Happy Swiss cows with bells leads to amazing cheese

I’ve been away, and internet-challenged to boot! Now back from Italy and a brief stop in Switzerland — much more on Italy very soon. First I must pay homage to the cows of Lauterbrunnen, with their big, noisy bells that would blend perfectly with a yodel here and there. This was the land of artisanal cheeses, a place you could go to learn cheese-making and cow herding. The grass looked so good I thought I might even eat some.

Switzerland has two well-known national dishes — fondue and rösti. These are based on their two great edibles, cheese and potatoes. I’ve known about fondue since the 70s, when the fondue craze struck American homes like an electric shock, planting thousands of fondue pots in our avocado and goldenrod kitchens. Ours was yellow, of course. We didn’t try the fondue in Switzerland because we smelled it so continually one evening while we waited for a table at a popular restaurant that we felt like we’d actually eaten it.

No, it was rösti that I was unfamiliar with, but I now know that it is a variation on hash browns, or latkes, or other such potato dishes.

Not my picture -- but ours looked just like this!

Rösti is grated potato, and the Swiss potatoes are very good. I know this because potatoes accompany just about every meal, sometimes combined with…cheese! Season the grated potato, shape it into a very buttery pan and fry it up. Very easy, very filling. The Husband ordered his with a curry flavor, which was not a great choice. Mine had bacon and cheese, and I plowed through about half of it. It was comfort food on steroids, and I’ll be making it here very soon.

An aerial view of cows, but no matter how far away you get, you can hear those bells

Back to cows. These Swiss cows are very happy and well cared-for. They spend all summer in the spectacular foothills of the Alps, eating clover and basking in the sun. And all that goodness yields a field of dairy products that has all that flavors of pure joy. Nutty, tangy gruyeres and emmenthalers, mellow yogurt, achingly fresh milk and butter. It’s a well-protected industry there, family-owned and carefully managed.

Lauterbrunnen, in the shadow of the Eiger, the Jungfrau, and the Monch peaks

Our favorite meal in Switzerland was a hunk of bread with several local cheeses which we cut up with — what else? — a Swiss Army knife. But stay tuned for Italy.

Yodel-ay-hee-hoo

©2010 Kitchenelly. All Rights Reserved.

One of Anne's most recent cookbook

Back in the wayback I had every intention of going to culinary school. I was graduating from college, and all I could think about was food and cooking and using my hands and food again. In the middle of my senior year I had taken an inspiring pastry class at Madeleine Kamman’s nearby restaurant/cooking school, The Modern Gourmet, and I was ready to jump from essay to entrée without looking back.

With French pastry terms rolling around in my head I started researching schools, so naturally I looked only in France. There was the estimable Cordon Bleu in Paris, of course, but I also considered Madeleine Kamman’s short summer course. Too short, not rigorous enough.  I didn’t exactly speak French (as in not at all) so I found myself very drawn to Anne Willan’s highly regarded school in Burgundy, Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne. Anne is English, though she and her husband, economist Mark Cherniavsky, had already spent years commuting back and forth between Washington, D.C. and France. I was certain to be able to understand the Queen’s English. But I didn’t meet Anne then, regrettably.

My first encounter with Anne was last week at a lecture of the Zamorano Club — Los Angeles’s “oldest organization of bibliophiles and manuscript collectors.” She was speaking about her rare cookbook collection and the forthcoming book she is writing on the subject for University of California Press. Her husband has been the principle bloodhound of the family in his hunt for rare editions of early, early cookbooks, and they have some amazing volumes. I actually got to thumb (carefully!) through a 1596 edition of a beautifully illustrated book by an Italian cook (Anne notes that the word “chef” had not yet come into use in the 1500s) named Bartolomeo Scappi. He has drawn careful pictures of his entire batterie de cuisine, and even shows how knives were stabbed into a hanging hay bale for storage (think knife block).

The knives Scappi has drawn look like some that I have in my collection, and on the right are various casseroles and steamers

This picture is from my second Anne sighting, only two days later. She was speaking at the Los Angeles Public Library for the Culinary Historians of Southern California, a group I am (now!) a member of. For this lecture she took a different angle, talking about the history of the recipe rather than the books themselves.

Anne fell in love with cooking right after college, as well. She took a class at Cordon Bleu in London and was hooked. Though she had come from a well-to-do family who may have expected more from her Master’s at Cambridge, Anne relocated to Paris, where she earned the distinguished Grand Diplome from Cordon Bleu. Her experiences after that included cooking at the Chateau de Versailles for a parade of distinguished guests. She met Mark there and they began their long love affair — with each other and with France. Anne and Mark bought a beautiful chateau in Burgundy where she expanded her Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne. Anne has always written about food, and her La Varenne Pratique is a classic among books on French cuisine. After 25 years in France, though, they’ve relocated right here in Santa Monica and will soon (I hope!) open the doors to more students.

Because I’d like to be a student, after all these years. As I mentioned, I had every intention of enrolling in culinary school. What stopped me was a brief stint helping an acquaintance open a restaurant in San Francisco. I don’t remember exactly how long I worked there, but it was in dog years — each moment times seven. And my ambitious boss nearly keeled over on the J Church from the stress. This was an English restaurant with English food, and in cuisine-crazy San Francisco it was a serious mistake. No one wanted steak and kidney pie (have they ever?).

Noooot good

I drew this little drawing when I was in the midst of this very crazy — and I mean crazy — period.

I ended up at a desk job, working in publishing and then on to cookbook writing. I took lots of cooking classes in San Francisco, and spent hours poring over and experimenting from cookbooks, among them one of my favorites, Anne’s French Regional Cooking. I later admired her books and series for PBS called “Look and Cook.”

The other drawing, the one that followed the crazy one, was this:

Chatting with boyfriend rather than firing the dishwasher, then the waiter -- I was the restaurant hatchet man!

I didn’t go to La Varenne France, it’s true, but I will gladly march myself right back over to Anne’s kitchen when she calls me.

Yes, she's beautiful -- and she speaks English!

Kelly McCune © 2010

©2010 Kitchenelly. All Rights Reserved.

The tat on the other arm is a knife & fork

In Junior High my big brother used to make me lie on his floor and listen to Jimi Hendrix. That was the only way to get the full impact he said, and yes, the black light was on and of course I did anything he said, hoping a little cool would rub off. I kinda got Jimi Hendrix — the humor, the little riffs and the complete artistic involvement. But back then I was mostly focused on what I could see under my brother’s bed.

I don’t usually write about restaurants but my dinner the other night at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena requires me to. I didn’t dine on the floor, thank God, but Michael Voltaggio just may be the Jimi Hendrix of food. Did the tattoo make me think of this? Or maybe the edge, the confidence, the sure-handedness of this young chef made me search for the way to describe the dinner, and “experience” was the first word that popped into my head. It wasn’t dinner after all, it was a food experience. Psychedelic. Yes, here’s how Wikipedia defines it:  A psychedelic experience is characterized by the perception of aspects of one’s mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters.

He could cook eclectically, too (thanks, Shreyans is in India @ flickr)

This food experience was not accidental. I and my immediate loved ones are starstruck by the contestants (and judges, oy!) on Bravo’s Top Chef, and we went like pilgrims to check out the culinary skills of Voltaggio, who is in the throes of the competition. At least still competing in TV-land, since the show is actually over and the winner known, but only to the brass at Top Chef and its sworn-to-silence contestants.

To begin with, the menu is beautiful and simple. Four- and five-course dinners are offered, and you are asked to make your selections from the categories of “Beginning,” “Middle” and “End.” The titles of the dishes are plain-Jane, such as “Halibut Cheeks,” “Wagyu Short Rib” and “Coffee Cake.” Ah, but those names are so misleading, and in retrospect, funny as hell. My Middle was “Turbot,” subtitled (but not more illuminatingly) “Butternut Squash, Madras Curry, Pumpkin Seed Granola.” Here’s what it looked like on the plate:

The round things are butternut squash "scallops" with a pumpkin seed granola-item on top

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. We started with an amuse-bouche — a single bite, gift of the chef — of the heart-of-the-heart of palm, hollowed out with something warm and creamy in it, accompanied by a nitrogen-chilled horseradish powder and a glistening deep-green blob of chive puree. All three, pop in the mouth, get the full impact. Cold, green, warm, spicy, soft, liquid. Nice.

The unstandard bread of the three choices was a bacon bread, and all were served with a choice of Vermont salted or French unsalted butter. (That’s not counting the truffle-swirl bread we had between Beginning and Middle, served with goat’s milk butter. Lordy!)

One of my two Beginning courses was a Langoustine with a tiny lobster lasagna under it, and it looked like this:

The delicate lasagna was hiding under the langoustine, and the sauce around it was a delicious bisque/elixir not mentioned on the menu

Another Beginning was the very pedestrian sounding “Heirloom Beets.” But these beets were the texture of beef tartare (here’s where I think Voltaggio has fun with words — beef/beet, yes! Tartare, of course). With it was a quail egg, except that goat cheese played the part of the egg’s white. The foie gras also wrapped a grape concoction, so there were always little surprises wrapped in surprises.

I’ve always envied the eye-candy that Japanese food is, with its colors and wrappers and textures. This food was not Asian, but it had sushi on the brain. Flavors that are separate but equal, and that combine to make a whole. Cuisine with wit. Amuse Cuisine (can I coin that?) Precision assembly, like this:

He thinks like a painter of food (thanks, Erik Arnestad @ flickr)

The service was what you’d expect at that level of dining. All the dishes were deposited at the same moment, the napkin was refreshed and tonged onto the table if you made a little excursion to the facilities. Or, as was our case, to the kitchen! Yes, we hugged Mr. Voltaggio in his own habitat, and got to talk food for several minutes on end. He also signed my birthday girl’s menu:

Already on its way to the framer...

He’s maybe old enough to vote and looks like he’s having far too much fun for the Langham. He’s got a young crowd in the back in a space that didn’t look all that large. And to ice the cake, as it were, crazy-hair Marcel from Season 2 of Top Chef breezed into the kitchen.

Marcel's signature matches his hair

Now the Langham needs to perk up its dining room to match the excitement of what’s coming out of the kitchen. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s like taking your trophy date out in your mom’s Lincoln Town Car. Nice, but…

As an extra at the end of the evening we were presented with a cold slate slab of chocolates, including a lollipop with the emphasis on “pop.” I spied other diners laughing around the room as we all bit into our exploding Pop-Rock lollys. Thanks, Mr. Voltaggio, for letting us all in on the joke.

Kelly McCune © 2009

©2010 Kitchenelly. All Rights Reserved.

I saw Julie & Julia a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still digesting it. It’s a mighty meal to digest, and before I go much further let me say that I loved it. I’ve been meaning to comment, and when Julia made the front page of the New York Times this past week I knew that time had come. Yes, I loved the movie, but I have a few bones to pick.

536 recipes, 365 days…did Julie really do it? Or did she kinda do it?

On a recent (and admittedly petty) trip to our nicer local grocery store, I priced some of the meats you’d need for the recipes in Mastering. A whole duck was about $35. Any steak, and Julie had to make at least three, would have been $15 to $19 per pound. Rack of lamb was $19.99 per pound, scallops $13.99. Okay, she wrote her blog in 2003, but it was New York. Let’s say she spent an average of $20 per recipe in ingredients — not hard to imagine with butter at $4 a pound and lobster tail closer to $30 — that’s $10,750 for the year. Sheesh.

But here’s really why my shopping trip was petty.

It was always my plan, from the time I first heard of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (I was about 17) to work my way through all the recipes. I knew at the end of that task I’d have…mastered the art of French cooking. Somehow I never undertook it, and I’d like to think I have real good reasons why.

To begin with, at seventeen I couldn’t afford the book, so I had to hang around and get a little older and then work in a cookware store after college where I could buy it with my discount. Whew, the book was daunting. No pictures, and so much specialized equipment. I had a couple of Master Chef pans (thanks to that discount) and some slightly damaged Le Creuset (discounted and marked down). So much butter and cream. So many expensive ingredients. And my cookware store salary didn’t allow for duck or foie gras or even steak.

By the time I had a little more money, Julia came out with her amazing bible, The Way To Cook. In her introduction, Julia acknowledged that things had changed since 1960 when she wrote Mastering, and this new book was about “the essentials of good cooking today.” Since then – 1989 — I’ve been intending to cook all the way through it. Really.

Julia Child was a beautifully realized work in progress. She put herself through the rigors of French cooking – classical cooking that was, by and large, the domain of restaurant chefs — and shared them in the minutest detail with hundreds of readers and cooks. These were the secrets of the French ecole de cuisine, which she demystified for the non-professional American home cook. But Julia moved with the times and the times demanded less fat, less fuss, and greater eclecticism. She knew that cooking at home would always be a very different animal than cooking in a restaurant.

I think Julie & Julia has been a touchstone for something important. I believe we are craving the skills to make really good food, to love that food and its preparation and ingredients, like Julia did. To experience her joy.

We’ve had Martha Stewart for twenty years, who, incidentally, cooked her way through Mastering, but Martha’s was a triumph of style over substance. Beautiful, tasteful plates, cool photography, not a drop or a sprinkle out of place. And now Julie Powell’s blog comes along as a triumph of concept over substance.

Is a gimmick really a satisfying accomplishment?

In the trailer there is a scene that I don’t believe was in the movie. Standing together with her “friends” on the street, Julie is informed by one of them, “Showtime bought my blog for a mini-series.” The trailer cuts to Julie telling her husband, “I could write a blog. I have thoughts.” This approaches what is fundamentally bothersome about Julie. Was her first goal to be famous? If so, she succeeded.

Julie breaks down in tears (again!) near the end of the movie when she gets a call about whether Julia Child has read her blog. We can’t hear the other side of the phone call, but she hangs up and says, with utter astonishment, “Julia hates me.” She has (another!) tearful tantrum/freak out which results in (another!) long support session from her patient husband. Does Julia “hate” her? No, says Russ Parsons in his excellent August 12 column (“Julie, Julia and me: I tell all”) from the Los Angeles Times.

Julia is merely (hold on to your seats) unimpressed by Julie and her blog. Young folks have had “good job!” thrown their way so many times that if they don’t hear it echoing in the background for every undertaking, all life sucks. If you read some of Julie’s posts, you may see why Julia would be less than dazzled. They’re like reading the Basketball Diaries while chugging a sixer of Red Bull and watching a Quentin Tarantino film on your iPod. Julie struggles with the recipes, shortcuts, hates many of the ingredients (“ew”), uses the f-word constantly (Julia decidedly NOT of the f-word generation), and complains endlessly. It’s not the most joyous approach to food and she’s not the most appealing persona.

I’m still scratching my head over how she did it. I tried calculating, dividing days, weeks, counting recipes. Complex recipes, some taking hours, to pull off after working full time, shopping for the ingredients, blogging, moving from Brooklyn to Queens, pulling up the old linoleum floor, and so on. And the shear exhaustion of typing “fuck” so many, many times. Maybe she had that text shortcut thing. But wait, here is the concept trumping the details. Or am I just being – well — jealous?

According to Russ Parsons, who printed out the Julie/Julia Project posts for her to read, Julia said, “Well, she just doesn’t seem very serious, does she?” She went on to add that she had tested and re-tested the recipes over eight years and many people had cooked through them quite successfully. Julia surmises that she (Julie) must not be much of a cook if she had problems. I don’t think that’s an unfair conclusion, since Julie is racing the clock rather than mastering the skill.

Julie Powell’s stunt did bring her fame and fortune, and maybe Julia Child would be thrilled to see her own book on the best-seller list and the front page of the New York Times. The library and the local bookstores have been scoured clean. Cordon Bleu in Paris has a link to the movie and anyone who’s ever been in Julia’s air space is blogging about it (yours truly). But the best outcome is that we’re all thinking about food and its careful preparation, because in the end we admire Julia, not Julie. This would make Julia very happy. And we have Julie Powell to thank for it.

There is a book entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the market, maybe even on the best-seller list. I know Super Size Me was a hit movie, and that there will always be hot-dog eating contests. But that doesn’t tell us anything about hot-dogs. It makes me yearn for the plodding and thorough research of the Coen brothers, the careful writing of Jane Austen, and Julia’s sincere dedication to the art of cooking.

Kelly McCune © 2009

©2010 Kitchenelly. All Rights Reserved.