John Whiting

Oysters, too! Sadly absent from my birthday dinner was Hugh Macdonald, designer of my website and long-time companion on my travels. Hugh and Meg have gone off to Najac to restore the old Notary's House. I am green with envy. But in the midst of redistributing the mediaeval dust, they did not forget the friends they left behind. This morning I took delivery of a dozen Loch Fyne oysters and a tub of smoked mussels! Tonight we shall partake of Huîtres Marinières, an extravagance wickedly suggested by Colin Spencer in his indispensible Fish Cookbook. As luxuries go, I would rate it above caviar. It’s a simple matter of simmering onions, shallots and garlic in olive oil, adding the oysters along with a very generous splash of white wine, and simmering until the oysters open. It’s made simpler still by the huge frying pan with a tight lid that I bought several years ago at Dehillerin, the great Paris cookery shop: Remove the oysters... ...add a nub of butter and reduce the juices to ambrosial essence of seaside euphoria.

Mary has her own method of making waves; she'll share it when she gets back from the Food Commission, where she helps to make waves of a different sort.Mary did warn us that the color was artificial, but most of us, including me, ate it anyway. The plate with the uneaten blue icing was hers. I polished it off later when she wasn't looking.

I was waiting for someone to pick up on that. Look again. It's an optical illusion stemming from the fact that we're seeing the inside of half a lighthouse, but interpret it as the outside, which is what we expect to see. Whole books have been written about tricks of perspective such as this. Adam, you're not alone; I puzzled over the photo for more than a few seconds before I realized what tricks my eyes were playing. Is there an analogy to be drawn with the nasty tricks the food industry plays on us with artificial flavors?

No apologies--puns are obligatory in our household!It's 1am in London and tired old whitings should should get out of the swim. Good night!

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As I mentioned somewhere above in the midst of all that verbiage, an old-fashioned wide-mouthed pottery mixing bowl is almost exactly the same shape as an authentic cassole. I used one for making a cassoulet with local ingredients in the north of Scotland.

"By popular demand", Mary has written up the terrine recipe: EDIT: Mary's the real cook in our house. She's written six food books--and she bakes!

You appear to be at home with the limerick!

I worked in Amsterdam several times, but not since Kees opened Marius. I know his cooking from Het Pomphuis, the wonderful restaurant he ran in Ede. My info about Marius comes from his old Chez Panisse friend, Charles Shere.From my early childhood on Cape Cod, lighthouses held a fascination for me. Later, in my more misanthropic moments, lighthouse keeping had a strong appeal, but I had to satisfy myself with a bit of light housekeeping.

We go out. One cassoulet a year is enough!

And if you, Marco, had been closer than Devon, you would have been among them!EDIT: The Bandol was smooth and mellow beyond description--or at least beyond mine. If I consulted the Davis wheel, I could come up with something pretentious.

Friends - I don't know when this blog will be locked, but before it happens, I want to thank you all for your generous response. Nothing stimulates the adrenaline like the constant feedback of a knowledgable and enthusiastic audience! It made the simultaneous cooking and writing a joy rather than a chore.

Denouement Since my 70th birthday, the living room centerpiece each year has been the lighthouse that Mary had secretly constructed for the occasion by model-maker Kath Dalmeny . It’s full of symbolism, the details of which would put even a Freudian to sleep. The tomatade on toast quickly disappears; I’ve barely time to photograph the first plate. The half-dozen guests include some of my closest associates: composer James Wood, sound engineer Mike Skeet and international author/producer/gadfly Warren Leming. Here we are, helping ourselves to the rémoulade. Come on, Mike, cheer up! Warren, delayed by London Transport, makes up for it by reading a birthday poem he’d written for me on the slow train. Finally, the moment of truth. It’s too dark, crusty and thick for some tastes, but it’s the way I like it. All that collagen in the pigs’ feet makes it stick densely together. With only a kilo of dried beans to almost five kilos of meat, Atkins Diet followers—if there are any left—could call it hi-fat, lo-carb! It’s accompanied by the sacred Bandol: Next, Mary’s architectural triumph, the terrine des fruits… …followed by the cake, a stormy sea surmounted by a lighthouse. (Having grown up in Provincetown, my early sensory memories are of lighthouses and foghorns.) It’s a rich white Christmas cake full of candied fruits and nuts, similar to one my mother used to make, but this recipe came to Mary’s mother via a GI billeted in their road in Grimsby during WWII. Finally, the desolation of a deserted battlefield. Roll on 2007!

Chufi, I'm working on my final report, but took a moment out to look at the blog online. You live in Amsterdam. Do you know Kees Elfring's restaurant, Maurius, fifty meters or so from the Zoutkeetsgracht terminus of the number 3 tramline?

Comfort Food Even the most sophisticated and demanding of gourmets is likely to have a comfort food, the psychological equivalent of the maternal breast. As a child, mine was peanut butter. As proof of the minimal effect that so-called maturity has on one’s basic needs, I have only progressed as far as peanut sauce. Mine is shamelessly adapted from Hugh Carpenter’s Pacific Flavors and takes fusion to new depths (or heights, if you’re in yogic headstand). These are my ingredients: peanuts Chinese chili sauce soya sauce balsamic vinegar sesame oil hoi sin sauce a few cherry tomatoes garlic fresh ginger fresh coriander Throw a handful of peanuts into a blender and roughly pulverize. Add a generous dollop of each of the five bottled sauces—the proportion is entirely a personal decision. Roughly chop a couple of garlic cloves and add. Grate in a generous amount of fresh ginger. Add lots of fresh coriander. (I keep it bunched up in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer and slice off what I need.) Blend at high speed. If the mixture doesn’t circulate in the blender, add another cherry tomato or two. Empty the mixture into a bowl, cover and microwave for a minute. It needn’t be cooked, only heated. For lunch most days I do a quick pressure-cooked vegetable stew or shredded stir fry and add the sauce on top, stirring it in. I only make enough sauce for one meal—if I made it in larger quantities, I would come downstairs in the middle of the night and finish it off. ----------------------- For grating, I use the indispensible Microplane. Originally invented as a woodworking took (hence its name), it consists of a series of tiny razor-sharp blades, all (except the third) pointing in the same direction There are several degrees of coarseness. Reading from the right, the finest is perfect for nutmegs, working quickly and without clogging. The next is ideal for fresh ginger; peeling is unnecessary, as most of the skin folds back as you grate and is easily disposed of. The third, a two-way grater, works quickly and well with hard cheeses. And finally, there’s a thin slicer, which requires particular care. In fact, any of them can easily add human flesh to your recipe. There’s a TV out-take of Rick Stein demonstrating their use and looking at the camera as he warns of the need for special care. Suddenly he yells and sticks his finger in his mouth.

Cassoulet final assembly The moment of truth has arrived! The meats, fat and stock are assembled and warming up from their storage in the fridge. The various stocks will be combined and heated. A large head of garlic will be peeled and pulverized in the blender with melted pig fat and some of the hot stock. The dry bread will be made into crumbs I’m using the largest cassole from the nest I bought from Mssr. Not. (I call them my Not Pots.) The saga of their acquisition is here. The bottom of largest pot is lined with the pork skin. The meats are combined in one large bowl A layer of beans goes in the bottom over the skins, then a layer of meat, then of beans, then of meat and a final smooth layer of beans. It’s sprikled with the bread crumbs and liberally drizzled with the duck fat. Into a gas mark 3 oven (not preheated; it could crack the pot). And then three hours of waiting, with periodic breaking up of the crust. Tomorrow when it’s reheated it will get another layer of bread crumbs and duck fat and allowed to set to a deep golden brown. ---------------- This is likely to be my last communication until Monday. Our guests might be insulted if I were to leave the table periodically to post photos and provide a running commentary. Big Brother this ain’t!

Celerie-rave remoulade Richard Olney wrote the recipe I used to follow, but Alice Waters’ version with mayonnaise in her Vegetable Cookbook is more luxurious. And when did I ever eschew luxury?! This is my even more self-indulgent version: 1 celeriac (celery root) Juice plus zest of ½ lemon 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard ½ cup aïoli (garlic mayonnaise) ½ cup crème fraiche or sour cream Chopped parsley Peel the celeriac and cut into julienne. (The shredding disc in a food processor produces the most easily chewable dimension.) Put it in a *big* bowl—the mixing is messy. In a separate bowl, mix the mustard, the lemon and part of the mayonnaise and cream. Stir it into the celeriac, adding more mayonnaise and cream as you go to get the consistency you want. A celeriac root can vary so much in size that precise measures are misleading. This is one of those happy recipes to which you can always add more as you go along. Aïoli I make it unashamedly in a blender, using the whole egg: 1 egg ¼ tsp mustard powder 1 tbl lemon juice 1 cup olive oil Several garlic cloves Salt and pepper Start with the first three ingredients and slowly dribble in the oil. When about 2/3 of it has been emulsified, it will thicken to the point where the textbooks tell you to keep stopping and scraping down the sides of the jar. This takes forever. My method is to *carefully* insert a disposable wooden chopstick down the side of the jar while the motor is running and rotate it slowly back and forth around the entire outer edge while you dribble in the oil. The blender should be positioned where you can see straight down into it, so that you can see whether the pool of oil in the center is being drawn in. WARNING: if you were to drop the chopstick, you could damage the blender. I’ve been doing this for twenty years and the worst I’ve produced is an occasional woodchip in the mayonnaise. Crush the garlic and stir it into the mayonnaise after you’ve transferred it to a container. Season carefully—the amount of garlic you’ve added will affect the apparent saltiness. Put the rémoulade in a bowl and top with the parsley.

Tomatade A few years ago, when Mary & I were visiting our dear friends the Ricchiardis in Torino, Constantino took me to a cheap Saturday market in a somewhat disreputable part of town, the sort of place where the flies hold a convention and you don’t ask the butcher when he washed his hands. I browsed around, mentally converting lire to pounds and then double-checking my figures—they were giving the stuff away! I came away from a shabby little stall with two kilos of sun-dried tomatoes for a sum which would have bought me a decorative little gift packet at Fortnum & Mason’s. (Although you could buy them in Piemonte, they didn’t figure prominently in the cuisine.) Fearing that they would go moldy long before I got through them, I packed them into a snap-seal plastic bag and tucked them away in the freezer. Some months later, when making up Lulu Peyraud’s tapenade (Richard Olney, Lulu’s Provençal Kitchen), I had a sudden inspiration. How about a sun-dried tomato tapenade, partially substituting them for the olives? After fiddling with the proportions and the method, I came up with the following, which more or less follows Lulu’s original in other respects. Tapenade comes from the Provençal word for capers, so I’ve called this concoction tomatade. Why not? 8 oz sun-dried tomatoes and black olives, roughly half-and-half 2 anchovies or 4 fillets 1 ½-2 tablespoons capers 1-3 cloves pressed garlic pinch of cayenne 1 teaspoon finely chopped basil leaves 3-4 tablespoons olive oil Pour boiling water over the tomatoes to just cover; leave for a few moments and then drain. (The longer you leave them, the softer they’ll be, but the more flavor will be drawn out. I like to get them just soft enough so they won’t take forever to absorb the oil.) When cool enough to handle, chop them roughly. Reduce to a rough paste in a food processor along with the other ingredients, except for the olive oil. Add the oil a little at a time, checking the consistency as you go. It should be homogeneous and spreadable, but not sloppy. The anchovies may be preserved in olive oil or canned, either with olive oil or salt. If the latter, rinse under running water and remove any salt crystals. Likewise the capers, which may be bottled either in vinegar or salt. How much salt you add to the recipe, if any, will be determined by the saltiness of these two ingredients. Cayenne and garlic to taste. Don’t be shy—some rough Provençal types are really macho about it! Use the best olive oil, of course; it’s a prominent part of the flavor. Note: This mixture will improve for at least a week, but it probably won’t be around that long. It needn’t be refrigerated if the weather is cool. The blanched sun-dried tomatoes will continue to soak up the olive oil for several days, so don’t hesitate to stir in more if the mixture becomes dry. PROCESSING NOTE: Food processor blades start to get dull very quickly. New blades may chop almost as fine as a blender, but old blades will only chop roughly. For some tasks this is an advantage. If you want versatility, keep your old blade and buy a new one, reserving it for very fine, almost liquidized mixtures. And keep it out of the accidental reach of fingers! PS: This time I bought semi-dried tomatoes from the Fresh Olive Company in the Borough Market. Moistly packed in olive oil, they didn’t need soaking.

You were just in time! When I checked later, the price had gone up almost 100% to the outrageous sum of 99p!I emailed Mirabel the URL of my write-up and she replied, sadly, that without a car or a travelling companion, the French D-roads are no longer accessible to her. What a grand lady she is! To have written such a food classic when her reputation lay in garden history! If any of our readers share a passion for gardens as well as food, check her out. Her Secret Gardens of France is a vicarious journey to be treasured.

TOMORROW’S MENU Pain grillée avec tomatade Celerie-rave rémoulade Cassoulet Terrine des fruits avec coulis de framboise Birthday cake (White Christmas cake) Coffee - Co-operative Quebradon, Huilia, Columbia, Dark Roast (Monmouth Coffee Company) Chocolate brandy cake [recipes to follow] ----------------------------------------- DRINKS Kir Domaine Tempier Bandol, Cuvée speciale la Tourtine 1988 Leopold Sommer Gewürztraminer Eiswein 1993 Chateau Fontpinot Grande Champagne, Premier Cru du Cognac, Tres Vielle reserve du Chateau l'Eau Normale de Londres ----------------- Kir is customarily made with Bourgogne Aligoté and crème de cassis. It was a traditional drink revived by Canon Kir, the Mayor of Beaune, as a rescue operation during a year when the vin blanc ordinaire was virtually undrinkable. That gives me the right not to be too fussy about which white wine I use. Domaine Tempier Bandol is a favorite of Kermit Lynch, who made it the favored accompaniment to a cassoulet among the Chez Panisse crowd. This is one of their best. We were served it as a rarity at a Wine Society Dinner in Hesdin; the next day I discovered that their local outlet had a dozen bottles on offer as a bin end at half price. The cognac was a gift from Edouard Cointreau when a press group I was with stayed at the chateau. We had a taste from their tiny barrel of pre-phylloxera cognac, of which there is a miniscule portion in this bottle. I’m sipping it as I write. Not bad.

The only tip I can offer is to find a bean you like and stick with it. The customary cassoulet bean was a broan bean rather like a lima, until the haricot was brought to France via Spain in the 16th century from the New World (new to whom?). These days the lingot is favored, such as the canolini from Italy. The ones I'm using this year I bought in October in Rome at the Organic Fair beside the Tiber next to the Ponte Sant'Angelo, but we didn't go there especially for that purpose. When a dish has so many conflicting traditions, there's no point in not making it with whatever beans you prefer.

I promise, it's not fatal--I've eaten it myself and I'm still here to tell the tale.

Vegan Cassoulet In 2001 I served cassoulet to a mixed table of carnivores and vegetarians. For the latter, I came up with the following, which I wrote down a few days later:

The cassoulet: this year’s preparation The various elements have been prepared separately as follows: Duck legs: Roasted slowly, covered, in the oven. The fat and juices are separated, the meat is removed from the bones and cut into bite-sized chunks and the bones then go towards making the stock. Sausages: Roasted slowly in the oven, covered, to at least 70ºC, cut up into 1” lengths and refrigerated. The juices then go into the pressure cooker with the… Pigs’ feet: Pressure-cooked with at least a cup of stock/water for about two hours. The meat is removed from the bones and refrigerated. Stock and fat are refrigerated. Pork belly: Slow-cooked on a gas ring with a heat diffuser in a heavy covered casserole/dutch oven, along with a roughly chopped onion and carrot, a few cloves, several cloves of garlic, and a couple of bay leaves. Brown it first, then simmer it in some of the already existing stock, so that the flavors integrate and intensify. This may take a couple of hours, after which the skin with its thick layer of fat is separated and the rest boned (if necessary) and cut into bite-size pieces. Roughly strain the stock. It will be very thick and rich; it can be thinned as necessary for the final assembly. Refrigerate. Shoulder of mutton: This is the most complex part of the meat preparation, but well worth the effort. It’s based on Richard Olney’s cassoulet recipe in his French Menu Cookbook. Beans: Keep it simple. Soak them overnight and check for defective beans and foreign objects (Don’t go overboard; these days the beans themselves will be foreign objects). Cover with water, bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer, checking regularly that there is plenty of water. The cooking time will vary according to how old they are. I’ve had beans from the farm that were done in less than an hour, and others from a supermarket so old that they never did soften. That’s why I don’t like to cook any of the meat along with the beans: when the beans are ready, the meat is likely to be overdone or underdone. I’m not a chef running a kitchen; I don’t have to use my time efficiently, so I’m happy to do jobs one at a time. Don’t bother to cook the beans in stock. There will be bean water left over, and if it’s stock, then there’s that much flavor that hasn’t gone into the cassoulet. In the final assembly, the flavors will have plenty of time to integrate. The beans should be close to the point of disintegrating on the tongue, but not quite—a touch of al dente is desirable. They’ll be getting several more hours of slow cooking. -------------------------------- There’s a final naughty ingredient to be prepared in advance. In a food processor, combine ½ pound of (warm) pork fat with a dozen cloves of garlic. This insidious suggestion comes from Paula Wolfert by way of the Sheres; mixed with the meat stews prior to assembly, it transports the cassoulet ineluctably to the higher realms of Dante’s Paradiso. Final note: Of course the pressure cooker isn't essential. A heavy stockpot and long cooking will suffice.

It's on Fortis Green Road across from Sainsbury and a few doors north from the Odeon.