![]() Un poêle, the masculine noun, is a stove, as in a wood-burning stove. Chefs Salles and Montagné suggest using une poêle, ovale de préférence. ![]() ![]() With my fish scored and seasoned, it was time to bring on the butter! As described in La grande cuisine illustrée, à la Meunière is a preparation of few ingredients, essentially referring to any fish prepared in melted butter. There’s a lot of flavor in the head and bones, so cook your fresh fish whole if you can. The fishmonger at Whole Foods was kind enough to scale and ebarber my fish, so I only needed to score it before seasoning inside and out with kosher salt and pepper.Īlso, unlike Chef Louis in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, resist the urge to cut off the head. The online Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française, along with my pocket-sized French-English dictionary, were key to decoding words like ebarber (take off the fins) and ciseler (score the skin). 627).Ĭhallenge number one was translating unfamiliar culinary terms from French to English. Instead of trying to make one of the many dishes that call for one or two spoonfuls of eight different sauces–I don’t think I own enough sauce pans for that!–I went with simple preparations for trout and asparagus that would let me focus on technique: Truite à la Meunière (p.214) with a side of Pointes d’Asperges à la Chantilly (p. These dishes scaled down the heavy sauces and ornate garnishes of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy in favor of lighter sauces that enhanced rather than masked the flavors of their expensive ingredients. Published in 1902 in Monaco, La grande cuisine illustrée is emblematic of the French haute cuisine that emerged in nineteenth century France in the ritzy hotels and restaurants of the Belle Époque. ![]() For an added challenge, I decided to dive into classic French cooking and test my translation skills with La grande cuisine illustrée : sélection raisonnée de 1500 recettes de cuisine transcendante by Prosper Salles and Prosper Montagné. Naturally, then, when it came to my entry into the Great Rare Books Bake Off, I gravitated to the many preparations for fish. I grew up on the Great Lakes and then spent most of my adult life in Louisiana, so I’ve never been more than a few city blocks from major bodies of water. If it lives beneath the waves, I’m willing to fry it and try it. ![]()
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