The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season. Richard Olney

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СКАЧАТЬ airiness in a mousseline forcemeat that, having absorbed a maximum of cream to be perfect, would risk collapsing through any further addition….

      This “convergence of the senses” remains the most important lesson I took from The French Menu Cookbook. As Olney emphasizes on nearly every page, exercising one’s sensual powers is what the act of cooking really is. By extension, it is just this sort of attention on the part of the cook that lies behind the transforming pleasure of a fine meal, the very noticeable difference between one prepared by a rote recipe follower and a responsive cook. The sensual language of cooking is what I set about to learn and which I still work to refine today.

      By Olney’s own description, The French Menu Cookbook is a “gastronomic manifesto,” a reflection of his life in the kitchen and at the table over the course of the twenty years he lived in France prior to its publication. In this sense it is a culmination. It is also highly personal. We are invited directly into Olney’s life to learn of his culinary initiation in the kitchen of his Iowa home (“the rock on which my church was built”), and the inspiration he gained from reading and practicing Escoffier. We meet his colleagues and the chefs he admired. We venture into his home kitchen in Provence, where he worked, cooked, and received. It will soon be evident to the reader that this is not merely a cookbook, but rather a diary of how a uniquely gifted cook lived, thought, and sensed. This sets it apart from better known, if to my mind less important books of the period. Look to Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Child, Beck, and Bertholle (originally published nine years prior to The French Menu Cookbook), and you will find a book of recipes applied to occasions. For Olney, the occasion is the recipe for the meal, and the meal bears the mark of a place, a season, a tradition relived in a resonant, new moment around the table. Set in this broader context, Olney’s recipes are removed from abstraction and find their proper habitat in the aesthetic experience of a meal.

      I suspect that at its first publication, many found The French Menu Cookbook to be a difficult, offbeat book, one that perhaps asked too much of the reader. To be sure, Olney proposes no shortcuts, is demanding in his insistence on prime ingredients and is not interested in instructing Americans on the best way to resurrect canned peas if fresh peas are not available. He offers no apologies for his predilection for traditional foods that were, and still are, unappreciated by Americans—lambs’ tripes, pigs’ tails, and calves’ ears and brains, among others—even in these enlightened times. Nevertheless, the reader is never stranded. Olney offers words of caution when the preparation of a menu might “represent a heavy expenditure that may… not justify the result, no matter how glorious.” Most useful is his sensitivity to the position of the cook who, he understands, must often double as host. The workload of the menus is organized and distributed in such a way as to avoid endless or nerve-wracking last-minute preparations. Apart from its broad and foundation-building message, The French Menu Cookbook is so full of tips and concise practical advice that it should be made an indispensable part of any cook’s education. I need only list a few examples to give the flavor:

      ON ROASTING PEPPERS:

       “A heat that is too intense will char the skins before the flesh becomes soft; one that is too gentle will dehydrate the flesh before the skins are loosened.”

      ON TIMING:

       “It is far better to wait for a roast partridge than to risk making it wait.”

      ON THE FIRST STAGES OF BRAISING:

       “The slightest fragment of onion that remains in the pan at this point will inevitably burn while the meat is coloring and leave a bitter taste in the sauce.”

      ON ADJUSTING THE TEMPERATURE OF THE STOCK POT:

       “Even if you are on intimate terms with your stove, unless you are accustomed to this kind of preparation and know the precise intensity of flame necessary, this regulation will require 15 minutes to ½ hour of turning the fire slightly up or down and rechecking a few minutes later.”

      ON COMPATIBILITY :

       “Serve the cèpes toward the end of the salmis service. They marry very well indeed, but the subtlety of each risks being muted by the other’s rich presence. One may, by serving in this way, appreciate them together and enjoy them apart.”

      ON THE ESSENTIALS OF MENU PLANNING:

       “The only thing to remember is that the palate should be kept fresh, teased, surprised, excited all through a meal. The moment there is danger of fatigue, it must be astonished, or soothed into greater anticipation, until the sublime moment of release when one moves away from the table to relax with coffee and an alcool.”

      For those who wish to simply read, imagine, or drool about food, The French Menu Cookbook is an exemplar of evocative, lyrical, and informative food writing. You may read with fascination of dishes of a bygone era, such as woodcock soufflé; calf’s liver with truffled cèpe purée; marinated, rolled boar’s belly hung in the chimney to smoke over smoldering olive wood; pike dumplings; and of “the thrush, whose flesh is as lovely as its song… roasted rare, unemptied but for the gizzard, which may be replaced by a juniper berry.” Discover how to clean a live sea urchin, draw a crayfish, cool your wine, work a drum sieve; learn that the French distinguish three types of skimming of stocks and sauces; and salivate over scrambled eggs with truffles slowly stirred in a bain-marie and venison, spit-roasted over a fruitwood fire. What becomes clear in Olney’s compelling descriptions of these dishes and techniques is that they are pertinently real, not merely part of a past mythology.

      Although his influence will probably never be felt as strongly as it was in the ’70s and ’80s, those formative years of California’s awakening to its culinary promise, we should be reminded that it was because of Olney’s intense convictions that chefs everywhere now respect the seasons, plant their own gardens, shop at local farmer’s markets, roast in the fireplace, make from scratch, flower their salads, and that by sensing while cooking, have discovered their art.

      Paul Bertolli

      February 2002

       US TO UK MEASUREMENTCONVERSION CHART

       Liquids

¼ cup	2fl oz / 60ml
½ cup	4fl oz / 125ml
¾ cup	6fl oz / 175ml
1 cup	8fl oz / 250ml
1¼ cups	10fl oz / 300ml
1½ cups	12fl oz / 350ml
1¾ cups	14fl oz / 400ml
2 cups	16fl oz / 475ml
2½ cups	1 pint / 600ml
3 cups	1¼ pints / 700ml
4 cups	1¾ pints / 1 litre
5 cups	2 pints / 1.25 litres

       Butter, margarine

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