Pommes Anna

When your life is in total disarray as is wont to happen from time to time, only Julia Child will do.

Structured potatoes and butter because you need some structure in your chaotic life. And as Julia says, butter makes everything better.

(A judicious amount of duck fat makes it even better. Oh, Julia!)

Most likely, the dish was prepared by Adolphe Dugléré who was a pupil of Marie-Antoine Carême who was quite possibly the greatest celebrity chef of all time. The eponymous Anna is unknown although theories proliferate.

Do we care? No, we don't bloody care. Potatoes and butter, does the CC really need to upsell this?

It's on pages 394-397 of Vol. II.

It should be trivially obvious that when a recipe features just four ingredients — butter, potatoes, salt and paper towels — and yet occupies three whole pages of explanation, it's going to be awesome.

Ironically, it's not hard. It's very easy. It just requires the one thing that's missing in modern cooking — patience.

All you have to do is "nothing". Can you patiently sit with your thumb up your ass for a longish time? That's all it takes.

That and a mandoline.

What is it?

It's a potato pie that looks really pretty and bejeweled if done right except it's made in a skillet.

It's been modified somewhat from Julia. This is more la bonne cuisine femme than it is la cuisine de roi.

Thank me no thankings, Julia, nor proud me no prouds.

Ingredients

potatoes
melted butter
salt

pepper/herbs (optional)

patience (metric tons of it!)

Note 1: You will need a cast-iron skillet or a non-stick pan with a loose cover. Don't sweat it. Even a simple aluminum foil will do. The heat never goes above medium. It's much more important that the heat be uniform than anything else.

Note 2: You need to cook the potatoes as soon as you slice them. You need the starchiness of the potatoes to make sure the dish sticks correctly.

Recipe

Melt some butter in a pan. Take off the heat. (This is what makes the recipe awesomely stress-free. No need to work in real-time. Chillax is the name of the game.)

Now, slice the potatoes as thinly as possible on a mandoline. Layer them in the pan so that they all touch and overlap and look pretty.

Drizzle some more butter over them. Season with some salt. (Add some finely chopped herbs here if you'd like.)

Overlap a second layer. Repeat with the butter, salt, and a third layer and a fourth one.

Put the pan back on the stove at medium heat. Once the butter melts, you should start hearing it sizzle at a low pace. This is when your patience kicks in.

(A generous pour of butter or olive oil around the edges doesn't hurt at this point.)

The pan will sizzle and the fat spit a little. Cover the pan for just  a minute so that the potatoes soften gently. Uncover.

Gently rock the pan to see if the starch in the potatoes have made them attach to each other. Let them keep cooking at medium heat. There should be a continuous sizzle.

When you smell the potatoes turn golden and toasty, it's time to gently turn them over. This is a bit tricky. Use a dish if you need to. You most likely will not need it.

Cook until the other side is also golden and crispy.

Enjoy your, "Oh sweet baby Jeebus, Julia is so much better" moment!

Green Peppercorn Pickles

The CC is not the sentimental type and he's certainly not the rhapsodising type but if there ever were something to send him into a Proustian "madeleine" moment, it would be these pickles.

What are they?

Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.

A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.

Back to the peppercorns.

Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.

If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.

Ingredients

(based on your canning jar size)

500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)

water

Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.

Recipe

Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.

Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.

Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.

Fish it out and let it sit.

Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.