Ptipois

Whatever the source, he was lucky enough to get newly-gathered fleur de sel and it probably still was a bit damp in the bag. If he had bought from the same source a few weeks later, there would hardly have been any violet smell, and no taste at all. Sometimes you get new fleur de sel, that happens.

Your grandmother was perfectly right. One is not supposed to drink water while eating couscous, though a sip of thé à la menthe or some wine is perfectly acceptable. Just look at what happens to couscous after a few minutes when you've poured the broth onto it and the vision speaks for itself.

Everybody drinks water. Even at lunch. But not much of it, if you look closely. These guys at some point have had to emancipate themselves from their mothers, who may well have kept telling them "Ne bois pas en mangeant", as so many French mothers have done for time immemorial. Drinking water in restaurants, especially at lunch, is also a by-product of the recent avoidance of wine (more and more people don't drink wine at lunch because it ruins their afternoon and they can't work).

Oh, now that I know it can help protecting the wild horses, I'm even going to like fleur de sel de Camargue!

Legally, no restaurateur, big or small, can refuse to serve a carafe d'eau. That's part of the 15 % service tax on your check. Now some just give you a dirty look when you ask but they can't refuse. Actually, drinking water while eating is not encouraged in French culture. It is supposed to slow down digestion, and BTW drinking iced water is supposed to ruin your stomach. Drinking water after eating is considered better for you.

The seafood terrine : I have no particular ideas, but try Dalloyau, they're reliable and their seafood terrines look nice. The spice bread: I don't know what you mean by this — do you mean gingerbread, "pain d'épices"? In that case go to a specialty shop and get some pain d'épices de Dijon. Street markets often have a stall dedicated to that kind of product.

The subtle sensation of violets can only be felt when the salt is newly collected. As the salt dries, it disappears. Fleur de sel is almost never commercialized while the violet smell is still in it. And this particularity is only for fleur de sel from the Atlantic coast. There is absolutely no violet smell in fleur de sel de Camargue, which is also a commercial gimmick but at least the Guérande fleur de sel could claim some authenticity in the days when you could get it directly from the producer. Fleur de sel de Camargue was developed when some people realized how much money they could make from it after seeing how well Guérande did. At any rate, whatever is left from the violet smell is reduced to nothing when fleur de sel is used on food. The "foodie" argument is not very pertinent when you figure how much some foodies will pay for overhyped gimmicks. Indeed fleur de sel, when it is sold quite dry and far away from the marsh, IS a sales gimmick, certainly not worth its price. However I will certainly not blame the paludiers from Guérande and Batz-sur-Mer for setting this up, for this gimmick very probably saved the marshes from destruction and development. About twenty years ago, the salt marshes were threatened because the grey salt was not profitable enough. If the paludiers have managed to save their jobs, their craft and their produce through overcharging for dried-up fleur de sel, so much the better for everybody. If they hadn't done that, maybe their wonderful grey salt would have disappeared and that would have been a dramatic loss.

Indeed it is not. It is mostly interesting because of its texture and, such as it is commercialized, has no particular taste in itself, or rather any difference in taste is conditioned by the texture. Texture is what I buy it for, but I always go for the cheapest and I prefer grey salt in general. I used to gather fleur de sel from the salt marshes of Guérande in the late 70's, when staying with a friend who had a few "oeillets", i.e. patches of salt marsh to exploit. We would work the traditional way: first, I'd collect the thin layer of fleur de sel from the surface of the water in a sort of rectangular spade, and throw it onto a heap on the ground. Then, when I had collected all the surface layer, he'd rake the bottom of the marsh to get the grey salt. The fleur de sel, when new, had a pinkish color and a very strong smell of violet. That's when it has all its mineral and organic principles, which it loses after a few weeks. Only fresh fleur de sel was supposed to be commercialized and used; as it whitened, it lost much of its interest. Later, in the 1980's, I suppose the salt makers of Guérande and other places too discovered the economic potential of fleur de sel, and they began to sell it as a luxury product notwithstanding the loss of its specific virtues. To me, it makes no sense to buy fleur de sel for a fortune when it is past its prime, since then it is nothing but salt, albeit with an interesting texture. Grey salt ages much better.

That's right, children. These cute things are pots de crème allright, and once empty they become pots à crème. And I think the teacher is going to try them (for pedagogic reasons).

Tablier de sapeur is, of course, a traditional lyonnais dish. Not a chef invention. I suppose that its color and aspect remotely recall what a fireman's apron looked like in the 19th century. Raisab — chef poetry, yes. That can be quite a thing. However, things are not so bad as they used to be in the late 80s and 90s. Names seem to have shortened up a bit, except in some places. When i thought of "cuisine French" I wasn't thinking of literal translations on chef-invented names. Even I have trouble figuring them out at times I also think that posh restaurant menus are often printed on large sheets of paper, and that the titles need to cover as much of that white surface as possible. That might be a reason. That is also due to the fact that chef cuisine is "assembly line" cuisine, i.e. elements assembled on the plate, so there needs to be a description of each element. And if poetry comes in, there you have it. Andouillette grillée frites is just what it says it is. Once things start piling up on the plate, more ink has to be poured too.

Thank you. If food writing keeps on really not feeding me too well, I can always teach cuisine French.

To clarify. - These pastry concoctions are not called "têtes des nègres" but "têtes de nègre". Their meaning is really as politically incorrect as was first suspected, no meaning of mushroom caps or anything there. They are from a time when everyday language was a less sensitive issue. - They are not specifically Alsatian but generally French. They tend to disappear slightly from pastry shops all over France but if there is a region where they will hang on when all other têtes-de-nègre have disappeared elsewhere, that must be Alsace. Actually they are not so much disappearing as being renamed: têtes-de-nègre tend to become têtes-de-choco. Except in Alsace, of course. However, the famous brown-cap cèpe mushroom, bolet tête-de-nègre, has not been renamed yet and doesn't seem ready to be. - Due to their round shape, they are noted for an uneven cooking of the French meringue that is their main element. Hence the soft texture of the meringue inside while the outside is crunchy and dipped in ganache, then in flaked chocolate. Another version involves hollowed-out French meringues filled and pasted together two by two with chocolate mousse. Same dipping in ganache and chocolate flakes.

I've never seen those large rattes on markets. Only in private vegetables gardens in Auvergne and the Cévennes. They taste definitely very different from the modern mass-cultivated rattes (which I loathe).

I would not recommend a mix since Robuchon-style purée and just purée are two distinctly different dishes. I think Moby's post (which I hadn't read yet when I sent mine) summed up my lengthy point very concisely. If you want robuchon purée, use the potatoes robuchon recommends. If you want true french purée, use bintjes or another starchy equivalent.

BF15 are more suitable for purée than rattes are, but the problem is that finding good-quality BF15 is not easy. Organic shops will rather carry other varieties. Rattes for purée are a funny idea only a three-star chef could possibly have, or maybe it's a deliberate tweak. Both will yield a denser, stickier mass than regular bintjes or other mealy potatoes, and if you use a blender, even at low speed, you must be ready for potato glue. I'd choose (as I wrote) a large organic charlotte, when it has had time to develop properly as a good all-purpose potato. When bintjes are unavailable, of course. Bintjes remain the best choice for me, though they have to be first-quality. My very personal opinion is that Robuchon's purée may be very famous, but it is not the purée to end all purées. It is competition food, a bit show-offy with all that butter and mystery surrounding it, but I'll take a good home-made traditional French purée with a reasonable amount of butter, i.e. poor people's purée, any time. Robuchon-style purée (and star-chef purée in general) is different from the ancestral French purée. It is more like some kind of potato and butter sauce. It is also much less digestible, the main characteristic of a proper purée being its lightness on the stomach, and thus it is a less good accompaniment for main dishes (better as a dish on its own). In old-time France, nobody at home could ever afford to put so much butter in a purée anyway. In a poor household it would have been unthinkable, in a bourgeois household it would have been offending to the principles of home economy, in aristocratic households it would have been either one or the other depending of how well the family did financially (from hereditary poverty with holes in the château roof to the benefits of clever business during the early 19-century restoration). So Robuchon-style potato purée is clearly a modern, cheffy, desincarnated avatar of the old French dish. And so, to get back to more modest but un-grandcheffed French purée, it is based on bintjes, milk, and butter. Large chunks of peeled bintjes simmered in a mixture of milk and a little water until tender. Salt added in the end. Drain well, rice in moulin à légumes while still hot (NEVER a blender and careful with the hand masher, unless you use it quite vertically, with no sideways or circular motion. Though with bintjes you don't have to be concerned with the potatoes getting gooey.). First add a little cooking liquid while mixing with a fork, then add butter in the end, I'd say 1/10 to 1/5 butter to the potato mass. Don't overmix, and add lots of pepper. And here comes the secret... The real purpose of bintjes in purée is indeed their relative tastelessness and their unique texture. Other potatoes (especially rattes) just have too much flavor and make up for this "potato sauce" aspect I described above. They soak in the butter, so you have to use an indecent lot of it. The bintje actually carries the butter flavor much better than any other potato, and that's exactly what lies at the heart of French-style purée: lightness, mildness, a comfortable fluffy smoothness (but not too much of it), and butter as a flavoring, not as the basic principle of the recipe with a little potato to give it body. When the purée is made that way, the butter taste is experienced "on top" of the potato basis and is not overpowering, but it is very present, much more than in the chic recipe. It is then recommended to use the best farm butter, made from raw milk, that you can find. A purée made with bintjes will enable you to taste the difference, a purée made with sticky potatoes won't. As a result, you don't have to add much of it.

I understand. But it will certainly not hurt if some of you "us" decide to enrich the vocabulary by rectifying the term to something, for once, more semantically correct. Besides, explaining why one is saying "pot à crème" instead of "pot de crème" would probably have a dazzling effect, socially speaking. Since "pot à crème" is one word in our vocabulary, and it's so close to the English equivalent, it is all the easier to get it right.

Yeah, I know the feeling. At least you'd have the pleasure of visiting the original place. Diptyque has been on bd Saint-Germain since 1967 or so. The place has an atmosphere.

How much heat can they stand? You could make chawan-mushi in them, or simply a royale. You may also make set jellies, mousses, and fools.

Thanks. There was no joke. It was a real question. So you meant "pots à crème". Cups meant for custard. I wonder why they are called "pots de crème" in English. For everyone's information, "de" means that the container already contains the stuff it is meant for, for instance when you buy un pot de crème fraîche (a jar of crème fraîche). The stress is put on the containee. "À" puts the stress on the container, the empty pot, supposed contain custard when it is in use.

Thanks. There was no joke. It was a real question. So you meant "pots à crème". I wonder why they are called "pots de crème" in English. For everyone's information, "de" means that the container already contains the stuff it is supposed to contain, for instance when you buy un pot de crème fraîche (a jar of crème fraîche). The stress is put on the containee. "À" means that the stress it put on the container, i.e. the empty pot, supposed to contain custard when it is in use. So you never buy "pots de crème" when they're empty, but "pots à crème". Perhaps it would be appropriate to call them "custard cups" or "custard pots", since that's what they are.

Exactly. Or the chefs keep some precious details to themselves (which is particularly true of pastry chefs, but not only). The "ratte" detail puzzles me. Of course the primitive "ratte" potatoes that used to be grown in private gardens in the South and Center of France were top quality, and probably good for purée. They sometimes reached large sizes that could make them suitable for mashing. But they are a rarity, and whoever should try to make a purée from the modern "rattes" (small, tough, slightly bitter little things that go green in no time) would end up with a sticky mess. Better choose a mealy potato like bintje or, if available, very large, organic charlottes.

As a native French, I'll have to ask: what are "pots de crème"?

Since you're mentioning packaging, I remember something that should please you. Le Diptyque is a forty-year-old, very Parisian perfume company that has one shop in boulevard Saint-Germain (left-hand sidewalk, walking from place Maubert and métro Maubert-Mutualité to the Institut du monde arabe and the river) and recently has begun to sell at other locations in Paris (grands magasins, deco shops). They were the first to launch a line of unisex perfumes and fragrances in the 1960's, with a unique, black-on-white, hand-sketched design. They're still carrying on with a collection of about thirty fragrances, all very original and high quality. They also manufacture the nicest fragrant candles you can find, plus a few soaps and a very rare toilet vinegar. Not much related to cooking but Le Diptyque is well worth a visit. They, and L'Artisan Parfumeur, are the only perfume makers I need. Le Diptyque has wonderful gift packaging, overlapping silk papers of different shades.

I'll second that hypothesis. It is quite possible that the restaurant recipe is different. I too have heard of a ration of half/half butter/potato from a reliable source.

Well BHV has five storeys, the basement is for hardware and tools. Just take three escalators, the kitchen department is on the 3rd floor. It is not particularly jammed and is one of my favorite shopping places, with amazing choice.