The Julia Child Dinner

Along with thousands of others, I'm sure, a group of us decided in the wake of Julie & Julia to do a meal together from Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ours was weeks in the planning, but it all paid off last night with four superb courses, paired wonderfully with wine.

Julia Child's two-volume work was for me, as it was for so many others, the introduction to gourmet cooking. Now, of course, her classic French recipes -- in the wake of nouvelle cuisine, fusion and the plethora of cookbooks built on the foundation she laid -- seem a bit dowdy. But that doesn't mean they don't taste good, and that was certainly the case for this meal.

We started with an hors d'oeuvres of paté de campagne. This consisted of veal, pork shoulder, calf's liver, and fatback put through a meat grinder with a rice panade, mixed with an egg, brandy, salt, pepper, allspice, thyme and minced onions parboiled then softened in lard and turned into a dish lined with strips of fatback. The paté was then placed in a pan of water and baked for about an hour and a half, to an internal temperature of 160 degrees F. Small slices of the paté were served on toasted rondelles of baguette, topped with a sliver of cornichon. The accompanying apperitif was a fabulous 1993 Dom Perignon.

The first seated course then was a gratin de quenelles de poisson. The fish in this case was a delicious halibut fresh from the Fishery, mixed Julia's pȃte à choux (flour, water, butter, salt, eggs, egg white) and lots of heavy cream. The quenelles are poached then gratinéed in a white wine sauce that, yes, has more butter, flour and heavy cream. But they nonetheless came out enchantingly light and I can say, since it wasn't me that cooked them, these could have been the best quenelles I've ever eaten. The wine was a 2008 Sancerre "Les Coutes" from Pascal and Nicolas Reverdy, discussed along with the other wines in my earlier posting on our January wine tasting at Weygandt Wines.

The main course was, what else, boeuf bourguignon. This wonderful beef stew with bacon, pearl onions and mushrooms was lush and tender, the wine making a rich dark sauce and the long cooking making the beef melt in your mouth. It was accompanied with a gratin jurassien, one of Julia's versions of scalloped potatoes, this one with heavy cream (yes!) and grated cheese -- in this instance cave-aged Gruyere from Franche-Comté bought at Cowgirl Creamery. The potatoes were white all-purpose potatoes from the New Morning Farm market, which held their shape nicely. The wine was the 2007 Marsannay Le Clos de Jeu from Domaine Collotte. This may seem rich to you, and indeed it was, and so good on a winter evening.

The cheese course was four cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery -- their own Red Hawk triple cream and a nutty aged Mimolette, a creamy blue Fourme d'Ambert from the Auvergne that almost stole the show, and a tome de Bordeaux goat cheese with a herb crust. Baguettes, by the way, came from Broad Branch, which may have the best baguettes in town. We started our two dessert wines -- a 2007 Maury and a 2006 Banyuls -- with this course, and decided that the red Maury went better with the cheese and the white Banyuls was delightful with the dessert.

Dessert was a Napoleon -- a labor-intensive puff pastry concoction that involved doing the several turns of the pastry the weekend before then spending a day cooking up a crème pátissière, an apricot jam, a white fondant, a chocolate trim, then baking the puff pastry and assembling the Napoleon, not neglecting getting just the right pattern on top with the chocolate stripes. It looked as accomplished as any I've seen in French pastry shops and tasted a good deal fresher.

The meal was a smashing success and a good time was had by all. Thank you, Julia, and bon appetit!

Meat

I've always loved meat and I don't buy the theory that humans are like apes and are naturally suited for a diet of berries and plants. Man has eaten meat since time immemorial. I accept that I need to eat less meat than I had when I was growing up, and one way to do that is to make sure I eat only high-quality meat. In these days, that means grass-fed, free-range, etc. -- everything described by Pollan, who in Omnivore's Dilemma, at least, never told us the end of his experiment with vegetarianism.

The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is very English, but England, as I've said here before, is way ahead of the U.S. in food consciousness. Visiting a butcher in London or the Borough Market is a totally different experience than shopping for meat here. I picked up this book some time ago and finally used a simple recipe from it during the snow week here.

"Pan-to-Oven Pork Chops With Garlic" is really more a technique than a recipe. You heat up an ovenproof dish as you preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Meanwhile, you take all the cloves from a head of garlic, unpeeled, and sautee them in some olive oil. Then you brown the pork chops in the skillet (I did a half-recipe, just two pork chops); salt and pepper them as they brown. You put the chops in the ovenproof dish, use a slotted spoon to remove the garlic gloves and put them on top of the chops, deglaze the skillet with white wine, reducing by half. You pour the wine over the chops and pop them in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. The result is delicious.

I used forest-fed pig pork chops for this recipe from a farm in Virginia that lets its pigs, a cross between a Duroc boar and a Tammworth sow, roam in 75 acres of woodlands. This meat, called Babes in the Woods, is available for pickup in a couple of spots around Washington, including every other Saturday in Silver Spring.

A friend put me on to this site a year ago or so, but my first order failed because they didn't have any of the things I wanted, so I gave up on it. But I tried again in January, ordering a pork loin roast and the two chops. I also wanted a pig's foot for another recipe but that wasn't available because the farmer does not butcher the pigs himself and the butcher keeps the skin and feet.

I picked up my order from the back of a pickup truck, frozen of course, and was astonished to pay $51 for a 2-1/2-lb. roast and the two chops. The meat was about $14 a pound! So here's the thing -- we want our artisanal, locally grown food, but we rebel against it costing more than the supermarket. Can't have it both ways. I won't buy this forest-fed pig every time I want pork -- the Niman Ranch pork at Whole Foods at half the price is an acceptable alternative -- but I will get it again. The meat is lean, though with delicious marbling, very flavorful and tender.

I cooked the other piece in a recipe from Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, "Roast Loin of Pork with Golden Raisins." You pound a paste of 4 garlic cloves, 1 Tbl. salt, 1 Tbl. herbes de provence, 6 sage leaves, 1 tsp. fennel seeds and 1-1/2 tsp. peppercorns in a mortar and smear that over the pork roast an hour before cooking. You preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Rub the bottom and sides of a cazuela with a cut garlic clove, smear some olive oil over the surface, add 3 medium onions sliced, 1/2 tsp. red wine vinegar, 2 Tbl. water, pinches of salt and pepper and put this in the oven for an hour. Raise the temperature to 400 degrees, stir the onions and flatten into a bed and put the roast on top. Return to the oven and roast for about an hour (internal temperature of 140 degrees). Transfer pork to cutting board and rest for 10 minutes, remove onions with slotted spoon, drain off most of the fat from the cazuela, add 1/4 c. vin de noix or 3 Tbl. red wine and 1 Tbl. cognac or port and light (this didn't work for me). Add 3/4 c. golden raisins that have soaked for 1 or 2 hours in 1 c. hot water and 1 Tbl. vin de noix (didn't use), along with the soaking liquid. Add cooked onions and bring to a boil, stirring. Slice the pork and arrange the slices over the onion mixture to serve in the cazuela. This also was fabulous as the garlic-herb paste made a nice flavorful crust for the roast.

I've learned a couple of things from this experience. One is that frozen meat is not bad at all, and since that's the only way it can be sold by vendors at farmers' markets I won't hesitate to buy it for that reason. Second, artisanal farm meat costs a lot more than even Whole Foods meat, but it's probably worth it. I can't afford it every day, but I will try more of the meats -- heritage pork, for instance -- available at the farmers' markets.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

This is a transformative book. I long ago stopped buying meat at Safeway or Giant and now I know why. So much of what Michael Pollan has chronicled in this book has filtered down into the general consciousness. This book and his subsequent works have been bestsellers and his ideas were a big part of the documentary Food Inc.

It's not just that Pollan does some great reporting -- visiting the cattle feed lots and corn fields of modern industrial agriculture, reading a massive amount of literature on food production, and doing a George Plimpton by going to Joel Salatin's Polyface farm and hunting wild pig with a Sicilian emigre -- but he relentlessly analyzes, reasons, reflects. And he does so in a lucid, intelligent prose that is laced with rich humor.

In the key chapter that explains the title of the book, Pollan describes how eating many kinds of food as do omnivores like rats and human increases brain capacity because of the choices that must be made. He contrasts that with animals like the koala bear who eat only one thing, such as eucalyptus leaves. "Eating might be simpler as a thimble-brained monophage, but it's also a lot more precarious, which partly explains why there are so many more rats and humans in the world than koalas. Should a disease or drought strike the eucalyptus trees in your neck of the woods, that's it for you. But the rat and human can live just about anywhere on earth, and when their familiar foods are in short supply, there's always another they can try."

Fungi are apparently neither animal nor vegetable and this whole chapter is hilarious. Pollan describes why people find mushrooms mysterious and somewhat off-putting. "That the fungi are so steeped in death might account for much of their mystery and our mycophobia. They stand on the threshold between the living and the dead, breaking the dead down into food for the living, a process on which no one likes to dwell."

But of course the real meat of the book, so to speak, is Pollan's vivid and damning description of where the meat at McDonald's or Safeway comes from. His patient tracing of industrial food from subsidized corn through the CAFO to the terrible process that produces ground beef. E. coli, obesity, and a host of ills are traced back to bad food.

What struck me is how relatively recent the really bad stuff is. The misguided agricultural subsidies started under Earl Butz, Nixon's Agriculture secretary. I grew up in a different world and much of this pernicious development took place while I was in Europe. European agriculture has been industrialized as well, of course, but never to the same extent and the backlash started much earlier than here. England is a good 10 years ahead of us in food awareness, I know from my friend Sheila Dillon at the BBC Food Programme.

But the awareness is growing here. The Joel Salatin chapters are such an eye opener, as Pollan meticulously describes the genuinely organic loop at Polyface Farm, where it all starts with grass. Polyface is only a couple hours' drive from here, so it's easy to relate to. Not sure to what extent I'll jump on the locavore bandwagon, though I'm already on it to a much greater extent than I was a year ago. We'll see.