Post Xmas French Gastronomy

This is from the SF Chronicle, a very funny article on French gastronomy to get over all the Xmas turkey and stuffed salmon and chocolate truffes and 'can I have an extra side of cheese & cream please?' ... And if you want to know something really gross, I know some people who season cheese with ketchup... hold on, I am one of them ;) (not all the time, don't rant yet).

A ONE-POT WONDER

France's iconic pot-au-feu is the perfect post-Christmas dish

by Janet Fletcher, Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Enough already with rich holiday food and daily overindulgence. Some year-end partying may lie ahead, but excess is losing its appeal. By now, most people are grateful for a reprieve from butter and cream.

For Laurent Manrique, the French-born executive chef of Aqua in San Francisco, the week between Christmas and New Year's is prime time for pot-au-feu. Only a Frenchman would consider this avalanche of boiled beef and vegetables to be a respite from excess, but Manrique makes the case.

"It cleans the stomach between Christmas and New Year's," claims the chef, who was raised in rural Gascony with a grandmother who made an expert pot-au-feu. With its restorative broth and plain but plentiful vegetables, a proper pot-au-feu provides a break between two holidays associated with feasting. "It's not diet food," admits the chef, "but it's considered a healthy dish."

And for a low-key New Year's Eve that's more about comfort than caviar, pot-au-feu - "the pot on the fire" - hits just the right note. It simmers slowly all day, perfuming the house with warm, beefy aromas. And leftovers to tide you through New Year's Day are all but assured.

Escoffier called pot-au-feu "the symbol of family life ... a thoroughly bourgeois dish which nothing may dethrone." Its origins are in the farmhouse kitchen, and although it has no particular regional affiliation, regional adaptations abound.

Waverley Root, who documented French regional cooking in the 1950s, mentioned at least four different renditions in his masterwork, "The Food of France": the Carcassonne version, which includes bacon, stuffed cabbage and white beans; the pot-au-feu albigeois (from the town of Albi), with stuffed goose neck; the Languedoc housewives' version, with salt pork; and the Béarn version, which he doesn't define.

Manrique still makes pot-au-feu at home the way his grandmother did, although she simmered it on the hearth and he has a Wolf range. Manrique's grandparents ran a modest auberge-cafe in their minuscule village, and his grandmother often cooked for the local laborers. Like French cooks everywhere, she used a variety of inexpensive, bony meats to give body to her pot-au-feu broth, and then used the broth to poach a garland of winter root vegetables. "I was lucky enough to do homework at the kitchen table, surrounded by those smells," says Manrique.

But while most recipes call for serving the broth first, with meat and vegetables following, Manrique says this is not the custom in his home. Instead, the fork-tender meats and vegetables come to the table on a warm platter and the hot broth accompanies them in a tureen. At the table, each diner gets a soup bowl with some of the meat, some of the vegetables, and a ladle of hot broth over all. Toasts spread with poached marrow are also part of the picture, as is a sauce curiously named gros sel (coarse salt). Resembling sauce gribiche, Manrique's gros sel is a mustardy vinaigrette with chopped herbs, cornichons and hard-boiled egg.

Hubert Keller, the Alsatian chef at Fleur de Lys in San Francisco, says he has never heard of Manrique's gros sel sauce. When his grandmother made pot-au-feu, the meal unfolded like this: first the boiled and cooled vegetables, sliced and served on a platter with a vinaigrette, fresh chives and deviled eggs; then the broth with marrow quenelles (dumplings); and finally the hot meats with a few more vegetables - hot this time - and a condiment of horseradish thinned with cream.

With so many grandmothers having a hand in this dish, it's not surprising that pot-au-feu stirs debate. Some insist on starting the meat in cold water to extract maximum flavor and produce the tastiest broth. Others immerse the meat in hot water, which coddles the meat but compromises the broth. The only way to achieve both objectives - rich broth and succulent beef - is via the Julia Child method: make a stock first, then cook the meat in barely simmering stock. But that's a refinement more suggestive of the restaurant than the farmhouse.

The beef chosen for pot-au-feu should be meaty cuts with some bone and a lot of cartilaginous tissue, the sort of meat that improves with slow cooking. Shank, shin, chuck, short ribs, oxtails and brisket work well, and an assortment makes the dish more compelling. The vegetables used to flavor the broth are eventually discarded; a fresh set of poached vegetables accompanies the meat.

For a home cook, the biggest challenge in reproducing a pot-au-feu may be finding the right pots. You need a large vessel, 16 quarts or more, to accommodate all the meats and vegetables - preferably a wide pot rather than a tall one so you can easily retrieve the meats as they are done and readily skim impurities from the surface. All-Clad makes a 16-quart stockpot in this wide shape; a tall stockpot will work, but is not ideal. You also need a second large, low-sided pot to poach the vegetables for serving.

Both Manrique and Keller insist that a pot-au-feu broth should glisten with fat. It needs to have "eyes" on the surface, or it isn't right. But some cuts, such as short ribs and oxtails, throw more fat than many diners may appreciate. To remove some or all of it, let the broth cool for at least an hour without stirring. The fat will rise to the top, and you can remove it with a ladle.

A youthful red wine of medium intensity pairs well with pot-au-feu. Manrique suggests a cru Beaujolais, such as St. Amour or Chiroubles, a Côtes du Rhône or a California Pinot Noir. Any first course should be light, and the same goes for dessert.

On the day Manrique demonstrated his pot-au-feu, he invited friends over for dinner to enjoy the results. They would start, he said, with a beet, endive and walnut salad and finish with whole Lady Apples roasted with butter and sugar, splashed with Armagnac and served with vanilla ice cream.

It would be hard to imagine a more inviting menu to launch the new year. And with Manrique's guidance, a fine pot-au-feu is within a novice cook's reach.

if you want to check out their recipe, here it is : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/26/FDCTTUL3I.DTL

G'nite,

CJ