He may have been wrong about whether anyone in the United States would eat Robuchon’s potatoes, but he was definitely right about how fattening they are. Here’s Robuchon’s original recipe:
1 kg (NOTE FROM ME: LET’S JUST SAY 2 POUNDS) la ratte potatoes
454 grams (ANOTHER NOTE FROM ME: LET’S CALL IT 1 POUND [2 STICKS]) unsalted butter, cold, cut into small cubes
¼ cup milk
Salt to taste
THREE THINGS TO NOTE:
1. There are only four ingredients. I am a firm believer in the cooking credo that the fewer ingredients there are in a dish, the better that dish tastes. Potatoes, milk, butter, and salt. What could be bad?
2. Good luck finding la ratte potatoes. Félicitations à vous if you do. If you don’t, it’s fine to use Yukon Golds or yellow fingerlings. I used yellow fingerlings. I thought it would be a nightmare to peel the little suckers but not at all—once they were boiled, the skins came off as easily as anything Lena Dunham ever wore on Girls.
3. Yes, that proportion above is correct: two pounds of potatoes to one pound of butter. It seems like a lot just reading it. Wait until you actually cook it. Mixing that much butter in with so few potatoes makes the ratio feel as if it’s ten pounds of butter to one pound of taters. It made my head spin even before I tasted it.
THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR COOKING ARE EQUALLY SIMPLE:
—Put the unpeeled potatoes in a pot and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer and cook for 35 to 40 minutes or until tender. Drain and peel the potatoes. Transfer the potatoes to a bowl and let them cool slightly.
—Turn the potatoes through a food mill on the finest setting, squishing them back into the cooking pot (AUTHOR’S NOTE: “SQUISHING” IS MY WORD. IT IS AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF THE PROCESS). It turns out that a food mill is another piece of cooking equipment I didn’t have. So I found something else on my shelves that looked like it would work. I had no idea what it was or why I had it, although eventually it came to me: I worked with a wonderful cook, Amy Thielen, on a cooking show called Heartland Table. She used this thing called a ricer and, while filming, I watched her squish something through it and immediately decided I had to have one. So, lurking behind the cameraman and the sound guy, I surreptitiously used my phone to go online and ordered one on the spot. Proof that there is a purpose to everything that happens in life.
—Heat the potatoes over medium heat, stirring until heated through. Add the butter in five additions, allowing each addition to be almost melted before adding the next until it all has been incorporated.
—Stir in the warm milk until combined (AUTHOR’S NOTE: THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE RECIPE SAYS THE MILK SHOULD BE WARM. BY THE TIME I GOT TO THIS STAGE, BECAUSE, OF COURSE, I HADN’T CAREFULLY READ THE RECIPE ALL THE WAY THROUGH BEFORE I PLUNGED INTO THE COOKING, I JUST POURED IT IN COLD. I PAID FOR THIS MISTAKE AT THE LUNCH TABLE!). Using a whisk, vigorously stir potatoes until fluffy. Season with salt.
—Smooth the top of the potatoes with the back of a spoon or a spatula.
Makes 5½ cups.
The mysterious thing called a ricer. It worked perfectly to squish up the mashed potatoes.
* * *
WHEN I MADE these irresistible potatoes for my mom, she didn’t care one iota how fattening they were, since at the time she weighed a hundred pounds tops. She did, however, care about a few other things when I presented her with my interpretation of the food she’d thought about rapturously for thirty years.
My mother forgets nothing when it comes to food: not taste, not texture, not appearance. So I was more anxious than usual when I scooped a large portion of Robuchon’s potatoes onto her plate. I had smoothed the top of the potatoes in the serving bowl, as instructed, so I was pretty sure I had the appearance down pat. And, before bringing the finished dish out of my kitchen, I’d slipped a spoonful into my mouth and was positive I’d nailed it. No question in my mind: I was ready to start work on the mashed potato line at the best restaurant in Paris.
I waited confidently for my mom’s reaction as she carefully took a forkful with her left hand and ate slowly and deliberately. My confidence faded while she sat in silence. And kept sitting in silence. And then kept sitting in silence. I assumed that either full aphasia had kicked in or she hated my version of her beloved potatoes. It was one of the few times I was rooting for aphasia. Fantasies about that Paris potato line job faded in the silence.
Finally, I timidly asked, “So…?”
With no hint of aphasia, she answered, “I’m thinking.”
She thought for another minute or two until I couldn’t take it anymore and blurted out, in a way that no professional chef would ever consider, “Come on already! Do you hate it? Is it any good at all? I thought it was fantastic! What do you think?”
Here’s what she thought: the potatoes were too lumpy. She was right, unfortunately. Robuchon’s version, according to my mother and every other person who is lucky enough to have ever tasted the original, had no lumps. Not one single lump. Mine were smooth enough for me but not for my mother. Remember those instructions in the recipe that said, “Vigorously stir until fluffy”? Well, I stirred vigorously until I thought my shoulder was going to fall off, at which point I decided, “Screw it, this looks good enough.” And that cold versus warm milk error? Turns out the warm milk would have dissipated some of the annoying lumps. Those damn potatoes did look good. But they weren’t really fluffy, just reasonably smooth. There weren’t many lumps. And they were small, tiny to be precise. But they were lumps.
Next up on my mom’s assessment: the potatoes didn’t taste the same as the potatoes that Robuchon had used. She was polite when she made that comment but she could taste the slight difference from the French potatoes. I didn’t tell her that I’d subbed in fingerlings for la ratte, but she knew.
Her final comment: the butter hadn’t been incorporated thoroughly enough. She was right on this count, too. As soon as she said it, yes indeed, I was suddenly and painfully aware of all the tiny lines of butter flowing through the bowl. I hadn’t even noticed them in the kitchen, but now each stream of butter looked to be the size of the Mississippi.
Deflated, I pouted a bit and then said, “So not good at all?”
My mom looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Delicious!”
I said, “Really?”
She smiled an angelic smile, and I was certain she was reveling in a flood of lovely memories of Paris, my dad, and the perfect meal. After a few moments, she said, “Delicious!” again, before the aphasia kicked back in. She really struggled with the next sentence, which took a while to come out. But come out it did:
“But … they’re … not … Robuchon.”
The truth is not always kind. But in the food world, as in the real world, it is always better to know than not to know.
YOTAM OTTOLENGHI’S QUAIL WITH RHUBARB SAUCE
My mother’s career in food didn’t just change my palate and my personal life. It had a huge effect on my career.
A few years after starting out in the publishing business, I became an editor at Random House (now part of the enormous Penguin Random House complex). One of the first books I bought in my role there was Wolfgang Puck’s first cookbook. I didn’t edit it because I didn’t know nearly enough to critique and fix his recipes; once I acquired it, the book was taken over by legendary editor Jason Epstein, who was not just a better editor than I was, he was a better cook. As my career and skills with a pencil (and later e-editing on my computer) progressed, I started to get more comfortable delving into the minds and intents of various chefs and more comfortable trying to tell them how to make their books better. I have now edited and published such chefs and cooks as Nancy Silverton, Suzanne Goin, Kenny Shopsin, and Lidia Bastianich. None of this would have ever happened without my mother’s immersion in the food world.
Eventually, I was doing more in the food world than just editing cookbooks; I began producing food shows under the b
anner of Random House Studio, a company I started in order to take full TV and film advantage of the corporation’s extraordinary access to talent. Of all the shows and films I’ve been involved with, by far the most fun experience was producing the show Heartland Table for the Food Network. The show sprang from a cookbook by Amy Thielen called The New Midwestern Table. I didn’t have anything to do with editing or publishing the book, but I did coproduce the show with Lidia and her daughter Tanya’s production company. The premise was closely based on Amy’s real life: she and her artist husband, Aaron Spangler, spent years living in Northern Minnesota in a cabin that Aaron built by hand (mostly with no power tools! So, he was not at all impressed with the fact that I learned how to cut a clove of garlic without slicing off my index finger at the knuckle). For several years, they lived there with no electricity or running water, something to which I never aspired, although I kind of admire their ability to do it, along with their sheer stubbornness not to give in to the modern world. At some point in their lives, they shifted to New York, where Amy worked in various chef-like capacities for some of the city’s top restaurants, and then they shifted back to Minnesota, where Amy gathered authentic midwestern recipes (as well as characters and stories) and wrote a wonderful cookbook. Tanya, our coproducer Shelly, an intrepid crew, and I spent several weeks filming twelve episodes of Heartland Table in and around Amy and Aaron’s cabin. While we were there, the average temperature was minus twenty-six degrees. One day it hit minus thirty-two. It was so cold that if your hair was a tiny bit wet when you went outside, it turned white because the water in the follicles froze. One day, one of the crew members took a cup of hot coffee outside, threw it in the air, and the entire cup of joe turned into a powdery white dust before it came close to hitting the ground. On one insanely cold day, I whined to an eighty-year-old Minnesotan that, with the windchill factor, it was minus forty-two degrees. Her response to me was: “Windchill factor’s for pussies.”
Despite having my manhood maligned by an octogenarian, shooting Heartland Table in outer space–level frigid temperatures was incredibly fun. And it made me even more determined to keep doing food-related shows. That determination happily led me to one of the smartest and loveliest food-related people I’ve ever met: Yotam Ottolenghi.
Ottolenghi is one of the great stars of the contemporary food world. His books are not just huge international bestsellers, they are brilliant, creative recipes within the context of a philosophy of food and cooking that has resonated with his readers in a way that few chefs have ever been able to achieve. Yotam Ottolenghi is also as charming as a person can be, wildly intelligent (he began life as a journalist and is a remarkably astute observer of politics and human nature), handsome, personable, and … wait for it … incredibly nice. He also has a fascinating background: he is Israeli and his business partner is Palestinian. He’s too good to be true. Except he is true.
Partnering this time with a company called Jupiter Entertainment, I went to London and had breakfast with Yotam at Nopi, his Soho restaurant. Well, to be honest, the night before I met the master chef for breakfast, I had dinner at Nopi. My logic was twofold: I thought I should have some firsthand knowledge about his food before our meeting. And I thought I might never have another opportunity to get a table at a restaurant that was so difficult to get into. It was an excellent call. The meal was spectacular, particularly the quail with rhubarb sauce.
Despite my mother’s insistence, for her own secretive reasons, on cooking quail, I have never been a quail fanatic. I usually prefer things I can rip apart in a vaguely caveman-ish fashion rather than something with small bones that would work well while listening to a piano recital. But I had never tasted anything like Nopi’s quail. It was satisfyingly meaty but also delicate and elegant. The rhubarb sauce was neither sweet nor sour, it was a sauce that somehow seemed as if it was destined to be drizzled on top of this fowl and had been there since birth. I couldn’t imagine eating quail again without this red rhubarb sauce drizzled over and under it.
It was a unique experience: eating something I had eaten many times before yet having it taste as if I were eating it for the first time. It was a thrilling dinner that gave me the same charge I’ve had eating Wolfgang Puck’s food at Chinois (where he reinvented Chinese food) and the original Spago (where he reinvented Italian food) or dining at Robuchon’s restaurants in Paris or eating Alice Waters’s food at Chez Panisse. To me, it was like going to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing van Gogh’s works for the first time. Nobody has ever painted like that. No one could ever paint like that because his art came from someplace inimitable.
I was equally exhilarated during our breakfast the next morning, where I had the best French toast I ever tasted. The glow continued after the breakfast came because Yotam and I were 100 percent on the same page. We wanted to do something similar: a show that was smart and different, pushed a few limits, and aimed high.
The process has been slow—it’s not a snap to sell something smart, clever, and fun—a combination of great food and social journalism—to a TV network. The Food Network, for instance, clearly adhering to the Donald Trump School of Creativity and Artistic Vision, said they wouldn’t do a show with someone who had a foreign accent.
It will happen eventually, though. Yotam will continue to open wonderful restaurants and write books and will eventually have a hit TV series. But this process of trying to create something fresh and intelligent and, most important, different reinforced something I’ve been trying to deal with for a long time: inside the kitchen, things might be complicated, but there’s a high percentage of success. Knowledge and preparedness actually pay off, providing an end result that is satisfying and pleasurable. It might take time and lots of repetition, but a certain degree of success is almost guaranteed.
Outside the kitchen, however, all bets are off. You can have the knowledge and skill as well as the tools and the right plan, but you’re as likely to run full speed into a closed door as you are to succeed.
Outside the kitchen you must deal with the human factor.
Outside the kitchen, in other words, you must deal with real life.
Which is why cooking is usually way more satisfying.
* * *
AS MUCH AS she loves quail and as often as she made it, by the time my mother and I began discussing this dish, she could not give me a favorite recipe. Nor could she remember or describe the best quail she’d ever tasted, so I had no starting point to figure out how to make the perfect quail for her. I did, however, have Yotam Ottolenghi’s e-mail address. I wrote him a note, describing my orgasmic reaction to Nopi’s quail with rhubarb sauce and asking for his recipe. Here’s what he e-mailed back:
So … I went looking for the dish you had and found something which is highly confusing, written in kitchen shorthand and I doubt very much you’ll be able to decipher it (I know I can’t). Have a look, see what you think and try at your peril.
Warmest,
Yotam.
At the end of the e-mail was exactly this:
QUAIL WITH RHUBARB
Stuff 2 butterflied quails with 80 gr of stuffing. And sous vide for 25 minutes in 85 degrees, then pan fry until golden brown.
STUFFING
2.4 kg pork sausage (minced)
400 g shelled pistachio (roughly chopped)
50 g Baharat spice mix
100 g fresh ginger (grated)
2 g black peppercorn
30 g salt
Mix together.
GLAZE FOR RHUBARB
2 tbsp tamarind
100 g caster sugar
50 ml lemon juice
200 ml cold water
100 ml red wine vinegar
1 bay leaf
100 g pomegranate molasses
1 star anise
Reduce to a thick glaze.
QUAILS
16 quails
De-bone/butterflied cut.
RHUBARB
1 bunch rhubarb
Roast in o
ven 3–6 minutes with some icing sugar, slice and caramelise in a pan with the glaze.
YOGURT (TAKEN FROM THE NOPI COOKBOOK, SO SMALLER QUANTITY THAN THE REST)
320 g Greek yogurt
1½ tbsp. date syrup (30 g)
1½ tbsp. pomegranate molasses
Coarse sea salt
Place the yogurt, date syrup, and pomegranate molasses in a medium bowl with ⅛ teaspoon of salt. Whisk until smooth and then transfer to a sieve lined with muslin (or a clean j-cloth). Draw together the edge of the muslin and tie together so that you have a ball of yogurt. Keep the yogurt in the sieve held over a bowl to collect the liquid which drains out and store in the fridge overnight (or less, see introduction to Nopi cookbook). Remove from the fridge 1 hour before serving: the thickness should be that of ricotta.
LIQUORICE GEL (INSIDE THE SOIL)
150 gr liquorice (sweets) (NOTE FROM SNOBBY AUTHOR: YOTAM USES THE BRITISH SPELLING OF LICORICE, SO I’LL CONTINUE TO DO SO BECAUSE I LIKE IT BETTER.)
120 gr caster sugar
150 gr water
Slowly cook until dissolve and blitz to a gel.
LIQUORICE SOIL
250 g ground almonds
160 g liquorice gel
160 g sugar
110 g cocoa powder
25 g ground star anise
100 g butter
Mix all together, spread on silicon mat, and dry in an 80°C oven for about an hour.
Um … Okay, where to start?
Yotam was correct: his recipe is a tad confusing in parts. In other parts, I had no concept of what the hell he was even talking about. But I decided that wouldn’t stop me. I also decided I was going to need some help with this one. So I asked Janis to co-cook with me. I had a slightly devious motivation in asking for her assistance: I also wanted her to serve as a co–guinea pig tasting this concoction before I dared to prepare it for my mother.
My Mother's Kitchen Page 11
