La Patrimoine Gastronomique Au Villaret

Upon my return to Paris this past week from the countryside my father and I scheduled a tour of restaurants. Our first stop was Le Villaret, an interesting bistro with a rustic farm-like atmosphere in the 11th arrondissement. My father and I both started with a Provençal tomato tart topped with garlicky frog’s legs. The tart was overly greasy, practically drenched in olive oil but the frogs were wonderful and I always relish the opportunity to eat them. Paris is a great place to eat because there is such a diverse range of cuisines and foods to choose from, whether French, Italian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern. There is also a wealth of regional restaurants in Paris testament to a wider trend in French gastronomy. Terroir and la patrimoine gastronomique or culinary patrimony have become embedded in French culture since the early 1980s with the arrival and subsequent widespread acceptance of fast food chains like McDonalds. Much like in the United States, European city centers like Paris and Rome have seen the birth of alternate food movements that have rapidly grown in popularity. The organics, sustainability, locavore, and slow food movements have incarnations in France largely driven by people opposed to globalization and industrial food. These twin antagonists have given rise to a revival of two cornerstones of French culinary identity: regional cuisine and local foods.

Regional cuisines, local food goods, and anything related to terroir are in demand right now and restaurateurs, chefs, and politicos are responding to the trend. As a result Paris is rife with Basque, Provençal, Breton, and Niçois restaurants serving the regional foods of that gourmet cultural microcosm. This increased focus on regionalism and local knowledge lies at the heart of the social movement French food anthropologists call la patrimoine gastronomique, which situates itself in opposition to widespread homogeneity due to globalization. Le Villaret has its own characteristic cuisine that I would call neo-bistro fueled by la nouvelle cuisine, another major element of French culinary identity. The second courses all looked amazing and my father decided on the warm lobster salad with spring vegetables and herb vinaigrette. It was a simple dish composed of a perfectly steamed lobster half on a bed of sautéed carrots, peas, asparagus, and baby potatoes drizzled with a peppery vinaigrette reminiscent of pesto. I was jealous that I did not order it because it was both tasty and summery. The chef used fresh seasonal ingredients in inventive ways to produce rather light and intriguing dishes that were beautifully plated, directly inspired by the nouvelle cuisine movement in French cooking. La nouvelle cuisine is a response to the orthodoxy of la cuisine classique characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes and an increased emphasis on presentation. It is marked by a move from excessively fattening and rich dishes featuring large amounts of animal protein like butter, cream, and eggs in favor of more imaginatively prepared food and inventive usage of a diverse array of ingredients. Some of the main tenets of la nouvelle cuisine include that cooking times should be reduced to preserve natural flavors; that cuisine should feature and highlight the freshest possible ingredients; and that chefs should always strive to experiment.

Another aspect that I find particularly interesting is that the founding chefs of the movement, Bocuse, Troisgros, and Chapel, used regional dishes for inspiration instead of dishes. I believe the celebration of regional cooking in cuisine classiquela nouvelle cuisine is a product of French culinary identity rooted in the preservation of uniquely French regional foods and at odds with the perceived homogeneity brought by industrial food conglomerates like McDonald’s. My main course at Le Villaret was rabbit medallions with buttered cabbage and caramelized shallots, a gamey dish that was exceptionally well presented. The dish looked too artistic to eat and it was a shame that I did because it looked better than it actually ended up tasting. The rabbit was a little tough due to overcooking though the shallots were sweet and almost candy-like. Le Villaret is deeply emblematic of French nouvelle cuisine with hints of Provençal cooking, inventive pairing of flavors, and a detailed attention to presentation. La nouvelle cuisine is one of many social movements advocating locality, terroir, and the preservation of la patrimoine gastronomique, critical aspects of French culinary identity. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Bistro Classics: Coq Au Vin

The other day the guardien of the house alerted us to the fact that one of the two roosters had recently been terrorizing the other which became an increasingly dangerous affair as the two vied for control of the flock of hens. I use the past tense because the problem was resolved and the aggressor was put to rest resulting in a fresh coq or rooster primed for cooking. Rooster is seldom used due to its extreme toughness and wealth of connective tissue; the male birds are far more active than their female counterparts. They have tons of flavor which is slightly gamier than chicken and their toughness lends itself to a richer broth when cooked. There are a variety of ways to cook a coq though virtually all involve marinating in some form of alcohol to tenderize the meat and lengthy low and slow cooking. One of the oldest French recipes that is served to this day is the archetypal dish and paragon of old school haute cuisine; coq au vin or rooster cooked in wine. It dates back to the 16th century when monarchs like Henry IV enjoyed the rust colored stew, though some say that even the ancient Gauls and their nemesis Julius Caesar dined on the dish.

Jean-Claude and I tried to make a traditional coq au vin last year, relying on a Google search to peruse recipes and ultimately decided on a hodge podge improvisation. We did not cook it long enough the meat ended up dry and very difficult to eat let alone cut with a knife. This year he and my father took another crack at it using Paul Bocuse’s recipe. Bocuse is widely held as an ambassador of modern French Cuisine and is easily one of the most prominent chefs of the 20th century credited as the founding father of French nouvelle cuisine. The dish is a complicated one indeed involving a lengthy bath in a mixture of red wine, carrots, onions, and plenty of fresh herbs after which the coq is dried for a day and then braised. Another round of vegetables including mushrooms is sautéed with lardons before the meat is added and stewed for hours and hours over low heat with more wine, in this case a bottle of Saumur from the Loire. Characteristic of French cooking, terroir plays an important role and affects the taste of each individual coq au vin. Each region has a variant using local wine such as coq au vin jaune in the Jura or coq au Riesling in Alsace though the most extravagant is coq au Chambertin though that runs a little expensive these days and with which it is kind of a shame to cook. The dish came out a lovely golden-red color with a thick, rich broth and tender meat that went excellently with the bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône we were drinking. We served the coq with some steamed potatoes from the garden which helped sop up all of the tasty sauce and was a perfect summer one pot meal.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I never make desserts and I flat out dislike the concept of baking though I respect the art which is way beyond me. Sugar and flour are simply to hard to work with and every time I bake, it turns out virtually inedible. It is curious however that I often make sweet treats in La Touche, leaving the savory cooking for the older guys who clearly know what they are doing. I prefer to be the young apprentice watching from the shadows or occasionally chopping vegetables or making runs to the garden to collect herbs. In short, I experiment with desserts in La Touche because there is little else for me to contribute and we generally lack a patissier or dessert-maker. There is a fancy ice cream maker that I love to toy with and one of my favorite activities is to convert whatever fruit from the garden or local markets my father brings back into frozen treats. For tonight’s dinner I poached a bunch of tiny pears from the single tree we have in the garden. I poached them in some vin du paille or hay wine which is a regional specialty to impart a boozy flavor with some cloves, cinnamon, honey, and lemon. The second sweet treat was donut peach sorbet with fresh strawberries and a strawberry-thyme coulis. Tasty tasty indeed and I think the older dudes were impressed with my dessert duo that was a refreshing treat after a rather rich old school meal. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Dejeuner Du Dimanche

I mentioned in a recent post that we eat a lot of salads at La Touche, my father’s country house in the Loire which he shares with a couple of long time friends. Lunch typically consists of several salads, a panier of bread, and a substantial wedge of cheese. It is a meal large enough to satiate an afternoon hunger but is not overly filling because there is rarely meat served unless it is reheated from the night before. A main reason for the plethora of salads is the summer surplus of garden produce including the aforementioned courgettes de nice, tomatoes, potatoes, and haricots verts. I wanted to do something creative with courgettes, the amazing little light green zucchinis, so I decided to make a carpaccio. Our kitchen is equipped with tons of culinary gadgets and the professional mandolin is one such toy perfect for cutting long translucent slices of zucchini. I arranged the slices on a large platter and dressed them a half hour before sitting down to lunch with lemon juice, olive oil, and sea salt. The brief marinating time gives the acidity in the sauce enough time to slightly breakdown the fibrous cells of the vegetable. I topped the zucchini with some shredded basil, a crack of black pepper, and a white impatient to dress up the presentation before we tucked in.

These little green strings look like haricots verts at first glance but they are far from their terrestrial cousins. These are in fact salicorns or samphire in English, an aquatic succulent that is very tasty whether raw or cooked. They are basically string beans of the sea which are a delicacy in France though they are beginning to be eaten with increasing frequency in England. In an interesting historical and linguistic note the term samphire is believed to be a British corruption, or bastardization depending on whom you ask, of the French name for the plant, herbe de Saint-Pierre. I have always eaten them steamed or boiled and coated in sweet butter or olive oil as a scrumptious accompaniment to seafood. Because salicorns are cultivated mainly in salt marshes they have a very high salt content and must be cooked without salt in plenty of water. It looks a lot like seaweed when cooked but does not really taste like the sea besides being salty. In fact the flavor is more akin to baby spinach, green beans, or asparagus. These are a very tasty vegetable indeed, one of the rare foods that I eat solely when I come to France highlighting the richness and variety of French cuisine that I find so intriguing.

The third dish we had for our Sunday lunch on the patio along with a delicious piece of Comte and a creamy wedge of Roquefort was sliced melon served au nature without any preparation. The French love a good melon and even though these French table melons look like cantaloupe, they are most certainly not. They actually taste nothing like cantaloupe, often served with ham, prosciutto, or with aged port poured into the cavity of a halved melon. Originally cantaloupe referred only to lightly ribbed gray-green European melons like these though it has gradually come to connote any orange-fleshed melon. They are a bit smaller than American cantaloupes and are eaten as a savory rather than sweet treat even though they are sweeter than their US counterparts. Anyway you slice it however a melon is a melon and these are incredibly popular in France and are particularly delicious in the summertime. I like mine with a generous crack of black pepper which creates an interesting dynamic between sweet and spice, a very tasty and refreshing lunch item to enjoy when dining outside in the sunshine. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Birthday Celebration Au Lion d'Or

I turned twenty four last Saturday and my father surprised me with an invitation to the local one star restaurant in the town adjacent to La Touche. Romorantin is a commune in the Loir-et-Cher department of central France known for its rugby team, small but charming chateau, and elite luxury hotel. The principal draw of the town however is the Grand Hotel du Lion d’Or or hotel of the golden lion. It is on the list of Relais-Chateau’s finest hotels and its restaurant is truly top notch. I have been celebrating my birthday at the Lion d’Or off and on since I was ten years old and it is consistently one of the gastronomic highlights of the year. I had the fixed menu, a five course affair with little treats along the way and a “surprise dessert”. We sat outside in the 18th century courtyard that provided an ideal setting for dinner though unfortunately did not facilitate photography. As a result I could only capture the first half of the meal so a textual description of the latter will have to suffice. The chef offered us a few small plates to whet our appetites consisting of, clockwise from top-left, a foie gras emulsion, sardine rillettes, and mackerel mousse with tomato coulis.

The first course was actually split into three dishes making the five course dinner seem more like seven or eight. It was a trio of chanterelle mushrooms or girolles in French, a veritable feast for the eyes and palate. The first was an overly rich eggy concoction that blew me away; oeuf mousseux aux girolles et sauce poulette or egg mousse with chanterelles and Poulette sauce. The dish was simply a buttery egg sauce paired with lightly browned chanterelles but the pairing of egg and mushrooms worked extremely well. Thankfully it was served in a small portion because otherwise I would have filled up before the subsequent four courses arrived. This is one of those things that seems easy enough to make but actually requires a ton of technical skill, experience, quality ingredients, and timing that amounts to what I imagine to be a very difficult dish to pull off at home.

The second of the chanterelle trio was girolles en gelee a l’estragon et sorbet de petits pois or chanterelles with tarragon jelly and pea sorbet. The sorbet was a vibrant green with an amazingly fresh pea flavor that must have had a hell of a lot of cream in it to enrichen the vegetal flavor. The sautéed chanterelles came surrounded by a deeply flavorful jelly and a crisp slice of prosciutto that virtually melted in your mouth, bringing a much-needed saltiness to the dish.

The last of the opening course was a jalousie de girolles et de pommes de terre persillees or chanterelles with potatoes and parsley. This was the most classic dish of the trio and by extension the most boring but the flavors were there and it was a nice end to an amazing round of appetizers. It was a little crazy and not to mention excessive to have chanterelles, one of my very favorite mushrooms, served three ways but man was it good.


The second course was langoustine avec mousse d’agrumes et pickles au vinaigre de sureau or langoustines with citrus mousse and elderberry vinegar-pickled vegetables. Langoustines or Norway lobsters are a slim, orange-pink lobster fished in the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean and North Sea as far north as Iceland. They taste like a cross between lobster and shrimp with an incredibly sweet and hardly fishy taste that is absolutely amazing whether steamed, grilled, sautéed, boiled, or eaten raw. They are one of my very favorite foods and I am so pissed that they are not available in the States. The citrus mousse had a very bright flavor reminiscent of Meyer lemons with notes of tropical fruit that contrasted perfectly with the lightly steamed langoustine and elderberry pickles. The little dish to the side was a langoustine tartare with “curry sauce”, basically a cream sauce with lots of curry powder, kaffir lime, and ginger. This dish was pristine and damn good, far and away my favorite course of the night. By the end of it night had fallen which unfortunately marked the end of the photography.

The third course was foie gras chaud avec lait d’amandes et cerises or sautéed foie gras with almond milk mousse and cherries, a very heavy dish that I could have done without. The third was sole et tourteau au menthe et corinadre avec un rouleau de printemps or sole with crab, mint, cilantro, and a fresh spring roll. Sole is a rather boring fish that signals fine dining and traditional French haute cusine but the dish as a whole lacked inventiveness. The final dish before we moved on to dessert was carre d’agneau au cumin et citron avec travers confits or lamb chop and ribs with cumin and preserved lemon. This was the second highlight of the meal consisting of two perfectly cooked pieces of lamb on a bed of minced eggplant with a robust sauce of cumin and preserved lemon. The surprise dessert in fact was two small treats. The first was a fantastic white peach soufflé with gooseberry coulis and lemon verbena ice cream, the third highlight of the meal. The second dessert was much less interesting; strawberry “jam” with lemon cake and milk ice cream. The meal was good as a whole but not nearly as scrumptious as I remember from previous visits. There were three or four truly remarkable things that I will try to replicate at home but others like the sole were just not that memorable. All in all it was a great night as we ate the remainder of the meal by candlelight which made for an elegant atmosphere and very special birthday. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Lunch On The Veranda

The three of us spent the morning by the pool before huddling around the television to watch an exciting mountain stage of the Tour de France. My first lunch at La Touche for the summer took place at my favorite spot, a little iron table on the brick veranda at the back of the house with a view of the donkeys. Per usual I left the serious cooking to the professionals, my father and Jean-Claude, as I often do because they have years of age and experience on me. I do cook in small spurts however like my cauliflower appetizer though strangely I experiment mainly with desserts. I never make dessert at home but since the savory cooking is mostly handled and I want to take advantage of the pedagogic element of observation in the La Touche kitchen I tend to lean towards sweets. For lunch however I made a savory salad to impress my hosts, a beet salad with shallots, yogurt-curry dressing, and cilantro. For lunch we had a few salads, a tasty terrine, and the ubiquitous cheese plate accompanied by a bottle of white Burgundy.

The second salad that I had the foresight to photograph before devouring was a lunch staple that I eat pretty much once a week while I am in the French countryside: tomato salad with eggs and black olives dressed with olive oil and house made vinegar. This tasty summer salad is a lunch favorite incorporating house ingredients like eggs, garden tomatoes, and the Nicois olives brought north lovingly once a year by Jean-Claude when he visits his family. In addition to the annual deposit of olives he also brings our major supply of cold pressed olive oil which his Aunt is responsible for. In addition to the farm goods and peppery Nicois olive oil making up the salad, the house vinegar really seals the deal. About four years ago we started to produce our own vinegars after realizing how much we had been wasting on wine that had gone passé or bad. Instead of dumping bad or old wine we began to seal it in terracotta basins with huge corks and tiny spouts to sit in the cellar and develop acidity and character.

The main course of the meal deviating from the salad routine was a terrine de cerf or deer terrine. It is basically a luxurious cold meatloaf with tons of spices and jellified fat. A terrine is a glazed earthenware terracotta dish with vertical sides and a tightly fitting lid that is rectangular or oval. The term also refers to food served in a terrine whether ground game or venison, offal and pâtés, or fois gras. The first step is to marinate your chosen meat in a mix of wine, armagnac, and a wealth of herbs and spices overnight. The meat, in this case deer given to us by a hunter neighbor, is then ground with ham hock to supply fat and flavor. Thick slices of bacon are placed on the bottom of the earthenware dish, topped with ground meat, another layer of bacon, a layer of herbs and spices, and finally gêlée or meat jelly. It is not a very appetizing sounding thing but meat jelly is an important aspect of the French art of pâté, fois gras, and terrine making. You can make your own with heavily reduced stock and bones that serve as a natural thickener but in this case my father bought gêlée from the local butcher which he heated to liquid form and poured over the terrine. The whole thing is then pressed and cooked in a hot water bath or bain marie for two hours, then refrigerated for three days to settle and collect itself before being sliced and enjoyed. It is a rather lengthy and difficult process for some and I totally understand that but it is truly unique, delicious, and extremely French dish. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!