Sweet but Torturous


When I was a kid, my folks had a hefty reprint copy of Prosper Montagne’s Larousse Gastronomique on the bookshelves. I’m sure, given how long it sat there, that it was the first English language edition from 1961. It was pretty wacky for a cookbook. Nominally an encyclopedia of French cuisine, it actually was a massive catalog of the terminally fussy school of cooking that can only be considered baroque. Occasionally the Larousse found itself on the hamper in front of the toilet, doing its rotation (along with Mad magazine paperbacks, field guides to various flora and fauna, and high school poetry readers) in the family bathroom library. 


Larousse wasn’t much for fundamentals. Rather, it assumed you had abundant sous chefs and commis, spent full time in a commercially-equipped kitchen, and could throw down such basics as glace de viands, hollandaise sauce, fish quenelles, veal forcemeat, and puff pastry in your sleep. The recipes ran to long lists of stuffed eggs, and not yer standard devileds, either. More like “Oeufs Farci a la Charles DeGaulle”, reading along the lines of “mash 2 salted anchovies soaked and deboned, 25 grams of mushroom duxelles prepared with butter, leaks and forest fungus, 50 grams of foie gras poached in fino sherry and butter with 20 grams of finely minced black truffle, the yolks of 6 hard-cooked eggs, fleur de sel, freshly cracked Malabar black pepper, freshly prepared quatre epices, and 10 ml of 40 year old artisanal Calvados. Stuff the egg whites with this mixture, place each egg in a previously cleaned and prepared artichoke heart, coast each with freshly prepared veal gelatin, place each artichoke and egg assembly in a nest of deep fried shredded potatoes, place each potato nest on a generous spoonful of previously prepared spinach made with heavy cream and nutmeg, coat the entire piece in veal gelatin, chill. Serve with Montrachet 1929 using thousand franc notes as napkin holders.”


You get the picture. Fun stuff to daydream about, not much for day-to-day assistance in the weeknight-gotta-get-dinner-ready-by-7 kitchen.


A client and good friend in Texas sent me a 5 volume cookbook set called “Modernist Cuisine”. Comes in its own custom-made Plexiglas binder, weighs right around 25 kilos total. Fantastic. You might have heard of these guys, they’re all the rage in high end (VERY high end) cooking circles. About as far as you can get from Alice Waters’ “fresh and simple”, this one starts with routinely cooking sous vide (slow poaching at low temperatures in vacuum packed pouches) to decorative foams made from guar gum and gum Arabic, to odd protein glues that can re-assemble deboned fish, fowl, and mammals. 

The hefty set of Modernist Cuisine.


Some of this stuff, entertaining as it is, is beyond the week night meal category (“Beef Short Ribs”: smoke for 7 hours, vacuum seal and cook sous vide at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 72 hours). However, a hell of a lot of it made to whet your experimental appetite (did I mention that these guys open their flagship restaurant only 6 months a year so they can move to their “research laboratory” for the other 6 months a year to develop new wackiness?). Hay-Smoked Chicken Breast, for example. After brining (which I do NOT recommend under any circumstances for poultry, since it makes them come out wet and slimy), you “lay hay in bottom of pan, cover with more hay, light with blow torch, when hay has burned down, remove chicken skin and serve”. 


It’s gonna take me years to get through playing with these babies. With a little luck, I’ll be working on one chapter or another next time you’re around to have dinner with us!


Thanks for stopping by. New material up at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , I’m still working on getting new stuff up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com . But I’m getting there. They’ll all be updated within a couple days. Thanks again!