Bookish Love

Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother's Kitchen

Opening:

My mother... asked me if I thought I was a good cook.

"Yeah," I said. "Not bad."

"Do you always leave the book open?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then you can't cook."

Matt McAllester's frequently delusional mother found an anchor in cooking (um, hello?). Elizabeth David, her favorite food writer, looms in these pages: "Study her if you want to know how to cook" his mother repeatedly chides. And McAllester, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, finally channels David, among others, as a way of working out his crazed, drinking mother's life and early death. Like Nigel Slater's riotous Toast, it is the thorny family in food, only less dense; in more human time.

I love that Elizabeth David's brilliance is a hub of Bittersweet. Some of the best chapters close with food she's inspired. Stark childhood pastiches and achy adult traumas end with cathartic recipes. He offers the most concise, approachable cassoulet you're likely to find, drop scones that sweetly mitigate childhood sorrow. His wife accuses him of cooking his way out of the stress of their failing pregnancies, and she's right - also out of broken youth; a mother's alienating madness. There is no end here to the restorative power of food.

It is an odd, sideways memoir/elegy/prayer of a book, as simple and knotty as Elizabeth David's superb three ingredient Oeufs en Cocotte à la Crème which McAllester finally grasps well enough to manage, book closed.

Last Summer Sunday Sweetness

For the last chilly Sunday of Summer our girls nabbed much of the crowd leaving Golden Gate Park's Comedy Day with their homemade lemonade stand. It was, clearly, quite the place to be.

Lemon Verbena Lemonade

15 lemons, fine zest (2 teaspoons) and juice (2 cups)

1 1/2 cup fine sugar, or to taste

2 good stems Lemon Verbena, for about 15 plucked leaves, rinsed

3 to 4 cups cold water

ice

Mix the lemon, zest, sugar and hand-crushed verbena leaves. Let sit for about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved and the verbena has imparted its flavor. Add water to taste and pour over ice.

Our Woodward's Garden Prix Fixe, through September...

PRIX FIXE $29 — 3 COURSES

Available Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays through September...

MIXED LETTUCES, TOASTED ALMONDS,

FRENCH BREAKFAST RADISHES,

TALEGGIO CROUTON, AND BANYULS SHALLOT VINAIGRETTE

•

RAGOUT OF SHELL BEANS, CIPOLLINIS AND CHANTERELLES

WITH GRILLED MARIN SUN FARMS’ FLAT IRON STEAK AND PIMENTON BUTTER

Recipe

•

PLUM COBBLER WITH LEMON VERBENA CREAM

Note: As we try to keep our ingredients fresh

and local, our menu may change.

woodward's garden

1700 Mission Street • San Francisco

woodwardsgarden.com

415.621.7122

ON THE MENU: Grilled Flat Iron Steak, Ragout of Fresh Shell Beans, Cipollinis and Chanterelles with Pimenton Butter

Oh the late Summer booty: fresh shell beans, those wild Italian onions, cipollinis, and chanterelles are spontaneously everywhere. The grow together/go together axiom holds mighty tight here. This dish is a no-brainer as far as mutual affinities go.

Flat Iron (ours grass-fed from sublime Marin Sun Farms) is a rediscovered shoulder/muscle cut that is made more tender in the butchering. The steak is cut around a center fibrous tissue. It is, according to Saveur, the second tenderest cut after the tenderloin.

Still, to me this is no filet. Flat Iron has texture and nap, which I admire in a steak. Manic Kobe worship has always eluded me... why would you want your steak to be foie gras? What's wrong with good old meatiness? And isn't real texture back anyway with our Pollan-inspired grass-fed revolution? This fleshy Flat Iron is toothsome, and because its from muscle, also has serious steaky flavor. Cut across the grain it is racy-succulent.

My adored Spanish Pimenton (smoked paprika) gives breadth to the dainty new beans and sweet, squat onions, and boosts the smoke of the apricoty chanterelles and the charred meat. Think earthy mushroom squeak/honey-onioned goodness.

Ragout of Fresh Shell Beans, Cipollinis and Chanterelles

with Grilled Flat Iron and Pimenton Butter (serves 4)

Pimenton Butter

4 ounces of butter, 1 stick, softened

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1/4 cup chopped chives

1/4 cup chopped tarragon or parsley

3 anchovies, mashed

1 shallot, minced

1 lemon, zest and juice

Sea salt and pepper to taste

Cream together butter, paprika, herbs, anchovies and shallot. Add the lemon zest and juice. Taste and season if necessary. The butter should be pungent. Shape into a log in a piece of plastic wrap or parchment paper. Twist the ends to tighten and refrigerate until firm.

Shell Bean, Cipollini and Chanterelle Ragout

1 pound cipollini onions

Olive oil

Sea salt and freshly gound black pepper

2 pounds shell beans, for about 2 cups shelled, Cranberry, Flageolet,

Cannellini...

1 bunch of thyme

1 bay leaf

1 chilie de Arbol, snapped in half widthwise and seeded

1/2 pound chanterelle mushrooms, cut into 1 inch wedges

1 large garlic clove, minced

3/4 cup chicken stock, preferably home made

2 tablespoons butter

Preheat oven to 375. Fill a medium saucepan with water and bring to the boil. Add the cipollinis to blanch for about 1 minute. Drain, cool and peel. Toss with 2 tablespoons olive oil, a good pinch of salt and pepper and spread out on a sheetpan. Bake about 45 minutes or until golden and tender. Check and shake the pan every so often. Set aside.

Place the shelled beans In a medium sauce pan and cover with 2 inches of water. Add 6 sprigs of thyme, the bay leaf and the chilie. Bring to the boil then simmer until tender, about 30 minutes. Drain. Pull out herbs and chili. Toss the warm beans with 2 tablespoons olive oil, a pinch of salt and pepper. Set aside.

Clean the chanterelles with a soft cloth/napkin. Cut into even sized, 1-inch wedges. Leave them whole if they are small. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a medium sauté pan until very hot. Add the chanterelles and cook over medium heat for about 7 minutes, stirring every so often, until tender and golden. Add the garlic, a teaspoon of picked thyme, a pinch of salt and pepper and sauté for another minute. Add the cipollinis, the shell beans and the stock. Cook for about 5 more minutes until creamy and sauce consistency. Swirl in butter and taste. Season again if necessary. Set aside.

To Assemble

4 flatiron steaks, about 5 ounces each

Olive oil

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

The ragout

The pimenton butter

1 cup arugula, or other fresh, spicy green like watercress

Fire up the grill. When hot, brush the steaks with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Grill to desired doneness, about 4 minutes per side for medium-rare. Remove and set on a plate, lightly covered with foil. While the steaks are resting reheat the ragout if necessary. Place about a half-cup of ragout into the center of a warmed serving plate or bowl. Top with a steak and any accumulated steak jus, a round of pimenton butter, and a little handful of of fresh greens.

How Gay is Jill and Kevin's Wedding?

Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body - Martha Graham

I would believe only in a god who knows how to dance - Nietzsche

Well, since I’m totally hooked I might as well try to figure the thing out. I’ve watched the Jill & Kevin Wedding video way too many times; woke my sweetie the morning I found it on Twitter - where insanities like this blossom - with coffee and the wireless announcing this was the only way I would ever consider marriage. I’ve thrilled to it almost daily now (it's an unfailingly intoxicating wake-up). So how does its addictive enchantment work?

The video is both utterly homemade and a perfectly wrought tiny film. A few opening seconds catch all the mise-en-scène of a small traditional wedding: the presider's instructive, sleep-inducing "voice over"; the milling corsaged guys officiating at the back of the church in ill-fitting, desert-hued suits; the eerie green sparkle dust of stain-glass filtered light; the restless hum of midwesternly modest pew dwellers.

.

The first hint that sedition's in the air comes in the three nasal synthesized blasts (from Chris Brown's Forever) that replace somber organ lines. And for a second the chunky guys who begin throwing programs and prancing could be a tired white-guys-do-hip-hop riff, yet instantly becomes something more interesting and wonderful. The poker-faced John Goodman stiffly hustling down the isle has joyous treason in his awkward limbs, can’t keep the mischief from his slow-swirling body. Cheeky day-glow bridesmaids swing sabers of boldly florescent mums in tight time into glorious vanishing shimmies. Even the earnest minister can't finally keep herself from swaying. And so it goes. Everybody "walks" the isle, each voguing change in their own fashion.

And it becomes instantly clear why dance is so tightly regulated within the church: for the irrepressible carnal joy of it, for its potential pentecostal subversiveness. Even relatively newfangled "Praise Dance" is suspect. Because the body doesn’t lie. It is a helpless conductor of other realities, other possibilities. And this danced wedding exudes pure transformation and joy. The mood is ultra gay, and indeed gayness itself is everywhere in this straight union... who can ignore that thromping beat, those hot pink gerbers, the Bob Fosse arm flourishes, those aviator glasses? The celebration gets its dazzling life (23 million YouTube hits and counting) from rubbing against those church walls, from pushing their boundaries. It wouldn't have nearly the same spark were it simply held on a beach.

And is there just something thrillingly transgressive about movement and music in unlikely places? The Belgium Train Station flash mob video is also compulsively watchable and euphoric. These performances offer different potential visions for previously controlled space; a new choreography for what has always been so tightly choreographed (whether for religious propriety or the sake of timetables). They are all about liberation. Just look at the people watching them. They can't stop grinning, can't keep their jumpy bodies still.

So is it too crazy to imagine, in the early days of a new forward-thinking leader, when states are beginning to fall domino-style to the side of marriage equality, that this one small renegade wedding speaks to the sudden very tangible possibility that what has been convention might in fact be pliant enough to contain all of our wild mysteries, all of our sacred loves?

Or have I, reader, skipped straight into a very deep end here? Do I pile far too many words onto one teensy viral video? I don’t know... my often reticent girlfriend is rocking beside me tear-streaked and hooting, our 8-year-old is squealing that she and her friends want to dance the isle at our wedding. And have you ever witnessed such an exuberant one? To paraphrase Mr. Brown's now infamous song: It’s like we’ve waited our whole lives.

Knopf Julia Contest!

What a fab, so very French competition! And this coming from someone who avidly avoids shamelessly promotional cooking events that usually involve having to incorporate some random, corporate "ingredient" into an original dish. But this contest was just right. It was all about passion. It coaxed us to spell-out our Julia love boldly by digging into her Mastering the Art trove to feed friends & family. What's more in Julia style?

I loved perusing the entries of my fellow mad-cappers. How totally kick was the multi- media Harlem bash post with it's video/text messaging/playlist/snappy invite/couture drama? Or Julia's Chicken Meunière carried out in onion-defying goggles? Or the earthy cool garden-to-table Oregon Gorge to-do? My wine-country soirée was rather prim by comparison. I really should have documented the post-dinner pool party or at least my Terrier's latent Frenchie tendencies. But honorable mention? Lovely. The adventure was brilliant. Thanks Knopf for sparking it and spreading the love.

The Julia Dinner

Photos by Julie Dodge

So after the early morning J & J screening last Sunday (see recent Julia-O-Rama post), we raced off to a dreamy Sebastopol spread, Olive Oaks (we actually have friends, Edita & Martino, with a named property!), raw poulet, haricot & pâte brisée in hand - to expliquez and document Julia Child’s cusine bourgeoise from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

To be honest, I haven’t cracked Mastering the Art for years, which is not to say I haven’t been using it constantly. Digging into it again for this fête, I realize how deeply I’ve internalized the tome: the teensy batch browning; the slow fat-loved sauces; the crucial flavor-punking deglaze; the tender fold into halcyon floss; the imperative right-hand-man of righteous stock.

My European cooking school (read: French, as it is undeniably they who codified the whole shebang into technique and decree), traded in pedagogies like alarmingly thick early morning hand-outs of huge family trees titled “Mother Sauce” that branched into all sorts of tangled, intimidating progeny: Sauce Soubise, Creme Fleurette & Ravigote... Child always brought this kind of gibberish (n’a pas de sens) all home to me in intelligible, lucid spades.

Choosing the menu was a surprising snap. The Californian in me - compulsively bound by season - landed instantly on Poulet Poele a l'Estragon (Casserole-Roasted Chicken with Tarragon). I mean Summer’s just so tarragon, which is itself just so damned French.

And with nothing but August’s green beans galore, the Haricots Mange-Tout à l'étuvée (Wax Beans Braised with Onions, Lettuce and Cream), stepped right up to preen beside the herby chicken.

And how could I resist Quiche à La Tomate, Niçoise (Fresh Tomato Quiche with Anchovies and Olives)? I mean if the JC oeuvre doesn’t scream savory custard tart, what on earth does? Besides, the 80's are so here again, and tomatoes sont arrivés.

Also, when Ms. Child pronounces a chocolaty something an “all time favorite,” you’re a fool if you don’t seriously investigate... hence, la Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheeba/Chocolate-Almond cake).

My co-conspirator Winnie throws in rogue Gougères and a Pommes Anna, crisply fleshed-out in duck fat, for good measure.

The dinner is quintessentially française: fearlessly fat and flavorful. The tart, an egg-tricked pissaladière in an butter-fused crust, is an old fashioned testament to how much tomatoes do love their beurre. The chicken is both rubbed in softened butter and browned to golden in the stuff. Tarragon is trussed within and laid beside the bird to long-stew in its crazy juices, then added by fresh handfuls to finish the glorious affair. Summer beans, onions and lettuce are layered raw into a gratin with herbs and stock to braise before anointed with thick cream. Ground almonds jacked with almond extract are tenderly wound in souffléd chocolate.

The final plate is a trippy shifting tableau: a blackened potato island surrounded by bronze poulet jus swimming up against thick jade haricot cream. The one European at the table, Martino, giddily notes - while cracking off another wedge of pomme - that the potato is so fat-full it practically fends off the chicken butter & creamy beans, which, I notice, does not slow him down in the least. Could anything on earth have delighted Julia more?