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!