Letters To Bourdain

Dear Chef Bourdain;

I’m down to the last half of the recipes in the book. Of course I took a lot of the low-hanging fruit for the first half, guts night notwithstanding. Now I’m trying to find the stuff for some of the harder-to-find ingredients.

Fuck you and your veal, Chef. Seriously, there’s no single ingredient that you use more than veal. You know, people don’t eat a lot of veal these days, have you noticed? Trying to find the more exotic cuts, most butchers are happy to oblige – if I buy a half a metric ton of it. And the dirty looks I get from other people when I ask for veal – you’d think it was THEIR baby I wanted to serve up on a platter. (Which would probably be fine with my wife.)

Frickin’ veal, chef! Why couldn’t you have gone nuts with like..chicken or pork chops or something?

Davy

Vichyssoise Les Halles

Dear Chef Bourdain;

I’ve never had much reason to celebrate Father’s Day in the past. Without getting bogged down in therapeutic self-revelation, let’s just say my actual father is a shitbird who was far better gone than present, and the nearest analogue I had (my grandfather) was really careful to remind me in many ways that he was not my father and I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking of him that way. So what a strange feeling it was to have a father-figure (my now father-in-law) who is not only worthy of respect and admiration, but also almost universally well-liked. This is the kind of guy you really don’t mind going an extra mile for on Father’s  Day. Or, for fuck’s sake, any day, but certainly this one in particular.

So what do you make for Father’s  Day, chef? Sorry, but the fussier French dishes in Les Halles Cookbook don’t really cut it. I wanted the kind of food that guys typically crave, but infrequently get unless they make it for themselves. Knowing also that my father-in-law has a perhaps strange obsession with coleslaw and corn-on-the-cob, I found more recipes in Ad Hoc At Home than in your book. But I didn’t want to bail on the project entirely, especially since I’m falling a little behind my goal of getting the whole thing done in a year.

So I settled on vichyssoise as a starter. It’s been quite warm lately, so a cold soup seems like a good idea. I decided to smoke some beef ribs (beef being his particular but not-oft-indulged favorite) and make coleslaw, corn-on-the-cob with lime salt and butter emulsion, and asparagus with poached eggs and smoked garlic-sausage. I spent the day before rubbing the ribs and letting them marinate, making the vichyssoise, and for the first time making my own sausage.

Nathan from Ikillit.com helped me with the sausage-making as well as the beer-drinking. He wouldn’t have any of the pork sausage, but we also made chicken and apple sausage, and since he’s murdered and dressed a chicken, that he could have. You know that expression “you don’t want to see the sausage being made”? Well, it’s not quite true. Really, you don’t want to see the cleanup. It’s fucking gruesome. There were literally gobbets of raw ground meat hanging from the wall, the cabinets, the counters…yikes, man.

Anyway, after the effort of making and packing the sausage (not a euphemism) knocking out the vichyssoise was no big deal. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m already planning my next batch of sausage, because it was really, really good. Good and fresh and lively in the way that lets you know what you’ve been missing with store-bought stuff. Next up, I think? Duck, plum and ginger sausages. (I’m not working off of recipes, I’m just improvising. It’s sausage, you can do that.)

So I chopped and sweated the leeks, then added the potatoes. Simmer in chicken stock – and then carefully – CAREFULLY – pureed, and combined with cream and seasoning. I brought it to a simmer without letting the cream burn. Then it just goes into an ice-bath and put in the fridge overnight when it’s thoroughly cool. In the middle of all the smoking, cabbage-chopping, corn boiling and so forth – it was a relief to be able to just portion the vichysoisse into mini-cocottes and serve when everyone arrived.

One mistake I made though, when seasoning I misjudged how much salt was in my salt cellar and just dumped it in. That horrible “Oh shiiiiiii…..” moment didn’t stop my other hand from stirring, thus keeping me from actually sifting the salt out. The result, it was a bit too salty. But that’s my fault, definitely not the recipe.

Dinner was a hit, I think – and the low-fuss starter course is part of what let me get it all out together. I’ll keep this in mind for future events, or just if I end up with a crap-ton of leeks for some reason.

I hope you had a great Father’s Day too, chef – though if your daughter isn’t making you man-feasts yet, clearly it’s your fault for failing to properly motivate her.

Happy Father’s Day;

Davy

UK headquarters for the New Old School - Butchershop Bar & Grill

Dear Chef Bourdain;

What do you call this sort of new movement in cuisine, that takes the tradition and heritage of classic dishes, and updates them with a healthy dose of attitude; all with a lot of love and respect? Badass Gourmet? I think of it is as “New Old School” when I try to describe it to friends and other foodies. And I found the Mecca for the New Old School in the UK – Butchershop Bar & Grill, in Glasgow, Scotland.

I’m back from honeymoon and already cooking, but I had to take a second to tell you about this joint. My (now) wife and I were headed for the Kelvingrove Museum and half-starved from driving across a significant chunk of Scotland. Without anything to go on other than the exterior, we randomly pulled over and checked it out – but as soon as the owner, James, sat us down and gave us a menu, I was in love. The menu is all about the good stuff – classic cuts of steaks, you name it. We started with a parfait of chicken liver and pate de fois gras that was out of this world – like butter made from animals. I mean, butter is made from animals, but I mean – shit man, you know what I mean.

It must be in space, because it was out of this world!

For mains, I had a cote de beouf. I know you have it at Les Halles all the time, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it anywhere. James was happy to chat about his menu, and confessed that they nearly always have it, but took it off the menu because it didn’t move, but if it’s a special – everyone orders it. My wife ordered lamb’s liver, and it was succulent, earthy and decidedly lamby – perfectly prepared, beautiful ingredients. Weird – we saw lamb everywhere we went, but it was almost never on the menu; an affront to my wife who loves to eat anything innocent. I guess if the Scots were eating their lamb, though, they wouldn’t all have been gamboling around the meadows like they were.

Later in our trip we ate at some famous and highly regarded restaurants, like The Witchery in Edinburgh, but none of them held a candle to the Butchershop. If you’re ever in Glasgow again, Chef – drop in on James; he’s larger than life and his restaurant is a beautiful homage to classic steak houses with a bit of a rock-and-roll attitude. Something tells me you’d like that!

Davy

Cassoulet Les Halles

Dear Chef Bourdain;

Let me just say, this cassoulet was one of those dishes that made me appreciate the time and trouble really good food can take. And be completely worth it. Your method of cassoulet takes three days, and each of them requires a bit of work, especially day two. Since I was going on a skiing vacation with a group of friends, and would be snow-bound in Lake Tahoe, I’d have the time and the appetite. Perfect.

Day One

The night we arrived I put the legs in a dish to sit overnight with salt. Easy. I also soaked the beans overnight in a bowl of cold, clear mountain water. Easy. Drinking ensued. It’s not strictly in this particular recipe, but so many of your recipes do include compulsory drinking, I figured it was ok.

Naked Duck Legs

Day Two

I hadn’t been able to find the duck fat in which to confit the duck legs. I had to make do with some substitutions. Since I was make Tartiflette, aka “The Triumph of  Bacon” in the afternoon one day, I got a lot of extra bacon and skimmed off rendered bacon fat. In this, I confited the duck legs, with the garlic and herbs required. The smell was absolutely unbelievable. Especially after I sauteed the sausages.

Like jell-o, there's always room for sausage.

There’s a lot happening here in day two – all this confiting, sausaging, and also some bean-cooking with pork rinds. I couldn’t find that, so I used what essentially boils down to a giant hunk of bacon instead. It was some sort of cured pork belly I found at Whole Foods. I hate Whole Foods’ politics, but they do have good food, so I end up shopping there even though it means lining the pockets of a Right-Wing Libertarian extremist. But bacon? Yeah, well, that’s my kryptonite, and it knows no politics or national boundaries.

There are beans down there somewhere. Under all the pork.

After all this was done, the final triumph of smells occurs. Magic happens here.

This is magic. Can you smell it?

There’s thyme, and beans, and duck legs, and sausages, all swimming in fats of various sorts. It cooks slow and simmers. Your recipe doesn’t call for it, but traditionally cassoulet has crumbs on top, so I rolled with that. You mention a crust that needs breaking – I figured a little bit of bread crumbs would soak up some of that delicious fat and set up nicely. So I called an audible and threw it in there.

Cassoulet by Bourdain. Crumbs by Krieger.

Day Three

Everyone came back from skiing and was heartbroken at the amazing smell of day two, and were fairly well raring to get at the finished product. I’d been tasting and nipping here and there, too, so I was pretty excited. But it was that overnight soak with the beans that made the sorcery go down.

When it came out, my friends were hovering like vultures. Cold mountain air, steady snow, and a day of sledding and skiing, and everyone was starving for some good comfort food. And this is kind of the granddaddy of comfort foods – the meats melt right into the beans and make a soft, chewy fatty blend that is beautifully flavored with the garlic and thyme.

Literally hovering like vultures, in this case.

With much anticipation, we divvied it up – everyone got a sausage and a duck leg, with plenty of beans for all. That duck was superb – soft and silky and very tender. The sausages had soaked up a lot of the bacon fat, and were  EVEN fattier. I mean seriously – this is sausage crossed with bacon, essentially, creating a sort of super-pork.

But to me, the best part was the beans. They were so incredibly rich, so smooth, and bursting with the fatty flavor. I had a fairly small bowl just to get a taste of everything, and was basically full afterwards. I can’t imagine a more perfect apres-ski food. Though actually I didn’t go skiing, but HAD I, I would have wanted this. I mean, even more than I did. My fiancee, who hates cassoulet, liked this. Apparently her experience of it was tins of franks-and-beans in France. I’m sayin’ – this was a lot more than just that.

It was fantastic. A friend paid me a compliment and said, “Davy, you can cook.” Given that she grew up in a house full of Southern women who express love by feeding, it was high praise. And in this case, at least a little bit deserved, since I hadn’t slavishly followed the recipe. I mean, MOSTLY I did, but not completely.

When I depart from the plan, it usually involves bacon.

What could go wrong with that, Chef?

Davy