When John and I entertain friends for lunch during the Christmas holidays, this is the dish I usually prepare:
The day before it is to be served:
2 lbs of frozen large farm-raised shrimp, shell on (easy peel shrimp)
Thaw shrimp overnight or under running water and boil 3 to 4 minutes in salted water with several tablespoons of Zatarain crab boil
Chill overnight.
3 mirlitons (chayote squash) Cut in quarters and boiled until tender.
Chill overnight
Next day, peel shrimp and put in a large bowl.
Peel mirlitons and cut in bite-sized pieces, and add to bowl.
Also add to bowl:
One can of hearts of palm, chilled, cut into bite-sized pieces.
Two stalks of celery, cut into small pieces
White part of one bunch of green onions, chopped
One bunch of chopped parsley
One can of water chestnuts, halved
Half a dozen Campari tomatoes, quartered, or a dozen grape tomatoes halved and pulp removed.
The tender part of a fennel bulb, cut into small slices
One teaspoon of red curry powder
Salt to taste (try one teaspoon, add more if necessary)
Two tablespoons of Hellmann’s mayonnaise
One tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
Combine with large spoon, cover and refrigerate until served in bowls over baby arugula
Serve with hot, crusty French bread and a dry white wine or Champagne or Prosecco.
Serves 6
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Raymonde Duval's Gigot
The fashionistas have taken over the Palais Royal in Paris and Raymonde Duval’s charming gallery which specialized in remarkable early 20th century French artists has been replaced by a shop selling chic and unbelievably expensive gloves. But we have many happy memories of beautiful works of art hanging on the walls of her small gallery, especially the brilliant canvases and works on paper by Augustin Hanicotte, a gifted artist who, celebrated in his lifetime, was almost forgotten after his death. Hanicotte was re-discovered and promoted by Raymonde in the 1990s. The artist, who worked both in Holland and in Collioure in the south of France, was a gifted colorist, very influenced by the Fauves, those early 20th century artists dubbed “wild beasts” because of their strong use of color and vivid imagery.
When Henri Matisse, one of the leading fauves, who early in the 20th century helped invent the movement in Collioure, left his studio there, Hanicotte moved into it and remained for the next thirty years. The culmination of Raymonde’s efforts to bring Hanicotte’s art back into the public eye was a large retrospective of his work held in 2000 in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Collioure and in the nearby Château Royal which is pictured in so many of his works.
We had the good fortune to spend a day in Collioure seeing the exhibition with Raymonde, and when the exhibition ended, we were able to purchase about sixty of the wonderful works that had been on display. We sold them very quickly, keeping only one extraordinary watercolor and gouache for ourselves.
Raymonde not only has a good eye for discovering art, but also a good nose for finding restaurants, and she is a superb cook. We have had many wonderful meals with Raymonde, both in restaurants she has discovered and at her own table. Several times in Paris, and once when she visited us in Virginia, she made this succulent leg of lamb for us.
8 pound leg of lamb
10 cloves of garlic, peeled
½ cup of Extra Virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon of pepper
Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees
Dry the leg of lamb, then rub in the salt and pepper, coat with the olive oil
With the sharp point of a knife, make ten holes in the lamb and stuff in the cloves of garlic.
Place lamb on a rack in a roasting pan in which you have put one cup of water and put in oven.
Every half hour put another cup of water in the roasting pan.
After 45 minutes, turn the lamb.
Turn it again after another 45 minutes.
Let cook for another ½ hour, then remove from the oven and set aside for ten minutes before serving. Serves 8
When Henri Matisse, one of the leading fauves, who early in the 20th century helped invent the movement in Collioure, left his studio there, Hanicotte moved into it and remained for the next thirty years. The culmination of Raymonde’s efforts to bring Hanicotte’s art back into the public eye was a large retrospective of his work held in 2000 in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Collioure and in the nearby Château Royal which is pictured in so many of his works.
We had the good fortune to spend a day in Collioure seeing the exhibition with Raymonde, and when the exhibition ended, we were able to purchase about sixty of the wonderful works that had been on display. We sold them very quickly, keeping only one extraordinary watercolor and gouache for ourselves.
Raymonde and her elegant and now vanished gallery in the Palais Royal
8 pound leg of lamb
10 cloves of garlic, peeled
½ cup of Extra Virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon of pepper
Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees
Dry the leg of lamb, then rub in the salt and pepper, coat with the olive oil
With the sharp point of a knife, make ten holes in the lamb and stuff in the cloves of garlic.
Place lamb on a rack in a roasting pan in which you have put one cup of water and put in oven.
Every half hour put another cup of water in the roasting pan.
After 45 minutes, turn the lamb.
Turn it again after another 45 minutes.
Let cook for another ½ hour, then remove from the oven and set aside for ten minutes before serving. Serves 8
Augustin Hanicotte (1870-1957) The Goat-herd, watercolor and gouache, 1925
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Tapenade of Jean Nicolas
Our friend Jean Nicolas, a retired Parisian banker, had for many years a very enviable job. As a loan officer of a major French bank, he would take potential clients to Maxim’s five days a week and over lunch decide whether or not the bank should lend them a great deal of money. Jean was then (and is still) very trim. I once asked him how he managed to keep his figure when he was obliged to eat so often in one of the great gastronomic temples of France. “Très simple,” he said. “I always order exactly the same thing: a chop, a green salad, and a bottle of Perrier.” Jean no doubt exercised the same self-discipline when handing out loans, and had more bankers followed his example, the world’s finances probably would be in less turmoil today.
Jean was born in Nyons in Provence. He makes a tasty and very healthful tapenade using this family recipe. He has pointed out that the caper is called “tapé” or “tapeno”in Provençal, thus: “ tapenado” or “tapenade” means a sauce made with capers, even though ripe olives are the principal ingredient.
2 ½ cups of ripe olives, pitted and rinsed
½ cup of capers
4 filets of anchovies
½ tablespoon of Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (2 if you prefer a thinner consistency)
Mix the ingredients and pass through a food mill or grind in a food processor, being careful not to over-process them.
Serve on toast or crackers.
Jean was born in Nyons in Provence. He makes a tasty and very healthful tapenade using this family recipe. He has pointed out that the caper is called “tapé” or “tapeno”in Provençal, thus: “ tapenado” or “tapenade” means a sauce made with capers, even though ripe olives are the principal ingredient.
2 ½ cups of ripe olives, pitted and rinsed
½ cup of capers
4 filets of anchovies
½ tablespoon of Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (2 if you prefer a thinner consistency)
Mix the ingredients and pass through a food mill or grind in a food processor, being careful not to over-process them.
Serve on toast or crackers.
Jean Nicolas on a visit to London, 1971 circa,
Lower Mall, Hammersmith
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Almost John Pozza's Tuscan-Style Beans
Life in Italy in the early 1960s was extremely inexpensive. At that time there were decent trattorie in Florence where one could get a good three-course meal for the equivalent of 50 cents. A bottle of the best Antinori Chianti Riserva cost 600 lire, just under a dollar. And shortly after I went to live there, for about eight dollars a month, I rented a room on the piano nobile of the 15th century Palazzo Rustici, behind the Palazzo Vecchio, where Leonardo da Vinci himself had spent some time in 1500 after he fled Milan because of the fall of his patrons, the Sforza family. The palazzo was then the home of one of his pupils, the sculptor Giovan Francesco dei Rustici, and it was with dei Rustici that Leonardo sought refuge.
My room in Palazzo Rustici boasted a graceful white marble fireplace topped by a fresco of Hercules, two arched alcoves that had windows facing the ochre façade of a Romanesque church, and a beautifully worn red brick floor that I kept swept and oiled. Such was the grandeur of my dwelling that I was usually able to ignore the reality that there was neither hot water nor any real source of heat. The fireplace was merely decorative and probably had been for centuries. That winter I bought a series of ornamental but useless stoves at the flea market and was probably lucky to have escaped asphyxiation. However, even when it was cold and damp, sunlight often streamed into the two windowed alcoves, giving the illusion of warmth. And I solved the hot water problem by joining the Canottieri, a rowing club on the Arno just a few blocks away, where I was able to take showers, shave, and maintain a reasonable level of personal hygiene.
The palazzo was a warren of rooms, large and small, rented out to foreigners: students, artists, and among them always a number of young Australians who were making their obligatory jaunt around the world before settling in down under. Next to my spacious room was a small one in which lived William, a pale, skinny, and reclusive young American scholar, who, by living very frugally, had made the funds of a one-year fellowship stretch out to five. A weepy Australian girl, inappropriately named Gay, who also lived somewhere in the palazzo, was obsessed with William and would leave gifts of food and flowers with notes at his door. When she became too intense in her pursuit, William would disappear for a few weeks, no one knew where.
The grand salone next to mine was the studio of a Fulbright artist from California, John Hunter, who was working on a series of huge paintings of Leda and the Swan. The working title he had given the series, which I believe he later wisely changed, was: “Take me to Your Leda.”
In the room above me was John Pozza, an Italian-American former Fulbright scholar from Arkansas who had decided to stay in Florence after his scholarship year was up, and had found a teaching job.An odd bird, but talented, his hobby was making life-sized Renaissance-style angels in papier-mâché, all of which had the face of his Italian lover, whom I often saw, coming and going, on the monumental stairway that went up to the piano nobile. John’s replicas were so authentic looking that once when he tried to ship one to Arkansas, the Belle Arti Commission intervened because they suspected that it was a national treasure. He received authorization for shipment when he scraped a bit off the bottom of the statue’s foot and showed the representative of the Belle Arti that it was actually made from recent copies of La Nazione, the Florentine daily newspaper.
A few years ago, John, living again in Arkansas, sent me his recipe for authentic Tuscan-Style Beans (Fagioli all’Uccelletto), which had been a favorite Florentine dish of ours, not only because it was usually one of the cheapest things on the menu. Here is my version:
1 pound dried navy beans
¾ cup of olive oil
6 cloves of garlic, finely minced or put through a garlic press
1 14 ½ ounce can of whole, peeled tomatoes and their juice
½ 14 ½ can of diced tomatoes and their juice
3 sprigs of fresh sage or ½ teaspoon of ground sage
1 teaspoon of sea salt
½ teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper
Soak beans for at least 8 hours in enough cold water to cover them.
Drain beans and rinse under cold water, then place them in a large saucepan. Cover them with unsalted cold water and simmer until tender but firm (about 45 minutes to an hour).
Heat the oil in a heavy skillet and lightly brown garlic, being careful not to burn it.
Drain beans and add them, the tomatoes and their liquid and the sage to the skillet and gently simmer until the sauce thickens, and the beans become tender, about an hour. Do not add salt and pepper until beans are done. The dish will be better if it is allowed to sit on the back of the stove for a few hours before it is served.
6 servings
\\\\\\\\\
My room in Palazzo Rustici boasted a graceful white marble fireplace topped by a fresco of Hercules, two arched alcoves that had windows facing the ochre façade of a Romanesque church, and a beautifully worn red brick floor that I kept swept and oiled. Such was the grandeur of my dwelling that I was usually able to ignore the reality that there was neither hot water nor any real source of heat. The fireplace was merely decorative and probably had been for centuries. That winter I bought a series of ornamental but useless stoves at the flea market and was probably lucky to have escaped asphyxiation. However, even when it was cold and damp, sunlight often streamed into the two windowed alcoves, giving the illusion of warmth. And I solved the hot water problem by joining the Canottieri, a rowing club on the Arno just a few blocks away, where I was able to take showers, shave, and maintain a reasonable level of personal hygiene.
The palazzo was a warren of rooms, large and small, rented out to foreigners: students, artists, and among them always a number of young Australians who were making their obligatory jaunt around the world before settling in down under. Next to my spacious room was a small one in which lived William, a pale, skinny, and reclusive young American scholar, who, by living very frugally, had made the funds of a one-year fellowship stretch out to five. A weepy Australian girl, inappropriately named Gay, who also lived somewhere in the palazzo, was obsessed with William and would leave gifts of food and flowers with notes at his door. When she became too intense in her pursuit, William would disappear for a few weeks, no one knew where.
The grand salone next to mine was the studio of a Fulbright artist from California, John Hunter, who was working on a series of huge paintings of Leda and the Swan. The working title he had given the series, which I believe he later wisely changed, was: “Take me to Your Leda.”
In the room above me was John Pozza, an Italian-American former Fulbright scholar from Arkansas who had decided to stay in Florence after his scholarship year was up, and had found a teaching job.An odd bird, but talented, his hobby was making life-sized Renaissance-style angels in papier-mâché, all of which had the face of his Italian lover, whom I often saw, coming and going, on the monumental stairway that went up to the piano nobile. John’s replicas were so authentic looking that once when he tried to ship one to Arkansas, the Belle Arti Commission intervened because they suspected that it was a national treasure. He received authorization for shipment when he scraped a bit off the bottom of the statue’s foot and showed the representative of the Belle Arti that it was actually made from recent copies of La Nazione, the Florentine daily newspaper.
A few years ago, John, living again in Arkansas, sent me his recipe for authentic Tuscan-Style Beans (Fagioli all’Uccelletto), which had been a favorite Florentine dish of ours, not only because it was usually one of the cheapest things on the menu. Here is my version:
1 pound dried navy beans
¾ cup of olive oil
6 cloves of garlic, finely minced or put through a garlic press
1 14 ½ ounce can of whole, peeled tomatoes and their juice
½ 14 ½ can of diced tomatoes and their juice
3 sprigs of fresh sage or ½ teaspoon of ground sage
1 teaspoon of sea salt
½ teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper
Soak beans for at least 8 hours in enough cold water to cover them.
Drain beans and rinse under cold water, then place them in a large saucepan. Cover them with unsalted cold water and simmer until tender but firm (about 45 minutes to an hour).
Heat the oil in a heavy skillet and lightly brown garlic, being careful not to burn it.
Drain beans and add them, the tomatoes and their liquid and the sage to the skillet and gently simmer until the sauce thickens, and the beans become tender, about an hour. Do not add salt and pepper until beans are done. The dish will be better if it is allowed to sit on the back of the stove for a few hours before it is served.
6 servings
\\\\\\\\\
Saturday, November 6, 2010
A Consommé Devoutly to be Wished
Jim S., from Omaha, lived in several sumptuous apartments in Florence for over twenty years and never learned to pronounce the names of any of the streets they were on. The last and grandest was on the ground floor of Palazzo Guicciardini where he, his partner, Roger, and his mother, whose wealth provided the wherewithal, lived in their idea of grand style.
The apartment was first rented out by the Guicciardini family during the difficult period just after the Second World War. Before that, the entire enormous palazzo, next to the Palazzo Pitti, was a one-family dwelling.
The first rental was handled discreetly by an agency. The agent assured the then head of the family, Count Paolo, that he had found an extremely suitable tenant: a titled Englishwoman. The Count and Countess Guicciardini were, therefore, somewhat startled when they saw the new tenant in the cortile: a very mannish woman wearing a man’s suit and sporting a monocle. They soon discovered that they their new renter was the surviving half of one of the most famous Lesbian couples in English literature: Lady Una Troubridge, companion of the writer Radclyffe Hall whose novel of Lesbian life, The Well of Loneliness, had shocked Edwardian England and much of the rest of the world.
After Hall’ s death during the war, Lady Una, previously the epitome of femininity, began to assume her dead lover’s masculine ways and took to wearing her Saville Row men’s suits. Count Paolo’s nephew, Francesco, told me, that at first his uncle and aunt were appalled and shocked to have such a person living under their august roof, but gradually they got to know Lady Una and they became fast friends, playing bridge together and attending together the opera at the Teatro Communale, to which Lady Una always wore her late partner’s elegant dinner jacket.
By the time the slightly strange ménage à trois from Omaha moved into the flat, Count Paolo and his wife were long dead and his heir, the bachelor Count Francesco, was the owner of the palace. He was not at all shocked by his new tenants. In fact, Francesco enjoyed entertaining a wide variety of types from all social classes, not a few of them slightly disreputable. Count Francesco was unconcerned by what anyone thought of the comings and goings. “I cannot live my life to please my concierge,” he once told me.
Jim S. filled the apartment with many costly things: original Majorelle furniture, Tiffany lamps, and the like, and he would gladly tell you just how much his furnishings were worth.
Once I was invited to dinner by Jim a few weeks before the annual Pitti fashion show. A disparate group of about eight gathered in one of the over-furnished salons for drinks before dinner. When we all had drinks in hand, Mrs. S. made her appearance, somewhat unsteadily. I suspect she had already had a drink or two. She was dressed in haute couture with many rings, bracelets, and chains and looked rather like a bulldog in elaborate drag. Roger handed her a drink, then another, and she drank them down without saying a word. Eventually, we moved to the dining room and took our places at a large rectangular table. I was directly opposite Mrs. S.. A lovely consommé was served and the conversation, which as I recall was about how high or low hems were going to be at the upcoming fashion shows, continued. Mrs. S. seemed to have no opinion on this topic and she sat silently as the various options were discussed. Then, suddenly, she snorted and fell face forward into her consommé. The conversation flowed on undisturbed while Mrs. S. gurgled softly in her soup. After a very long moment, Roger got up, lifted her out of the bowl, wiped her off with her napkin, and led her away. Surprised by the seeming nonchalance of the other dinner guests, I turned to my neighbor, a disagreeable German countess named Eva, and said. “Poor Mrs. S.! I hope she is going to be all right.” “Don’t worry about it,” Eva replied. “It happens every night.”
I never saw Mrs. S. again. A year or so after the dinner party, I heard that she had fallen and broken her arm but was mending nicely for an 80+ year-old. A few weeks later, one morning just before dawn, I had a vivid dream: there was a knock at the door of my apartment in Piazza Peruzzi. I opened it and there was the Angel of Death, wings and all. “I’ve come to tell you that Mrs. S. is dead,” the Angel said. “Thank you for letting me know,” I replied, and then woke up, and realized it was just a dream. It had seemed so real.
Later that morning friends came by for coffee. While I was telling them about the dream, the telephone rang. It was one of Jim’s friends. “Have you heard about Jim’s mother?” he asked. “I think so,” I said. Mrs. S. had died of natural causes a few hours before. Soup was not involved.
Here is a consommé, adapted from a recipe in my 1942 edition of The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book, into which Mrs. S. might have enjoyed a plunge. It is fairly simple to make, but does requires a lot of time.
Consommé Doré
1 gallon of water
1 chicken, cut up in pieces
1- ½ lbs beef marrow bones
1 lb of good boiled ham, cut in chunks
The whites and shells of two large eggs
2 large sprigs of parsley
1 small parsnip
1 carrot
2 stalks of celery
1 medium yellow onion
1 leek, washed
3 cloves
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
3 dashes of Tabasco hot sauce
1 pat of butter
Put the chicken, ham and bones into a large pot of cold water, bring to a boil and let simmer for five hours, keeping the pot well covered.
Chop the vegetables and sauté them in a skillet with the pat of butter until tender . Add the vegetables, the salt, pepper, Tabasco, and cloves to the soup and let it simmer for another two hours.
Let the mixture cool and then chill in the refrigerator over night. Next day remove the congealed fat and scoop up the jelly, leaving the thickest part of the sediment (which, after the much-boiled bones are removed, can be added to another soup)
Put the egg whites and shells into the jelly and bring to a fast boil for about ten minutes, then let settle and cool.
Strain the mixture through a double layer of cheese cloth. According to the Picayure Creole Cook Book, it should be “ a beautiful golden-brown color.” May be served hot or chilled, garnished with a thin slice of lemon and a sprinkle of chopped parsely.
Serves six
The apartment was first rented out by the Guicciardini family during the difficult period just after the Second World War. Before that, the entire enormous palazzo, next to the Palazzo Pitti, was a one-family dwelling.
The first rental was handled discreetly by an agency. The agent assured the then head of the family, Count Paolo, that he had found an extremely suitable tenant: a titled Englishwoman. The Count and Countess Guicciardini were, therefore, somewhat startled when they saw the new tenant in the cortile: a very mannish woman wearing a man’s suit and sporting a monocle. They soon discovered that they their new renter was the surviving half of one of the most famous Lesbian couples in English literature: Lady Una Troubridge, companion of the writer Radclyffe Hall whose novel of Lesbian life, The Well of Loneliness, had shocked Edwardian England and much of the rest of the world.
After Hall’ s death during the war, Lady Una, previously the epitome of femininity, began to assume her dead lover’s masculine ways and took to wearing her Saville Row men’s suits. Count Paolo’s nephew, Francesco, told me, that at first his uncle and aunt were appalled and shocked to have such a person living under their august roof, but gradually they got to know Lady Una and they became fast friends, playing bridge together and attending together the opera at the Teatro Communale, to which Lady Una always wore her late partner’s elegant dinner jacket.
By the time the slightly strange ménage à trois from Omaha moved into the flat, Count Paolo and his wife were long dead and his heir, the bachelor Count Francesco, was the owner of the palace. He was not at all shocked by his new tenants. In fact, Francesco enjoyed entertaining a wide variety of types from all social classes, not a few of them slightly disreputable. Count Francesco was unconcerned by what anyone thought of the comings and goings. “I cannot live my life to please my concierge,” he once told me.
Jim S. filled the apartment with many costly things: original Majorelle furniture, Tiffany lamps, and the like, and he would gladly tell you just how much his furnishings were worth.
Once I was invited to dinner by Jim a few weeks before the annual Pitti fashion show. A disparate group of about eight gathered in one of the over-furnished salons for drinks before dinner. When we all had drinks in hand, Mrs. S. made her appearance, somewhat unsteadily. I suspect she had already had a drink or two. She was dressed in haute couture with many rings, bracelets, and chains and looked rather like a bulldog in elaborate drag. Roger handed her a drink, then another, and she drank them down without saying a word. Eventually, we moved to the dining room and took our places at a large rectangular table. I was directly opposite Mrs. S.. A lovely consommé was served and the conversation, which as I recall was about how high or low hems were going to be at the upcoming fashion shows, continued. Mrs. S. seemed to have no opinion on this topic and she sat silently as the various options were discussed. Then, suddenly, she snorted and fell face forward into her consommé. The conversation flowed on undisturbed while Mrs. S. gurgled softly in her soup. After a very long moment, Roger got up, lifted her out of the bowl, wiped her off with her napkin, and led her away. Surprised by the seeming nonchalance of the other dinner guests, I turned to my neighbor, a disagreeable German countess named Eva, and said. “Poor Mrs. S.! I hope she is going to be all right.” “Don’t worry about it,” Eva replied. “It happens every night.”
I never saw Mrs. S. again. A year or so after the dinner party, I heard that she had fallen and broken her arm but was mending nicely for an 80+ year-old. A few weeks later, one morning just before dawn, I had a vivid dream: there was a knock at the door of my apartment in Piazza Peruzzi. I opened it and there was the Angel of Death, wings and all. “I’ve come to tell you that Mrs. S. is dead,” the Angel said. “Thank you for letting me know,” I replied, and then woke up, and realized it was just a dream. It had seemed so real.
Later that morning friends came by for coffee. While I was telling them about the dream, the telephone rang. It was one of Jim’s friends. “Have you heard about Jim’s mother?” he asked. “I think so,” I said. Mrs. S. had died of natural causes a few hours before. Soup was not involved.
Here is a consommé, adapted from a recipe in my 1942 edition of The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book, into which Mrs. S. might have enjoyed a plunge. It is fairly simple to make, but does requires a lot of time.
Consommé Doré
1 gallon of water
1 chicken, cut up in pieces
1- ½ lbs beef marrow bones
1 lb of good boiled ham, cut in chunks
The whites and shells of two large eggs
2 large sprigs of parsley
1 small parsnip
1 carrot
2 stalks of celery
1 medium yellow onion
1 leek, washed
3 cloves
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
3 dashes of Tabasco hot sauce
1 pat of butter
Put the chicken, ham and bones into a large pot of cold water, bring to a boil and let simmer for five hours, keeping the pot well covered.
Chop the vegetables and sauté them in a skillet with the pat of butter until tender . Add the vegetables, the salt, pepper, Tabasco, and cloves to the soup and let it simmer for another two hours.
Let the mixture cool and then chill in the refrigerator over night. Next day remove the congealed fat and scoop up the jelly, leaving the thickest part of the sediment (which, after the much-boiled bones are removed, can be added to another soup)
Put the egg whites and shells into the jelly and bring to a fast boil for about ten minutes, then let settle and cool.
Strain the mixture through a double layer of cheese cloth. According to the Picayure Creole Cook Book, it should be “ a beautiful golden-brown color.” May be served hot or chilled, garnished with a thin slice of lemon and a sprinkle of chopped parsely.
Serves six
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Florence, October 2009
A cat in the garden of Villa I Tatti, where we had an al fresco lunch, October 15th, 2009
A view from the villa at Grassina, October 2009
Eugenio, Simonetta, John and Joel, in front of Santo Spirito, Florence, October, 2009
Eugenio's Lasagna, Grassina, October, 2009Sunday, October 10, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Beating Austerity in the Kitchen (More or Less) - A blog about food and the people I've shared it with.
When I was on liberty in London as an N. R. O. T. C. midshipman more than half a century ago, I bought an English cookbook because I was charmed by its title: Beating Austerity in the Kitchen. It sounded so stiff-upper-lip, that much-admired quality of the English. The Second World War had been over for almost a decade, but life in Britain still seemed grim. London was pocked with bombed-out ruins, drabness was pervasive, and the food I encountered in the restaurants and hotels was hardly edible.
I stayed in a small hotel near Russell Square where breakfast was included in the modest cost of the room. Each morning at seven, the proprietor set out racks of cold, scorched toast and poured thin, lukewarm milk over bowls of cornflakes which by a quarter past seven were unrecognizable as such.
Buying a cookbook in post-war England was perverse, bordering on the masochistic. Beating Austerity in the Kitchen was a thin volume that might have been mistaken for a slender first book of poems by a chronically depressed poet had it not been for its bright yellow dust jacket festooned with red and blue rosettes. It contained a lot of information about preserving, storing, and stretching food that was still being rationed, and was written for the British housewife accustomed to preparing and eating the kinds of dishes Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote: “Oh, the superb wretchedness of English food, how many foreigners has it daunted, and what a subtle glow of nationality one feels in ordering a dish that one knows will be bad and being able to eat it!”
Apart from its gaudy dust jacket, the showiest thing about this modest book was the name of its author: Lady Peacock. Since by now the good Lady more than likely “has gone to get the prize for domestic virtue” (the translation of an inscription I once saw on an ancient tomb in Florence), she probably will not object if I borrow her title for these recipes my partner, John Copenhaver, and I have enjoyed through the years and would like to share with our friends in this new Age of Austerity when we may not be eating out quite as often.
Some of the dishes are a little extravagant to fit comfortably in a blog with a title that suggests restraint and frugality, but if you prepare them in your own kitchen, consider what you will save on tips alone.
I stayed in a small hotel near Russell Square where breakfast was included in the modest cost of the room. Each morning at seven, the proprietor set out racks of cold, scorched toast and poured thin, lukewarm milk over bowls of cornflakes which by a quarter past seven were unrecognizable as such.
Buying a cookbook in post-war England was perverse, bordering on the masochistic. Beating Austerity in the Kitchen was a thin volume that might have been mistaken for a slender first book of poems by a chronically depressed poet had it not been for its bright yellow dust jacket festooned with red and blue rosettes. It contained a lot of information about preserving, storing, and stretching food that was still being rationed, and was written for the British housewife accustomed to preparing and eating the kinds of dishes Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote: “Oh, the superb wretchedness of English food, how many foreigners has it daunted, and what a subtle glow of nationality one feels in ordering a dish that one knows will be bad and being able to eat it!”
Apart from its gaudy dust jacket, the showiest thing about this modest book was the name of its author: Lady Peacock. Since by now the good Lady more than likely “has gone to get the prize for domestic virtue” (the translation of an inscription I once saw on an ancient tomb in Florence), she probably will not object if I borrow her title for these recipes my partner, John Copenhaver, and I have enjoyed through the years and would like to share with our friends in this new Age of Austerity when we may not be eating out quite as often.
Some of the dishes are a little extravagant to fit comfortably in a blog with a title that suggests restraint and frugality, but if you prepare them in your own kitchen, consider what you will save on tips alone.
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