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A review by Lydia Itoi
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Cooking by the book
The Odd Couple of French Cuisine
A review by Lydia Itoi
published in the San Jose Mercury News, May 29, 2002
Last year, peripatetic French superstar Alain Ducasse stormed New York with his extravagant, not to mention exorbitant, cuisine. This year, he is crossing the pond with Françpose Bernard, the doyenne of easy cooking. This culinary Odd Couple teamed up to write The Good Cuisine, a "simple to spectacular" study of 52 of the most popular ingredients in France by a master chef and a quintessential French home cook.
Ducasse and Bernard each contribute two recipes for ever ingredient chapter, then comment on each other's work. The result is a spirited exchange of she says tomato, he says tomahto. Bernard, bless her, is the busy cook's advocate. Practicality is her mantra, always with a sharp eye on the bottom line. She objects to excessive fuss and tries to keep dirty pots to a minimum.
In this book aimed toward home cooking, Ducasse is clearly not offering food as it would be made in his restaurants. But even in these simpler recipes, Ducasse is still a three-star chef. He juxtaposes cooked and raw textures in vegetable medleys, often saucing them with meat juices, and demonstrates an easy way to cook fish fillets between two plates. He sees nothing wrong with calling for violin zucchini or two kinds of shallots for one oyster casserole. The complexity of Ducasse's recipes ranges from the simple, almost reactionary statement of a baked potato lumpily mashed with a fork to foie gras and pigeon drumsticks done up in pastry.
The asparagus chapter says it all. Bernard's fancy-sounding Milanese asparagus is just blanced asparagus under a sprinkling of Parmesan, browned in the oven. So simple it hardly required a recipe, yet delicious. Ducasse's Parmesan cheese asparagus, on the other hand, involved 3 pounds of beef chuck and oxtail cooked separately for a total of five hours, the meat ultimately discarded. His Parmesan asparagus came cloaked in rich elixir of beef haunted by the unexpected presence of steeped olives. All this for a side dish? Maybe not on a weeknight.
Ducasse made his first chocolate mousse from one of Bernard's books, and there is clearly a great deal of mutual respect. His collaboration with a home cook confirms what I suspected ever since my first glorious meal at his Paris restaurant: Beneath the glitter and gastronomic pyrotechnics lies a perfect roast chicken. In The Good Cuisine, he is paying homage to his roots in the food of everyday life, but he can't help trying to elevate it at every turn. Watching Ducasse deconstruct ordinary dishes and put them together again is a lesson in everyday creativity. His hints for refining techniques are the equivalent of an extra-credit course at Le Cordon Bleu. The message seems to be that food does not have to be elaborate to be good, but a little extra effort (and quite a bit of butter) can turn dinner into delight.
Bernard's comments on Ducasse's recipes are mostly pure appreciation, giving an artist his due. However, she does occasionally cross off the more expensive items from Ducasse's shopping list and deem certain steps too cumbersome.
This book does have serious drawbacks, most of which can be attributed to the problems of translating across language and culture. To a U.S. audience, especially those for whom "simple cooking" means five ingredients thrown together in 15 minutes or less, these two opposite chefs seem cut from the same fluted mold. Maybe it is the foreign names we associate with high-priced menus, but the fact is, simple cooking to a French cook is considered fancy fare here, even easy classics like Steak au poivre or Coquilles St. Jacques. The Good Cuisine does contain many truly easy and delicious recipes by both chefs, but it does not help that they are buried under others that reinforce the image of French food as fussy and difficult. Each recipe is rated for expense as well as difficulty, but both can be somewhat skewed for a U.S. audience, given differences in ingredient prices and presumed baseline cooking skill.
Another problem is complexity under the guise of simplicity. Each recipe takes no more than a page, and some are so short that they look like a tiny hors d'oeuvre on a big white plate. This is accomplished by stringing the ingredients together like beads on a necklace and by packing terse instructions into a single jammed paragraph, a bold capital letter delineating each step. A short-looking recipe can thus involve a surprising number of complications....
The 52 most popular ingredients in France are not necessarily popular, or even common, here. The seafood section is especially alienating for a West Coast cook with limited access to dogfish, hake, whiting and langoustines. With the help of a good fish store or a reference book, the recipes are still useful with local substitutes.
But while too-literal translation can cause a comedy of errors, we adventurous home cooks should not give up. Like travel, encounters with foreign cookbooks pay off in proportion to the effort to overcome communication barriers. The reward in The Good Cuisine is learning about two French views of la cuisine bourgeoise, with good prospects for some spectacular meals in the bargain. Plus, it isn't every day that we can have motherly advice and a three-star chef stirring up the pots.
Recipe from The Good Cuisine for Françoise Bernard's ...
Sea bream with mushroom stuffing
Serves 4
Preparation time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Itoi's commentary: Here Françoise Bernard demonstrates how truly simple yet stunning a stuffed whole fish can be. Alain Ducasse would never settle for less than a gilt-head bream, but given the limitations of the best fish market in my neighborhood, I made do with a glossy, pink-flecked New Zealand snapper. I also incorporated all of Ducasse's suggestions except for the deglazing, so as not to disturb the fish's repose. Snuggled in my oval earthenware dish on a mushroom bed lined with tomato and lemon, the fish came out of the oven like a ray of Mediterranean sunshine on the seashore.
Ingredients:
6 tbsp. milk
½ cup white bread crumbs
4 tbsp. butter, divided use
7 oz. button mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
1 shallot, chopped
1 egg yolk
4 tbsp. chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
1 sea bream, about 2½ lb., scaled and cleaned
Strip of bacon (optional)
¾ cup dry white wine
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Heat the milk and add the bread crumbs. Sauté the mushrooms and shallot in 2 tbsp. butter over medium-high heat. Squeeze the milk out of the bread crumbs. Mix the bread with the egg yolk, parsley, and mushroom mixture. Season with salt and pepper to taste. (Itoi comments: I would also season the fish on all sides.)
Stuff the fish and sew the slit with kitchen string, or simply wrap the string around the fish 3 or 4 times, to keep the stuffing in place. You may also cover the slit with a thin strip of bacon before tying to prevent any stuffing from falling out. Place the fish in a baking dish, pour the wine over the fish, and dot with the rest of the butter. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, then serve directly from the baking dish.
Note by Ducasse: Cook this dish to perfection by choosing an earthenware baking dish and filling it with slices of button mushrooms. The mushrooms will add moisture, which will make the fish juicy. A few slices of lemon and tomato will add a little touch of acidity and fresh flavor to the cooking juice. Deglaze the dish with a bit of chicken stock, a few drops of olive oil for a smooth finish, and some arugula leaves for a tart, peppery flavor.
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