Simply Superior Soup (or "Effing French Cooking Magic")

It’s the last week of December 2015 as I (begin to) write this, 2016 looming just days away, and for cooking options we are decidedly into the winter larder.  On December 6 we were amazed to eat, and very much enjoy, the last garden tomato.  The last leaves of fresh kale were part of a festive Christmas dinner:  seared venison loin (harvested from the Bide-A-Wee property last year) with a rich, savory red wine and port reduction; lima beans simmered with stock and aromatics, then pureed, a surprisingly luxurious result from a humble dried bean; then the kale, braised with chestnuts and garden leek, a splash of our homemade cider vinegar.  Though we haven’t really celebrated Christmas in any traditional way for some years, I’m not going to let an opportunity for a festive dinner go by.  And anyway, we think of it as a continuation of our solstice festivities—especially appropriate here, as Mary’s birthday occurs during the same time.

Once those last leaves of kale vacated the crisper, dinner planning turned a page.  It’s true that there’s still quite a bit of “fresh” produce, from both garden and farmer’s market stock-ups, in our cellar, in the fridge.  But the term fresh doesn’t really mean the same when applied to storage carrots, cabbage, squash, and onions, as it does when describing a handful of beans or a bowl of tender lettuce harvested from the garden to be prepared and served minutes later.  Those winter stand-bys are fresh in the sense of not being frozen, dried, pickled, fermented, etc., but…you know what I mean.  It’s not the same as throwing dew-dappled snap peas in the wok or snipping fragrant dill into a dressing.  Our vocabulary fails us in efficiently denoting that crucial difference:  there’s fresh produce, and then there’s fresh produce. 

This is not to disparage the stalwart vegetables of winter, not at all.  Like reliable character actors, they show up and fill their roles with unfailing professionalism, year after year, decade after decade, while the fad for arugula fades, or a trendy heirloom cucumber turns out to be just another pickle, after all.  Cabbage, potatoes, carrots, squash, onion, leek, turnip, beets--the roster might at first glance suggest daily supper at the gulag:  bung it all in a kettle, boil until done.  But there’s a saying I like (and as far as I know, I came up with it), goes like this:  There’s meat, and then there’s cooking.  Which is to say:  It’s not always only about the ingredients, but often as much or more about imagination and skill in preparation.  Today’s soup, which we had as a first course on Christmas night, is a perfect example.

If it hadn’t come with a sexy French name, I might never have tried it.  Puréed cabbage and potato soup sounds, you must admit, a good deal less appealing than Crème de Choux aux Beurre de Roquefort.  The source is Madeleine Kamman’s In Madeleine’s Kitchen.  There are three remarkable and surprising things about this recipe:

1)  In spite of the cream—crème—in the title, there’s no cream in the soup.

2)  In spite of the fancy-sounding title, the list of ingredients is short and plain.

3)  In spite of the short, plain ingredient list, the resulting soup is delicious, even luxurious, the result of “Fucking French cooking magic,” as I described it, enthusiasm overwhelming decorum, in a tweet.

There are a couple of secret ingredients:  walnut oil, and confit fat.  But I think you could do without those if you don’t have them, substituting good butter for the confit fat, olive oil for the walnut oil.  However:  if you haven’t tried French walnut oil, it is well worth seeking out.  A commonly available brand, and the one we always buy, have even brought back from Paris in the past, is J. Leblanc.  It’s pricy, but a little goes a long way.  For me, a salad of fresh tender lettuces straight from the garden, dressed with nothing more than walnut oil and a bit of fleur de sel is one of life’s simple luxuries.  But I’m getting ahead of the season.  Just one more note on the walnut oil:  the French stuff is made from lightly toasted walnuts, so it’s amber in color and has that nutty fragrance and flavor.  The golden walnut oil often sold at “health food stores” and co-ops is not the same.  The French walnut oil should not be used for cooking, only dressings and seasoning.  (NB: the English name is in small print on the bottle, so you’re looking for a bottle labeled “Huile de Noix,” as above.  For Mpls/St Paul readers, Cooks of Crocus Hill carries it, but are currently out of stock in all stores.)

The basis of the soup is potatoes, cabbage, and water.  It gets a smoky depth of flavor from bacon.  Not a lot of bacon, either, less than an ounce per person in Kamman’s recipe (she actually calls for pancetta).  No cream or milk, as noted above.  No stock, just water (you can call it Chateau Sink, as Jacques Pepin sometimes jokes, or perhaps Domaine du Tappe, to French it up).  There’s a bit of garlic, whose presence is felt.  The beurre de Roquefort is simply blue cheese and soft butter mashed together, a few grinds of coarse black pepper—a simple compound butter; it’s worth making extra, for it’s nice to have around, to smear on a burger, say.

And that, my friends, is it, the ingredient list in its entirety.  You gently render off small cubes of the bacon or pancetta, add potatoes and garlic, then the cabbage.  This sweats for a few minutes (“mellows,” in M Kamman’s version), then you add water and simmer until the cabbage is very tender.  The well mellowed vegetables and bacon are then whizzed up in a blender (I used a food processor, carefully spooning out the solids, adding liquid gradually; an FP is really not the best appliance for pureeing soups, I’ve learned from bitter experience).

And get this:  it suffers not at all from being made a day ahead and reheated just before serving.  On Christmas Eve I added a little crunchy garnish, chopped goose skin cracklings—yeah, I happened to have some lying around; don’t hate me because I’m beautiful—from the goose we cooked for our first solstice celebration.  When I made it again for lunch I toasted some small croutons in olive oil—it’s really about the textural contrast, that crunch to perk up the creamy soup.  (See:  "It's all about the garnish".)

Coming back around to my earlier point and seasonal eating and the winter larder:  this is a fabulous dish that you would never make in the summer, but which is perfect for the cold months when, you know, you have a lot of potatoes and cabbage around.  It also reminded me how absolutely lovely and civilized it is to start a meal with a soup, so elegant and yet so comforting.  A fading tradition I hope to start reviving in our house.

My adaptation of Madeleine Kamman’s recipe:

Creamy Bacon, Potato, and Cabbage Soup with Blue Cheese Butter

Serves four as a first course, two to three as a main course—add salad and crusty bread to make it a meal

2 ounces bacon or pancetta, preferably in one chunk

1 tablespoon duck confit fat or butter

1 medium or 2 small potatoes, 6-7 ounces total

1 large or 2 small cloves garlic

¼ of a green cabbage, about 12 ounces

1 tablespoon walnut oil, plus additional for garnish*

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the blue cheese butter:

2 ounces unsalted butter at room temperature

2 ounces blue cheese

Croutons or cracklings, optional but highly recommended

In a small bowl, mash the butter and blue cheese together with a fork until well blended.

Cut the bacon or pancetta in small dice, about ¼-inch.  Peel the potatoes and cut them into smallish cubes, about ¾-inch.  Shred the cabbage into ½-inch strips.

Heat a medium saucepan and add the confit fat or butter, then the bacon.  Cook over medium-low heat.  As the bacon renders its fat and begins to brown, add the potatoes, tossing them in the fat, then cook, stirring occasionally, until they become a little bit brown, 4 to 5 minutes (you’re just looking for a golden color, not deeply browned as for hash browns).  Stir in the garlic and cook for another minute or two, then add the cabbage, a couple generous pinches of salt, and several grinds of black pepper.

Turn the heat to low, cover, and let the cabbage sweat (“mellow” is the term M Kamman uses) until well wilted, about 5 minutes.  Add 3 cups water, bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and cook partly covered until the cabbage and potatoes are very soft, 15 to 20 minutes.

Let the soup cool for a few minutes before pureeing.  If using a food processor, separate the solid from the liquid parts of the soup and purée the solids first, then gradually add in the liquid.  When everything is in the FP, purée for about a minute.  At the end of the minute, drizzle in the walnut oil.  Return the soup to the saucepan.  Reheat just before serving.  (Note:  Kamman directs you to strain the soup back into the pot after puréeing; I did not bother with this step, finding the soup smooth enough to my taste without straining.  Straining would no doubt produce an even more velvety and elegant purée, if that's what you're after.)

To serve:  heat the soup and taste for salt; you will probably want to add another pinch or two.  Ladle the soup into bowls, and to each add about a tablespoon of the blue cheese butter.  Add croutons or cracklings, as you please, drizzle a small amount of walnut oil over the surface of the soup, and serve.

*If you don’t have/can’t find walnut oil, use a flavorful olive oil—or, perhaps pumpkin seed oil, such as Wisconsin’s own Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil.  And, how about this—if using pumpkin seed oil, think about substituting butternut squash for all or part of the potatoes, then garnish with toasted pepitas instead of the croutons/cracklings.

Happy soupage!

Strong Cheese Accident

There's already a lot of weird stuff in my fridge, so why not add a jar of fresh homemade cheese marinated in ramps and cider? Right, no reason not to, at all.

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about blogs that rely on "adapted" recipes from other sources, about originality and creativity in food writing and blogging, and shaping influences, inspirations; about where ideas come from and how to properly acknowledge our debts and the contributions of others to our own development.  I'm far from sorting it all out, but I think that this little experiment, no matter how it turns out, is a great example of how a whole slew of sources and influences, from across continents and even centuries (the fromage fort method being very, very old, indeed), filtered through a curious (and not very organized) mind, might produce something which, while not new in any sense, may turn out to be unique in its own way.  That's what I love about food, and the diverse community of people who are compelled, perhaps obsessed, by it.

 My kitchen processes seem to be bouncing off accidents these days, from burnt honey to abandoned cheese. Home cheese making isn't difficult, I keep hearing, and I believe it. I'm sure it's just like smoking meat and fish, or fermenting sauerkraut: ridiculously easy when you know how it works and have done it a few times; incredibly daunting when you're looking from the outside and have never done it before. Plus, it's a commitment. You turn milk into curds and whey, and then you have to deal with the product. And while I knew that milk is mostly whey and just a wee bit of curd, I wasn't quite prepared to confront the reality of that. It's like boiling maple sap down for syrup. You can read and perfectly well process the fact that it takes around 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, but until you've done it, you can't possibly understand what's involved in getting rid of all that water.

Well, backing up a bit: I finally made cheese, the very most basic kind, simple set curds that we know from Indian cooking as paneer. I got the method from Tricia Cornell's nifty book Eat More Vegetables .  You just  bring some milk up to a simmer, stir in something acidic, and the solids congeal and separate from the liquid whey.  Pour the results through cheesecloth, which catches the solids.  Let that drain well, and you have basic white cheese.  From one quart of milk I got a half cup of cheese and 3 1/2 cups of whey.  I know there are things you can do with whey, from using it as liquid in pasta making to feeding it to your hogs.  I have no hogs, and was going out of town the next day.  I tossed the whey, feeling as if I was dumping perfectly good milk down the drain.  If any of you have clever uses for whey, I'd love to hear about them.

So, from my beautiful quart of whole raw milk I now had this rather paltry little sack of cheese, and obviously this swap which on one's first go seems like a pretty lousy deal is just something you have to get past if you want to make cheese.  Yes, I'm aware that milk is a liquid, and yes, at an intellectual level I realize that I shouldn't have expected a quart of milk to magically turn into a quart of cheese.  Just the same....  Sorry, don't mean to belabor the point.

But there's the set-up:  quart of delicious milk becomes sad-looking tiny sack of cheese, going out of town--bung it in the fridge, deal with it later.  And so today is later.  I peeled the cheese out of the cheesecloth.  It was a bit yellowed on the outside, and the cheesecloth stuck.  The texture was chalky, and it tasted like...nothing.  I was becoming depressed, and then, a lightbulb!

Dimly, from the addled recesses of my still somewhat jet-lagged mind, I recalled a preparation I'd been meaning to try, a variation on a marinated goat cheese recipe (which itself was a variation on the French fromage fort, or strong cheese) that I'd seen in one of Madeleine Kamman's books, In Madeleine's Kitchen .  My thought upon reading that recipe a while back was to try using Wisconsin white cheese curds, dry apple cider, and ramps in place of the goat cheese, white wine, and leeks that Madeleine uses.  And now I had my own homemade cheese to sub for the cheese curds--except, when it came down to it, I didn't have enough homemade cheese to fill even a very small jar, so I added an equal weight of cheese curds to fill it out.

The idea here is sort of double-fermented, or ultra-washed rind, cheese.  As Madeleine notes, the usual way to do this is to make a purée of leftover bits of cheese, along with wine, garlic, maybe some herbs, and let that sit in a crock until it becomes nice and...aromatic.  I wrote about that method here.  I can't really call this a recipe, this impromptu assemblage, but here's what I had:

2 ounces each fresh homemade cheese (unsalted) and white cheese curds, in 1/2-3/4-inch cubes
2 plump ramp bulbs, sliced thin
3/4 cup dry hard apple cider
2 generous pinches coarse salt
about 12 whole black peppercorns
1 sprig fresh tarragon
1 tablespoon sunflower oil

I combined the ramps, peppercorns, and cider in a small saucepan, brought it to a boil, and simmered for a minute.  When it was cool I added it to the cheese, along with the salt.  I spooned this mixture into a small jar, making sure the cheese was covered with rampy cider.  Then add the oil, put on the lid, shake it up, put it away in the fridge for a while.  Madeleine says to leave the marinated goat cheeses for three months.   I think I'll check mine in a week or so, and report back.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

A Sunny Soup for Winter; The Redemption of Dead Bread

One good thing about the dry indoor air of a northern home in winter: bread does not tend to get moldy. One bad thing: it dries out faster than you can say pain au levain. I throw away a certain amount of bread, I have to admit. Not proud of it, but there you go. I love the crust too much, so I will not plastic-bag my bread. Comes a time, then, that the last quarter of a batard, or a good-sized heel of a boule, becomes absolutely petrified, slicing is out of the question, you'd need a sledge hammer to penetrate the crust.

So a certain amount of dead bread hits the trash can here, but last week I found myself with an entire large batard of what had been delicious mixed-grain levain that had made the trip to Bide-A-Wee and back, then languished on our Saint Paul counter for a few days. When I finally took it out of the bag it was more suitable for inflicting blunt-force trauma than for sandwiches or toast.

But I couldn't toss it--a whole uncut loaf of bread? Not a chance. I recalled something I had read, I think it was from a Madeleine Kamman book, how in mountainous regions of France they do a massive baking after the wheat harvest in the autumn, and those loaves are then dried in the cool, dry mountain air, and then used through the winter. On top of that, it just so happened that Mary had encountered a similar account in the book she's now reading, Emilie Carles's memoir, A Life of Her Own (the original French title is way better: Une Soupe aux Herbe Sauvages). She writes:

This bread was meant to last the whole winter, and we carried it to the hayloft where we spread it out on the huge hanging trestles, and we'd go fetch it up there as needed. Obviously, it was as hard as wood; to soften it ahead of time, we'd hang a few loaves in the sheep pen, just above the sheep. The heat and humidity softened it to a point, but it was a far cry from fresh bread and from one end of winter to the other, we ate it stale. We used a special knife, yet it was so hard to cut that it shattered into fragments that scattered to the four corners of the kitchen. But it was good: that bread had an extraordinary smell, and what a taste! My sisters and I fought over the crusts, sucking on that bread with as much delight as if it had been cake. Dunked in café au lait, it was a feast.

Can we even begin to imagine that kind of life, that kind of approach to food and eating? It seems quaint and charming, appealing in a way, a bit repulsive in another (could that "extraordinary smell" and the fact that the loaves were softened in the sheep pen be at all related...?). Well, I love the idea of making something wonderful from what seem unpromising ingredients--that's the magic of good, simple cooking.



Dry bread immediately makes me think of soup, but I needed to treat the bread some way first, lest it empty the soup bowl of all liquid like a sponge. I took my rock-hard loaf and rended it into pieces with bread knife, cleaver, and brute force. I put the pieces in a big mixing bowl, and poured in some water, let it absorb. I checked back a couple of times, broke up the larger chunks, added a bit more water. When it somewhat resembled bread again, rather than rubble, I fried the pieces in a lot of olive oil with a couple of crushed cloves of garlic--this would be the richest part of my soup, along with the cheese. And now, I bet some of you are nodding and smiling right now, because you know what I'm going to say next: That old dead bread, shredded to raggedy pieces and fried, was uncommonly delicious. I had to stop myself snacking on it, or there would be none left for lunch.

In honor of the bare-bones salvage simplicity of my croutons, the soup itself had to be equally spare--just some oven tomatoes* from the freezer, stock, and a grating of cheese.

Salut! A splendid result. I won't be throwing away much dead bread from now on.



Winter Tomato Soup with Fried Bread
Serves two

6 ounces stale bread, preferably a whole grain levain type—something with character
12 ounces oven tomatoes (or excellent canned)
1 1/2 cups stock
¼ cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small onion, sliced
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Grated gruyere or similar

If your bread is merely stale, just cut or tear it into chunks roughly 2 inches square. If the bread is very, very dry, break it into large pieces and toss it in a bowl with ¾ cup of water and cover the bowl with a plate. Let stand 2 hours, mixing occasionally. If the bread soaks up all the water before it’s soft, add a bit more. If it gets waterlogged squeeze it like a sponge to extract excess water. When you have something workable, cut or tear it into 2 inch pieces.

Heat the olive oil in a heavy skillet and add the bread and crushed garlic cloves. Fry the bread until nicely golden and a bit crisp. Remove garlic add the sliced onion. Cook until the onion wilts a bit.

Divide the bread into 2 soup bowls. To the skillet add the tomatoes, stock, salt and pepper. Simmer 10 minutes. Taste for salt. Spoon the tomatoes over the bread and top with grated cheese.

_____________________________________________
* Here's my method for those, for future reference; won't do you much good right now, but the pictures are pretty. I've altered the recipe somewhat; I now peel the tomatoes prebaking, and I don't cook them down quite so much, to leave distinct chunks.

Here's a little ode to heirloom tomatoes from a while back, too.


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Round Again

In which the last of the past meets the first of the new, via soupage. So here some of the last of last year's garden leeks, potatoes, and carrots meet the vanguard of early spring, the chives, the sorrel. I could have added a little mint. It's a variation on a Madeleine Kamman recipe for nettles soup--not that we can't get nettles now, we can, just not in the yard. (Lots of other "weeds" out there, though, and several edible.)

I grew all that stuff, by the way. Proud of meself, I am.


It is puréed, enriched with some cream, topped with a bit of grated Wisconsin "gruyère," or as you please--as Mme Kamman says, it "does not hurt." A dish both rich and green in flavor, the tart nip of sorrel subdued but still influential. A fine transitional soup to say merci and au revoir to the root cellar, and a big bienvenue to the gardening year. If you have sorrel, chives, garlic chives, and mint in your garden you get the first green of spring, year after year, without doing a thing.



Leek and Sorrel Soup
serves two

1 large leek, cleaned, sliced crosswise into 1/4-inch pieces (about 1 1/2 cups)

1 1/2 Tbsp unsalted butter

2 medium potatoes (about 8 ounces total) peeled, sliced 1/4-inch or thinner

3 cups chicken stock

1 packed cup young sorrel leaves

1/4 tsp salt

1 small carrot, grated

1/2 cup heavy cream

chives, about a dozen blades

grated cheese, such as gruyère, about a cup, optional

salt and pepper to taste


In a heavy-bottomed soup pot melt the butter and add the leeks. Cook over medium heat until they are soft, 6 to 8 minutes. Add the potatoes and the stock, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and bring to a boil. Line the sorrel leaves up with the stems all facing the same way. Chiffonade up from the bottom, slicing halfway up the leaves. Add the sliced stem ends to the pot, set the top halves of the leaves aside. Cook at a high simmer for about 30 minutes, until the potatoes are very soft, falling apart.

Turn off the heat and let the soup cool for a few minutes, then run it through a food mill or push it through a sieve (you may blend it if you like, before sieving--not necessary if using a food mill). Return the smooth soup to the pot and bring back to a simmer. Set a bit of the grated carrot aside for garnish, and add the rest to the soup. Cook for 5 minutes. Chiffonade the rest of the sorrel, and set a little aside for garnish. Add the rest to the soup. Chop the chives, save some for garnish if you like, add the rest to the soup. Add the cream and cook another couple of minutes without letting the soup come to a boil. Add a few grinds of black pepper if you like, taste for salt.
Serve with crusty bread and a green salad.



Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw. Recipe adapted from When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman, one of my favorite books.

Culture Club

I've cued up Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of J.S. Bach's The Goldberg Variations on the stereo, and I've got the opening lines of Shakespeare's sonnet 116--"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,/ Or bends with the remover to remove..."--in my head, just to, you know, bring a little culture to the proceedings. *

Now I'm going to get out the buttermilk, yogurt, and sour cream, the Cedar Summit Farm cream and whole milk, and mix up some home-cultured delicious dairy products. (Our friends Dave and Florence Minar and family run Cedar Summit; they are local food heroes of the first order.)

What we're doing here is introducing beneficial bacteria into a conducive medium. Sounds a bit dry (or maybe a bit scary), but that's how we get some of the world's most cherished foods--parmigiano reggiano, roquefort, camembert. These kitchen-cultured efforts don't produce anything that remarkable, but they're nice things to have in the fridge, just the same: crème fraîche, and whole-milk organic yogurt.

One of my culinary heroes, Madeleine Kamman, has this to say about home-made "crème fraîche":

"I am totally aware that 'making' crème fraîche is a favorite sport of the American cook; all I can say is if cooks enjoy themselves making crème fraîche, they might as well go ahead and do it. The taste of any of those products, however, has nothing at all to do with true crème fraîche; sometimes the texture is right, but the taste is never in the least reminiscent of the French or European unpasteurized products." (In Madeleine's Kitchen)

Ever the tactful Frenchwoman, it's awfully difficult to discern Mme Kamman's true opinion; but I get the impression she's not that big a fan of American kitchen sports. Nonetheless: let us carry on.**

In my previous post, the recipe for Crepes aux Poireaux called for crème fraîche to be added to the leeks at the end of softening. You can buy crème fraîche at better grocery stores now, but it's easy to "make" at home. And you know what? I do enjoy it. Furthermore, I feel that, using excellent dairy products as raw materials, I get a pretty good result at the end. I'm sure Madeleine is correct that the crème fraîche that comes from French alpine dairies is better than mine; we just don't happen to have a lot of those in my neighorhood of Saint Paul.

Other uses for crème fraîche: it gives cream sauces a tangy, silky finish; a dollop into vinaigrette produces a tangy, silky dressing; mixed with chopped fresh herbs, spread on a slice of rye bread and topped with smoked salmon, it makes a canapé or brunch dish of uncommon tangy silkiness. It can be used as a topping for fresh fruit, with or without a little added sugar, honey, or maple syrup. It's the basis for the Alsatian tarte flambée, or flammekuche, a sort of pizza topped with onions and bacon.

Anywhere you would use heavy cream or sour cream, crème fraîche could probably stand in, lending the recipe, how should I put it?: I think "a silky tang" says it best.

I don't make crème fraîche every week, or even every month, but when I do make it, I try to make more than I'll need for one use. Having it around--it keeps for at least a couple of weeks--lets me think of more uses for it.

For this experiment, I cultured crème fraîche using both sour cream and buttermilk. Into one cup of cream I added about two tablespoons of buttermilk, into the other, two tablespoons of sour cream.

The other thing I set a-culturing this day was a jar of yogurt. I used about two cups of Cedar Summit organic whole milk, and two tablespoons of cultured plain yogurt. This way, I get organic whole-milk yogurt cheap, and I know it's made from great, local milk. Skim, one- or two-percent milk will yogurt up just the same way. I put all three containers in my oven with the light on, door closed. I had put the heat on for just a few seconds, to get it warm (it's February in Minnesota; the house is at 65 degrees, the kitchen extremities colder). Then the light alone kept it at near 90 F.

I left them in there overnight, and here are the results:

Left to right: yogurt; the sour cream crème fraîche; buttermilk crème fraîche. Both kinds of crème fraîche turned out well. The sour cream version was a bit thicker, the buttermilk job just a wee bit creamier. There were subtle differences in the taste, but not so much that I'd say I prefer one over the other.

The real surprise, to me, was how compulsively eatable the warm, fresh-from-the-incubator yogurt was. They make wonderful whole-milk yogurt in France, and I particularly remember the sumptuous yaourt served with brunch at our beloved Pen Roc Hotel near Rennes in Brittany. While not as rich or creamy as the French product, I think mine was better, for being fresh as can be, and made with that superb Cedar Summit Farm milk (take that, Mme Kamman!).

It was so good it inspired me to whip up a breakfast dish, Apple-Maple-Yogurt Toast, which will be my next entry.

___________________________________________

*Gould originally recorded The Goldberg Variations in 1955, a tour de force performance that launched his career. I generally prefer the later recording--a calmer, more tempered and meditative rendering. On a related note (but not very), I have in a drawer somewhere here a manuscript of personal essays loosely united around the topics of trout streams and fly fishing, entitled The Girdle Bug Variations, named for a fly consisting of black chenille body and white rubber legs--cunningly echoing the black and white keys of a piano. As presently comprised, these essays contain no mention of Glenn Gould. It occurs to me now that maybe they ought to. (Some purists say The Goldberg Variations should only be played on the instrument for which they were originally written, the harpsichord; I say if the piano is good enough for Gould, it's good enough for me.)

On the Shakespeare: Those lines are printed as found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I remembered them correctly except for two words: I had us instead of me, and that where Will has which. I've fixed it up so as not to spread misinformation on the Internet. "That" sounds better to my inner grammarian than "which" in this context, but I can never remember the rational. In this case, I guess I'll concede that a tie goes to The Bard.

**I really am a huge fan of Madeleine Kamman; she is a brilliant cook and a wonderful writer. Her memoir-with-recipes, When French Women Cook is one of my favorite books...though it always makes me think that the French make better crème fraîche than they do book titles. (I've just noticed that in this book, she tempers her opinions somewhat, noting mildly that "...trying to make crème fraîche is a ridiculous waste of time..." [p. 6]. Apparently you can read the whole dang book at that linked site.)


Text (except the Kamman and The Bard) and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

M. Potato-Head

It was our first full day in Paris in December of 2006. We were staying at the Hotel Langlois near the Trinité church in the second arrondisement, Right Bank. We arose late and groggy and walked out into a gorgeous day that could have passed for Indian summer in Minnesota. We had slept through breakfast at the hotel—indeed, it was now lunchtime—and we hadn't gone far before hunger overtook us.
It was our good fortune to be standing at that moment at the intersection of the Rue Richelieu and the Rue Quatre Septembre. Directly across the street was an unassuming little neighborhood brasserie called L’Ami Georges. The sidewalk blackboard listed a lot of the old warhorses—quiche, steak-frites, escargots, smoked salmon—but also less common dishes—house-made rabbit terrine, foie gras with oyster mushrooms, brandade. We had a feeling someone was actually cooking in this kitchen, and once we poked our head in the door we were quickly drawn in by the comfortable dining room and the patron's warm welcome.

Mary ordered quiche with fries and a salad. I was intrigued by the sight and smell of some kind of potato gratin that arrived at several tables while we waited. It turned out that this was the "tartiflette maison," potatoes baked with cream, bacon, and onions, with a copious layer of melted cheese on top. I could think of worse things to eat after a long day of travel and a restless night’s sleep.

We passed the time till our food arrived with a few sips of red wine from a demi-carafe, and a few bites of a really good sliced baguette (you're not guaranteed great bread in French restaurants these days; on one previous trip we'd been in the country for three days before we were served a piece of bread worthy of the name). We didn't have much to say to each other. We were just settling in to the feeling of being in Paris again, getting over the jet lag, the culture and language shift. And we were hungry. When our food arrived with the patron's sincere "Bon appetit," we didn't stand on ceremony, but dug right in.

I didn't know what kind of cheese it was on top of the tartiflette—I guessed brie at the time, and was wrong—only that it was highly aromatic and extremely delicious. I had taken a few healthy forkfuls before I set down my knife and fork, took a bite of bread and a swallow of wine, and began to declaim.

"You know..." I said, which is how many declamations begin, and Mary looked up from her plate with kind attention. (One of my wife's many charms, though surely not her greatest, is her willingness to let me declaim, even over lunch, even in Paris.)

"You know," I said, indicating the dish of creamy, smoky, cheesy potatoes before me, "when you say 'French food,' people tend to think of exotic, expensive ingredients, and fancy sauces and elaborate presentations. But this, this is what French food is really about: potatoes, bacon, cream, cheese. Just simple, great ingredients treated with care and respect. This is what it's all about." Mary reached over with her fork and took a bite. She nodded in agreement. We were both too hungry to brook further declamation. The point had been made. We were glad to be in France, eating real French food, and it's rude to talk with your mouth full, regardless of what continent you're on.

I did make a mental note, though, to track down the origins of tartiflette. Not to imply that I have read the Larousse Gastronomique from cover to cover, but I tend to think that I'm pretty well versed in French cooking, both high and low. To discover a dish that I have absolutely never heard of is rare. It was clearly a country, "peasant" type of dish, the sort of thing you’re served in a half-timbered tavern on a mountain road where you sit beneath ancient beams as the afternoon sun filters in through the thick leaded window panes wavy with age. You’d have a pichet of rough young red wine to go with it, and crusty country bread from a wood-fired oven, and when you broke through the crust of cheese to release the aromas of cream and bacon and onions you took a deep, satisfied sniff, and when you put the first bite in your mouth you thought, “Yes, everything’s going to be all right.”

And so, having concocted in my imagination this venerable romantic history for the estimable tartiflette, imagine my surprise when later that same day, as our train pulled out of the Metro station on our way back to our hotel, there on the tiled station wall we beheld a gigantic poster, in garish red and orange, advertising, "La Maxi Tartiflette" at...Pizza Hut.

It’s the small ironies like this that really make travel interesting. And serve as cautions against letting one’s imagination roam too far unattended.

I'll spare you the suspense and let you in on the secret: Tartiflette is not a dish of ancient peasant lineage, but the relatively recent invention of cheesemakers in the Savoie region trying to move a few more rounds of reblochon. It is, nonetheless, an excellent dish, and worth recreating while the land around us is still white and cold. Like a brand-new piece of furniture expertly distressed to pass for antique, tartiflette wears its novelty well. (As to the Pizza Hut version, I couldn't say.)

I decided to write about tartiflette this week for a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is so I'd have an excuse to show you some pictures of Paris. Now, I know pictures of Paris don't have much to do with local foods (unless, of course, you happen to live in Paris, lucky you), but I see by the calendar that we are smack dab in the middle of February, arguably the most gruesome month of the year here in Minnesota, and seeing a few photos of Paris probably can't hurt. Just to help take your minds off the ice, the snow, and the windchill.

The other reason is local-foods related, though, and it's this: tartiflette and similar dishes, casseroles or gratins, are a great way to make appealing meals out what few local vegetables we still might have access to at this time of year, mainly those that come in root form.

Getting back to the tartiflette before getting on to a recipe: A little research revealed that the term and the dish were invented in the 1980s by the producers of reblochon cheese, a raw cow's-milk cheese from the mountainous Savoie region. It was a good gambit by those French cheeseheads, since the "recipe" (of which I found dozens of variations in an Internet search) generally calls for an entire round of reblochon, about a pound-and-a-quarter, for each four-serving tartiflette. It’s rib-sticking fare, for sure, the après-ski entrée par excellence.

Madeleine Kamman, one of my favorite food writers, has written a book called Savoie: The Land, People, and Food of the French Alps. It was published in 1989, focuses on the unique foods of the region, and contains not a single mention of tartiflette, while reblochon cheese receives a rhapsodic three-page description, and occurs as an ingredient in a number of dishes.

Kamman is an uncommonly intelligent and engaging writer. Her memoir-with-recipes, When French Women Cook, should be on every Francophile’s shelf. And given the climatic similarities between alpine France and our upper Midwest, Savoie... turns out to be an excellent resource for local-foods enthusiasts in our part of the world. The section on gratins, in particular, is full of appetizing ideas for simple main-course dishes based on seasonal ingredients—potatoes, squash, leeks, cabbage, turnips, apples.
Kamman is never shy with her opinions, and I especially enjoyed these introductory remarks to the gratin chapter:

No recipe followed to the ¼ teaspoon will ever give you a civilized gratin….

No two vegetables once sliced give the very same volume when measured in cups; so if a dish is too large, use a smaller one, and if it is too small, obviously, use a larger one. The same applies to the amount of stock or cream needed; if there is not enough cream or stock to cover the vegetables, by all means add more without worrying whether you are doing the right thing or not.

Worrying about amounts of ingredients takes all the fun out of cooking. Make sure that you always have enough cream or broth, or both, when you make a gratin, and proceed from there, cooking the gratin with your eyes and your nose; both will tell you when it is done. One thing is certain, it should look tight and well reduced, not soggy with unreduced liquid. Now good luck, you will make it, I am certain; generations of peasant women have done it very successfully before you.
With those encouraging words as preface, I give you my own take on tartiflette, as well as full permission to tweak it as you like to suit your tastes.

There’s only one small problem with making a true tartiflette here in America: we can’t get reblochon cheese. Until yesterday afternoon I thought we could, because I had purchased something labeled as reblochon at Whole Foods. But while I was out on a cheese research mission yesterday, looking for some sort of local equivalent to reblochon, I found at the Wedge co-op a cheese called “Fleur des Alpes,” which was described as a reblochon-type cheese made with pasteurized milk. That’s the key: Reblochon is made with raw, unpasteurized milk, and since it is aged less than 60 days, it cannot legally be imported to the U.S.
If you were in Paris, however, you'd no doubt have access to enough reblochon to fill the river Seine from right bank to left.

The “reblochon” sold at Whole Foods is labeled as a raw-milk cheese, but I saw the wrapper it came in, and it was called “Fromage de Savoie,” not reblochon, which is one of those watchfully managed appellations d’origine controllée, or AOC for short—if it ain’t certifiable reblochon, you can’t call it reblochon.

So the bad news is you can’t buy real reblochon here. The good news is the alternatives are quite satisfactory, especially when melted over potatoes, bacon and cream. We did a taste test last night of three reblochon imposters, and here’s what we found:

The winner was a Wisconsin cheese called “Les Frères” made by the Crave Brothers dairy in Waterloo, Wisconsin. I found it at Farm in the Market in the Midtown Global Market, as well as at Whole Foods. This is just a lovely, distinctive cheese, rich, sharp, aromatic, and earthy. This was really a find. This cheese would earn its place on any local artisan cheese cart. Definitely not for melting only.

The runner-up was the “Fleur des Alpes,” the pasteurized reblochon stand-in. This was also an estimable cheese to eat on its own. It was perhaps a bit creamier than Les Frères, a bit more refined tasting. We preferred the slightly barnyard-y quality of the Wisconsin farmstead product.

And coming in a distant last was the so-called reblochon from Whole Foods wrapped in the “Fromage de Savoie” label. Proving that raw milk isn’t everything to a cheese, this was the blandest of them all, and though it must have been aged more than 60 days, it also seemed the least well matured. Having said that, this was the cheese we used on our first tartiflette, thinking it reblochon, and it produced a very tasty dish. So, you really can’t lose.

Another local-cheese option would be a nicely fragrant German brick cheese. We’ve used brick on a tartiflette, and found that it has just about the right texture, and melted very well into the potatoes. The only drawback was that the brick is a good deal more…aromatic, let’s say, than reblochon-type cheeses. If you don’t mind the smell, it’s a pretty good substitute.

This recipe calls for four ounces of cheese per person, which is rather a lot, but remember it’s a main course, and most of the rest of it is potatoes. And the portions are hearty—it serves two if those two have good appetites and have been working or playing hard in the cold for a couple of hours. Otherwise it will probably serve three at dinner, or someone gets a nice warming lunch next day.

Tartiflette
Serves two

1 ½ pounds russet or Yukon Gold potatoes, 3 or 4 medium-large spuds
½ pound "reblochon", brick, or other flavorful, melty cheese
2 slices thick-sliced bacon (about 3 ounces), cut into ½-inch lardons
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
¼ cup dry white wine
½ cup heavy cream (Cedar Summit our local choice, of course)
Salt and pepper

Peel the potatoes, quarter them, then cook in boiling water till they are nearly done but still a bit al dente, 12 to 15 minutes. Drain and let cool, then slice them ½-inch thick.

Heat your oven to 375.

In a small skillet over medium heat, cook the bacon lardons slowly till they have rendered most of their fat and become golden. Remove the bacon from the skillet and set aside. Leave a couple of tablespoons of fat in the pan and add the onions. Cook till tender and translucent, about five minutes.

Remove the skillet from the heat and add the wine, then put the skillet back on the heat and cook till the wine is reduced by half. Set the skillet aside.

Rub the inside of a 6-cup gratin (oval baking) dish (or 9-inch pie plate) with the crushed garlic clove. Discard the garlic clove. Add the potatoes, bacon, and onion-wine mixture. Season with a couple of good pinches of salt, and a few grinds of the pepper mill. Pour the cream over the top.

If you’re using reblochon-type cheese, slice it in half across the middle, leaving the rind on. Cut these pieces into largish chunks, and arrange them on top of the potatoes in the baking dish, rind side up. If using another type of cheese, cut ½-inch slices and arrange them over top of the potatoes. They probably won’t cover the whole thing.

Bake for 20 minutes, then check to see if the cheese is nicely melted and the top is getting brown. If not, leave it a few more mintues.

Remove and serve immediately.

Here’s a nice winter salad that we enjoyed with our tartiflette a couple of weeks ago:



Cabbage, Carrot, and Apple Slaw
1 small carrot, peeled and julienned or grated
1 wedge cabbage, shredded (about a cup)
1 small apple, peeled, seeded, cut cut into slivers to approximate the carrot and cabbage

Put the shredded cabbage in a bowl and toss with a pinch of salt. Let sit at least 15 minutes.

Add the carrots and apple, and toss with a vinaigrette made of:

1 tsp honey
1 tsp good mustard—we like grain mustard for this, but a good Dijon will work fine
1 tsp white wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon grapeseed or other light vegetable oil
Pepper to taste

Mix it all up and let it sit awhile. You can use green or red cabbage, or Savoy or napa, for that matter. All sorts of winter roots and greens can be used in slaws like this.

Of course you’ll want some good crusty bread with that (a pain de campagne, our Strasbourg Seedy or Wheaty), and a glass of wine—nothing fancy, a crisp dry white from the Savoie would be perfect, or a gruner veltliner or a sauvignon blanc. A lighter red like a beaujolais or a cabernet franc from the Loire (Chinon, Touraine), slightly chilled, would also do very well.

It has been a long, cold winter here already; hey, it’s Minnesota, what did you expect?

Just the same…. A dish like tartiflette can make you not mind the cold so much. Might even make you wish for snow, at least once more before the thaw.

Brett Laidlaw