Sunday, August 03, 2003

Heartened by your many suggestions, on Friday night I tackled spit roasted chicken, Poelet a la Broche.  I first attempted the string-tied-to-the-pot-handles technique, but the chicken seemed rather much for the string, so I switched to another, my very largest, stock pot, and at the risk of scandalizing Pookie, who expressed such virulently anti-clothes-hanger sentiments in the comments the other day, I shoved a piece of one through the chicken and wedged the  ends under the pot handles.  This worked nicely, especially once I’d managed to awkwardly truss the chicken.  Damn, it really is such a good thing that I’m not trying to make a living as a sailor or a dominatrix, my knot skills are sorely lacking.  So I tied some bacon that I’d blanched  (Julia particularly tells me to “never use regular bacon,” which makes me wonder if all those other times she told me to blanch the bacon she was just pulling my chain) around the beastie and threw some olive oil-coated potatoes down into the stock pot under the chicken, and stuck it in the oven for awhile.  Julia says that if I have a “spit attachment in the oven,” which I guess was what I’d sort of concocted, that I should heat the broiler to a moderate temperature – though I guess maybe because I’ve been living in rented apartments in the outer boroughs for most of my cooking career I’ve never experienced a broiler with more than one temperature, that is “broil” – stick the chicken spit pot in the oven, and “leave the oven door ajar.”  I hope that the notion of me in an un-air-conditioned Queens apartment in August cooking a chicken in an oven with the broiler blazing and the door propped open with a baking sheet is good for a giggle.  Anyway, it wasn’t actually that bad, because I could leave the kitchen and attend to other things like sucking down vodka tonics and watching silly shit on television while it cooked.  And it wound up very juicy and good tasting, though it never browned properly.  I blame myself for being too lazy to baste properly at the end.  Anyway, a very relaxing evening prior to the all-day brain-a-thon I’d be engaging in Saturday. So I started my morning with errands, picking up the fanciest red and white burgundies I could buy for under twelve dollars a bottle, buying a Prince CD – nothing more embarrassing than buying the best hits collection of Prince, but dude I like the songs, and our collection is woefully lacking  – buying some little onions and mushrooms and bread and, lastly, calves’ brains.  The guy at Ottomanelli’s didn’t even blink when I asked.  He brought it out from the back, in a plastic bag.  It looked like a brain.  Smaller than I’d imagined.  Gosh.  I brought it home and set it to soak in the half-bath, because once again our cold water tap isn’t working in the kitchen. So then I go check my email.  I got a note from an angry older gentleman who spent 22 years in the military in France, and who expressed the opinion that the Project is, in essence, an unpatriotic endorsement of Charles DeGaulle’s 1966 decision to withdraw France from NATO’s unified military command structure, which sadly resulted in the relocation of NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels.   And I guess maybe he’s right.  Not as far as the endorsement goes – how could I possibly celebrate the event that so callously ripped thousands of U.S. servicemen and women from the French cuisine they had learned to love, and forced them to sustain themselves on mussels and pommes frites? – but certainly Julia’s masterpiece is of a piece with that dark period in our nation’s relationship with the French, an attempt to bring the treasure we’d lost to our shores. Seriously, though.  I’m not going to criticize anyone for hating the French, except maybe to say that it’s rather a too-easy hatred to maintain, like shooting frogs in a barrel (ba-dum bump!), but this rejecting French food is just nonsense.  It’s like a Muslim extremist not letting his son play with a hula hoop because it’s the godless invention of the Great Satan – it’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. So back to food.  I got all the prep out of the way – soaking the brains, browning mushrooms and braising onions for Cervelles en Matelote (Calf’s Brains in Red Wine with Mushrooms and Onions), marinating half the brains in lemon juice and salt and pepper and oil for Cervelles au Beurre Noir (Calf’s Brains in Brown Butter Sauce.)  The idea was to make a half recipe of each of the brain recipe and get this section over with as painlessly as possible.  We’d corralled two volunteers, Helen and her boy Dan.  Actually, three, if you count Dan’s dog Toni, which I do.  I made crepes out of the Crepes Souffles batter, which is just crepe batter with stiff egg whites beaten in, and the Frangipane, or  Almond Custard Filling, I’d be filling the crepes with for the Crepes Fourrees, Frangipane.  Christopher Lydon stopped by to chat in the afternoon, and we sat in our sweltering kitchen – I’ve actually hooked our air conditioner up in there, which it does a certain small amount of good, but we had to turn it off to accommodate Chris’s recording equipment, so swelter we did, sorry Chris – chatting about blogging and Julia and the Bronte sisters while I eviscerated cucumbers for Concombres a la Mornay, Cucumbers with Cheese Sauce, the last of the cucumbers and very nearly the last of the vegetables in general.  He also used our bathroom, which I didn’t remember until afterwards was adorned with soaking brains.  Sorry, Chris. An aside here – I was thrown into something of a philosophical tizzy by the brains.  I mean, yes, there was the ick factor, the issue that when you washed them, you inevitably wound up with bits of brain matter strewn Tarantino-esquely about the sink and your garments, and the weirdo gummy white matter that held the brain together, that was sort of like fat, I guess, but also looked and felt like something that could be called spongiform.  But then there was the mystery of life.  I mean jesus.  You’d think a brain would be complex and conduited with all the pathways of thought and receptacles of memory, but no.  It’s just this flabby sad little organ.  How can it be?  How can we be?  HOOWWWW???!!!!! With the cheese sauce I had my only serious issue of the day.  I don’t know what the fuck was happening, it took me three attempts and even then it was not successful.  I can’t figure out what happened.  Well, I sort of can.  The first two times, I didn’t use the right proportion of flour to butter for the roux.  The second time, in addition, I added cornstarch straight into the sauce, like a moron, trying to thicken it up, with predictably unsavory results.  The last time I did it properly, as far as I can see, but the sauce still didn’t thicken up very good.  I added some cornstarch, properly this time, mixing it first with a bit of the sauce, and that helped matters a bit, as did adding a whole lot of cheese.  But it was not the Mornay sauce I have executed so flawlessly in the past.  I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me.  I went through a brief crisis of faith – if I couldn’t make a simply Mornay sauce after eleven months, what was the point of all this?  Perhaps, Eric noted, being particularly understanding, it was an elaborate lesson in patience for him.  Or perhaps, Lumi the cat, seemed to suggest, languishing on her back in front of one of the fans in the living room, it is all a vicious Masonic plot to torture the cats of Jackson Avenue with heat stroke.  “Fucking Masons,” you could almost hear her mutter. So all went surprisingly well other than that.  The cucumbers, peeled and seeded and sliced into matchsticks, tossed with butter and dried basil, went into the oven to bake.  The brains for the Cervelles en Matelote were set into some simmering red wine flavored with beef stock and garlic and thyme and bay leaf and cooked uncovered, just under the simmer for twenty minutes, then allowed to sit in the liquid off heat for another twenty.  Then the brains were set aside and sliced, and the wine stock was boiled down with some tomato paste, and thickened with a paste of butter and flour.  The sauce was then strained into another bowl.  The brains were laid into the pan with the braised onions and the mushrooms, and then the sauce was poured over it.  Upon rewarming, the brains rather distressingly melted into the sauce, which was probably for the best. The Cervelles au Beurre Noir had the lovely advantage of dispensing with two recipes at once.  The Beurre Noir, Brown Butter Sauce, is just a stick and a half of clarified butter and browned to a nut color, with parsley added and cooked down vinegar.  Only Eric had bought cilantro instead of parsley, and then Helen and Dan couldn’t find any.  So no parsley.  And I wasn’t as assiduous as I should have been regarding the clarification process, though I really did try my best.  Still there were a few bits of white stuff, which became black stuff.  Oh well.  I stirred in capers, per Julia’s suggestion for a variation, and kept the sauce warm on a back burner, not so tough considering that despite the air conditioner’s best efforts, the kitchen was now 95 degrees.  Then I drained the brains, that I had been marinating, and tossed them in flour, and browned them over high heat in butter and oil.  Tossed them with the butter sauce and that was that.  The cucumbers I tossed with the slightly sad Mornay sauce, dotted with butter and sprinkled with cheese, and ran under the broiler.  We made some fusilli that were the only noodles that the corner bodega had, which Eric had to buy because Helen, flushed with the success of hanging blinds in her room, forgot to bring the egg noodles.  Tossed those with butter and some scary old parmesan.  Dinner. Helen, it turns out, is a big fan of brains.  She has eaten goat brain curry on the street in India, being a far braver woman than most.  She loved my brains.  For the rest of us – except for Toni, of course, a greyhound lab mix with such beautiful manners that my cats took her mostly in stride, and a wonderful affinity for prewashing of all dishes – the jury is still out.  Personally, I could take the brains in red wine sauce with onions and mushrooms, because it tasted mostly like onions and mushrooms and red wine.  The brains just sort of melted into the sauce and made it taste rich.  But the pan fried brains – I don’t know.  It was like eating fried fat times about a thousand.  Almost surreally rich, and with this gummy, half melted texture, and that on top of the ew brains problem was a little much for me.  The cucumbers were fine, but I still prefer plain baked cucumbers, I think.  Dan, wine genius, brought some really lovely German reisling, and we had a high old time, and finished off with the almond custard filled crepes, sprinkled with Scharffenberger chocolate and sugar and butter and warmed in the oven.  Delicious, like slightly soft cannolis, actually – they’d crisped up in the oven.  Ah food.  And Toni, as I said, helped with the clean-up.  I’m going to be getting a dog, it’s decided. It is now Sunday, and Eric, now known as He Who Washes Many Dishes Badly Often, has finished with his morning-after chores.  I’ve looked over the book and am feeling optimistic.  This can be done – all it’s going to take is a couple of weekends of sheer hell, that’s all.   12:42:55 PM    comment []