Pasta For One (Or More)

              

The Fleshpots of the East

Chicken Fricassee (for Jane Davies)

One Easter before I was born, my father gave my sisters a pair of baby chicks that he had named, ominously for them,  Fricassee and Gumbo. According to my sister Lorraine, Gumbo was, alas, soon petted to death. But Fricassee lived to be a Methuselah among chickens.  She was still alive when I arrived a few years later and I remember her well.

When I was an infant and Fricassee was still a fairly young hen, our family lived in a small frame house on Brashear Street, near the college in Lafayette, Louisiana, where my father was  a professor of agriculture. It was an exceedingly quiet neighborhood and there was so little traffic that Fricassee was allowed to stay unsupervised in the front yard. According to Lorraine, Fricassee soon struck up a friendship with Connie, a neighbor’s pet duck on the other side of the street. Lorraine tells me that every morning Fricassee would cross the street to get her friend Connie and then accompany her back to our yard where they would spend the day clucking and quacking and scratching for bugs. At sunset, Fricassee would take Connie back to her yard, and then return home to the pen behind the house where she slept each night.

When my father became Dean of Agriculture, we moved from Brashear Street to the college farm.  Fricassee came with us and led a privileged life among the other barnyard fowl.  A few years later, when my father was named president of the college, we moved from the farm to the newly-constructed President’s House on the campus.  It was not a suitable place, my mother decided, for a pet chicken. She asked Mr. Landry, the grocer, if he would mind keeping Fricassee in his chicken coop. Mr. Landry said that would be fine.  We often accompanied Mother to Landry’s Grocery on Cherry Street and always went to the coop behind the store to say hi to Fricassee.  This continued for some time until the Saturday my mother telephoned Mr. Landry to order a chicken for our Sunday dinner.  The chicken he sent was Fricassee. Mother, fortunately, came out the back door just as Gus, our servant, was about to wring Fricassee’s neck. Mother screamed and stopped the execution.  Fricassee was not sent back to Mr. Landry. A pen was found and she lived out the rest of her life, not in the Groves, but in the bushes of Academe in our back yard.

At least once a week, we had for lunch (our main meal) chicken fricassee made from some fowl less fortunate than Fricassee.

It was prepared by our diminutive cook, Lizzie Pillet, who was descended from a Pygmy tribe. She was tiny, but a wonderful cook who every day brought to the table delicious dishes that, I’m afraid, we probably took for granted.

I still love chicken fricassee and though I have it less often than when Lizzie prepared it, I do make it from time to time and serve it, as it was always served, over boiled long grain rice.

Here is my recipe:

Large pie pan

Dutch oven

Heat oven to 350 degrees

4 large organic chicken thighs with skin and bone

2 tablespoons of olive oil

4 tablespoons of flour mixed with 1 teaspoon of salt and twelve    turns of freshly ground pepper in the large pie pan

Another 2 tablespoons of flour for browning

1 medium yellow onion, peeled and roughly chopped

2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped

1 small jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced

¼ cup of minced seasoning ham

¼ teaspoon of red curry powder

2 bay leaves

2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

½ cup of chopped parsley

1 cup of torn basil leaves

About 1 cup and a half of organic chicken stock, with more in reserve.

Dry the chicken thighs and toss in the flour mixture until well-coated.

Heat olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat.

Brown the chicken thighs in the olive oil and then set aside.

Sauté the onion, celery and jalapeno pepper in the olive oil until they are softened.

Remove vegetables, lower heat  and add two tablespoons of flour to the Dutch oven and lightly brown, being very careful not to burn the flour.

Put chicken thighs and minced ham back in the Dutch oven and add enough of the chicken stock to almost cover the chicken.

Add the remaining ingredients and put into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes, or until tender, checking from time to time to make sure there is enough cooking liquid.

Serve over boiled long-grain rice. Accompany with a dry white wine like sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio.

Chicken thighs in flour mixture

Minced jalapeno

Chopped seasoning ham

Chicken Fricassee in the Dutch oven

Served over boiled long grain rice

A Perfect Caesar Salad

Recently we spent a week in the lovely Connecticut town of Kent and while there had a number of meals, both lunch and dinner, at a much-loved Kent institution: The Fife N’Drum. (www.fifendrum.com)

It is hard to decide which to praise more: the food or the ambience. Both are memorable. The ambience is warm, unpretentious, convivial, and the food is consistently excellent.

 

The guiding spirit of the restaurant is dapper Dolph Traymon who owns the restaurant with his elegant and welcoming wife, Audrey.

In 1973, Dolph retired from his successful career as a staff pianist for A.B.C. and as an accompanist for such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Joel Gray, to open with Audrey a restaurant that would not only serve good food, but also become his own personal concert hall. Today, at age 92, Dolph still entertains the diners six days and six nights a week with beautifully polished performances on the restaurant’s two Steinway grands.

We had five meals at the Fife n’Drum and therefore were able to have a real sampling of the menu. Everything was good, but the dishes we liked best were the half duck flambé and the tenderloin au poivre.  And especially the Caesar Salad for two with which we began almost every meal.

 

In this age when the deconstructed Caesar – several unmolested leaves of romaine lettuce artfully arranged on a plate with an anchovy and a few croutons – often appears without warning in restaurants that should know better, the classic version of the Fife n’Drum is both delicious and reassuring.

 

Dolph and Audrey’s daughter, Elissa Potts, who does a superb job of managing (“stage managing” would perhaps be a more accurate description)  the restaurant and making sure that the guests are as coddled as the egg yolk in the Caesar Salad, generously gave me a copy of the recipe, and I tried it last night with a good result. My Caesar lacked only the theatrical flair of the table-side preparation by one of the skilled staff.

We had our last meal at the Fife n’Drum on a Sunday evening and spotted Daniel Boulud, one of the most famous chefs in the world, sitting quietly at the bar enjoying his dinner. What better endorsement could a restaurant have?

Here is the Fife n’Drum’s Caesar:

A large wooden bowl

4-6 anchovies or the equivalent of anchovy paste

½ crushed clove of garlic

½ teaspoon of dry mustard

10 turns of freshly ground pepper

Mash all to a paste, then add

1 coddled egg yoke*

1 tablespoon of Lee & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce

¼ cup of good olive oil

2-3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar

Mix together to emulsify

Then add to the bowl:

1 head of romaine washed and chopped

1 cup of croutons**

10 more turns of freshly ground black pepper

Toss together until all the romaine is well coated

*I dropped a fresh organic egg in boiling water for one minute before separating the yoke from the white.

**Next time I may make croutons from scratch, but last night I used store-bought plain croutons tossed in olive oil with a clove of crushed garlic and a pinch of salt in a skillet over a medium flame until they were crisp and slightly brown. On second thought, they were so good that next time I may not attack a day-old baguette, as the recipe for croutons I have calls for me to do. What a bother, not to mention all those crumbs.

                     Waiter Tino Santiago and his tableside creations

                             The Fife n’Drum Caesar

                          Tino preparing the duck flambé

Cous Cous Salad

So far, all of the recipes in this blog come from past meals. This one, however, I have just finished making and it is going to be served tonight when we have four guests coming to dinner. It is  baking hot in Fredericksburg (but not the soggy, oppressive heat I remember from my native Louisiana…when people in Virginia complain about the summer heat and humidity, I always think; “If they only knew!”) So we are having a cold buffet.

The Cous Cous salad is going to be one dish of a meal that will also include chicken salad and shrimp salad, served with a Sauvignon Blanc, and followed by a chocolate mousse from our cherished Wegmans. I couldn’t make a better one.

Ingredients:

20 ounces  of plain Cous Cous

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 teaspoon of salt

4 cups of water

Put water, oil, and salt in a large pot and bring to a boil

Add Cous Cous, turn off heat and cover.

Let sit for five minutes then uncover and gently fluff with a fork, breaking up all lumps

 Empty into a very large bowl.

Then add and mix in:

 1 medium zucchini, chopped and blanched in boiling salted water for one minute

6 Campari tomatoes, quartered and seeded (or cherry tomatoes, halved)

½ small  jalapeno, finely diced

½ cup of finely chopped fresh herbs: chives, parsley, tarragon, basil and mint

1 can of whole water chestnuts, drained and halved

¼ cup of pine nuts

¼ cup peeled and salted pistachio nuts

¼ cup roughly chopped roasted, salted almonds

Chopped green onion tops

One small sweet red pepper, seeded and minced

Juice of one lemon

¼ teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper

Add extra olive oil if the salad seems too dry

Let chill in fridge for at least four hours.

Serves six as a side dish (I hope)

                             The finished Cous Cous Salad