Lulu’s Baked Halibut with Mushrooms and Cream

halibut-mushroom

Some days you see a recipe and weather be damned.  That’s what happened to me when I was flipping through Richard Olney’s homage to Lulu Peyraud, Lulu’s Provencal Table and saw:

“Baked Halibut with Mushrooms and Cream”

Yes, I’m a sucker for breadcrumbs.

I cooked the dish that very night to bid adieu to L’s mother, flying back to Sydney the next day.  I made a few small adaptations, and the results were absolutely delicious and comforting.  This dish will be back on the menu again in future, no question.

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Lulu’s Ratatouille (and the benefits of elbow grease)

ratatouille-lulu

I’ve been reading Julia Child’s My Life in France and the difficulties she faced trying to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  In 1959, when Houghton Mifflin finally passed on the book, and before Knopf picked it up, Julia read a note from her champion at Houghton who explained the rejection, “They feel [the average housewife] wants ‘shortcuts to something equivalent’ instead of the perfect process to the absolute.

America’s culture has changed a lot since then, but anyone who reads Simone de Beauvoir’s 1947 America Day by Day will be struck by how much has remained consistent.  The business instincts of the Houghton execs remains somewhat true today if Rachel Ray’s empire is any evidence.  Thankfully, there is room for more ambitious efforts, as Julia Child and Simone Beck proved and as new author/chefs continue to show; a recent example is Paul Bertolli’s almost literary Cooking by Hand.

Ratatouille strikes me as a perfect dish to highlight the merits of the two mindsets (and there are indeed merits to both).  Sometimes I will throw together a ratatouille very quickly, let all the components stew together for a while unaided, and enjoy a perfectly good rendition.  However, with a little more effort and time, you can take the dish to a different level entirely.

On Friday evening, after picking up some lovely fresh vegetables from the local farm, I rolled up my sleeves and put together an adaptation of Lulu Peyraud’s ratatouille from Richard Olney’s cookbook Lulu’s Provencal Table. It is considerably more involved than my usual, but the result, which we ate the next evening, was the sweetest, most delicious ratatouille I have had in a long while.

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Pork Pastries with Pickled Onions, or The Stuffed Cabbage That Kept On Giving

stuffedcab-meat-pie-plated

I barely know how to start this post, or write it. It was the story of the recipe that turned into three. Our saga begins with our protagonist (that would be me) adapting a Richard Olney recipe for stuffed savoy cabbage. Enter cabbage stage left. Enter stuffing stage right.  The audience gasps.

Now, I don’t know what kind of uber-cabbages Olney was eating in the south of France, but as my imaginary heckler would say, “zat stuffing will nevarre feet in zat cabbage! Zat ees not a vrai Franche cabbage!”

I had a lot of extra stuffing. I mean I had 6 pork pastries and a meatloaf worth of extra stuffing.  But like all good tales, our protagonist learned along the way and came to a happy conclusion. The learnings: that I prefer to stuff individual leaves to an entire cabbage, and that this stuffing makes a damn good meat pastry/pie!  Yes valiant readers, unlike a French movie, this tale ends happily (and with no cigarettes or accordian music either!).

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Olney’s Simple French Food; Recipe Links 4-23-09

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“Even vegetarians expend most of their ingenuity trying to destroy the vegetableness of the poor fresh things, welding them into horrible imitations of meat dishes in pathetic compensation for self-imposed deprivation.”
— Richard Olney on cooking vegetables, Simple French Food

Do you find that the longer it takes you to read a book, the harder it becomes to pick it up and start?  Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been referencing Richard Olney a lot recently. The truth is I’ve had his book Simple French Food for almost 15 years, collecting dust on my bookshelves all this time. I picked it up right after college when I decided to learn to cook, out of a sense of associated loyalty. Olney and my father (an editor) worked together on the Time Life Good Cook series, but I was very young at the time and did not meet him.  So novice-me bought the book and was intimidated right off the bat.  I scurried back to the familiarity and ease of my Julia Child, and kept this one on the shelves.

Fast forward to a month ago, when I picked it up in earnest. What a change! All of a sudden, it wasn’t scary anymore.  Quite the contrary, to the older, more experienced me, this book is brilliant, accessible and often funny.  A book like this does not go out of style.  I read it basically cover to cover, and was quite inspired.  I like that Olney often explains his reasoning and purpose behind a decision, rather than just dumping out some ingredients and assembly instructions. Verdict: an oldie but very goodie.

P.S. Another book of Olney’s that I love, and which has not collected so much unjustified dust, is Lulu’s Provençal Table.

It has been way too long since I posted some recipe links, though my list has been stacking up. Here are a few from the pile that inspired me:

Zucchini Puddings

(part of From Provence to the Catskills, our celebration held as part of of the Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24 blog event)

Following on from Elizabeth David, Richard Olney was assigned the entrée (in the French meaning of the term). Flipping through his cookbook Simple French Food for inspiration, I came across this description: “one of these little puddings, prelude to an amicable chunk of rare meat, might take many a jaded gastronome by surprise.” Well, zucchini are abundant at Gill’s farmstand, and our menu certainly included an “amicable chunk of meat,” so Dick’s zucchini pudding soufflés sounded just the ticket.

Well, delicious it certainly was, but as a soufflé, it was something of a flop (pardon the pun), hence the renaming of the recipe. As an aside, if you’re ever tempted to cook from Richard Olney, bear in mind that “simple” is a complete oxymoron for this publication. Any recipe that reads in part “prepare the béchamel as usual” with no further guidance is not for the novice. These recipes also require a fair bit of stamina and concentration.

Zucchini Puddings

Zucchini:
1 lb of zucchini
Salt
2 tbs butter

Béchamel
2 tbs butter
3 tbs flour
¾ cup milk

3 eggs, separated
Salt/pepper

Sauce
2/3 cup tomato puree (home made – see below)
1 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

The first step is to prepare the zucchini: grate about one pound of peeled zucchini (Olney recommends hand-grating or using a Mouli-julienne, but he was writing in 1974; two cycles of the Cuisinart saved me about 2 hours). Arrange the grated zucchini in layers in a bowl, sprinkling each layer with salt, and let stand for 30 minutes. Then work the zucchini with your hands to get the liquid out of it: squeeze it repeatedly “until it is swimming” in juice, strain it a couple of times through a sieve, and press well “to rid it of flagrant moisture.” This is a fairly labor-intensive step and takes a while to get the zucchini properly dried out. Next, sauté the zucchini over a medium flame in a generous amount of butter (well, it is French cooking) until well dried out and starting to color, about 10 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Next, the béchamel. In a saucepan over a medium flame, melt the butter, add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon for a minute or two to make the roux. Turn down the heat and add the milk to the roux a little at a time until well combined (this works best if the milk is warmed up for about a minute in the microwave first. Continue to stir until thick and creamy – this will happen fast with only 3/4 cup of milk. You can also use a whisk to keep the sauce free of lumps. Remove the saucepan from heat as soon as the béchamel has thickened and let it cool slightly. Then, mix in the 3 egg yolks one at a time. Season with salt and pepper. Then stir in the cooked zucchini.

In a mixing bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Add about a third into the béchamel/egg/zucchini mixture to loosen it up, then gently fold in the rest of the beaten egg whites. Take care with this step – do not let yourself become too distracted by interesting political conversations or attention-seeking 3-year-olds and over-mix the egg whites, or the puddings will not rise and you will have to change the name of the dish from souffle to pudding. Don’t worry if you do – they will still taste good.

Pour the mixture into well-buttered ramekins (or a single larger souffle dish). Place the ramekins in a large shallow baking dish. Pull out the oven rack half-way, put the dish on the rack and then pour in enough boiling water to immerse the ramekins to two-thirds of the way up the sides (a bain-marie). Cook at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until the surface of the puddings is firm and springy to the touch. Take ramekins out of the bain-marie and allow to cool for 10 minutes.

Turn the oven up to 450F.

While the puddings are cooling, make the tomato sauce: whisk together the tomato puree and cream, season with salt, pepper, cayenne. You can used canned puree, or make your own as we did by cooking up 2 tins of skinless plum tomatoes, a handful of basil and several sprigs of oregano, a few pinches of salt and sugar. Bring this to a boil, then simmer for an hour. Run this through the food mill, then cook it down further for another hour or two until it has a nice thick consistency (this yields much more than you need for this recipe, but tomato puree is quite useful to have around, so we made extra).

Turn the puddings out of the ramekins and return them to a baking dish large enough to hold all of them comfortably. Pour over enough tomato sauce to coat the puddings well, allowing the sauce to run down around them in the dish. Top with grated parmesan cheese and return to the oven for 20 minutes or so, until the surface is browning and the sauce bubbling. Plate and serve, spooning some of the tomato sauce around the puddings.

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We served this with a viognier wine with decent acidity. The puddings (aka souffles) might not have puffed up to full glory, but they disappeared quickly from the plates.