and the safest thing to make. The rotted barley version is wonderful if it works but it could be a dangerous proposition. All of the murris are extremely salty so use them sparingly and don’t add additional salt before tasting your dish... it’s like liquid salt.

What you will end up with is just splendid. It has a magical quality that adds an amazing depth to all meat dishes that I’ve added it to… what remarkable results. It’s not that it tastes great by itself, but alchemy happens when it joins other flavors. I'd like to share it (and the wonderful Byzantine art) as a Christmas present to you... it is a gift to your cooking for sure.

Kitab al-Tabikh, The Bagdad Cookbook by

Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn al-Karim al-Katib al-Baghdadi (d. 1240)

I originally found the Byzantine Murri recipe on the site Coquinaria , but it and the other versions came from Charles Perry, former LA Times restaurant critic and expert on the ancient cuisines of the middle east and North Africa among others. He translated Kitab al Tibakhah from the 13^th century (a great book to own, titled A Baghdad Cookery Book). I have made a few wonderful things from the book.

It was he who spurred me on to make the rotted barley murri after I met him at the Oxford Food Symposium last year. He patiently endured my sending him photos of the progress to check the quality of the mold (it should have what looks like spider webs, sign of the existence of aspergillus mold that’s also used in making sake) and even tasted one of my concoctions! For that I will be eternally grateful.

Once you’ve made your murri, you need to take it out for a test drive, don’t you? I found this recipe for merguez (or Mirkâs) from Al Andalus Cookbook of the 13th Century , translated by Charles Perry. It is completely different from the spicy and positively red with chilis merguez we think of today because the recipe pre-dates the discovery of the new world! It started out as a warmly spiced and fragrant mix, served with a greened, vinegared sauce. I’ve always used pomegranate molasses with my merguez so my recipe includes it, the original does not. It’s really good and the murri works its magic on the lamb.
May I say these are great for hors d'oeuvres served sliced and sauced on bits of pita or alone.

To begin at the beginning, here is the first recipe for murri that I made, the safe one, beginning with the translation:

Description of Byzantine murri [made] right away: There is taken, upon the name of God the Most High, of honey scorched in a nuqrah [perhaps this word means 'a silver vessel'], three ratls; pounded scorched oven bread, ten loaves; starch, half a ratl; roasted anise, fennel and nigella, two uqiyahs of each; byzantine saffron, an uqiya; celery seed, an uqiyah; syrian carob, half a ratl; fifty peeled walnuts, as much as half a ratl; split quinces, five; salt, half a makkuk dissolved in honey; thirty ratls water; and the rest of the ingredients are thrown on it, and it is boiled on a slow flame until a third of the water is absorbed. Then it is strained well in a clean nosebag of hair. It is taken up in a greased glass or pottery vessel with a narrow top. A little lemon from Takranjiya (? Sina'ah 51 has Bakr Fahr) is thrown on it, and if it suits that a little water is thrown on the dough and it is boiled upon it and strained, it would be a second (infusion). The weights and measurements that are given are Antiochan and Zahiri [as] in Mayyafariqin.

Marble from my friends at Statewide Granite and Marble in Jersey City

Byzantine Murri from Coquinaria

3 T honey

1 1/2 oz bread

1 T wheat starch

2/3 t anise

2/3 t fennel

2/3 t nigella

1/4 t saffron

1/3 t celery seed

1/4 oz carob

1/4 oz walnut

1 1/2 oz quince (if you can’t get quince, you might try quince jam and then cut some of the honey)

1/2 c salt in 3 T honey

1 pint water

lemon (1/4 of one)

Cook the honey in a small frying pan on medium heat, bringing it to a

boil then turning off the heat and repeat several times till it tastes scorched. I used my homemade wheat/rye bread and toasted it till it was nearly burnt then mashed it. The anise and fennel were toasted in a frying pan then ground in a mortar with celery seed and walnuts. The quince was quartered and cored and cubed. After it was all boiled together for about 2 hours they recommend that you put in a potato ricer, to squeeze out the liquid and then add lemon juice. The recipe makes about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 c of liquid. Add another 1/2 c of water to the residue, simmer 1/2 hr -1 hr, and squeeze out that liquid for the second infusion, which yields about 1/3 c. A third infusion using 1/3 c yields another 1/4 c or so."

Here is a translation of the recipe for Mirkâs (Merguez Sausage) from Al Andalus:

It is as nutritious as meatballs (banâdiq) and quick to digest, since the pounding ripens it and makes it quick to digest, and it is good nutrition. First get some meat from the leg or shoulder of a lamb and pound it until it becomes like meatballs. Knead it in a bowl, mixing in some oil and some murri naqî', pepper, coriander seed, lavender, and cinnamon. Then add three quarters as much of fat, which should not be pounded, as it would melt while frying, but chopped up with a knife or beaten on a cutting board. Using the instrument made for stuffing, stuff it in the washed gut, tied with thread to make sausages, small or large. Then fry them with some fresh oil, and when it is done and browned, make a sauce of vinegar and oil and use it while hot. Some people make the sauce with the juice of cilantro and mint and some pounded onion. Some cook it in a pot with oil and vinegar, some make it râhibi with onion and lots of oil until it is fried and browned. It is good whichever of these methods you use.

Here is my version:

Mirkâs (merguez sausage) based on the recipe from Al Andalus Cookbook of the 13th Century

1 pound ground lamb (if you have a meat grinder make this leg or shoulder of lamb)

¼ lb chopped lamb fat, ground or chopped finely (you don’t need this if you are not stuffing casings)

1 T olive or sesame oil (not Chinese toasted sesame oil but the light and clear variety)

3 T murri ( if you don't make it... use soy sauce... a close alternative)

½ t ground black pepper

½ t ground coriander

½ t lavender

¼ t cinnamon

2 ½ ’ of sausage casings (these freeze beautifully, I cut them in lengths, wind them and freeze them so I always have them on hand when I want to make sausage.

Sauce

1 m onion, chopped small

1 T olive oil to fry plus 2 for the sauce

½ c chopped cilantro and mint

2 T vinegar

2 T pomegranate molasses

1 T homemade grenadine (recipe HERE) or pomegranate juice w a tiny bit of orange flower water

Put the mixture together and fry some to taste for seasonings (I like adding a little more lavender, pepper and cinnamon myself), it’s really important to do this before you invest in stuffing the sausage. When you like what you taste, stuff the sausages and dry in the fridge for a few hours uncovered (this helps them brown better, your casings will have been soaking in water so this will dehydrate them). If you don’t want to go the stuffing route, this is just fine sautéed in patties.

Fry the onions till browned and add the vinegar and pomegranate molasses and granadine or pomegranate juice. Stir to blend and then pour over the sausages, serve with chopped cilantro and mint sprinkled about or stir the herbs into the sauce and wilt them... not as bright in color or flavor if done that way. This is fabulous on a bed of whole wheat couscous.

Cooks in the kitchen, relief from Ashurbanipal’s Palace, Ninevah 7th c BCE

Here are some more versions of murri to play with, I'm doing #4 next!:

Murri 2

Take 5 ratls each of barley and flour. Make the flour into a good dough without leaven or salt, bake, and leave until dry. Then grind up fine with the barley, knead into a green trough with a third the quantity of salt, and put out into the sun for 40 days in the heat of the summer, kneading every day at dawn and evening, and sprinkling with water. When black, put into conserving jars, cover with an equal quantity of water, stirring morning and evening: then strain it into the first murri. Add cinnamon, saffron and some aromatic herbs.

Murri 3

Take barley and wheaten or barley flour, make into a dry dough with hot water, using no leaven or salt, and bake into a loaf with a hole in the middle. Wrap in fig leaves, stuff into a preserving-jar, and leave in the shade until fetid. Then remove and dry.

Persepolis Horse

Murri 4 from Kitab Wasf al-At'ima al-Mu'tada:

How to make al-Murri al-Naqî‘ lil-Maghâriba (the infused soy sauce of the North Africans). Knead barley, unleavened and without salt, exceedingly well and make it into loaves, each one half an Egyptian pound. Then wrap them in male fig leaves and insert fig tree ¹ twigs into them as far as the leaves will permit. Spread them out on barley bran and arrange them side by side in a house which sunlight does not enter, or not much. ² Then leave it 20 days. Turn it over, top to bottom, and leave it another 20 days.

Then you gather them with their rot and leaves and pile them up and leave them 20 days. Then you break off a piece of it, and if you find red veins inside, it is quite ripe. If not, leave it another 20 days.

Then take it in any case and clean off the decay with a knife. Gather it and pound it in the mortar or grind in the mill. Then weigh it, and add one fifth of its weight in table salt ³ and as much dry thyme as salt, and as much milled dry coriander as thyme, and as much as the coriander of these spices: caraway, nigella, fenugreek, anise, fennel, each of these the measure of a fifth; and let the fennel be more. ⁴

Then you put it in a new vessel, or (one) with a trace of oil, and it should be wide-mouthed. And you put it on the rooftop so that the sun falls on it most of the day, and you put water on it until its consistency becomes like flowing date molasses. You throw into it broken-up carob, fennel stalks, citron leaves and the pith of (bitter) orange branches, of each as much as is abundant, and two or three pine cones, as much as is done; let their seeds have been removed. You stir it with a stick of fig wood with branches, putting its end to the bottom and its root on top and stirring it with the strength of violent heat. And you cover it with a sieve woven of bast and esparto and put a cloth on it to prevent wasps ⁵ and flies from falling in, for they often love it ardently. Leave it in the sun 40 days.

Then you clarify it with a filter and put it up in a clay pot ⁶ for the sun, shielded with oil. Then, for every 10 Egyptian pounds, you throw in a third of a pound of flour of groats, kneaded leavened and baked in the bread oven but not completely done. Then break it into crumbs while hot into this raised ⁷ (sc. murri) and leave it in the sun for ten days.

Strain it and put up in glass vessels sealed with oil. This is the first extraction, ⁸ and it is the excellent one. If you want to extract another from it, take that which you left before and add water to it and leave it another 40 days. Then, after straining it, throw in hot bread as you did before, and you leave it 10 days and strain it, and it is the second water. And if you want a third and a fourth, do so. Then keep the dregs and dry them in the shade as loaves, for they enter into some dishes.

Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday!

Thanks to Statewide Granite and Marble in Jersey City for the wonderful stone piece!!

One of my favorite ingredients in the world is Madeira, and Rare Wine Co. is doing a fabulous box for the holidays filled with a selection of 4 gorgeous wines for a song... ranging from sweet to dry for all your needs... this is a perfect gift for you or your friends who love to cook! Go HERE to get it.

Goose –– Wicked, Delicious – Smoked in Garbure (a French Stew) & Roasted with a Holiday Drink

2011-12-08T07:25:00.000-08:00

Attack goose

I really don’t like geese.

My beloved German grandmother’s family had a picture-book farm in Wisconsin. The gigantic dining table was a wonder –– placed in front of a huge fireplace –– I think it sat 20! The kitchen smelled like the best bakery in the world since there was always something cooking there. My great aunt Amelia, who towered over her tiny, but well-turned-out husband Fred (who still had his old-fashioned lace-up shoes custom made for him 60 years after they had gone out of fashion) was the matriarch of the family and a formidable woman. Legend has it when Fred died, she picked up the phone and called the funeral home, “Fred’s dead, pick him up” and went back to her work. For some reason I remember her hair so clearly, pulled astoundingly tightly, forming a tiny braided bun on top of her head. I realized why she always went on about my gram’s, thick, still auburn hair (at 75) when I saw the bun down one day –– it was down past her waist but thin as a pencil –– it was hair envy! She was a tyrant around the farm, and everyone quivered at the sight of her. Her kitchen was so clean you could perform surgery there without hesitation –– everything gleamed from continual polishing and scrubbing.

The house was really extraordinary and I marveled at its 3-foot thick stone walls like some medieval castle. Every doorframe had 2 doors, every window had 2 inner and outer windows. It was always the perfect temperature, winter or summer because of this massive construction. The house was built to last until the end of time. Its boon and its curse was that it stood right by Lake Michigan, a fact that made it very valuable (the lake formed one edge of the property). Her dim children, who didn’t feel any love for the place, when approached by developers sold it for a pile. I never had the heart to find out if the magical house was torn down. My small consolation (schadenfreude?) was that it would have been a hellish job.

It was at this farm that I learned about farm animals, drank milk warm from the cow (it was like drinking warm cream and insanely rich), and eating home-smoked sausages and hams and eggs fresh from the chickens. I didn’t know how lucky I was.

It was on one of these visits that I had my first encounter with anser anser domesticus and it wasn’t pretty. I was young, 7 or 8, and having a grand time running about the land.

Grafton Wisconsin Octagonal Barn

My great uncle Bill had an octagonal barn down the road at his place and my brother and I just had the time of our lives swinging from a rope and dropping into the hay below. We were Tarzan and Errol Flynn all rolled into one that day… and we got away with it without getting caught, score!

We were back at Amelias’ when the attack happened. I had visited the lovely cows and laughed at the very charming pigs (having a hard time imagining them as bacon and already having a bit of an issue with killing them for food… especially after meeting them!). We opened a gate to walk to another barn. Out of nowhere the squawking started. A gaggle of geese came around the corner… honking like mad and led by an enormous gander. We made eye contact and I knew then and there my goose was cooked. I ran and he ran after me. My brother made it over the fence clean but I wasn’t so lucky. The white demon bit my leg brutally hard as I was climbing the fence. It was a completely unnecessary and vicious thing to do.

When I made it over and looked back he was still honking and looking at me with the most malevolent stare imaginable. Think Jurassic Park's Velociraptor … that’s the look (the real velociraptor was only the size of a goose, and we now know it had even had feathers –– the movie folks went for the larger Deinonychus for a size model and changed the face to make it look more sinister –– they changed the name because, well, Velociraptor sounds sexier than Deinonychus). I swear, he must have been an ancestor of my feathered nemesis –– but I digress...

Juno Moneta

I discovered that guarding is in the nature of geese. Wikipedia said that the sacred flock of geese in the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitoline Hill saved Rome from the marauding Gauls in 300 BCE by alerting them of a stealthy night attack. The epithet Moneta could have come from the Latin word monere –to warn or from the word mon for mountain or hill. As of 273 BCE, the mint was established in her temple and the word money may have come from that association. Perhaps that is where golden egg laying geese came from?? As it is, whole books have been written about geese in folklore.

I know, carrying a grudge for a lifetime is really bad –– but, well, I have and it has only recently abated–– somewhat. My early Bambi dietary laws (don’t eat anything cute) put goose at the top of my meat list for years. I asked for a Christmas goose for years.

Looks deceptively cute here, doesn’t it?

Fast forward to adulthood. I made my first Christmas goose in my new apartment. After all, goose was the first thing Elizabeth the 1st ate to celebrate the sinking of the Spanish Armada –– she recommended it to her people to celebrate Christmas as a fitting tribute for the accomplishment and the blessing of saving the kingdom. It was delicious and there was a great degree of satisfaction cooking it. I stopped making it since my ex didn’t care for goose–– many don't after bad experiences with tough, greasy, badly prepared birds.

I hadn’t made goose in many years when a friend delivered a beautiful specimen to my door from an upstate farm last month. I marinated it in Madeira and was rewarded with a gorgeous bird by reworking a Cook’s Illustrated recipe I found (for the life of me I couldn’t find my old recipe!).

I thought I’d get the most out of it by making stock with it but the last time I tried it years ago, it was a disaster and tasted just plain nasty. My friend, Ken, told me my mistake had been cooking it too hot. My next effort was spectacular. Goose was now back in my virtual pantry.

This brings me to Jim Schiltz.

I discovered Schiltz Goose Farms in South Dakota (thanks to my friends at D’Artagnan) while researching foie gras and gavage (the method of force feeding to enlarge a bird’s liver) a few months ago (Schiltz doesn't force feed, by the way).

I realized that when I was young I thought all foie gras was from a goose (foie gras d’oie). Now it is almost always duck (foie gras de canard) … so much so that it no longer labeled as such. Foie gras is now almost exclusively duck.

But what of the goose? As I discovered in researching foie gras, the goose was the first bird to be fattened for their livers –– the Egyptians began cultivating foie gras thousands of years ago and began domesticating them even further back.

I asked my friends at D’Artagnan about goose recommendations and they sent me to Schiltz Goose Farms.

Photograph from Schiltz Goose Farm

Starting with a few Toulouse eggs in 1944, they have become the largest producer of goose products in the US. What I found on the site was truly amazing. They began by raising weeder geese! Did you know that geese were the often raised as weeders? They were released in fields to keep the weeds down in fields of cotton, strawberries, asparagus and mint. They were replaced by herbicides in the 1960s, which I now understand was a good thing since the poor bird's weed diet was not good for them.

By that time the Schiltzes had begun raising geese for meat. They are free-range birds who live their lives mostly outdoors, living on feed and foraging which makes for the most flavorful and nutritious birds. Jim Schiltz said, "For the whole smoked goose we use geese that have been processed within our USDA (P-242), SQF Certified facility, that came from our farm in South Dakota, where they are raised in an extreme free range setting. The geese begin their lives indoors for a couple weeks, then are given the choice of being inside or outside. They have approx 100 sq ft per bird to run around in, in other words 400 to 500 geese per acre. Once they eat the grasses that are planted for them down, we bring them fresh greens daily. It is a world apart from the factory farming that rightfully upsets people."

Although I got the goose liver that had drawn me to Schiltz to begin with ( that I will share with you soon) I also got a smoked goose from Schiltz after I saw they were available. When I got the package I was knocked over. It is the meatiest, juiciest goose I’ve ever seen (it was nominated for the 2012 Taste Awards)! It was so big that it went to the front of the recipe line because my freezer (already toooo full) couldn't contain it and, well, I couldn't wait to taste it! It was so good that stripping the bones of the meat, I tasted like mad and each bit was fantastic with different tastes and textures from every part of the bird, WOW (and they are offering great deals on shipping for the holidays!)

But what to do??? I had an idea to use it in a cassoulet or something like.

So, where to go for the recipes? Geese, country life, farm-fresh ingredients –– my mind started wandering to Baron Roy Andries de Groot. Ok, you may ask, what does a blind gourmet who lived in Greenwich Village have to do with farms or geese? Well, he wrote a wonderful book about a tiny hotel run by a pair of French food muses, Vivette Artaud and Ray Girard. The book was called The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. de Groot felt their cooking expressed the unity of their way of life –– a beautiful expression, don't you think? It was the first book of his that I read… I mean, how could you not with a title like that… it practically oozes poetry, doesn’t it? de Groot found the inn by chance on a trip to research the famous Chartreuse liqueur and endeared himself to the women who ran it. He stayed with them for months, coming and going with the seasons and writing down local recipes that had never been written down before. It was the cuisine of the place and the seasons and de Groot loved the idea of both. He was an enormous proponent of food in place and of the season and the recipes in the book capture that place perfectly.

It was a cold and rainy day as I went on my goose chase. I took a detour and got lost in the Alpine valley of La Grande Chartreuse near the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse and L’Auberge de l’Atre Fleuri. What these divine ladies do with eggs and cheese is worth the price of the book, and the stories –– well de Groot makes you feel like you are there –– he’s a splendid writer. I was having too much fun revisiting the book, no matter that there were no goose recipes for me there.

Returning to the task at hand after my virtual visit to Auberge, I reached for another volume of his called Feasts for All Seasons, I just knew he would have what I wanted. This book actually preceded Auberge by a few years but the same principals are in evidence (don’t worry, I’ll revisit Auberge again and tell you more about de Groot –– he was quite a character). It was written in the 60’s and the recipes have that feeling about them –– caught as they were between the style of classic French cuisine and the soon to be hot international savor our food was to transition to –– with a little 60's supermarket mentality thrown in (although de Groot lived in Manhattan and had unusual ingredients at his fingertips he was writing for the general public and had to make concessions in authenticity for the less adventurous).

In the chapter, “The Family Meals of the Fall” I found a perfect recipe for my goose, he calls it La Garbure. It was nestled between New Orleans Jambalaya and Moorish Lamb Couscous.

Toupin, 1850 French

He says it is a famous peasant dish from the Pyrenees and includes the direction that it should be thick enough that the ladle stands up in the stew –– cooked and served in a toupin (this would have been stuck in the back of the fireplace to cook low and slow - Le Fanion in NYC has them). I have made some changes like using a smoked goose (but I warmed it in fat so it became like smoked confit).

It wasn’t a cassoulet in the classic sense since de Groot made it with green beans and not dry beans and it is soupier in a way, but when I did a little research I found the original French version used fresh white beans or dry… so I threw in some cooked dry beans and added cabbage that was as ubiquitous as root vegetables in the many recipes I found. I think de Groot wouldn’t have minded the changes since he recommends using what you have to make it (he chose the peculiar addition of green peppers which I decided to skip—this was the 60’s after all). When making garbure (and many other things) I agree with my friend Ken Albala … use the recipe as a guide. You need not adhere to the ingredients like they were written on stone… use what you want. I do recommend those chestnuts. They give it a soft, warm je ne se quoi.

This has always been a soup of the country… of Gascony and the Basque region… the name Garbure probably came from the Spanish garbias meaning stew. The most famous version is from Béarn (yes, as in Bearnais, although the sauce didn’t come from there!) in the Pyrenees Mountains and was served in 2 courses with the soup coming first –– spooned over the bread slices, and the meat as the main course with served with cornichons and salad and sometimes with pickled hot pepper.

I could imagine it working in great Aunt Amelia’s kitchen superbly… and it’s a great way to avenge my white-feathered nemesis’ attack so long ago… lots of cooked goose!!!

La Garbure (serves an army… 10 easily)

2 legs and 1- ½ breast, 1-½ thigh from a smoked goose from Schiltz Goose Farms (save the rest for later… or use it all if you would like… this baby has a lot of meat

4 cups goose or duck fat OR use 6 pieces of homemade duck or goose confit.

2 slices bacon or a bit of pork belly or Ventreche (it needn’t be smoked because the goose is)

salt (won’t be necessary if you are using smoked goose which is salted) and pepper

1 dry chili pepper

3 cloves of garlic

2 m carrots

A solid chunk of roast meat OR remains of pork butt OR ham hock OR Toulouse sausage* OR Keilbasa OR smoked pork chops –– OR a mixture of any or all of them, whatever you have around or are in the mood for… I read that this soup would sit at the back of the fire for weeks or months in its toupin and that things would be continually tossed into it so that it was constantly evolving… a nice idea.

1 lb green beans, tipped and trimmed (or fresh limas or the traditional fresh, shelled white beans) and/or

1 cup white beans, soaked and cooked till softened (I would do more, perhaps double at least 1 ½)

1 lb baked and shelled chestnuts (I used a jar of cooked French chestnuts)

2 large Leeks or 4 small (white part) in 1” lengths (use one for the stock and one for the soup)

1 lb small boiling potatoes

1 small Savoy cabbage, shredded

2 m white turnips, peeled and cubed (about 2 pounds)

1 bottle Beaujolais

2 T chopped marjoram and thyme

1 bunch parsley, chopped

Slices of toasted bread… with garlic herb butter, even better.

If serving in 2 courses, serve the meat with cornichons and salad with a light vinaigrette.

Cut the goose into breast pieces, legs and thighs and remove the meat from the bone. Reserve the bones… break them into smaller pieces. Reserve the skin for cracklings –– they are sooo good! Melt the fat in a deep skillet. You can add any fat from the goose to the pot and render it as you go, then remove what remains. Add 1 breast and the legs and thigh and cook over a very low heat for 1 hour (reserve the rest, or use it all if you would like –– this goose had a lot of meat). Skip this step if you are using your own confit.

Remove from the fat when cooled somewhat –– leave fat clinging to the meat. If you want a rich broth… use the fat that will pool on the goose meat… otherwise leave it on the plate when you put the meat in the soup. Adding it will make it very rich (you can save it and add it later if you are worried about the fat).

Sauté the bacon in a large pot (around 10qt) until it is brown and has rendered a good coating of fat. Sauté the leeks and garlic.

Add 2 c of the red wine and bring to a boil for a few minutes. Add enough water to come halfway up the pot and bring to a boil (I used the whole carcass so used about 3 QT that gave me 2 Qt of stock).

Add the bones and the ham hock and hot pepper and simmer for 3 to 5 hours until you have a good stock (I usually do it till the meat falls off the bones to get what I like and that took 5 hours). Remove the ham hock and the goose bones. Discard the bones and remove the meat from the ham hock and reserve.

Skim the fat (I did this the day before and let it cool and then removed the fat and brought the stock up to a simmer).

Add the turnips, bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes.

Add the potatoes, halved, the leek split and careful washed and cut into 1-inch pieces. Add the scraped carrots, cut into chunks. Bring this to a boil and then reduce to a bare simmer for 30 minutes. Then add the salt (with the smoked goose you don't need it) and pepper.

Fry the sausages if they are raw. Prick them and brown them to loose some of the fat. Leave the meat in big chunks if you are using it and add it and/or the sausages to the pot.

Put the green beans and chestnuts and cabbage into the pot and add the confit and meat you have harvested from the ham hock and cooked dry beans and cook another 30 minutes at a bare simmer. Sprinkle with fresh herbs.

Remove the large pieces of meat and sausage. You can either serve these separately on a platter as it is traditionally done, and place mostly vegetables in your individual soup bowls and ladle the broth over them or slice into bite-size pieces and return them to the tureen and ladle them out together. Either way, put 2 T of red wine into each bowl before ladling the soup and serve with toasts.

Toulouse Sausage

1 pound ground pork

1/8 lb pork belly, finely chopped (a processor works well for this)

1/8 c white wine
1 T Madeira ( Boston Bual from the Rare Wine Co.)

1 t salt

1 t sugar

½ t pepper

small clove garlic, minced

¼ t nutmeg

pinch of sage and thyme

1 2’ length of sausage casing

Combine all the ingredients and let sit in the fridge for an hour. If you don’t have a sausage stuffer, use a pastry bag and fill the casings with the mixture but it takes a strong hand. Tie the sausages off at 6 or 8” lengths and put in the fridge, uncovered to dry for a few hours.

Roast Goose

1 goose(you can order one from Schiltz Goose Farm)

1-2 T madeira (Boston Bual from Rare Wine Co. is perfect

3 T hazelnut oil, frozen

1 T heather honey

2 T chopped fresh herbs

s&p

1 cup red wine

3 T Madeira

½ c demi-glace

Put the goose in boiling water for one minute and remove, Turn it upside down and do it again. Remove, pat dry and rub with madeira put in the fridge on a rack, uncovered overight.

Heat the oven to 325º

Remove, salt and pepper the bird. Stuff the frozen hazelnut oil, honey and herbs under the skin of the breast. Place the bird on the rack, breast side down. Roast it for 1 1/2 hour. Remove from the oven and remove the accumulated fat. Turn it so the breast side is up and cook another 45 min to hour. Check it to see if it is done…if the drumstick meat feels soft when you push on it, you are ready. If it is, turn the oven up to 400º and remove the bird.

Transfer the bird with the rack to a jellyroll pan and let roast for 15 more minutes to crisp the skin. Remove the liquid/fat from the roasting pan while this is cooking. Separate the fat from the juices. Deglaze the pan with the red wine and Madeira. Pour back the lovely juices you have separated from the fat and add the demi-glace. Adjust the seasoning and serve with the sliced goose (which should have been resting 10 minutes while you do this). If you would like a thicker sauce, add a few T of flour to the sauce… make a slurry with some red wine and add to the sauce, stir till thickened.

My friend David Solmonson over at 12 Bottle Bar asked me to come up with something that fits the bill for a holiday drink. I pulled a few books out (real and virtual) and settled on one that David of 12 Bottle Bar had sent my way, the Café Royal Cocktail Book from 1937. I was feeling color and went for drinks with red in it.

When I found the Pink Rose I asked Petunia, my St. Bernard, her opinion (she was hovering since it was past her walk-in-the-park time) and she said “woof” (which is an expression we use in the film business when we move things to camera… when it’s where you want it, whoever’s looking through the lens says ‘woof’). I knew I was on the right track. The picture above is an homage to her good taste.

Something about pink froth seems right for the holidays.

You see, I love pomegranates and pomegranate juice. When I found out grenadine was made from them, well I was shocked… it tastes nothing like it. I found a recipe to make it and decided I was going to give it a go one day… that day has come.

As you see, the recipe couldn’t be easier and it’s so wonderful to look at. I did change it a little since the grenadine was so delicious…. I had to have a little more of it!

Petunia’s Pink Rose (2 small or 1 large drink)

1 egg white

2 T grenadine

2 T cream

2 t lemon juice

2 T to 4 T gin to your taste

I don’t have a cocktail shaker so I whipped the egg white with a mixer till a loose meringue formed. Then, I put the rest in a jar and shook it like mad. I combined them gently and voilá, Petunia’s Pink Rose. I also made a star out of the grenadine in the center.

Enjoy it for the holidays!!

Grenadine (this makes about 1 ½ cups)

1 c pomegranate juice (about 3 pomegranates should do it or buy the juice)

1 c unbleached sugars

1 oz pomegranate molasses

1 or 2 drops Aftelier Petitgrain or 1 t orange blossom water

Heat the juice just enough to melt the sugar… keep it low so you don’t lose the fresh flavor. DO NOT BOIL! Add the molasses and dissolve and then add the petitgrain or orange flower and you are good to go. Some people advise adding vodka to give it staying power… it is fresh juice after-all. I say… use it all up for a party… you’ll be glad you did!!!

For the best chef gifts, go visit Aftelier, she has the best essences on the planet and I use them ALL the time from Bergamot to rose to jasmine and fir... they make magic! This is an unsolicited recommendation... just love to share great things (and she's having a holiday sale!).

Thanks to Gollum for hosting foodie friday!

Armagnac, Paris and Duck Wellington with Armagnac Sauce

2011-12-01T02:45:00.000-08:00

Photo from Finest and Rarest

I discovered Armagnac in Paris a very very many years ago. I was young and my boyfriend and I walked all over the city for a few perfect weeks. This was a great way to see the city but now that I seem to have lost my travel diary, a bad way to remember places… especially since I have no sense of direction at all (I could get lost in a paper bag with a map). After all these years the names may have faded with my idea of where things were exactly but the most important part of the memory never does. I remember my first taste of Armagnac and magret de canard from that trip as if it were yesterday.

On one of those walks we entered an enchanted cave of a place because I was taken with the look of the owner as I peered through the window. He looked like a large version of John Drew (John Barrymore’s uncle) with a handlebar moustache that belonged to another age. His energy level was so expansive you could feel it through the glass. He seemed to take a shine to me and even made me believe my fractured French was charming—he was the perfect host.

One of the first things I noticed about the place was a large cabinet filled with hand-labeled bottles of Armagnac. The handwritten labels made them seem very special… slightly blackmarket and exciting. He was opening the latticed door to the cabinet frequently and pouring from the bottles for his patrons. The mutual affection was palpable.

Finest and Rarest

When it was time to order, he took charge and I was so glad he did. After rich soup and a surprising salad of bitter greens and confit, he introduced me to rare duck breast. I was in heaven and would have willingly stayed there forever if I could have done. The experience led me to try to attempt smuggle some raw duck breast in my suitcase (stuffed in tall boots) on the plane back so I could make it in NYC. It did not work. I was busted in customs and lost my duck breast and my pride (they were not amused) to the customs agents.

I was still swooning from the duck and a dark Gascon wine (also with a handwritten label) when I asked him about his Armagnac. He was over the moon to show his collection off to a young American obviously in his thrall. He began pouring… young Armagnac, old Armagnac –– he loved this stuff and although I was never much for spirits –– his enthusiasm was infectious. He even came up with an Armagnac soufflé. Although I could barely walk when I left, I still remember his gigantic smile and enormous personality. I can’t think of Armagnac or magret de canard to this day without thinking of him.

Armagnac comes from the Pays de Gascogne. Unlike cognac, it is only distilled once and actually pre-dates cognac by at least 200 years having first been mentioned in 1411 as aygue ardente,, aygue de bito or eau de vie made by a man named Antoine (not that Antoine was the first, Arnaud de Villeneuve was distilling wine in 1250 and the Chinese were using the technique 3000BC). The reason for this, said Brandy Classics was the association between the Islamic learning center in Salerno and the University of Montpellier. It was from this association that the Arab art of distillation was learned (I wrote about distillation and polymath Persian chemist Avicinna HERE). A 1441 record said that the “distilled spirit relieves pain, keeps one young and brings joy.” It came to be known as Armagnac during the 16^th century and was popular with Dutch sailors (it was the Dutch who taught the vintners of Cognac the technique centuries later).

Once I starting poking around I couldn’t stop and found a wonderful, informative article by Charles Neal.

Unlike cognac, which is 72% alcohol, Armagnac is only 53-60% alcohol and distilled in a continuous still called an alambic (from the Greek ambix that means a pot with a small opening to the Arab’s al ambic for the distilling equipment). In Armagnac they still use portable versions (most made from the classic copper material) that are shared by many vineyards… driven from farm to farm during the season. The lower alcohol content and single distillation method helps the spirit retain more “esters, acids and congeners” which give it more rustic flavor… that and many years in oak casks, known as une piece armagnacaise, using either Gascon oak from the Moniezun forest which is rare and gives the spirit more tannin or Limosin which gives it more vanilla. It is these techniques that give Armagnac its distinctive flavor. Although the best armagnacs are not adulterated, lower priced Armagnacs can be adulterated with boisé (a boiled wood chip product) sugar syrup and caramel for color. The real thing spends a long time in oak and doesn’t change once it is bottled. Some Armagnacs have spent as much as 30 years in cask (anything more leaves them dry and too woody). They also are vintaged which cognac once was but is no longer.

Armagnac is made from 4 grapes, Folle Blanche, Ugni Blanc, Colombard and Bacco 22A. Before the Phylloxera epidemic, Folle Blanche was the primary grape used but it is a delicate grape… hard to grow and prone to disease. These days Ugni Blanc is the largest component of Armagnac. Bacco is the dark note of the mix. From what I read, Neal doesn’t care for the colombard component.

There are also 3 regions of Armagnac: Bas-Armagnac, Ténaréze (this is where my bottle hails from), and Haut-Armagnac. Any Armagnac that is only labeled Armagnac comes from any or all of the regions and is a blend. Those labeled with the district have distinct personalities of the place… the terroir if you will, that has very different soils and so, different and distinct flavors.

A good bottle of Armagnac is not cheap. An old bottle will set you back a few hundred dollars. The amazing site, Finest and Rarest has an amazing selection for those of you who are interested in shooting over the moon of flavor (of many wines and spirits, not just Armagnac… it is a site to dream on). I can say from experience that the old Armagnacs are truly wonderful and full of a rustic glory ––wild and untamed yet elegant. I always like to recommend using good quality for cooking. Then, if you want to finish it with a tiny bit of the great stuff at the end… that will give you the most bang for your buck.

The recipe that I will share with you is one that I’ve been wanting to make for sometime. duck breast Wellington. Last time I made beef Wellington (that I wrote about HERE), I said to my guests that I thought duck breast would be great done that way. A strange combination of circumstances led me to make it for Thanksgiving when my plans to go away were canceled the day before. I had duck breast in the freezer and thawed it (thanks to D'Artagnan, I don't have to smuggle it in my boots anymore...). I made my duck fat puff pastry and used a small piece of cooked foie gras I had left over from the movie as part of a mushroom duxelle (using mushrooms left in the fridge). This was totally a last-minute dinner that turned out spectacularly and the Armagnac sauce (another thing that I’ve wanted to make for sometime) was perfect. I know –– having demi-glace and truffle butter handy is a little unusual (let me tell you when the hurricane threatened my electricity being cut off, I saw my frozen treasures threatened and shook in my boots at the possibility of losing it all… I was much blessed not to have had that happen) but I was glad of it when this could come from it (Dr. Lostpast thinks I am a freezer hoarder).

My fix for a blown holiday made skipping overcooked supermarket turkey and nasty side dishes became a great idea–– may do it next year!

Duck Wellington for 2

1 duck breast from D'Artagnan, fat removed.

s&p

¼ t 5-spice powder

1 T Armagnac

½ t Dijon mustard

1 T apricot pureé or jelly

4-5 m. mushrooms (wild or white), chopped

1 T truffle butter

1 t thyme leaves (fresh)

1 T Madeira

1 T cognac

3 T foie gras , fresh or mousse ( I love their cubes –– I keep them in the freezer and chop them off as needed)

1 piece of puff pastry*(approximately 9x12)

1 egg beaten with 1 T milk

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 small shallot, chopped

2 t butter

1 cup demi-glace

3 T Armagnac

s&p to taste

1 T basil jelly**, gooseberry or current jelly, optional

2 T truffle butter

2 t truffle oil

Rub the duck in salt, pepper and 5-spice powder.

Take the fat of the duck breast and sauté to release the fat and remove. Saute the duck breast on both sides in the fat till browned then remove and cool. When cool, stir together the armagnac, mustard and apricot and brush on the duck and rest.

Saute the shallot and garlic in the butter. Add the chopped mushrooms and sauté. Add the thyme leaves. Add the liquors and reduce. If using fresh foie gras sauté gently.

Lay out the puff pastry on a sheet of parchment and place the cooled duck breast on one half. Cover with the mushroom/foie gras mixture. If using mousse, spread a layer on the duck before adding the mushroom mixture.

Close one half of the pastry over the other and close by wetting one side and pressing them together firmly, I used a combination of a folk and a pastry wheel to clean up the edges. It is necessary to put slices into the paste so that it will spread as it rises.

Return to the fridge for 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 425º and place the sheet pan you will be using in it to heat it. Brush the egg and milk mixture all over the pastry and then place on the pre-heated pan.

Bake for approximately 30 minutes. Be watchful, each oven is different. Also, turn the sheet midway to assure even baking. Also, if you use additional decoration as I did, remember to check it… it will brown faster since it rises higher than the rest and should be covered with a foil strip before it burns.

While the pastry is baking, make the sauce.

Saute the shallot and garlic in the butter. When soft, add the demiglace and reduce slightly. Add the armagnac, salt and pepper to taste. Add the jelly if you wish at this point. Allow to cool slightly, and add the butter to make an emulsion. Add the truffle oil.

Remove the duck and let it rest for a few moments before slicing. Serve with the sauce.

*Recipe for basil jelly HERE … I love the stuff

*Duck Fat Puff Pastry

Butter layer

1 lb + 3 ½ T (510g) cold unsalted butter

2 t (10 ml) Lemon juice

1 c (130g) bread flour

pinch of salt

Dough

3 c (400 g) bread flour (freeze it)

3 ½ T (55g) duck fat, frozen)

2 t Salt

1 c cold water (start with 3/4 and add as needed, you may not need a whole cup)

Mix the butter and the flour and lemon and salt into a paste, make a 6” square and chill on wax paper till firm

Knead very sparingly and refrigerate.

Make the dough into a rectangle and put the butter in the center in a diamond... fold the dough around it like an old envelope, bringing the 4 outer points to the center of the butter. If it’s warmed up, chill it. Otherwise roll it to a rectangle and fold it like a brochure and chill ½ an hour. Roll it out and do it again 6 times, resting for ½ an hour to an hour in the fridge each time (if you have a cold kitchen, less time is needed).

I left mine overnight after the 5th turn and made the last turn the next day. I rested it one more hour and rolled it out. You will have enough for 3-4. Freeze what you do not use.

For great midcentury objects and furniture for the holidays, visit my friend Diana's online store!

Food in Film, Duck with Port and Cherries, Duck Ragout with Pasta and Cream Sauce (and other camera-ready delights!)

2011-11-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

I discovered that movie food was different from real food pretty early in life.

I was in love with old movies, especially swashbucklers. I loved watching them and reading about them. The beautiful tables groaning with plate and goblets and gorgeous food made me want to eat like my favorite characters. My poor mother got some peculiar requests for her shopping forays to be sure. I assumed that what we saw was real and delicious.

Pouring over old movie star bios as was my wont in those days (I was under 12 after all), I was shocked to discover that Tyrone Power was nearly killed by a chicken. Yes, a chicken.

You see, there are 2 different types of food for film, the edible type and food for show. It seems Power took some of the latter and that had been sprayed with DDT to keep the flies away. He decided suddenly to eat the chicken… not a scripted move at all, and before a horrified prop could stop him, he had taken a few bites and was taken quite ill.

Adventures of Robin Hood (1939)

It comes out that much of the food on film set tables… food that has to sit for hours under hot lights or in the sun, is faux food or altered to give it staying power. What is eaten is switched out between takes to keep it fresh and edible.

When I grew up and went into the movie business as a member of the art department (the department responsible for food) I learned all of this first hand.

Age of Innocence

I loved hearing set stories from films shot in NY and, as a serious foodie, was especially bowled over by the amazing work that was done by chef Rick Ellis (who also did the food for American Psycho--- quite a stretch!) to recreate late 19^th century New York society dinners. The scenes were further enhanced by a remarkable collection of china and decoration amassed by decorators Robert Franco and Amy Marshall (under the watchful eye of designer Dante Ferretti) on Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence. It blew me away (believe me when I tell you what they did was heroic).

There are so many others like the great Babette’s Feast (which I’ve written about HERE) that I've actually cooked dishes from and is a particular favorite.

Vatel

Another food-centric favorite was Vatel (a story of the baroque chef who committed suicide when the fish delivery was late) that featured extraordinary food scenes and decoration.

Marie Antoinette

That baroque style was featured once again in Sophie Coppola’s magical Marie Antoinette.

But movie food tells a story. Sometimes the austerity of the table speaks volumes about what is going on in the film. It’s not all about pomp and grandeur. It's about telling a story about lives lived. What and how we eat says a lot about who we are to quote Brillat-Savarin, "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are."

Who can forget the genius of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane as the whole life of a marriage is shown in the changes at the dinner table, from this:

to this:

or how the relationships in Ordinary People

or American Beauty

can be enriched by the architecture of the dining room, the design of the food, the decoration and even the lighting.

Seduction can come with only perfect lighting and a bunch of grapes... and of course Garbo.

As many of you know, I have taken a break from working in films to write this blog. I did a return engagement for a director I love for a film he wrote and directed. It seemed only right that a major component of the film was a dinner. I forgot what 14-hour days felt like! I cooked and cooked and in the end it was a huge success.

All of the food was edible. We had no DDT sprayed chicken! The days of shooting at a dinner table were made easier with oil lights from Firelight Glass –– not having to worry about candle continuity was a real pleasure. The table came from Made of New York and was magnificent. I wanted a table with a lot of character to offset the shine of the dishes. The table is made from wood from old NYC buildings and is a hundred years old or more.

The meal was written with duck –– a lot of duck in the described dishes –– so I called D’Artagnan – the best place on the planet for great duck!

First, a few weeks before shooting, I went through photos online to show the director so he could pick what he liked visually based on what he had written. We do this for all elements of the film with the director from furniture to paint colors to what’s on a table. We call it show and tell. For that, my input is added to what I have read in the script. For instance, although the script said ‘duck ravioli’, I found a picture of an open ravioli (and a description of the dish from Walter’s Bistro reported by Kevingeats. ) to show him an open-faced ravioli because I told him you wouldn’t see there was duck ragout in a closed up one. From dozens of photos he chose the ones he wanted.

I did have to make some changes to the recipes. The food had to last through a whole day of lights and eating since we didn’t have the budget for multiples (actually, in a larger film, I wouldn’t be doing the cooking… outside my job description).

The crayfish were on a base of canned cream of celery (the real thing would have separated in an hour) and was based on a picture from choosy beggars that the director had loved. The canned soup stayed exactly the same all day long (it was never intended to be eaten, only seen). The parsley oil did dissipate over the course of many hours and a crayfish being removed to a plate for 4 takes.

The foie gras was sautéed and placed on a swirl of apricot jam that stayed beautifully, sadly I didn’t remember to snap the picture till the end of the night!!

One picture taken in natural light, fresh on a plate… what a difference!

For the duck with cherries, I used plain old cherry pie filling cut with a little pomegranate juice. I brushed the duck on the platter with oil to keep it moist and we added to the actor’s plates with fresh duck. They did eat it all day and I was gratified that the kids on the set, who I was told were picky eaters, said they now loved rare duck breast… to the amazement of their mothers. For the real recipe I would make my old standby, cherries and port… so good!

This is after 10 hours of shooting!

For the duck ragout pasta, I did make the ragout with duck confit and it was delicious. I bought fresh pasta, boiled it and cut it into squares. I laid down a bit of spinach with my handy giant tweezers and then some duck and Boursin cheese and covered it with more pasta and a drizzle of sauce (I made this from a description that went with the picture I showed the director… and it was delicious). I then slathered it with bottled Alfredo sauce… a necessity because homemade cream sauce would have separated in a minute. Again, the store-bought stuff stood up beautifully and looked the same from beginning to end. The only near disaster came when I left my cooking area and someone used a tea kettle, moving the platter of pasta I had placed there. When they were done, they put the platter back but left the burner on super low instead of off!!!! I caught it before it broke but had to so some repair as the middle had really heated up and the ragout was leaking out of the pasta in an unpleasant way.

For dessert I enlisted the aid of Erika Beth at Life’s Too Short to Skip Dessert to make them, since I am not the queen of desserts. Even while running the NYC marathon and prepping for an opera (she is an accomplished opera singer too), she stepped up to the plate and came through with chocolate cake and a lemon tart and cupcakes. We had to make a few changes to make them more like the pictures the director approved (swirls on the cake and caramel on the lemons) –– something that often happens on shoots. It was it great that she made them… the crew ate them up afterward! I made madeleines for an extra plate on the table (4 days later they were stale as could be, but fresh they were perfect).

I read about the new Dominic Ansel Bakery on Spring Street in NYC and had to get some of his famous macaroons… they were wonderful and so colorful!

I used Daniel Boulud’s recipe for Madeleines courtesy of Donuts to Delirium since I couldn't find the Elizabeth David recipe I usually used and they were just as good as she had promised!!

THE RECIPES

Duck Breast with Cherries and Port Sauce

2 duck breasts from D' Artagnan

salt & Pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

With a sharp knife score the fat of the duck breasts in a criss-cross pattern. Season the duck with salt and pepper. Warm a cast iron skillet over medium heat.

Place the duck breasts, fat side down, in the skillet to render the fat, about 6 minutes. Turn the duck breasts over and sear for 1 minute. Turn the fat side down again and place the skillet into the oven to roast for 7 minutes, until breasts are medium rare. Rest them for 5 minutes then slice. (this technique is from the food network),

Cherry Sauce with Port

2 shallots

1 T butter

1 c sour cherries (fresh or frozen are best)

½ c port

2 T basil jelly or current jelly

1 T cognac

S&P to taste

Pinch of 5 spice powder

Pinch of ginger

Pinch of cayenne

Saute the shallots in butter then add the cherries, wines and jelly and spices. Reduce the sauce and pour over the duck.

Duck Ragout Ravioli with Boursin Cheese

Duck Ragout

2 T butter

1 m onion, chopped

2 m carrots, chopped

1 stalk celery, chopped

4 duck confit legs from D'Artagnan, skin and bone removed and chopped coursely (or meat
from a whole duck cooked low and slow or even chicken thighs cooked low and slow)

1 glass red wine

1 cup chicken stock

1 T armagnac

3 T tomato paste

2 T mixed fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, sage, rosemary)

salt and pepper to taste

Saute the vegetables in the butter till soft. Add the confit and the rest of the ingredients and cook for 45 minutes over a low heat. What should be left will be thick and rich.

Boursin Cream Sauce

½ t minced garlic

2 T minced onion

2 t butter

2 c heavy cream

1 package Boursin Cheese

¼ to ½ t nutmeg
1 T madeira (Boston Bual from Rare Wine Co)
1 t cognac

2 T chopped parsley

s& p to taste

Saute vegetables in butter, when soft, add the cream, reduce somewhat then add the cheese and the rest of the spices and parsley.

1 bunch spinach, sautéed with salt and pepper, squeezed dry and chopped

3 sheets fresh pasta, boiled and sliced into squares.

Take enough of the pasta to cover the platter and place on a warmed up, heat proof platter slathered with a layer of sauce. Top each square with some of the spinach and a T of the ragout. Top with another square. Spread the rest of the sauce over it and place in a 300º oven to warm for a few minutes… then serve.

Lemon Tart based on an Epicurious recipe

Tart Shell:

1/3 cup almonds (about 2 ounces)

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour

3 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

2 tablespoons (or more) ice water

Candied lemons:

2 large lemons, sliced very thin on a mandoline

3 c. sugar

3 c. water (plus more for blanching)

Lemon Filling:

2/3 cup fresh lemon juice

1/2 cup sugar

3 tablespoons crème fraîche or sour cream

4 large eggs

Caramel

1 C sugar

¼ c water

Tart Shell:

Finely grind almonds in processor. Add flour, sugar and salt and process until blended. Add butter and process until mixture resembles coarse meal. With machine running, add ice water, 1 tablespoonful at a time, and blend until moist clumps form, adding more water if dry. Gather dough into ball; flatten into disk. Wrap in plastic; chill at least 1 hour and up to 1 day.

Preheat oven to 375°F. Roll out dough on floured surface to 12-inch round. Transfer to 9-inch-diameter tart pan with removable bottom. Fold dough overhang in, pressing to adhere and forming double-thick sides. Pierce dough all over with fork. Freeze 20 minutes. Bake crust until set and light golden, piercing with fork if crust bubbles, about 30 minutes. Cool crust on rack 15 minutes. Maintain oven temperature.

Candied lemons:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. You want to use a large pot so that your lemon slices aren’t crowded in the pot to ensure that the pieces stay in tact. Carefully add lemon slices, and blanch for approximately 3 minutes. Drain lemon slices, and repeat the process one more time.

Bring 3 c. sugar and 3 c. water to a boil, and add blanched lemon slices. Simmer for 25 minutes, and remove to cool/dry on a cooling rack, piece of wax paper, or a silpat.

Lemon Filling

Whisk lemon juice and sugar in medium bowl to blend. Whisk in crème fraîche. Whisk in eggs 1 at a time until well blended. Pour mixture into crust.

Bake tart until filling is set, covering crust edges with foil if browning too quickly, about 35 minutes. Cool tart completely in pan on rack. Refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Keep refrigerated.)

Remove pan sides, Top with candied lemons.

Take the sugar and water and slowly cook to golden caramel.

Spoon the caramel over the lemon slices and serve.

Thanks to Gollum for hosting Foodie Friday!