Coolinary Comes To Metairie, By Way Of France.
Chateau Du Lac on Metairie Road is one of several restaurants outside of Orleans Parish to merge into the Coolinary celebration this month. Chef Jacques Seleun–a well-trained French chef, born in Brittany–assembles three choices in each of three courses for $39. The dishes are cherrypicked: these are among the best creations I’ve found in many dinners at Chateau du Lac. Creations? Yes, but maybe I should add that most of Chef Jacques’s cooking is straight out of the classic French catalog. Here are the choices.
Chef Jacques at Chateau Du Lac.
Salade Verte
Mixed greens, shallots, green onions, parsley, French vinaigrette
~or~
La Gratinée à l’Oignon
Authentic French onion soup
~or~
Rabbit Terrine
Cognac and pistachio
~~~~~
Poisson du Jour
Poisson du jour
~or~
Duck MagretSauce du jour
Sauce du jour
~~~~~
Classic Coq au Vin
Slow-roasted chicken with red wine and pork belly
~or~
Warm Chocolate Molten Cake
~or~
Ile Flottante
“Floating island,” créme anglaise, toasted almonds
~or~
Tarte Tatin
French apple pie
This menu is available Mondays through Saturdays for dinner only.
Chateau Du Lac
Old Metairie: 2037 Metairie Rd. 504-831-3773. www.chateaudulacbistro.com.
NOMenu invites restaurants or organizations with upcoming special events to tell us, so we might add the news to this free department. Send to news@nomenu.com.
Thursday, July 30, 2015.
Antoine’s Historic Dinner #1, With John Folse.
The public relations team at Antoine’s (and wouldn’t that have been a peculiar string of words twenty years ago) is busy this year with special events to celebrate the current 175th anniversary of the restaurant. One of the best of these–and I don’t just say that because I thought of and orchestrated the same idea five or six years ago–is the new Historical Dinner Series. It’s a monthly event that takes advantage of the deep recipe archives at Antoine’s. Just in the forty years I’ve been a customer there, I’ve seen at least a hundred dishes disappear from the menu. (At its peak, it featured 140 items.)
Chefs Mike Regua, John Folse, and (rear) Chris Lusk (he’s the chef at R’evolution).
The idea is to bring well-known local chefs into Antoine’s to partner with Antoine’s own chef Mike Regua in resuscitating some of those old plats. The inaugural chef is a good choice. John Folse is not only one of the best-known chefs in Louisiana, but he has made a long study of the evolution of Creole and Cajun cuisines. In fact, he write two books with that title, among several other enormous tomes.
Chef Folse gets two assignments. The first is to serve his own well-known Death By Gumbo: a dark-roux, intense-stock potage with a whole dirty-rice-stuffed quail, looking like an island in the bowl of gumbo. I have regarded this as more a gimmick than anything else, but I must change my mind. This is certainly as fine an example of chicken-and-sausage gumbo as has ever been brought to my mouth. And chicken gumbo is among my very favorite dishes. It is genuinely exciting, and all three dozen people in Antoine’s Rex Room agree with that assessment.
Truite en papillote.
Folse’s second task is to attack the pompano en papillote–fish baked with a big sauce inside a parchment bag. That dish was long considered one of Antoine’s signature items, involving as it does a ceremony at the table as the waiter wields knife and fork to unroll the parchment from the fish and its thick, crabmeat-and-shrimp sauce.
Folse didn’t follow the recipe, but that was a good thing. My memory of the papillote shtick was that the fish was great and the sauce was great, but that they cancelled each other out. Folse’s version used a much lighter sauce with a good bit of crabmeat, but not so much that the flavors of the speckled trout were lost.
Filet mignon with mirliton stuffing.
The dinner begins with two of the three canapes from the old menu, one topped with crabmeat and the other with oysters, each in a thick, breadcrumb-united sauce. Then a trio of oysters Rockefeller, rendered perfectly. Then the gumbo, a salad, and the trout. The meat course is a small filet mignon cooked in such a way as to make it very juicy, and without much of a crust. Again I think: is there a sous-vide apparatus in the house? Yes or no, this steak was just fine. The side dish–mirlitons made into a stuffing–is the one item that few guests thought much of.
During the dinner, the p.r. people give a verbal history of Antoine’s, beginning when Antoine was a young man in Italy, and coming to the present. I hear nothing that contradicts my own rather extensive writing about Antoine’s history, although their origin of oysters Rockefeller leaves out the seamy aspect. It was originally constructed from leftovers.
Baked Alaska.
The baked Alaska moment arrives, with a big one marched around the Rex Room in flames. There is agreement as to the engrossing nature of the program and the goodness of the food.
In a lull during the dinner, Antoine’s business chief–Rick Blount, the great-great grandson of Antoine–shows me some drastic changes in the building. In an area with three new bathrooms (a longtime need) is a passageway that leads to the always astonishing wine cellar. There is now room in the cellar for a table. Rick says that this will be operational for very special guests in the near future.
Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St Louis. 504-581-4422.
Basic Cornbread
Some morning, when you wake up earlier than everyone else in the house, make a batch of this cornbread in time for breakfast. Set out softened butter and cane syrup for dipping. My mother did that for us often enough that just thinking about it makes me want to get the iron skillet out for tomorrow morning.
If you don’t consume the cornbread right away, let the remainder get stale, then use it for the Blueberry Cornbread Pudding we featured in this space recently. That recipe can be found here.
1 cup self-rising cornmeal
1 cup self-rising flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg
1 1/2 cups of buttermilk
1/4 cup rendered bacon fat, melted
1/2 stick butter, melted
Preheat a well-cured nine- or ten-inch black iron skillet in a 450 degree oven while making the batter.
1. Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl. In a second bowl, beat the egg, add the buttermilk, and whisk in the bacon fat and butter.
2. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones and mix until just combined. Don’t worry about small lumps.
3. Pour the batter into the preheated skillet and return it to the oven at 450 degrees. Bake for twenty minutes, or until the middle of the top begins to brown lightly.
Remove from oven and allow to cool for about five minutes before serving.
Serves eight to twelve.
Corned Beef Poor Boy @ Parkway Bakery
Corned beef in New Orleans usual boils down to a) a lunch special in an inexpensive neighborhood restaurant; 2) a special in almost every restaurant in town on St. Patrick’s Day; or iii) a sandwich in a deli. The corned beef poor boy at the Parkway Bakery fits none of those categories. It comes from Vienna Beef in Chicago with the two qualities one wants most from a corned beef: leanness and tenderness. The Parkway’s kitchen keeps it tender by steaming it. It winds up on good Leidenheimer’s French bread with Creole mustard and whatever else you want. May I suggest no cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, or mayo?
Parkway Bakery. Mid-City: 538 Hagan Ave. 504-482-3047.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
August 6, 2015
Days Until. . .
Coolinary Summer Specials End 25. Three-course dinners $39 (or less). All the menus can be found here.
Seasonings
Today is Midsummer Day, the halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. This datum triggers two emotions. The first is joy that half of the summer is ahead. The second is disappointment that we’ve let the first half go by without having a picnic on the lakefront. Another dichotomy: you have either a month and a half more of long, sunny days, or that much more sweltering heat. It’s either get away for vacation before school starts (which it does this week, for some kids), or start watching the tropical storm satellite images for the bad part of that season. Whatever. At the very least, get these things done in the next few weeks:
Chill with a sno-ball.
Drink a mint julep.
Make a meal of chilled crabmeat, shrimp, and (why not?) oysters.
Have a midsummer night’s dream.
Food Calendar
Today is Jerk Day, in honor of Jamaican Independence Day. (See below.) Jerk is the Jamaican barbecue. It differs from the American counterpart in relying less on smoke for its flavor and more on a peppery seasoning. Jamaican jerk seasoning is a wet rub, made by pureeing peppers, onions, and herbs. Two distinctive ingredients are Scotch bonnet peppers (the Jamaican name for habaneros) and pimento (allspice berries). They slather the chicken or pork and marinate it overnight. Then roast it in a closed outdoor grill over charcoal (most authentic: branches from the allspice tree) at about 250 degrees for enough time (an hour for chicken, six hours for pork) to get it crusty on the outside and about 170 degrees on the inside. And then you will be a jerk chef.
Today is also Root Beer Float Day. Isn’t that a brown cow? That question exhausts the topic.
Far-Flung Creole Cuisines
Today is Independence Day in Jamaica, which ceased to be a British colony today in 1962. It continues to be part of the British Commonwealth. Its food is fascinating, particularly to New Orleanians. It’s another flavor of Creole. The Jamaican everyday dish–rice and peas–fills the same role that red beans and rice does here. Jerk cooking (see above) is a Jamaican culinary signature.
Two uniquely Jamaican foodstuffs are ackee (a starchy fruit related to the cashew, it looks like scrambled eggs when cooked) and what they call pimento (we call it allspice, which is the berry of a specific tree). Curried goat is another very popular and delicious Jamaican specialty.
Other Jamaican flavors you’re familiar with are Pickapeppa Sauce and Myers “Plantation Punch” rum, a critical ingredient in making the Hurricane cocktail. Jamaica’s unique culture and magnificent tropical scenery are, unfortunately, compromised by tremendous poverty, lack of resources, crime, and political inefficacy. (Sound familiar?) Click here for a good collection of Jamaican recipes.
Annals Of Latin American Cooking
Today in 1825, Bolivia became an independent country. It’s named after Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator. I have seen Bolivian restaurants in New York, but we’ve never had one in New Orleans. Lima beans are very popular there. Here’s a page of recipes for distinctive Bolivian dishes.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Fryville, Massachusetts is thirty-six miles west of Boston. It’s a former farming area that has evolved into a collection of large houses on larger pieces of land. A country club is nearby. This was once a Quaker area, as evidenced by the nearby Friends Cemetery. Hills rise here and there, but much of the land is marshy, particularly in Hog Swamp, which separates Fryville from the I-495 beltway around Boston. There are some wineries around here, and one of them is the nearest restaurant: J’s Restaurant At The Winery, in Bolton, three miles north.
Edible Dictionary
allspice, n.–The name strongly suggests that the contents of the small jar on the spice rack is a blend of many different seasonings, most of which have a strongly aromatic or peppery quality. In fact, allspice contains only one ingredient: the dried, small fruits of a medium-size tree that grows in the Caribbean islands. It is especially associated with Jamaica, where it’s widely used in the local cookery. In Jamaica, it’s called pimenta, but it has nothing in common with the roasted red peppers called pimientos in America, where allspice is sometimes called Jamaican pepper. It’s not related to black, white, green, or pink peppercorns, although it’s about the same size as those. Nor is is particularly hot in its flavor. The allspice name came into use during British colonial times, recognizing the fact that allspice does have a flavor that tastes as if it could be a mixture of things like cinnamon, nutmeg, and mild peppers. The American recipe most likely to include allspice is apple pie.
Deft Dining Rule #121
Crispy fish skin is so delicious that you should never miss a chance to eat it.
Food In Science
Alexander Fleming was born today in 1881. He is the man who discovered that the green mold that grows on bread, cheese, and other foods has a property that kills bacteria. It took a while to figure out how to use that effect for disease prevention, but it resulted in penicillin. Which brings up a question: if penicillin kills bacteria, and it’s manufactured by the mold that grows on blue cheese, should we eat as much blue cheese as we can?
Food In Show Biz
This is the birthday, in 1911, of Lucille Ball. Her groundbreaking television show I Love Lucy was such an icon of early television that it probably still is on the air somewhere in the world at all times. Among the most famous episodes are two involving food and wine: the chocolate factory scene and the grape-stomping episode. I Love Lucy was a reworking of a successful radio show Lucy did with the same producer. My Favorite Husband ran along the same plot lines, but with a different (and compared with Desi Arnaz, very normal) husband.
Food In Art
This was the birthday, in 1928, of Pop Artist and glitter pied piper Andy Warhol. Among Warhol’s most memorable paintings were frank, cartoon-like renderings of Campbell Soup cans, among other food items.
Food And Drink Namesakes
Actress Soleil Moon Frye was born today in 1976. She was Punky Brewster on television. . . Adrienne Curry, winner of the first season of America’s Next Top Model and former waitress, was born today in 1982. . . Goose Gossage tied a major league record with his 300th save today in 1988, for the Cubs. . . Speaking of baseball, early Philly Sherry Magee was born today in 1884.
Words To Eat By
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.”–Jay Leno.
Words To Drink By
“The health of the salmon to you: a long life, a full heart and a wet mouth!”–Irish toast.
The Amazing Crawfish.
As the crawfish season ends, we start wondering how many barrels of etouffee have been made. I’ll bet that could be an item for “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!”
Click here for the cartoon.
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