Tag Archives: French cuisine

Dear Julia, Happy Birthday! #100, or, Why I Loved You

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Dear Julia,

Happy 100th birthday!

Today lots of famous food writers will write or post reams of flattering words about you. I know, I’ve already seen them, the New York Times leading the charge with three features about you, one by your friend Jacques Pépin.

Like Jacques, many others will point out, once again, that you almost singlehandedly transformed the sorry excuse for food in the 1960s United States into the bounty and abundance that we see today in nearly every grocery store on every corner. (Except for the food deserts of our inner cities, but that’s worth another meditation, another day.)

And indeed the pundits are mostly right, especially the part about you changing the focus from the lousy food of the early 1960s. I shudder to think of the casseroles, sweet Jello “salads,” and TV dinners, miracles of miracles, that children ate. No wonder the first food revolution took place in the 1960s! The local foods movement of today is nothing new, not at all.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you that a long time ago I decided I was never going to cook French food. It seemed so fussy and HARD. To tell you the honest truth, I felt faint whenever I looked at your Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The recipes went on for PAGES! Instead, I dabbled in all sorts of other cuisines, a bit of Chinese, some Mexican, and LOTS of Italian. But somehow, somewhere, it dawned on me that French cooking forms the backbone and much of the meat of Western cooking. Soon I owned both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Just to show you what a sluggard I was, my copy of volume one came out in January 1981, the 32nd printing! Unlike Julie Powell, I never cooked my way through either one, it being impossible to buy things like mushrooms, eels, and endives when I lived in Honduras and other developing countries.

But I certainly stained a lot of pages! Along the way, I fell in love with France, too.

I’m glad that I finally met you, even for a brief moment. Aside from your books and all the TV shows and everything else, the most important thing you ever did was to teach us how to enjoy food and eating and cooking.

And you know what? You really were showing us how to enjoy life, by sucking every ounce of flavor from every moment.

Thank you, Julia! Truly, you were “Our Lady of the Ladle.”*

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

*TIME magazine coined this phrase in 1966.

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes

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“A visual feast as well as a gastronomic one . . . Organized by ten essentials that any successful bistro must have, French Bistro almost reads like a graphic novel, thanks to the prolific and colorful photographs.”

When you walk into a Paris bistro straight off the street on a cool fall day, the odd leaf rustling at your feet as you cross the threshold, you expect something almost magical to happen, don’t you? And, according to the authors of yet another book on French cuisine, that’s exactly the feeling you are entitled to, one that bistro owners—if they’re any good at what they do—want you to experience.

A visual feast as well as a gastronomic one, French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes first appeared in France in late 2011 under the title Bistrot, which captures the essence of what a French bistro ought to be. “Bistro” generally signifies a small, rather informal restaurant that serves more rustic or regional food than do grander haute cuisine establishments. The authors—Bertrand Auboyneau, owner of the successful Parisian bistro, the Paul Bert, and François Simon, food critic for a Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro—set out to dissect the so-called “bistronomy movement” and examine just what makes a successful bistro. They feature 13 of the most emblematic bistros in Paris, including Auboyneau’s own bistro, the Bistrot Paul Bert.

Organized by ten essentials that any successful bistro must have, French Bistro almost reads like a graphic novel, thanks to the prolific and colorful photographs.

In the same manner as a recipe, the bistro calls for specific ingredients and each section of the book covers those ingredients: The Owner, The Chef, The Chalkboard Menu, The Wine, The Servers, The Table, The Décor, The Clients, The Ambience, and The Aromas. As you move through the book, the authors introduce to you several stellar Parisian bistros. You meet their owners and get a taste of what it would be like to eat in those establishments.

Not surprisingly, then, food is not always the most important aspect of a bistro, although it obviously is the reason for the whole drama in the first place. And speaking of drama, Mr. Simon writes the short vignettes in each section using metaphors of the stage production.

One of the most interesting of these short sketches deals with The Clients. In some Parisian bistros, the owner or maitre d’ will seat American tourists and French people in separate parts of the bistro. Since people tend to be “unpredictable beings,” every bistro owner stays on the lookout for the “type” likely to ruin the calm ambiance of everyone else’s meal.

As Mr. Simon writes, “The success of an evening at a bistro can often hinge on a single client. A grumpy person who complains nonstop can easily spread his mood to neighboring tables.” But on the flip side, the traveler, happy to be dining in their first French bistro, is welcome. “When they arrive, the world feels right again: the bistro is no longer a refuge for crosspatches but once again fulfills its vocation of a welcoming inn.”

But what about the recipes? Are these bistro favorites within the reach of the average home cook? A glance at the recipe index—featuring over 50 recipes—shows a wide gamut of dishes, ranging from Porcini Omelet and Fried Eggs with Black Truffles to Homestyle White Asparagus to Green Bean Salad with Aged Parmesan to Sole Meunière with Lemon-Buttered Steamed Potatoes and My Grandmother’s Chocolate Cake. Many of the recipes call for ingredients not readily available to American home cooks: suckling pigs, blood sausage, beef cheeks, and roasted pigeon.

Photo credit: Peace and Love in the Kitchen

Nevertheless, French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes shares secrets about some of the all-time bistro standbys like Entrecôte with Béarnaise Sauce and French Fries, as well as Chocolate Soufflé and Tarte Tatin (upside-down apple tart).

Lush with heart-stoppingly glorious photos of bistro interiors, exteriors, and food, French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes is fun to read and to cook from. Yet it is far more than another mere cookbook loaded with French recipes. French Bistro: Seasonal Recipes also provides English-speaking readers with the requisite tools to judge a bistro and determine its potential value as a place to eat.

And nothing is more necessary than a toothsome and relaxed meal after a long day hoofing it through Notre Dame and the Louvre, fighting the crowds that seem to engulf Paris more and more every day.

Photo credit: Fred Bouaine

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

At My French Table

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If as a child you loved fairy tales and dreamt of being Cinderella, or if you longed to be the handsome prince with a turreted castle, you’re going to adore Jane Webster’s gloriously illustrated At My French Table: Food, Family and Joie de Vivre in a Corner of Normandy. The book imparts the warm feeling you get snuggling up in bed with a magical story and a steaming cup of sweet cocoa.

Along with Anne Willan’s From My Chateau Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2000), Susan Hermann Loomis’s On Rue Tatin (Broadway Books, 2001), and Amanda Hesser’s The Cook and the Gardener (W.W. Norton, 1999), Jane Webster’s At My French Table provides intimate glimpses of French life through the eyes of an expatriate brave enough to follow dreams that so often are never more than wistful yearnings.

Previously published in Australia in 2008, and more a memoir of a dream made real than a cookbook per se, At My French Table recounts Australian native Jane Webster’s move with her four children and husband Pete from Melbourne, Australia to Bosgouet, a Norman village 10 minutes from Rouen, France. As Webster so succinctly put it, “On Easter Sunday in 2004, during one of those walks, it hit me: I don’t want to wake up when I’m seventy-five and wish we had done this.”

Ms. Webster describes how she and Pete fell in love with everything French on their Paris honeymoon. When they returned to Melbourne, she signed up for cooking classes at the French Kitchen and the Lake House. So smitten by cooking that she eventually quit her day job as an elementary school teacher, she opened La Gare, a small café serving French food and pastries.

When her sister married a Belgian and moved to a town on the outskirts of Paris, Ms. Webster says, “I sternly told myself that it was my familial duty to visit them—often.” And Jane and Pete and their children found excuses to visit, so often that Webster began dreaming of chateau life.

But how could that play out?

Reality being another thing altogether, Ms. Webster finally hit on the idea of buying a chateau with the goal of opening a cooking school, but one with a slightly different twist: She would also offer tours of the area’s markets and other foodie sights. She and Pete decided that Normandy offered the most ideal location, being relatively close to both London and Paris.

Soon the hunt was on for a property. What they found was a stunning 19th-century red-brick chateau with 50-acre park, built over a spot where another chateau, dating to the 17th-century, had stood before burning to the ground. The original stables, however, still existed on the estate. Other outbuildings built by Nazi occupiers remained on the property as well. But the commercial kitchen in the basement (really the first floor) clinched the deal for Webster.

Unlike some memoirists who, like terriers after rats in a hole, worry over every small setback, Ms. Webster focuses mostly on the positives of the experience of setting up house in a country where she didn’t speak much of the language. After scrubbing oak parquet floors with a mixture of water and tea leaves, she set to learning to speak French, saying “I had only known enough French to get me through my stays in Paris.”

Written in the relaxed style of a personal letter, At My French Table reveals much about living la vie française without seeming pedantic or pretentious.

Recipe sections filled with traditional seasonal dishes link the six chapters of narrative. Ms. Webster tells of planting and designing her potager, or kitchen garden. She delves into the niceties of French social etiquette and the intricacies of a decent Camembert. Everything from the game of pétanque to Linden tisane comes under her flowing pen. Her teaching skills and her current métier as a tour guide become apparent as she introduces an auction house in Elbeuf and the weekly markets of Normandy, from Bosgouet to Dieppe to Honfleur.

But the greatest splendor of At My French Table lies in the superb full-color photography of Nikole Ramsay. From the cover, with its triptych of street scenes laced with gold and roses to pictures of her family, students and the chateau itself, the visual kaleidoscope never ends. Three smooth ribbon bookmarks, in the colors of the French flag, attest to Webster’s sense of detail and taste.

Not all is perfect in paradise. At the book’s price of $40.00, you might have a few quibbles with At My French Table, namely the relatively few recipes and the annoying lack of captions on many of the pictures.

From the very first words, “Pourqoui? Why?,” this soul-soothing book is impossible to put down, such a visual and verbal feast it is. Be prepared to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon reading, and dreaming, followed by a busy Sunday cooking some of the 40 recipes in your kitchen.

You might not be able to get your foot into the glass slipper, but with At My French Table in your hands, believe me, you’ll feel the ageless magic of the Cinderella story.

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

La Tour d’argent poinct ne leurre*, or, Pressed Duck, Blood and Guts and All

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La Tour d’Argent, exterior (Photo credit: David Queen)

What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen. ~ Alice B. Toklas

The famed, if slightly faded, Parisian restaurant, La Tour d’Argent, embodies the French idea of culinary hegemony.

So do ducks.

As you stand outside the window, peering into the sanctum sanctorum of the restaurant, traffic clattering behind you on the Quai de la Tournelle, you might not realize that the signature dish served inside this actually began because of Spanish immigrants to the Vendée region in 1650, during the reign of Philip IV of Spain.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

They captured the wild ducks munching on the crisp marsh grasses there and domesticated them.

The Challandais ducks served at the Tour still come from that region.

Rouen ducks

It’s hard to picture the Tour – which began serving meals in 1582 to such luminaries as Henri III, Cardinal Richelieu, and Madame de Sevigné – as anything other than the gastronomical palace it is today, but in 1929, as Julian Street makes clear, today’s Tour, like cuisine, evolved from a somewhat less glorious state:

When I first knew the Tour D’Argent it was a plain place with a wooden floor covered with sawdust, but it was none the less a temple of gastronomy, for it was presided over by old Frédéric Delair who, with his high bald forehead, his steel-rimmed spectacles, and his whiskers, resembled Ibsen or Thackeray, and who, like Ibsen and Thackeray, was an artist, though in a different field.” (From Where Paris Dines, 1929)

Once you walk through those heavy wooden doors, and you settle down in the plush-bottomed chairs, the waiter hands you a large menu covered in black leather, about the size of a small briefcase. Trying to find a comfortable position against the ornate caned-back chairs, you’ll choose from the following dishes, featuring Challandais ducklings:

Caneton Marco Polo, sablé parmesan aux asperges  140 €

Caneton “Tour d’Argent”, pommes soufflés   140 €

Caneton à l’orange, carotte aux agrumes et pain d’épices  140 €

Caneton rôti de saison   70 €

Just so there’s no shock, when you order Caneton “Tour d’Argent,” you will be privy to a very exclusive ritual, a practice that may seem barbaric.

Your duck, you see, died by strangulation so as to preserve its blood for the sauce. No more than twenty-four hours later, the chef lightly roasts the dressed carcass, the liver set aside for the sauce, removes the legs and breast, and the duck arrives at the customer’s table. The canardiers wheel out a large silver “duck press” and go to work, pressing the duck carcass so that the blood trickles out into a sauté pan. The maitre d’ mashes the liver and mixes in the blood, along with Madeira, Cognac, and lemon juice. (See link to recipe below.) The process has roots in the custom of salmis (salmigondis), or game stew.

What emerges is a sauce the color of dark chocolate, with the unmistakable tang of blood that you know from biting your tongue or cheek too hard. Wild, salty, iron-like, primitive. You could almost be sitting on the banks of a river in the twilight, the heat of a small fire fading, instead of at table overlooking the Seine and the Ile de la Cité, gazing at the birthplace of Paris.

Photo credit: FXCuisine

Terrail kept a diary and recorded the number assigned to each duck and the name of the person who ordered it. Upon leaving, customers received a certificate the size of a postcard with this number. The Prince of Wales ate duck number 328 in 1890. Forty years later, Franklin D Roosevelt enjoyed duck number 112,152.

What strikes me about this treatment of duck?

It resembles in some ways the idea of pressed duck found in Chinese cuisine, though the blood isn’t used in the same way. And that, as you can guess, requires some looking into.

But blood figured in many ancient recipes in Europe, too. Coq au Vin comes to mind, as does blood sausage. In fact, many dishes in regional French cuisine utilized blood as a thickening agent, due to the coagulation of proteins in the presence of heat. Or just air. Sanguette, where the blood of a chicken cooks in a nest of lard strips and herbs and then is fried, another way in which the French used animal blood in cooking.

Photo credit: Terry Dwyer

Recipe for Canard au Sang, from Vincent Price’s book, A Treasury of Great Recipes (1965).

For visual tour of a duck-pressing experience see FXCuisine.

*”The Silver Tower does not deceive.” Motto inscribed on the covers of the menus cases.

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

Rationing and the Black Market in Nazi-Occupied France: Some Thoughts

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“Life is hard (On vit mal). Everyone grows thinner. A kilo of butter costs one thousand francs. A kilo of peas forty-five francs. A kilo of potatoes forty francs. Still we must find them.” – Jean Guéhenno, August 1944

Rue de Rivoli (Paris) under German occupation

Speaking as the beneficiary of an immense system of food production in the twenty-first century, as the citizen of an increasingly obese nation where over two-thirds of my fellow citizens are considered overweight,  I can only imagine food shortages in one way: through the seasonal deprivations that occurred when I lived in West Africa. When I read of French women trying to find food for their families during the height of rationing during World War II, I recall trying to find enough tomatoes to feed guests coming for dinner on a hot, dry evening in Burkina Faso (formerly the French colony of Haute Volta). Short of magic, or sudden wealth, I could find no more than six, no matter how many market streets I touched on.

And so, like many French women in the past, I simply went without.

Not the same at all, you’re right, really, but still the memory sticks with me and makes it a little easier to comprehend the enormity of what cooks faced as they navigated the rationing system and the black markets that bloomed as the years of war continued on and on.

Rationing was meant to ensure supplies, and not necessarily to reduce consumption. But that’s not how it turned out; sometimes people simply couldn’t use up all their rationing coupons in a month because they simply couldn’t find the food to buy with the coupons, much I found no tomatoes.

Bread rationing

During the war, scarcity happened for a number of reasons, aside from seasonality:

  1. Military operations destroyed or interfered with transport; troop and equipment movements took precedence.
  2. The Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942 cut France off from supplies coming from her colonies and trade partners there.
  3. Although France produced a lot of food prior to the war, the loss of labor led to a reduction in agricultural production as men went to war and women worked in factories. Shortages of fuel and fertilizer hampered agricultural production, as did the lack of large animals for plowing.
  4. The Germans  requisitioned food not only for troops, but also for their civilian populations. Rations were much higher in Germany than in France, as the following table shows:
Food rations (February 1941)* Germany France
Normal consumption (in grams)
Bread (daily allotment)

340

300
Meat (weekly allotment)

500

360
Fats/oil (weekly allotment)

270

100
Sugar (monthly allotment)

1200 – 1500

500
Workers
Bread (daily allotment)

550

400
Meat (weekly allotment)

1000

360
Fats/oil (weekly allotment)

400

100
Sugar (monthly allotment)

1200 – 1500

500

And so people turned to the black market if they could. Producers faced stiff fines or worse if the authorities caught them holding back food for sale in any manner other than the official channels.

Looking at the following chart, it is quite easy to understand why people attempted to sell goods on the black market:

Food* Official Price Black Market Price
Beef for roasting (kg)

72.00 F

 150 – 250 F
Milk (liter)

4.60 F

 12 – 30 F
Butter (kg)

78.00 F

 450 – 600 F
Eggs (piece)

3.60 F

 8 to 10 F
Cooking oil (liter)

50.00 F

 1000 F
Charcoal for cooking (kg)

46.00 F

 500 – 1300 F

Given the prominence of food in French national identity, how did people come to grips with the sudden change in their eating habits? Called le système D, or débrouillage (resourcefulness), the change encouraged the French to form new networks that they might not have ever attempted prior to the war, for social and class reasons. People with money generally fared better than those without, but people with ties to the countryside survived well, too, even without money, because their country cousins often sent them food packages.

Take Georges Mazeaud for instance, a Parisian glovemaker,who turned 61 the first year of the German occupation. His cousin,  Gaston Grenouiilleau – whom he never met – lived in Georges’s natal village of Concourson-sur-Layon near Samur, Georges wrote to Gaston, begging him to send food, three kilos as permitted by law at the time: “Bacon, cheese, butter, pasta, in fact anything that you can eat.” Georges had so many mouths to feed – wife, children, grandchildren – and complained to Gaston about paying eighty francs for a chicken more bones than meat. Gaston replied with packages containing rillettes that reminded Georges of his aunt Léontine and a joint of lamb. But Georges tried hard to reciprocate over the years and fashioned gloves for his cousin and his cousin’s family and friends.**

Of course, the Nazis cracked down hard on people who tried to operate outside of the regular channels, making it even more difficult for people to obtain food because purveyors obviously preferred to deal with people they knew.

One interesting culinary-related fact about the German occupation of France and the French experience versus that of the British and the Americans is there seemed to be few cookbooks published about how to make good-tasting food out of scraps and scrapings. I’m asking myself if somehow part of that difference might be related to to the fact the French were actually occupied, while the British and the Americans remained free of an outside, occupying force. More on this later, hopefully.

*Tables translated from La France dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
**Mazeaud’s story comes from Fonds Paul Grenouiileau (Angers), relayed in Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains: Everyday Life in the French Heartland Under the German Occupation (New York, 2003), chapter 3, “Bread.”

See the following for more on the black market in France during World War II:

Fourment, G. “L’évolution du marché noir et sa répression,” Controle Economique 3: 234-235, Mai 1944.

Grenard, F. La France du marché noir, 1940-1949 (Paris, 2008)

Minoli, Ramon F., M.D. “Food rationing and mortality in Paris, 1940-1941,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 20 (3): 213-220, July 1942.

Sanders, Paul. Histoire du marché noir, 1940-1946 (Paris, 2001)

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

It Might Be a Stereotype, but ….

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I love this picture of a snail.

Like many mollusks, snails seem to have been  eaten in substantial quantities by early man, as witness the mounds of snail shells found in archaeological sites.

See Prehistoric edible land snails in the cirum Mediterranean: the archaeological evidence (2004) (Extensive bibliography)

Fatema Hal: The Interchange of Culinary Ideas Between Morocco and France

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On Tuesday, Fatema’s talk (in French) is on “Maroc-France: La cuisine en partage” (“Sharing Food and Cuisine: Between Morocco and France”). Fatema will also do a demonstration on almond briwats on Wednesday March 14, at 3 at GU (Location is ICC 425), and she will give a talk at the French Embassy/Maison Française on Thursday March 15 at 7 p.m.: “Le Maroc sur la route des épices” (Morocco and the spice road). This talk will be translated in English.

Crème de la Crème: Crème fraîche, a Fable and Some Facts

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One thing must be cleared up at the start.

Crème fraîche does not count sour cream as an equal. Yes, both come from fermented cream. But sour cream may contain a minimum of 18% butterfat, while true crème fraîche must weigh in at anywhere between 30% and 40% butterfat.

Fermented food products began in the historically murky days before people thought to record their every bite. I like to think of these foods as fortuitous accidents, the kinds that happen when something tempts someone’s attention away from the task at hand.

And that brings us to a fable, sort of, a “fabulous” story. as it were.

Menhirs at Carnac (Photo credit: Aufnahme von Snjeschok)

Once upon a time, there was a young man, a cowherd perhaps, and a young milkmaid. They made sheep’s eyes at each other, hurrying through their chores, thinking of their prearranged – if not illicit – meetings behind the menhirs/cairns nestled on the hilltop behind the medieval village. This particular day, it’s late, for the chores took longer than usual, and dusk will soon darken the path to the stones. And so the young woman quickly pours some skimmed-off cream from the morning’s milking into an earthenware jug after she finishes the evening milking. But suddenly, with a dung-saturated tail, the contented cow slaps the woman’s skirt. She grabs her hair scarf and frantically rubs at the foul-smelling spot. Then she turns and runs after her paramour, forgetting all about the cream,  her long brown hair fluffed by the wind.

At noon the next day, she remembers the cream, meant for making butter. She shoos away the flies. The cream lies thick in the jug, so she dips in a finger and brings it to her lips. She tastes it, sweet and tangy all at once. “Aaah,” she says out loud, “Maman will like this, I hope!”

That could be it, that Maman loved it, especially when she boiled the soup over a too-hot fire. Maybe.

Actually, it’s more likely that chefs like La Varenne served a form of whipped cream, “chantilly,” recorded in Le cuisinier françois, his cookbook written in the 17th century. But the celebrated 19th-century chef, Antonin Carême, possibly did the most to boost crème fraîche into the circles of haute cuisine. Because of its rapid spoilage, cream generally went for butter-making, ensuring a somewhat longer shelf life.

Today, in the town of Isigny-sur-Mer, located in the Norman province of Calvados, on the border of Cotentin and Bessin, the crème fraiche produced there now bears an Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, granted in 1986.

Lactic-acid fermentation aids in the coagulation of casein proteins in cream; bacteria of the Lactococcus and Leuconostoc species produce the lactic acid which then works on the protein. That’s why the cream doesn’t curdle in the presence of heat or acid – the bacteria have made the protein unavailable for chemical reactions due to heat or acid.

Cooks and chefs utilize crème fraîche in a number of ways, but one of the most functional uses concerns sauce-making, one of the pillars of French cooking, THE pillar in the opinions of many. The thickened, fermented cream does not curdle even in the presence of acid or when added to hot soups, leaving sauces such as Bonne Femme, Breton, Normande, Poulette, Princesse,  Rémoulade, and Suprême smooth as glass.

 (528). Princess Sauce (Sauce A La Princesse), from Charles Ranhofer’s The Epicurean (1893)

Put one pint of bechamel (No. 409) into a saucepan, adding to it two tablespoonfuls of chicken glaze (No. 398), one gill of cream, and some grated nutmeg; stir in just when ready to serve, four ounces of fresh butter, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, and the juice of one lemon.

Note: If you try to  make crème fraîche at home, as Julia Child suggested, be sure you use buttermilk with live cultures. The proportions are about 2 T. buttermilk to 1 cup heavy cream. Mix in a glass jar. Leave, covered, at room temperature until thickened, about 8 – 24 hours, depending on room temerature. Keeps refrigerated for about a week. Addendum: I need to mention that it’s possible to use regular buttermilk, though it doesn’t get quite as thick. Speed up the process by leaving the mixture uncovered at room temperature for an hour, let it sit for about 6 hours covered, and then stick it an oven heated to about 100 F and then turned off – I use the bread-proofing feature on my wall ovens. I leave it in there for about an hour and it tends to solidify quite nicely. After that, it goes in the fridge.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

The Expert (French) Cook in Enlightenment France: A Review

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If you scrutinize sixteenth-century Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen’s painting, “The Cook in Front of the Stove,” you will see a rather stereotypical image of servant cooks, one that persisted in popular memory in Europe until well into the nineteenth century. Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason University and codirector of Zotero, attempts to get beyond that image in his thought-provoking new book, The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France.

Beginning with the premise that much what passes for fact about cooks in eighteenth-century France is in fact somewhat fictitious (“fakelore”!*), Dr. Takats tackles the myths and realities of the cook’s occupation.

The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France consists of five chapters: Defining the Cook, Corrupting Spaces, Pots and Pans, Theorizing the Kitchen, and The Servant of Medicine. Dr. Takats’s major thesis is two-fold: that cooks “actively participated in the Enlightenment” and that his work offers “a new way of looking at the relationship between labor and gender.”

Note that the stance of the cook on the cover closely resembles that of the woman in Aertsen’s painting.

His book attempts to analyze the process by which cooks became seen as professionals and not just servants.

Like Susan Pinkard in A Revolution in Taste (2009), Dr. Takats identifies the eighteenth century as a time of profound change in French culinary practices, specifically “la cuisine moderne,” which threw off culinary excesses dating from the Middle Ages and adopted the simple and the natural, principles of the Enlightenment.

The major difference between Dr. Takats’s The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France and other books similar to Pinkard’s—Amy Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (2000); Priscilla Park Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (2004); T. Sarah Peterson, Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking (1994), and Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000)—lies in Dr. Takats’s persistence in looking at the people who actually did the work in the kitchen. As he says, “In recent years, a steady stream of scholarship has continued to flesh out this narrative [of the changes in French cooking based on ingredients and techniques] and little has emerged to challenge it.” He also tosses Barbara K. Wheaton and Philip and Mary Hyman into this disdainful stew of similarities. Oooh.

With a few exceptions like those personages involved in pastry making and catering, cooks never formed guilds or other institutional structures to help them achieve status and acceptance as did other professional occupations. Therefore, records of their activities tend to be restricted.

As Dr. Takats states at the beginning of his narrative, his “sources are diverse, because the study of cooks requires an especially multifaceted approach to evidence.” Those resources included material stemming from the fields of “architecture, consumer culture, and the press, and the history of science and medicine—all situated within the broader context of the Enlightenment.”

Dr. Takats examines these sources closely, including literary works, which emphasized certain ingrained cultural and social attitudes toward the cook’s profession. Eighteenth-century denizens tended to regard cooks— both male and female—as dirty, germ-encrusted beings prone to theft and bad morals and even possibly poisonings. After all, cooks could defraud their masters, poison them, and embarrass them with lewd behavior. Just with a pot, a fire, and a wooden spoon. Imagine that … .

Yet in spite of these negative views, cooks earned fairly high salaries and wielded a tremendous amount power within the household, be it upper class or middling and bourgeois. Cooks even sought to promote their culinary knowledge in medical matters, claiming that they knew the healthy way to eat and thus prevent any number of maladies. In other words, “Understanding the potential power of cooking only made cooks more dangerous, not less.”

Dr. Takats suggests that these cooks took the new modern form of cookery, “la cuisine moderne,” and “aimed at establishing themselves as expert engineers of taste through the fusion of a new theoretical knowledge with existing mechanical skill. Although largely formulated in cookbooks, la cuisine moderne’s most important contribution was not its recipes but rather its new cook: a ‘taste professional. . . .’”

And that story, while not populated with personal details in any depth, emerged from affiches, or advertisements in weekly trade journals, for positions and household accounting records. Based on the documentation, Dr. Takats shows that—contrary to popular belief even today—cooks were surprisingly literate and numerate.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

This state of affairs is demonstrated by their accounting skills and access to highly “portable” cookbooks, which cost “around three livres for a single-volume work, about the price of a dozen eggs.” Many cooks spoke more than one language and were thus capable of producing a number of foreign dishes. Most of the period’s cookbooks came from the hands, if not the pens, of servant cooks.

The only quibble I have with The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France lies in Dr. Takats’s theme of cooks borrowing elements of the Enlightenment to further their agenda, that is, finding a respected place in society and professionalization of their trade. The tie to that philosophical movement seems weaker than it should be. A brief chapter on the key elements and thinkers of the Enlightenment would enrich this highly fascinating, but relatively short, book.

Although The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France covers a time period far removed from our own, the eighteenth-century trend toward simple and more natural food reflects our own time in many ways.

The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France will interest scholars and lay people alike, those with a passion for the history of cuisine, especially the labor and other tasks that went into the preparation of food and the creation of a profession.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Other secondary sources about cooks and chefs in France include the following:

Drouard, A. Histoire des cuisiniers en France,XIXe et XXe siècles (Éditions du CNRS, 2004)

Poulain, Jean-Pierre et Neirinck, Edmund. Histoire de la Cuisine et des Cuisiniers: Technqiues culinaires et practiques de table, en France, du Moyen-Âge à nos jours (Éditions LT Jacques Lanore, 2004)

*First used in 1949, by R. M. Dorson in Jrnl. Amer. Folklore 62: 201.  ”The deliberately contrived product is not folklore but what I have elsewhere called fakelore. Fakelore casts a warm, nostalgic glow over the folk; it grins coyly at their fun, and drips tears over their tragedies.”

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Apples in France: What’s the (Hi)Story? (Part I)

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Braeburns (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

You might say that apples and I have a special relationship – apple sauce and apple cakes and apple pies. I grew up climbing a majestic apple tree in my yard and adored the smell of the fluffy pink blossoms when spring finally swooped down on eastern Washington state and all the snow melted.

One day when I was a young child, my father and his boss at the nearby university grafted a couple of branches from different apple trees onto the pippin apple tree in our yard, using pencil-thin cuttings from trees flourishing on the boss’s property. I never thought much about apples before that. And I forgot about it all until a few years later, when my dad lugged in a big bowl of different apples, all from the same tree. Suddenly the pippin gave birth to some Palouse beauties and a variety of Macintoshes, as well as the usual pippins. We preserved our apples in a large stone cellar, making forays often to turn some of the apples and to grab others either to eat or to cook.

So last week, I finally did it. I baked a Tarte Tatin.

And that, my friends, was not an easy task, contrary to Julia Child’s greatly modified recipe in Mastering the Art! I recalled the tarte I’d eaten at my friend Jane’s house in Morocco – she’d lived in Paris for five years and studied for her diploma at Le Cordon Bleu. She knew what a Tarte Tatin ought to be. And I could tell that Julia’s recipe simply would not result in a vraie/true Tarte Tatin! She recommends slicing the fruit! I looked at nearly a dozen cookbooks, in French and in English, trying to determine how to go about it without undue stress and burning caramel.

Tarte aux Pommes à la Solognote (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

In the so-called true version of the tarte, the cook needs to stand the apple quarters on end and caramelize them that way, turning them once or twice during the process. Many cooks simply cut the apples in half and core them, placing the halves into the caramel and forging ahead that way.

Frankly, I enjoyed making the Tarte Aux Pommes à la Solognote much more. (See the recipe given below.)

The upshot of the Tarte Tatin exercise resulted in a prolonged journey into the history of this peculiar apple dessert, which in turn led me to the history of apples, particularly that of the apples grown in France.

How was it that a dessert strongly associated today with traditional French cuisine only appeared at the end of the 19th century, in the 1880s to be exact? And there are many variations of the dish, obviously, but I wondered if this tarte wasn’t the descendant of some ancestral pot pie or something? Sure enough. Antonin Carême wrote about gâteaux renversées in his pastry book, Le Patissier royal parisien (1841). And there’s always the Tarte Aux Pommes à la Solognote, a very similar dessert found in the Sologne region where the sisters’ hotel stood.

But myth is always more magical. The apocryphal history of the Tarte Tatin goes something like this:  At the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, Stéphanie Tatin, one of the Demoiselles Tatin (Caroline, being the other), dropped an apple tart, picked it up off the floor, and proceeded to reheat it by putting the apples first into the pan and then placing the crust on top. Methinks the crust would be a bit ripped up after smashing onto the floor, likely stone or brick or maybe tile, all quite hard surfaces. She then flipped the whole thing back onto the plate and served it to some ignorant customer – sort of reminds me of some of the dishes we line cooks resurrected from the floor in a certain seafood place … .

The sisters’ tarte became famous because Maxim’s in Paris began serving it, calling it, well, Tarte Tatin, which the sisters apparently never did.

Once I started looking at the history of the tarte, and by extension, apples, the first thing that struck me was the tremendous number of myths associated with apples throughout history, more so than many other fruits. The Garden of Eden represents just one of those fascinating stories, not to mention Hercules, Helen and Paris and the Trojan War,  the Atalanta-Hippomenes race, and Snow White, among many others.

The Judgement of Paris (Peter Paul Rubens, 1636)

This mythical presence is important, because it touches on why apples seemed to be inordinately revered, enough to figure in Western art, folklore, religion, and so on. As Purdue horticulture professor Mitch Lynd says in “Great Moments in Apple History,”

… apples have been associated with love, beauty, luck, health, comfort, pleasure, wisdom, temptation, sensuality, sexuality, virility and fertility. Stories and traditions about man’s origins connect him to a garden of paradise filled with fruit trees. The stories are essentially the same whether it be the Semitic Adam, the Teutonic Iduna, the Greek Hesperides, or the Celtic Avalon, man’s idea of paradise centers on an abundance of cultivated fruit, its sensual irresistibility and the consequential calamity of its seduction. 

France produces two million tons of apples per year; fifty percent goes to the export market, but the other fifty percent fills the stomachs of people in France, who share a long history with apples, or shall I say, many varieties of apples.

Just what have apples added to the French diet over the centuries, besides a few delectable desserts?

To be continued …

For more on the fascinating topic of Tarte Tatin, see:

Friends of the Tarte Tatin 

Histoire et gastronomie : Les TATIN à Lamotte-Beuvron, by Henri Delétang (2000)

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Tarte Aux Pommes à la Solognote
Makes one 9 – 10-inch tart

3 medium apples, peeled and chopped into 1-inch pieces
½ cup unsalted butter + ¼ cup unsalted butter
2 T. light vegetable oil
½ cup granulated sugar
½ t. grated fresh lemon zest
1 t. grated fresh orange zest

Pastry for 9 – 10 – inch crust

Heat the oven to 375 F.

Make your pastry, form it into a disk, wrap in wax paper or foil, and chill it while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Put the butter and oil into a large cast-iron or other heavy skillet and heat to almost smoking. Stir in the apple pieces, coat with the butter, and then sprinkle in the sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves and covers the apple pieces. Stirring fairly constantly, watch the sugar/apples form a syrup that will begin to caramelize. Apple pieces will turn slightly golden brown and when that happens, watch closely and stir carefully to avoid burning the apples and yourself! Sugar syrup is HOT. Remove from heat.

Take the pie dough from the refrigerator and quickly roll out to 9 – 10 – inches. Reserve.

Heat the remaining ¼ cup of butter over high heat in another heavy skillet, the one that you will use to bake the tarte. Scrape in the apples. Place the dough over the top of the apples, tucking it around the apples like a baby’s blanket.

Bake for approximately 7 – 8 minutes and then turn the heat up to 500 F to crisp and brown the dough.

Remove the skillet from the oven and place on cooling rack for a few minutes, not longer. (If you don’t think the caramel is cooked enough, set the skillet oven a burner on medium-high and let the caramel bubble a little bit, watching it constantly to avoid last-minute burning, )

Wearing heavy-duty hot mitts, place a large plate over the top of the skillet, and carefully flip the tarte onto the plate. Place the tarte back onto the cooling rack. You may serve the tarte warm, at room temperature, and cool. I usually serve it with slightly sweetened whipped cream to which I add a hint of vanilla extract, though this is not traditional.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

A Long Tradition: French Chefs in Britain, or, Daniel Galmiche’s French Brasserie Cookbook: The Heart of French Home Cooking

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Britain, much to the chagrin of her more patriotic sorts, has long enjoyed the the food of France. In The British Housewife (Prospect Books, 2003), Gilly Lehmann explains this by pointing out that French haute cuisine dominated upper-class British kitchens in the early eighteenth century. She points to Massialot (Cuisimier Roïal et bourgeois, 1691; translated as The Court and Country Cook, 1702) as one of the more obvious sources of this trend, but she also makes it clear that Robert May’s more traditional British culinary repertoire still impacted chefs and cooks alike. Lehmann acknowledges a culinary dichotomy between male and female cooks, with the women leaning more toward traditional British cookery because of household ledger receipt books and the like.

What followed bordered on comedy sometimes; for example, think of the shenanigans of the Duke of Newcastle trying to retain a French chef named Clouet.

And still, in spite of all the years since then, in spite of the surge toward British cookery (and the poor reputation of that in certain circles), French chefs still migrate to Britain and cook.

That’s exactly what a young French chef from Gascony,  Daniel Galmiche, did.

Pundits dub celebrity chef Daniel Galmiche, a Frenchman working in England, “gastronomy’s best-kept secret.” Overseeing the kitchen of The Vineyard restaurant in the quasi-rural England of Stockcross, Berkshire, Galmiche takes advantage of his traditional culinary apprenticeship – he started working in professional kitchens at age 15 – and trained under Michel Roux. Galmiche grew up in the region of Franche-Comté, influenced by the cooking of his Great-Aunt Suzanne and the proximity of Burgundy, a region known for superb rustic cuisine. He’s earned four Michelin stars in his tenure at top British restaurants, cooking an exciting version of traditional French brasserie dishes. French Brasserie Cookbook: The Heart of French Home Cooking is his first cookbook.

And lovers of French cooking will find Galmiche’s French Brasserie Cookbook: The Heart of French Home Cooking a welcome addition to their culinary libraries. Behind the usual recipes – and many of the recipes reflect those found on menus across France – the offerings in this gorgeous, beautifully illustrated book not only inspire fledgling cooks to grab an apron and a mandoline. The recipes provide challenges and surprises for the experienced cook as well. Unlike many cookbooks penned by chefs, Galmiche’s French Brasserie Cookbook both promises and provides do-able, delicious recipes.

After a brief introduction to the concept of “brasserie,” Galmiche delves into a short glossary, defining some technical terms used extensively in French cooking. Then comes a chapter on the basics, filled with such essentials as stocks, sauces like hollandaise and vinaigrette, and pastry doughs. The six chapters that follow supply the cook with a wealth of straight-forward recipes and guidelines for creating scrumptious French food without all the fuss inherent in a professional kitchen.

The chapter “Appetizers” includes various classic soups like fish soup with saffron and lighter, more traditional rendition of onion sup, complete with a cheesy crouton. Tapenade, anchoïade, asparagus with parsley vinaigrette, and terrines round out the rest of the chapter.

Moving on to “Meat, Poultry & Game,” Galmiche satisfies the longings of readers yearning to recreate the memorable meals they ate while inFrance. Steaks and stews, pork in various guises, cassoulet, charcuterie, chicken in red wine, spatchcocked chicken, duck, rabbit, and even game like venison show up in this chapter.

Fish lovers naturally expect some of their favorites in the chapter titled “Fish & Shellfish,’ likeDoversole and salt-crusted sea bass, and Galmiche doesn’t disappoint. From pan-fried red mullet to bouillabaisse, many of the classics tempt the cook.

Vegetarians generally don’t fare well in France, where there’s never been a real tradition of vegetarianism except that associated with religious heresies. But Galmiche inserts a “Vegetarian Dishes” chapter right after the meat and fish sections. Quiches and omelets, crepes and risottos, as well as various tarts, ought to please vegetarian readers.

And all cooks will turn to the following chapter, “Side Dishes & Salads,” to find many simply prepared dishes using zucchini, green beans, peas, potatoes, and tomatoes.

The final chapter, “Desserts,” consists of many tarts – including the ubiquitous Tarte Tatin made with apples, as well as Great-Aunt Suzanne’s pound-like cake and various other treats, particularly chocolate mousse and crème brulée.

Of five recipes tested – Onion Soup with Comté Cheese Croutons, Pork Steaks with Mustard & Gherkin Sauce, Zucchini with Olive and Thyme, Creamed Mashed Potatoes, and Spatchcocked Chicken – all turned out remarkably well, even when cooked by a somewhat inexperienced 32-year-old male cook. Directions read smoothly, concisely, and clearly. Some extra fussiness slowed down the finishing of dishes; for instance, in the recipe for the mashed potatoes, the recipe called for boiling the potatoes and then baking them at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes to dry them out. This step might be eliminated, if time is short, but the resulting mashed potatoes tasted creamier and smoother than the usual fare.

Chef Daniel Galmiche (Photo credit: Vineyard Restaurant)

Perhaps the words of the chef himself will suffice to sum up the nature of this excellent cookbook:

“In this book, you will find some lovely, uncomplicated recipes that come from all overFrance. Some are traditional with a twist (for example, I have made them lighter or more-up-to-date); others are specialties from particular regions but made my way. … Hopefully, once you’ve tried them, you will make them again and again. I wanted to create a book that’s not too “cheffy” (the kind only chefs can follow), a straightforward home cookbook that’s fun to read and inspires you to cook some really terrific French food … “

In French Brasserie Cookbook: The Heart of French Home Cooking, Daniel Galmiche has certainly succeeded in making French cooking accessible to cooks of all skill levels.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Give the Gift of Cooking French Food at Home: Some Cookbooks That Make a Seemingly Impossible Task Possible

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Beef Daube Beginnings (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

I have to tell you that the cookbook lists that come out every year around Christmas time drive me crazy. Like you’re really going to savor, say, 101 Recipes Using ___________? (Fill in the blank.) Or you’re going to run out and buy another Italian cookbook when you already own somewhere in the neighborhood of 225? (I do. Really.)

And since I am an unabashed Francophile, I cringe over the lack of French cookbooks on these lists.

So I decided to come up with my own list and it has nothing to do with the latest books in publisher’s catalogues. (Though the Maranville book  appeared in 2011.)

You probably think of French food as being too snooty, too chef-driven, and too rigid in its execution to be everyday fare. Qualities too passé, in other words, for today’s cooks. To be honest, as much as I respect Julia Child, her laborious recipes scare me and I usually find a simpler recipe using the ingredients in my refrigerator. As I think about it, I am not sure Julia really helped cooks to cook French food other than for dinner parties. In other words, Julia is not an everyday thing, at least not in my kitchen.

But, at the same time, it is hard to imagine how those svelte Parisian women, who could not possibly be eating chicken breasts in cream sauce on a regular basis, stay so thin if they eat French food every day. Granted, many of them smoke … .

Thus, when TV celebrities like Mario Batali and Giada de Laurentiis make Italian cooking appear easy and doable and healthy and cheap (no foie gras, no truffles, or not too many), well, anything remotely French goes the way of Steller’s Sea Cow.

Italian cooking crops up everywhere these days. Seriously …

Yet, guess what? Millions of French people cook French food every day. And most are not chefs.

Open-air markets in Paris and elsewhere might be fading away slowly, thanks to the encroachment of huge chain stores like Monoprix. But these markets still exist and no matter where French people shop for food, the crowds attest to the fact that people are cooking and eating at home in large numbers. Rolling carts trail behind stylishly coiffed ladies dressed properly in sweater “twin-sets,” and jeans-clad young matrons push baby carriages with babies in front and large pockets in back filled with groceries. People don’t have as much time to cook and France is no different from the United States in that regard: prepared foods and frozen foods abound everywhere in modern France.

Nonetheless, feathery leaves of fennel and thick quarters of country bread poke out of those carts and onto French tables at nearly every meal. There may even be a pineapple or a mango or a papaya tucked into that cart, with a few limes and possibly some pre-cooked couscous.

Obviously the French cook prepares dishes on a daily basis, dishes that have nothing to do with haute cuisine. That’s why regional cookbooks add so much to an understanding of French cuisine. The major (haute) French cookbooks of the past, discussed in part by Barbara Wheaton in Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789, resulted from the impact of a palatial cuisine, something stemming from the upper classes and the court of kings and dukes and princes of the blood.

Few people recorded the everyday cooking going on in peasant huts or in the kitchens of the bourgeois. Several regional cuisine projects in France managed to salvage recipes via oral history and through manuscript family cookbooks carefully tended by women.*

So here’s a brief, very brief, list of French cookbooks for everyday home cooking that actually work and provide you with the opportunity to discover an amazing fact: French cooking is really not any harder than Italian. (I know, because once in my misguided culinary “youth,” I cooked only Italian food for a whole year, rarely repeating a dish, testament to the ingenuity of Italian cooks and la cucina povera.)

These sturdy bridges to French cuisine rarely have the taint of chef about them, though given the ambience of food in France, a little pinch of the haute would not be unexpected. And the recipes taste good. Best of all, you won’t need a brigade of kitchen slaveys.

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*Next: A list of facsimile cookbooks for the curious cook and some discussion of French regional cooking.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Who was Ginette Mathiot? And Why Should You Care?

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Ginette Mathiot wrote books that bring up long-lost taste memories in France, much as Marcel Proust’s oft-quoted prattle about about madeleines. Only her work proves infinitely more readable and enjoyable. She also basically sticks it to Julia and makes French cooking seem less like a prolonged session at the dentist’s.

One of her books, Je Sais Faire la Patisserie, appeared in an English translation on bookshelves on November 5, 2011. It’s a book that just might crack open the mysteries of French pastry making. Like all such translations, quirks and surprises abound.

You may well ask, Why a book on pastry making in France?

French cooks don’t really need to do much baking, for a couple of excellent reasons.

After all, in France, pastry-making and cake-baking tend to be the domain of bakeshops (patisseries) that appear everywhere in French cities. Patisseries definitely pose a danger to passersby because of the tantalizing aromas seeping out as the door opens and closes with the comings and goings of customers clutching bags or boxes of sweets. How is it possible to resist that brilliant little gold-flecked chocolate cake in the window? (Answer: it’s not.)

In addition to the patisseries, another factor precludes baking in the French kitchen: most French ovens in the home seem to require a Ph.D. in astrophysics in order to operate them without mishap.

Ginette Mathiot

But this state of affairs did not stop French home economist Ginette Mathiot from writing what became one of the most popular baking books ever published in France.

Just who was Ginette Mathiot?

Ms. Mathiot first wrote Je Sais Cuisiner, France’s version of The Joy of Cooking, when she only needed to blow out twenty-five candles on her birthday cake in 1932. Je Sais Cuisiner sold over six million copies. The recognized expert on French home cooking, Ms. Mathiot went on to write over thirty other books, including Je Sais Faire la Patisserie (Albin Michel, 1938). In a country where male chefs rarely released their stranglehold on the whole concept of cooking, Ginette Mathiot defiantly titled many of her books with the words Je Sais or I Know (How to). She earned the Legion d’Honneur for her efforts in promoting French culture and cuisine. And interestingly enough, she wrote Je Sais Cuisiner Autour du  Monde, with recipes from Mali, Bénin, Sénégal, and the countries of North Africa.

I suspect, though right now I cannot prove it, that her book sat on shelves in French homes when families left France to follow the father of the family to one of France’s overseas colonies.

English speakers may now enjoy the simply written recipes that enabled three generations of French women to cook in an increasingly servantless and busy world.

Phaidon Press, publisher of Ms. Mathiot’s Je Sais Cuisiner as I Know How to Cook (2009), offers English-speakers another of Ms. Mathiot’s books in Phaidon’s signature attractive format: her 1938  Je Sais Faire la Patisserie, published in English under the title of The Art of French Baking. Again with the expertise of well-known French food blogger Clotilde Dusoulier (Chocolate & Zucchini), who also worked on Je Sais Cuisiner, the editors modernized and clarified various aspects of the 350 recipes. Among the changes made in Je Sais Cuisiner, one included leaving out instructions for gutting and cleaning rabbits. In the Foreward to The Art of French Baking, Ms. Dusoulier mentions a change made in the English version of Mathiot’s book: the stipulation that cooks mix baking powder and flour together, something not done in the French edition.

Like most cookbooks on baking, The Art of French Baking starts off with a discussion of essential ingredients and techniques, followed by a chapter containing “Basic Recipes.” Here the cook finds information about the primary components that make French baking so unique: pastry doughs, frostings, fillings, sauces, and syrups. Individual chapters cover “Small Cakes,” “Gateaux,” “Tarts and Pastries,” Cookies,” and “Milk and Egg Desserts.” The last section of the book features recipes from “Celebrated Chefs” of today, like Gail Gand and Pierre Hermé. The 150 full-color drawings and photos throughout the book provide cooks with some visual guidelines for the recipes.

And those recipes make Julia Child’s long-winded recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking seem like a Tolstoy novel in comparison. Short and to the point, Ms. Mathiot’s recipes may well appear too brusque at first for North American cooks.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Take the recipe for Sablés, a type of shortbread cookie that requires rolling out the dough to ¼-inch and cutting it with a cookie cutter. Six ingredients and about eighty words of instructions will likely make the trepidant cook think, “Well, I can make that.” The dough came together well and rolled out smoothly. Everything worked well, although no definitions appear in the book for “superfine sugar” – which appears in most of the recipes. And so making the sugar involved an extra step: whirling it in a food processor until it looked like a cross between powdered and granulated sugar. Another odd bit in the recipes turned out to be the requirement for seven or nine tablespoons of butter, requiring the cook to cut off an extra tablespoon from a stick of butter, sold in eight tablespoon sticks in American supermarkets. The Sablés won approval by tasters, who couldn’t (and wouldn’t) stop at just one.

Other tantalizing tidbits in The Art of French Baking include Madeleines, Auvergne Gâteau, Jelly Roll, Chocolate Log, Parisian Custard, and Vanilla Soufflé. Most of these sweets taste far less sweet than American desserts, making it possible to really savor the flavor of orange or butter or other ingredients. With less sugar, the recipes become more accessible to some diabetics.

Novice American cooks may find The Art of French Baking a bit of a challenge, being used to having very precise measurements and expecting recipes to fit together precisely like Lego blocks. Paris Sweets: Great Desserts From the City’s Best Pastry Shops (2002), by Dorie Greenspan, likely will appeal more to bakers and cooks just starting out on their kitchen adventures. On the other hand, experienced cooks and bakers will enjoy the thrill of working with recipes written like the ones our ancestors cooked from, demanding flexibility and ingenuity.

So that’s why you should care about  Ginette Mathiot. She makes the French home-cooking tradition accessible on a daily basis, in a way that Julia Child really never did.

Making Sablés: A Visual Essay

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Mixing the dough until crumbly …

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Gathering the crumblies into a ball …

Photo credit: C.; Bertelsen

Rolling out the dough …

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Ready to bake …

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Baked …

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Belleville Revisited

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Belleville metro (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

The Belleville market — straddling the crossroads of Paris’s 10th, 11th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements — presents the determined photographer with a tremendous dilemma: how to take pictures without being literally swept up in the crowds and jostled like a buoy bobbing in heavy seas?

Although the market runs from the Menilmontant metro stop to Belleville (about 2 km.), the easiest way to tackle it  seems to be to get to the Belleville stop, the beginning (or end, depending your point of view) of this market, the likes of which I’d never seen before. And I’ve seen quite a few. Unlike some markets, there is only one aisle for shoppers to walk through.

Perched precariously on the median of a quite busy road, the width of the median determined just how much space shoppers could co-opt. In two words, not much. After I climbed up about twenty grimy stairs, cluttered with tattered plastic bags and other trash fluttering lightly in the morning breeze. Almost immediately, I slipped into the stream of people – mostly North Africans, although a few people from West Africa braved the surge with the rest of us.

Belleville Market (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

And then it happened: I realized I would never be able to lift up my camera to get any pictures because like Cuban cigars packed into  a small wooden box, shoppers completely filled the passageway between the vendors. My arms remained pinned to my sides. Cradling the camera, fearing the accidental smack of a sack filled with potatoes or the odd melon, I stumbled by mounds of fruit: apples, grapes, nectarines, all the usual fruits found in France. A few vendors, and only a few, sold the spices I expected of a market catering to North Africans. A fish monger here, a charcuterie there selling beef- and lamb-based meats, a poultry man, the market consisted mostly of produce.

As I spotted the egg man, the center aisle of the market widened for some reason. I popped out of the crowd like a cork out of a champagne bottle. I grabbed my little recyclable 6-egg carton and held it out to the vendor as I muttered “Bonjour, monsieur.” You have to remember that he sold more types of eggs than we’ll ever see in a supermarket, so the next obvious step was to choose which eggs would  go into my cloth bag and suffer through the crush of bodies still behind me.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Brown eggs, I like those, though I know the color makes no difference, so I decided that six large ones would do nicely. Into the carton they went. I flipped out my euros and paid.  He said a few words in English to me. And I asked him how he knew I spoke English (like it wasn’t obvious … ). He pointed to my camera and sunglasses. (Nobody seems to wear sunglasses in Paris and only tourists carry cameras, which get looks verging on the evil eye sometimes.) I ended up giving him my business card and he passed it to the vendors next to him.  ”No pictures of me,” he said sternly, “but you can take pictures of the eggs and his onions.”

Vendor of onions and potatoes, Belleville Market

And so I finally found an opportunity to take a few pictures. Eggs and onions, mostly.

Fast flicks of the shutter, smiles all around, and off I went into the madding crowd. When I saw an opening out to the street between two trucks, I took the easy way out.

The shops lining the market street offered more picture-taking opportunities. The breads displayed in the windows especially caught my attention.

As I walked around the trucks to get back to the metro stop, an injured woman sat lolling like a Raggedy Ann doll in the road, her market bag torn and produce of every kind lay squashed on the asphalt, women milling around her, onlookers staring. Someone brought a caned bottomed cafe chair for her to lean against as she held her jaw in one hand. Given the location of the market, it wasn’t surprising that accidents happen. Helplessly, I stood for a moment, knowing I couldn’t help her, but hoping she would be alright, I started down the stairs to the train and into another world.

Bread in Shop Window, Belleville (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Celebration! With Champagne …

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Gherkins & Tomatoes / Cornichons & Tomates celebrates an anniversary in a couple of days, and I would like to thank all readers — old and new — for their ongoing and strong support. A special thanks goes to friends and family, who keep me going by saying nice things and bringing me champagne.

This post brings the total number of posts to 751 since July 28, 2008. Imagine that, three years!

So join me for a glass or two of the bubbly and future posts about food, culture, and anything remotely French.

Photo credit: Tim Baker

The Crêpe Makers of France

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Photo credit: Nelson Sosa

Photo credit; Andy Simonds

Photo credit: Bob Bradburn

Photo credit: Rene Passett

Photo credit: James Offer

Photo credit: ozziebackpacker

Photo credit: Javier Lastras

Photo credit: Michael Lovitt

Want to make your own? Here’s a recipe from Epicurious:

Nutella and Banana Crêpes

4 servings

ingredients

Crepes:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups fat-free milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
Cooking spraySauce:
1/4 cup hazelnut-chocolate spread (such as Nutella)
2 tablespoons fat-free milk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large firm unpeeled bananas (about 1 3/4 pounds)
Powdered sugar (optional)

preparation

To prepare crepes, lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Place flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl; stir with a whisk. Combine 1 1/2 cups milk and eggs, stirring with a whisk. Add milk mixture to flour mixture, stirring with a whisk just until smooth. Cover batter; chill for 15 minutes.Heat a 10-inch nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat. Remove pan from heat. Pour a scant 1/4 cup batter into pan; quickly tilt pan in all directions so batter covers pan with a thin film. Cook about 1 minute.Carefully lift edge of crepe with a spatula. The crepe is ready to turn when it can be shaken loose from the pan and the underside is lightly browned. Turn crepe over; cook 30 seconds.Place crepe on a towel; keep warm. Repeat procedure until all the batter is used. Stack crepes between single layers of wax paper or paper towels to prevent sticking.

To prepare sauce, combine the hazelnut-chocolate spread, 2 tablespoons milk, and vanilla in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring with a whisk until smooth. Keep warm.

Peel bananas and cut in half lengthwise; cut each half crosswise into 2 pieces.

Heat a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat. Arrange 4 banana pieces in a single layer in pan. Cook 1 minute or until lightly browned. Turn pieces over; cook 1 minute. Remove banana pieces from pan; keep warm. Repeat procedure with remaining banana pieces.

Place 1 banana piece in center of each crepe; fold sides and ends over, and place, seam side down, on clean surface. Repeat procedure with remaining banana pieces and crepes.

Spoon about 1 tablespoon sauce onto each of 4 plates, spreading to cover center of plates. Arrange 2 crepes on each plate; sprinkle with powdered sugar, if desired. Serve immediately.

The Weird, Different, and Just Plain Interesting Restaurants of Paris: A Photo Gallery

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Like many of you, I dream about being in France. A lot.

And, of course, I daydream about eating in Paris, in spite of naysayers who point their compasses at other, more culinarily au courant corners of the globe.

I’m already making lists of culinary adventures in preparation for my grant-sponsoredjourney this fall, doing research in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.

The following are but just a few of the places I’m imagining …

Greek Restaurant in Paris's Latin Quarter (Photo credit: Frédérique Panassac)

Restaurant in basement of 12th-century Parisian church (Photo credit: Jerry H.)

Smallest restaurant in Paris? (Photo credit: Who cares?)

Restaurant Café de l'Odéon (Photo credit: Hotels Paris Rive Gauche)

Restaurant Impala Lounge (Photo credit: VieDeGeek)

A Dog's Life in Paris (Photo credit: Ryan)

What was French about Mexican Cuisine?

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When you bite into a chicken taco or scoop up guacamole, you probably won’t be thinking about France.

Yet, France left indelible fingerprints on the cuisine of Mexico. Jeffrey Pilcher, in Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Dialogos) (1998), attempted to examine the question, but much remains to be done.

In 1831, Mariano Galván Rivera published El Cocinero Mexicano (The Mexican Cook/Chef). Written by an anonymous author, Mexico’s first printed cookbook appeared to be heavily influenced by French techniques like stock making and the use of the Bain Marie, as well as breads and pastries. The book went through several printings and included few of the dishes so beloved by modern aficionados of Mexican food. Nineteenth-century housewives also turned to the cookbook by Jules Gouffé, chef of Paris’s Jockey Club, El Libro de Cocina (1893). 

Most writers on the subject of French cuisine in Mexico point out that Emperor Maximilian and his wife Carlota only spent a few years in Mexico and could not possibly have influenced the average cook very much. These royals brought in a Hungarian chef, Tudos, heavily influenced by classical French cuisine. Ah, but they don’t take the story up to the Porfiriato, or the period during 1876-1911, when Don Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico with a mano de hierro. His iron-fisted manner certainly led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Don Porfirio

And so did his opulent, Francophile dining style, masterminded by his chef Slyvain Dumont, who hailed from Verneuil-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris.

For a grand supper on September 15, 1910, celebrating the centennial of Mexico’s independence from Spain (1810) and his 80th birthday, Díaz ordered dishes inspired by French cuisine. Ten thousand people seated themselves at the National Palace in Mexico City. Twelve courses appeared on tables lit by filaments demonstrating the novel technology of electricity. He served French wines, particularly champagne. The china bore his emblem of an eagle around the rims of the plates and his monogram in the center.

The following list attests to the extravagance of the event:

13,000 serving plates
1,000 salt shakers
1,500 serving platters
11,000 cups and glasses of different sizes
20,400 plates
350 waiters
16 chefs
24 sous chefs
60 helpers

To make stock for the soup and sauces, three cows and three calves faced the executor’s knife. One hundred turtles metamorphosed into turtle soup, and 1,050 salmon provided fillets.  The rest of the groceries reads like a feast served by a French king, implying deprivation for the masses of poor people not invited to the gala:

2,000 beef fillets
800 chickens
400 turkeys
10,000 eggs
180 kilos of butter
600 cans of French asparagus
90 cans of foie gras
400 cans of mushrooms
300 cans of truffles
60 kilos of almonds
160 liters of cream
380 liters of milk
2,700 heads of lettuce
10 tons of ice
200 cases of sherry
200 cases of Pouilly
200 cases of Mouton-Rothschild
50 cases of Cordon Rouge
250 cases of Cognac Martell
700 cases of anis-flavored liqueur

The menu?*

Melon glacé au Clicquot rosé (Melon with Champagne)
Potage Christophe Colomb
Saumon du Rhin grillé à la St. Malo (Grilled Salmon à la Rhin with Shellfish Sauce)

Filets de sole Lerat
Poularde à l’écarlate (Chicken in Red Sauce)
Lobsters

Salade Demidoff
Eggplant with Rhine Wine

Brioche à la Parisienne
Peaches Melba
Chocolates, Pastries, Tarts

Salade Demidoff – Demidoff Salad

One part each of sliced potatoes, truffles and cooked carrots, each of them seasoned and macerated in white wine. Dress this salad with mayonnaise sauce.

*(The menu comes from archived material held at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.)

For more about Porfirian excesses, see Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Second Edition) (1987), by William H. Beezley, with its discussion of the imitation of foreign cultures, much as people imitate Tuscan culture today.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

“Authentic” French Food: A Real Parvenu

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Spend a weekend reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography (2007) and you’ll end up with quite a full plate, filled with crazy peddlers, ruthless kings, slain surveyors, and insular peasants.

And you might even gain a whole new outlook on France and her hidden history, Rick Stein’s TV show, French Odyssey, to the contrary.

Named a Slate Best Book of the Year and winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, The Discovery of France takes common nostalgia about the French café and the quaint landscape smelling of lavender and turns it all upside down.  Just how engineered is today’s French identity seems to escape many conservatives basking in the shadows of Marine Le Pen and the National Front.

To read Robb’s book is be struck by how new France really is. His work follows Eugen Weber’s excellent Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (1976).

The whole question of French identity relies on knowing what it is to be French. But what exactly is French?

As Robb says so emphatically,

the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centered on Paris.

Abbé Henri Grégoire

A Church and political functionary, Abbé Henri Grégoire , determined that one of the best ways to unify France would be to exterminate the various patois spoken throughout what is now considered to be France. Because the authorities in Paris sent out the news and government decrees  in French, they couldn’t be sure that the  peasants out in the boonies were “getting it.” And thus by 1794, the Abbé went to battle and basically tried to kill off whole dialects in the name of La Belle France. Nevertheless, by 1880, only one-fifth of the total population used French easily.

If language took that turn, what about food? Cooking?

By the early nineteenth century, Marie-Antoine Carême cooked for the Duc de Talleyrand. Carême revolutionized haute cuisine. It became synonymous with “French” cuisine in the minds of the increasing numbers of tourists visiting the country, including the future American president, Thomas Jefferson. What appeared on a peasant’s’ table — if he or she even had one — told an entirely different story.

According to Robb,

A story was told of four young men from Saint-Brieuc in Brittany who discussing what they would eat if imagination was the only limit. One suggested an unusually long sausage, another imagined ‘beans the size of toes’, boiled with bacon, the third chose a sea of fat with a giant ladle to cream it off and the fourth complained that the others had ‘already picked all the good things’.

Anyone who’s eaten in a bistro or brasserie will not identify this food as  French.

Bread Oven in Aveyron (Photo credit: B. Carlson)

Take a look at the daily peasant fare of Anjou, recorded in 1844: bread, soup (cabbage, potato, or onion), a vegetable and a hard-boiled egg. The happy few might find a few nuts, a sliver of cheese, and salted lard to beef up Sunday’s bread. Bread — usually baked hard like hardtack — sometimes lasted for up to three years and required a long dip in liquid like whey or buttermilk or water or wine in order to be eaten. The type of bread baked in any given place depended on the availability of fuel.

Girl with Levain

This all stands in stark contrast to the delicious food described in French cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, in Description des artes et métiers faites ou approuvés par messieurs de l’Acadamie Royale des Sciences …, Paul Jacques Malouin included bread recipes, one  specifically for soup, pain à soupe:  flat, round, all crust with no soft crumb. Malouin stated that this bread served well for households where servants received rations of bread.

You see, most of the food from the provinces ended up in Paris, creating a “fantasy image on the provinces” and their so-called abundance. That market, or markets, created the produits du terroir so highly identified with regional cooking, cassis being one example among many.

The bottom line:  There is “no such thing as a ‘pure’ Frenchman,” according to Robb. By extension, dare we say there is really no French cuisine either?

Photo credit: Sacher Dos

Garlic Soup (a Provençal recipe from Clifford Wright)
Makes 6 servings
Preparation Time: 1 hour and 5 minutes

[Note: This recipe is a very typical recipe across the Mediterranean. Although Mr. Wright doesn't comment on the nutritional value of the soup, the relatively large amount of olive oil added calories and the bread also contributed energy, which is the major requirement of the body, regardless of the time in history.]

2 quarts water
15 large garlic cloves (about 1 head), crushed
Bouquet garni, tied in cheesecloth, consisting of 8 sprigs fresh parsley, 8 sprigs fresh thyme, 8 sprigs fresh marjoram, and 1 sprig fresh sage
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 to 12 slices French bread, toasted golden or not
Finely chopped fresh parsley for garnish

1. Bring the water with the garlic cloves, bouquet garni, olive oil, salt, and black pepper to boil in a 4-quart casserole and boil for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour, uncovered.

2. Place one to two slices of bread in each bowl and ladle the broth over. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

An Ancient Mediterranean Taste: France’s Boutargue

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Boutargue/Poutargue/Bottarga

The Egyptians who fled to Marseille from Egypt after the Napoleonic debacle there  (1801) brought with them a hankering for batarekh, now called boutargue or poutargue in Provençal.

Mugil cepahlus

Happily, Marseille happened to be a place where they could find batarekh, a caviar-like product made from the pressed and dried roes of grey mullets (Mugil cephalus). Eaten sliced potato-chip thin with olive and lemon juice, batarekh dated back centuries to ancient Egypt. At the time that the refugees stumbled off the boat in Marseille, bearing the dead and moldering body of their leader Ya’qub Hanna, whose wife refused to bury him until their ship, the Pallas, reached terra firma, Marseille boasted at least eight producers of batarekh.

Martigues, France

Most of those producers plied their trade in Martigues, a nearby town, somewhat rough and unsavory. Although batarekh rarely reached Paris at that time, except during Lent, according to the Dictionnaire portatif de commerce (1770), the Arabs living in Paris relied on their Marseille kin and friends to send them the coveted batarekh. Thus batarekh was a common trade item in the early nineteenth century.

And it tied the immigrants to their homeland, no doubt making the strange language and their diminished social standing more tolerable.

Batarekh likely comes from the Arabic buṭariḫ [بطارخ ], which in turn comes from the Coptic outarakhon and from the Byzantine Greek ᾠοτάριχον [ᾠóν = “egg”+ τάριχον = “pickled fish”], which Simeon Seth – an 11th century Jewish writer – condemned in his writings.

It doesn’t take much to connect the dots and realize that because Alexandriain Egypt produced the best batarekh, again according to the Dictionnaire portatif de commerce, that this salty by-product of the ancient practice of fishing served a role beyond that of the delicacy status attributed to it today. It literally manifests the human tendency to use everything edible from nose to tail, or in this case from fin to egg. It staved off hunger and added flavor to dull grain porridges and monotonous bowls of beans.

Boutargue preserved with wax coating

Paintings on ancient Egyptian tombs show people removing the roe from buri (modern-day barri, for mullet). The practice of preserving fish like this probably dates to Byzantine times, the sixth or early seventh centuries, and most likely even before that. The seafaring tendency of many Mediterranean people, as well as the nomadic nature of others, led to batarekh. Like the venison or buffalo jerky invented by Native Americans, batarekh provided sustenance where none was to be found, at least not easily.

In Letters on Egypt: containing, a parallel between the manners of its ancient and modern inhabitants, its commerce, agriculture, government and religion; with the descent of Louis IX at Damietta. Extracted from Joinville, and Arabian authors, Volume 1 (1787, translated from the French), Claude Etienne Savary wrote:

The Bourri, or mullet, is the most beneficial of all to the fishermen, who open the females, and take out the roe, of which they make boutargue, by salting, and vend it through all Egypt. The various outlets of the lake to the Nile and Mediterranean being full of islands, rushes, insects, and herbs, the river and sea-fish swarm and multiply here infinitely; supplying two thousand fishermen, and clouds of birds, without apparent diminution. Nature has done so much for Egypt that the fecundity of its earth and waters is inconceivable; wherefore has it ever been a nursing-mother to neighbouring nations. They salt the roe, and dry it in the sun; it is a food well known to the sailors of Provence.

Fishermen first gutted the female fish and gently massaged the delicate sacs by hand to get rid of air pockets between the eggs. Adding salt came next. Then they flattened the sacs between planks of wood and sun dried the sacs for up to 2 months. Covered with a coating of beeswax to preserve them, the sacs – if dried sufficiently – lasted nearly forever. By the time the drying process ended, the roe lost about 35% of its total mass. Cathy Kaufman provides a recipe for making it from scratch in her Cooking in Ancient Civilizations (The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series: Cooking Up History)  (see pages 67 -68).

Photo credit: Amelia

You can see this in the following poem from Familière Description du tres vino porratimalvoise et tres envitaillegoulmente royaume Panigonnois, mystiquement interpreté l’Isle de Crevepance, influenced by the myth of Cockaigne, with its overtones of hunger dreams reminiscent of World War II concentration camp survivors, as well as the work of François Rabelais. The common denominator in all these meats is salt …

By the streams running with such excellent wine,

Little by little one sees

Corned beef, boutargue, and hams.

And, oh yes, rumor had it that batarekh possesed aphrodisiac properties.

If you find some boutargue, and you might under the Italian name bottarga, just grate it on some hot pasta or cut it in thin slices and eat with bread, olive oil, and squirts of lemon juice. Never, ever, cook boutargue.

For more on boutargue, see:

Bates, Oric. Ancient Egyptian Fishing. Harvard African Studies. 1: 265, 1917.

L. Keimer. La boutargue dans l’ancienne Egypte. Bulletin de l’Institute Francaise de l’Egypte. 21: 215 – 43, 1938 -1939.

Note: Thanks to a timely Julia Child Fund grant underwritten by the generosity of  IACP’s The Culinary Trust, I will be able to post a lot more first-hand accounts after autumn of 2011, because I’ll be on location in France, studying the impact of immigrant cuisines on the future of French cuisine.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

The Lost Arabs of Marseille: Food, Family, and France

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In his  timely Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831 (2011), Ian Coller writes of the Arab families associated with Ya’qub Hanna, an Egyptian, a Copt and first non-French general who’d served with  Napoleon Bonaparte in his military campaigns in Egypt. The cover, I believe, was chosen to highlight the idea of the Arab “Other.” The artist, Anne Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (1767 – 1824) titled it “Portrait of Mustapha” and painted it in 1819.

Engraving from period of Napoleon III

These families ended up in Marseille. Forbidden for complex political reasons from continuing north to Paris, a restriction later lifted, they attempted to make the best of their lives in a strange country. Pensions awarded for service to the State enabled them to do so, but also reinforced their isolation and insularity, their continued identification as Arabs. In other words, the recent influx of immigrants from France’s former North African colonies represents a continuum of a process that has been ongoing for a long time. And the roots of today’s racial and cultural clashes can be seen in the events described in Coller’s book.

Scarce as dietary information is, Coller includes a few sentences, based on work done by French historian Georges Reynaud in 1866 and correspondence found in archives:

… they cultivated molokhiyya [Corchorus olitorus], a favorite green vegetable of the Middle East, which they dried and sent to their compatriots in Melun [where a military squadron called "Mameluks" served in the French army] and Paris. Their letters are filled with details of other foods they were sending from Marseille – dried fish (batarekh) and coconuts, olives, and dates.

In referring to the coconuts, Coller emphasizes the ways in which the immigrants negotiated with power, and hence survival, in a foreign land. Like many foodstuffs, coconuts played a subliminal role in the intrigue to “make it” and bring family and friends along to greater prosperity and social standing.

Mikha’il Sabbagh, who lived in Paris, wrote to his friends in Marseille, including Francois Naydorff, asking them to procure some coconuts for him. His purpose? To throw a gala party to welcome in the New Year of 1810. And to impress the movers and shakers in the capitol. Of course, people in Marseille like Naydorff wanted to weave together some networks to further their own agendas. As Coller states, “They [coconuts] were a symbol of ambition and aspiration.”

The problem? The British blockade of the Caribbean and France’s ports, thanks to the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. Getting a coconut through the lines and onto French tables would almost require a crack Seal Team to succeed.

But somehow Naydorff found nine coconuts. When he cracked open one to test it, he found the interior somewhat yellow, but still up to the task of wowing the guests at Saddagh’s party. He wrote:

I left the other eight coconuts whole because in France people consider the flesh inside less valuable than the shell, which they use for hunting goblets.

We don’t learn how the party turned out. But living in Paris conferred status

Molokhiyya still spices and thickens various dishes, particularly in Egypt. Here’s a recipe that doesn’t include tomatoes. It comes from Paula Wolfert, via Nora George, author of Nora’s Recipes from Egypt, based on her mother’s recipe notebook, handwritten in Arabic. Note that it is a very time-consuming dish. Go to Paula’s site to read the delightful story she tells of eating this dish with Nora.

Chicken with Molokhiyya

Serves 4

2 pounds chicken parts, preferably legs and thighs
1 small onion, quartered
Spice packet: 1 stick cinnamon, 1/4 tsp.mastic, 1 tsp. peppercorns and 3 cardamom pods wrapped in cheesecloth
1 tsp. salt
6 cups water
Pinch each of sumac and dried thyme
Olive oil

Onion-Cinnamon-Vinegar Dressing:

1 cup cider vinegar
½ cup finely chopped red onion
Pinch of ground cinnamon
1 Tb. butter
1 Tb. crushed garlic
1 tsp. salt
2 Tb. ground coriander

1 frozen 14-oz. package molokhiyya imported from Egypt(available at Middle Eastern grocers)

Accompaniments:

2 pita breads, cut into triangles and toasted until brown in the oven
2 cups freshly cooked white rice

Put the chicken, onion, spice packet, and 1 tsp. salt in a 4-quart casserole. Add 6 cups water and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes, skimming foam and scum off the top from time to time. Remove the chicken to a greased baking dish, sprinkle with a pinch of sumac and thyme; moisten with 1/4 cup broth and keep covered with a foil tent. Refrigerate.

About 1-1/2 hours before serving, preheat the oven to 425 F degrees.

Strain the chicken broth; discard the fat, measure the broth and add more water if necessary to make 4 cups. Return to the saucepan and bring to the boil. In a skillet heat the butter to sizzling, add the garlic, 1 tsp. salt, and coriander and fry, stirring, until the texture is sandy and brown in color, but not burnt. Add to the boiling broth and cook over medium heat for 15 minutes.

An hour before mealtime, bring soup to a boil, add frozen molokhiyya and cook uncovered over medium heat until it completely defrosts, without excessivestirring. (If using fresh or dried molokhiya, see “Notes to the Cook” below.) Makes about 3 cups sauce. Meanwhile, set the chicken in the oven to brown. Make the onion-vinegar-cinnamon dressing and let stand 30 minutes.

To serve in layers in individual cereal bowls: place toasted pocket bread triangle on the bottom; add a few spoonfuls of plain rice, the chicken, a ladleful of sauce and top with a spoonful of the onion-vinegar-cinnamon dressing.

Notes to the Cook: One-half pound dried molokhiyya can be substituted for fresh or frozen: rub the leaves between hands until finely crushed. Forty minutes before serving, rinse quickly in a strainer, drain, soak in enough hot broth to cover for half an hour, then add to the boiling soup and cook uncovered for about 10 minutes.

If using fresh molokhiyya: Rinse and carefully dry. Use a mezzaluna or half-moon chopper to finely chop then set aside until ready to add the last 10 minutes. Don’t worry if it feels a little slimy to the touch. (A food processor can be used for the chopping.) Add the fresh molokhiyya to the boiling soup, immediately reduce heat and cook, uncovered, (to retain its green color) for 5 to 10 minutes. Remove from the heat the moment it begins to boil.
______________________________

Other names for molokhiyya include jute mallow, Jew’s mallow, bush okra, long-fruited jute, Spanish okra, tossa jute, tussa jute, nalta jute, and West African okra. There are at least 18 different ways to transliterate the word from the Arabic  ملوخية:
Moulokheyya, Mulukheyya, Moolookhieh, Mouloukhia, Mloukhia, Melokiyah, Meloukhia, Melokiyah, Milookhia, Milookhiyya, M’Loukhia, Molohia, Molokhiya, Molokhiyya, 
Molukhyia, Mulukhia, Mulukhiya, and Mulukhiyah.

For more on the scientific aspects of molokhiyya, see the entry at Purdue’s New Crops Website,  Corchorus olitorius L. , and also the one at Plants for a Future.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

The Fish of France: Weever (Trachinus draco Linnaeus )

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Photo credit: Misjel Decleer

A bouillabaisse fish, the weever is. Mentioned in William Verral’s A Complete System of Cookery (1759) as “weaver,” the weever fish’s spines emit poison. According to Clifford Wright, a restaurateur in Marseille likely invented bouillabaisse, an expensive version of fish stew and not really the traditional fisherman’s fish boil. 

Photo credit: Marseille Tourisme

So much for romantic nostalgia and visions of bereted shivering men huddled around a bubbling pot of fish tails and mussel shells.

Charles Dickens expounded on bouillabaisse in a most enticing way in Household Words, a Weekly Journal (Vol. 1, 1881, p. 351):

The bouillabaisse, is one of the foremost of representative French dishes, and it is at the same time uncompromisingly southern. The Marseillais declares that nowhere can it be fully appreciated as in the incomparable city on the shores of the Mediterranean; and he would scout the idea — if he could read Thackeray’s poem — of bouillabaisse in the “New Street of the Little Fields.”

The bouillabaisse, says the enthusiast, must be eaten in a southern climate, under southern skies; one must be penetrated with the effect of the brilliancy of the scenes, the burning heat of the sun, the fresh breeze in the shade, in order to perfectly enjoy the

Sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotch-potch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could out-do.

As for Thackeray’s recipe —

Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dare;

…

When it is remembered that there are, as a rule, about fifteen or sixteen heads of garlic in a quantity of bouillabaisse deemed sufficient for four persons, it will be easily conceived that the partakers of this southern dish are not agreeable company to those who dislike the perfume of garlic.

Provençal Potage, Bouillabaisse. Take any kind of fish, but tho best arc whiting, dory, haddock, or cod. Fillet the fish and trim it. Pat in a frying-pan an onion sliced, a clove of garlic, some parsley finely chopped, a bit of lemon or orange-peel, some salt, pepper, spice, saffron, with a pint of water, a tablespoonful of oil and a glass of light wine for each pound of fish. Add the fish filleted. Stir the potage, and put it on a quick fire for a quarter of an hour till it bubbles. Let it remain now on the fire for five minutes; add a bit of butter mixed with flour, and serve. Fennel and bay-leaf may be added, if liked.

Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, p. 659, 1883.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Why Bother with Culinary History?

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Photo credit: Wendi Dunlap

Photo credit: Wendi Dunlap

A friend recently asked me, “Why is culinary history important?”

Actually, her words came out of her mouth a little more harsh sounding than that:  ”Why are you wasting so much of your time on that stuff? Why don’t you just write up some recipes, like how to make that great bread you always make?”

Momentarily speechless, I realized she asked me the question that I periodically ask myself.

What difference does it make if we know about French chefs and their cookbooks from the 18th century? Why does it matter to us today if the elite of Britain hired French people to work in their palatial houses? Who cares?

First of all, the subject is endless in its permutations. Having a deep fascination (obsession?) with the details of the kitchens of the past guarantees that boredom keeps at bay.

Secondly, for cookbook lovers and collectors, culinary history provides opportunities for wallowing in the riches of recipes and receipts.

Cookbooks, however valuable as primary sources, must be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. According to Tom Jaine,* of Prospect Books, there’s a gap between what the cookery books portrayed versus what people actually ate every day. This trend has been around since the beginning of cookbook printing and continues to this day.  Monthly glossies  have readers drooling over the pages of glorious photographs of dishes that no one will make more than once, if ever. And the Food Network reminds us of our shortcomings in the kitchen at the same time it empowers us to throw in a pinch of chile pepper in the chocolate cake batter. I mean, if Rick Bayless can do it, so can I!

But back to the questions.

William Anne Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

A third reason for pursuing the subject of culinary history lies with learning how we got to where we are today. In the case of studying the history of French cuisine, the association of the kitchen with power and diplomacy is very telling, because history explains (or at least attempts to!) the ways in which French cuisine influenced more than just stomachs.

I am appalled that there’s no more interest in the questions of food and food history in academia, the Congress, and even the White House. Here we are, at a tremendous junction in history, and we’re arguing about local food, feeding people with money, while people with no money are starving, even here in the United States. History can teach us what questions to ask, give us the courage to ask them, and insight into the solutions.

So what questions DO we want to ask about food and cooking in the past? Or the present, for that matter? What do we want to know about how we nurture ourselves? How can we practice hospitality in an often hostile world?

That’s the key word, everybody. Hospitality. And not just the proper napkin or the right fork. How do we truly nourish each other?

I’d like to end with a famous quote from Virginia Woolf, as pertinent today as it was when she wrote it and certainly relevant to the 18th-century English nobility so taken with all things French:

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

From A Room of One’s Own (1929), Chapter 1, p. 18

_________________

*Tom Jaine, “Do Cookery Books Tell the Truth?” In: Culinary History, A. Lynn Martin and Barbara Santich, eds. (Brompton, Australia : East Street Publications, 2004, p-. 87 – 96).

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

The Duke of Newcastle’s Pique, or, A Good Chef is Hard to Find

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The Duke of Newcastle and His Cook (British Museum Print no. 2684)

The diarist Samuel Pepys,  no mean observer of human foibles that relieve the monotony of day-to-day human life, recorded — almost in real-time —  the Francophilic transformation of the English nobility after the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Since Pepys devoted a portion of his library to cookery, it’s not surprising that his diary records some of  the culinary aspects of the Restoration. One of Pepy’s most favored books bore the title L’école parfaite des officiers de bouche, written by Jean Ribou.  Pepys owned the third edition, published in 1676.

Samuel Pepys

From even a quick reading of Pepys, what happened was that the upper-class English soon equated French cuisine with political power. The hoity-toities of the Whig government nearly all came to employ French male cooks, thus making French cuisine the food of diplomacy. The precursor, as it were of the cigar-smoke-filled saloon teeming with Tammany Hall types.

How did this transpire? Why did proud Englishmen fail to ask, “Where’s the beef?”

Royal English exiles, Charles II and James II in particular, “disappeared” in France while waiting out the political turmoils of the Cromwellian period. After the Restoration in 1660, when the Stuart monarchy marched (or rather sailed) home, French influence sailed with them and soon permeated English court life.

William Keppel, Earl of Albemarle

The Duke of Newcastle, as we have seen, enjoyed the services of a chef named Clouet, until that gentleman decided to cut and run to the service of another, William Keppel (Earl of Albemarle),  the Duke’s friend and then the British ambassador to France and later governor of Virginia. Clouet specialized in a form of nouvelle cuisine made popular in the 1730s.

Human nature being what it is, regardless of era or place, the Duke of Newcastle complained to his friend that he needed a new cook, badly.  Since Clouet, the object of his despair, worked for Albemarle, for whom the situation could have been anything but comfortable, Albemarle consulted Clouet and together they came up with a chef named Hervé (Hervey in Franglish).

But, alas, like the ugly older brother of a handsome  fairy-tale prince, Hervé couldn’t capture the heart of the Duke. And this is where the story really becomes a classic: Newcastle wrote (in French) to his old cook, Clouet, pouring his soul out:

It may be that the new cuisine does not please us here, but I cannot believe that he has mastered the art. His soups are usually too strong and his entrées and entremets are so disguised and so mixed-up that nobody can tell what they are made of. He never serves small hors d’oeuvres or light entrées, and he has no idea of the simple, unified dishes that you used to make for me and which are so much in fashion here, such as veal tendons, rabbit fillets, pigs’ and calves’ ears, and several other little dishes of the same kind. … In other words, he has no resemblance to your ways and your cuisine, and to what I require.

Reproduction of 18th-century stockpot

Clouet responded firmly in phonetically written French:

As regards his mixed-up entrées and entremets, French cuisine has never been anything but mixtures. This is what gives it that great variety which places it above all the other cuisines of Europe. Masters who do not like these mixtures should be so good as to inform the cook of this, and to let him know how they wish to be served, so that the cook can show his skill by conforming to their desires. It is also most unfortunate  for a cook that his master should be incapable of judging his performance for himself, so that he is often judged by critics who are totally ignorant.

That’s telling  him, Clouet!

Fortunately, an English sous chef named William Verral, who worked with Clouet at the Duke of Newcastle’s estate, wrote A Complete System of Cookery (1759), recording the recipes with which Clouet enchanted the Duke of Newcastle.

To be continued …

For more on the Newcastle-Clouet saga and the time period, see:

Driver, Christopher and Berriedale-Johnson, Michelle. Pepys at Table (1984)

Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2003)

_____. “Politics in the Kitchen,” Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (2): 71 – 83, 1999.

Pepys, Samuel. The Joys of Excess (2011) [Excerpts about food from his diaries.]

Sedgwick, Romney. “The Duke of Newcastle’s Cook,” History Today 5: 308 – 316, 1955.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

French Chefs Abroad: Alexis Soyer and His Irish Famine Soup Kitchen

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It is to be regretted that men of science do not interest themselves more than they do on a subject of such vast magnitude as this; for I feel confident that the food of a country might be increased at least one-third, if the culinary science was properly developed, instead of its being slighted as it is now.

~~ Alexis Soyer, A Shilling Cookbook (1855)

Alexis Benoît Soyer

Jamie Oliver’s fight to bring nutritional nirvana to West Virginia might remind you of somebody.

That somebody was Alexis Benoît Soyer, a flamboyant French chef born in the same year as Abraham Lincoln. Soyer died in 1858 as a result of contracting Crimean fever* at the side of Florence Nightingale, working to reduce the pain and suffering of British soldiers sent to the Crimea “not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”**

Before Soyer so gallantly sailed to the Crimea at his own expense, he took up the cause of the London poor, particularly the Huguenot émigré silk weavers in Spitalfields and the starving millions in Ireland.

He set up soup kitchens in London with the help of wealthy benefactors, mostly women. When the desperate British government sought him out in 1847 to deal with the starving Irish, he stepped up to the stove and doled out 6000 meals a day in less-than-ideal conditions. Making the most of the media of the day,  Soyer wrote copious letters to The Times.

Like Nightingale, he tried to create nutritious food, using some of the nutritional knowledge emerging from the work of scientists like Justus von Leibig, who touted the benefits of beef extract and who proposed its use for laborers and people suffering from illnesses.

Thus was born Soyer’s famous “Famine Soup.”  Soyer claimed that this soup could sustain a healthy working man.

Ingredients for Famine Soup (Large Quantity):

12-1⁄2 lbs leg of beef
100 gallons of water
6-1/4 lbs drippings
100 onions and other vegetables
25 lbs each of flour (seconds) and pearl barley
1-1/2 lbs brown sugar
9 lbs salt

Ideally, in looking at the ingredients, the drippings, sugar, flour, and barley would provide energy and spare the protein in the beef from being used as energy. Depending upon what types of vegetables the cooks threw into the pot, the soup also likely provided vitamins and minerals in some quantity. Soyer recommended celery leaves, turnips, and the green ends of leeks, which we usually thrown away.  He figured that the cost of a quart of this soup cost ¾ d. Unfortunately, many critics pounced on Soyer and upbraided him for misrepresenting the nutritional value of his soup. Twelve pounds of meat to 100 gallons of water DOES make a pretty “skinny” soup.

But Soyer’s heart sat firmly in the right place, as he made clear in Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, or the Poor Man’s Regenerator:

Though I have fulfilled my promise by giving publicity to my Receipts for Food, which I have composed for the poor, it has been suggested to me by the benevolent, to publish a small pamphlet with the following receipts, which might prove useful to humanity at large, having the great advantage of being very cheap and easily made. I have also added a few simple receipts for dishes, which may be made at a trifling expense, by copying which, every labouring family may reduce their expense, and live much better than they have hitherto done.

Alcide Mirobolant

Punch quipped about this “Famine Soup,” saying it was “not Soup for the Poor, but rather, Poor Soup!”  In creating a stereotypical French chef named “Alcide Mirobolant,” William Makepeace Thackeray parodied Soyer in Pendennis,  a novel published in 1849.

Soyer served as the first chef of the Reform Club in London and hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. Because he never learned to write in English, he turned to F. Volant and J. R. Warren to write a prolific stream of cookbooks, including books for bettering the nutrition of soldiers and the poor. You will find many of his books on Google Books. (See list below.)

The impact of most migrating French chefs might not have been on the same level as Soyer, whose camp stove was used as late as the Gulf War in the early 1990s, but examining their influence proves that much remains to be disc9vered.

________________

*Modern medical experts believe “Crimean fever” may have been typhoid fever.

** In the words of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Books by Soyer:

The Gastronomic Regenerator: a Simplified and Entirely New System of Cookery … Suited to the Incomes of all Classes (1846)

Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, or the Poor Man’s Regenerator (1848)

The Modern Housewife or Menagère (1849)

The Pantropheon, or History of Food and its Preparation (1853)

Alexis Soyer’s Shilling Cookery for the People (1855)

Soyer’s Standard Cookery for the People (1855) (Enlarged and revised American edition of A Shilling Cookery for the People)

Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, Being Historical Rminiscences of the Late War … (1857)

Instructions to Military Hospital Cooks in the Preparation of Diets for Sick Soldiers … the Receipts, by G. Warriner and A. Soyer (1860)

Books About Soyer:

The Adventurous Chef: Alexis Soyer, by Ann Arnold (2002, juvenile)

The People’s Chef, by Ruth Brandon (2006)

Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef, by Ruth Cowen (2006)

Portrait of a Chef, by Helen Morris (1938)

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

To India, via Paris’s Le Passage Brady

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Map of French India, 1741 - 1754

In spite of French presence in India for a couple of centuries, trying to find Indian curry in France tends to be a bit of a chore. The first Indian restaurant didn’t open in Paris until 1975. Those in the know (mostly British expatriates pining for curry in London) lament the lack of good Indian food, although there’s an occasional stampede to certain Indian restaurants in parts of Paris, only to find that the owners are Pakistanis.  And Richard C. Morais’s  delicious novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey (2010), although fiction, documents what happens when French and Indian cuisines clash.


Like the guardians of the French language, culinary purists want to keep French cuisine free of foreign influences. But given the global mobility going on literally and virtually, well, it didn’t take long for modern chefs like Pierre Gagnaire to sprinkle a bit of curry spices into their pots and casseroles. (One of his books carries the title Reinventing French Cuisine … .)

Pierre Gagnaire's Infusion au vadouvan (Photo credit: Adam)

Because France also colonized parts of the Caribbean, most people in France with experience of curry identify the taste with Caribbean Colombo, a Creole curry from Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Lest you  still think French curry is an oxymoron, think back to Gourmet magazine (oh, how I miss that one) and an August 2008 article written by Kemp M. Minifie.

Minifie first tasted vadouvan on top of some salmon, at a Parisian restaurant, Le Chateaubriand. And the rest is history.

Or maybe the real discovery of vadouvan lies with Season 5 of the Bravo’s television network series, “Top Chef.”

Le Passage Brady (Photo credit: Ratozamanana Andriankoto)

Vadouvan, sold by Indian grocers in the Velan market in the 10th arrondissement, in the Passage Brady, now sits on the spice shelf alongside the quatre épices and fines herbes. Related to a masala mixture from Pondicherry called thalippu vadagam (see recipe HERE), vadouvan took American culinary media, if not by storm, at least for a bit of a ride for a while.

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Here’s the recipe as printed in Gourmet:

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

  • 2 lb onions, cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1 lb shallots, halved
  • 12 garlic cloves, peeled
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
  • 1 tablespoon thinly sliced fresh curry leaves (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon ground cardamom
  • 1 teaspoon brown mustard seeds
  • 3/4 teaspoon turmeric
  • 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon hot red-pepper flakes
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

  • EQUIPMENT:

    an electric coffee/spice grinder or a mortar and pestle
  • Preheat oven to 350ºF with rack in middle.
  • Pulse onions in 3 batches in a food processor until very coarsely chopped (there may be a few large pieces remaining), transferring to a bowl. Repeat with shallots, then garlic.
  • Heat oil in a deep 12-inch heavy nonstick skillet over high heat until it shimmers, then sauté onions, shallots, and garlic (stir often) until golden and browned in spots, 25 to 30 minutes.
  • Grind fenugreek seeds in grinder or with mortar and pestle. Add to onion mixture along with remaining ingredients, 1 Tbsp salt, and 1 tsp pepper and stir until combined.
  • Transfer to a parchment-paper-lined large 4-sided sheet pan and spread as thinly and evenly as possible. Bake, stirring occasionally with a skewer to separate onions, until well browned and barely moist, 1 to 1 1/4 hours.

    Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen
COOKS’ NOTES:
  • Vadouvan keeps in the refrigerator 1 month (cool before covering) or in the freezer 6 months.
  • We’ve also got a web-exclusive recipe using the leftover vandouvan.

RECIPE BY PAUL GRIMES

When I made this, I used red onions, and the spice mixture turned out darker than I expected. BUT when thrown into a bit of shimmering chicken fat and stirred about with rinsed fresh spinach, oh boy, the resulting flavor astonished me. Just one tiny taste made the time it took to make vadouvan was well worth it. Yellow or white onions result in a more golden color, thanks to the turmeric.

And just in case you’re in Paris now, or will be soon: Those in the know say that Saravana Bhavan (a chain of Indian vegetarian restaurants) on Rue du Faubourg St. Denis and Krishna Bhavan on Rue Cail serve passable Indian food in Paris.

Others say that a restaurant called Passage de Pondichéry is the place to frequent.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

East is East and West is West: Pondicherry and French Curry

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Street scene in Pondicherry (Photo credit: Ascension Gateway)

In Pondicherry, Pondichéry, or Puducherry as it is now called again (since 2006), you still see streets sparkling with old colonial buildings, dating back to a time when passersby heard French spoken daily.

Puducherry Police Officer (Photo credit: Adam Jones)

Yet, those buildings, policemen’s hats, and a fully functioning French lycée or school, are among the few overt signs that you’ll notice of France’s colonial presence in India. The French colonized a piece of India in the 1600s, leaving only in 1954. After the Treaty of Paris in 1815, France had rights to five comptoirs (trading posts), including Pondicherry. The comptoirs were Mahé, Yanaon, Karikal, and Chandernagor. Unlike the British or the Dutch, the French borrowed very little from the cooks of Pondicherry. And did the cooks of Pondicherry dip their figures into the ragoût? Likely not, if the ragoût contained beef or pork or even chicken.

A series of French governors ruled the region.  Bellanger, a French officer, took charge on February 4, 1673. In 1674 François Martin became the the first French governor and turned the area into a port town.  Joseph François Dupleix, who arrived in 1742, left the deepest footprint. Dupleix married a Creole woman from Chandernagor, a sign that you know led to changes in the kitchen as well as the social melting pot.

Governor Joseph François Dupleix (Picture credit: Larousse)

Divided as it was into two sectors, the French Quarter (“Ville Blanche” or “White Town”) and the native Quarter (“Ville Noire” or “Black Town”), the mere geography of Pondy stymied culinary interchanges, although you will still find French restaurants in the city today.

But some clues let you in on the fact that French colonists didn’t completely abhor curry and brought a taste for it back home to France.

Old Pondicherry Café

Antoine Beauvilliers first mentioned curry in his 1814  work  L’Art de cuisinier (The Art of French Cookery). He mentions curry (Kari) in three recipes: Curry Sauce, ou à la Indienne; Curry of Chickens (Kari de Poulets); and Sauce en Tortue.

Curry Sauce, ou à la Indienne. Put into a stewpan three spoonfuls of reduced telouti, as much consommi, a tea-spoonful of currypowder ; take a little saffron, boil it in a small pan; when it has given its colour rub it through a search into the sauce ; let it boil, and skim it; if it 15* not hot enough put in a little Cayenne pepper.

Sauce en Tortue. Put into a saucepan a ladleful of reduced Espagnole, a large glass of hard Madeira, a tea-spoonful of curry powder, and half that quantity of Cayenne; reduce the whole; skim, put in some cocks’ combs and kidneys, artichoke bottoms, a veal or lamb’s sweetbread ; boil the whole, that the ingredients may taste and take the colour of the sauce; at the moment of serving put in six or eight hard yolks of eggs; take care not to break them in stirring the sauce, and serve.

Even the British commented on the plethora of French cuisine in India.

Colonel Kenney-Herbert, a British Army officer and author of ‘Wyvern’ (Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert): Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878), wrote that “… dinners of sixteen or twenty, thoughtfully composed, are de rigueur; our menu cards discourse of dainty fare in its native French.” [Emphasis added.] This trend began, according to Lizzie Cunningham, as early as 1838 or before. In Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2006), she quotes (no attribution given) a British visitor to India who delighted in finding that “French cookery is generally patronised, and the beef and mutton oppressions of ten years since are exploded.”

Given that Indian cooks — generally males — working for gentlemen like Kenney-Herbert and Governor Dupleix toiled in rather rustic kitchens, as David Burton says in The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India (1993),

… this overblown fare was precisely what was demanded of the Indian cook of the era. Faced with this task, without proper ingredients or any real tuition, and using primitive charcoal stoves with rudimentary implements, in a hot humid climate (which made the task of pastry making, for instance, almost impossible), it is little wonder that what the Indian cook produced fell somewhat short of classic French cuisine.

No less a luminary than Georges Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for chicken curry (Emincé de volaille au curry) in his monumental work, Le Guide Culinaire, saying as well that, “It may be of interest to note that the authentic type of Indian curry is not suitable for European tastes, but the flavor of the above sauce is generally acceptable.”

David Burton, in his more recent French Colonial Cookery (2000), suggests that cross-cultural marriages like that of Dupleix led to the invention of spicy French-influenced dishes in Puducherry, such as Panchanaga Seekarane (Pondicherry Lamb Roulades) and one recorded by French poet Stephane Mallarmé in a French magazine in 1874, called Moulongtani pour un Réveillon (a version of the more well-known English mulligatawny.

French Colonial Architecture in Puducherry

 

Photo credit: Melanie M.

For primary manuscripts on the French in Pondicherry, see Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscripts in the French institute of Pondicherry (4 volumes).

To be continued …

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Culinary Diffusion? Yes, in Alain Ducasse’s Kitchens

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Chef Alain Ducasse (Photo credit: Executive Class Blog)

In a way, it’s the French version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.”

World-famous French chef, Alain Ducasse, chose fifteen women from Sarcelles, a suburb of Paris housing mostly poor immigrants mainly from France’s former North African colonies.

Sarcelles (Photo credit: La Gazette)

Sarcelles market (Photo credit: Banlieues de France blog)

An article in The New York Times tells the whole story, almost a Cinderella saga:

15 Women Win Golden Tickets to Alain Ducasse’s Kitchens – NYTimes.com

All are from Sarcelles, all were either born outside of France or are first generation immigrants. Most have a passionate interest in cooking but little knowledge of French cuisine, accustomed instead to North African traditions and families eating from one large dish. A young woman from Mali screamed, her friends said, when she first saw a live lobster.

Like many culinary schools, Ducasse’s

… also runs a small restaurant, open to the public, which dares to eat the products of the school kitchen, but for only $18 for a three-course meal. The other day it was a beef roast or a curried chicken, with flan for dessert topped with a big tuile cookie.

Living as they do in what can only be described as housing projects not unlike those in big cities in the United States, these fifteen women know what an opportunity they’ve been given. According to the article, they do not feel patronized at all.

It shall be interesting to see what, if any, effect their formal training has on their home cooking in the future. And … what effect their culinary heritage will have on French cuisine.

Alain Ducasse Cooking School

Making tuile cookies can be a bit challenging at first, but if you’re interested, try this recipe from Epicurious.com.

Photo credit: Robin Catesby

For more about Alain Ducasse’s cuisine, see the following books:

Grand Livre de Cuisine: Alain Ducasse’s Desserts and Pastries

By Alain Ducasse and Frederic Robert

Ducasse Flavors of France

By Alain Ducasse and Linda Dannenberg

By Alain Ducasse, Didier Elena, Franck Cerutti and Patrick Ogheard
By Alain Ducasse and François Simon

L’Atelier of Alain Ducasse : The Artistry of a Master Chef and His Protegés, By Alain Ducasse, Jean-Françoise Revel, Benedict Beauge and Hervé Amiard

Spoon:  Food & Wine, By Alain Ducasse and Hartmut Kiefer

Brassai’s Paris, a View Through the Tunnel of Time

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Photo credit: Brassai

Before the second world war, filled with the wandering souls of the “Lost Generation,” Paris throbbed with the fluttering notes of jazz and the clattering of horse hooves on cobblestones.

And Paris also served as a subject for the art of photographers like Brassai, one of the earliest photojournalists, influenced by surrealism.

Brassai (born in Hungary as Gyula Halász) moved to Paris in 1924, worked as a journalist, and started taking pictures in 1930 to use with his articles. He had a penchant for photographing the other side of Paris, life as it happened after the sun sank behind Les Halles. Among myriad subjects, verging on a Toulouse Lautrec-like fascination for the ladies of Pigalle, he also liked to photograph people in cafés.

Photo credit: Brassai

Photo credit: Brassai

Another Toulouse-Lautrecian figure, Henry Miller said of Brassai, ”When you meet the man you see at once that he is equipped with no ordinary eyes.”

Photo credit: Brassai

Most of the people are not eating, but bistro fare — this is France after all — has not changed much over the decades since Brassai focused his camera on these fascinating faces.

"Bijoux" in Place Pigalle Bar (Photo credit: Brassai)

Simone de Beauvoir at Café Flore, by Brassai

De Beauvoir and Sartre created much of their work in cafés, as did other writers of the times. I once read that the streets, for many Parisians, open up to what ought to be called a big living room, which makes sense because most people live in extremely tiny spaces …

Jean-Paul Sartre at Café Flore, by Brassai

For more about Brassai:

Brassai: Letters to My Parents, by Brassai, Peter Laki, and Barna Kantor (1997)

Brassai: Paris By Night, by Brassai and Paul Morand

Brassai: The Eye of Paris, by Anne W. Tucker (1999)

Brassai: The Monograph, by Brassai, Annick Lionel-Marie, Alain Sayag, and Jean-Jacques Aillagon (2000)

A ubiquitous, delicious dish that symbolizes bistro cuisine, essentially a form of le fast food, steak frites simply shouts “Paris!”

Afterwards ... Taken in a Paris Bistro 2010 (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

Here’s Alice B. Toklas on frites:

The Real Right Way for French Fried Potatoes

Peel the potatoes, cut them all of the same size and length.  Put them in moderately hot oil, lard or very white beef fat—there should be enough so that the potatoes are not crowded. When the potatoes come to the surface, remove them from the fat at once. Let the fat reheat quickly, increase the highest flame. The potatoes should not be out of the fat more than 2 minutes. Plunge them into the fat for the second time and remove at once. Sprinkle with salt and serve at once. (From: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954)

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

La Malbouffe, Oui ou Non? Fast (Ethnic) Food and the French

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If you saw the following headline  pop up on one of the many news feeds streaming into thousands of computers around the global, you might think, “Oops, some editor didn’t ingest their caffeine fix in time!”

French Get the Taste for Fast [Ethnic] Food

(Click on the link above to read the article that inspired this post.)

Ah oui? The honest-to-goodness truth? A pita restaurant in Antwerp, Belgium scored a whopping 13 out of 20 points from the picky GaultMillau critics.  Après ça, le deluge, because after that, in the minds of purists anyway, French cuisine is tainted, going to the dogs, garbage it is.

But it isn’t, not at all.

You see, the French* left a lot crumbs so to speak in their overseas empire, La France d’Outre-Mer. But generally they did not eat the local food, at least not like the Dutch did or even the British, who respectively went for the Indonesian rijsttafel (“rice table”) or Indian curry like starving men, which some of them were at times. Starving, that is.

Marché Dejean (Goutte d'Or neighborhood, Paris) Photo credit: David Dufresne

And so what do you find there in that article, but pita, falafel, and hummus, foods dear to many Lebanese immigrants and others from the Middle East. But of course there is much more to be had. The open-air markets of teem with food that might have been unfamiliar to the average grand-mère decades ago.  Customers seeking that food come from all the perimeters of the French colonial empire.

Given the prices of traditional French food (even that served in homey bistros can easily set you back a couple hundred dollars in the flash of a menu), it’s no wonder that the French finally find themselves craving the food of their former colonies.

That’s not to say that the French NEVER ate the local food when they lived and worked Outre-Mer. In “A Moroccan Luncheon,” French writer Colette described the food so well that by the end of the short passage, you might just find yourself headed toward the kitchen:

She had already placed before us pale griddle-cakes cooked in sugared butter and sprinkled with almonds, pigeons bathed in succulent juice with green olives, chickpeas buried fresh beans with wrinkled skins, and lemon cooked and recooked and reduced to a savory purée …

The following photos suggest just some of the many gastronomic pleasures surrounding adventurous French eaters:

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

 

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen

Photo credit: Busy Pochi

Photo credit: Vee Satayamas

Photo credit: Moacir P. de Sá Pereira

Photo credit: Graham Holliday

For a little more about France’s diversity, see:

“Immigration in Postwar France,” by Toby McNeill (1996)

The Ethnic Paris Cookbook, by Charlotte Puckette and Olivia Kiang-Snaije (2007)

*”The French” could be debated and defined in any numerous ways, but here I guess we must refer to native-born French people, with roots reaching back to the Gauls.

And you can’t leave without a recipe, this time for homemade Harissa, a North African condiment that will take off the top of your head if you wield that spoon too carelessly. Use with just about any North African dish, goes particularly well with couscous — just drizzle a little over your food before starting to eat.

HARISSA
Makes about 1 cup

12 dried chiles, seeds and stems removed, soaked in warm water for half an hour
4 large garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 t. salt
1 T. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 t. ground coriander seeds
1 t. ground fennel seeds
1/2 t. ground cumin seeds
2 T. extra virgin olive oil

After soaking the chiles, drain them and (wearing rubber gloves) squeeze out excess water. Place chiles and remaining ingredients in a food processor or blender and purée.

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

The Things They Carried*: Brief Glimpses of French Food in Vietnam

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In the film, “Indochine,” you sense the rampant orientalism that made Edward Said one of the most quoted scholars on the subject of colonialism and the creation of the “Other.” The heat, the fans, the sweat, the passions, the exoticism and erotocism, all these visual cues recreate the mental picture many of us have regarding colonialism, at least of the type practiced by the Western powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mix in the complex history of Vietnam and you’ve got a real mélange, an astonishing mix of ingredients.

Although the French ruled Vietnam for only ninety years beginning in 1858, their impact on the region called French Indochina, including Laos and Cambodia, began much earlier with the arrival of French Jesuit missionaries in 1615 and was profound.

According to David Burton, in his enlightening but incomplete French Colonial Cookery: A Cook’s Tour of the French- Speaking World (2000), the Vietnamese only added a few ingredients of French cooking to their plates and stoves: “French bread, pâté, pâtisserie, jams and conserves, butter, coffee, beer, wine, condensed milk, yoghurt, ice cream, and vegetables such as artichokes, cabbages, cauliflowers, carrots, and asparagus.” (And later, “La Vache Qui Rit” cheese, seemingly indestructible no matter what tropical heat storekeepers subjected it to, no matter where in the tropics, including Burkina Faso, formerly Haute Volta.) Many of the vegetables grew well in Dalat, a hill station 4000 feet about sea level. In a manner akin to the British colonials in similar hill stations in India, the French retreated to Dalat to escape the impossibly hot summer weather.

Other foods brought by the French to Vietnam, and adopted by Vietnamese cooks, include beef (beef stew or Bo Ragout still appears on menus, often without Asia-specific spicing), crème caramel (flan), meat-filled pastries,  and Banh Mi, the ubiquitous sandwiches made with baguettes and liver pâté. Some writers  suggest that French soup cookery also influenced Vietnamese soup-making, too.

Vietnamese (Indochinese) Family at Table (Collection Raymond Chagneau)

In her colonial-era diary, Claudie Beaucarnot wrote in 1943, “We equally devoured the crêpes and the Vietnamese sausage purchased in a small village where we stopped to procure charcoal,” indicating that two of France’s signature dishes — saucisses (sausages) and crêpes — were available as street food.

But recall that this is just a brief glimpse (for now) of the situation vis-a-vis French food in Vietnam. The impact of ninety years of colonialism seems not to have made a huge dent in the traditional cuisine of the country — heavily influenced as it was by Chinese cuisine since the second century AD. A fascinating story, worthy of a film, yes, just not “Indochine,” which I confess I did like because of the political statements it made alongside the usual portrayal of colonialists and their economic and social power and privilege.

Dalat, Vietnam (Photo credit: Eric & Margaret of "Scott Free")

Domaine de Marie Convent, Dalat (Photo credit: Brad.Leah)

The following photos hint at the lingering legacy of France’s ninety-year rule of Vietnam:

The Green Tangerine, Hanoi

 

Mango Crepes (Photo credit: alpha)

Turtle Croissant (Photo credit: Bhakti Dharma)

 

Vietnamese Dish with Side of Baguette (Photo credit: Derrick Lau)

 

Street Vendor with Baguettes (Photo credit: Brian Jeffrey Beggerly)

 

Baguettes (Photo credit: Jasmi Yusoff)

 

La Vache Qui Rit in Saigon (Photo credit: Andrew)

Crème caramel (Flan) (Photo credit: Wanderlust & Lipstick)

Thit Bo Kho, a Vietnamese version of French beef stew, reflects the French-influenced use of beef in Vietnamese cuisine. Here’s a link to  a recipe that ought to warm you up on a cool winter day.

Thit Bo Kho (Photo credit: Ravenous Couple)

*With regards to Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990).

© 2011 C. Bertelsen

Gifts of French Food: Blogs to Hold in Wonder

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Photo Credit: Beth Jusino

With each gust of drafty air from the front door, the candles  shimmer, and the flickering light scintillates off blood-red wine glasses and the golden gilt rimming them. Your mouth rounds in an “O” as you see the table for the first time. The sight never fails to cast its spell as, for a brief  moment, the magic sweeps through you. All these small moments add up to the persistent memories looming over every Christmas Future. Yes, you might have kicked your brother’s foot under the table or stuck out your tongue at your sister. You might have rolled your eyes as Aunt Mimi told the same story over and over. And you might have knocked over the bottle of red wine on Mother’s pristine damask tablecloth, its purity forever blemished by your clumsiness. But no matter what you did at the Christmas table as a child, you will still remember the English china that belonged to Grandmother and the thrill of  eating real butter instead of margarine. You will still remember the beauty.

Gathering around the table, such a powerful, almost primeval, image.

The other day, Ronelle of MyFrenchKitchen, posted the most stunning photographs of Christmas dinner tables that I have ever seen. And so she got me to thinking about two of the marvelous French blogs* I read. It took a while to find these, let me tell you, so this morning I thought, “Why not share them?’

So here we go, a few of the jewels, odes to the creative (and philosophical) human spirit:

MyFrenchKitchen:

“So welcome here in my French kitchen in Touraine, on the banks of the river Loire. Join me in a cup of coffee and let’s accept that which isn’t always a success in the kitchen OR in life. But mostly, let’s share our passion for all that’s good in life…great food, crazy family life, great friendships,  great experiences.”

As for Ronelle’s hand-drawn recipes — fabulous seems like such an overused word, just like “awesome,” but there’s no other way to put it. Take a look.

Lucy’s Kitchen Notebook:

“We celebrate Epiphany every year here in France with galletes des rois, a custom that involves a lovely mix of rituals that embellish the Christian holiday, coming from all kinds of sources – the cake for the poor, stemming back to the middle ages, the “feve“, symbolizing renewal according to some, the crown symbolizing the French monarchy, but it all centers around the idea that giving creates life and giving can elevate anyone from pauper to king. Generosity of spirit is the little red pill that gets you out of the Matrix. The epiphany that frees us.”

Regarding Lucy’s photographs — no words can describe them, none. See for yourself.

Joyeux Noël!!!

Photo Credit: Nancy's Daily Dish

*Both written in English.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

Another Last Word on French Cuisine and UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” Program

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The recent inscribing of  ”intangible cultural heritage” status  to “the French gastronomic meal” by UNESCO brought both cheers and jeers to the table.

As I wash my hands and get out my Le Creuset terrine baker for the paté de campagne en croûte for Thanksgiving appetizers, I’d like to share a quote with all of you about French cuisine, at least as it exists in the incarnation rewarded with the UNESCO designation:

Although it may be commonly agreed, and not by the French alone, that gastronomy is somehow “innately”‘ French, only in the nineteenth century, however important the ancien régime contribution, can one identify anything resembling a national culinary discourse. Of course, assigning gastronomy to the French “character” or unique geography or exceptional climate  begs the question, all the more so since most of the institutions, ideologies, and practices that express these character traits originated, again, only in the nineteenth century.  … In fixing these culinary practices in a circumscribed space, the gastronomic field allows us to distinguish between what is distinctively French and what is more generally modern about these culinary practices, what French cuisine and French culinary practices share with other cuisines as well as the elements that set French foodways apart. [Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France." In Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss, eds. French Food: One the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture (2001).]

France currently supports its highly codified culinary heritage via institutions and programs already in place, like the Chambre Syndciale de la Haute Cuisine Française, École Nationale, Centre National des Arts Culinaires (founded in 1985), Web pages, classes for young children concerning cuisine and taste, Meilleur Ouvrier de France, and the Salon du chocolat.

French family meal (LIFE photo)

To my way of thinking, this quote points out that, in some ways, the UNESCO award is simply business as usual for France. They will now have a bit more money to put into programs similar to the ones they now operate, as well as new ones. The French have been aware for some time that their cuisine and the products that go into face some serious challenges, not unlike those faced by other developed nations. Changes in agricultural practices and consumer tastes affect cuisines all over the world. So too the immense immigration patterns, particularly in the case of France, where French citizens now hail from the far-flung borders of France’s former colonial empire.

True or not, many people, including the British, find French snobbery about their cuisine a bit off-putting. But as Jean-Robert Pitte, author of French Gastronomy and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the UNESCO designation says,

“This is not about trying to conserve the recipe of blanquette de veau or boeuf bourguignon,” nor is it “an affirmation of superiority,” he says. “Every country in the world has dishes of quality and identity that people gather around and share. But there is a French way to prepare a gastronomic meal, with a succession of dishes and association of food and wines, that is specifically French.”

Fads come and go, sometimes cooking methods go out of style (think American casseroles and, yes, some fancy French concoctions that can only be prepared by hordes of commis and other slaveys working in hot vast kitchens), but I still hold that preserving a part of French culture that impacted the world so strongly is not a bad thing. As Pitte muses, ”What’s threatened is the joy of living we get through what we eat and drink.”

And THAT’s what’s evolving everywhere, or so it seems. All the focus on eating healthy, worrying about antibiotics in the Thanksgiving turkey (which you might eat only once a year), excessive concern over organic foods, all this detracts from the very thing that food does for us as humans: it nourishes us and brings us  into community with others. Or at least I hope it does.

And that, for me, is the very important message conveyed by  UNESCO ‘s recognition of “the French gastronomic meal” (what a mouthful!). It’s not a question of nationalism, competition within communities or between cooks, it’s about forming community. And as much as people might rail and wail, the French ideal of the family meal, while not unique by any means since other cultures enjoy the same thing, presents us with an aide memoire of what we could lose if we don’t watch out.

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Émile Zola eating with his family (LIFE photo)

Butter, Bread, and Radishes

Gather together some fresh crusty bread, soften up some unsalted butter, and wash and trim lots of red radishes. Pull up your chair and pour some wine. Put some butter on the bread, sprinkle on some coarse sea salt, and top it with a radish. Eat.

© 2010 C. Bertelsen

French Cuisine, an Exposition on Medieval Food Not to be Missed

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Click on the image to “attend” a gorgeous exposition of the history of medieval French cuisine:

Peasants

Be sure to click on the images in order to start the slide shows, chock full of paintings depicting culinary life during the Middle Ages.