A year or so after the Puck/Lazaroff wedding, Jean-André visited Los Angeles and stayed at my parents’ house for a week, cementing the connection. A few years after that, I managed to go to Provence and stay at Jean-André’s hotel for a couple of days—the place was more beautiful and the food far beyond what I’d imagined. So when it came time to head off to write the second Norton book, I knew I wanted to be somewhere near Les Baux. Amazingly enough, I found the exact house I had pictured and hoped for in the perfect town of Goult, in the Luberon.
During this year abroad, my mother came over for a three-week visit. In the course of that visit, the four of us—my mom, Janis, Norton, and I—drove to Italy, with the express purpose of seeing the town of Lucca, where my brother had recently lived for a couple of years.
Lucca was as beautiful as Eric had said it was. We stayed in a lovely old hotel for one night and, using our guidebook, booked a dinner reservation at what seemed to be an excellent restaurant. In the afternoon, after strolling around the walled city, we struck up a conversation with the hotel owner. He didn’t speak English and none of us spoke a word of Italian, so the conversation was composed of incorrect but understandable French on both sides and a lot of hand signals. He asked if we were serious about food and we said we definitely were. I told him my mother was a famous chef, which got my mother’s usual instant response: “I’m not a chef, I’m a cook. Wolf is a chef.” That got my usual response, which was: “Mom, it doesn’t make any difference. No one cares.” And in this particular instance, I tacked on: “And he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, anyway.” But he did understand and he was impressed enough to tell us that the restaurant we’d chosen for dinner that night wasn’t very good and asked if he could recommend another place. We said sure. He then asked if we liked truffles.
I had discovered truffles while living in the Luberon. I’d read about them and had been desperate to try them and as soon as I arrived in Goult, I sought them out. You could buy them much the way people bought marijuana in Washington Square Park back in New York: from shady-looking characters who would go “Pssst” as you walked by. Farmers sold truffles under the table so they didn’t have to pay the astronomical taxes. If you knew the right street corners in almost every Provençal town, there’d be a guy in an overcoat, loitering suspiciously, and if you said the magic words, “Avez-vous des truffes, Monsieur?” he’d open his coat to reveal several pounds of truffles, layered into different pockets, cut into different sizes. Once you got over the overpowering odor, it was quite a magnificent spectacle. In the town of Apt, not far from Goult, I began to rendezvous regularly with the local truffle dealer and Janis and I had become addicted to the stuff, although we doled the nuggets out carefully to ourselves and our new friends since, even when purchased on the black market, they were quite expensive.
Which is why the immediate answer to our hotel owner was, “Yes, we love truffles.” Without saying another word, he picked up the phone, called a restaurant, and spoke rapidly in Italian. The only things we managed to catch were “famous chef” and “truffle dinner.” That was enough for me. We were there.
The restaurant, Solferino, was located in an old house; its various rooms were each used as small and separate dining rooms. Before we ordered, Janis said that my mom had been treating us to everything on this trip so she insisted on paying for dinner that night. That was okay by the three of us—my mom, Norton, and me. Norton was not big on picking up checks, although in a very real way, he was paying for the entire year abroad.
Soon after we were seated, the owner of the restaurant appeared before us, made a fuss over my mother, and said we didn’t have to order—we were being served their special truffle dinner. Over the next several hours, he proceeded to bring out a six-course truffle-laden meal. I can’t remember everything we ate but I know it included truffled eggs, three separate pastas with three different truffle sauces, and a truffle-stuffed Cornish game hen. About halfway through the meal I leaned over to Janis and said, “I have some bad news. You chose the wrong night to pick up the check since this meal is going to cost about ten thousand dollars.” She nodded, steeling herself for what had to be an astronomical bill.
Just when we all thought the meal had ended—and by this point we were grateful because we could barely move or breathe—we were served small filet mignons that were topped with generous portions of truffle cream sauce. The sauce dripped over onto the sides of the steaks and onto the plate and contained chunks of black and white truffles the size of small dice. It was a magnificent sight and, although we thought it was impossible, we polished off every last bite. My mother, who weighed a hundred and ten pounds on her heaviest day but could outeat a horse, proclaimed this steak the best she had ever tasted. The sauce was not at all cloying or heavy and the truffles exploded with scent and taste.
At some point during the meal, we had an extended conversation with the owner. It turned out he knew many of the chefs my mom worked with: Wolf and Nancy Silverton and a few others (we later found out that Nancy knew Solferino well and had even cooked with the owner). After our steaks, he led us into the kitchen, introduced us to his mother, who looked pretty frail but was clearly the one who had done all the cooking that night. She was thrilled to meet us, we were thrilled to meet her, we were presented with a bottle of homemade grappa as a gift to take with us, and then, back at our table, we were served dessert against our wishes—individual chocolate bombes with tiny American flags stuck in them—and yes, we ate every last bite.
Then we gulped and asked for the check.
Janis held out her hand, was given the bill … and discovered that all we’d been charged for was the two bottles of red wine that we’d downed with dinner. The whole meal came to about sixty bucks. When we protested, the owner—and his mother, who emerged from the kitchen to take part in the discussion—shooed us away and said that they were honored to have such a well-known chef dining with them and that they wouldn’t think of charging us. I practically had to cover my mom’s mouth with my hand to stop her from saying, “I’m not a chef. I’m a cook.”
The next morning, while driving back to France, we all started sniffing, wondering what the odd smell could be that was filling the car. At some point, Janis realized that it was the smell of truffles: our epic dinner was emanating from our pores.
Before returning to Goult, we stopped off for lunch at one of the ritzy towns on the French Riviera. A friend of ours was visiting someone with a house in Villefranche-sur-Mer and, knowing of our travels, invited us to stop by for lunch on our way home. The house was tasteful and elegant with a view of the Mediterranean, the hostess was gracious, and she and her two guests—my friend Nina and an elderly woman who was a legendary Parisian book editor—prepared a perfect lunch of cold roast chicken, roast beef, French cheeses, salad, and, of course, good wine. We donated our freebie bottle of grappa, which was a big hit.
As we ate, we regaled the three women with detailed descriptions of every meal we’d eaten on the other side of the French/Italian border. We focused particularly on every magnificent morsel we had downed at our truffle dinner. At one point, the book editor, who smoked continuously and had a deep, throaty voice, said, “Congratulations.”
We all turned to her, waiting to see whom she was congratulating and why. She nodded at me and Janis.
“You are now officially French,” she proclaimed. “You are eating one superb meal while spending the entire time talking about another one.”
Solferino’s Steak with Truffle Cream Sauce Recipe
⅓ cup heavy cream
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Thinly shaved fresh truffles, to taste
DIRECTIONS:
Whisk together the cream and the egg yolks until thoroughly mixed. Place in a medium saucepan over low heat. Add the lemon juice and olive oil gradually, whisking as you add. Add the shaved truffles. Stir gentl
y for about 5 minutes.
Serve hot.
STEAK PREPARATION
1 small tournedos of beef per person
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Over high heat, with a bit of olive oil, char each side of the beef. Don’t cook through, just brown each side.
Put the tournedos in the oven and cook for exactly 15 minutes (although check after 10, just to be safe). This should leave you with perfect, medium-rare tournedos for everyone.
This is remarkably easy to prepare. Good thing, since this is the dish I’d decided to make at the last minute as a follow-up to Abby and Peter’s two-day salmon coulibiac fantasia. I didn’t think things could get any better than the coulibiac appetizer, but the people at the dinner party looked and sounded almost orgasmic when they bit into this follow-up dish. I think their response was largely due to the fact that people are rarely served truffles at a home-cooked meal.
I have only a few comments about how best to prepare this baby.
Normally, tournedos (a.k.a. filet mignon) is my least favorite cut of beef. I love skirt steak, sirloin, rib eye, you name it, but although tournedos might be the most expensive of them all, I’ve always found it somewhat tasteless and I’ve never loved the texture. To be totally snobby, I always thought that people who order filet mignon do so because it’s expensive and they don’t really know what they’re doing. Um …
I’m wrong. When topped with this truffle sauce, these steaks were amazing. I tried this sauce with a couple of different and usually preferred cuts of meat and, yes, they were all good—what could be bad?—but nowhere near as good. I have no idea why this is so, but it is.
The only other thing you need to know is that truffles are insanely expensive. A little rock of white truffle can go for five hundred smackers. The black ones are less costly but they ain’t cheap. I wouldn’t tell this to too many people, but you can supplement the real thing with a canned version of a truffle cream sauce. Try Urbani Truffle Thrills, Cream and Truffles. Each 6.1 ounce can costs about ten dollars on Urbani.com, and you might need more than one can, depending on how many steaks you’re serving. But this sauce has real truffles (almost all the versions of bottled truffle oil are chemical re-creations with no real truffles in there). Most people won’t know the difference. I wouldn’t use it instead of fresh truffles, but as a way of saving a few bucks, go ahead and use it with at least one fresh truffle to make more sauce. Real truffles are worth it. I swear.
A few years ago, I was in Tuscany and went on a truffle hunt. My small group and I trudged a few miles through a lot of dirt and mud, led by two dogs, a human guide, and the farmer who owned the land. By the time I got back to the hotel, I basically looked like a five-year-old boy who’d spent the day making mud pies. I was covered in the stuff.
But it, too, was worth it.
Here’s what I learned on my hunt.
—Most farmers use truffle dogs rather than truffle pigs to find these goodies. Dogs are smaller and more agile and can find truffles in spots pigs can’t get to.
—They train puppies to be truffle dogs by putting bits of truffles in their dog food, developing their taste for the delicacy. Oh, to be a truffle puppy in my next life.
—White truffles and black truffles do not grow separately at vastly different locations or times of the year or different climates. They just grow at slightly different elevations and require slightly different amounts of water. We found both white and black ones on our hike.
—There is a huge illegal fake-truffle scam throughout France and Italy. These fake truffles are being created in Eastern Europe and smuggled over the border into legitimate truffle-growing countries, where they are sold for an indecent profit to unsuspecting and not-so-discerning foodies and importers. This news shook me to my very core.
After our search was over, we repaired to a small stone cottage next to the farmer’s main house. There, his wife served us red and white wines that they had made from their own grapes (very good), toast (from their homemade bread—so good) topped with olive oil (made from their own olives—scrumptious), and butter (yes, of course, churned themselves from the cream that came from their cows). And on top of it all were fingernail-size flakes of black and white truffles, shaved and placed to completely cover each slice of toast.
Worth it. Definitely worth it.
MY ALMOST-MADE-UP FAVA BEAN PUREE
If the coulibiac is the most important dish to my mother on an emotional level, and if the steak/truffle concoction is at or near the top of her taste chart, this side dish is probably the least important recipe on her list. It is here because she insisted that her perfect dinner had to have a vegetable, she settled on fava beans as her favorite green vegetable, and she really likes the backstory to this recipe. My mother has a wide range of things that make her laugh. But I think she laughs the hardest at stories that reveal me to be your basic dolt.
I made a fava bean puree for the very first grown-up dinner party I ever threw. I don’t know why I picked it. At this point in my life, I’m not sure I’d ever even tasted a fava bean. I just know that I got it in my head to do it, I found a recipe, and I was off to the races.
The reason for this particular dinner party was that Cindy—the girlfriend who drew me back to L.A. and was with me and my mother the day she decided to go to work at Ma Maison and who changed my life and career by giving me my Scottish Fold cat Norton—wound up moving to New York to be with me.
Cindy was relatively easygoing and had a very good heart. She also had a mother who was not to be believed: sour, mean, and nasty—and those were her best traits. My mom used to love hearing about Cindy’s mom because my mom came out looking so good in comparison. I would tell her some nightmare story about Cindy’s mother and my mom would just smile and raise an eyebrow. I’d go, “I know, I know, you don’t have to say anything,” and mostly she wouldn’t, although sometimes she’d mumble something about how lucky I was.
Not too long after I enticed Cindy eastward, her mom decided to pay her daughter a visit and see what all the fuss was about when it came to the new boyfriend. Cindy was a wreck, since her mother’s favorite sport was tearing down Cindy’s self-confidence. She’d say things like, “Oh, are you actually wearing that dress to go out?” or “Is that really the way you want your hair to look?”
Understandably, Cindy was a bit fragile around her mother, and always on edge. I decided I’d be the perfect boyfriend and give my pseudo- and horrid mom-in-law the time of her life. I was twenty-four years old, an assistant editor at a publishing company, and my first novel had just been published to limited sales (like, to my parents and their friends), so I wasn’t exactly rolling in dough. Nonetheless, I took the two women—making it clear it was my treat—to the fanciest and nicest French restaurant I knew of in the Village. I don’t remember what we ate but I do remember I ordered the best bottle of wine that was in my price range and that the entire dinner for three cost more than I earned in one week’s paycheck. What the hell: I was doing this for my beloved.
Dinner was reasonably pleasant. Then I called for the check, as suavely as I knew how, and paid it with my credit card, trying my best not to look ashen or tremble even minutely as I added a tip and signed my name. When it was all done, I lifted my glass to take the final sip of wine before we left, told Cindy’s mom how glad I was to get to know her, and posed the following innocent question: “So … did you enjoy your dinner?”
To this day, decades later, the words that came out of her mouth resonate inside my head as if spoken mere seconds ago. I can hear her distinctive, scratchy voice and hear her whiny, dismissive tone and see the not so subtle sneer on her face as she said:
“All food tastes like cold, gray lumps of clay to me. I’d be happy if I never had to eat again.”
I knew several things at that exact moment. First: that Cindy and I were doomed because if there was even a 1 percent chance that she was going to evolve—or devolve—into her mother as she got older, I would most likel
y wind up in prison after I drowned her in our bathtub (assuming that at some point in the future, I’d be able to afford a place with an actual bathtub). Next: that I could live to be 150 years old and never understand why Cindy’s mom hadn’t mentioned her aversion to all solid food before I’d spent my entire bank account on dinner. And finally: that I’d made a huge mistake by insisting Cindy and I have a dinner party two nights hence so Cindy’s mom could meet some of our friends.
I was out of the rat apartment by this time. Thank God for that because Cindy’s mom’s potential response to that place is beyond anything my fertile imagination could conceive. My new apartment was hardly fancy or luxurious, but it was at least rodent free with no visible garbage outside the window. I don’t remember the full meal that I prepared on that Saturday night. I’m sure it was something simple like a roast that I stuck in the oven and a salad (my idea of cooking back then was to make my own salad dressing, using oil and vinegar and a dash of mustard instead of buying a bottle of premade Italian dressing). But for some unknown reason, I had it in my head that I had to make a fava bean puree.
Somewhere, I found a recipe and it didn’t seem all that difficult. It was basically boiling a bunch of fava beans, mashing them up with butter and a few herbs, and voilà, a delicacy was born. So I bought whatever amount of beans the recipe called for and got up earlier than usual that Saturday morn, just to make sure nothing could be left to chance. I made myself a cup of coffee, read the paper, relaxed and confident, even though this was my first time preparing a real dinner for real company. Deciding it was never too soon to start, I turned to the recipe for fava bean puree and read the first instruction: “Shell the fava beans.”
No problem. I’d helped my mom shell peas before. I figured this was the same level of work. I took one fava out of the bag and began shelling. Five minutes later, I was still trying to get the bean out of the hard shell. I checked the recipe. Yup, the beans were supposed to be shelled before they were cooked. I squeezed, I cut, I squeezed some more. Cindy woke up about an hour later, came into the kitchen/living room area, and I greeted her with the words: “Look! I’ve been doing this for almost an hour and I’ve shelled five beans. Five! There’s thousands of the fuckers! It’s going to take me three weeks to shell all these fucking beans!”
My Mother's Kitchen Page 18