A Revolution in Taste was profiled in The New Yorker just the other day!

Pinkard reveals that before the storming of the Bastille a revolution took place at dinner tables all over France, when ornate, liberally spiced medieval styles of cooking were displaced by farm-fresh food prepared so that it “not only tasted, but also looked, like what it was.” Le goût naturel is strikingly relevant to the way we eat today. For instance, the Newtonian physician George Cheyne, who pioneered a new science of dietetics, advocated the reduced consumption of corn-fed poultry and cattle and argued that vegetables be eaten according to the season. Pinkard relishes debunking persistent myths: champagne was not invented by a Benedictine monk named Dom Pérignon but, rather, caught on thanks to the invention and diffusion of the modern wine bottle. Her lively account concludes with a series of meticulously sourced ancien-régime recipes demonstrating the finesse with which French food is now synonymous.

Those ancien-régime recipes are what I’ve been posting here over the past weeks. Part of that finesse lies in their simplicity. Getting it “right” is part ingredients, part practice. With that in mind, I turn to Thanksgiving. Whether or not you “celebrate” the holiday, what better way to spend a day than to cook? My problem: half my guests will be vegetarian. No giant bird for me. So I’m thinking that I’ll cook my holiday fall-back animal: lamb. I haven’t had any since my May trip to Scotland.

Below is a lovely recipe that Pinkard takes from Bonnefons, nice and simple to execute, but done right, looks heavenly.

As for the vegetarians, there’ll be plenty of veggies around, maybe last week’s beet dish.

After the jump: Roasted Rack of Lamb with Bitter Orange Deglazing Sauce

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If you’re like me, you love beets. They’re all over restaurant menus lately, which is great. Though delicious and simply done, I find ordering them underwhelming. After all — they’re really easy to make at home, and they keep for ages. I’ve gotten my wife eating them, and probably do so 2 or 3 times a week. Here, Susan Pinkard, trolling through historical French recipes, has excavated a recipe for a Good Friday dish (totally vegetarian). It’s unlike my usual beet routine, so I’m going to give it a whirl. How could one go wrong with 2 sticks of butter?

BEETS WITH BEURRE BLANC (La Varenne)

Serves 4

In his list of dishes suitable for Good Friday, the strictest fast day of the church year, La Varenne mentions “bette-raves au beurre blanc” (beets in white butter). Sadly, no recipe is included with the listing. However, in an earlier chapter on entremets suitable for fast days, he described a dish of beets sauced with vinegar and fresh butter that suggested the thickened butter sauces that he used for fish. Pairing such a luscious sauce with the earthy beet seems slightly odd nowadays, but it is delicious. Because beets kept well through the winter, they would have been a welcome addition to the Lenten table, when the growing season was just beginning in the region of Paris. The rich, elegant sauce, creamy but balanced by the acidity of the vinegar, would have provided relief from the general austerity of the fast day menu. Note: If you use red beets (as La Varenne recommends), their powerful color will turn the portion of the beurre blanc with which they come into contact into beurre rose!

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Recipe from the Early-Modern French Kitchen

If you’re like me, tonight you’ll be parked in front of your TV with your friends, some take-out and a drink. Once this madness dies down, get back in the kitchen! Now, I love monkfish. If you’ve never tried it, think delicate, and very much like lobster. Personally, I prefer it to lobster. After seeing Susan’s adaptation of this La Varenne preparation, I know how I’ll be cooking it next time I pick some up. -J

MONKFISH WITH WHITE WINE BUTTER SAUCE (LA VARENNE)
Serves 4

This method of poaching fish in white wine, butter, and aromatic seasonings is still a staple of French cooking today. It is usually associated with delicate saltwater fish such as sole or flounder. La Varenne, however, recommended this method for a wide variety of fish, including monkfish and barbel. La Varenne wrote that sauce of this sort should be “bien liée” (well-thickened), or even “fort courte & bien liée” (strongly reduced and well-thickened) to set it apart from the thin butter glazes he used in other recipes. Because he failed to spell out the technique he used to achieve this result, the recipe that follows is my best attempt to approximate the results he described.

The method bears a family resemblance to that of making a modern beurre blanc, but uses somewhat less butter that many modern recipes. See also the following recipe for beets with beurre blanc, also from La Varenne.

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The Surprising Provenance of Sparkling Champagne

Nothing is more French than sparkling champagne, you say?

Well, not exactly. Although the wine itself comes from the province of Champagne, just to the east of Paris, the idea that a glass of champagne is supposed to be bubbly is not itself French in origin. In fact, it’s English.

What? The English invented sparkling champagne? Oh, that can’t be, I hear you saying. Well, first a bit of history.

Yes, since the Middle Ages the wines of Champagne were luxury items, highly regarded for their refreshing tartness and acidity. But these champagnes were still wines, not the bubbly variety we cherish nowadays. Most of those champagnes were made of a mix of grapes in which pinot noir predominated, imparting a pale pink to light red color to the wines (the palest pinks were called “vin gris,” those of slightly deeper hue were known as “oeil de perdrix”—or “eye of the partridge”—while the darkest were a pale garnet color). Thanks to easily navigable water routes down the Marne River to the Seine and beyond the to English Channel, this still champagne was widely distributed, and it commanded handsome prices in the markets of Paris, London, and other cities of northern Europe.

However, in the second half of the 17th century, this rosy picture began to change.

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Hollandaise Sauce Made Easy - from a 17th-Century Kitchen

“I can’t make hollandaise sauce—it’s too hard.”

How many times have you heard that or said it yourself? No single recipe epitomizes everything people love and fear about French cuisine more fully than hollandaise sauce, a luscious emulsion of egg yolks and butter flavored with a little lemon juice. A properly made hollandaise sauce is sophisticated, perfectly balancing acidity and richness. Its satiny texture transforms simple foods such as steamed vegetables and poached fish into voluptuous indulgences.

Hollandaise is heavenly to eat, but tricky to make: heat it a little too much and you end up with a curdled mess; add the butter too quickly and the sauce separates into pools of butterfat and sour liquid. Hollandaise should not be kept warm for extended periods (especially these days when salmonella is so common in eggs) and thus is best prepared right before it is served. Many cooks, including those of us who are otherwise confident about using classical French techniques, have found ourselves frantically trying to reconstitute a broken sauce or making a second batch from scratch while guests kill time drinking too much wine. Other cooks simply rule out hollandaise as a recipe too fussy or too intimidating to try in the first place.

Not to worry. Hollandaise itself descends directly from one of the oldest and most celebrated recipes in the history of French cuisine and, in its original form, it is not nearly as intimidating as cooks now find it. We’ll get to that, but first a bit of history.

After the jump: La Varenne, Sauce Blanche, the potager, and fool-proof hollandaise

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