Real Men Eat Salad

A nineteenth century salad from the works of Lucien Tendret - author of La Table au pays de Brillat-Savarin.

Put into a salad bowl some olive oil of the best quality, some white wine vinegar, 4 tablespoons roast turkey juice, 1/2 teaspoon tarragon mustard, the inside of a lobster, salt, and pepper. Stir until the mixture is perfectly smooth. Then add slices of lobster flesh, slices from the breast of a braised chicken and the breast of a roast turkey without the skin, the breast of three young partridges (keep the best slices for decoration), some thinly sliced truffles cooked in an excellent dry white wine, some mushrooms prepared in the same way, and a number of shelled crayfish. Cover with a layer of blanched endive (chicory) leaves. Add a second layer of the mixture, then a further layer of endive. Then on top tastefully arrange the reserved slices of meat, a few strips of ham from which the fat has been removed, a few large slices of truffle and mushroom, a border of shelled crayfish, a tablespoon of capers washed in white wine, and a cupful of stoned (pitted) green olives. Put a mound of thick mayonnaise in the centre with the largest truffle on top. Serve with the finest dry champagne, very cold but not iced.

Twenty-first century, eat your heart out!

Spring Mac 'n Cheese (with Truffles)

Who the hell is the CC kidding? He can't afford truffles. But nearly as good is using a cheese that has truffle skin built into it. Yes, it's exactly as good as it sounds.

Food and Social Class

One of the greatest descriptions of the relationship of food to mores and social class is undoubtedly the description of Madame Bovary encountering the dining room at the ball given by the Marquis in Flaubert's masterpiece.

What is left unstated is just as important as what is shown.

Emma's shock realization that many of the women had not put their gloves in their glasses (the conventional way for women to notify the servers that they were abstemious in the consumption of wine) is a show-stopper for her - the idea that women of a certain social rank would publicly consume wine is unthinkable to the petit bourgeois society that she is a product of.

The Marquis opened the drawing room door; one of the ladies (the Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, a hook nose, a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair a simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young woman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner; and gentlemen with flowers in their buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire.

At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the dining room with the Marquis and Marchioness.

Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a bishop's mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon gave you the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid with copper baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed motionless on the room full of life.

Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses.

But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all these women, bent over his full plate, and his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black ribbon. He was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere, once on a time favourite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens! Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.

Dagad Phool

This is a dried lichen (yep!) used in Indian cooking. (Latin: parmelia perlata.)

Certainly the only example of a lichen the CC knows off that's used as a spice.

It has a characteristic unmistakable woodsy musky earthy smell (not quite truffle-esque, and not quite morel-esque but unmistakably earthy.)

Anyone who claims to make the very Maharastrian goda masala or the Andhra vaangi baath podi without this is pretty much clueless about food.

It seems to have a reputation as an aphrodisiac (unverified by the CC but that's another "hello truffles!")

On Naivete

Chefs and food lovers, by their very nature, are born optimists. After all, the thought, "I'll cook you a meal but it will probably be lousy" is not very likely to sit well with an audience, either public or private. The idea of making a commercial career out of the same sentiment can safely be consigned to the failed ideas of history.

The article that set the CC off on this reverie was a recent one in the New York Times where it was revealed with a grand flourish that "truffle oil" was far from natural; in fact, most commercial truffle oils were just "concocted by mixing olive oil with one or more compounds like 2,4-dithiapentane (the most prominent of the hundreds of aromatic molecules that make the flavor of white truffles so exciting.)"

Well, to invoke the vernacular, "DUH!"

The world doesn't produce enough truffles to satisfy the ongoing craze of "truffle oil", and most importantly, since truffles are near impossible to produce commercially (although a few entrepreneurs in Australia are trying), the logical conceit should be that it would be near impossible to ensure a steady supply year after year.

No, no, the CC was distinctly NOT shocked by that particular revelation. What took him by surprise was the surprising naivete of chefs (whom he would've expected to know better.)

“I thought that it was made from dried bits and pieces of truffles steeped in olive oil,” said Vincent Nargi of Cafe Cluny in Manhattan."

Pauvre petite!

The naivete extends to other domains.

Witness the rise of "organic" food. Or as a French friend of the CC's once said in a delightful accent, "Ze French word ees equally stoopide. Biologique! Az oppozed to what? Metallique?!?"

Stare at a label in the marketplace.

"Natural? As opposed to what? Unnatural?!?"

The CC pines to have the first taste of "unnatural" food (perhaps Twinkies qualify?) and has a similar opinion on "unnatural" thoughts (How unnatural could they be if the CC actually thought about them? They could be illegal, distasteful, or even immoral but "unnatural"? The CC thinks not!)

No, no, the CC knows that food is both natural and unnatural.

Take raw ingredients whose sole aim was Darwinian survival from predators, carry out the afore-mentioned predation (this applies to vegetables as well), subject them too all kinds of processes (boiling, baking, braising), and produce an article that ensures both survival of the species and a tickling of the senses.

What could be more unnatural than that?

Cooking, mes pauvres petites, is a deeply unnatural act.

However, there is still something distasteful about the "truffle oil".