Monday, November 18, 2002

Boeuf a la Mode.  Now, this is the kind of French food I’m talking about.  This is berets and striped shirts, and poets coming down from their garrets after a night of writing and sex and cheap wine to eat off chunky white plates among the stevedores (are there stevedores in Paris?) well anyway manual laborers of some sort in a huge, warm room with steamed windows and rough-hewn tables.  This is good, simple, French stuff. Slice up some carrots and celery and onions.  Put half of them in the bottom of a bowl along with a bay leave, a whole clove, a halved clove of garlic and thyme.  Place a salted and peppered hunk of rump roast on top. Spread the other half of the vegetables on top, with another bay leaf, clove, garlic clove and more thyme.  Pour in 5 cups of red wine, a bit of brandy, and some olive oil.  Cover and let marinate for at least 6 hours, up to twenty-four.  (I only managed 4 hours, actually, but there is not question here that more is better.) Take the meat of the marinade, drain, and pat dry.  Brown it on all sides in very hot cooking fat.  Lard is really best; I didn’t have any and so used cooking oil.  Pour out the fat and pour in the marinade; let that boil down by half.  Add calf’s feet, veal knuckles and/or blanched bacon rind.  I’m a little skittish about calf’s feet after the foul-smelling experiment with the aspic, and was unable to find veal knuckles.  I used bacon rind and veal neck bones.  But something more cartilaginous would really be better, I imagine.  Bring back to a simmer, then cover and stick in a 350° oven for four hours or so.  While it’s cooking, make the onions and Carottes Etuvees au Beurre (Carrots Braised in Butter) and the Oignons Glaces a Brun (Brown-Braised Onions) to go with. The carrots are simplicity itself.  Just peel and quarter, then toss into a pan with water some sugar, a bit of salt and some butter, and boil slowly, covered, for half an hour.  The onions are not much harder, though there are a few more steps.  First peel them by throwing them in boiling water for thirty seconds, draining them, and squeezing them out of their skins.  (I’m using white pearl onions here.)  Then sauté them in butter and oil for 10 minutes.  JC writes, comfortingly, I think, “You cannot expect to brown them uniformly,” and so you can’t.  But you can get them sort of brown-spotted all over.  Then you pour in some beef stock or red or white wine (I used beef stock) and an herb bouquet – an actual one this time, since I at last have cheesecloth – and simmer for half an hour or so.  Once the carrots and onions are done, they can sit and wait for basically ever. I turn the beef in the oven every 45 minutes or so.  Every time I take the lid off the pot, a whoosh of purple-flavored steam.  I also, at last, make rice the Julia way.  I put a big pot of salted water on to boil.  I sprinkle in the rice and let it boil away for 10 minutes or so, until it’s about halfway done.  Then I drain it, rinse it with hot water, tie it into a square of cheesecloth, and put that in a steamer unit over simmer water.  I let it steam for twenty minutes. When the beef is done, I take it out, but it on a platter.  I strain the cooking juices into a saucepan and simmer that for a few minutes, tossing in a mixture of port and cornstarch for some extra thickness.  The sauce really probably would have been better with more nether parts of animals in it, but it is intense as it is, if a tad thin.  I throw the carrots and onions into the sauce for a few minutes to reheat them.  Then I spoon them back out and put them around the roast on the platter.  I spoon a little sauce on top, and bring the rest to the table in a gravy boat. (I have no gravy boat.  I bring the rest to the table in a cereal bowl.) It is a good, warm, filling, heartening meal.  It is the kind of meal that makes me feel that cooking meals like this is what I want to be doing all the time, and that I would rather drop dead of a cholesterol-induced attack than wake up the next morning and go to work.  We also ate the almond Bavarian.  This was not so much stevedores-in-a-steamy-dockside-public-house as tourists-in-a-fancy-coffee-shop, which works also.  It was quite good, though I felt that I was too aware of the slightly chemical taste of almond extract.  I now have to go do some work before I go to work.  Bringing work home on the weekend; I believe that officially makes me an office wank.  Ah well, what can I do, commit hari kiri? Hmm....   7:45:29 AM    comment []