In her book My Life in France, Julia Child gives a rapturous account of her first encounter with French cuisine: sole meunière for lunch at a restaurant in Normandy. ‘The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter,’ she writes. ‘It was a morsel of perfection.’ Yet, mysteriously, there is no recipe for sole meunière in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One. Why did Child omit this supremely elegant dish?
Sole meunière / Sole meunière
Could it be because it’s too simple to prepare? Sole meunière, after all, is fish dipped in flour and fried in butter (with a little French trick or two to lift it from the ordinary to the sublime). Its name betrays its humble origins — the word meunière derives from moulin, or flour mill. Nothing fancy here. But as Child recalls in My Life in France, written with Alex Prud’homme, the sole meunière she tasted in Normandy was fish ‘of a higher order than any I’d ever had before.’ Indeed, she says, that first lunch was ‘the most exciting meal of my life.’ And, as you’ll see when you make this dish, that’s no fish story.
Let’s get one thing straight right from the start: there is nothing crude about crudités. This lovely fresh vegetable plate — my all-time favorite starter — is the dish I most long for whenever I’m away from France for a while. There is something quintessentially French in the way the vegetables are prettily arranged in mounds, then topped with a zesty sauce. It’s so fresh it feels like visiting a garden – and finding it on your plate.
When I first tasted risotto al radicchio I was dining alone in Venice and chose it almost at random from a menu with many other dishes that were unknown to me. Bitter red salad with rice? Why not, I thought, figuring it was worth trying something new. How could I have imagined the sublime dish that was brought to my table, rich and subtle, the flavor of the radicchio leaves tamed to a hint of something wild mellowed by creamy rice, butter and parmesan cheese? But there was something more to this dish, something unusual. Intrigued, when I returned to Paris I phoned the chef, who let me in on his secret…
With the end-of-year holidays approaching, this Russian-French version of gravalax makes a fine festive dish. The salmon is marinated overnight in salt and sugar — et voilà, it’s ready. Although I enjoyed this dish many times while working in Russia, where it is known simply as riba salyonnaya, or salted fish, I only started making it in Paris thanks to a Russian friend who passed along her family recipe. Served with shots of vodka or flutes of Champagne, it will get your holiday meals off to a spectacular start.
One of the things I find most amazing about cooking is the way the simplest of ingredients can be turned into a dish that is, frankly, sublime. Red onion tart is such a dish. The onions are gently sautéed with a pinch of thyme, then placed in the tenderest of savory pie shells, sprinkled with cheese, bathed in a mixture of egg, milk and cream, salted, peppered and sprinkled with nutmeg. And all it takes to prepare this creation is one red onion.
