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.
.
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
.
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!
I’m a weekly reader of your blog, Diane, even though I don’t always comment. Most often, I’m just so stunned — and impressed — by your improvisational ability that any comment I would offer seems superfluous! But your blog posts are unfailingly a vicarious culinary experience for me, a calorie-free tasting event without actually smelling, eating or doing anything except reading and imagining. Thank you!