Julia's omelet

I was flicking through Twitter and noticed @stickifingers had posted a YouTube link to a video showing Julia Child making an omelet.

It was just on lunchtime so I headed for the kitchen, grabbed a couple of eggs laid by a chook living the good life and got cooking. I usually make a fork-assisted omelet, pouring in the lightly mixed eggs and pushing the omelet’s edges towards the middle to allow uncooked egg to spill over round the edge of the pan.

Child’s method is to lightly beat the seasoned eggs with a little water, place a tablespoon of butter in a deep pan on high heat, swirling the pan so the butter coats the bottom and sides.  When the butter is bubbling, the eggs are poured in. The pan is then shaken fairly enthusiastically until the egg is cooked and flicked a couple of times so the omelet slides to one edge of the pan. The pan is then held over a plate and slowly inverted until the omelet slides out onto the plate.

I could have done with a slightly deeper pan than my crepe pan but it was all relatively painless. No drama. A beautiful omelet which I finished with a scattering of cress.

Saucy surprise

I was browsing through an old cookbook this morning - Lady Maclean's Book of Sauces and Surprises.

The book failed to survive a purge at Wellington Library about 10 years ago and I picked it up, along with a few others, for a mere dollar. It emerged from a carton after a recent shift. Time to read it.

The title intrigued me. I like surprises.

The book starts with the basics and covers the traditional stocks, before detouring through the busy cooks' cheats using tinned soups, bouillon cubes, tinned clam juice and the like. A mild surprise, perhaps.

The usual suspects are there, too. The classic French sauces, the emulsion sauces, traditional English and American sauces.

Admiral Ross's Indian Devil Mixture attracted my attention but it was a fairly tame mix of  cold gravy, ketchup, English mustard, butter, curry paste, vinegar and salt mixed smoothly on a soup plate then used as the stewing medium for some cold meat.

Victorian Cockle Sauce sounded a little exhausting with 100 cockles to  diligently clean before cooking was even considered.

A Good Sauce for Prawn Cocktails (this book was first published in 1978) was a more refined version of the ubiquitous mayo/tomato sauce/lemon juice concoction that did the dinner party rounds of the time.

Goodness knows what President Jimmy Carter did with his special sauce: "Puree 4 or 5 bananas with about 75g/3 oz peanut butter. Pass through a fine sieve and mix with mayonnaise" but Veronica Maclean's verdict was, "Not as strange as it sounds. In fact a new and interesting flavour."

There are some store cupboard sauces for thrifty cooks to make for themselves instead of buying the commercial versions. These include Worcestershire Sauce, Harvey's Sauce and the scary-sounding Government Sauce which was flagged as "the universal tomato ketchup at its best: it comes from Washington DC". I wonder if President Obama has latched onto that?

Elizabeth Arden's Special Dressing didn't contain any face cream but it did have Worcestershire Sauce, tarragon vinegar, onion, oil, egg yolks, horseradish, parsley, watercress, Veg-e-sal ("vital to the recipe") and a teaspoon of monosodium glutamate. She must have liked it - it made three cups of the stuff.

I was nearing the end of the book and still no great surprises. In fact, some of the 600 recipes sounded worth trying.

Then among the cold sauces "from all over" I spotted one from Australia, specifically from Melbourne.

"This sounds peculiar but tastes good with a cold chicken or a cold duck salad." And the recipe "Simply fold about 75g/3 oz sieved marmalade into the mayonnaise." Well, well, well.

I've looked in various older Australian cookbooks for this "Marmalade Mayonnaise" without success. Was it really a Melbourne specialty? No word in Stephanie Alexander's magnum opus The Cook's Companion.

Google couldn't throw any light on the subject. 1001 Foods You Must Eat Before You Die didn't mention it. I trawled through my sauce books and cooking textbooks. Naught. I was beginning to think some Aussie joker must have pulled Lady M's leg.

Then I came upon Ambrose Heath's 1948 work, The Book of Sauces. There it was - another recipe for Marmalade Mayonnaise Sauce, though used slightly differently.

"To a teacupful of mayonnaise sauce add two tablespoonfuls of orange marmalade and serve with fruit salad." And the origin? "American."

Surprise, surprise!

This sounds peculiar but tastes good with a cold chicken or a cold duck salad

Footnote: Veronica, Lady Maclean was a diplomat's wife and socialite who wrote several books, including cookbooks. Her first husband died young and she then married Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean who was later created a baronet.

They travelled widely during their 50 years together and her cookbooks contain recipes from many people she encountered along the way. Another I have in my library, Second Helpings and More Diplomatic Dishes features recipes from many diplomatic gastronomes, augmented with others "begged, borrowed or stolen from good cooks and cookery writers".

She died in 2005 aged 85.

In Julia's kitchen

As last I’ve joined the rest of the food-writing world and seen Julie and Julia, an enjoyable two-hour journey that made me remember what an influence she had on my own cooking.

I first became acquainted with Julia Child in the 1970s when her TV programmes were shown in New Zealand. I’d been cooking enthusiastically for years, ever since I discovered Elizabeth David’s cookbooks and slowly widened my own gastronomic horizons.

Certainly one of the most glorious reasons to master French puff pastry is the Pithiviers

Alas, many of the ingredients in David’s books had not reached New Zealand shores. The “ethnic” food of the early 1960s was largely Cantonese fare that seemed more chicken skin and cabbage than even vaguely exotic. And our “curries” made with mince, curry powder, sultanas and rice, with an occasional side of sliced banana.

Gradually all this changed. In the late 60s I invested in the Cordon Bleu Cookery Course that came in weekly parts for about two years. I never missed an issue and I still have the complete set. I happily cooked my way through many recipes, from chicken Veronique to beef Stroganoff. I grappled with choux pastry, was introduced to avocados and made hamantaschen.

Then Robert Carrier became my new best friend and The Robert Carrier Cookbook and its companion Great Dishes of the World got me into serious cooking mode as those “foreign” ingredients became more readily available. The former continues as part of my cookbook library thanks only to the holding power of some seriously industrial black tape.

Folded down page corners (yes, I am a library vandal) chart my course in the kitchen as I travelled the world vicariously through Carrier’s recipes.

Then came Julia Child. I loved how this gangly woman lurched through her recipes, handing on her knowledge, passing off mistakes as experience – there was no re-shooting scenes then. In fact, her occasional onscreen mishaps made her all the more endearing. Her books though, as I soon discovered, were something else.

I bought both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The French Chef Cookbook plus Julia Child and Company and Julia Child and More Company. But the book that really struck a chord with me was From Julia Child’s Kitchen.

This was first published in 1975 although my edition is the 1981 Penguin printing. This book didn’t waste time sitting round on the kitchen bookshelf. It was regularly out on the bench. By then I was married with two young sons and a mortgage. There wasn’t a lot of spare cash for going out wining and dining. My career was on hold while I stayed at home looking after babies and free-lancing for a few treats like new kitchen gadgets.

If we wanted to eat fancy meals, I had to make them, so I did most weekends. We also held quite a few dinner parties and many of the recipes were literally From Julia Child’s Kitchen.

The instructions were precise and unambiguous. She knew which bits an inexperienced cook might find tricky and a recipe could run over several pages. Photos and line drawings demystified procedures like disjointing chickens and making pastry.

Oh, the pastry!

There was one ambitious dinner I cooked for two well travelled artistic friends. We started with a frothy watercress soup, “misted with chives” as I had read in a novel. This was followed by carefully skinned and sliced avocado “leaves” with a “rose” fashioned out of thin smoked salmon slices. (This was the early 80s!)

Friends in the diplomatic corps had put me on to a very good butcher who had a nicely prepared veal rib roast ready for me when I called. By then I had mastered my microwave oven and produced twee little bundles of carrot matchsticks tied with chives. The béarnaise sauce was perfect. The broccoli with toasted pinenuts was bright and green. The pommes duchesse were works of art.

But then Julia and I pulled off the triumph of the night. I had decided I would make Le Pithiviers for dessert.

“Certainly one of the most glorious reasons to master French puff pastry is the Pithiviers, a rum-flavoured almond cream baked between that buttery wonder dough, pâte feuilletée, known variously as flaky pastry and thousand-leaf dough as well as French puff pastry,” Mrs Child said. I was enticed.

During the previous day I quietly worked my way through the pastry making exercise. All went to plan and it was looking good. Butter and dough were married together, turned, rolled and chilled, turned, rolled and chilled. Julia held my hand through five pages of instruction and made sure I had a perfect product. The four-page almond cream was made in between and next day I set to assembling Le Pithiviers.

“The usual pattern for a Pithiviers is a wheel of swirling spokes starting at the steam hole and curving gracefully out to the edge where they spread out 1/2in apart.” I managed that without mishap and the egg-glazed masterpiece was committed to the oven.

I could barely comprehend the absolute beauty of the dessert that emerged. Perfectly risen layers of the butteriest lightest pastry. What a shame we didn’t run round photographing all our food in those days!

From Julia Child’s Kitchen is now a book of many parts. The glue down the spine has crumbled with age. So has the sticky tape that was holding the cover on. Even robust insulating tape won’t rescue it.

Unfortunately pages 353-356 are missing. That was the recipe for Pate en croute – a free-form pate I made as the centrepiece for a Christmas party buffet three or four years later. Another triumph thanks to Julia.

I certainly didn’t cook every recipe in the book, but there are many smears and splodges of evidence that I cooked a good few. The $13.50 I paid for it was clearly a good investment. Maybe it’s time I bought a replacement. Ummm, maybe not – it’s currently listed on Amazon for up to $US450.

Fusion, profusion, confusion

Last weekend I had a very surreal food experience. So surreal I’m still wondering if it really happened.

A group of us were staying at Mercure’s Balgownie Estate Vineyard Resort in the Yarra Valley for the annual Opera in the Vineyards.

Friday night and it was time to dine. It was a long time since my modest fruit and yoghurt lunch and I was ready to enjoy a good meal at the resort’s restaurant, Rae’s.

The first item on the menu seemed a trifle strange – cream of peas and Granny Smith apple with candied beetroot and a smoked paprika twist. Was that a soup? Maybe. But I fancied prawns anyway.

They were listed as pan-fried in spicy sumac with creamy coriander polenta and a drizzle of red capsicum and coconut. That fusion of Middle Eastern, Italian, tropical and Asian flavours going on round the prawns should have sounded warning bells. However, I didn’t think I could tackle crispy scallop ravioli with cream of spinach, walnut, thyme and parmesan oil or a parfait of chicken livers cooked in kiwifruit wine with pear chutney. And the idea of lillypilly Chantilly mixing with the limes, capers and parsley oil on the cured trout sounded similarly odd.

Hey, I thought they said their food was simple. In fact the starters all looked fairly complicated. I know menu descriptions can sometimes look overly complicated and a couple of green dots on a plate can turn out to be the “broad bean puree” or the “capsicum reduction” on what initially looked like a shopping list. We ordered.

I could have done with more of the prawns and a lot less of the polenta.

One friend wasn’t paying attention and missed the “crispy” adjective in the ravioli and so was expecting regular ravioli, not fried ones.

Another’s air-dried wagyu fillet sat in infused orange and cracked pepper, crowned with witlof salad and hummus.

I’d chosen a ballottine of chicken breast for my main and was starting to get a bit nervous about the portobello mushroom and feta filling and the accompanying puree of cocoa beans and green tea. It arrived with additional garnishes not even mentioned on the menu. The sad thing was all this busyness was total overkill. The chicken itself was delightful but the other trimmings defeated me and confused my palate

The slow-cooked duck leg in pineapple next to me came on a bed of broad beans, onion jam and bergamot orange sauce. Too many things going on there spoiled what he said was a great piece of duck. And so on round the table – a reduction of coffee milk fought it out with celeriac mash, chorizo, baby tomatoes and marinated chickpeas round the lamb. A caramel and wasabi sauce finished the seared tuna with its muesli crust, carrots and cumin. The lottery of flavours left what was generally agreed was nicely cooked meat or fish struggling to assert itself.

The food, which should have been a highlight of the weekend, was very disappointing. Obviously a lot of work had gone into it but there was just too much happening on the plate. Perhaps the tapas and degustation culture has made us lean more towards savouring one taste sensation at a time.

I believe the restaurant has its own newly established vegetable garden. Hopefully the produce will be allowed to speak for itself in the future.

[Sorry about the quality of the photos. The restaurant was dimly lit and I dislike using a flash at the table.]