the essentials

a wednesday wander

Hullo to readers old and new!

I’ve been doing more cooking than writing in recent weeks because the qualifiers for the world cup (or, more formally, le Championnat du Monde de Pâté-Croûte) are less than a fortnight away. An update on that adventure is forthcoming, but suffice to say that this week and next, I’m absolutely aswim in pâté-croûte. If you’re a paying subscriber and would like a slice, drop me a line – it’s now about as good as I’m ever going to get it.

Also, the qualifiers are open to the public! They take place in Montreal on the evening of Monday, 16 October. If you’d like to see what goes on, tickets to the gala dinner are available here. You’re basically buying a ticket to an awards dinner, but dinner consists of slices of pâté-croûte from all the candidates… if you come, please let me know, I’d love to say hullo.

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This trip to Singapore was a many-dimensional mess, but we managed to eat some brilliant Malay cooking. Twice, we were serve ketam lemak, blue flower crabs embraced by a coconut milk gravy. The first was at a restaurant called Fiz, where the “Ode to the everyday seafood curry” looked like this:

The second, from a takeout-only home kitchen called Orang Laut (“people of the sea” – an old name for a particular Malay tribe), looked like this – the orange dish top left:

In Thomas Keller and Michael Ruhlman’s Bouchon cookbook there’s this recipe for boeuf bourguignon that I can still repeat virtually from memory:

The primary techniques for Bouchon’s beef bourguignon are those of refinement – removing the impurities at every opportunity… 

One of our practical rules of refinement is to separate all the ingredients. Make a bed of the vegetables in the braising vessel, lay down a sheet of cheesecloth, put the stew meat on top of this, then cover the ingredients with stock. When the meat is done, you can lift out the meat and strain the sauce, discarding the vegetables, which have given all their flavor to the sauce and meat. You can further refine the sauce by straining it again and degreasing it again, then returning the meat to the sauce and allowing it to cool in the braising liquid so that it can reabsorb some of the moisture lost during cooking. This is best done several days before finishing and serving the stew.

To serve, cook the vegetable garnishes perfectly – so that the carrots are vivid orange, the onions bright, and the potatoes are cooked but firm, not mushy – and add them to the stew. And that is how something normally considered rustic or country can be as at home in an elegant restaurant as at a bistro. 

I’m fairly sure that book (and its sister from the French Laundry) were foundational to an entire generation of professional cooks – less through its recipes, and more through the articulation of philosophies like this. If you have memories of these books to share, positive or negative, I’d love to hear them (please hit reply, or leave a comment).

The folks who wrote that passage would have liked the crab curry at Fiz. Nothing impure remained. Each pristine element had been cooked separately so we could muddle them only after they reached our plates. The gravy felt like it had been through a dozen strainers. It was so easy to eat I could have fed it to a baby while wearing a blindfold, and so inviting I might have stolen it from the baby’s mouth. 

The paper bowl from Orang Laut contained, as so many Southeast Asian dishes do, so much inedible. Leaves of makrut lime and pandan, stalks of lemongrass, whole beachfuls of shells, everything that had given up its flavor to the dish. We stalked the bowl like egrets, dipping for fragments, with gravy on our fingers and many-pointed shells shattering in our mouths.

Maybe we shouldn’t diminish the struggle with the crab. Maybe the mess, the work we do at the table, is essential too. That and the awareness of everything that was added to the dish, the bones of all the aromatic bounty lavished upon it, jumbled together for us to dig through – who’s to say all that’s unnecessary, and should be stripped away?