PÊCHES MELBA
For those of a certain age, “Pêches Melba” may lift the lid of memory’s dusty recipe box—the one in which such dishes as Turkey Divan, Chicken à la King, Beef Stroganoff, and Oysters Rarebit were long ago filed away and forgotten. The mind nudged, you may recall that this was a dessert whipped up around the turn of the last century by Auguste Escoffier at London’s Savoy Hotel in homage to Dame Nellie Melba, the glass-shattering Australian soprano (whom we also have to thank for Melba toast). But, as for the dish itself, what most likely comes to mind is a vague impression of ice cream and canned peaches topped with some kind of fruit sauce, whipped cream, chopped nuts—a confection, that is, exuding all the bogus hauteur of a “company dessert.”
I have yet to find a cookbook that offers the dish exactly as Escoffier presented it, and many recipes are such depressing travesties that it’s little wonder that peach melba has fallen not only out of favor but out of mind. Most contemporary cookbooks ignore it, even those that specialize in fruit. In this instance, the banishment is wildly undeserved. Escoffier created a dessert that ought to be made only on a few rare summer days—and that was his fatal error. Chefs and food writers found it too wonderful to exercise any such restraint. To keep it on the menu, they poached the peaches, cooked and thickened the raspberry pulp, and then, when the result no longer seemed all that special, resorted to those instruments of the devil: whipped cream and chopped nuts.
So, forget all you ever knew aboutpêches melba . Then, if chance should bring your way a perfectly ripe peach this summer, do this with it—as Escoffier directs inMa Cuisine —and just call it:
SUMMER PEACH AND FRESH
RASPBERRY DESSERT
[serves 4]
4 fragrant, fully ripened peaches
1 pint fresh raspberries
1 pint premium vanilla ice cream
Dip each peach quickly into boiling water to loosen its skin and then into icy cold water to keep the flesh from cooking. Slip off the skin, cut the peach in half, remove the pit, and set each half, cut side up, in a small chilled dish. Put the raspberries in a sieve and, if they are from the supermarket, give them a quick rinse in cold water. Use a rubber spatula or the back of a spoon to press out their pulp into a bowl, discarding the residue of seeds. Scoop a ball of vanilla ice cream (its size is up to you) and put it on top of a peach half. Press the other half of the peach on top of this, and spoon over a quarter of the raspberry puree. Prepare the other 3 servings in the same manner and serve at once.
One Maine winter’s day, Matt was prepping a pile of grapefruit for marmalade, and cutting all that citrus rind into tiny slivers brought back memories of her brief stint in the late 1970s making desserts at the Harvest Restaurant in Cambridge. Joe Hyde was the head chef, and while he was a brilliant cook, he was not much of a dessert enthusiast. His idea of the most refreshing conclusion to a meal was fresh fruit, artfully cut up and swimming in booze. Consequently, Matt’s pastry skills were hardly put to the test; she spent most of her time replenishing the restaurant’s bottomless fruit cup and slivering orange rinds for Joe’s special favorite—Oranges à l’Arabe.As it happened, we had some navel oranges at hand, and so, once the grapefruit sections were bubbling in the pot, she whipped up a batch for that evening’s dessert. Here’s the recipe, adapted from Joe’s too-little-known book,Love, Time & Butter.38
ORANGES À L’ARABE
[serves 4 to 6]
8 seedless oranges
cup sugar (or to taste)
1 vanilla bean
2 to 3 tablespoons Grand Marnier
Remove the zest (the thin outer peel) from 4 of the oranges and cut this into toothpick-sized slivers. Cover these with water and bring to a boil in a saucepan. Drain and re-cover with cold water. Boil and drain. Cover a third time with cold water. Stir in the sugar, add the vanilla bean, and simmer until the slivers become translucent threads and the liquid is syrupy. Reserve.
Carefully pare away the peel and pith from all 8 oranges to expose the flesh of the fruit. Then use the knife blade to free each segment from its membrane, putting the pieces (and any juice) into a shallow bowl. Remove the vanilla bean from the syrup and pour this, the zest, and the Grand Marnier over the orange slices. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. This dessert can be prepared up to 24 hours in advance.
TALES FROM
THE OLD COOKSTOVE
POT ON THE FIRE
pot-bouille. In theGrand Dictionnaire universel Pierre Larousse defines this word as “everyday household cooking.” It was used in this sense by Flaubert, Richepin, Huysmans, and Vallès; Zola used the expression as the title for one of his books (1882). The termpot-bouille is no longer in use but the more colloquialtambouille, derived frompot-en-bouille, is still found.
—Larousse gastronomique
Although he is all but forgotten by most readers today, a quarter of a century ago Roy Andries de Groot was a romantic if also intimidatingly formidable presence in the food world, a man of grand gestures and summary judgments, possessing an awesome palate and an even more awesome gift of describing what it encountered. If Samuel Johnson was the Great Cham of literature, de Groot was surely the Great Cham of food writing. Everything about him was larger than life, not least the fact that his intricate evocations of place and plate flowed from the pen of a blind man—a condition that, to my memory, he never once directly referred to in print.
I was not one of his admirers, but I understood why others were so enchanted by him. He demanded a lot from life, and, at least by his report, life was impressed enough to deliver. In one typical de Grootian narrative—it appears in the posthumous collection of his essays,In Search of the Perfect Meal —his driver gets lost on a trip through the endless marshland along the western shore of the Gironde estuary in southwest France. They had planned to lunch on the famous local oysters,les gravettes, at Arcachon, but after a morning of hard driving under a fiery sun they were grateful to find themselves in the lime-tree-shaded central square of a small country town.
The square was entirely deserted; it was high noon and everyone was at home eating lunch. However, they noticed a tiny café and, peering through its window, spotted twopetits fonctionnaires, the town postal clerk and the stationmaster, waiting to be served their meal—exactly the sort of men, de Groot was well aware, who “in any town always know the best place for lunch.”
As, indeed, it proved to be. Madame bustled out of the kitchen to seat them herself. Perhaps they would like to begin withles saucissons truffés bordelais … followed by anomelette aux fines herbes … then some chops ofagneau pré-salé —local lamb that had grazed on the salt marshes and was consequently already seasoned … ? Monsieur came over from the zinc-topped bar and gestured toward the café’s back door, through which could be heard the cackling of chickens; if they preferred, he said, in a few moments one of those could be ready for the sauté pan.
All this sounded very good, but de Groot had picked up an unfamiliar but delicious aroma wafting from the kitchen. What, he asked Madame, was that? She hesitated a bit before responding. It was, she finally said, a family dish, an ordinary sort of stew, too plain a thing for gentlemen like themselves. De Groot demurred; it wasjust the sort of thing for a gentleman like himself. And the reader knows, even before he describes what happens next, that he is about to enjoy one of the best meals of his life.
When the unknown dish was placed in the center of the table, it appeared as an enormous earthenwaretoupin, radiating warmth. The steaming fragrance, when the lid was lifted, made waiting almost unbearable. The gently bubbling stew appeared to be a close cousin of boeuf bourguignon but was cooked in the red wine of Bordeaux. The flavor of the wine was as if it were concentrated and yet softened. This effect was achieved, I was to learn later, by the use of sweet figs. The chunks of beef, pork, carrots, mushrooms, and onions were all covered and unified by a wine sauce thickened, not with flour, but with a distillation of mashed veg-etables. Intrigued, I asked our host how long t
he dish had been cooking. “It has been on our fire for ten years, Monsieur!” Unbelievingly, I prodded: “In that time, how often has the pot been refilled?” “In ten years, Monsieur, the pot has never been pot on the fire empty—each time we eat from it, we fill the pot up again with new ingredients, but the base remains the same—this is the concentration of flavor that forms the sauce.” I asked about the wine in the pot. “It must be a good red Bordeaux, of course, and the vintage must be exactly as old as the dish.”
It was at this point, I think, that I threw the book on the floor.
Even so, I’ve read a lot of culinary flummery over the years, and none of it has haunted me the way this passage has. The thing is, although every element of the story rings false, there issomething beneath it that I nevertheless want to believe. Make no mistake, I have never thought that his story was true—it is more akin to wanting to believe in fairies. Except, in this instance, I’m not even sure what name to give to this longing: the best I’ve come up with is the romance of the pot.
IT IS THECRACKEDPOT
THATLASTS THELAONGEST.
Excepting the harder vegetables the French boil absolutely nothing, in our meaning of the word at least. From Dunkerque to Bayonne, from Nice to Strasbourg, not one ounce of anything goes into the pot unless it be to make soup: but then the nation lives on soup. Roast meat costs too much for the everyday consumption of a population whose earnings average eighteenpence a-head: so they feed on a copious stew of bacon, sausage, cabbage, potatoes, and bread—and very good indeed it is.
— Frederic Marshall,French Home Life (1873)
Unlike, say, the pan or the kettle, the pot is less an implement of the home kitchen than its emblem—at least, of that room as it once was, dark and smoky, its walls coated with grease, and permeated with the smell of food. Because of this, the pot takes on an amorphous shape in our imagination, which is why it lends itself so easily to such compounds asteapot orbeanpot orpotherb orpotholder.
Or, for that matter,crackpot, fusspot, andstinkpot. The connotations of the wordpot in English often have an edge of condescension—even of contempt—about them. Apotshot, for example, was originally an unconscionably easy shot fired out of hunger, not sport; apotboiler is a work written strictly for the money;potluck once meant a supper where you got what happened to be caught by the ladle and now means something thrown together any which way to feed the neighbors; and apotwalloper was a commoner who could gain the right to vote only by proving he had a fireplace in which to do his cooking.
Compare the image of a pot simmering on the stove with a spitted haunch of beef roasting over the fire: the meat, large, seared an appetizing brown, glistening with fat, fills the room with its presence; with it on the table before you, you can eat until you drop. The pot, on the other hand, hunches over its contents like a despotic cook. You can see nothing; only a whisper of aroma is allowed to escape from its confines. It will strike you as stingy, since the amount it contains is predetermined; as secretive, since there is no telling what is hidden inside it, even if you are allowed to lift up the lid and look; and as insubstantial, cooked into boneless, diluted stuff that lacks anything into which to really sink your teeth. There are few epithets as stinging aspotlicker —a person so debased and doglike as to be willing to lap up the remains at the bottom of the pot.
Of course, nothing could be more spineless than a pot, which is all belly and—at least until recently—lacks any perceptible brawn. Traditionally, pots were made of fired clay. They started out fragile, and cooking made them more so—hence, the old adage “No water spilt nor pot broken,” only half of which makes sense today. Because of this, they were given a bulbous—potbellied—shape to make them stronger and expose more of their surface to the heat. But that shape also underlined their vulnerability. To “go to pot” is to surrender unresistingly to a slide into self-indulgence—to let yourself go soft.
Sometime in the late 1860s, the British historian Frederic Marshall, author ofPopulation and Trade in France in 1861–62 , published a series of entertaining and insightful articles on French home life inBlackwood’s Magazine. In them, he explains to his English readers how the French raise their children, conduct their marriages, dress themselves, furnish their homes, and manage their households, and, with great relish and much detail, how they go about preparing their meals.39
In fact, Marshall uses this account as an opportunity to lambaste the culinary habits of his native land, especially the British tendency to regard any food that cannot be roasted as somehow unworthy of notice. He is particularly scornful of the English habit of boiling food and then tossing out the cooking liquid, which he calls “one of the most senseless acts to which human intelligence can descend; it is an inexcusable, unjustifiable, wanton folly.”
How much better the French, who, with their unique culinary marriage of parsimony and gastronomy, have produced a cuisine in which even the water that has cooked the cauliflower is treated with respect; in which meat is bought in small portions and then has every atom of nutritional value cleverly extracted from it; and in which the first rule of cooking is, as might be expected from a nation gone to pot,go softly.
French kitchen-ranges do not resemble those which are still so generally in use in England, where the same vast mass of coal goes on blazing itself away, whether its heat be employed to boil a kettle or to roast a sheep. In France, cookery is carried on with wood or charcoal fires, roused up to activity in five minutes when the time comes to use them. A fire to roast a chicken is made just big enough to serve the purpose; the combustion of a pennyworth of charcoal boils or stews the contents of two saucepans at the same time; directly the operation is complete the fire is covered up with ashes, or is put out. In the case of soups, and of the few other dishes which require hours of gentle simmering, the very nature of the process prohibits strong flame and its accompanying loss of fuel. “Cuisinez doucement” is the first counsel given to a beginner; and that means, amongst other things, never have a bigger or a hotter fire than you really want; for if you do you will waste money, and will burn your casseroles and their contents.
A hot fire will also crack your pot—at least if it is one of those clay pots that, in so many forms, were for generations an absolute familiar in the French kitchen. These pots must be handled gently and set over a gentle flame, and what emerges from them has itself been gentled: it is, in every sense,bien cuit. Such a pot in such a kitchen, rather than proving a hindrance, is a reflection and an abettor of a culinary philosophy based on the firm belief that haste makes waste. If a cracked pot does last the longest, it is because the cracking has served as an effective chastisement to the cook.
THEPOTSITS ON THESTOVE
BUTITDREAMS OF THEGARDEN.
Potage:a Jumblement of several sorts of Flesh and Fowl boil’d together with Herbs, and served up in the Broth, mix’d together after the French Fashion.
— Edward Phillips,The New World of English Words
(5th edition, 1696)
And therefore the French do well to begin [their dinner] with their herbaceous pottage.
— John Evelyn,Acetaria: A Discourse on Sallets (1699)
The looming presence of the pot in the French culinary imagination is revealed through a simple enumeration of some of the famous dishes prepared in one—petit salé aux lentilles, daube de boeuf à la pro-vençale, navarin d’agneau printanier, blanquette de veau, boeuf à la mode, haricot de mouton, bouillabaisse, boeuf bourguignon, cassoulet, poulet en cocotte.Add to this list such items as confit, pâtés and terrines, and the innumerable daubes and garbures, not to mention that backbone of French peasant cooking the potée—the “copious stew” of bacon, sausage, beans, cabbage, and the like, whose ultimate realization is thepot-au-feu —and the case is closed.
This, then, is the basic conjugation of French home cooking:pot, potage, potager, withpot being the present,potage the future, andpotager the past tense. In current parlance, apotage —a thick creamy soup that could serve as a meal
but is usually eaten as a first course—lies somewhere between the elegantly delicate consommé and the heartier, gut-fillingpotée. But the original meaning was closer to that of the English wordpottage, which my dictionary still defines as “a thick soup of vegetables [what the above-quoted writers meant by the wordsHerbs andherbaceous ] and often meat.”
The wordpotager is more complicated, but it has always had something to do with the vegetables that are the essential part of apotage: sometimes it referred to the person who cooked them, sometimes to the person who grew them (an English writer described Monsieur de la Quintinie, who abandoned the law to become head gardener at Versailles for Louis XIV, as “that haughtypotager” ), but most usually, and now almost always, to the garden in which they are grown. As Georgeanne Brennan, author of two books on the subject, explains:
Apotager is a year-round garden whose purpose is to supply the kitchen on a daily basis with fresh vegetables and herbs. It is cyclical not linear, because even while being harvested in the current season, it is continually being replanted for the coming season.Potagers are an integral part of the French food tradition, and although their numbers are diminishing, a trip through France will reveal plots of land planted to vegetables in front of houses, along streambeds and railroad tracks, and behind blocks of urban flats.
Apotager, then, is a kitchen garden, but a kitchen garden with a difference. American gardeners, even if they won’t admit it, are in love with surfeit. The word thatgarden immediately brings to mind (second only, perhaps, toweeds ) isbounty —the basket overflowing with tomatoes, the armload of cabbages, the garbage bags stuffed with zucchini or pole beans.
Although garden writers claim that this hoarding impulse is a remnant of our pioneer heritage, it may originate from the fact that in this country gardening is generally associated with growing flowers, not vegetables or fruit. And with flowers, massed effects are very pleasing, with one crowd of blooms following another as the seasons progress. This, though, is not the French way. As Brigitte Tilleray says inRecipes from the French Kitchen Garden,
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