November 26, 2009
Posted by Kerry Saretsky, November 19, 2009 at 5:15 PM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
My love of turkey is only a recent development. And even at that, I only consent to eat it when it's freshly roasted, usually on Thanksgiving. Anything else—turkey sandwiches, turkey soups, turkey whatevers—just aren't going to happen. So I have a high sensitivity to those who want to try something other than turkey for Thanksgiving.
To me, these Quatre Épices Poussins are the perfect holiday bird. Something about Thanksgiving requires a bird, and I feel compelled to uphold that. But sometimes you want something smaller to alleviate leftover overflow in your apartment fridge, or something quick-cooking to disguise the fact that you were actually at work until two hours before your mother-in-law arrived, or something different from what you had last year. Tradition, after all, isn't for everyone. These young chickens are holiday poultry that cook quickly, are perfect for one (you can portion it for an army or a sweet dinner for two), are entirely unique, and have tremendous stage presence.
The stage presence comes from a traditional French spice blend called quatre épices, or four spices. Consisting of cracked black pepper, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, the blend is reminiscent of rich medieval dinners, centered around a great long table on which a roasted pig reclines, clenching an apple in its mouth. Highly spiced, and lightly spicy, it is a seasonal je ne sais quoi that makes these little crispy-skinned, succulent game birds special enough, and festive enough, for the holidays.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, November 12, 2009 at 6:30 PM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
I love this time of year. Not only is November home of Thanksgiving and my birthday—the two greatest dessert experiences per annum—but it's finally, definitely, and indisputably cold. While others pull out cashmere scarves and fleece-lined gloves, I pull out the enamel stew pots. It's braising season.
These sweet-tart lamb shanks fall of the bone with the prick of an eager fork. Tender, but bright, they don't lull the taste buds to sleep like many another seasonal stew. The meat is braised with windowpanes of garlic, dry white wine, rosemary, and lemon confit. Roasted pearl onions add a delicate, earthy sweetness that complements the deep citrus acidity of the lemon. The result is still comforting, with the braised, autumnal texture, but the flavor is pert and unexpected.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, November 5, 2009 at 5:15 PM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
Pâte à choux, or choux pastry, is the Madonna of doughs. It is always reinventing itself. It can be fried into beignets; boiled into Parisian gnocchi; piped into éclairs; piped with cheese and roasted in gougères; sliced and sandwiched into profiteroles. But the most simple and perfect of them all is when they're crusted in sugar and baked into the little-known (Stateside) chouquettes.
Chouquettes loosely translates to "little bits of choux." They are usually sold in baskets perched atop the glass pastry cases of bakeries and pastry shops in France. A sort of afterthought, they are just profiteroles shells—crisp, airy, and hollow, crusted in lumps of pearl sugar. They are just a bit sweet, and slightly rich and eggy from the pastry. They make the perfect snack: unassuming, unextravagant, unfilling. But yet they add that touch of afternoon sweetness to the day, and take the edge off a rumbling belly.
Choux pastry, which is composed of one French word and "pastry," another intimidating word, sounds like it might not be worth the trouble. But in reality, it is one of the easiest doughs to make, and unusual in process too, so that you feel accomplished and chef-y. And once you've mastered choux, you can make any of the things I enumerated above.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, October 29, 2009 at 4:45 PM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
Last week I wrote about my trip to Provence this past summer, and my stay in a little seaside town called Cassis. I thought, from the name of the town, that I'd be sipping Kir Royales made with Burgundy's specialty crème de cassis (made from the homonymously named blackcurrant), but I ended up spending my entire trip in pursuit of the perfect bouillabaisse.
Bouillabaisse is a saffron seafood stew with a past. As the fishermen in Marseille harbor went out to collect the great fish they would sell to the upscale restaurants, they would also collect little local rockfish for themselves, like rascasse or scorpionfish. These they would throw jumbled into a stock nearly identical to the equally iconic soupe de poisson, along with some potatoes. And that would be dinner.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, October 15, 2009 at 5:30 PM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
I think the frequent recurrence of rissoles in this column of late reveals more about me than about French cuisine. When the weather turns too cold for me to go outside and fry myself, I come inside, and fry other things. Two weeks ago, it was summer fruit wrapped in puff pastry—a very conventional rissole. This week's shrimp and sorrel leaves wrapped in filo dough are about as unorthodox as the day is long—although, admittedly, with winter crouching towards us, the shorter days may not be the best yardstick.
I began a somewhat torrid love affair this summer with sorrel. As they say, the most important ingredient in any fiery relationship is mystery—and sorrel held that for me. It started at culinary school, where the chef conjured up salmon and a creamy sorrel sauce to match. My first question was, "Why do we always use lemon?" Sorrel speaks with the same acidic accent, but in a language far more grassy, earthy, and velvety.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, October 8, 2009 at 6:00 PM
"Think of these drumsticks as a savory-sweet Provençal version of the sticky chicken wings you nibble at the bar."
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
Fall is the new year of the fashion world, so this week's recipe will have a little something to do with trends. Thumbing through my stack of French culinary magazines, I discovered a delicious one: apricots and lavender. These Lavender-Apricot Chicken Drumsticks have three great things going for them: they are easy, cheap, and colorful (the peachy-orange of the apricots and muted violet of the lavender).
Lavender and apricot is a popular Provençal pairing. But the most interesting thing I learned when in Provence this summer: Provençals hardly ever eat lavender. When I visited an Herbes de Provence farm in Lourmarin, the owner guided us through bushes of thyme and rosemary towards the lavender. I asked what she puts in her special HdP blend. She rattled off a list, including summer savory and the aforementioned thyme and rosemary.
"What about lavender?" I asked. She turned to me, startled. "You mean, in the food?" she gasped. Apparently, lavender is a culinary trend that we have only appropriated from Provence (although, as I said, I often see it, gleaming and glossy, in French culinary magazines). For the Provençals, it remains exclusively in the realm of soap.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, October 2, 2009 at 11:30 AM
[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]
Whenever I think of rissoles I think of Rizzo from Grease, and that they, like her, are a little bit naughty. They are stuffed balls of all-butter puff pastry, deep-fried in oil—talk about grease. But done right, they are the best kind of beignet, or doughnut. These little Pop'ems or doughnut holes are a parting gift, a last hurrah of summer before the autumn chill hits and makes frivolous, delicate things like doughnut holes and berries seem a thing of the past, or the all too-distant summery future.
I have a somewhat sweet confession. When I was young, right on the way home from school, there was a Dunkin' Donuts. In what you might consider truly un-French fashion, Maman and I went through a phase where we stopped there nearly every day after school as an afternoon pick-me-up (we went through a similar phase with McDonald's french fries). And just as Maman, Gallic integrity intact, had no problem ordering french fries, so she had no problem ordering French crullers. As for me, I always stuck with the pink strawberry frosted. These rissoles are my homemade grown-up version.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, September 24, 2009 at 5:45 PM
[Photos: Kerry Saretsky]
For me, it still feels like summer—that means stolen moments outside and late night grilled dinners. My stomach doesn't feel quite as ready for fall, with its great stuffed roasts, as does my closet, with its new leather jacket and tall boots, and warm, tickling sweaters that make me crave a cooler day. And when eating French food in the summertime, it is always better to face South to Provence, where the wine and Champagne are served on the rocks, and the flavors are always light and bright and punchy as summertime itself.
When we think of tapenade, we usually envision a thick, smooth paste of black olives spiked with anchovies and garlic. But this version is tapenade's boisterous blond twin: briny green olives are kept chunky and are smashed to a crumbling rubble with the usual Nice suspects of lemon, thyme, garlic, capers, and anchovies. Matching green penne traps all the salty bits and pieces in its tentacling tubes. A chopped emerald city of baby spinach and arugula turn this room-temperature pasta into a salad.
I love to serve this pasta salad along with grilled steak or shrimp. Because the pasta has so much unusual flavor, you don't have to do a thing to the meat except cook it. And because this pasta salad is served at room temperature, I love to pack it for a picnic—whether that picnic is by the ocean or by the office water cooler. It's also the perfect thing to pick and peck on, perhaps because I can eat it straight from the fridge. I confess; it's addictive.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, September 10, 2009 at 5:00 PM
"Tarragon with tomato is the French answer to the Italian duet of tomato and basil."
I've said it before and I'll say it again: tarragon is a quintessentially French herb, distinctive and inimitable, and massively underestimated. Tarragon tastes to me like a cross between chervil and fennel—slightly licorice, delicately perfuming. It's reserved, but not a wallflower because its flavor is so distinctive. This week, the herb garden underdog is the hero of this easy, summery, satisfying chicken-on-the-bone stew.
For some inexplicable reason, tarragon has always struck me as feminine—and her first and second husbands are chicken and tomatoes. Tarragon is the secret to the best chicken salad, and tarragon with tomato is the French answer to the Italian duet of tomato and basil, another delicate but distinctive herb. Tomato and tarragon soup, served warm or cold in the summer, is a true treat and a welcome way to shake up everyday flavors.
I love this dish because it's light, yet hearty, cheap from the fall-off-the-bone dark meat chicken, but still elevated from the fresh summer tomatoes and tarragon, and vermouth that creates the stewy, steaming sauce. You should have many extra baguettes on hand for lapping up the broth.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, September 3, 2009 at 4:45 PM
I hate the summer: the heat, the ennui. Labor Day is the weekend I look forward to for months—when I start imagining the first of the cool fall breezes and the first day of school (yes, I was one of those kids). It's my real New Year. As summer takes one last gasp, I finally let myself enjoy the heat, perching at a picnic table full of sandwiches, and I find myself a pool somewhere. There is urgency to Labor Day: grill, tan, sweat. It's now or never.
I wanted to give you the recipe that I will be making for la famille this Labor Day. As some of you read in my post last week, my favorite sandwich this year is the lobster sandwich from Daniel Rose's restaurant Spring in Paris. Since so many of you thought it looked amazing (which it is), I thought I'd try to recreate it in my own kitchen. All it took was some local Florida spiny lobster, fresh citrus, chives, celery, and mayonnaise.
I took my first bite d'homard when I was in cooking school in Paris this summer. We were in the kitchen nine hours a day, six days a week. In fact, I was so exhausted and so overwhelmed with food that I hard ate anything. So when my best friend suggested we trek up towards Montmartre for lobster sandwiches, I figured it was about time I sat down, let someone else do the cooking, and ate.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, August 27, 2009 at 5:00 PM
Children always grow up too fast. For me, that meant wanting to drink wine so desperately so I could be just like Maman. But she had a strategy for dealing with me: just say yes.
It's hard to imagine extricating the French from their wine, and as we know from French Women Don't Get Fat, denial is not a part of the French regime, but rationing is. Many French children, yours truly included, start training for the main event—a glass of wine with dinner—from a very young age. First, we get a finger dipped in a glass of smoky Merlot. Then, a splash of Sauvignon Blanc diluted into our water. That's where I got the idea for this week's recipe: Drunken Angel Hair with Leeks and Cream.
The angel hair is cooked in a boiling cauldron of water and white wine, just like I had drank as a child, and then tossed together with a soft, sweet sautéed spaghetti-julienne of leeks and sweet cream, plus a little more "raw" wine to finish it off. It's like a drunken Vichyssoise with pasta instead of potato.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, August 20, 2009 at 5:15 PM
"I don't think the best technique is absorption—it's eating."
Grilled Port Lamb Chops with Garlic Confit and Sauce Vierge "Persillade" is a dish that contains more French words than a high school vocab quiz. A quick translation is a Frenched rack of lamb, cut into finger-food lollipops, soaked in Port, caramelized on the grill, then topped with a fresh, biting sauce made from soft, sweet garlic and parsley.
When I took French in school, my teacher, an outlandishly gentle, white-moustached little man, once tolerated my jabbering my way through an oral exam and then broke his steely silence with, "You speak the French of the Paris gutters." I laughed. Is that where Maman had come from?
Memorization is boring. People can debate all they like about the best way to "absorb" a language, but I don't think the best technique is absorption—it's eating. For instance, when I recently found myself eating dinner on the sidewalk in Paris my duck confit came with potatoes Sarladaise. I had no idea what they were, but I will now never forget the word Sarladaise as long as I live, for it will always conjure up blissful images of Place Dauphine in the summertime, the tinkling of pétanque balls, and sliced potatoes fried with garlic and duck fat. In short, I was mesmerized. Not memorizing.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, August 6, 2009 at 5:30 PM
"They are like potato chips for sweets fiends, and you could eat a whole sack of them before noticing they were gone."
Belles Lettres
When I was in second grade, I had a little cubby hole—a mailbox for returned art projects and writing experiments, like my first novel stitched together with dental floss. Even then, I had an appetite for romance, but there isn't much point in running after Mr. Postman when everything he delivered, you sent to yourself.
One day, I saw my French flag hanging out of my mailbox. We had been assigned, as good American children, to recreate the flags of our forebears. I had successfully achieved le Tricolore, with the help of Maman, in heavy weight red, white, and blue construction paper. But as I pulled the stiffly out-furled flag from its cache, a little sheet of paper, light as a leaf tossed in the back-to-school wind, floated down to the carpet. I knelt in my knee socks and picked it up. On a tiny rectangle of torn out spiral notebook paper it read:
Kerry,
I like you a lot.
Your Secret Admirer.
Except, the Rs in my name were backwards. Despite his minor fault in orthography, I felt my knees knock together, my palms go sweaty, and my face flush hot. I was only six years old, but I had a feeling I would be hungry for this feeling for the rest of my life.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, July 30, 2009 at 4:45 PM
"Too often, we think of French haute cuisine without remembering the old, rustic heart that beats beneath it."
A Split Personality
France is a two-faced country. About a month ago, I ordered duck confit at an English French restaurant. It came out like a sculpture, the plate glazed with a filigree of haricots verts, and laced with a doily of frisée. It was all very embellished--like a necklace belonging to the Empress Josephine, with the duck as the crown jewel.
But then last week, I ordered duck confit in Paris. It was perched unceremoniously atop a smattered nest of coin-sliced potatoes, seared in duck fat and garlic. I often find that we regard the French, and French food, from without as something different from what they truly are within.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, July 26, 2009 at 5:00 PM
An American in Paris
One thing I learned from the chefs at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris is that love and cooking are one and the same.
I'm reserving some of their "cook from your heart" maxims for a later column--actually, I'm not sure if I can print some of their kitchen-bedroom metaphors on Serious Eats--but suffice it to say that I began to regard meat doneness and vegetable brunoise with a certain lovelorn inner eye. If I was turning an especially stubborn potato, I sometimes wondered what had happened to our relationship, and felt as though I was about to be broken up with; I would dab a tear on my kitchen towel.
I have written before that my father is a creature of habit. He eats salmon almost every night of the week, but he always takes one night off: Sunday, when he invariably indulges in Eggplant Parmigiana from the corner pizzeria. In New York, the Eggplant Parmigiana is a "Napoleon" of heavy-breaded, deep fried rounds of eggplant, whose greasy crispness is soaked into oblivion by the sweet-tart, runny-chunky tomato sauce, glued together with oozing mozzarella. I think Sophie Dahl described it best in her novel as something that will inevitably make you fat--but both she and I think there is no better New York City comfort food.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, July 16, 2009 at 4:00 PM
"Unwrapping the unlucky but delicious trout feels something like Christmas."
My grandmother is my own Edith Piaf.
Mémé has a voice that trembles on the air, buoyed up by soprano aspirations. It is a beautiful but homemade voice--like a quilt. There is no better kind of voice for lullabies.
She is the kind of lady who sings "La Vie en Rose" to herself in the swimming pool, cartooning the twisting belle époque ironworks of Métropolitain signs and Parisian street lamps about her in thin air amid the cruel, deep, empty blues of a Florida pool and a Florida sky. It is "La Vie en Rose" now, but when I was very young, she would spin a roulette wheel of dainty little French lullabies in her head, and wherever the ball landed, she would begin with her dancing-ballerina-in-a-jewel-box voice.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, July 9, 2009 at 6:00 PM
The Missing Ingredient
Sometimes, at the end of the day, when you look at a recipe, you realize, too late and too tired, that you don't have all of the ingredients. And that delightful pesto pasta you were planning will just have to go without pine nuts. It will look like pesto pasta, but you'll know, even if no one else does, that there's something missing.
It's the same with life.
You try to balance it out, follow the recommended doses of sweet pleasure and brittle work, to serve to yourself, in the end, the perfect plate, the life you expected, to savor and to enjoy. But sometimes, as with dinner, you have to forgo one of the ingredients. I have found, over the last couple of years, that my recipe for life may have contained one part too many European haute cuisine expatriate existence, and many parts too few of the friends and family that are to my heart what Maman's pot au feu is to my stomach.
I met Lauren when we were both freshmen at Princeton in September 2001. In two days time, she is marrying Jason halfway across the world from Paris in San Diego, and I can't be there. So as a gift to them, to go along with the Waterford, I thought I'd tell you about where we Princetonians learned to eat, and to share a recipe with you that I created for them.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, July 2, 2009 at 5:00 PM
"Poaching eggs are stubborn creatures; they go their own way as they please. But if you just take a spoon, and turn them about a bit, confuse them, then you are in control. Just like with a man. Now, they are trained and obedient, and all the more beautiful for it."
Lessons from a French Chef
Kerry had a little lamb.
But if it had been up to Mémé, I would have had a lot more.
Here in Paris, at cooking school, a chef told me this week to treat my food by its characteristics. Such a statement might seem vague and pedantic, especially when it was barked in French over the roar of ten boiling stoves. But Chef (who told me to be sure and write about him as soon as possible) approached my stove, and stood behind me as I successfully battered and broke another poaching egg.
"Kerry, Kerry!" he purred my name as the r's rolled up from his throat like the bubbles rising in my simmering pot. I know he's supposed to be a figure of authority, but that pronunciation reminds me of nothing but home, and the tears that began to surface in my eyes could have resulted from the drenching heat, the frustration of the damn egg, or just violent homesickness. No matter many how many times you turn your cutting board over in the kitchen, some emotional cross-contamination cannot be helped.
"Imagines que les oeufs sont les hommes." Imagine that eggs are men. And then he said something that made me stop dead where I was. He opened his mouth, and murmured a phrase that Maman has been muttering to me with great unsuccess for the last fifteen years: "Les hommes sont comme les chiens. Il faut les traîner." Men are like dogs. They must be trained.
He went on to tell me that poaching eggs are stubborn creatures; they go their own way as they please. But if you just take a spoon, and turn them about a bit, confuse them, then you are in control. Just like with a man. Now, they are trained and obedient, and all the more beautiful for it. Many of the students are offended by the French chefs' constant parallels between food and gender-based metaphor, but I think there is something lovely and touching in the French way of confronting the basic differences between the sexes, and embracing them, laughing at them, admiring them, and extolling them. I used to think Maman was terrible to call men dogs. Now, I'm beginning to understand. They like it!
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, June 25, 2009 at 6:00 PM
This is the story of the ugly duckling.
I wrote last week that I was a vegetarian growing up, and this is how it happened. One night, I was staying at my father's house, and he had already gone to sleep. But I couldn't. It's as if the New York stars and moon had aligned to keep me awake to witness this seminal moment that would direct my fate for the next decade.
I was flipping through the channels, but a seven year old late at night, I couldn't find any Gem or She-Ra to watch. Too disappointing. Oh, but I did find these adorable little animals! They were minks, and the documentary was on how they went from being these nuzzling little weasels to the coat hanging in Mémé's closet. If you've seen such a program, you know how awful it is, and why it's on very late at night: so little girls like me won't see them, have nightmares, and go vegetarian. But that's exactly what I did.
I scribbled down the address, and sent away for information. It arrived, with more cute weasels, and fliers to hand out around my class. What a great idea! I figured. I called my headmistress, and asked if it would be all right if I handed out some anti-fur campaign materials. My school was all-girls and old, and in a fiercely pro-suffragette mindset, allowed us girls to get carried away with our hearts. I've always love that about that school.
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Posted by Kerry Saretsky, June 18, 2009 at 5:30 PM
One of the most wonderful things my boyfriend has ever said to me was, "Kerry, you make vegetables exciting." Sexier words have never been spoken.
You may not know this about me, but I was vegetarian for twelve years growing up. And most of those years excluded not only red meat and chicken, but also seafood, eggs, and Jell-O. I assure you, I was not one of those girls who "doesn't like meat." I know I shouldn't say this, but I always get the feeling they're pulling the wool over my eyes My favorite pre-veg childhood lunch was a bacon cheeseburger. But I had pets, and I stayed up one late and fateful night watching an animal rights infomercial. And I was done, until I turned eighteen.
Maman was always handy with the Puy lentils, so I never much noticed I was different when I was at home. She made all sorts of exciting things (sexy vegetables run in the family): chickpea and vegetable tagines, oozing cauliflower gratins, broccoli roasted and webbed with fresh crumbs of baguette. But adolescence is about socializing, and that usually meant dinner at a friend's house after grueling hours of physics homework. It was always the same: we would seat ourselves around the table, and so-and-so's mom would trot out a gorgeous, gleaming roast chicken, plaid with a forest of herbs, glistening with butter. Or a side of salmon, basted red with chipotle, still smoking from the grill. Or joints of lamb, collapsing off the bone, stewing in wine. I remind you, it's not that I didn't love to eat meat. I was a conscientious objector.
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