Ptipois

"Bonne continuation" is a good example of "furniture manners", something you say just for the sake of saying something. When one is not close to a person and cannot say "bon voyage", "good luck", "have a great time" or "kiss the kids for me", one sometimes says "bonne continuation", just some sound really, which has the merit (?) of not meaning anything. It has — as you have noticed — been industrialized in recent years, particularly in restaurants. In any case, restaurant or daily life, it always sounds a bit vulgar from being so stiff, awkward and commercial. It makes me cringe every time. I'll take "bon appétit" any time. Only once, though, I admired the creativity of waiters in a Brest fish restaurant, all dressed in black-and-blue striped t-shirts, who said "bonne traversée" after picking up the menus.

Ah, Daniel, many thanks for this post!

Julot, I gather that you have dined at Loiseau when Loiseau was alive. Have you dined at the place in recent years? If so, has it changed a lot? Have they managed to maintain the same level of quality?

The 60s, as far as I'm concerned... It was, shall I say, fairer, in the sense that not just rich people had access to excellent cooking, that excellent cooking was not only found in expensive restaurants, and that good cooking was better distributed on all levels of society. Of course bad food has always existed, which makes the study of this matter tricky. But I am describing a past reality: housekeeping was taught at school until the late 50s, family transmission was still very active, and many more people were familiar with the act of cooking that there are now. Well, of course it does. Especially insofar as you doubted the validity of my comparing Peyrot's cooking to the kind of fare that used to be found in the most respected country auberges. You are still not getting my point. I am not only talking about chefs. What I am talking about is cooking. Cooking, and I also mean cooking at its highest level, is done not only by chefs. They are a rare resource, and also, regarding French cooking, they are overprofessionalized. Now it is all in the hands of a few experts. I am not complaining about it, just stating a fact. That is where things stand now. They may change, they may last, I don't know. I am only using your own terms. It is, now. But that was not my point at all.

Who had the experience of tasting Jean Delaveyne's cuisine? It was still possible in the early 90s, at his restaurant Regain, which later became Constant's Violon d'Ingres. Superior classical French cuisine. And a delightful old chef with a wonderful sense of humor. I remember a wonderful timbale de macaroni Albuféra (with pigeon and a gorgeous sauce) and fresh cod in aïoli that was everything I could ask from that kind of dish.

It is not romanticizing, you do see what I am referring to. That missing page is nothing mysterious or completely lost, and when I say that cooking has disappeared, I am overpessimistic. I can at least say much of it has disappeared, and you have to search for it now. Of course memory plays tricks but, on the other hand, memory does shape our taste references throughout our lives. The kinship between Claude Peyrot's braised oxtail, his father's auberge cooking and my adopted mother Emma's roasted dishes (she was an aubergiste in the Nice hinterland hills back in the 60s and she fed me at lunch because walking home from school at noon would have taken too long) is quite obvious to me, as it will to anyone who has known those times. Then the roots of French haute cuisine become more tangible, the missing page is found.

I was writing about something different, a definite level of cooking which, I think, no longer exists: high-quality popular cooking. It was Peyrot's background (his father's auberge kitchen in the Ardèche) and I was raised on it too, so when the chef and I had conversations about that style of cooking, we perfectly knew what we were talking about. The relative overall poorness of contemporary "modest" food (compared to the relative overall excellence that prevailed, say, until the 80s) and fussiness of "elegant" food are deceptive. They easily make one overlook, or just hide the fact, that there is a missing link, a torn page in the history book, that questions the value of that duality. The duality is a reality now, but it is a very recent trend.

No, the actual dishes, with their perfect and rare balance in the execution, etc., were absolutely something that could have been found in a good auberge back in the 1950s or 60s, just as I wrote. I do not believe in the existence of any gap between that exceptional cuisine, which I call "popular gastronomy" (now disappeared), and what you call "grand restaurant". This is a modern, artificial characterization and segmentation of cooking that I do not agree with. Ducasse, anyway, came later with a different style, and different priorities, leading French cuisine further away from its roots, but the fact that the roots are no longer visible does not mean they never existed. And they had nothing to do with "grand restaurant" style.

You can trust the Foires aux Vins in most grandes surfaces. The ones at Carrefour are particularly interesting, the selections are made by a very competent wine expert, who also makes superior syrah (clos-des-fées) in his Languedoc estate.

Some years before I even thought of making a living as a food writer, I met Claude Peyrot, chef of Le Vivarois, through a very close ladyfriend of his, who was my best friend at the time. Sometimes when I visited her around midday, and depending on the, um, weather conditions, she would take me to nearby Le Vivarois (she lived a couple of streets away) for lunch. That was my first contact with haute cuisine. But I was much more dazzled by the character. The problem was that my friend was half-anorexic, and that spoiled our first lunches. When asked by the maître d' what we should like for lunch, she'd immediately answer "oh not much, we're not very hungry" so we got half-portions. After she did the trick to me once or twice I learned to speak up: "Yes and I am normally hungry, so please serve me as you would serve a normal person." So I did not get to experience the full extent of Le Vivarois until I learned to defend myself. The food was simple, strong-tasting, dazzling. More the kind of food you should get at a country auberge that is known regions around, than at an elaborate three-star. But that is precisely the kind of food I like. It was manly (in the sense that it had balls) and feminine (in the sense that it was based on a perfect mastery of reducing, simmering, crisping up, achieving the umami of old family cooking) at the same time, and normally I would never risk that kind of gender comparison which I think is 99% of the time utterly stupid, but for this occasion only I find it justified. Because Peyrot's cooking was a perfect union of yin and yang, and referring to gender makes sense in this case. I remember the extraordinary cèpes ravioli, the salad with truffle oil, the oxtail braised in red wine then oven-grilled, the côtes-du-roussillon blanc or coteaux-de-l'ardèche that Peyrot himself recommended for our meals, the way he had with wild things like mushrooms, game and truffles. Once I asked him if he would compose an all-truffle menu for a group of a few friends who loved truffles, and such a truffle dinner I never saw (until I had one at the Pébeyre's, in Cahors, last year but this is another story). He was quite a character. He was humorously irreverent with his richest and stuffiest, or richest and most pretentious, clientele. Nonsense that they are used to get away with everywhere else he would never let pass. When my friend and I were eating in the smaller room, we would hear loud talk from the other, larger room. Sometimes the loud talk would abruptly stop and silence would follow. After a minute Peyrot would come to our table, literally wriggling with joy. He'd sit down with us and say: "You'll never guess what I just said to <insert name of any Rothschild here> or <insert name of famous fashion designer here>." No, indeed, we'd never guess. So he told us. It was hilarious, dirty, well-thought, impossible to repeat here, and it totally explained why his restaurant was generally only half-full. He is, after all, one of the rare great chefs who kicked Gault and Millau (or one of the two, I do not remember) out of his restaurant. Once when I was working for food critic Claude Lebey, and had lunch with him, we talked about Peyrot. He looked tense, as if he remembered something unpleasant. He then told me that he had visited Peyrot one late morning and had found him vacuuming his dining-room. "Can you imagine, he said, a starred chef vacuuming his restaurant like any cleaning woman!" Clearly it was utter scandal for him. But that was not all. "When Peyrot saw me coming in, he hardly turned around, said hi to me and then went on vacuuming his carpet." Lebey was dumbfounded. A food critic feared by all French chefs, someone who asked Senderens to screw up one of his signature dishes for 12 people and Senderens did it, was gracing Peyrot's restaurant with his presence and Peyrot was not even paying attention! Needless to say, I admire Peyrot tremendously, the man and the cooking.

So sorry to read about your unpleasant experience.

Hello Anne! Yes, the blanching liquid does not contain anything worth holding on to. A little blood, impurities, and the flavor is extracted from the meat by longer boiling. I do not think you are dumping flavor down the drain. Generally a French-style stuffing: sausage meat mixed with bread (soaked in milk then drained), chopped onions, the fowl's liver (and sometimes a few more livers that your butcher usually gives you for free when you tell him you're going to make a poule au pot), and lots of mildly aromatic herbs like thyme, chives and marjoram. Plus an egg or two. The chicken is then sewn up so that no stuffing escapes, and trussed. What I described was the common stuffing. In Normandy they may use a more sophisticated stuffing made from chopped roasted onions, chives, chopped stale bread, butter and coarsely chopped chicken livers. Chestnuts or mushrooms may also be added to the stuffing. I would say it depends on how you skim. Judging from your recipe, I notice you skim regularly all throughout the cooking. Which means that your skimmage is, actually, broth. I'd certainly strain that through cheesecloth and use it like any beef broth. As for the fat, it is simply beef fat. And if you have any uses for that, by all means keep it. Beef fat is not commonly used in modern, urban France. But I do know of a terrific Norman recipe for graisse normande (flavored beef fat). What you do is melt this fat and add finely chopped leek greens, carrot, parsnip, thyme, bay leaf, onion, black pepper, a little allspice and sea salt. Simmer this on low heat for a few hours until all moisture is gone. Strain, keep the fat refrigerated. Add to sauces, vegetables and soups just before serving. Breton kig ha farz is a terrific traditional dish from Northwestern Brittany (province of Léon). It is a potée (simmered meats and vegetables) which usually contains beef and pork (ham hocks, sausages, salted pork belly), carrots, parsnips, cabbage, turnips, leeks, root celery and potatoes. When the simmering begins, two different batters are made, which are called farz sac'h. There is the white farz (farz gwen - wheat flour, eggs, milk, raisins and chopped prunes) and the black farz (farz du - buckwheat flour, eggs, milk, raisins and prunes). Each batter is poured into a special bag (sac à farz) made of very close-textured white canvas and tied at the top. Both bags are dropped into the stock and simmered with the potée for a couple of hours. At the end of cooking, the meats and vegetables are served on a dish, the farz taken out of the bags and either sliced or crumbled, with a little broth poured on top. The whole thing is eaten with a sauce of chopped shallots slowly roasted in salted butter. Not exactly, but the stock is clearly an important part. Browning the meat will seal in the juices and result in the Maillard reaction (improperly referred to as "caramelizing"), which will flavor the stock not like a stock but rather like a jus. Through the simmering method used in pot-au-feu, flavor is extracted slowly from the meat and there is no Maillard reaction involved. I am not enough of a scientist to tell you more but stocks made from browned meats are very different from stocks made from non-browned meats. Long ago, pot-au-feu (also called "le bouilli", and the stock "le bouillon") was one of the most common dishes on French tables. Everyone, even the working classes in the 19th century, had access to it. It was prepared at least once a week, so every family had a good supply of stock handy. Pot-au-feu stock was, for a long time, a regular staple of French kitchens, as a base for soups, sauces and cooking vegetables. Pot-au-feu broth was considered a very important health food and was served at restaurants. Popular restaurants were called "bouillons", they were places were workers could be served cheap, nourishing, energetic food.

Yes of course, use crème entière (liquide or fleurette, which is the same thing) for whipping. But do not whip the thick stuff like crème fraîche or crème double. Since the topic of coffee comes up, I will add that using crème entière liquide (or fleurette) in coffee is perfectly OK. Crème liquide légère is good too. Do not look for half-and-half, it does not exist in France.

Exo-Store, 52, avenue de Choisy, is open on Mondays. See this map. It does not mention which places are open on Monday but I think the two smaller Tang locations (44 avenue d'Ivry and 168 avenue de Choisy) might be open.

Hi Pennylane; to answer your questions: crème semi-épaisse does not need to be whipped but I suppose it would whip allright, just in case you'd like to know. As for Bridélice I never use it (I always prefer a little of the real thing to a lot of the fake thing), but I think it was conceived for all the normal uses of crème fraîche (i.e. a dollop on tarte Tatin or the like).

Hello, I was PMd by John Talbott that there were a few questions about pot-au-feu here. I'll take care now of the ones already asked, sticking to the basics, and then fire on, you may ask more. Yes, absolutely. Browning the meat beforehand will give you something edible, of course, but it won't be pot-au-feu. The structure of the stock will be entirely different. However there are two methods: covering the meat with cold water and bringing to the boil, and plunging it in boiling water to start the cooking. The first method will give you a very tasty broth and slightly less tasty meat, and the second method will give you the reverse. What is usually done is covering the less delicate meats with cold water, bringing to the boil, skimming, then adding salt and the remaining meats, bringing back to the boil and skimming again. There is much less skimming involved when you add the meats to the boiling water. I am not such an adept of heavy skimming to I do it two or three times in the first stage of boiling, and just once after I've added the remaining meats. After that, the stock should just barely simmer for a couple of hours, after which I'll add the vegetables, in a definite order: carrots, turnips and root celery first; then the leeks (tied in a bundle) and more fragile vegetables. NEVER any potatoes in the stock because they spoil it. Potatoes should be boiled separately. An old trick to color and flavor the stock is to add a whole onion, oven-roasted with skin on, in the early stage of cooking. The onion will be discarded later. First, in poule au pot, the chicken is stuffed. That detail is specific of the dish. Second, there will usually be more leeks in the stock and a little cabbage, and no marrowbones. Cabbage is rarely used in pot-au-feu. Pot-au-feu, by the way, is only beef. Of course you may add a little veal shank but strictly speaking it is 100% beef. There should be three sorts of meats: fatty (i.e. short ribs), lean (i.e. chuck) and gelatinous (i.e. shin, jowl or oxtail). The ideal cut to include in a pot-au-feu is the carotte or galinette, a small elongated part of the shin that becomes spherical when cooked and is extremely gelatinous and tasty. Any boiled dish of the pot-au-feu type that includes another type of meat becomes a "potée". There are also endless regional variations, like the very interesting Breton kig ha farz. In a traditional pot-au-feu, you will serve coarse sea salt, gherkins and strong Dijon or Meaux mustard to go along with it.

Well sometimes I take pictures and sometimes I don't. It depends on whether I intend to blog about the place or not. Likewise, most of the time I keep a mental track of the dishes I've been served, whatever use I want to make of that later, but I am not a high-end cuisine fetishist and that gives me a sometimes casual attitude. If I find my dining companion and his conversation the most interesting part of the experience, and (in the case of L'Astrance) in perfect harmony with the place, the cooking, the atmosphere, what I will retrieve from that moment is an undifferentiated, global feeling of happiness. I also think L'Astrance, through the constant level of quality and especially the humility of its cooking, helps that kind of experience to happen. The food on the plates does not particularly leap at your face crying out: "Look, I'm cool!" So you may concentrate on other things and at the end of the meal you don't feel your mind has been hijacked by the chef (which can be an interesting experience in some cases, it all depends on the chef). I think loving good food is, primarily, not an affair of recording things. It is first and foremost the ability to surrender to pleasure and the joy of sharing in the most nonintellectual, primitive, shamanic and cave-people-like way.

Sour cream is virtually nonexistent in France. Very hard to find. Bridélice is calorie-reduced cream with thickeners added. It is slightly sour, like crème fraîche, so that is why your husband thought it was sour cream. It is not technically crème fraîche, hence the different name. (You may find a similar product under the name "crème allégée".) Is it double cream you want on your pumpkin pie? Use a product called "crème semi-épaisse", sold in small cartons. It does not have the sourness of crème fraîche. Or use whipped "crème liquide" or "crème fleurette".

Tête de veau is calf's head, boned and rolled up and boiled in a vegetable stock. Eaten warm with a sauce.

No, I was too absorbed by the conversation with my dining companion and I didn't even think of taking a picture. I'll gladly go back though.

Tiny baby eels.

One precision: I do not know what "head cheese" precisely means in English, I mean if it refers to beef or pork. In French things are clear: "fromage de tête" (literal translation of head cheese) is pig's head terrine (or pig brawn), "museau vinaigrette" aka "salade de museau" is beef snout. Both are delicious and taste rather similar, the pig version being a bit softer and the beef version slightly crunchier. Pig is diced, or served as a slab, and beef is thinly sliced. Both are dressed in the same vinaigrette, or rémoulade: lots of mustard, lots of shallots, lots of black pepper and vinegar.

Thanks Julot, your comments are spot on. I went to L'Astrance last week and we took the L'Astrance menu, 170 euros I believe. Well worth the price. But perhaps it is only served at lunch.

Though I am not sharing John's disbelief in L'Astrance's qualities, I should mention that the experience you are going to get there is radically different from the one you will get at the other two. L'Astrance is quiet, discrete, aerial, the contrary of show-offy. It is like a breath of fresh air, the place to get a rest from the sometimes overpowering experience of dining at Parisian three-stars. It feels like lying on a sandy beach caressed by a nice breeze and recovering after attending a few elephant ballets. I have heard from various places that the place does not deserve three stars, I do think it does deserve three stars precisely for the reasons I mentioned. Or if you want to stay in the other category, why not try Ledoyen or Guy Savoy?

The original location on rue du Bourg-Tibourg is the nicest.