Julia, meet Françoise

Lamb stew, ready for cooking

While Mastering the Art of French Cooking is the great and celebrated masterpiece, the cookbook I really want to do more cooking from is La Cuisine by Françoise Bernard. For a start, her recipes are a lot simpler, and use a lot less butter. So, when I needed a dish I went for Bernard's lamb stew with white beans, haricots aux mouton. Also, I bought the book quite a while ago, and I haven't made a single recipe out of it. A shame to leave such a large book neglected on the shelf.

Then I watched another episode of The French Chef. Julia was working with chicken livers and made timbales. Oh, how I wanted to make those right now (which was quite impossible, as I was watching tv in bed, it was late, and I had no chicken livers in the house). An appetizer of timbales followed by the lamb. A lovely French meal.

I had, by the time I was watching Julia make timbales, already bought my lamb. Everything was ready. My beans were soaking. The lamb recipe contains only a few ingredients (one of which is butter). I did have some reservations about it. It is a stovetop meal, while I prefer to see my bean dishes cook slowly in the oven. There were other items too, but this time I was going to make it exactly as the recipe said. It it were a success, I could tweak it later.

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Queering Cuisine?

Some years back, after watching Julie & Julia, I was disappointed to learn that Julia Child was a bit of a homophobe, though later in life she did moderate her aversion somewhat. This might be thought of as the scorched béchamel of Julia's life. Laura Shapiro, in an excerpt of her biography of Child in Boston Magazine, wrote that

Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in midcentury America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term pedal or pedalo—French slang for a homosexual—draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homovipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.”

Ouch.

And so it's an irony that three gay men were Child's comrades-in-arms in improving American cooking. And she knew all three. The writer John Birdsall has just won a James Beard Award for his essay, "America, Your Food Is So Gay." (Which I saw referenced on Andrew Sullivan's blog, which he saw on Daniel Fromson's blog at the New Yorker.)

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Chicken roasted with tarragon - An adventure in the kitchen

The chicken, browning before the roasting.

Julia Child said that a roast chicken was one of the standards by which a cook or restaruant can be judged. And usually when James brings home a chicken from the farmers' market, I roast it with some herbs. WWJCD? Roast it wth herbs. But I did that last week. And the week before. So this week, I decided to try making her recipe for poulet poêlé à l'estragon, chicken roasted in a cassarole with tarragon.

Further, I decided to make it a little more elaborate by stuffing the chicken. Now the French becomes poulet poêlé à l'estragon farci aux duxelles (I think I got that right). I can turn out a roast chicken with less than half an hour of prep work, followed by ninety minutes or so in the oven (depending on the size of the bird). I knew this would take more time. It's a much more complex dish. I started a little later than I planned and a lot later than I should have. I assumed that the recipe would take about three hours to make. I was in the kitchen for more than five hours.

Then there was the cream cheese. I'm aware that Child had to, on occasion, substitute ingredients where American grocery stores just wouldn't have the item that a market in France would have. How much less French are you going to get than cream cheese? It was only after I made the dish that I realized that she was substituting for either farmer cheese or Neufchatel. I can get those. Some future time. On the other hand, I'll probably divide the remaining cream cheese into appropriate portions for future iterations of this dish and then freeze them.

The reason I wanted to it stuffed was to have an excuse to make duxelles, the chopped mushroom paste. This alone took well over an hour, although none of it was difficult. Chop the mushrooms. Wring them out in a towel (it was amazing how much liquid they exuded) and then sauté them. Easy, but fairly labor-intensive. Not a quick item.

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I take the plunge

Let me cut to the chase. My husband described it as “a most extraordinary meal.” We were mindful, however, that I had gone through an entire stick of butter in the course of the evening (good thing I made 8 servings; just a mere tablespoon per person). It was delicious.
I have finally made Julia Child’s beef bourgingnon recipe. What I actually did in the kitchen was a hybrid of the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and how she did it on the first episode of The French Chef. The main difference is that on The French Chef, she thickened the sauce with a beurre meurniere, instead of just reducing it. Perhaps she championed that method for the book and her co-authors outvoted her. There on WGBH in 1963, she could rule the kitchen and despite the “Ecole des 3 Gourmands” badge, only one gourmand had a say now.

Before shopping, I reviewed the recipies. That’s recipies. The real problem is that in making beef bourgingon, you’re making three dishes (that come together in the end). Two of the dishes can be used as side dishes if you’re not making beef bourgingon. You sauté quartered mushrooms in butter and olive oil, and you braise boiler onions in beef stock. And you make that braised meat dish. The supermarket had chuck tender, which was the cut that Julia Child used. I must learn to write down needed proportions, since when I got to the store, I somehow assumed I would need a pound of mushrooms.

That wasn’t the only incorrect assumption. I also assumed I would spend about two hours in the kitchen before I could walk away. I was there for three hours.

Quartering mushrooms is a snap. I went through that pound so quickly, that I waited until I was done before I saw that I only needed a half pound. The excess mushrooms will get used later. I mean, they’re yummy sautéd mushroom. Tell me you’d be disappointed to find them in your fridge. All of this involved skills that I have used many times over the years. If you’re reading this for a “I had never tried this before” moment, you will be disappointed.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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