french house cooking philosophy and such

ah, studio or cooking: which one is more important? well, seeing as a review is not a negotiable thing, but cooking is, i went with studio. for the past three or four weeks. in return, my body feels like it’s on its last legs, coughing out all the brain cells and vital organs. i’m not kidding about coughing stuff up, either. it’s gross. it makes it really hard to get up in the morning. i suppose that’s all i should expect, though, after subjecting my body to all that sleep deprivation, horrible eating habits, and all that other good stuff that comes with studio.

all the same, i wanted to go out with a bang for my final menu at lmf. i suppose i might guest chef a couple times in the future, but this is my last menu as a senior. it’s the same feeling that i have graduating this year as an undergrad – next year’s graduation with my MCP means more in terms of getting a job, but these are the four years that have mattered, and the ones that have made me what i am now. – end overly gushy sentimentality –

back to what matters – the food! i wanted to do something elaborate without overtaxing my already overtaxed body. i’ve come to realize the beauty of simple food that requires no preparation. to get to the point, here is the menu:

la nourriture francaise a la maison francaise: un repas en cinq parties
1e : potage puree de crecy
2e : petite salade verte
3e : poulet roti a l’estragon
veg – quiche aux epinards
gratin de pommes de terre
carottes a la creme
4e : pause de fromage
5e : napoleons aux fraises

so, in english, a five-course traditional french meal. while i have no control over how people actually eat their food, i made the following suggestion: a carrot soup, followed by a small, simple (lettuce, oil and vinegar) salad to cleanse the palate and act as a break before the main course, then protein (because it’s so difficult to be a vegetarian in France) with a starch and a vegetable, and another pause (filled by cheese in this case, with cornichons), then dessert. dessert in this case was “napoleons,” but were really oatmeal tuiles/florentines filled with whipped cream and strawberries.

this was a particularly fun menu because it was very simple, and i made up the dessert (while not all that original, it was at least a very nice combination of sweet, tart, and buttery). the idea of being elaborate with very simple things is an interesting one. it was also not as taxing on my cooking team as my menus are wont to be. it’s also very satisfying to create a menu in courses, for some reason, though people often don’t understand that they are correspondingly smaller amounts of food. sigh. the american way of eating can be very frustrating sometimes.

and, the decision for french food. when i tell people that i live in french house, and that we cook dinner, they invariably ask “so do you eat a lot of french food?” the answer, should you happen to meet me, is, resoundingly no. occasionally, yes, but if you were new somewhere and needed to devise a menu, wouldn’t you choose food that you grew up with? and, seeing as none of us are native french, but rather american, it follows that the majority of the food we eat is either american, italian, or lebanese. (we have three lebanese students.) anyway, the french food. since we have it so infrequently, i thought people should be educated on what it is. not that i am any kind of expert in french food, in regards to both the process of cooking it or the repertoire of dishes, but i thought i’d give it a go all the same. what i came up with was a group of things that are very simple, but make up something that’s really quite nice. i was more successful combining flavors/textures with the dessert more than anything else; the main course was a result of wanting to roast chickens, trying to find a suitable vegetarian option, and wanting to cook carrots (this is a common way to make up a menu in french house – menus are often lists of food that we haven’t had in a long time but have a sudden yen for). i hate raw carrots, but i do love cooked carrots quite a lot.

every time i make up a menu, i try to make it as painless as possible for my cooking team. if i want to do something elaborate, then i shouldn’t foist my lofty goals upon the rest of my cooking team – we’re here to have fun and take a break from MIT, not reinvent the wheel. i was more successful with this last year, when i had more time (i realize now that when i thought i was busy last year, i really didn’t know the meaning of the word) and could do more prep work ahead of time. as it is, i always end up prepping something ahead of time, because it needs more time than 4-6:15pm will afford, or because i couldn’t possibly put my cooking team through that much work. an example of this: for a menu last fall i made all of the pies ahead of time because the rest of the menu would have just been too complicated. also, the pies needed to set to be truly good – i like my pumpkin pie cold and pecan pie needs time to set. for this menu the only prep work i did was the tuiles, the night before.

somewhat surprisingly, i was fairly successful with suppressing the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off type of hysteria that generally characterizes cooking during my menus. two of the courses required virtually no work (the salad and the cheese), so i had one person working on each other recipe, pretty much. let’s not talk about the quiche crust, but the quiche filling was pretty good (thank you, julia child). it if isn’t going to be good, it might as well look good, hence the traditional fluted tart pan-shaped quiche (and after all, it was a traditional french meal).

dinner was late, because as usual the chickens took a while to bake. i believe it was because they were stuffed full with a bunch of tarragon and lemon wedges – effectively acting as a stuffing. but they were pretty good, anyway; i think they needed a bit more tarragon, and less lemon, but the skin was crackling and golden, and the meat was actually perfectly done on all of the chickens. you would think that it only takes an hour to roast a chicken, but that’s just not true when you have two chickens on the middle rack and an enormous pan of potatoes on the bottom rack – everything just cooks more slowly because there’s more in the oven and the heat doesn’t circulate as evenly. these four chickens (in two ovens) took fully two hours to get to the right temperature. in bastings of butter, that’s a lot of butter.

on the bright side, dinner was good and well-attended – no empty chairs! i am always happy when my menus are well-attended, though i understand all the same if someone doesn’t like what i’m making. this is probably pretentious, or vainglorious, or whatever you might want to say, but i have always wanted to be somewhat of a legend at french house – almost famous, you might say. i’ve put away the late-night cookie-baking for late-night model-making, but i still do put heart and soul into my menus, which are pretty much (sappy as this may sound) an open declaration of love both to french house and food in general. anyway, the 300-in-a-night cooking record past, food stewarding glory/grueling/anal days over (and i’m happy to see that some of the changes i made in the system will continue), i am left with this last menu. you don’t often get the chance to cook for thirty people, unless of course you live at french house, in which case you get that chance once a week. if i can’t change the world, i would have liked to at least changed french house.

oh, and the wine – i didn’t have any white wine lying around (or at least, good white wine), so i put a bottle of rose in the fridge before i left for class this morning. i can hear your sigh, reader, at the thought of a rose wine. well, i’m as much of a wine snob as you, dear reader, and i hate those sickly sweet rose wines. the rose wine we had tonight was just something i got at a local wine shop, but most importantly, it was from france, so it was dry. if you want to get into specifics, it was an e. guigal, 2002 cotes du rhone rose. it was pretty good for a rose, though of course they’re not really anything special – pretty acidic, well balanced, not overly anything. it was quite good with the food.

i keep waiting for a menu to be red-wine-appropriate, which is somewhat frustrating because people often make either vegetarian food or things with chicken, neither of which take all that well to red wine. and i’m not sure what the custom is with just drinking red wine with everything, table-wine-in-france style. ah, well. that south african red wine is just going to have to sit around a while longer. and charles needs to have his birthday already, or that tokaji is going to burn a proverbial hole in my pocket. or, maybe i’ll keep it and we can drink it when we graduate, since i know jessica will drink it with me (it’s a 5 puttonyos 1996 tokaji from hungary, one that we tasted in the wine class we took over iap).

if you are still reading – i happen to be going out to dinner not once, but twice this weekend, and oddly enough, to the same place (petit robert bistro). you get the benefit of a real restaurant review then, eh?

and, the list of restaurants i still need to go to with jessica : central kitchen, veggie planet, no 9 park, craigie street bistrot, chez henri, helmand, coriander bistro, upstairs on the square, oishii, blue ginger, and salts. oh! and if you have the new zagat guide for boston, they totally quoted me in their bit on pigalle (“perfect pacing” – yes! almost famous!).

i realize that i have forgotten to give a formal edict on the result of my menu! by attendance, a resounding success – that whole “last menu ever” bit really pulled people in. by virtue of the food, doing pretty well. not a flawless choice of dishes, but each one was done well (thank you cooking team) and the whole five-course thing seemed to keep people around for a while – which was the point, anyway. i think probably the best part was the dessert, as is generally the case with my menus. this one is probably the simplest one i’ve ever done, though, partly to convince myself that i can do very simple things. sometimes the knee-jerk reaction is to go for the baroque/rococo/era-of-gold-encrusted-things type of dessert, elaborate and all-out, whereas a very beautiful, simple japanese type of thing goes much better. all in all, though, a lot of fun and a fitting goodbye to cheffing at french house.

and a bit of a footnote:
does anyone else hate saying “potatoes au gratin”? i hate saying it with the american accent because it’s french and, well, i know french so i should use the french. but people don’t understand you unless you say it with the american accent. so frustrating.