Milk (20 page)

But strange to say, or perhaps not so strange, the taste for these voluptuous imaginings never spread far beyond the United States. Vichyssoise and the rest remained far outside mainstream French preferences. The cautious embrace of vichyssoise in
Elizabeth David’s
French Provincial Cooking
seems to depend on toning down the general milk-and-cream content of the original—and no one could possibly question David’s credentials as a cream lover. It strikes me as significant that chilled soups freighted with heavy cream became synonymous with American gourmet cooking at just the time that honest-tasting unhomogenized whole milk with its intrinsically creamy quality was disappearing from the American table. Part of what filled the vacuum was cream, with sometimes good but often regrettable results.

By my lights, the fall from grace that cold cream soups underwent
a few decades back was not wholly unmerited. But vichyssoise as made by
Diat was certainly the best of them, a genuinely pleasant soup that doesn’t deserve the “updates” or “makeovers” or “tweakings” commonly visited on it in recent years. A few points have to be kept in mind if it is to taste like anything:

I don’t see how Diat’s straightforward cold soup can be improved on, unless by a dash of acid such as lemon juice or good wine vinegar. My puréeing device of choice is a hand-turned food mill, though the original uses just a strainer. This amount, which according to Diat ought to serve eight, seems more suitable for ten or twelve, since it makes about 3 quarts. The recipe can easily be halved.

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan, add the leeks and onion, and sauté gently until scarcely browned. Add the potatoes, water or stock, and salt, and cook over medium-low heat until the potatoes are tender, about 35 to 40 minutes. Put the mixture through a food mill set over a bowl. Return to the pan and stir in the milk and light cream. Season to taste and bring to a boil before letting cool to room temperature. Stir in the heavy cream and chill thoroughly. Serve very cold, garnished if you like with minced chives.

T
his dish is one of our last remaining links with “soup” in its oldest sense. The word
originally meant bread, often toasted stale pieces or the hard crust of a loaf, put to frugal use by being soaked (“sopped”) in something wet—water, broth, ale, wine, or milk. The last of these was certainly the most nutritious alternative in many parts of Europe where during bad times some people were lucky to see meat a few times a year. Somehow the “soup” idea was first transferred to the soaking liquid and then reattached to a whole class of liquid dishes minus the sopped bread. Today there are only a few soups that we routinely associate with bread crusts or croutons. And few people would be likely to think of the spoonable breakfast or supper dish called “milk toast”—once routinely fed to nursery-age children and invalids—as having the slightest connection with soup.

Even divorced from its old associations with thrifty medieval foodways, milk toast has its charms. It can be a lesson in the happy affinity of bread and milk; read the milk-toast entry (in which two people revel in a no-pains-spared version at a supremely elegant restaurant) in
M. F. K. Fisher’s
An Alphabet for Gourmets.
Of course, it can also be dreary beyond belief. The difference is all in the caliber of the two star players. The bread must be firm and nicely toasted, the milk fresh and creamy. Detail-minded cooks used to specify “rich milk.” I can’t see making it without unhomogenized whole milk from a good small dairy; if that’s out of the question, mix homogenized whole milk with a dash of cream or a few dashes of half-and-half. (You can indeed splurge by using nothing but cream, for what used to be called “cream toast.”)

Here is the general idea: You will first need some fresh hot toast, from slightly stale bread. (Give coarse, hearty bread a day or two to acquire the right texture; let fine-textured, dainty bread stand overnight.) Allow about as much toast per serving as one greedy person might eat for breakfast. I prefer it sliced rather thick and toasted to a good rich brown on both sides. Butter the hot toast on both sides—this keeps it from getting too soggy too fast—and put it in individual serving bowls, preferably rather deep ones. Some people tear or cut the toast into bite-sized pieces.

Meanwhile, have some “rich milk” slowly warming in a small saucepan, preferably with a large pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper to each cup. There is a slurpy-is-better school that uses a
generous cupful to two substantial slices of toast, and another wing that likes about half that amount, or just enough to be almost absorbed by the toast. When the
milk is too hot to stick a finger into, pour it over the toast in the bowls. Serve at once, while the toast has a little bite to it.

VARIATION:
Serious
milk-toast lovers should investigate a splendidly bold-tasting Balkan counterpart usually called
popara,
enriched with feta cheese. My version is slightly modified from the directions in
Maria Kaneva-Johnson’s
The Melting Pot: Balkan Food and Cookery.
Crumble an ounce or two of feta cheese into a bowl, cover it with creamy whole milk, and let soak for 30 minutes to an hour. Drain off the milk into a saucepan. Meanwhile, take some robust, slightly stale country-style bread, broken into bite-sized pieces, and divide it among four ovenproof serving bowls. Dot the surface with bits of butter and heat the bread in a preheated moderate (300°F) oven for about 20 minutes. Briefly scald the milk, with or without a little sugar. (The proportions, by the way, should be such that the milk will be almost completely absorbed by the bread.) Scatter the drained cheese over the bread in each bowl and pour the hot milk over it. If desired, sprinkle a dash of Hungarian or Turkish paprika over each serving.

M
ilk
sauces thickened with flour did not become common in European cooking until the eighteenth century. After that, however, they took a sharp upturn paralleling the rise of modern dairying and modern flour milling. By the turn of the twentieth century, milk sauces overshadowed other kinds in most middle-class American and English kitchens. When up-to-date cooks of Fannie Farmer’s era thought of “sauce,” milk-based white sauce was what they most often had in mind.

Standard white sauces of a century ago usually involved either a briefly cooked mix of flour and butter with milk added, or a slurry of flour (or starch) and cold milk that thickened in cooking. With small variations like the addition of tomato or egg yolk, they could be rechristened by many other names. Similar mixtures were the base of cream soups. When made very thick, they were the starting point for croquettes.

After the 1970s, white sauces as a class were largely relegated to the culinary Hall of Shame, an understandable fate in view of what most of them had come to taste like by midcentury. But we should
not forget that butter was generally more buttery and milk creamier during the first heyday of white sauces in American kitchens. In other words, they weren’t necessarily as insipid as they would become. And the founding white sauce that gave birth to them wasn’t insipid at all. It was the French béchamel, a sauce that demanded scrupulous, thoughtful attention and judgment. A true béchamel must be cooked a long time with extreme delicacy so that it stays white instead of browning; at the same time, it develops real flavor of its own.

The béchamel version that became classic, after being championed by
Carême in the early nineteenth century, used a rich mixture of cream and an elaborate, painstakingly reduced meat stock as the liquid. A little later, milk came in as a substitute in the version called
sauce béchamel maigre. Maigre,
meaning “lean,” designates dishes that are meatless or otherwise suitable for Fridays, fast days, and Lent, when nothing on the table is supposed to be
grasse—
non-“lean,” or meat-based. (The word means literally “fat,” or “fatty.”) The family of modern American white sauces originated as shortcut versions of béchamel maigre.

Béchamel grasse
has nearly vanished today, even in France, but I would recommend the following version of béchamel maigre to anyone willing to put a little more time and effort than usual into white sauce. Admirers of
Madame E. Saint-Ange’s noble twentieth-century cooking manual will recognize that my version is adapted from hers.

(A parenthetical note: To reconstruct a decent if not super-ambitious béchamel grasse, replace the milk with any preferred combination of stock and cream—nonultrapasteurized, it should go without saying. To get closest to the spirit of the original, use a rich veal stock.)

YIELD:
About 2 cups

The few simple enrichments and aromatics given here make all the difference between a subtly flavored sauce and what critics not unjustly call “library paste.”

Chop the onion, carrot, and celery into medium-fine dice. Coarsely cut up the parsley stems and mushroom trimmings.

Melt half the butter in a small heavy saucepan over low heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery, parsley, and mushroom and optional ham scraps. Cook, stirring, for 8 to 10 minutes, being careful not to let the vegetables brown. Scrape out the sautéed aromatics into a bowl and melt the rest of the butter in the same pan over very gentle heat. Meanwhile, heat the milk just to boiling in another small, heavy saucepan.

Add the flour to the butter and cook over low heat, stirring gently, until the mixture is smooth. It must not brown. Whisk in the hot milk. Return the sautéed aromatics to the pan and add the bay leaf, thyme, salt, pepper, and a discreet grating of nutmeg. Bring the sauce to a boil. Simmer, uncovered, over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. The sauce should become somewhat thicker than heavy cream, without sticking or browning on the bottom.

Pour the sauce through a mesh sieve into another pot or heatproof container, gently pressing with a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible from the cooked vegetables without getting any of the pulp. It is now ready for use. If it has to stand for a while, melt a little more butter over the surface to keep it from forming a skin; reheat very gently, stirring, over a heat-deflector such as a Flame Tamer. (Alternatively, put it in the top of a double boiler and reheat over hot water.)

A
jí
is Caribbean and South American Spanish for “chile peppers,” as well as the name for various sauces or infusions based on them—for instance, this Venezuelan table sauce made with milk, to which I was introduced by the endlessly knowledgeable
Maricel Presilla. Maricel loves it with fish. I could eat it with nearly anything. Like the little experiment with smoked fish or onion on
this page
, it is an object lesson in how milk absorbs and transforms strong, penetrating flavors. (Do not expect the consistency to resemble a chunky salsa; it will be as thin as milk.)

By all means save the puréed chile-herb mixture after straining off the infused milk. It will keep for a few days in the refrigerator, tightly covered, and makes a wonderful addition to anything from cream cheese to cornbread batter. See
Spicy-Milky Peanut Sauce
for another excellent use.

YIELD:
About 3 cups

Stem and seed the chiles; coarsely chop them with the scallions and garlic. Put them in a blender or food processor with the cilantro and about half a cup of the milk; process to a purée, turn off the motor, and add the salt with the rest of the milk. Pour the mixture through a medium-mesh strainer into a bowl, pressing hard to extract every last bit of milk from the puréed aromatics. Store the infused milk in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for up to 4 to 5 days, and serve as a table sauce with any kind of simply cooked meats, fish, or vegetables.