On Rue Tatin (18 page)

Another time Monsieur Lafertin brought a haunch of very small wild boar. “I had a good week,” he said, then proceeded to tell me exactly how to cook it. I’ve noticed that when I receive a gift of food in France, whether it be a piece of wild animal or a half dozen eggs, it is never given without a litany of directions on how to care for and cook it. I sort of followed his recipe—he likes a lot more cream than we do—and it was delicate and delicious.

His most recent visit—which involved the purchase of yet two more rugs, one of them from Chechnya that is filled with such joy and spirit in both its color and its design that we immediately felt our house and our lives would be less without it—was notable for the discussion about wine. Monsieur Lafertin is, naturally, a connoisseur. “I have many clients in the wine business,” he said. And he went on to cite the names of their wines, which are among the best France has to offer.

Monsieur Lafertin has become a fixture in our lives, and we are somewhat astonished at the good fortune that first brought him our way. We are also somewhat astonished at our willingness to entertain him, for what is more of a cliché than a traveling rug salesman? But when he arrives we enjoy ourselves, knowing all the while that we are participating in one of the oldest sorts of commerce, and that we are being taken for a very entertaining ride.

ROASTED LEG OF WILD BOAR
RÔTI DE CUISSE DE SANGLIER

Wild boar isn’t an everyday meat, though since we’ve lived in Louviers we’ve had a regular supply. Once October dawns and the hunting season begins, Jean-Pierre Dubosc, our friend, farmer, and restaurateur, takes to the woods with his rifle, his camouflage clothing, and his band of
camarades
and spends the day leisurely tracking
sanglier,
usually in his own woods that surround his farm. Whoever gets an animal shares it with the group. If they get two they have more than they can eat and they share the excess with friends, which is where we enter the picture.

The boar here range in woods and fields and feed on acorns and whatever they can steal, and their meat is lean and flavorful. (They are anathema to farmers, which is one reason Jean-Pierre takes delight in hunting them.) If you don’t have a ready supply of wild boar, try this with a pork shoulder or haunch. Serve it with an elegant Burgundy.

One 6-pound/3-kg leg of wild boar

1/4 cup/50g coarse sea salt

1/4 cup/30g coarsely ground black pepper

1 bottle/1 liter hearty red wine

4 dried, imported bay leaves

80 sprigs fresh thyme, rinsed

40 black peppercorns

12 cloves

1 medium carrot, trimmed, peeled, and cut in
1/4-inch/.7cm chunks

1 medium onion, cut in eighths

1/4 cup/60ml best-quality red wine vinegar

TO ROAST THE WILD BOAR:

20 whole cloves

2 to 3 tablespoons/30–45ml olive oil

FOR THE SAUCE:

2 cups/500ml chicken or veal stock

3 tablespoons/45g red currant jelly

Flat-leaf parsley, for garnish

1. Rub the leg of wild boar all over with the salt and the pepper. Place it in a shallow dish, cover it loosely, and refrigerate it for 36 hours.

2. Bring the wine, half of the herbs and the spices, and the vegetables to a boil in a medium-size saucepan over medium-high heat and cook for about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature. Strain and whisk in the vinegar. Discard the herbs, spices, and vegetables.

3. Quickly rinse the salt and pepper from the boar to remove most but not all of it. Pat it dry and place it in a shallow dish. Stir the remaining herbs and spices into the cooled marinade and pour it over the boar. Return it to the refrigerator, loosely covered, and let it marinate for 36 hours, turning it at least four times.

4. Preheat the oven to 450° F/230° C/gas 9.

5. Remove the leg of wild boar from the marinade and pat it dry. Make 20 tiny slits in it all over, and insert a clove into each slit. Transfer the boar to a baking dish, drizzle the oil over it, and pour one-fourth of the marinade over it. Roast in the center of the oven until the boar is golden on the outside, and when you cut into it is a very faint pink, but not in the least red, which will take about 2 hours (about 155 ° F/68° C on a meat thermometer). Check it occasionally and as the marinade cooks away replenish it with the remaining marinade.

6. When the boar is roasted, remove it from the oven, and set it on a platter in a warm spot, loosely covered, to sit for at least 20 minutes so the juices have a chance to retreat back into the meat. To prepare the sauce, heat the pan with the cooking juices in it over medium heat, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Transfer to a medium-size saucepan. Whisk in the stock and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce by about one-fourth, then stir in the red currant jelly. Continue cooking and whisking until the sauce is smooth and satiny, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from the heat.

7. Before slicing the boar remove as many of the cloves as possible. Thinly slice the wild boar and arrange it on a platter. Garnish with flat-leaf parsley. Either pour the sauce over the meat or serve it on the side.

8
TO
10
SERVINGS

MELTING APPLE CUSTARD
FONDANT AUX POMMES VANILLÉES

Our neighbor across the street, Line Roussel, saw me come home from the market one day with a basket full of apples and ran over with this recipe, which she claimed was the best apple dessert she had ever made. Rich and cream-filled, it is now one of my favorites. It is best made with tart baking apples—I use Cox’s Orange Pippins or Boskoop. If you can’t find these varieties, use Empire, any Spy apple, or Jonathan.

3 pounds/1.5kg tart cooking apples, peeled and cored

7 tablespoons/100g unsalted butter

1 cup/200g sugar

6 tablespoons/95ml Calvados, optional

1 whole vanilla bean, split down the middle

3 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

11/4 cups/300ml heavy cream, not ultra-pasteurized

1. Preheat the oven to 425° F/220° C/gas 8.

2. Cut the apples in quarters. Heat the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. When the butter is hot and foamy add the apples and sauté them until they are golden all over, about 10 minutes. Add 1/2 cup (100g) of the sugar and cook until the sugar has caramelized, shaking the pan so the apples and sugar are moving across it and the sugar doesn’t burn. If using the Calvados, pour it into the pan and swirl it around. Then, standing back from the pan so you don’t get burned, light a match over it and flame away the alcohol in the pan, gently shaking and swirling the pan until the flames die down.

3. Transfer the apples to a 6-cup, nonreactive charlotte or soufflé mold.

4. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean. Whisk together the eggs and the egg yolks in a medium-size bowl and then whisk in the vanilla seeds. Whisk in the remaining 1/2 cup (100g) sugar and the cream until the mixture is combined. Pour the mixture over the apples, and bake in the center of the oven until the top is golden and puffed, about 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and present the dessert, then let it cool for about 20 minutes before serving.

4
TO
6
SERVINGS

ELEVEN
               

The Perfect Stove

ALL MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE I’ve cooked on the simplest of gas stoves, except for a brief period when I owned a six-burner professional stove with a “drive in” oven that was so large and inefficient it wouldn’t brown anything. I’ve always preferred simple functionality over aesthetic drama, and I’ve always had a sense of responsibility to my readers not to cook on a stove that was any different from what I imagined they had in their kitchens.

Times have certainly changed. Many American cooks or aspiring cooks have kitchens that would put a simple French restaurant to shame, with gorgeous professional equipment, multiple ovens, acres of space and light. So as we began planning the kitchen at 1 rue Tatin I didn’t feel I needed to worry about having a kitchen that might be more sophisticated than those of my readers. With that concern banished, I started thinking about what I really wanted to cook on. I knew I wanted something gorgeous, but aesthetics were not my first consideration as I started searching. I began by reading the want ads. A national want-ad sheet called the ARGUS offers professional equipment sold at auction and comes out each Thursday. I looked in it to see what was being offered and found everything from
chambres froides
—huge walk-in refrigerators—to croissant-makers and
baguette
shapers. The problem was that all the auctions were in distant cities like Lyon or Nantes and I wasn’t interested in going to all that much trouble. So I searched the want ads closer to home, hoping to find my dream stove.

I began talking with friends—restaurateurs and others who’d done their own stove searches. I called kitchen equipment companies for their catalogues, went to stores that sold kitchen equipment, then eventually to professional equipment showrooms. I soon discovered that my choice was limited to either the run-of-the-mill stove that anyone can buy made by companies like Phillips, Brandt, Rosières, Dietrich, Gaggenau, or Bosch, or ultra-professional hunks of metal destined for restaurants made by Morice, Bonnet, or Ambassade. France wasn’t like the United States with its wealth of semiprofessional stoves. Here it was the little guys or the big guns.

There was LaCornue, of course, which fits in a category all its own. Individually made to order, each one painstakingly constructed by a single artisan of the finest cast iron and enamel, the Rolls-Royce of the stove world, the LaCornue is so gorgeous you want to assemble the family around it and take its portrait. There were two things that held me back from the LaCornue, however, and the first was price. With the cost of labor in France and the time it takes to make and assemble a LaCornue we could have purchased another small house. The second was that I’d cooked on a LaCornue and while I enjoyed it, it wasn’t the sublime experience I would have expected.

Nonetheless, I went to the LaCornue showroom in Paris to flirt with the possibilities. And there they all were, with names like Le Château, Le Petit Château, Le Castelet. They were stunning, sleek, old-world, with elegant brass hardware and beautiful oven doors that closed with a satisfying thud, forming a vacuum that ensured no heat could possibly escape. I discovered that LaCornue was just about to release a whole new line of stoves, intended, I suppose, for people with big dreams, smaller budgets, and limited space. I was excited and took the literature—there wasn’t yet a stove to see. When I got home to study the brochure, however, I realized the baby LaCornues were made for Lilliputians. With their mini-burners and weensy ovens they would never do for me. Putting two pans on the stovetop at once without having one of them tumble to the floor would require a near-impossible feat of engineering. And the prices were still outrageous.

In leafing through professional catalogues, looking in showrooms, and talking with professionals I had decided the most likely brand of stove for me was made by Morice. Sturdy, professional, and well-regarded, they had a certain sleekness to them. Of course I had not seen one up close but in the photographs they looked good. Morice also made a simple four-burner stove with a small oven and I figured two side-by-side would be perfect. The stoves were all gas, too, which is what I wanted. Not only is the cost of electricity in France impossibly high, but I don’t trust electric heat for cooking—it’s just not hot enough.

I went to a professional equipment showroom to look at a Morice. The salesman said he didn’t have the exact model I wanted but he showed me what he had. I was getting used to this. Showrooms in France aren’t like showrooms in the United States. They usually don’t have much in them, and the customer is required to place a great deal of faith in photographs and the salesperson. I’m not sure why but when you want to actually see a model of stove that is in a catalogue, nine times out of ten you can’t. You have to imagine it.

The model the salesman did have to show was huge, an ultra-professional, hulking brute of a thing with stocky, unattractive legs. It didn’t wow me. It didn’t even make me excited, it just made me realize that my aesthetic demands were greater than I’d let on, even to myself. However, a problem worse than looks had presented itself. The all-gas ovens made by Morice had no broilers, and there was no way to have a broiler installed. The reasoning was simple. If a restaurant wants to produce dishes with a nice crusty brown top they simply stick it under the
salamandre
, an unwieldy piece of equipment that heats to approximately the same temperature as the surface of the sun and is very practical when producing food for forty to fifty people at a time.

Disappointed but not daunted, I tucked the Morice back in my file and continued my search, during the course of which I discovered that the era of beautiful home kitchens is arriving in France. Many of the professional stove manufacturers have begun to offer
mi-professionnels
, or semi-professional, stoves for the home, a step up from ordinary stoves but not quite in the league of professional stoves.

I became intrigued with a stove manufactured by a well-known company. From the dimensions in the catalogue there was one that would give me just what I wanted. I measured pots and pans and baking dishes, made three-dimensional drawings of the oven to see what would really fit in it, and calculated the cost, which fit within our budget. Now I just had to go see one. Michael and I took the train to Paris and found ourselves outside a promising-looking equipment store where stoves and refrigerators spilled out onto the sidewalk. We walked in and there was the stove sitting off to one side, looking just as good in real life as it did in the photographs. Graceful, it nonetheless looked well built and had many aesthetically pleasing features like brass knobs and a towel rack, and a lovely brushed metal finish. The closer I got, however, the less sturdy it looked and the brushed metal finish turned out to be paint. That in itself was no problem, I realized, because I knew they offered a plain, stainless steel façade.

I studied the burners; they were well placed with plenty of room for large saucepans. I could easily imagine a
pot au feu
simmering away on one of them. The brass handles were quaint, the brass bar across the front of the stove practical and attractive. The real test was yet to come, however. I opened the oven door. To my dismay it felt lightweight. I closed it and it kind of bounced once before really closing. Not a good sign. Michael did the same. He’d been examining other parts of the stove and I could tell from his look that he wasn’t that impressed. My heart sank. I knew it was not as solid as what I was looking for. It certainly was attractive, however, and the price was decent.

Then I thought about the fact that for all the glories of French cuisine, most meals today cooked in a French home are prepared in kitchens the size of a large bathroom on the simplest of stoves with maybe four, but often just three, burners and one tiny oven. The grandiose French kitchen belongs to a bygone era. It is Americans who have turned the contemporary kitchen into a palace where work and life intermingle. As France and French tastes change—and they are, as we could see with the fledgling selection of
mi-professionnels
stoves already available—choices will improve. For now, however, the selection was still limited.

I was becoming discouraged. I didn’t want to wait for the evolution of the French kitchen. I wanted a stove I could use sometime in the next year. I continued to read the want ads and even went to several used equipment stores. I found what I thought was the stove of my dreams. True, it had six burners not eight and the oven was enormous, but it was painted a cobalt blue and in great shape, and it wasn’t the least bit expensive. The salesman was really pressuring me, telling me he had seven clients who were desperate to have it but since I was
sur place
, on the spot, I could have it. I tried to bargain with him but the price was firm. He had me. I plunked down half the purchase price and arranged a delivery date.

But when the crew came to deliver it they couldn’t fit it through the front door of our house. There they stood, the four
gaillards
, beefy men who had brought it, scratching their heads. Michael arrived home from an errand and looked at the stove, then got out his measuring tape. “We can’t use this stove anyway,” he whispered to me. “It’s way too deep.” At that exact moment the delivery crew had found a solution—they were proceeding to dismantle the stove and take it through the door piece by piece. I discouraged them, but they persisted. I told them they shouldn’t do that, it was too bad but we’d live with our disappointment, that I didn’t want them going to the trouble. I didn’t tell them I’d made a mistake. They insisted in that frustratingly accommodating way people have when you really want them to just give up and give in, and finally I had to just come out and say I didn’t want it.

They looked shocked and there was much head-shaking and a few phone calls back to the
patron
. With great huffing and puffing and more head-shaking they reloaded it onto the truck—it was incredibly awkward and heavy—and went off saying they didn’t think I’d get my money back.

I called the store owner to explain that it was simply too big and that I hadn’t realized it. He was very angry and didn’t want to refund the money. I reminded him that the salesman had pushed me to buy it with the information that he had seven other people standing in line for it, and at that he relented. It took months, but I did get the down payment back.

With that experience I gave up entirely the idea of a used stove. My needs and desires were too specific and wouldn’t be satisfied with just any old stove. So I kept looking. I got on the Internet and found an American company that was selling stoves in Europe, but they were obviously only doing it on paper because their salesman never did call me. I drooled over everything that was so easily available in the States, knowing I could get it shipped over but knowing also that it would cost as much as the stove to do it.

We finally decided we’d go look at a professional equipment place in Rouen that we’d avoided up until now, because everyone we knew said their prices were outrageous. We strolled around the showroom, which had a great selection of
mi-professionnels
in front, each of which we knew intimately, and a good selection of professional stoves in back. We admired a baby LaCornue that was “on sale” for $5,000, and we drooled over a Smeg, which remained the best-designed stove we’d seen anywhere, except for its oven configurations, which were a mystery. It offered two electric ovens—I was ready to capitulate on that—but one oven was enormous, the other so narrow you couldn’t fit a dinner plate into it. What was it for? No one could answer that question.

A salesman came to speak with us as we wandered and when we explained what we wanted he got a thoughtful, faraway look in his eye. He showed us what he had, listened to us talk, then sat us down.

“Écoutez,”
he said. “I know what you want, and I can get it for you.” I didn’t believe him, but he started pulling out catalogues from a company called Cometto, which I’d never heard of.

Showing us photographs of the stoves, which were sturdy and beautiful in a very professional kind of way, he praised the workmanship comparing it with LaCornue but saying, very confidentially of course, that it was a much better stove because it was practical. He went on about all the European safety regulations that this stove met, about how they were made to order, and could thus be made in any configuration we wanted, about how the company had been in business for years but never made stoves for the home. They were just thinking about doing it, and he was sure they could give us what we wanted.

I started to get very excited. We talked more, going over all the stoves in his showroom and catalogues. He agreed with us on our assessments about them all, shaking his head in the most understanding way. “These companies are just beginning the
mi-professionnel
stove,” he said. “I understand they don’t suit your needs and, quite frankly, they aren’t very good.” Then he went through each brand of stove and told us why it had once been good and was no longer, or why it was good for some things but not for others. He was an excellent salesman, the first we had met who had given us good, solid information. He made a living selling equipment to food services and restaurants and we felt that our situation intrigued him and that he really wanted to find us a solution.

He gave us a Cometto catalogue and told us to go home and think about it, and that he would call us in a few days. The prices he had quoted were much more than we had planned to pay, but after all of the looking we’d done we knew they were fair.

We went home and got out our other catalogues and figures and compared them all, spreading everything on the dining room table. I re-drew diagrams of ovens so I could get a real sense of the dimension. The Cometto was looking better and better. We called the salesman before he could call us, to see if we could actually see a stove.

“Oh, I don’t have a model to show you,” he said, then paused. “There might be one you could go see, though it won’t be exactly like what you want. I’ll call the company and see about it.”