Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2 (2 page)

Beef stews, veal chops and steaks, and veal stews take the same type of tour, our object being to show what you can do with reasonably priced meats for family meals as well as for entertaining. On the other hand, the luxurious tenderloin of beef also has its series of transformations. It is roasted whole, baked in a cloak of mushrooms
duxelles
and wine, as well as being, in another recipe, cut into slices and stuffed before roasting. Finally, in an original version of Beef Wellington, it is sliced, stuffed, and baked in a special type of
brioche
crust. An expensive roast of veal undergoes a group of variations, as does a whole roasting chicken, which finally appears with a boned breast and a corseting of pastry.

We hope you will enjoy the vegetable chapter as much as we do, because we have had fun with these recipes. Although there are a few of the classics, like
pommes Anna
and
pommes duchesse
, most of the recipes are originals that we have been working on for a number of years until we felt they were ripe for you and this volume. The chapter starts with broccoli, which we have treated freely
à la française
although it is almost unknown in France; we love its color, its flavor, and its year-round availability. We also love eggplant, not only for its beauty as a vegetable object, but also for its adaptability and versatility; we have broiled it, sautéed it in
persillade
, creamed it, souffléed it, served it hot, cold, stuffed, and wished we had room to do more. A lovely recipe for pumpkin-in-pumpkin introduces a group of unusual zucchini dishes stemming from sautéed chunks of it to an original clutch of grated zucchini treatments. Spinach, chard, and turnips all have representation, as do several versions of sautéed potatoes. There are stuffed onions, stuffed cabbage, stuffed zucchini, and cold stuffed artichoke hearts. Again, most of the vegetable chapter is built on themes and variations, and is designed to engender the flow of your creative juices.

Two entirely new categories are the chapters on breads and pastry doughs and on
charcuterie
. One is not really dining
à la française
without proper French bread to mop up the sauce on one’s plate, without a fine
terrine
or
pâté
to start the meal, without
boudins blancs
for New Year’s Eve or for the turkey stuffing. One needs also a symmetrically baked, beautifully textured sandwich bread for hors d’oeuvre, and
brioches
and croissants for breakfast. These everyday staples in France were once considered luxury items here and, in fact, when you buy them now in gourmet shops they
are
luxuries. But you can make them yourself with pride and pleasure and at a fraction of the cost.

Until our editor, in her gentle but compelling way, suggested that we really owed it to our readers to include a recipe for French bread, we had no plans at all to tackle it. Two years and some 284 pounds of flour later, we had
tried out all the home-style recipes for French bread we could find, we had two professional French textbooks on baking, we had learned many things about yeasts and doughs, yet our best effort, which was a type of peasant sourdough loaf, still had little to do with real French bread. Then we met Professor Calvel of the Ecole Française de Meunerie in Paris, and it was like the sun in all his glory suddenly breaking through the shades of gloom. Fortunately those two years on the wrong road had been useful, because as soon as Professor Calvel started in, we knew what he was talking about, even though every step in the bread-making process was entirely different from anything we had heard of, read of, or seen. His dough was soft and sticky; he let it rise slowly twice, to triple its original volume—the dough must ripen to develop its natural flavor and proper texture. Forming the dough into its long-loaf or round-loaf shapes was a fascinating process, and so logical; slashing the top of the risen loaves before sliding them into the oven was another special procedure.

This was a tremendously exciting day for us, as you can imagine. We now knew we could succeed, because we had seen and felt with our own hands so clearly where we had failed. We rushed home and went to work again while Professor Calvel’s teaching was vividly with us. There remained the problem of working out the formula with American all-purpose bleached flour instead of the softer French unbleached flour. There was also the matter of adapting the home oven by some simple means into a simulated baker’s oven, with a hot surface for the bread to bake on, and some kind of effective steam contraption. Although you can produce a presentable loaf without these two professional oven requirements, you will not get quite the high rise or quite the crust. Paul Child and his usual Yankee ingenuity solved the hot baking surface by lining the oven rack with red quarry tiles, which he heated up with the oven; he created a great burst of steam by placing a pan of water in the bottom of the oven, and dropping a red-hot brick into it. The flour problem solved itself; although our
maître
loathes bleached flours, we found, thank heaven, that the familiar brands of all-purpose bleached flour work remarkably well. We are thus delighted to report that you can make marvelous French bread in your own kitchen with ordinary American ingredients and equipment.

Pastry doughs,
pâte brisée
and
pâte feuilletée
, also go hand in hand with cooking and eating traditions in France. While packaged dough mixes and frozen adaptations can certainly serve in emergencies, it is part of your training as a cook that you be able to turn out at least the dough for a pastry shell as a matter of course. It is actually, we think, when you have made the dough for your first
quiche
or tart, and have been complimented enthusiastically and specifically on the crust, that you begin to feel you are stepping out of the kindergarten and into a more advanced class of cooking. If you have had
troubles or qualms, therefore, about handmade dough, try the recipe
here
; the electric mixer or food processor works quickly and beautifully. And if you have hesitated to tackle the traditional flan ring lined with dough and weighted down with foil and beans, try the
upside-down cake-pan method
, which is an easy way to make pastry shells. Furthermore, the egg formula in the recipe makes a deliciously crisp, tender, buttery crust.

As soon as you feel confident with pie-crust dough, we urge you to take on the larger and more fascinating challenge of
pâte feuilletée
. This is the French puffing dough, which consists of hundreds of very thin layers of flour paste separated by hundreds of layers of butter; it rises in the oven to several times its original height, to form
vol-au-vent
and patty shells, puffed entrées like the cheese tart, as well as the
cookies
, and the
tarts and desserts
. Properly made, it is flakily tender, and a delight to both tongue and palate. Although few French home cooks make puff pastry, since they can buy freshly baked
feuilletées
at their local
pâtisseries
, it is something that you, as a cook, will find tremendously useful all the rest of your kitchen life. We have spent years on puff pastry ourselves, wanting to make sure that the recipe in this book would be as good with American flour as it is with French flour—the trouble with American all-purpose flour being that it has a higher gluten content than French flour, and that makes differences all along the line. We worked out combinations of unbleached pastry flour and all-purpose flour, we have tried instant-blending flour, and we have finally settled on a mixture of regular all-purpose flour and cake flour as being the most sensible. Although it takes a little longer to work with, it produces a beautifully tender, high-rising dough that is even more impressive, we think, than its French counterpart. The illustrated recipe for
simple puff pastry
is easy to follow, and we suggest your first creation be a handsome puff pastry tart, the
cheese
, or
the jam
. Both of them are quick to form, yet give a very handsome effect to start you off in a whirl of success.

Our forefathers did the kind of cooking in
Chapter V
,
Charcuterie
, if they lived on a farm and made their own sausages and cured their own pork. Few French householders, again, attempt any of this today, because they can buy all kinds of sausages
chez le charcutier
, as well as salted pork, preserved goose, sausage in
brioche
, molds of parslied ham, fresh liver
pâté, terrines
, and all the other marvelous concoctions that embellish French gastronomical life. The particularly wonderful taste of these creations is derived from the fact that they are freshly made, on the premises. We, who want to partake of the same pleasures, must make our own. And for anyone who enjoys cooking, producing
charcuterie
, like making bread and pastry, is a deeply satisfying occupation. You will be amazed, if you have never tried your own before, how rewarding
just a homemade sausage patty can be; it is only freshly ground pork mixed with salt and spices, but it tastes the way one dreams sausage meat should taste. The large
saucissons à cuire
, will make you think of France, as will the
jambon persillé
. When you want a real
cassoulet
, you can make the real
confit d’oie
, and have enough preserved goose left in the crock for many more meals. The difficult Christmas present or the gifts to hostesses need bother you no more—bring along one of your own
pâtés en croûte
.

The final chapter contains favorite desserts and cakes that we have been testing out on our guinea pigs—our students and families—for a number of years. The frozen desserts, so useful for all of us who need attractive finales that we may complete well in advance, are made without benefit of the ice-cream freezer; they vary in complexity from quickly made fruit sherbets to an elegant chocolate mousse dressed in meringues, and a flaming French baked Alaska,
la surprise du Vésuve
. We also give you a group of original fruit desserts, custards, and a liqueur-soaked French shortcake, a number of handsome desserts made with puff pastry, and a selection of
petits fours
. Among the eight cakes at the end of the chapter are a fine French honey bread,
pain d’épices
, a walnut cake, a beautiful meringue-nut layer cake called variously
Le Succès, Le Progrès
, or
La Dacquoise
, and two chocolate cakes. It will be for you to judge whether we have achieved the ultimate in chocolate with
La Charlotte Africaine
or with
Le Glorieux
, or whether that perennial cake winner made of chocolate and almonds,
La Reine de Saba
, in Volume I, still retains the title.

In all of our recipes, and especially in those for desserts and cakes, we have taken full advantage of modern mechanical aids wherever we have found them effective. While Volume I reflects France in the 1950’s and the old traditions of French cooking, Volume II, like France herself, has stepped into contemporary life. We must admit, in Volume I, to a rather holy and Victorian feeling about the virtues of sweat and elbow grease—that only paths of thorns lead to glory,
il faut souffrir pour être belle
and all that. However, we are teachers; we want people to learn. And if we make it hard to cook through snobbish insistence on always beating egg whites by hand in a copper bowl, for instance, or always mixing pastries by hand (
il faut mettre la main dans la pâte
), when it is the hot hand that makes all the trouble, we know we have already lost a great part of our audience. We have therefore developed our own methods for
machine-beaten egg whites
, for
machine-made cakes
, and there are directions for doing all the pastries and doughs by machine as well as by hand. Because machines make cooking so much easier, and because recipes that take tedious effort by hand—like
quenelles
, mousses, and meringues—can be done in minutes by machine, we
urge you to provide yourself with the best you can afford, and refer you to the
illustrated suggestions
.

We have so far said hardly a word about the illustrations, which are, to our mind, the glory of Volume II. We can speak of them without a hint of modesty because they are the result of a remarkable feat of teamwork between Paul Child, our action photographer, and Sidonie Coryn, our illustrator. Because of their tireless expertise we have been able to picture step-by-step operations that to our knowledge have never been adequately illustrated before; we now feel confident that this combined visual and verbal presentation makes absolutely clear the most complicated sounding process. For French bread alone there are 34 drawings, showing the procedure from the start: mixing the dough, kneading it, how it looks when risen, how to deflate it, and the intricacies of forming the dough into various loaf shapes. Tenderloin of beef is pictured in such detail that you can buy a whole one and trim it yourself. With an illustrated guide before you, you can bone out the breast of a chicken, trim and tie a saddle of lamb, or cut up a lobster. Puff pastry and croissants are illustrated every step of the way, as are
brioches
and
bouchées
. You can see how to form upside-down pastry shells, how to stuff a whole cabbage leaf by leaf, and if you have never done or even seen a
pâté en croûte
in your life, you can be assured of success, because you have 12 drawings to show you every necessary move.

Without the team of Child and Coryn such coverage would have been impossible. Paul Child, ready at a moment’s notice, was there to make careful, detailed, perfect photographs of any step of any recipe at any time during the day or night. Occasionally, when on-the-spot drawings served better than photographs, he contributed his talents to such techniques as the art of cutting up lobsters and crabs, carving a saddle of lamb, or depicting the bone structure of a breast of veal, and he was happy to draw the tricky arrangement of an eggplant dish that our words alone had confused. The major load of illustrating fell, of course, to Sidonie Coryn—her 458 drawings for this book are an incredible achievement. From grapefruit knives and cake pans to the step-by-step illustrations for a
Pithiviers
and
Dacquoise
, from electric mixers and garlic presses to the intricacies of a
poularde en soutien-gorge
, she has skillfully and stylishly drawn the essence of Paul Child’s photographs, eliminating nonessentials and putting the right emphasis on the points of crucial interest.