People interested in fine cooking are over-inclined to think in terms of truffles, wine sauces, flambéed fruits, and the spécialités of famous eating places. Fine cooking, to be sure, is all of that. But it is also derived from knowing the subtle distinctions that exist between simple ingredients. I believe that recognition of these differences marks the real connoisseur, just as the utilization of this knowledge marks the real cook.
Consider, for instance, how often the various members of the onion family are used in cooking, and you'll agree that knowing how to use them advantageously is more important than choosing the kind of liqueur to put in a coupe aux fruits.
Every French chef learns in the first weeks of his apprentissage the separate roles played by onions, leeks, and shallots—if his mother's cooking hadn't already taught him. Use them correctly, and a dish is brought nearer to perfection, not merely flavored. These are tricks of the chef's trade—and, I might add, very basic ones that no good cook can disregard.
Leeks are for soup, and no Frenchman thinks he can make a really excellent soup without them. Patage Parmentier or vichyssoise may be made with onions instead of leeks and still be a perfectly good soup, but it will lack a recognizable refinement of flavor. Imagine my chagrin, upon arriving in this country to find myself hunting the market for leeks. I finally persuaded one of my suppliers to arrange with a market gardener to grow enough to assure me an uninterrupted supply. Now, of course, you can find them at every greengrocer's in New York City—and I hope all over the rest of the country, too.
The flavor of leeks, while similar to that of onion, is more delicate and subtle, enhancing rather than overpowering the other flavors in the soup. The important thing with leeks is to distinguish their two parts—the white section at the base and the coarser green tops. The white part should be used for white soup stock and for the more delicate soups, such as chicken or vichyssoise, while the green put is only put into darker or stronger soups. The bright green tops of leeks are especially good in patage Saint-Germain, or pea soup, because they not only add flavor but also improve the color. A good trick with leeks is to add one when cooking vegetables for the purée base of cream soups. This gives a sophisticated, almost unidentifiable flavor. And. finally, there's the question of cleaning leeks, which are very sandy. To remove the grit, split the leeks lengthwise or quarter them and gently scrub the pieces under fast-running water.
Here's a recipe for a soup made in the spring and early summer in the part of France that I come from. One taste will prove how well leeks blend with other soup ingredients.
Spring Soup Bourbonnaise
Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a sauce-pan. Clean 3 leeks and remove the coarse green tops. Chop the remaining white and light green tops and add them to the butter. Add 1 small onion, chopped, and cook until it is a light golden color. Add 3 medium-sized potatoes, sliced, 1 medium-sized carrot, sliced, and ½ tablespoon salt. Add 2 quarts water, bring to a boil, and cook for 15 minutes. Remove he tough ends from 12 stalks of asparagus and cut each stalk into 3 pieces. Add the asparagus pieces and ¼ cup rice to the soup and cook for 25 minutes longer. Add ½ pound spinach, cleaned and chopped, and cook for 10 minutes more. Correct the seasoning with salt and a little pepper. Finish the soup with 1 tablespoon butter or 1 cup cream.
Another trick with leeks is to serve them as an hors-d'oeuvre. If they are simmered gently in the soup, they can be removed without falling apart. There is plenty of good flavor still in them, and they can be chilled and served with vinaigrette sauce (see May, 1950). As a matter of fact, in France leeks are called the asparagus of the poor.
Onions, of course, are used in a thousand and one ways, as even the most inexperienced cook knows. To those who like hearty food and are not concerned about fine nuances of flavor, an onion is an onion regardless of how it is cooked. But not so in the good French cuisine. For a delicate flavor, onions are cooked only until soft, as in the cream sauce for eggs à la tripe. For the more penetrating savor required in a tomato or brown sauce, onions are cooked until they turn golden. And when browned a rich, deep color, they are just right for petite marmite or for oxtail soup.
More than forty years ago, I learned the trick of using well-browned onions for flavoring and coloring soup in preference to caramel or any other agent. I discovered this when I was the new, young, and very ambitious potager in the Paris Ritz Mr. Files, the general manager and a real gourmet, was particularly fond of soup and for dinner preferred an individual casserole of soup or a petite marmiteand a fruit dessert to anything else. One day, the stock bubbling in the marmiles on my range seemed to lack both color and flavor, and as it was getting near mealtime. I was more than a little concerned. We cooked on ranges that had flat tops, and it was our duty each morning to scrub the tops with dry salt until they were spotless, just as omelette pans are cleaned. So I decided to put some little onions right on the top of my range, let them get good and brown, and then put them in the marmites. Later that day. Mr. lilies told me how good the petite marmite had been. So from then on. I always added the browned onions, and he made it a custom to bring the guests to whom he was showing the kitchens over to my range to see “what made our petite marmite so good.” Lacking a flat-top range, an iron frying pan can be used, if the onions are turned all the time so they will be thoroughly brown. It is better nor to put fat in the pan, or only a mere trace, because it will rise to the top of the soup and have to be skimmed off.
Try eggs àl a tripe and see how cooking them this way gives a more delicate onion flavor to the dish.
Oeufsà la Tripe (Hard-Cooked Eggs with Onions)
Parboil 3 medium-sized onions, sliced, in boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes, drain, and place them in a saucepan with 3 tablespoons butter. Cook slowly without letting them brown. Add 3 tablespoons flour, season with salt and pepper, and mix together well. Add 3 cups milk (or half milk and half cream) and cook for ½ hour, stirring constantly until the sauce thickens and then occasionally. Slice 9 hard-cooked eggs and add them to the sauce. If desired, the onions may be strained out of the sauce before the eggs are added.
Shallots play an entirely different role in cooking. Their main use is to give a very special savor to sauces. Your Frenchman considers shallots as important for certain sauces as he docs leeks for his soups. I think it is unfortunate that they are not better known in this country. In many American cities, it is difficult to find a brisker of shallots, although in places where French cooking is the rule, as in New Orleans, they seem to be more common. Sometimes shallots are called “green onions.” They look like tiny onions, but their outside skin is very much browner. If you have a kitchen garden, you'll find them easy enough to grow, and for each shallot planted, you will harvest a bulbous cluster. They keep well in a cool, dry place until used. Their flavor is sharper, more distinct, and less sweet than that of onions.
There are two tricks to using shallots. One is that only a small quantity should be used to impart a subtle flavor to sauces; the other is that they should never be allowed to brown when cooking because this will give the sauce a slightly bitter taste. Shallots have a special affinity for wine, and in la baute cuisine they are always included in such sauces as vin blanc, bonne femme, chasseur, portugaise, and so on. The following recipes, one for chicken and the other for Ash, call for simple wine sauces flavored with shallots in the true French manner.
Poulet Sauté an Vin Blanc (Chicken Sauté in White Wine)
Clean and singe 2 chickens, weighing 2 to 2 ½ pounds each, and cut each into 8 pieces. Season with salt and pepper. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a large frying pan and arrange the pieces of chicken in it, skin-side down. Cook them over a medium fire until golden-brown. Turn the pieces over, partially cover the pan, and continue cooking for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove the breasts and cook the remaining pieces for 5 minutes longer, or until they are done. To test for doneness, pierce with a fork, and if no pink juice follows the fork when it is withdrawn, the chicken is cooked. Remove the pieces from the pan.
Add 2 shallots, finely chopped, and ½ tablespoon flour to the butter in the pan, cook for 1 minute, and add ½ cup white wine and the same amount of tomato juice. Let this boil for a few minutes, stirring all the time to dissolve the juices that have browned on the pan. When the liquid is reduced almost half. add 1 tablespoon butter and roll it around in the pan to blend. Do not continue cooking after it is melted. Return the pieces of chicken to the pan to reheat for a minute. Serve them sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.
Before presenting the fish recipe, I think it will be helpful to give a trick for cooking the topside of a fish when there is not enough liquid in the pan to cover it. Trim a piece of paper in a Circle about the size of the pan and cut a ½-inch hole in the center. Butter one side of this paper and place it, butterside down, on top of the fish. Cover the pan and cook the fish according to directions. The paper holds in the steam, the little hole in the center releases enough steam to prevent the paper from rising out of place, and the topside of the fish will be cooked as well as the underside.
Filet of Sole Bonne Femme
Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a shallow pan. Over it spread 2 shallots, finely chopped, and 6 mushrooms, cleaned and sliced. Season 6 fish filets with salt and pepper and place them on top. Spread 6 more mushrooms, sliced, over the fish and sprinkle with a little chopped parsley. Add ¾ cup dry white wine. Cover with a piece of buttered paper cut the size of the pan and with a small hole in the center. Cook over a fairly quick fire for 10 to 12 minutes. Remove the fish to a serving platter and keep hot.
The sauce may be finished in either of two ways. The simpler is to make a manié butter by creaming together 1 tablespoon butter with 1 teaspoon flour. First reduce the liquid in the pan, if there is more than 1 cup. and then thicken it with the manié butter, swirling it into the sauce and removing the pan from the fire as soon as the butter is melted. Pour this over the fish and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. The second way makes a richer sauce and a more elegant dish. Reduce the liquid in the pan to about ½ cup and add ½ cup cream sauce. Mix 1 egg yolk with ¼ cup cream and combine with the sauce. Heat this but do not allow it to boil. Fold in 2 tablespoons whipped cream, pour the sauce over the fish, and glaze under the broiler.
At this season of the year, all of us are thinking about salads and about using the fruits in season. Spring and summer bring to me a flood of boyhood memories of the verdant French country-side where those bonnes ménagères françaises like my mother had so many ways of getting the mast out of the season's bounty. Their tricks were often economy-minded, and I'm not the only chef who has put them to good use. There's one. for example, of using the green outer leaves of lettuce that are too often discarded. After these leaves have been cleaned, well drained, and crisped, they may be cur into julienne and combined with chicken or fish salad mixtures. And still another trick is to cut out carefully the heart of the lettuce so that a base and shell which can be stuffed are left intact. This is an excellent and novel way to serve leftover meat and to use up surplus lettuce. Here's the recipe.
Laitue Farcie (Stuffed Lettuce)
Remove the center part of a head of lettuce very carefully in order to have a shell of outside leaves about 1 inch thick and the base intact to hold a filling. Wash well under running water and parboil for 2 to 3 minutes in boiling salted water. Invert in a colander and when thoroughly drained, place the lettuce, base down, in a bowl to hold it in shape while stuffing it.
For 2 medium-sized heads of lettuce, prepare the following stuffing: Mix together ¼ pound each pork sausage and leftover ground cooked meat, 2 tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, 1 cup cooked rice, 1 clove garlic, crushed, 1 onion, finely chopped and cooked until soft in a little butter. ½ teaspoon salt, and a little pepper. Add 1 beaten egg. Stuff the heads lightly and tie them with a soft string. Put 1 carrot and 1 onion, both sliced, in the bottom of a casserole, place the heads of lettuce on top. and add stock or canned tomatoes to a depth of about 2 inches around the lettuce. Put a strip of bacon or fat salt pork over each head. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook in a moderate oven (350° F.) for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Since this is its most popular season. a few words about potato salad and three tricks with it. One is to mix the dressing with the potatoes while they are still warm because they absorb more of the flavor and make a tastier salad. The second is to add 2 or 3 tablespoons of hot water after the potatoes and dressing are combined to make the mixture more succulent. And finally, chill potato salad for only about an hour or two. Never prepare it so far ahead that it must be kept overnight in a refrigerator. This practice will invariably give the mixture an undesirable clammy coldness.
In using the fruits that are now coming into season, I have noticed that the French like to make open tarts while Americans seem to be particularly fond of two-crust pies. But either way, when using small fruits, the cook has the problem of juice that starts running as soon as the heat reaches the fruit. Well, here's my trick for that. Sprinkle the bottom of the pastry generously with stale cake crumbs or crumbled macaroons. The latter with their almond flavor are especially nice in cherry pies. The liquid will be thickened, but so lightly and pleasantly that the tart or pie loses none of its rightful juiciness.
Then, at this time of the year, I see women making preserves to stock their cupboards for the winter. And many have asked me how to prevent fruit like strawberries and cherries from rising to the top of the glass instead of staying well distributed. The following recipe takes care of that problem. And. in my opinion, it also makes a better-tasting preserve because the sugar and juice get the benefit of the cooking and the fruit itself retains its fresh flavor. The trick is that the hot sugar syrup penetrates and partly cooks the berries, thus shortening the time required for actually boiling them.
Confiture de Fraises (Strawberry Preserves)
Use ½ pound sugar for each pound strawberries. Clean the berries, remove the hulls, and let them drain well. Put the sugar in a preserving kettle and add just enough water to dissolve it when brought to the boil. Cook until a little syrup dropped in cold water forms a soft ball (238° on a sugar thermometer). Add the berries and put the saucepan where the berries will remain hot but not cook. Leave for about 10 minutes, skimming the top if necessary. Remove the berries with a skimmer and put in a bowl. Cook down the syrup to the soft-ball (238°) stage again, add the berries to it, and let them stand in a hot place for 15 minutes. Remove the berries again and cook the syrup down again. Add the berries and cook until the juice falls in thick, clinging drops from the side of a spoon. Let this cool for 24 hours before filling sterilized glasses.
Confiture de Cerises (Cherry Preserves)
Follow the directions for strawberry preserves, using 1 pound sugar for each pound sour cherries or ¾ pound sugar for each pound sweet cherries.