When you choose the dishes that make up the menu, think of each dish in terms of three qualities: its flavor and character, its texture, and its degree of richness.
Flavor and character refer to whether the food is sweet, sour, tart, spicy, piquant, bland, strong and full flavored, or delicate. There are distinctions between sour and tart, between bland and delicate; you must learn to recognize them. Rice and potatoes, for example, are bland, but not particularly delicate. A vegetable soufflé, on the other hand, can be delicate, but not necessarily bland. Texture provides other sensations. Foods are crisp, soft, tough, tender, smooth, grainy. A good menu, however, permits none of these characteristics to dominate. The smooth, satiny sauce in a main course can be offset by the crispness of a tossed salad, just as a cream soup should be followed by fish or meat that has perhaps been simply sautéed, not by one served in a cream sauce.
But the greatest pitfall of menu planning is the tendency towards making menus overly rich. It is probably our zeal to serve fine, beautiful meals that gets us lost in a maze of delicious dishes loaded with enough cream, butter, egg yolks, wine, nuts, chocolate, and so on to carry through a dozen meals. Today's tastes, today's dietary knowledge, today's fast-paced living are not eu rapport with the great dinners of the nineteenth century whose menus were long, complicated, and incredibly rich. Serve les grands diners—and later we will come to that—for your special parties, but offset your elaborate dishes with others that provide a flavor and texture balance and the needed element of simplicity.
And so we come to the actual selection of foods which go best together on the menu. I strongly favor foods in season because they offer maximum freshness, crispness, and tenderness. Unless you know the particular preferences of your guests, I'd advise avoiding the “borderline” foods (such items as kidneys, frogs' legs, and some of the root vegetables) that many Americans seem to shy away from.
Basically, you can proceed in either of two ways. The first is to decide on your main course, the pièce de résistance, and, having serried this question, choose for other courses complementary foods and accompaniments. The second way is to start the menu plan with one of your spécialtiés, regardless of which course in the meal it represents—it could be the soup or even the dessert—then select oilier courses to complement it.
What do I mean by complementing? Well, I believe the courses in a menu are complementary when they offer varied foods, varied flavors, and varied textures. Par example, all the dishes should not be bland nor all piquant, nor all smooth, nor all delicate. And I cannot stress too often that a fine, rich main course will shine most brilliantly if the rest of the meal is kept simple. You can never go wrong if you serve a clear soup at the beginning and a fruit dessert at the end of such a dinner.
One important characteristic of French luncheons and dinners is the way they begin and end. By this I mean that even the simplest meal seldom starts with the main course. It will be preceded, for example, by a soup, or, if the main course is itself a hearty soup or has a thin sauce, perhaps by hors-d'oeuvre. The opening course may be very light or fairly hearty, depending upon what will follow.
The same rule holds true for the ending of the meal. Often it is just that, a finish or an ending. When the main course consists of an especially rich or spicy dish, dessert should be simple: fruit, which can be served in various ways, or cheese with crackers or crusty bread, or fruit and cheese. A word is in order, therefore, about first and last courses before I give you some typical menus for little French meals, to crying your own kitchen.
Since this a primer series, it is hardly appropriate for me to discuss elaborate and complicated hors-d'oeuvre in a first article on menus. We will not concern ourselves now with pâtés, mousse de foie gras, tartelettes de fromage, and so on. Instead, I will describe how the French put together the popular hors-d'oeuvre variés, and any ingredient I mention will be available either in one of your local stores or by mail. As a matter of fact, reading mail-order advertising will undoubtedly uncover many unusual delicacies.
Pinterest
