Remembrance of Things Paris
Page 31
Serve scallops with beurre blanc.
RHUBARB CHARLOTTE
Serves 6
Active time: 45 min Start to finish: 1 day
2¼ lb rhubarb, leaves and root ends discarded
1 cup granulated sugar
1½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice
37 (3-by 1-inch) soft ladyfingers
2 tablespoons kirsch
¾ cup chilled heavy cream
3 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
Special equipment: a 6-cup charlotte mold
Cut enough rhubarb into ¼-inch-thick slices to measure 6 cups, reserving remainder for another use. Cook rhubarb, granulated sugar, and lemon juice in a large heavy saucepan over moderately high heat, stirring occasionally, until rhubarb exudes juices. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until rhubarb falls apart and is reduced to about 2 cups, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool to room temperature.
While rhubarb simmers, brush flat side of ladyfingers with kirsch. Lightly oil mold and line with two 24-inch-long crisscrossed sheets of plastic wrap, letting excess hang over side. Line side and bottom of mold with some of the ladyfingers, flat sides facing inward and trimming bottom ones to fit snugly.
Beat together cream and confectioners’ sugar until it just holds stiff peaks. Spoon half of rhubarb into mold, smoothing top, and spoon half of cream over it, smoothing top. Cover cream with 1 layer of ladyfingers. Repeat layering with remaining rhubarb, cream, and ladyfingers. Fold plastic wrap to cover charlotte and weight with a flat-bottomed dish filled with a 2-lb weight. Chill charlotte 1 day.
Remove weight and dish. Unfold plastic wrap and invert a platter over mold. Invert charlotte onto platter, using plastic wrap to loosen charlotte.
VEAU À LA CRÈME
(Veal Tournedos in Cream Sauce)
Serves 4
Active time: 10 min Start to finish: 25 min
1 (¾-lb) piece Gruyère, rind discarded
4 slices Canadian bacon
1 veal tenderloin (1¼ lb), trimmed and cut crosswise into 4 equal pieces (tournedos)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
½ cup crème fraîche (4 oz)
Preheat oven to 450°F.
Using a cheese planer or a sharp knife, cut 4 thin slices (4 by 2 inches) from Gruyère. Cook bacon in an ovenproof 10-inch heavy skillet over moderately high heat, turning once, until lightly browned, about 2 minutes total, and transfer to a plate. (Do not clean skillet.)
Pat veal dry and season with salt and pepper. Heat butter in skillet over moderately high heat until foam subsides, then sauté tournedos until browned, about 4 minutes total. (Veal will be only partially cooked.)
Remove skillet from heat and put a slice of bacon, then cheese and crème fraîche, on each tournedos. Roast in middle of oven, uncovered, until cheese begins to melt, 8 to 10 minutes. (Veal should be slightly pink inside.)
Transfer tournedos to plates. Whisk pan juices until blended, season with salt and pepper, then divide among plates.
BLANQUETTE DE VEAU
(Veal Stew)
Serves 4 to 6
Active time: 1½ hr Start to finish: 3 hr
For meat and vegetables
2¾ lb veal breast (bone in)
1 lb boneless veal shoulder, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces
2 ½ qt water
6 fresh parsley sprigs
2 fresh thyme sprigs
1 bay leaf (not California)
4 black peppercorns
2 onions, halved
4 carrots, quartered crosswise
1 leek (white and pale green parts only), halved lengthwise and cut crosswise into ½-inch pieces
2 tablespoons unsalted butter ½ lb mushrooms, quartered
For sauce
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 large egg yolks
2 tablespoons crème fraîche 1½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Stew meat and vegetables:
Cut meat away from veal breastbone, reserving bone, and cut meat into 2-inch pieces.
Bring veal breast and shoulder, veal bone, and water to a boil over moderate heat in a 7-to 8-quart heavy pot, skimming froth. While water is heating, wrap parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and peppercorns in a small square of cheesecloth and tie into a bundle to make a bouquet garni. Add bouquet garni and onions to pot and simmer, uncovered, until veal is tender, 1¼ to 1½ hours.
Preheat oven to 300°F.
Transfer veal with a slotted spoon to a heatproof serving dish and keep warm in oven, covered with foil.
Discard veal bone, onions, and bouquet garni, then pour stock through a fine sieve into a large bowl. Return stock to cleaned pot, add carrots and leek, and simmer until tender, 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer vegetables to serving dish. Boil stock until reduced to about 2½ cups, about 10 minutes.
While stock is reducing, heat butter in a 10-inch heavy skillet over moderate heat until foam subsides, then cook mushrooms, stirring, until just tender, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer to serving dish and season veal and vegetables with salt and pepper. Keep warm in oven.
Make sauce:
Melt butter in a 2-to 3-quart heavy saucepan over moderately low heat, then stir in flour. Cook roux, stirring, 3 minutes (do not let brown). Whisk in reduced stock and simmer, uncovered, whisking occasionally, 15 minutes. Whisk together yolks and crème fraîche in a small bowl, then whisk in 1 cup sauce. Whisk yolk mixture into remaining sauce with lemon juice, then cook over moderately low heat (do not let boil), stirring constantly, until it reaches 160°F on an instant-read thermometer and coats back of a wooden spoon.
Season sauce with salt and pepper and pour over veal and vegetables.
March 2001
PARIS TODAY
GRAND MASTERS
Jonathan Gold
My last lunch in Paris this year was at Les Élysées du Vernet, which is a staggeringly good restaurant a couple of blocks from the Arc de Triomphe, at the back of a small hotel favored by minor royalty. You know all the stuff you’ve heard about French people deserting their temples of cuisine for the bargain bistros—packed like hamburger franchises along a turnpike access road—in the neighborhoods around the Étoile? Well, something else must be going on here, because Les Élysées du Vernet, the demesne of chef Alain Solivérès, is crawling with Frenchmen, natty in that particular kind of fitted blue suit they all seem to be wearing at the moment with almost identical striped shirts and plain, post-Regis ties, a room full of bankers and government men draining flutes of Champagne and eyeing the ham trolley with the anticipatory gaze of zoo tigers scoping out a pail of raw chicken. The ham trolley! Of course!
By the time you get to your table, where a small bowl of olives is already waiting to accompany your apéritif, a uniformed hotel doorman will have ushered you into the vestibule, where a pretty, well-dressed woman will have brightened in recognition of your name. A smooth functionary who is turned out in the somber clothes of a deputy assistant cabinet minister will have checked you off a list and nodded his approval. Which is to say, in about thirty seconds, the restaurant manages to address the three eternal obsessions of a Frenchman’s life—seduction, cuisine, and easy mastery of bureaucracy—without so much as breaking a sweat.
French people, you understand, love reservations, probably because the average restaurant owner takes as much pleasure in telling you that his establishment is complet (full) as he does in selling you that 1,500-franc bottle of Côte Rôtie that has been sitting above the stove for years. To be fair, it is very pleasant to be greeted by name and led to a table set up expressly for you. When you have reserved, it is your table; it has always been your table; ever will it remain your table. On such certainties does French civilization rest.
All around you, the ham is being shaved into thin, shockingly pink curls; whole, large fish are separated into fillets and neat mounds of bones, fins, and spent fennel branches.
If you have been wondering why Paris is still considered the cap
ital of world dining, you could do worse than look at Solivérès’s scallop appetizer. You’ve probably had a few great scallops in your day, but this one is extraordinary, toasted to a blackened crunch but still slightly underdone, pully-rare inside, with the texture of fresh taffy, an understated sweetness, and a small but unmistakable fragrance of the sea. As incredible as this bare scallop is, it acts basically as a slate on which play the funky, marvelous flavors of its garnish, the various salty muskinesses of chorizo, lucques olives, and hard cheese diced microscopically fine, colliding with and glancing off each other on the tongue like billiard balls on baize. The preparation is simple—you could probably do it yourself given matchless ingredients and a good, sharp knife—but the effect is extraordinarily complex, almost too exhausting to contemplate.
Next, perhaps, a superb Parmentier de sanglier au panais (a sort of shepherd’s pie of stewed boar blanketed with mashed parsnips), followed by a simple dessert of crackly, thin wafers of sugared pastry, vanilla ice cream, and a sprinkling of roasted autumn fruits. With the dessert, a Beaumes-de-Venise. With the demitasse, a big bowl of sugared almonds and pistachios. On the way out the door, women are given long-stemmed roses; men, bags of those sugared nuts.
One could hardly wish for a better lunch. The gently glowing dining room, with a stunning art nouveau ceiling of vaulted stained glass designed by Gustave Eiffel himself, would be a proud addition to any museum in Europe. The food is perfect. The location is smack in the middle of one of the most heavily touristed precincts in the world. And yet almost nobody I know has even heard of this place, despite its two Michelin stars and Solivérès’s exalted place in the pantheon of Alain Ducasse’s disciples.
Which is to say, if the Paris dining scene, despite all its widely publicized setbacks, is rich enough that a restaurant like Les Élysées du Vernet can get lost in the shuffle, the city must still be a pretty great place to eat.
And it is, even when you least expect it to be—in a smoky brasserie like Le Vaudeville at one o’clock in the morning, perhaps, when the frank deliciousness of a simple frisée salad practically knocks you backward, or when an oyster at a basic Les Halles tourist bistro is brinier, sweeter, than anything you’ve tasted in San Francisco or New York, or when an anonymous Miromesnil wine bar serves you a plate of heart-stoppingly good garlic sausage. If you frequent such American restaurants as Jean-Georges and Citronelle, you will not be much surprised by anything you find within the stark, leather-lined walls of Guy Savoy, but the next plate of mashed potatoes you run across could change your life.
I had come to Paris, I suppose, to check out the newest wave of bargain bistros; the small restaurants, mostly run by refugees from grand-hotel kitchens, whose addresses are currently much coveted by American foodies. This may be the first juncture in recent French history, I might add, where you are more likely to happen upon a fashionable restaurant in the “Pas Trop Cher” section in the guidebooks than in the more comprehensive listings of “Tables Branchées,” and I had greatly impressed the locals by having had a small meal of grilled fish and sherry at an obscure Biarritz-style cantina whose sole virtue as far as I could tell was its proximity to my hotel. Everybody I met was talking about a chicly grumpy couscous place fitted into an old bistro in the Marais, and a new Thai restaurant that served credible Chiang Mai-style salads. L’Épi Dupin, L’Ardoise, Bookinistes, and the other bargain bistros I visited were barely better than modest neighborhood cafés in New York, the ones that don’t make it into the pages of Gourmet.
Grand cuisine, which had descended in an unbroken line from at least Carême to the present, was apparently dead, a museum piece of interest only to tourists and the hopelessly bourgeois.
So while I was not surprised, on the second day of my trip, when I lucked into some hare that may have been the single best thing I have ever eaten, I was a little surprised that I had encountered the dish at Pierre Gagnaire, a card-carrying grand restaurant in another small luxury hotel just off the Champs-Élysées. Gagnaire, after all, is a passionate, non-entrepreneurial chef of the sort that is supposed to be obsolete, and his sedate chambers are about as fashion-forward as a corporate boardroom. Gagnaire is beloved by the Gulfstream V crowd. Gagnaire is where you go for delicate plates of sole with grapefruit and baby fennel, not for anything as earthy as this hare, served in three courses.
Gagnaire can be the greatest restaurant in the world if you hit it right, a gallery of modernist flavors that pop as vividly as anything from early Godard when his images come together—lacquered duck skin with honeyed shiitake mushrooms; smoked black olive gelatin with shallot confit; a tiny spiced pig’s-blood pudding steamed in a cabbage leaf—and can leave you shaking your head in bewilderment when they do not. Like Glenn Gould, say, or Kurt Cobain, Gagnaire always seems to be prodding at the limits of his medium, perpetually on the brink of mayhem. It is the possibility of failure in his best dishes, plus the impression of an artist working at the edge of his abilities, that makes his cooking so thrilling. I do not think we will be seeing a bargain bistro from Gagnaire soon.
The excitement in most French cooking seems to involve the nuances of a dish, the many sensations produced by the many different bits of a stewed hen, say, and how the meat reacts over time to its garnishes, to the sauce, to the Chiroubles you happen to be drinking. Gagnaire is all about quick hits instead, startling juxtapositions meant to be absorbed in a moment: thirteen ways of looking at a turnip.
Even by three-star standards, Gagnaire serves a lot of tiny courses before the meal even begins: airy little beignets, perhaps; cunning purées of smoked salmon and avocado wrapped into tight spinach dumplings; tiny onion tarts garnished with nasturtium blossoms. These may be only hors d’oeuvres to the hors d’oeuvres proper, which may include a silver dollar of sweetened haddock, a Bloody Mary sorbet garnished with a chiffonade of fresh horseradish, and a weird, wonderful tartare of mixed, hand-chopped beef and fish, topped with a little seaweed. One has the feeling that one of Gagnaire’s grails is to create a seamless link between fish and flesh.
The basic unit of cuisine at Gagnaire is the constantly changing tasting menu of many, many courses … say, fish layered between puff pastry with paper-thin slices of dried apples and caramel; grilled scallops balanced on their sides in a pistachio sabayon; or lettuce-wrapped shrimp “dumplings” with tiny bits of ice plant for crunch.
Other chefs may attempt unlikely pairings, but Gagnaire outdoes them all with a mind-bending dish of molten foie gras and pressed caviar. Two different kinds of Japanese seaweeds assist in this stunning shotgun wedding of luxury ingredients, a symphony of brininess, crowned with dehydrated cross sections of carrot and a single perfect fried oyster. This may be one of humanity’s lifelong dreams fulfilled: to marry these two ultimate foodstuffs without their seeming in the least contrived, the foie gras cooked in such a way as to bring out the sharp livery tones more than the lushness.
Among the tangerine-peel semifreddo and the chocolate whatevers on the multicourse tasting dessert was a single prune stuffed with braised licorice root, swathed in burnt sugar and bathed in a richly bitter sauce of caramel and quince: Sharp and mellow, licorice paired with jammy fruit, it was a tiny étude in sensation, and it was powerfully good.
And then there was the hare, served in three courses—first, slices of the grilled saddle; then a sort of savory mush baked into a giant pie whose potent, luscious stink turned every head in the restaurant when the waiter broke the golden crust; and then the incredibly rich royale itself, made with reduced blood and various giblets, that may have been the strongest meat I have ever tasted, all of existence compressed into a single, reeking tablespoonful of soft protein. I couldn’t wait to eat it again.
The new-style bistro La Régalade, you realize, is an entirely different kind of restaurant, with an aesthetic almost diametrically opposed to that of the austere juxtapositions, the strenuous luxuries presented by the restaurants of grand cuisine. At La Régalade, once you shrug yourself free of your coat
, you are brought bread, butter, and a huge terrine that practically sizzles with the flavor of browned pork fat, from which you are invited to scoop out as much as you feel like eating.
If you order cochonaille (served family style even if you are the only person at the table who has ordered it), there is a seamless segue into a basket of dried sausage, blood sausage, and spreadable Southwest sausages of which you also eat as much as you want and then perhaps a little more, drowning just a bit in the sea of garlic, pork, and cool Chinon, perhaps digging around in your neighbor’s big plate of scallops with basil or a beautiful, earthy soup of puréed lentils and chestnuts ladled over a sort of foie gras mousse that melts in the heat of the broth, adding its own bittersweetness, its wallop of luxurious richness to the purée—a spectacular dish.
Just at the moment you have gorged yourself into rapture, out comes a crisply roasted wood pigeon, bursting with sweet, funky juice; breast red as a fire truck and soft as warmed butter, seasoned simply with pepper and buckshot. I had once eaten a Parmentier dish at the Montparnasse bistro L’Assiette, which had a layer of blood sausage where I had expected to find chopped beef, and I have spent nearly a decade looking for a version that was half as good. La Régalade’s was even better—buttery mashed potatoes frosted with a thick layer of seasoned blood in the style of Béarn, then topped with more potatoes and run under a salamander for a minute to crisp. I was so happy that I almost wept.
“But where should I eat?” I once asked a newspaperman I knew whose specific advice in Barcelona had once led to two full weeks of great meals, and whose knowledge of Paris restaurants was reputed to be deep. He thought for a minute, and his shoulders finally slumped in defeat.