Blueberry Buttermilk Rolled Scones

Scones have come a long way from their origin as humble oatcakes baked at the hearth on an iron griddle. A clue to their long ancestry is the buttermilk and baking soda still used as their leavening – dating from the days before modern baking powder. Oatmeal scones are still the most traditional version of these small quick breads, but fancier (and much sweeter) varieties have proliferated on bakery shelves.

Tom and I don’t care for breakfast cereals, so my pantry doesn’t provide oatmeal for a spur-of-the-moment decision to make scones for breakfast. I do have a favorite scone recipe, however, and I’ve found a way to get them to the table even more quickly of a morning.

My recipe comes from Baking with Julia, a handsome volume based on Child’s Master Chef television series, with recipes from many well-known bakers. Its buttermilk scone recipe is attributed to Marion Cunningham. I’m being particular about the source because this exact recipe, word for word, can be found in quite a few places on the Internet, with no credit given to the book. I was astonished to see such blatant plagiarism! You can read an honest posting of the recipe here.

I vary the recipe from time to time, using honey for sugar, yogurt for buttermilk; kneading in some raisins, chopped apricots, or blueberries; and always cutting back on the melted butter and sugar topping, which is too much sweetness for me. This week for the first time I decided to try two new things: making the dough partially the day before, and shaping it into the recipe’s option for rolled scones with a jam filling, rather than plain triangular ones. I had some excellent Maine wild blueberry jam that I thought would be very nice in them.

But I’d never seen a rolled scone before, and I wasn’t sure I was reading the shaping instructions correctly. So, also the day before, I’d googled “rolled scones” for images (which is how I happened upon the plagiarizations of the recipe). What I saw were round buns, each with a pinwheel pattern made by several spirals of jam within the dough. OK, we can try that.

The advance steps went fine. I put together the dry ingredients, cut in the cold butter, and put the whole bowl in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, I stirred in the buttermilk and kneaded the dough briefly. Then it was time for the rolling.

Here’s where things went iffy. The recipe said to roll each half of the dough into a strip 12 inches long and ½ inch thick. Parenthetically, it concedes that the strip won’t be very wide. I’ll say it wasn’t – mine barely reached 4 inches. Then it said to spread on 2 tablespoons of jam, leaving a narrow border bare on one of the long sides, roll it up like a jelly roll, and slice it. Well, since my jam was more like a preserve, containing many tiny whole wild blueberries, it couldn’t be just painted smoothly onto the dough. It made a lumpy line of filling.

It was a struggle to wrap the dough around those berries far enough to enclose the filling at all, with no hope of rolling it up far enough to make a spiral pattern. It sliced more cleanly than I’d feared it might, but the slices came out lopsidedly circular, with a single puddle of jam in the center.

I suspected those jam puddles would ooze out all over the pan the moment it hit the oven. But they didn’t. The scones weren’t exactly neat looking when baked, and they were quite small: Each half of the recipe, which would have made 6 triangular scones, made 12 rolled ones. But they tasted perfectly good. No problem: just eat two instead of one. Two are already gone from this next picture – Tom and I couldn’t wait to sample them.

I must admit that, interesting as the rolled scones were for an experiment, the effect on the palate was really no different than if you’d just spread jam on a baked plain scone, which are a lot quicker and easier to make. I know this because, fearing that I might mess up the rolled ones, I used only one half of the recipe for them. Here are the six plain scones I made from the other half, modestly awaiting their own acquaintance with the wild blueberry jam.

American Dinner for Italian Friends

Some wine-professional friends from Italy were in town this week, so we invited them to dinner at our house. As a break from their usual steady diet here of Italian-style restaurants (with all the good and ill that that implies), they asked for an American meal. I rarely cook American for dinner parties, but the occasion justified some extra effort. Here’s the all-American menu I served – interpreting the term broadly enough to include Latin America:

Florida Rock Shrimp with Cocktail Sauce
Guacamole with Yellow Corn Tortilla Chips

Caribbean Black Bean Soup

Broiled Shad

Braised Short Ribs of Beef
Butter-braised Brussels Sprouts
Mashed Potatoes

Cheeses: Jasper Hill Winnemere, Meadow Creek Grayson, Pleasant Ridge Reserve

Apple Pie

For each course, Tom found an American wine that he hoped would go well with it. You can see his choices and their results as he reported them on his blog. Here are the recipes I used for the meal and the Italian guests’ reactions to them.

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Florida Rock Shrimp; Guacamole

My first choice for an appetizer had been Maine shrimp, which marvelously sweet-fleshed little beasties are just coming into season. Alas, thousands of other New Yorkers seem to have had the same idea, and six local fish stores didn’t have any left on the day of the dinner party. So I settled for small, deep-water rock  shrimp from Florida, which are supposed to taste like lobster. Briefly boiled, they weren’t very lobsterlike, but they were tasty enough with Tom’s spicy cocktail sauce. I also made my favorite, classic guacamole recipe from Diana Kennedy’s The Cuisines of Mexico. The Italians had never had guacamole before; they loved it.

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Caribbean Black Bean Soup

This recipe came from Heirloom Beans, the Rancho Gordo cookbook. I’ve praised this artisan California bean grower in previous posts, and this recipe reinforced my appreciation. The variety I used is Midnight, a delicious black-purple bean. You sauté onions, carrot, and jalapeño chile in lard; add cooked beans along with ground roasted cumin seed, oregano, cayenne, chicken broth, roasted garlic cloves, and roasted tomato; simmer until everything gets thoroughly acquainted; run some of the beans through a blender or food processor and stir them back into the pot. Serve, garnished with sour cream and cilantro. Very spicy, very nice, and very interesting to the Italian guests, who weren’t familiar with black beans.

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Broiled Shad

Shad has also just come into season here. These Atlantic-ocean fish don’t go into the Mediterranean, so I thought a small portion as an intermediate course would be an interesting new taste for our friends. And so it was: The distinctive, almost smoky taste of this late-winter specialty seemed to be a real treat for them. I used a very simple preparation from the American Cooking volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series. Merely melt a lot of butter in a baking dish, add shad fillets, turn them in the butter a few times, and set the dish under a hot broiler for about six minutes. Salt, pepper, and serve with lemon wedges. It was simultaneously rich, lush, and delicate.

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Braised Short Ribs

This recipe is also from the Time-Life American Cooking volume. It produces wonderfully rich short ribs with only the most basic additional ingredients. The recipe starts with a very useful trick for browning a large quantity of meat: Flour the pieces lightly, set them on a rack on a large roasting pan, and put them in a 500° oven for 25 minutes. So much easier than hand-turning a few at a time in a pan with butter or oil! Since short ribs are well-marbled cuts, the excess fat simply drops down beneath the rack and keeps the meat from frying.

After that, the short ribs are added to a casserole in which you’ve sautéed carrot, onion, garlic, and thyme. A small amount of stock or broth is added, with a bay leaf, and the covered casserole is put into a 325° oven for about an hour. The liquid barely touches the short ribs (I’d really call this a casserole roast, not a braise), but it keeps the meat moist and succulent and emphasizes the meat’s natural beef sweetness. Very large ribs need a bit more time, as ours did. The strained cooking juices make a delicious gravy. Once the unusual-to-Italians cut was identified (manzo sufficed), it was eaten with gusto.

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Apple Pie

This is my mother’s apple pie. I learned to make it by watching her in the kitchen, and it’s the only dessert I ever make without a recipe. I start with a plain short pastry. I peel, core, and thinly slice about six apples; heap them in the bottom crust; pour on a cinnamon-sugar mixture (I couldn’t tell you how much; I do it by instinct) and a few dots of butter; lay on the top crust and seal the pie in my mother’s style – pressing the crusts together with the tines of a fork. I brush the top with a little cold water and a sprinkling of sugar, and bake it. Depending on how sweet the apples are in themselves and how free a hand I’ve used with the cinnamon-sugar, the pie may come out more or less sweet, but it’s always enjoyable.

Our Italian friends had never eaten an American apple pie before, and they found its appearance a bit puzzling. It’s like a torta di mele, I told them, and they nodded their heads happily and took another bite.

Sweetbreads Taillevent

Tom had a birthday recently. Between a festive dinner in a restaurant or one at home, he chose home (where properly aged wines don’t cost a fortune). He asked for sweetbreads en croûte. I knew this would put me on my mettle. Tom still dreams about one of the best meals of his life, at Taillevent in Paris, in 2007, where his main course was a heavenly Chausson feuilleté de ris de veau, sauce mousseuse à l’oseille. We still have the menu we brought home that evening, signed by the proprietor, Jean-Claude Vrinat, and his chef, Alain Solivérès.

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We both knew there was no way I could equal that fabulous dish. But I went looking in my cookbooks, and imagine my pleasure at finding a recipe in Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine called Sweetbreads Taillevent. It was not as elaborate as the restaurant’s dish – which was a mercy! Perhaps it was an earlier version. Oliver and Vrinat were contemporaries and friends, so it may have been meant as homage. In any event, the recipe looked appropriately festive, and it was not really difficult to make, except for the pastry crust.

I’ve always made puff pastry from a Julia Child recipe that’s very different from Oliver’s – slightly in ingredients, largely in technique. Hence, I could see this would be an interesting experiment. As a kindness to my readers who have minimal interest in comparative puff pastry making, I’ll discuss those technicalities at the end of this post. On to the sweetbreads!

We agreed that Tom would take the lead in preparing the sweetbreads while I focused on the pastry. (I was also doing a soufflé for dessert.) So this was very much a cooperative endeavor.

In the elaborate French manner, the sweetbreads had to be soaked for two hours, bits of fat and membrane cut off, soaked again, and blanched. A charming way to spend the afternoon of one’s birthday, n’est ce pas?! But from there it was not much different from a standard braise. Cut carrots, onions, mushrooms in julienne strips; simmer them in butter in a covered pan; add the sweetbreads and white wine, cover, and simmer for half an hour.

Then remove the sweetbreads and vegetables to a plate, reduce the pan juices, and add an outrageous amount of crème fraiche – a whole cupful for just the two of us. (Oh, those French!) Reduce that somewhat and set the sauce aside.

Meanwhile, there I was, attempting to make an attractive pastry case for the sweetbreads. I was cutting back a recipe for four, which gave me a lot of arithmetical exercise to calculate what size of a round pastry shell would equal half the volume of an eight-inch square shell. As I’ve said before in this blog, numbers are not my friends! Here’s what I came up with:

I must confess that never in my life has a baked puff pastry case risen for me the way the recipes say they will. This day’s was no exception. It didn’t behave horribly, but it was no very beautiful thing. And when we filled it with the sweetbreads and their sauce, placed its pastry lid on top, and set it on a serving plate, it looked like nothing so much as a poorly constructed flying saucer.

Still, the whole dish tasted just lovely. The pastry was crisp and angelically buttery; the sweetbreads were luscious; the crème fraiche had managed to absorb itself almost entirely into the other components. Alongside, we served spinach seethed in butter (as if the dish needed more butter!) and braised black trumpet mushrooms.

We were happy. And we learned something. We’ve always thought that the French were over-fastidious about sweetbreads, that all that soaking and blanching wasn’t really necessary. Italians don’t do it, and Italian sweetbread recipes have an attractive earthiness. This dish showed us that, while those steps may not be necessary, they do have a point. They firm the texture and etherealize the flavor, making sweetbreads very compatible, very easily integrated, with ingredients like the mushrooms and crème fraiche – and that, we can say on the basis of this recipe, is not a bad thing at all.

Here’s the birthday celebrant, trying to decide whether to drink the white wine we’d had with the first course – a 2009 Chablis premier cru – or the red wine he’d chosen for the sweetbreads – a 1990 Gevrey Chambertin. (He drank both.) Happy birthday, Tom!

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Postscript on the puff pastry

In the past I’ve always made the “simple puff pastry” recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering, volume 2. This, when ready to use, consists of 72 layers of butter alternating with 73 layers of dough, which was impressive enough for me. For the birthday dish I decided to follow Oliver’s classic recipe, which results in – I kid you not – 729 layers of butter alternating with 730 layers of dough.

During all the folding and rolling and turning this requires, Oliver cautions, “It is very important that the butter not break through the dough at any time” and “it absolutely must not ooze out.” Well, fine, but I wish he’d also said how to prevent that, because I couldn’t. And since he regards a breakthrough as inconceivable, he doesn’t suggest any way to remedy it. So I struggled along, poking the butter back in and plastering over the breaks with flour.

Eventually I achieved a 5-inch-high brick of 1,459-layer dough. Then came the hardest part of the job: rolling it out to a thickness of ⅛ inch. That took a lot of time and muscle power – so much that I wonder if I worked the dough too hard, causing the pastry case not to rise as high as it should have in the baking. But, as I said above, the taste and texture were perfectly good, so I was content. I think I’ll stick to Julia’s recipe in the future, though.

Hamburger Rolls for Superbowl

Very few things can take Tom and me away from our dining room table at dinnertime. Superbowl is one of them. Especially with the Giants playing! So the big question for last Sunday became “What can we eat on plates on our laps on the couch in front of the television?” And the answer became: Hamburgers.

Now, a good hamburger deserves a good roll, but commercial hamburger buns are pretty awful – giant puffy marshmallows with an artificial suntan pretending to be a crust. Upscale groceries’ bakery departments offer many kinds of fancy rolls that, enfolding a juicy burger, will give your palate and teeth something more to consider. But I thought it’d be a good day to fire up the oven and make my own.

The recipe I use is for mini picnic rolls, from the King Arthur flour people. I merely shape the dough into 8 good-sized rolls instead of 24 tiny ones. I like the recipe because it’s got a little cornmeal in it, a little sugar, and a little butter, making for a nice flavor and texture. (The recipe also wants a smidge of potato flour or dried potato flakes, but since my pantry doesn’t run to those, I just skip that.)

The rolls came out well, though a little larger than ideal and a little fragile (crumbs on the lap, the sofa, and the living room floor during the exciting moments of the game). This was probably because I used half again as much yeast as the recipe called for. I thought I ought to because my regular breads haven’t been rising as much as they should lately. I buy instant yeast by the pound and keep it in the freezer. I just noticed that the current package’s “best if used by” date is March 2011, so I’m pushing the envelope, even with the preservative capability of the freezing. Guess I’d better buy fresh yeast.

Anyway, we had a comforting coffee-table picnic (the urban equivalent of the tailgate party) while we struggled along with the Giants toward their glorious cliff-hanger victory. To accompany the hamburgers we’d made baked beans, potato salad, and green salad, and set out homemade bread-and-butter pickles and Tom’s famously spicy doctored ketchup. And in defiance of all those beer commercials on the tube, we drank Ridge Zinfandel and San Pellegrino.

(You can see a bit of the football game reflected in the glass at the back of the table.)

If you’re interested in these rolls, you can find the recipe on the King Arthur website.

Beginner’s Tripe

In 1968, M.F.K. Fisher said “The trouble with tripe is that in my present dwelling place, a small town in Northern California, I could count on one hand the people who would eat it with me.” Regrettably, I, whose present dwelling place is a huge city in the Northeast, can say the same in 2012.

But Tom and I love tripe. So when I made my newest cookbook purchase, Jennifer McLagan’s Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal, the first section I turned to was the one on tripe. And smiled to see that quotation from Fisher’s With Bold Knife and Fork. McLagan realizes the difficulty of persuading people to eat tripe, which must be why she dubbed this recipe Beginner’s Tripe. It has so many other tasty things in it, she hopes to distract the faint-hearted from thinking about the principal ingredient.

I well know the difficulty of that. To me, tripe’s public relations problem is that it’s not one of those exotic-sounding but mild meats like rattlesnake or alligator, of which you can tell people, “Oh, don’t worry; it really tastes just like chicken.” Tripe doesn’t taste like chicken. Tripe tastes like nothing but itself. It’s animaly. It’s pungent. It’s spongy. It’s Dionysian, not Apollonian. But those of us who like it, like it for just those reasons. Sorry, faint hearts! But – truth be told – this recipe does go a long way toward disguising those characteristics.

The recipe is for a sort of stew, which starts with a thick sauce base of olive oil, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, lemon zest, chile flakes, and tomatoes. Nothing to fear there, and plenty of concealment for the tripe!

The tripe, cut into tiny strips (thanks, Tom), goes into that sauce along with some meat broth, and cooks lengthily on top of the stove until it’s tender. McLagan says to blanch it first, but tripe is sold so cleanly pre-cooked these days that I rarely bother to do that, and I didn’t this time. No problem.

Now here comes the interesting part, which is the major tripe-distracting ingredient in the recipe: chickpeas. Cooked or canned chickpeas (I used good canned ones) are drained, rinsed, dried well, and sautéed in olive oil until browned. To them are added sliced chorizo and diced red bell pepper, all of which is further sautéed until the chickpeas are crunchy, the chorizo rendered, and the pepper softened.

Once all those things are added to the tripe and sauce, heated together briefly, put in a serving dish and topped with parsley, the chickpeas take on the lead role and the terrifying tripe becomes almost undetectable to both the eye and (alas!) the palate in the busy, colorful mixture.

This is a really good dish, flavorful and lively. It wants some crusty peasant bread to sop up the sauce with, possibly a green salad alongside, and a red wine strong enough to stand up to the spicy density of the dish. It might indeed convert a tripe-timid person – though for true aficionados, there isn’t enough tripe in it. Tom wants me to double the proportion of tripe, next time we make it.

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 is 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!