A Simple Apple Tart

I offered to bring the dessert for a dinner party last Saturday. This was foolishly bold, given my notable non-expertise in the confectionery arts. But I knew that our hosts, Lars and Karen, were forgiving friends and moreover would feed us so well and bountifully that we wouldn’t have desire or capacity for an elaborate dessert. So I turned to my old standby, a simple apple tart.

My giant recipe binder has three good apple tart recipes that I’ve clipped from magazines, one very elaborate, one classy but pretty easy, and one quite minimal. The third, from an old issue of Saveur, is the one I use most often. The only ingredients are apples, sugar, and a plain short pastry crust made with butter.

Apples are difficult this season, maybe because our summer and fall were so rainy. The stores offer lots of choices, but a variety that’s crisp and juicy when you buy it one time may be dull and mushy when you come back the next time. However, I found some beautiful Romes this week. So beautiful that I bought too many; the tart only ever needs two or three. Well, applesauce coming up!

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I’d made the pastry the day before, so I just had to roll it out and line a tart pan. In my page on favorite kitchen tools I’ve talked about how much I like the Norpro pastry frame. Here it is in action:

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The recipe suggests using a false-bottomed pan so the tart can be free-standing when served. But since I’d be carrying it along Greenwich Village Saturday-night sidewalks, I took a sturdier ceramic dish. I sprinkled a tablespoon of sugar over the pastry base, paved it with thin slices of apple, sprinkled more sugar over them, and baked it.

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The apple slices cooked properly and looked pretty, but you can see that the edges of the crust are quite dark. I’m having trouble with my electric ovens again – they’re running not hot enough in the lower settings, too hot at the higher ones. The tart was supposed to take 40 minutes at 425 degrees. Fortunately, I checked it after 30 minutes and pulled it out immediately. To compensate for that mishap, I added one thing that isn’t in the recipe – I painted the apples with a glaze made with apricot preserves.

The dinner was fully as delicious and as copious as we’d expected, and the hosts were good enough to say the tart was just the kind of dessert they liked best. It might even have been true, because the four of us almost finished the whole tart.

Hake in Green Sauce

I think I know why there are no skinny Santa Clauses. The extra pounds that the holidays always put on me have been slower than usual to come off, this year. As a result, I’ve been looking around for relatively light recipes – but ones that would still be interesting to make. I found just the sort of thing I wanted in Anne Willan’s French Regional Cooking.

Merluza, Salsa Verde, or Hake in Green Sauce, is a Basque recipe from the book’s section on the Pyrenees and Gascony. The author explains that what’s called salsa verde there isn’t a sauce at all, but rather a garnish of green vegetables – in this case, peas, asparagus tips, and parsley. That made a penny drop for me: Last year I did a post about a dinner from three Spanish cookbooks, which included a dish of clams and hake in salsa verde. I wondered about the name at the time, since the only green thing in that recipe was some parsley. Now I know.

Willan’s recipe started by having me cook peas, asparagus tips, and little potatoes in three separate pots of boiling water. Then, I floured my thick hake fillet and browned it in olive oil. I put the fillet in a pyrex dish, topped it with minced garlic and a few shakes of cayenne, and surrounded it with the cooked vegetables. I added salt, sprinkled on parsley, drizzled on olive oil and a small amount of water, covered the dish and put it in the oven for 20 minutes.

It made quite a pretty presentation, though I was amused to see that it came out of the oven (left) looking just about the same as it did going in (right).

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And how did it taste? Well . . . all right. The hake was bland. Hake is pretty much always bland, so I should have known that. The fish didn’t have enough flavor of its own to rise above the strong garlic presence. The vegetables tasted nice and fresh, but having so briefly been acquainted with each other and the fish, there had been no interchange of flavors among them: each remained its own separate island of pleasant taste. The whole was definitely not greater than the sum of its parts.

Willan’s recipe does have several virtues, however. It would be an excellent dish to prepare in advance, since once it’s assembled it can sit for a few hours in the refrigerator before the short stint in the oven. And the calorie content had to be admirably low. I just wish the flavor content had been a little higher. If I do this recipe again, I’ll try it with cod or scrod, or maybe even monkfish.

A few more words about my concern for calories, which may seem odd in light of the kinds of dishes I often write about on this blog. (I don’t eat like that every day.) I was overweight for much of my life. Five years ago, I slowly and sensibly lost 50 pounds, and I’ve kept them off ever since. Still, three to five of those pounds creep back on during each holiday season and vacation, which forces me to grit my teeth and pare them back off. Doing this has so far kept me able to fit into my size-10 slacks (which may not seem very small to you, if you’re not 5’ 10” tall), but as I grow older, the struggle between vanity and gluttony gets ever more intense. Sometimes I don’t know which side I’m rooting for!

Pappardelle with Sausage and Cream

I’m not mad about cream sauces for pasta. Too often I find them either insipid or cloying; sometimes, in restaurants, even faked up with floury white sauce. But one of the first recipes Tom and I ever developed for our first cookbook, La Tavola Italiana, is a pasta sauce with cream that we still love whenever we make it for ourselves.

In Italian, the recipe is called alla contadina – peasant-style. Preparations of that name can vary greatly in different regions of Italy. This version from the north, because of the cream and the fresh egg-based pappardelle (which, if you don’t know them, are a little like fettucine on steroids). But cream is not what you principally notice as you eat. The robust main flavor is from crumbled Italian-style hot sausages, sautéed with chopped onions in butter and olive oil. Thinly sliced mushrooms provide a gentle foil, and the cream (and more butter) is just a soft, silky medium for their meeting.

The published recipe calls for homemade sausages as a preference, as well as homemade pappardelle. Tom and I did actually make our own sausages some years back, but we can get such good ones in stores now we rarely go to the trouble. But homemade pasta is an essential part of the dish for me, even though it’s also easy to buy now – and in fact, any fairly sturdy commercial egg noodles will do, as well. If you make your own pasta often enough, the process stops seeming like a lot of work and is just one of the things you do in the kitchen. This time I made just enough for two servings of pasta.

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The sauce is also easy to make. Rather than describe the steps, I’ve taken a photo of the recipe’s page in our book – complete with one of the food stains that adorn so many pages of my frequently used cookbooks!

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And here’s the result – just waiting to receive a topping of grated parmigiano and freshly ground pepper on our individual servings.

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If you try the recipe, first taste it just as is; you might find it spicy enough from the sausage. But the cheese and pepper gives it a little extra oomph. And, as Julia Child might have said if Paul had taken her to Rome rather than Paris, Buon appetito!

Lobster Thermidor; Blini for Caviar

Today starts my third year of weekly reports on my cooking adventures. In 2010, per a New Year’s resolution, I wrote only about making new-to-me recipes from my cookbook collection. Last year I broadened out to old favorites as well. For 2012 I’ll keep that openness. This post, about my just-past New Year’s dinner, covers one recipe of each kind.

Lobster Thermidor, despite the name, always strikes me as an ancien régime dish. It’s sinfully rich, but Tom and I get a yen for it occasionally. It has the kind of lushness and voluptuousness that is missing from much contemporary cuisine. In the same class, champagne and caviar, that seasonal classic, seemed a suitably over-the-top way to precede the lobster. And, in keeping with the ancien régime theme, I decided to try my hand at making blini to serve the caviar on.

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Blini

I had recipes for these tiny yeast-raised Russian pancakes in several cookbooks. The most authentic one called for buckwheat flour, which I haven’t been able to find lately, so I settled on the white-flour version in Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. The whole recipe was said to make 24 two-inch cakes; I thought 16 would more than do for the two of us and cut quantities accordingly.

Flour, milk, a bit of sugar, and yeast made the first sponge, which rose exuberantly in 1½ hours. Next I had to beat in egg yolks, blended with softened butter, more flour, and salt. Here I made what could have been a bad mistake. Without thinking, I broke the whole eggs over the butter and was already mixing them when I realized what I’d done. In the immortal word of a recent Republican presidential hopeful, Oops!  What to do – throw it out and start again? No, Tom counseled; just go with it. OK, I thought; after all, it’s only a glorified pancake batter; what could hurt? So I just went with it.

The next rising was even more vigorous than the first, producing a giant bowl of gloppy sponge that vaguely resembled the extraterrestrial creature from The Quatermass Experiment. This was the point at which the egg whites were supposed to have been whipped and folded in, but of course I didn’t need to do that. So on to the cooking.

The sponge was much thicker than a normal pancake batter, making it difficult to drop neat circles onto the griddle, but the little blini behaved beautifully, and didn’t stick at all. But oh, there were a lot of them! We ended up with 36, not the 16 that my two-thirds of the recipe was supposed to make. (Irma, what happened there?) Well, the extras will freeze, giving us an excuse to eat more caviar in 2012.

We had two kinds of caviar to taste that evening, both from American sturgeon. In the photo below, the one on the left is hackleback and the one on the right is transmontanus.

The transmontanus was twice as expensive, but it was also twice as good – like fresh osetra, compared to the hackleback’s saltier sevruga style. Having been lovers of true osetra before we were priced out of the market for it, the transmontanus is a happy new year’s discovery for Tom and me. (But it’s worth noting that we’ve had hackleback from other suppliers that was both less expensive and more osetra-like than this day’s batch. Clearly, the world of domestic caviar holds many mysteries.)

Our transmontanus caviar

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Lobster Thermidor

Though labor-intensive, Lobster Thermidor really isn’t difficult to make. Despite the name, it doesn’t actually date from French revolutionary times. It was invented in Paris in 1896, in honor of a new Sardou play named Thermidor at the Comédie Française. An old-fashioned dish it may be now, but it’s incredibly good. I use Julia Child’s recipe from the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is more elaborate than some versions, less so than others. The whole dish can be prepared well in advance, leaving only 15 minutes of finishing in the oven at dinner time.

The recipe starts simmering together wine, water, aromatic vegetables, and herbs, in which the lobster is then steamed. Here’s my two-pounder, fresh from the pot.

The steaming liquid is strained and used to make a velouté sauce, which is then enriched with the lobster’s coral and tomalley, dry mustard, egg yolks, and heavy cream. The lobster meat is cut up, sautéed in butter, and doused with cognac. Some of the sauce is mixed with the lobster meat, along with a few sliced mushrooms, previously stewed in butter and lemon juice. The mixture is heaped in the halved lobster shells; topped with the rest of the sauce, grated cheese, and dots of butter; and finished in a hot oven. Voilà!

This lavish a dish wants simple accompaniments; we had steamed asparagus and small boiled potatoes. Tom’s wine closet produced a lovely 2000 Corton-Charlemagne to drink with it.

Rich as the dish was, we had no trouble finishing it.

So, Happy New Year to all, and my thanks to the faithful followers of this blog. In 2012, I hope to hear more from you in comments — whether to agree, disagree, or just tell your own cooking stories!

Guinea Hen Jean Cocteau

Christmas dinner needs an important dish for a centerpiece. This year Tom and I started cookbook research and planning for the meal weeks in advance. We finally chose an elaborate recipe that we’d never made before from Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine: Pintadeau farci Jean Cocteau, stuffed guinea hen served with boudins blancs, boudins noirs, and sautéed apples.

What did Jean Cocteau have to do with the dish, you ask? We wondered too. It isn’t explained in La Cuisine, but I found out that, five years before it was published, Oliver had produced a very small, elegant printing of another book called Recettes pour un ami, with a preface and many illustrations by Cocteau, for whom three of the dishes were named. That book is a collector’s item now, listed for 375 pounds sterling when last available, so I’m never likely to see it.

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La Cuisine’s photo of the guinea hen looked good; all the ingredients were interesting, and the instructions seemed quite plausible when we read through the recipe. It wasn’t until we actually began to make the dish that we realized how bizarre it was. (I must mention that this was a cooperative cooking adventure; Tom and I prepared the whole dinner together.)

To start with, the recipe’s proportions were Gargantuan. To serve two persons, it called for a two-pound guinea hen, four boudins blanc and four boudins noir (that’s a good pound of sausages per person), eight fried croûtons the size of the sausages, and four apples. I’d like to have seen Cocteau and his ami Oliver eating all that!

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We had a three-pound bird, which we knew would be ample for our four diners in the context of the rest of our menu. Ditto one each of the apples and black and white sausages. In a fit of abstemiousness, we skipped the croûtons.

The stuffing mixture was bread, hard-boiled egg, raw egg, the hen’s giblets, nutmeg, cinnamon, tarragon, chives, and chervil. We made the amount given for a two-pound guinea hen, and it was way too much even for our larger bird. I had to squeeze some of it into the neck cavity and sew it up tightly with a darning needle and thread.

The bird was to be wrapped in pork fat and casserole-roasted on top of the stove, with white wine and a mirepoix of carrots, onions, and garlic. Gargantua struck again here: You were to chop three whole carrots and three whole onions for the mirepoix. Even allowing that vegetables in France 40 years ago were probably smaller than ours are now, that still would’ve been a vast amount. And the whole cup of wine called for would’ve made a very acid gravy. So again we made adjustments.

Now, continuing the impractical instructions (don’t worry; this story has a happy ending): The whole guinea hen, once browned, was supposed to be done in 25 minutes. Have you ever tried to brown a bird that’s wrapped in pork fat? It’s simply not possible. And our larger bird took 45 minutes to tenderize. Then you were supposed to reduce the pan juices and just pour them over the bird for serving. Our mirepoix vegetables, even though chopped fine, and even after the longer cooking time, were still in recognizable bits, so the sauce would have been pretty ugly. We pureed it.

Here’s the dish as we brought it to the table:

Note how different it looks from the mahogany-brown bird in the book’s photo, above. Note too how pure white the book’s boudins blancs are, totally unmarked by sauteeing in butter, and the absence of apples or gravy in that photo. One more fraud perpetrated by the food stylists!

The good news is that the dish was really excellent. Odd as the combination was, the bird, the blood sausages, the mild sausages, the apples, and the gravy all came together felicitously. With them we drank a 2005 Moillard Beaune Grèves Premier Cru, and happy we were.

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A few more words about Cocteau and food. In addition to his serious writings, he did a jesting piece called Petit lettre à la dérive, which creates a litany of the dinner-table imperatives that parents deliver to their children:

Mange ta soupe. Tiens-toi droit. Mange lentement. Ne mange pas si vite. Bois en mangeant. Coupe ta viande en petits morceaux. Tu ne fais que tordre et avaler. Ne joue pas avec ton couteau. Ce n’est pas comme ça qu’on tient sa fourchette. On ne chante pas à table. Vide ton assiette. Ne te balance pas sur ta chaise. Finis ton pain. Pousse ton pain. Mâche. Ne parle pas la bouche pleine. Ne mets pas tes coudes sur la table. Ramasse ta serviette. Ne fais pas de bruit en mangeant. Tu sortiras de table quand on aura fini. Essuie ta bouche avant de m’embrasser.

Cette petite liste réveille une foule de souvenirs, ceux de l’enfance. C’est très longtemps après qu’on arrive à comprendre qu’un dîner peut être un véritable chef-d’oeuvre.

As a New Year’s wish, therefore, may we all, in 2012, eat our soup, sit up straight, not play with our knife, wipe our mouth before kissing anyone, and enjoy many dinners that are veritable chefs d’oeuvre!

Christmas Cookies!

Oh, the annual agony of choosing what kinds of cookies to bake for Christmas! Or, perhaps more accurately, what kinds Tom and I can bear to forgo this year. I try to keep quantities down so we don’t wind up being reproached by tins of rapidly staling cookies on through the end of January. Yes, I could freeze some for later use, but they’re Christmas cookies; and we aren’t cookie people at any other time of the year. And yes, we could give bags of them away, but that exposes us to retaliation from friends who have also made too many Christmas cookies.

Well, it’s not the worst kind of problem to have, is it?

After much fond perusal of many traditional favorites, I decided to confine myself to three kinds this year: peanut butter, Toll house, and ruggelach. No ginger snaps, kourabiedes, lemon drops, vanilla crescents, spice walnut slices, Ischler törtchen . . . sigh. But without at least three, Christmas might as well be Lent.

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Peanut Butter Cookies

When I was a kid my mother always made these for Christmas. (We’d leave a plate of them out for Santa Claus when he came to dress the tree and deliver the presents.) Over the years I’ve tried various recipes, all good, but my favorite is this one, which I clipped from Saveur magazine several years ago. It’s credited to a book I don’t own, Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies.

These are the classic peanut butter cookie shape, plain rounds with the cross-hatching from fork tines that I loved to be allowed to press into the ready-to-bake dough when I was little. Just the look of them brings back childhood Christmases in an almost Proustian way. They’re very rich – not overly sugary and with a toothsome texture from crunchy, not creamy, peanut butter.

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Toll House Cookies

I freely admit, my recipe for these cookies was, is, and probably always will be on the back of the package of Nestlé’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels. I don’t see any reason to try to improve on such a good thing. I like to buy loose walnuts in the shell, which I believe are fresher than bags or cans of shelled walnuts, and I can usually prevail on Tom to do the nutcracking for me (cue the Tchaikovsky music). Granted, Toll House cookies are not particularly Christmasy, but that’s the only time I ever make them, so they’re Christmasy to us.

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Ruggelach

This is another Christmas treat that my mother used to make, and I still use the recipe given her by a Jewish friend some 60 years ago. Traditional fillings for these irresistible little cream cheese pastries are chopped walnuts with either jam or cinnamon and sugar. My ecumenical version – very appropriate this year, when Christmas and Chanukah practically coincide – varies them somewhat by using different jams or honey with the walnuts, or fruit preserves alone. New this year because of what my larder afforded were some with chopped dates along with the walnuts and for those with jam, three homemade flavors: fig, strawberry, and pineapple. They all turned out well but looking much alike, so you get a tiny taste surprise when you bite into one.

My ruggelach never look as neat as the ones sold in stores. Those are usually formed in long rolls and then sliced before baking. I make mine as individually rolled-up triangles, some of which often get a little stretchy and lopsided. But there’s never anything wrong with their taste.

So there’s my 2011 Christmas cookie collection. And here’s my wish for many merry Christmas cookies to all of you and yours!

Two Exotic Legume Dishes: Mujaddara and La Loubia

Toward the end of each year, as the weather declines from chilly to frigid, I start thinking of long-cooking, rib-sticking legume dishes, based on beans and lentils. I have good French, Italian, and American recipes for these pulses, but this week I was feeling global, so I looked in my cookbooks for something more exotic.

I also happened to have in my pantry superior varieties of both brown lentils and white beans. The lentils – small, tender, golden brown – are from Castelluccio, in Italy’s Umbria/Marche region, by way of a shop in Torino. The beans are alubias, an heirloom variety from Guanajuato, Mexico, by way of Rancho Gordo. In one sense, it was silly to try to do anything exotic with either of these, since they’re both marvelously flavorful just in simple preparations from their home regions. But I had culinary Wanderlust, so I looked farther abroad.

Mujaddara: the lentils

For the lentils, I went as far as the Arab Levant, using Clifford Wright’s book A Mediterranean Feast. This is an imposing tome of gastronomical history, as indicated by its subtitle, “The story of the birth of the celebrated cuisines of the Mediterranean from the merchants of Venice to the Barbary corsairs, with more than 500 recipes.” Mujaddara is a rice and lentil pilaf recipe, a traditional dish in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.

The recipe starts by having you fry a batch of onions to top the eventual dish. I have to say the instructions for the onions gave me pause. The author seems to think you can slice onions less than 1/16” thick, toss them in hot olive oil, fry them until dark brown, and still have them hold together as slices. Has he ever actually tried this? It can’t be done. The onions immediately fall apart, as my photo of the frying stages shows.

But the general technique is close enough to the way Indian recipes brown-fry onions, so I just did it that way and didn’t worry about their shape.

Then you boil lentils in water until they’re almost tender, and set them aside. Soak rice in water for half an hour, and drain it. This rice preparation is again very like the way Indian recipes treat basmati rice, but this author didn’t specify a type, so I used long-grain Carolina.

Finally, you sauté a little freshly chopped onion in butter, add boiling water, salt, the lentils, and the rice, and cook until the rice is tender and the water all absorbed. Transfer to a serving dish and top with the fried onions.

It was good. Mild tasting at first, but it grew on us as we ate. With the rice and lentils combining to make a complete protein, we could practically feel the nourishment we were getting! The lentils were definitely the star of the dish, because the rice had gotten a little pulpy from the soaking. So if I do it again I’ll either reduce the proportion of rice or use basmati to see if it contributes more to the flavor and texture.

La Loubia: the beans

I found my bean recipe in the Dried Beans and Grains volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series. Translated as Spiced White Beans, it’s a dish from Morocco, or more generally, North Africa. The recipe looked perfectly easy to make, and so it was. After an overnight soak (or a two-minute boil followed by a two-hour soak in case, like me, you forget about the beans the night before), the beans are cooked in plain water until nearly tender. Meanwhile, you make a heady paste of garlic, cumin, cloves, paprika, cayenne, salt, and olive oil, and then simply stir it into the beans for their last 20 minutes of cooking. That’s all there is to it.

The dish looks pale and plain, but it was enticingly fragrant, and the unusual (for me, at least) blend of spices made it a delicious accompaniment to broiled lamb chops. The fleshy beans, flavorful in themselves, picked up different nuances from the seasoning and tasted slightly hot, slightly herbal, and slightly fruity – sometimes all at once, sometimes sequentially. Very intriguing.

At the outset, one thing about the recipe had struck me as improbable. For six servings it called for four cups of dried beans. At the rate they expand when cooked, that would yield almost a cup and a half of cooked beans per person. A mighty hefty portion, unless the beans are meant to be the entire meal!

I decided to make the dish with only one cup of dried beans, which would be more than enough in a full dinner for two. But the amounts of spices called for in the recipe were quite modest, mostly just pinches. Using only one-quarter of them didn’t seem as if it would do much for my good-sized pot of cooked beans. So I approximately halved the spices, and that worked out quite well. Maybe Moroccan chefs’ fingers take bigger pinches than mine do!

A final note 

Tom took the leftovers of both dishes and made an excellent soup of them, adding a little sautéed carrot, onion, and pancetta, and then his homemade broth. Ingenious fellow, my husband.

“Really Spicy” Shrimp Creole

Musing over the mildness of the “creole” shrimp fritter recipe I wrote about here several weeks ago, I found myself remembering actual Shrimp Creole, a definitely spicy dish. I’d had it in New Orleans restaurants years ago but had never made it at home. Research in my cookbooks produced three very different shrimp creole recipes, all looking interesting.

One book was a famous New Orleans restaurateur’s; its “light” version of the dish had 14 ingredients. The second was an inexpensive plastic-spiral-bound book of Creole recipes, bought from the French Quarter flea market. That down-home version called for 20 ingredients. I chose the most elaborate one, from Rima and Richard Collin’s New Orleans Cookbook: it had 27 ingredients.

Here are most of the things I assembled for the dish:

The Collins say their recipe, named Shrimp Sauce Piquante, is the original version of Shrimp Creole, and that it’s a “really spicy Cajun dish” for which you may want to reduce the cayenne the first time you make it. (I always thought Creole and Cajun are not the same cuisine, but never mind that.) Reading the recipe, I saw that the only actually hot ingredients were ¼ teaspoon chili powder, ¾ teaspoon black pepper, and ½ teaspoon cayenne for two pounds of shrimp. That didn’t seem outrageously hot to me, so I ignored that warning and used the full dose of cayenne. I also noted that, despite all the ingredients, the cooking was easy and straightforward.

The recipe started out in true New Orleans fashion, much the way a gumbo recipe does, making a brown roux with flour and oil, and adding scallions, celery, onion, green pepper, garlic, and parsley. That already smelled delicious.

Then in go tomatoes, red wine, bay leaves, allspice, cloves, salt, pepper, cayenne, chili powder, mace (I didn’t have any), basil, thyme, lemon juice, and water. All that is simmered lengthily so everything gets acquainted. Finally, the shrimp are added.

Here I had to diverge from the Collins. They wanted the shrimp to cook for 20 minutes. I had nice, fresh medium-size shrimp (probably they were called jumbo, in the oxymoronic way fishmongers name shrimp), and I couldn’t bear to think of them shriveling up into tough, tight, essentially flavorless canary droppings, which happens when you cook shrimp in liquid for too long a time. I didn’t want them to become only vehicles for the spices: I wanted to taste shrimp too. So I gave them five minutes.

That was just fine. The shrimp were still moist and juicy, the sauce nicely nubbly and vegetal, and the spicing just right for a dish to be served over plain boiled rice.

Bet you thought I was going to say it came out unbearably hot! But no, it was just – as the recipe said – piquant. We enjoyed it very much.

Thanksgiving Dinner Support: Two Breads and a Dessert

Contrary to our characters as it may seem, Tom and I don’t cook for this holiday. Our tradition is to join a pair of good friends at their table, bringing along a few interesting edibles and drinkables to supplement the bountiful dishes awaiting us there.

I always bake breads for the feast. This year I made ciabatta to go along with the soup and turkey courses, and walnut bread for the cheese course. My ciabatta recipe comes from Maggie Glezer’s Artisan Baking Across America, a truly splendid book. The walnut bread is my adaptation of a recipe I found on The Hungry Tiger website, which itself was a Glezer adaptation. Thus do traditions get passed along!

Here are the ciabattas:

Now, you may think they’re kind of pitiful-looking. I wouldn’t deny it. But they’re supposed to be like that. In Italian, “ciabatta” means an old worn-out slipper.  But this is a great, rough, country bread. It starts with a 24-hour pre-ferment using four kinds of flour: all-purpose, bread, rye, and whole wheat. The very soft dough then gets long risings, gentle handling to prevent deflating, and baking on a stone in a very hot oven. The result is a rich flavor, an airy open crumb, and a good crunchy crust. Molto artigianale, as they say in Italy.

The walnut breads are more attractive little bombs of loaves. You can find their recipe here. My major alteration to it has been to include some fat in the dough – walnut oil when I have it, olive oil when I don’t – to make the bread less dense. (Though the no-oil version is good too.) This bread goes very well with any kind of cheese. Not bad toasted for breakfast, either.

And then there was a dessert. My hostess was making a pumpkin pie, so I wanted my contribution to contrast in flavor and texture. I decided to try something with pears. (Regular readers of this blog may remember that I’ve had some bad luck with pear desserts in the past, but I don’t give up.)

Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts is a book whose photos are utterly seductive. I was attracted to his recipe for a pear tart for the frivolous reason that it’s made in a long narrow pan rather than the typical round one, and I happen to have a long narrow pan that I rarely have a chance to use. The recipe was also interesting for its additional flavors: After the sliced pears are arranged on the raw pastry crust and moistened with lemon juice, you sift onto them a mixture of sugar, cornstarch, nutmeg, and black pepper; and when the tart comes out of the oven you drizzle some melted raspberry jam over it. The black pepper on fruit particularly intrigued me.

The tart came out well and tasted fine. The nutmeg and black pepper gave it spiciness, and raspberry is a flavor that goes well with pears. But – to make a short story long – the making of it gave me a few bad moments, which were entirely my own fault.

As I said above, I don’t use that long narrow pan very often. On Thanksgiving morning when I went to roll out the chilled dough, I noticed for the first time that the recipe specified a 4½ by 14 inch pan. Mine is 4½ by 19 inches – about one-third larger. Eek! Would I have to make another batch of dough? Would there even be time to do that?

The size of the sheet of dough my rolling pin produced was totally inadequate. But, luckily, the recipe was for a boiling-water crust made with only vegetable shortening (Crisco), not butter or lard. That kind of dough behaves practically like putty, so I was able to press it into the pan with my hands and squeeze it out – thinly, thinly! – just enough to cover the bottom and sides. It took a lot of persuading, and I used every last speck of the dough. After that harsh treatment any other kind of crust would have baked into concrete, but to my great relief, this one stayed decently tender and flaky. Also luckily, I had bought enough pears to fill the long pan. And I wound up actually liking the proportion of crust to filling.

So my contribution to the holiday feast was successful. Tom’s was too. He brought along two bottles of grappa. Not that it was needed – the hosts also had grappa, but for a Thanksgiving meal there’s never too much of a good thing, is there?

Wild Boar Piedmontese Dinner

Returned from our truffle-seeking travels in the Piedmont, Tom and I wanted to recapture the gorgeous flavors of that region’s food in a dinner party. Last week I wrote about the pasta dish we created for it with the black truffles we’d brought home. Three of the other courses of that meal – aperitivo, secondo, and dolce – were as authentic as I could make them.

Aperitivo

In this country we think of an aperitif as something to drink. In Torino we learned that they use the same word to designate also the nibbles that cafes and wine bars give you when you order a glass of wine. Here’s the elegant little plate Tom and I received along with our glasses of Dolcetto at Baratti e Milano, a classic belle époque café:

Wasn’t that lovely? Also delicious: We were enchanted. This is not the kind of food I’ve ever tried to make, but for the dinner party I gave it my best shot. I made up a batch of pâte brisée (Simca’s recipe; a rich version with egg), shaped and baked it in 40 tiny barquette molds, and prepared 5 kinds of toppings, one each for the 8 diners:

• Asparagus with lemon mayonnaise
• Spinach blended with ricotta
• Spicy sun-dried tomato puree
• Sausage rounds with mustard and cornichons
• Shrimp with curry mayonnaise

Here they are on the living room table, along with the magnum of Billecart-Salmon rosé generously brought by Frank, one of our guests.

Not as exquisite as the professional batch, but not bad for a first try – and evidently tasty: They disappeared in no time at all.

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Secondo

After the aperitivi, we moved to the dining room and had a small antipasto (roasted prosciutto-wrapped fennel spears, which I’ve written about before); the truffle pasta for a primo; and then, per secondo, braised wild boar.

I took a classic Piemontese recipe from a classic Italian cookbook, Ada Boni’s 1200-page Il Talismano della Felicità. The boar shoulder came from D’Artagnan. Tom cut it up and I marinated it for two days in red wine, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, bay leaf, sage, and marjoram. I braised it in the strained marinade, more wine, and some tomato paste. It took three hours to tenderize, but then it was meltingly delicious, though the sauce needed a little correction to reduce its acidity. With it I served duchesse potatoes and butter-braised Savoy cabbage.

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Dolce

Panna cotta was originally a Piedmontese specialty, but now it’s all-Italian. It’s a great dessert for an elaborate dinner because it’s extremely good, extremely easy to make, and what work there is can be done a day or two in advance.

I used a recipe from a long-ago issue of Gourmet magazine, clipped out and preserved in my recipe binder. You just bring heavy cream, half and half, and sugar to a boil; stir in vanilla and dissolved gelatin; pour it into ramekins, and chill them well. At serving time, I unmolded them onto plates and drizzled them with strawberry sauce. Alongside I served brutti ma buoni, Piedmontese hazelnut meringue cookies brought back from our trip.

Another charming thing about this dessert is that it’s so light and lively on the tongue, it makes you feel refreshed, even after all the previous rich food you’ve had. Of course, that’s an illusion. But in a dinner like this, calories can’t count! And in any event, grappa helps burn off some of them: Beloved husband believes that grappa provides negative calories.

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Here’s the full menu I printed up for the occasion: