No Menu Tomorrow.
I am away on my annual retreat at Manresa in Convent, Louisiana. Where, amazingly, the food is good enough for me to report on. Saturday at lunch is the best red beans I have all year. Great pork loin Saturday night. Fried catfish and Seafood Gumbo on (of course) Friday. I will walk several miles on the levee, the Mississippi River at my feet. I can go down and touch it. All this is done in silence, which I have no trouble maintaining.
Wednesday, November 16, 2016.
Fall Menu @ Peppermill.
The event last night at the Pontchartrain had me up late last night. I can’t catch up today. In the background is the specter of the Marys, driving two carloads of furnishings from Mary Leigh’s former apartment in Washington. D.C. They are making this run in two days, with today’s run the longer. They will arrive deep into the night. To make sure they actually have an apartment waiting for them, I contact the landlord, who needs a few more forms electronically signed. One of them is for ML’s big dog, it costs $500 for him to take up residence. A couple more checks in that vicinity have to be written and delivered to the apartment’s office. I barely get all that done before radio air time.
I was to have dinner with the Marys after the show, but they are running far too late for that. I haven’t had anything to eat all day, and the tension makes my creativity run low. I stop at the Peppermill, where I dine well but a bit too often.
They’re offering a special autumn menu, which includes the kind of dishes you’d eat when it starts getting cold. The shepherd’s pie is intriguing, but I cook that better than anyone else I know. (Because I can make it my way if I do it myself.) They also had brisket, served with brown gravy and mashed potatoes. I remember a time when I thought that combination was one of the better of suppers. I also had in mind that this might be a boiled beef brisket, such as what Tujague’s, the Bon Ton, and the late Maylie’s made house specialties. This wasn’t that.
I should have gone with my first menu plan. First, an appetizer of oysters Riccobono (like Italian oysters, but with mushrooms in addition to the topping of seasoned bread crumbs, garlic, and a little Parmesan). Then a side salad, and a cup of soup if it sounded good (it did: cream of spinach). Caramel custard–one of the best versions in town, at least as good as Galatoire’s famous versions–for dessert.
By the time the Marys check into apartment and load all the stuff into it, it’s approaching midnight. Mary Ann’s motherly instincts click in, darkly. and I tell her to ignore her perspectives of the moment. Tomorrow, things will look a lot better.
I awaken in the middle of the night listening to an episode of Escape, an old CBS Radio drama from the 1950s. It’s written by no less than sci-fi master Ray Bradbury. In it, Americans land on Mars. They encounter Martians, who look just like us, and who don’t believe it when the Americans state their origins. It turns out that the Earth-dwellers had landed in an insane asylum. The psychiatrists explain that all the Americans’ fantastic stories are just illusions. Then the doctors shoot them all to death.
I will not listen to the radio-drama station late at night. It does nothing for one’s sleep.
Peppermill. Metairie: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266.
Chicken with White Bordelaise
Bordelaise sauce in New Orleans is usually nothing much more than garlic-and-parsley butter. But the original Bordelaise (which means “from Bordeaux”) always includes red wine. This variation created by Chef Dennis Hutley at his now-gone restaurant Le Parvenu is a white wine bordelaise enriched with a little cream. It makes a light entree with a lot of flavor.
Turkey or chicken with a white bordelaise sauce.
4 chicken breasts, skin and bones removed
2 Tbs. clarified margarine (or butter or olive oil)
1 tsp. pureed fresh garlic
1/4 cup dry white wine
3/4 cup heavy cream
1 Tbs. butter
4 medium mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 tsp. butter
1. Season the chicken breasts with salt and pepper.
2. Heat the clarified margarine (or butter or olive oil) in a skillet over medium heat. Sautee the chicken breasts for about eight minutes and remove from the pan.
3. Add the garlic and saute for a few seconds. Add the white wine. Allow most of the wine to boil away, then add the cream. Bring to a light boil, and reduce by about half.
4. In the meantime, in a separate skillet, sautee the mushrooms in the butter until they soften. Add the white wine and cook until most of the liquid is evaporated. Remove from the heat and keep warm.
5. Return the chicken to the pan with the creamy bordelaise sauce, and cook until the chicken is completely done. Place the chicken breasts on the plate and keep warm.
6. Bring the sauce up to a good simmer again. Chip the butter into the sauce and whisk it in. Nap the sauce over the chicken breasts. Top with some of the mushrooms. Serve with vegetables and potatoes, rice, or pasta.
Serves four.
Bread Pudding Fitzmorris @ Arnaud’s
Full disclosure: (and you have every reason to be suspicious): this is named for me. I praised this unusual version of New Orleans’s favorite dessert so many times in so many places that Arnaud’s proprietor Archie Casbarian finally stuck my name on it about fifteen years ago. It’s not my recipe, although I wish I could claim it. The bread is layered, with thick strata of custard running through it, and thinner stripes of cinnamon. The sauce is just sweet and alcoholic enough to work, and the cube they bring you is just slightly too large to finish. I get it every time I go to Arnaud’s, and not for the ego imperative.
However, the rule for namesake dishes at Arnaud’s says that of the dish stops selling, it will be unceremoniously yanked from the menu, no matter how good a friend the namesake may be. But with bread pudding, I think its continuing appearance on Arnaud’s dessert menu is assured.
Arnaud’s. French Quarter: 813 Bienville. 504-523-5433.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
November 17, 2015
Days Until. . .
Thanksgiving–9
Christmas–33
New Year’s–40
Food Calendar
Today is National Baklava Day. Baklava, the delicious, honeyed pastry of nuts and phyllo, is a universal dessert in Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants. But most of us over the age of forty in New Orleans became acquainted with it not in such cafes but at the Central Grocery or the Progress Grocery, where baklava was the classic dessert to have after a muffuletta. (How did we do it?)
Baklava (and phyllo pastry itself) was invented in Turkey about a thousand years ago. In fact, the Penguin Companion to Food points to an Azerbaijani version of baklava made with pasta dough, and says that this may be evidence that baklava predates phyllo. The nuts, syrup, and layering have always been a hallmark of the dessert. However, no source can explain why baklava is always cut into diamond-shaped pieces instead of squares.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Dinner Hill is in the Guadalupe Mountains, about twelve miles north of the Texas-New Mexico border, and less than a mile west of the boundary of Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This is dramatic desert country, superb for hiking. Dinner Hill rises to 6407 feet, and has creeks running away from it in all directions. You will need to pack your food in to have a meal on Dinner Hill. The nearest restaurants are a fifteen-mile hike to Whites City, an old tourist town on the Carlsbad Caverns Highway.
Edible Dictionary
eclair, French, n.–A dessert or breakfast pastry shaped something like a thin hot dog bun. In its traditional form, it’s made with choux pastry dough–the kind from which cream puffs are made. This forms a stiff, smooth exterior while leaving large empty areas inside. The interior is filled with pastry cream, usually flavored with chocolate. A chocolate icing (fondant, in the best examples) covers the top. The eclair became popular in the middle 1800s. A hundred years later, it was well enough known that American doughnut shops began making their version of it, with fried doughnut dough, a filling of bavarian creme, and a chocolate icing.
Deft Dining Rule #751:
It is impossible to cut through a piece of well-made baklava with a knife and fork, so you may as well eat it one layer at a time.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
Frozen phyllo pastry is handy and easy to use, but it dries out so quickly that you must cover it the unused sheets with a nearly airtight wrapper as soon as you remove what you need.
Annals Of Food Marketing
This is the birthday, in 1834, of Nancy Green. You may not have heard of her, but you certainly would know her face. She was the model for the image of Aunt Jemima on millions of boxes of pancake mix. She may have been the first living person whose image was trademarked. Born a slave in Kentucky, Nancy was hired to represent Aunt Jemima in 1890. She appeared at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, making pancakes. Her sparkling personality made her so popular that the company gave her a lifetime contract. She did well with that, and she did good, too, sharing her time, familiar face, and money to antipoverty campaigns until she died in 1923.
Food Inventions
Nicolas Appert, French cook and inventor of the modern process of canning food, was born today in 1749. He was inspired in his effort by Napoleon, who offered a large reward for anyone who could develop a method of preserving food for his armies. It took Appert fourteen years to work it out. It amounted to heating the food in nearly full container and then, while it was still hot, capping it with an airtight seal. He used glass jars with wax for the seals.
Movies To Drink By
Don’t Drink The Water opened on Broadway today in 1966. It was the first play written by Woody Allen. It ran for two years, and upgraded his career from stand-up comic and writer to major theater and movie force.
Annals Of Grocery Stores
Wal-Mart, which up until that time had been an enormous dry-goods store, opened its first Super Center today in 1988 in Oklahoma City. That combined a very large supermarket with the full array of fresh meats, vegetables, a bakery, etc. with the old store. It immediately began a bruising competition with existing supermarkets, forcing many out of business and the rest to make big adjustments to their marketing plans.
The Saints
Today is the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, one of several patron saints of bakers. She is also the patron saint of hoboes and those with toothaches.
Food Namesakes
Jim Brewer, an all-star pitcher in the 1960s and 1970s, was born today in 1937. . . Peter Cook, the British comedian who partnered with Dudley Moore on a show called Beyond The Fringe, caused his first smiles today in 1937. . . Another Brit, Gerald Savory, was born today in 1909. He was a playwright, movie scriptwriter, and producer of television shows in the early days of the medium in this country. . . Actress and model Leslie Bibb was very cute (and a few hours old) today in 1974.
Words To Eat By
“What good is it if I talk in flowers while you’re thinking in pastry?”–Ashleigh Brilliant.
Words To Drink By
“You’re like a beautiful chandelier. I’d like to be around when you get lit up.”–Irving Brecher, American comedy radio and film writer, who died today in 2008.
Crime And Pizza Crust.
The best way around the danger is to throw the pizza instead of rolling it. Makes a better pizza, too.
Click here for the cartoon.