The Greasy Spoon

Bitter Chocolate Mousse

It's simple. It's delicious. It's a classic of French cuisine. This recipe is almost fool-proof if you follow my exact instructions.

Buy a slab of dark chocolate. Go for a chocolate with a high cocoa content (75% cocoa solids and above). I used a Swiss Lindt chocolate with over 85% cocoa solids. Melt it very slowly in a double boiler (ie a bain-marie) with about four tablespoons of water, until it's smooth and shiny. Make sure the chocolate remains warm, rather than hot. Remove it from the heat.

Next add two tablespoons of unsalted butter and a tablespoon of crème fraiche. Mix them in very slowly. Now it's time for the eggs. Take hold of three eggs (kept at room temperature), and separate the yolks from the whites. Add the three egg yolks, one by one to the chocolate mixture. Stir them in very slowly.

In a separate bowl, whisk up the remaining three egg whites. Make sure that the bowl is clean, and there is no trace of egg yolk, otherwise the whites won't get stiff.  Whisk them until they are form stiff peaks.  Add a pinch of salt, and  a tablespoon or so of fructose or white sugar. This will give the egg whites a lovely gloss. Now for the fun bit.

Add a dollop of the stiff egg whites to the chocolate mixture and stir it in very, very gently with a metal spoon. You need to hold your spoon as if it was a feather.  What you don't want to do (as I did the first time I attempted this) is to stir it briskly. The lighter your touch, the lighter your mousse. It's a fine art. Slowly stir in the remaining egg white.

Divide the mixture into ramekin dishes, and place them in your 'fridge for at least three hours. If you're in a cheffy mood, you can pipe the mousse into the ramekins in arty swirls, as shown in the photograph. Decorate with shavings of white and dark chocolate. Eat.

Image via Wikipedia

The Perfect Chip

There was an excellent article by Christopher Hirst in The Independent yesterday, about how to make the perfect chips, sorry, America- "freedom fries". After much experimentation and angst he came up with a method loosely based on Heston Blumenthal's:

500g Arran Victory (Waitrose Heritage Potato) or Maris Piper potatoes.

1) Peel and chip 400/500g potatoes, and then wash them thoroughly.

2) Boil a pan of large salted water.  Add  the chips and return to the boil, and then reduce to a gentle simmering for ten minutes.

3) Remove the chips from the water, and leave to cool on a cake rack. When cool, chill in the 'fridge.

4) In a heavy bottomed saucepan, heat 1.5 litres of groundnut oil to 130C.  Using a wire mesh basket, fry the chips for nine minutes.

5) Remove the basket, and shake off the oil.  Cool the chips on a cake rack, and then chill in the 'fridge for the second time.

6) Heat the oil to 190c.  Fry the chips in a mesh basket for 2-3 minutes, until they are golden.  Drain the chips, then spread them on a double layer of kitchen paper. Serve immediately.

Image via Wikipedia

Soufflé Heaven

I'm amused by soufflés. There's just something terribly camp about them, isn't there?  I'm not exactly sure what it is: the acute accent on the e? Or the high drama of 'The Rise", perhaps? The fact that the Table has to wait for the Soufflé, rather than the Soufflé having to wait for the Table- giving you the chance to fuss dramatically around the kitchen, and then to have queeny hysterics when your soufflé collapses. 

Control Freaks love them, too. There's all that stuff about the right temperature, the correct way to beat the egg whites, the proper way to do this, the proper way to do that. So I was quite happy to leave this one to The Girl, who came up with a fabulous aromatic soufflé, flavoured with tarragon.

I will go as far as saying that I think her soufflé was the best one I've ever had.  Tarragon, as you will remember, has an intense aniseedy, licoriquey, Pernod-y taste, and is considered by le gratin to go extremely well with poultry. It worked well with the cheese in the soufflé, and gave the dish a punchy, herbal flavour. If you like tarragon, you're going to love it. Not that I want to patronise you in any way; I am aware that most subscribers to The Greasy Spoon have probably made more soufflés, than I've had hot dinners:

First you need to turn on you oven. It's really important that you get your oven really hot (200C) as this sudden heat is what makes ths soufflé rise. Get hold of a soufflé dish, and smear the inside with the greasy bit of a butter wrapper. 

Next, it's time to make a roux. You'll remember how to do this. Flour cooked in a large knob of butter, stirred until smooth, and then turned into a sloppy kind of sauce with the addition of milk. Keep the pan on a gentle heat and stir or whisk like crazy, until all the lumps have been removed.

Remove from the heat, and let the white sauce cool down a bit (you don't want the eggs to cook as yet). Whisk in three egg yolks, add a dollop of mustard, grate in some Gruyère cheese, and throw in a good handful of tarragon leaves. Season with salt, pepper and lots of grated nutmeg.

Whisk up three egg whites until they're stiff. It's very important not to get any fat in the mixing bowl (ie egg yolk) as this will prevent the egg whites thickening up. The mixing bowl needs to be extremely clean. Finally, mix the egg white into the cheesy, herby, white sauce, using gentle hand movements. Use a metal spoon.

That's about it. The soufflé mixture, not surprisingly, goes into the soufflé dish, and the dish goes into the hot oven. Half an hour later it should be ready. If it hasn't risen properly, you can blame me, this blog, the cat's mother, and the world in general. Nothing like throwing a tantrum to clear the air, is there?

Savoy Cabbage and Bacon Gratin

Here in London, it's been freezing cold for the last few days. This afternoon we had a flurry of gobby, wet snowflakes, and grey skies. With weather like this, I'm keen on gutsy winter food; nothing too elaborate or refined.  Savoy Cabbage and Bacon Gratin is ideal: it's a classic supper dish which is easy to make, and inexpensive too, which is no bad idea in this current financial climate.

Blanche a Savoy Cabbage.  'Blanching' is simple. It just means placing the cabbage into a pan of water, and bringing the pan to boiling point (having previously removed the tough, outer leaves). Once this has happened, remove the cabbage and shred it up. Fry some chopped bacon in a pan, and add a sliced onion, some crushed garlic and a teaspoon of caraway seeds. When the onion and the bacon have cooked, toss in the cabbage.

Transfer everything to a gratin dish, pour over some double cream, and top with breadcrumbs and some grated cheese. Bake in the oven, until the 'crust' has turned a nice golden brown.

Foie Gras

I had forgotten how crazy I am about Foie Gras.  The Girl and I have been beetling around Paris over the weekend, and it was an opportunity to re-visit old haunts.  We were staying in the 7eme- very close to the fabulous Bon Marché food market (La Grande Epicerie) and department store- which I would urge you to visit next time you're there.  It's a massive supermarket, filled with every conceivable food you can possibly think of, albeit with a French slant, naturellement.  For some reason, I'm a big fan of terrines, and when I'm in France I always seem to end up ordering the stuff, time after time. I like the way the French serve foie gras: a simple slab of terrine, with a small ramekin or tot-glass of chutney or onion confit.

First stop was at Le Petit Prince de Paris (of vodka sorbet fame)- a popular, local restaurant in the Rue Lanneau, up near the Sorbonne. I like the place, it's good value, and inside is decorated with mirrors, candles, and slightly campy antiques. The food is excellent in a relaxed sort of way, and the service is friendly. I had the terrine de foie gras.  It came with the obligatory confit, and a glass of cranberries. The bitter-sweetness of the cranberries was a perfect counter-foil to the richness of the foie-gras. Incidentally, the French seem to have a current obsession with square plates.  What's this all about? I find it slightly pretentious, also off-putting and not very practical: your knife and fork has a tendency to scrape along the side of the plate rather too often.  A bit like someone dragging their spikey finger nails down a blackboard. Anyway, back to the foie gras.

On Saturday night, I had the same thing all over again, but this time flavoured with vanilla.  I adore vanilla- and that's worthy of a separate post at a later date. But, strangely enough, the best foie gras of the lot was at a tiny bistro in Le Marais, Chez Pierro.  This is just a tiny brick-walled room with a few tables, a studenty yet discriminating clientele, and a young and enthusiastic staff. You didn't get much foie gras, only a few chunks with some delicious nutty bread, and seved with a pot of home-made mango and ginger chutney, but Mon Dieu, it was formidable.

By the way, you may already have noticed: I've added some fun, inter-active things to The Greasy Spoon. I'm conducting a Marmite poll.  Please vote.  Once you've pressed the button and cast your vote you will see a map of the world which tracks the distribution of Marmite haters and Marmite lovers around the globe.  All utterly pointless of course, unless you're a shareholder in the Marmite Corporation of the United Kingdom.  Much more useful is the "Answer Tips" application. Double-click any word on The Greasy Spoon, and you will be taken to a detailed encyclopedic link, which might be especially useful if I've gone off on some bizarre tangent.

The Medieval Christmas Banquet

I'm quite curious about the food people ate in the Middle Ages. In The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, Heston Blumenthal mentions his fascination with a bizarre 14th century French cookery book, Le Viander de Taillevent, in which a chicken is plucked alive, basted with soya, wheat-germ and dripping to simulate roasting, coaxed asleep, and then 'brought back to life' at the table.

In case you're wondering, the rather beautiful illustration is from the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours and depicts the month of January.  It probably shows the Twelfth Night banquet, as during the Middle Ages the focus of the Christmas festivities tended to be during the Twelve Days of Christmas, and after the Advent Fast.

I've adapted a 15th century  English recipe for Goose in a Garlic and Grape Sauce which you could easily make at home. I haven't tried it yet, so I've no idea what it tastes like- it could be foul:

You make a stuffing out of garlic cloves, seedless grapes, chopped parsley and salt, and then stick it up a goose. Roast the bird in an oven set at 350C (20 minutes per pound). When you're happy that the goose is cooked, take it out of the oven, and set aside to cool.

Spoon out the cooked stuffing and blend it in a food processor, adding three hard-boiled egg yolks, and half a cup of cider vinegar. Spoon the finished sauce over the goose.

Steak Tartare

A few months ago, I met some friends at Brown's Restaurant in Maddox Street. Brown's is an established chain of East Coast style restaurants- you know the sort of place, red checked table cloths, open brick walls, French café chairs. The waiter asked me how I liked my steak cooked and I said 'rare'.  Shaking his head, he told me that 'under company policy' they were not allowed to cook rare steaks.  What utter lunacy is this?  Are we not responsible for our own decisions?  I've eaten plenty of rare (and with my own werewolf tendencies, I really do mean rare) steaks in my time, and not once, I repeat once, have I ever had any sort of stomach upset.  And if the meat is of the highest quality and fresh too...

(Actually, on reflection, I might just possibly be telling a fib.  A few years back, I had an excellent Steak Tartare at Le Procope in Paris.  Later that evening, I tucked into a plate of marinated, raw herring at a dubious place up in Monmartre. A few hours later, I was violently sick.  If I had to put a bet on it, I would point a long finger at the herring).

What is Steak Tartare?  It's chopped up raw beef steak (or horse-meat), served with onions, capers, Worcestershire sauce and often, a raw egg.  Supposedly invented by the Tartars, I suspect that Steak Tartare is a 20th century dish of no great antiquity. Luchow's, the Manhatten restaurant founded in 1882 by Guido August Lüchow, has a recipe for Steak Tartare in their cookbook, published in 1952.  

Here's my way of making it.  I stress that not only will you need the best cut of beef, but the freshest example you can find, too. Do not make Steak Tartare out of any old steak you've had lying around in the 'fridge.  If you're going to mix in an egg, make sure, again, that the egg is very fresh.

In a small bowl, mash up some anchovies, capers and Dijon mustard.  Add the minced beef steak, and fold in some chopped red onion, chopped flat leaf parsley, a dash of Tabasco, a dash of Worcestershire Sauce and a few chili flakes.  A spoonful of olive oil goes well, too. If it's your thing, break in a small, fresh egg.  Season with lots of salt and pepper, shape the Tartare into a round and serve it with chips in the French manner.

Poulet Forestière

Here's a recipe for an autumnal chicken and mushroom dish that Bon Viveur rather grandly called Poulet Forestière, published by The Daily Telegraph in 1964.  I make it often.  If the cooking techniques seem slightly weird - that's Fanny Cradock and 1960s cookery for you.  I would probably flambé the chicken and mushrooms in the cognac to burn off the alcohol (rather then add it neat towards the end as in the original recipe) and also sauté the mushrooms separately (rather then cooking them with the chicken, and risking their disintegration).  

Of course, the trouble with this sort of recipe is that it could turn out a trifle bland if you use bog-standard ingredients. To counter-act this, I would suggest that you use meaty, brown field mushrooms (rather than those flavourless button mushroom things), an organic, free-range chicken; be generous on the cognac and make sure that the dish is properly seasoned with a quality sea-salt and lots of chunky black pepper.

Cut up a decent free range chicken, and dredge the pieces in flour, seasoned with sea salt and pepper.  Sauté the pieces in unsalted butter (making sure you don't crowd the pan- otherwise the chicken will boil, rather than fry), sauté some nice field mushrooms, and then simmer both the chicken pieces and the mushrooms in a casserole dish with chicken stock and white wine in a medium oven for about three quarters of an hour.

Arrange the chicken and mushroom in a serving dish, and strain off the cooking liquor into a small pan. Thicken it up with a beurre manié (that just means a flour and butter roux), a tablespoon of cognac, and a teacup of cream.  Reduce slightly until thick, check the seasoning and then pour the sauce back over the chicken and mushrooms.

Alsace Lorraine, Part Two

Next stop was the spooky Chateau de Jaulny in Lorraine. This unfashionable part of North Eastern France is remote, and off the tourist track- which being an admitted "contrarian" was one of the reasons for going there in the first place. The countryside is beautiful, if slightly desolate, and relatively unpopulated; with the lovely, fast, empty French roads surrounded by deep, dark forests, and undulating hills. Perfect werewolf country.

Jaulny stands silhouetted on a ridge and has a whiff of Transylvania about it. The chateau may have once been the residence of Joan of Arc.

Madame was charming, and explained that the stuffed wolf's head mounted on the stone wall in the Hall (which would have done Hammer proud) had been shot by one her ancestors at beginning of the last century. Wolves, apparently have now been re-introduced into France, and are now making their way back to Lorraine. After two unsettling nights (is Jaulny haunted?), we crossed the Vosges mountains into Alsace.

Alsace is a fascinating part of France. Until the end of the First World War it was part of Germany, though today it is a curious hybrid- the look is decidedly German, though the feel of the place is French. As soon as you leave Lorraine, things start getting Germanic: chalets appear; churches start aquiring onion domes, you start to get towns ending in "burg", and "heim"; supermarkets sell canned goat cheese terrine, the hills are alive with the sound of. And this applies to the food, too. If you're going to enjoy Alsatian food, the charming town of Colmar is probably a good place to do it.

Colmar is a Medieval huddle of half-timbered and shuttered houses, cobbled streets, winstraubs and tasty, buxom waitresses in the traditional dirnl. Lots of gingerbread, too.

One of the most delicious Alsatian specialities is the tarte aux flambee. This is similar to pizza, but has a thinner, more delicate crust. The traditional tarte has onion and smoked pork; though in a smallish restaurant opposite the kofihaus, The Girl had a superb asperges blanc tarte, washed down with a carafe of the excellent Alsatian wine.

Another Alsatian dish is sauerkraut, or charcoute. Pickled cabbage is stewed gently for three hours, often with a splash of Reisling at the end of the cooking period, and then served with sausages, bacon, and smoked pork.

Before we left Colmar for The Fatherland itself, I had another chance to sample the delights of the tete de veau. Well, I had to, didn't I? This one was well-prepared, with the chunks of pink coloured simmered meat (and the accompanying gobbets of brains and fat) arranged in an earthenware pot. With the viniagrette came a mayonnaise and caper sauce.

Alsace Lorraine, Part One

Camp Followers of The Greasy Spoon will have noticed that Yours Truly has been away for the last few weeks. I'm not especially apologetic, as The Girl and I have just spent the first half of August on a driving holiday around North Eastern France (destination Alsace Lorraine), Belgium, Luxembourg and the western reaches of Baden-Wurttemberg, which of course, as you all know, is in sunny Deutschland.

One of the raison d'etres of the holiday was the food. I was curious about the cuisine of Alsace- which has a fantastic reputation, and is partly Germanic, partly French (Alsace and large parts of Lorraine were annexed by the newly created German Empire after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870). It didn't fail to disappoint. But more of that later.

First stop was at a chateau close to the Somme battlefield, near Arras. Lovely house, but an immensely sad place, being as it was only a few kilometres from the former Front Line. After all these years, the ghosts of those desperate battles of the summer of 1916 still linger on. The breakfast table was graced by a glass bottle of pure, filtered apple juice, made by the local villagers. Apples, and that means cider too, are a feature of this area, which slightly surprised me, thinking as I did that this sort of stuff was more commonly found in Normandy.

We had a fantastic dinner at a low-key restaurant, La Cote d'Agneau, in the small town of Doullens. Service was pretty dopey, but By Gum, the food was good: lovely, intense flavours- a fabulous foie gras terrine, and rich, roasted tomatoes left to stew on the vine.

I noticed that the French tend to flavour their food far more than we do in England; they're generous with their salt and pepper; and I suppose that this is one of the reasons why they tend not to have salt and pepper pots on the table. This is a tip we can easily copy in our own kitchens.

Despite current opinion, I still reckon that French food is generally far superior to British food. Here in London, we've got lots of excellent (and expensive) restuarants patronised by the reasonably affluent, and well-off; but if you drive out to the English countryside, it can be a very different story. In France, the general attitude is different. You can eat in some dusty restaurant in a deserted ghost-town of a village, and the food, although not necessarily superb, will still, generally, be pretty darn good. Shops sell local produce of a superior quality (often organic), and the standard offered by supermarket shines in comparison to the unimaginative, chemical blandness of British supermarkets.

After a night of sin at the ultra haut bourgeois Chateau d'Etoges (serried ranks of shiny cars, pushy wine-waiters, a superb dinner, and a much needed bottle of the excellent local Borel-Lucas champagne) we sped on to Epernay, where we shacked up at the Pierson Whittaker Champagne House.

The Champagne industry is centred on the two towns of Rheims and Epernay. We toured the celllars of the House of Tattinger, founded relatively recently in 1932. They were extraordinary. The offices of Tattinger are on the outskirts of Rheims and above ground are both modernist, and extremely slick. But directly underneath this temple of corporate efficiency is a labyrinth of ancient monastic cellars, stocked with thousands of bottles of maturing champagne. Incidentally, in case you're wondering, Champagne is generally cheaper in the local supermarkets of the Rheims area- and there are definitely some bargains to be had out there. However, in the rest of France, the price of champagne is almost up to UK levels- and that means it's currently pretty expensive.

Tomorrow, in the next exciting installment of The Greasy Spoon: werewolf country, the delights of Colmar, and the gothic horror of German "cuisine"...