DORIE GREENSPAN

Cafe Salle Pleyel Burger: The Burger of The Times

2008-07-16T14:25:30-04:00

You may remember that last fall I wrote about the terrific hamburger at the Cafe Salle Pleyel, a restaurant created by my friend Helene Samuel, about whom you've heard me talk before.

Well, today the Cafe Salle Pleyel burger got big-time coverage -- it's the star of Jane Sigal's extensive story In Paris, Burgers Turn Chic. It's a really good story and, after you read it, you should take a couple of minutes to view/listen to the accompanying audio/slideshow as well - the pictures are swell.

Now here are the two best parts of the story:

First, there's guest chef Sonia Ezgulian's recipe for the Pleyel Burger with capers and cornichons and Parmesan cheese (my photo was taken when the cheese of choice was a very American cheese).

Second, and unimaginably exciting, wonderful, smart, funny, talented Helene Samuel is the author of The New York Times's Quotation of the Day. In the space usually reserved for the words of heads of state, Nobel Prize laureates and rock stars, my friend Helene is quoted as saying about the burger:

"IT HAS THE TASTE OF THE FORBIDDEN, THE ILLICIT -- THE SUBVERSIVE, EVEN."

It makes our national favorite sound pretty romantic, doesn't it?

Summer House Cooking: Putting the season's vegetables to good use

2008-07-14T11:27:04-04:00

While the tomatoes in my garden are still too green for anything, even green tomato pie, the corn is already sweet, the zucchini already plentiful and the onions ready for their close-ups at my local farmers market in Lyme.

As many of you know, I'm very attached to our little market, which is one reason why it was such a pleasure for me to write about it for the August issue of Bon Appetit magazine. The story, which is now available online, includes 8 recipes that are favorites of mine for the season:

SUMMER CORN SOUP (pictured above) -- not only do I love the flavor and texture of this soup, I love that you get to use everything corny to make it, including the cobs!
TOMATO AND TAPENADE TARTLETS -- so sophisticated looking; so easy
CAPER-ROSEMARY TUNA WITH HERB SALAD -- worth firing up the grill for, even if the tuna only cooks on it for a very few minutes
GRILLED SCALLOPS AND NECTARINES WITH CORN AND TOMATO SALAD -- I love the combination of sweet scallops, nectarines and corn with the bit of acidity you get from tomatoes (I also love the surprise of nectarines in a main course)
GRILLED EGGPLANT WITH CAPONATA SALSA -- think eggplant as bruschetta
GRILLED LEMON CHICKEN AND MOROCCAN COUSCOUS SALAD -- one of my summer go-to recipes
GRILLED FLANK STEAK WITH SPICY PEPPER AND WATERMELON SALAD -- the salad, a mix of bell peppers, fiery sriracha sauce and cool watermelon, is perfect with steak, but just as good with chicken or fish
ZUCCHINI TAGLIATELLE WITH MINT, CUCUMBER AND LEMON -- no pasta here, just zucchini sliced on a mandoline or v slicer to look like tagliatelle; it's fun and it's good with so many things -- I served it with roasted salmon last night

I hope you'll take a look at the story (I don't know how long it will be up, since links get updated so frequently) and that you''ll enjoy the read. And I really hope you'll cook from the recipes.

The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie: David Leite Goes on a Quest

2008-07-09T13:11:50-04:00

David Leite, he of the wonderful Leite's Culinaria, set himself a quest fit for a knight: he wanted to find the perfect, the ultimate, the best, the most satisfying chocolate chip cookie -- and he found it!

In today's New York Times you can read about David's adventures and his conversations with New York City bakers about everything from the ingredients (I got in my 2-cents worth championing salt), the size of the cookie, the size of the chips and the length of time the dough should rest before being shaped (days, says one baker), to the optimal munching temperature (warm wins). It's a terrific read -- no surprise, since David is such a very, very good writer -- and it's a great study into the enduring classic.

There's a also a recipe, a compilation of all that David learned. I'm betting it's going to be the most-baked cookie of the week.

(PS -- these are chocolate chip cookies from Baking From My Home to Yours)

The Big Cheese: Rodolphe Le Meunier in Tours

2008-07-03T09:05:50-04:00

Cheese is a tricky business no matter how you slice it. While the paean has it that cheese is the highest achievement milk can hope for, the reality is that first you’ve got to have good milk. And, like everything else about cheese, the milk is a partnership between man and Mom Nature. It’s Mother N who provides the cows, goats and sheep who’ll give the milk and, since she’s also responsible for the grass the animals will eat, the taste of the milk is her doing as well. After that, it’s us humans who turn the milk into cheese, an ancient process that’s deeply respected in France, where it’s often pointed out that you could eat a different cheese every day for a year and still not have made your way through the country’s offerings.

Except in the case of fresh cheeses, which are eaten within days of being made, newly made cheese is only a faint, faint whisper of what it is meant to be and what (if all goes well) it is capable of becoming. To bring the cheese to perfect maturity – or, put another way, to see that it lives up to the potential Mother Nature and the cheesemaker gave it – you need an affineur, the expert who ages the cheese.

In some cases, the affineur might be the cheesemaker, but often it’s the cheeseseller, and in France, where being an affineur is an important craft, a cheeseseller who does his own affinage will announce it proudly: his sign will say Fromager-Affineur.

Recently, when I was traveling with Maison de la France in the Loire Valley, a region unparalleled for goat cheese, I met a young cheeseseller/affineur who is one of the country’s best, having gained the title of MOF, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (best artisan in France).

Rodolphe Le Meunier, once dubbed the Zidane of fromagers (Zidane was probably France’s greatest soccer star and a national hero), earned his stripes (as an MOF you’re entitled to wear blue, white and red stripes on your collar) in 2007 by passing a blind tasting; a jury tasting of his cheeses; a theoretical written exam; an oral exam; and a cutting test in which he had to slice a series of cheeses to perfect weight, size and form. He also had to create and serve a dish based on cheese – he made a mousse of Langres with spices.

Although he learned his craft from his family, like so many young chefs, winemakers, farmers and producers, he’s found a way to use modern technology to recreate centuries-old traditions.

Walk into Le Meunier’s “cellars” and you’ll find yourself in a large, cold space that could double for an operating room. Gone are the romantic stone caves with their iffy humidity. In their place are perfectly controlled refrigerators, each set to the exact temperature, humidity and ventilation levels needed for each type of cheese.

For sure, push-button control has made a part of the affinage process easier, but none of the buttons can determine when a cheese is at its most sublime. For that, you still need people as knowledgeable as Rodolphe Le Meunier.

And to give us a taste of what it means to age a cheese to perfection, he cut a piece of Comte from July 2005. Comte is a firm, pressed cheese from the Jura that is sweet, fruity, nutty and, when it’s as old as this one was, speckled with little grains that could be mistaken for salt, but which are casseine (a protein).

Aged Comte is one of my favorite cheeses and one we usually serve at Christmas and New Year’s with either Savignin or Vin Jaune, both wines from the Jura. This one was exceptional!

If you live near Le Meunier or are visiting Tours, lucky you, you can go straight to the source. Or, if you’re in Paris and want to nibble on Le Meunier’s work, you can find his cheeses at his friends’ shops, Dubois (47 Blvd. Saint Germain, Paris 6) and Quatre’homme (62 rue des Sevres, Paris 7), both fromagers/affineurs and MOFs. If you’re nowhere near France, you can still get a hunk of something wonderful from him through the magic of two-day delivery. Finally, if you’re just curious about Le Meunier and his cheese, you should go to his site, Fromages en Jazz (did I mention that he’s also a musician?). In fact, you should go there even if you don’t love cheese – it’s got great stuff.

TWD: Apple Cheddar Scones

2008-07-01T06:48:22-04:00

This week my friends at Tuesdays with Dorie baked Apple Cheddar Scones from Baking From My Home to Yours.

If you want to see how they've done -- and how differently the same recipe can be presented (I always find this interesting) -- go to the TWD blogroll.

There are now over 200 TWD bakers -- bravo to Laurie of Quirky Cupcake who came up with the idea, started the group and maintains the site -- and three cheers for all the bakers!

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see so many people baking every week. And the most exciting part is that many of the group's members are new bakers just learning their way around the kitchen. I love this.

These days, when people tell me they have no time to bake, or that it's rare to see anyone making sweets at home, I just tell them to take a look at the members of TWD.

(This photo is a photo of the wonderful picture taken by Alan Richardson, he of Hello Cupcake fame, for Baking From My Home to Yours.)

The Last Word (for now) on Sardines - Russ Parsons Has It

2008-06-28T06:18:14-04:00

After writing about my experience filetting sardines and using them to make an escabeche, I got an email from my friend Russ Parsons, food and wine writer for the Los Angeles Times, and the author of How To Pick a Peach (a fascinating read).

Russ is a certified fan of sardines and, when writing about them for the Times, described his way of dealing with the bones:

The flesh of the sardine is so tender and soft that you could probably do all of the cleaning using a butter knife. But in the interest of time and a neater piece of fish, you'll probably want to use a paring knife.

Still, there's not much to it. Begin by laying the fish on a board and making a small cut on the dorsal side right behind the head and straight down through the backbone. Make another incision on the belly side just behind the front fins. Holding the fish under running water, gently twist the head from the body. If you do this right, most of the innards will come away with the head. Discard these.

Using the same small knife, cut a slit the length of the belly and rinse out the inside. Lay the fish on its back on the cutting board and make two shallow parallel cuts the length of the backbone. You'll want to be careful not to cut all the way through the meat.

With your thumb and forefinger, grasp the exposed backbone near the tail and pull up, using the fingers of your other hand to hold the meat in place. The backbone and larger ribs should lift cleanly away, leaving you a neatly butterflied fish.

Finish the preparation by scraping away the black skin along the ribs and cutting away the rib endings on either side. There will still be some bones left, but these will be so fine they won't be a problem. Do check to make sure all of the bones around the collar of the fish are gone.

And then Russ sent along his recipe for Sarde in Saor, the classic Venetian sweet-sour dish that's related to escabeche. Russ says that the raisins and pinenuts are optional, that the way to eat it is on a slice of toast and that the traditional Venetian accompaniment would be a glass of a less Verdicchio. Mille grazie, Russ.

SARDE IN SAOR

From Russ Parsons and The Los Angeles Times

Makes 4 to 6 servings

Oil

2 pounds sardines, cleaned

Flour

Salt

2 pounds onions, thinly sliced

1/4 cup olive oil

3/4 cup white wine vinegar

1/4 cup white wine

1 bay leaf

1/3 cup raisins

1/3 cup toasted pinenuts

Heat 1/4 to 1/2 inch of oil in a large heavy skillet until it is hot enough that food sizzles when added to it. Lightly flour the sardines on both sides and fry in the hot oil until lightly browned, less than a minute per side. Using a slotted spatula, lift the sardines from the oil and drain on paper towels. Season with salt.

Drain the oil from the skillet, but don’t wipe it clean. Combine the onions and the olive oil in the skillet and cook over very low heat until the onions are very soft and just beginning to turn golden (not brown). This can take as long as an hour. Stir the onions from time to time, scraping the bottom of the pan to release any browned bits of sardine that are stuck there.

When the onions are soft and sweet, add the vinegar, white wine and bay leaf and increase the heat to medium. Cook until the liquid has reduced to a glaze. When you tip the pan to the side, there should be only a couple of tablespoons of liquid left. Remove the pan from the heat, discard the bay leaf, and stir in the raisins and pinenuts.

Arrange 1 layer of sardines in the bottom of a small baking dish. Cover it with a thin layer of onions. Repeat with the remaining sardines and onions, pouring any liquid that’s left in the pan over top. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 2 days before serving.

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

2008-06-24T07:00:02-04:00

It's not that I have sardines on the brain or anything, but I came across the following line last night in a French food magazine:

Little children love sardine beignets sprinkled with some fleur-de-sel.

I don't know what it's like at your house, but had I handed our kid a fried sardine puff -- with or without ritzy salt -- I don't think I'd have been greeted with a grin.

Ah, those lucky French tots. I love the thought that little ones might go from pureed peas and carrots directly to sardine beignets without stopping at Cheerios or peanut-butter sandwiches. Of course, French children never get peanut-butter because their parents are convinced it's the root of all obesity. (I'm exaggerating only a smidgen.) But that's a different story..

Give A Man A Fish ...

2008-06-22T11:37:48-04:00

On my way home from the Marche Saint Germain this morning, I kept thinking of the Chinese proverb:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I'd just bought a kilo (about 2 1/4 pounds) of sardines and I'd hoped that madame, the fishmonger, would filet them for me. And she would have -- if I'd only wait 30 minutes, please. Because it was a warm, sunny, perfect Paris day, and because I'd no more shopping to do to fill in the time, I said I'd filet them myself. Madame gave me a quizzical look -- read doubtful -- and, because she was too polite to say, "I bet you've never done this before and don't know what you're in for," she said, "You know, you've got a lot of sardines and it will take you a while to filet them."

"Well," I said, "I really do have to get back home, so I'll take them as is. But," I asked, "would you just show me how to do it?"

Madame pulled out a well-worn fileting knife -- very thin at the top and not so wide at the bottom -- laid the fish out parallel to her with the head to the left, made a diagonal slash below the gills, then pressing the flat of the knife against the backbone and rib bones (they're probably not called that, but the names make sense to me), she cut cleanly to the tail and lifted the filet away from the fish. She flipped the fish over, still keeping the head to the left, and repeated the motion. The skeleton that was left wasn't as neatly picked clean as the one Picasso made famous, but the remains looked clean and symetrical and she'd done it in 30 seconds.

Returning chez moi, I cleared the decks, sharpened a paring knife and put on some music. I had 12 sardines and figured that had madame cleaned them, it would only have taken her 6 minutes. I probably could have waited, but I'm glad I didn't because it only took me half an hour, I did a pretty decent job of it, and I learned something. Not bad for a Sunday morning.

I also got to turn the filets into escabeche, a dish in which the sardines are first quickly sauteed and only partially cooked, and then drowned in hot aromatic oil and vinegar, a mixture that completes the cooking and pickles them, too.

The downside of escabeche is the wait -- once the dish is assembled, it needs at least 6 hours in the fridge to cure. Had I remembered that I'd have to hang for so long before tasting the my work, I might have found the patience to wait 6 minutes for the fish to be fileted. Of course, what I would have made up in time, I'd have to forfait in bragging rights.

Here's a recipe for SARDINE ESCABECHE from The Cafe Boulud Cookbook (Daniel Boulud and Dorie Greenspan, Scribner's)

Makes 6 servings

1 1/4 cups extra-virgin olive oil

Flour for dredging

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

1 1/4 pounds sardine filets, skin on (from about 2 1/2 pounds whole sardines)

2 sprigs thyme

2 sprigs cilantro

2 sprigs basil

1 tomato, peeled, trimmed and thinly sliced crosswise

6 pearl onions, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced crosswise

3 cloves garlic, peeled, split, germ removed, and thinly sliced

2 small carrots, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced

2 stalks celery, peeled, trimmed, and thinly sliced

18 fennel seeds, toasted

18 coriander seeds, toasted

2 bay leaves

Pinch of red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon ketchup

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1/2 cup white vinegar

Juice of 2 lemons

Lemon wedges for serving

Pour 2 tablespoons of the olive oil into a large nonstick saute pan or skillet and warm it over medium heat. Spread some flour out on a plate, season it with salt and pepper, and dredge only the skin sides of the sardines in the flour, shaking off the excess. Slip the fish into the pan, flour side down, and fry on the flour side for 1 1/2 minutes - the fish will be undercooked, but it will finish cooking in the marinade. Lift the fish out of the pan and pat off the excess oil; discard the frying oil, wipe out the pan and set it aside.

Arrange the sardine filets attractively in an overlapping pattern on a rimmed serving platter or in an oval gratin pan that holds them snugly. Strew the thyme, coriander, basil and diced tomato over the fish and set the platter aside for the moment.

Return the pan to medium heat and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. When the oil is hot, toss in the onions, garlic, carrots, celery, fennel and coriander seeds, and bay leaves to cook, stirring, until the vegetables are almost cooked through, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the remaining 1 cup olive oil and all the other remaining ingredients, except the lemon juice and wedges, to the pan, bring to the simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Pull the pan from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Pour the hot sauce over the fish. Cover the platter with plastic wrap and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. Chill the escabeche for at least 6 hours, or overnight, before serving.

To serve: Serve the escabeche with lemon wedges on the side. If you'd like, you can drain off some of the marinating liquid, emulsify it in the blender, and use it as the dressing for an accompanying green salad.

Chateau de Cande and the Would-be Monarchs

2008-06-20T13:56:32-04:00

I've been traveling through the Loire Valley with Maison de la France and have not had much internet access, so I've got a pile-up of things to share -- now all I've got to do is find the time...

For starters, there's my visit to the Chateau de Cande, where Edward, Prince of Wales, and Wallis Simpson, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, were married on June 3, 1937. Here, on the walls of the chateau's library, are the Windsors' signatures and their wedding date, carved with a rotograveur.

And here's the menu for what might have been a storybook wedding, but which turned out to be the start of a life in exile:

Jambon d'York
Langouste
Foie Gras
Caviar
Salade Russe
Navarin aux Legumes (lamb stew with vegetables)
Fricasse de poulard et poulet (fricasse of young hen and chicken)
Patisseries
Fruits refraichis (cold fruit)

All set out as a buffet in the chateau's dining room

The Man-Who-Would-Be-King, Edward, who abdicated the throne of England for the woman he loved, married Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American socialite at Cande, the home of their friends, Charles and Fern Bedaux, in the heart of the Loire Valley, far from either England or America, and, as it turned out, far from most of the important people in their lives.

While the couple invited 300 people to their wedding, only 16 showed up and, even in the fabulous wedding portraits by Cecile Beaton, the couple don't look so cheerful.

The sad and fascinating story of the Windsors has been written about endlessly, but it's not a story that ever interested me enough to follow it -- it's not easy for me to be interested in two extraordinarily privileged, but profoundly selfish people. Yet, after the tour of Cande, all I wanted was a comfy couch, a mound of bonbons (or M&Ms) and a stack of Windsor biographies.

Cande is unique among the famous chateaux of the Loire because it's not as grand as the others -- it would be easy to settle into the library for an afternoon catnap -- and it wasn't built (or even visited) by a king, as so many of the chateaux in the valley were. But it was home to the Windsors for months before their marriage and there's plenty of Windsorbilia to see.

The photos of the Windsors are extraordinary, particularly the famous picture by Philippe Halsman, which was part of his series called Jumpology. Halsman's theory was that a person's true personality was revealed in his face during the act of jumping, the idea being that you drop your "mask" when you have to concentrate on thrusting yourself in the air and landing safely.

Here are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor caught mid-air, she looking happier than she appeared to be by all reports, and he looking terrified, as though he knew what a sad future he'd consigned himself to.

The Halsman photographs are remarkable and, even though it's totally unrelated, I can't resist showing you the picture he took of a jumping Marilyn Monroe for the cover of Life Magazine

All tours of Chateau de Cande are guided and our guide had a touching understanding -- an affection, even -- for the Windsors. For any royal-watchers, the tour is a peek into a part of the family the Queen would probably like to forget; for anyone interested in fashion, the tour is a treat.

Wallis Simpson, credited with popularizing the phrase, "A woman can never be too rich or too thin," spent her riches clothing her thin body, and there's a small, but wonderful, selection from her wardrobe at the Chateau. Her panther jewels from Cartier, her painted luggage, some of the elegant gowns made for her by Schiarparelli and Dior, and this ensemble

a very early design by a very young designer, Karl Lagerfeld, now the man responsible for Chanel.

Wallis may have lacked many qualities, but she sure had a good eye.

Recycling the Empties in Paris and New York

2008-06-15T13:27:13-04:00

Last night I had a dinner party with lots of wine, as you can see, and this morning I had to toss the empties into the recycling bin, located in the courtyard in full view of all of my Parisian neighbors.

There isn't a time when I do this that it doesn't make me think of differing attitudes (or at least what I perceive of as differing attitudes) between my French and American neighbors.

In our New York apartment, the recycling bin is in a common back hallway. Whenever I toss a bunch of bottles into the bin, I have the same thought: "What will the neighbors think when they see soooooooo many bottles."

In Paris, as each bottle crashes to the bottom of the bin and breaks, I imagine my neighbors looking out of their windows, seeing me, l'americaine, and saying: "Bravo! She's getting the hang of life here."