As chef de cuisine during the great years of New York's old Ritz-Carlton, I faced many times every day the same problem as a hostess giving a party, or, for that matter, as a housewife planning dinner. How shall I start the meal, what shall I choose as the pièce de résistance, what about the accompaniments, what kind of a dessert? In short, how shall I decide on the menu? Such decisions cannot be underestimated, because the best foods in the world, the most excellent cooking, can almost verge on failure if the dishes selected for a menu lack ambiance.
My menu making had to serve a multitude of needs. First came the long luncheon and dinner cartes du jour from which the guests ordered. Scores and scores of dishes—hors-d'oeuvre, soups, entrées, grilled foods, fish, and so on—had to be included for our patrons' choice. And don't think for one minute that the same menu could be repeated day after day. Not in any César Ritz establishment! The classic dishes of the French cuisine, everything from hors-d'oeuvre to desserts, appeared daily, but that was only the beginning. I had to think of the spécialtiés and the seasonal delicacies to be considered, and the many special occasions as well. Whether I was concerned with a method of preparation for the first strawberries of May, a wedding banquet, or one of the new dishes any important chef wants to introduce, menu planning presented a challenge every day.
In addition to the actual foods selected, the Ritz banquet menus often included the recipes for special dishes and sometimes anecdotes about their origin, notes on the wines served, guest lists, and decorative sketches. Every day there were dozens of very special menus to be put together, too. Always, late in the afternoon and early in the evening, I could depend upon answering the telephone again and again, each time to hear another voice saying, “Monsieur Louis, what would you suggest for a dinner for four”—or six or eight or maybe just un diner intime pour deux— “to be served in my apartment?” A quick mental review of our spécialtiés and of the particular preferences of our guests naturally influenced the planning of these menus.
So for many, many years I wrote menus. Great years, those that followed the turn of the century, when haute cuisine reached such high peaks of perfection. Difficult years, when wartime shortages put every chef on his mettle. Prohibition years, depression years. But the menus I recall with the greatest nostalgia were never set down on paper. They are the menus for the meals I ate in those two kitchens of my childhood, the sunny room of ma mère Annette—a combination kitchen, dining room, and sitting room in the house where I was born—and the big farm kitchen of ma petite grand-mère, an all-purpose room, too, with its high fireplace at the kitchen and the big table covered with a checkered cloth. When I watch today's trend toward shorter menus and more practical cooking and think of a lesson about menu planning, I sense the pendulum of eating habits making a great swing back to the days of my childhood and the meals served by those two wonderful cooks. A close similarity can be found between what gourmets look for today and what ma mère et ma grand-mère turned out in those so very comfortable Burgundian kitchens.
Putting together a group of dishes that will make a delectable meal is, in a sense, a very personal task. For instance, if you know that your family or guests dislike certain foods, you can't overlook the fact. You must consider, too, what foods are in good supply, and also honestly face up to your limitations as a cook. My first suggestions in menu planning, therefore, are as basic and practical as the very need for eating. Select foods that you know will be acceptable, and judge carefully whether to introduce unfamiliar or exotic dishes.
It is equally important to know how to buy food, that is, how to recognize quality. If you can market wisely and become familiar with the offerings of each season, you are off to a fine start. Always remember not to over-extend yourself. Keep your menu within the range of your capabilities and the time you can devote to the cooking. As a novice, be satisfied with two or three dishes, well prepared and attractively served.
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.
The phrase hors-d'oeuvre variés means a group of diverse appetizers, a selection that may consist of two or three, or fifteen to twenty different foods, but the latter number is only usual in restaurants. For home meals, three to six hors-d'oeuvre provide a varied combination and a practical number for the cook to prepare. They may be very Simple, but they must be appetizing—vegetables, fish, or shellfish served with a cold sauce, piquant salad mixtures, canned fish, or the cold sausages that the French call saucissons. You will not need large quantities of any of them, because only a very little is served. Of course, for a buffer supper, you may increase the quantities and serve these foods as the main course of the meal, but now we are speaking only of appetizers. Consequently, a slice or two of meat, a piece or two of fish, or a spoonful of salad will suffice. If you have limited the hors-d'oeuvre to two varieties, then, of course, more of each should be served.
Each food should be arranged separately in a small serving dish or placed in a section of a divided dish, so that the different sauces remain separate from one another and from unsauced foods. A typical French service consists of perfectly plain china and glass dishes, oblong or four to six inches square, with the edge one-half to one inch high. These fit on an oblong tray. The appearance of the hors-d'oeuvre tray is considered very important. All the sliced vegetables and saucissons should be thinly and evenly cut and overlapped neatly in the dish; salad ingredients should be cut in small even pieces, cabbage in string-like shreds. Herbs, especially parsley, chives, chervil, and tarragon, used either individually or in combinations, should be finely and evenly chopped, then scattered lightly over the surface as a decoration, but never chopped hit or miss and then thrown in clumps on the food. Use only enough sauce to moisten the food and to highlight its flavor, never so much that it floats in a great pool.
Here are sonic suggestions for hors-d'oeuvre varies: sliced tomatoes, sliced cooked beets or tiny whole ones, and cooked asparagus tips, each dressed with vinaigrette sauce, then sprinkled with finely chopped herbs; sliced hard-cooked eggs, pieces of raw cauliflower in Russian dressing; cooked shrimps, crab meat, or lobster with an appropriate mayonnaise dressing; potato salad, celery salad, cabbage salad; various kinds of saucissons; and sardines, anchovies, pimientos, and pickled onions, just as they come from jars or tins. If you are fortunate enough to have one of those real gourmet treats — wonderful peas, beans, or asparagus, fresh from the garden at their peak of succulence—I would suggest serving it as a separate course after the main course, as the French do. You'll quickly discover how much more enjoyable it is that way, and how much more importance it lends to the enjoyment of the special garden-fresh vegetable.
When the meal ends with fruit instead of a more elaborate dessert, the simplest procedure is to serve the fruit fresh. Just what you should select depends, naturally, upon the season. Large fruits are washed, well dried, and chilled or served at room temperature, according to your preference, and then arranged attractively in a serving dish or basket. Sometimes, however, the fruits may be peeled and cut in small pieces, combined in a serving dish, sprinkled with sugar and, if desired, with a little liqueur. This arrangement is called macédoine de fruits. Or you might decide to make a compote de fruits by poaching suitable fruits in a light sugar syrup to which a vanilla bean and a little cum or liqueur may be added, Fears are often poached in red wine with sugar. Berries are cleaned, well drained and hulled, and served with sugar and heavy cream, passed separately. The French sometimes serve strawberries marinated in red wine and sweetened with a little sugar.
When cheese ends a meal, it is traditional to arrange several kinds of cheese on a wooden tray, a marble cheese server, or a flat plate of china or glass. Crusty French bread in a basket and Melba toast or crackers, plain or toasted, accompany the cheese plate.
The following menus, though simple, comprise the methods of cooking that we have studied in this series, and they are based on good menu-planning principles. We have gone even further and incorporated in these menus dishes that we learned to make in previous lessons. Where recipes are not included, they are to be found elsewhere in the “Primer for Gourmets,”
These menus are offered merely as suggestions for the guidance of the kitchen novice. If you prefer heartier meals, or more elaborate ones, make use of the suggested menus as starting points and, using the rules above, add a salad to this one. hors-d'oeuvre to that, or include an extra vegetable that you particularly like.
Begin the first dinner with a slice of smoked Nova Scotia salmon, sprinkled with its classic seasoning, freshly ground pepper. Boiled buttered noodles make a properly simple accompaniment for the rich beef goulash (April, 1958) to follow, and next comes a tossed green salad (October, 1957) that demands the crispest greens the grocer can provide. Strawberry tarts are the pièce de résistance, the brilliant fruit, at the height of its season, arranged in the little pastry shells on a lied of whipped cream and topped with gleam ing currant jelly.
Strawberry Tarts
Make the following tart pastry: To ½ cup creamed butter add ½ teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1 small egg and mix the ingredients. Blend in 2 cups sifted Hour, using a pastry blender, fork, or the hands, until the mixture is the texture of coarse meal. Add gradually 4 to 5 tablespoons cold water, or just enough to make a firm dough. Cut the water in with a knife lightly and carefully; do not work the dough. Roll out the dough into a sheet ¼ inch thick, cut from it 6 small circles of dough and line 6 individual tart pans. Prick the bottom and sides to prevent bubbling, brush the dough with milk, and bake the pastry shells in a hot oven (400° F.) for about 30 minutes, or until they are brown. Cool the shells, spread them with whipped cream, and on the whipped cream arrange circles of strawberries, washed lightly, drained, and hulled. Spread over the berries a glaze of currant jelly, heated until it is soft.
A light soup, mes amis, provides a pleasant overture to the mere substantial dishes to come; to the basic consommé described in our Primer, beet juice and celery are added to make consommé viveur. No group of menus for spring would be complete without the appearance of shad roe. With the rot, serve pureed spinach and tiny potato balls tolled in butter. The simplicity of the vegetables is carried through to the dessert: perfect pieces of fruit and your favorite cheeses.
Consommé Viveur
To 2 quarts clear consommé (November, 1957) add ½ cup beet juice and 6 outside stalks of celery with their leaves. Bring the soup slowly to a boil, strain it, and add ½ to 1 cup celery, cut in fine julienne.
Shad Roe Bonne Femme
To 2 tablespoons butter in a shallow saucepan add 3 shallots, and 1 tablespoon parsley, all finely chopped, 12 mushrooms, cleaned and sliced, 5 pairs of shad roe, arranged side “by side, and a generous ½ cup while wine. Cover the roe with a circle of wax paper, cut to fir the pan, and make a hole in the center of the wax paper to allow steam to escape. Bring the liquid to a boil, cover the pan, and simmer for 10 minutes, or until the roe are tender. Remove the roe to a flameproof platter. Reduce the liquid in the pan to half its original quantity, blend in l/4 cup cream sauce (January, 1958), and swirl in 1 tablespoon butter. Correct the seasoning with salt, pour the sauce over the roe, and brown the cop under the broiler. To make a more uniform brown glaze, fold 2 tablespoons whipped cream into the sauce just before pouring it over the roe.
Potatoes Parisieune
Cut 6 peeled potatoes into small balls, parboil them in salted water for 5 minutes, and drain them thoroughly. Melt 4 tablespoons bolter in a saucepan, add the potatoes, and cook them, rolling them in the butter with a wooden spoon, for about 10 minutes, or until they are golden. Season the potato balls with salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle them with finely chopped parsley.
In the November, 1957, “Primer for Gourmets,” 1 dealt with the question of stock-based soups; you will find there directions for making a rich consomme that should jell readily. If the jelling presents a problem, however, add to the soup 1 envelope of gelatin softened for 5 minutes in a little cold water. Chill the consommé in the refrigerator until it is set. Serve the jellied consommé in frosty-cold bouillon cups and garnish them with wedges of lemon and parsley sprays. Pork chops in a piquant sauce follow, served with buttered steamed rice and asparagus with sauce polonaise. Your dessert of macédome de fruits may consist of any mixture of fruits, depending upon what the bounty of the season offers; combine them with liqueur, if you choose. Kirsch lends its mellow flavor particularly well to this refreshing dessert.
Pork Chops Piquant
Trim the far from 6 pork chops and render enough of the fat in a skillet to cover the bottom of the pan. Brown the chops quickly on both sides, reduce the heat, and sauté them until they are tender, or until the juice shows no tinge of pink when the chops are pricked with a fork. Remove the chops to a heated serving platter.
Discard the fat from the pan, add 1 tablespoon butter, and in it sauté 2 tablespoons shallots, chopped, until they are soft but not brown. Add ¼ cup vinegar and cook the sauce until it is reduced to half its original volume. Add 1 ½ cups tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped, and ½ teaspoon salt, cover the pan, and cook the sauce over low heat for 10 minutes. Add 3 tablespoons chopped sour pickles, 1 teaspoon parsley, finely chopped, and a little chopped tarragon, to taste. Thicken the sauce with beurre manié, made by creaming together 1 tablespoon butter with 1 teaspoon flour, correct the sea-soning with salt, and pour the sauce over the chops.
Polonaise Sauce
To ½ cup browned butter add 3 tablespoons fine dry bread crumbs and cook until the crumbs art golden brown.
Dinner begins with hors-d'oeuvre variés (page 68) and proceeds to a simple broiled chicken (February, 1958), accompanied by pommes frites and French-cut green beans with mushrooms. Dessert is caramel custard, a favorite on both sides of the Atlantic.
Pommes Frites (French Fried Potatoes)
Peel 6 potatoes and cut them in pieces about as long and thick as the little finger. Wash them in cold water and dry them well. Cook them in deep fat or oil (375° F.) for 7 to 8 minutes, or until they are soft but just beginning to brown. Remove them from the fat and drain them well on absorbent paper. Let the fat get a little hotter (about 390° F. to 400° F.) and return the potatoes to it. Cook them 1 or 2 minutes more, or until they arc golden brown and crisp. Drain the potatoes, salt them, and serve them at once. Do not cover the potatoes after they are cooked.
Green Beans with Mushrooms
Clean 1 pound green beans, remove the ends, and slice the beans lengthwise. Simmer the beans in 2 cups water with ½ teaspoon salt for 20 minutes, or until they are tender, and drain them. In a shallow pan in 2 tablespoons butter sauté the caps of ½ pound button mushrooms, seasoned with salt and pepper to taste, until they are a light golden brown. Add the beans. cook until (hey are coated with butter, and sprinkle them with chopped parsley.
Caramel Custard
In a saucepan, over low heat, scald 1 ¾ cups milk with a 2-inch piece of vanilla bean. Heat together 3 whole eggs, 2 egg yolks, and ½ cup sugar. Remove the vanilla bean from the milk and pour the hot milk slowly over the egg mixture, stirring well. Add ¼ Cup caramel and stir until it is dissolved. Pour the mixture into 6 custard cups, set the cups in a pan of hot water, and bake the custards in a moderately slow oven (325° F.) for 30 minutes, or until a small knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
Caramel
Cook equal parts of sugar and water in a heavy shallow pan without stirring until the syrup thickens and turns golden. The caramel may be stored in a jar.