Perfect for one, two or a crowd, quail makes a fine dish both for holidays and every day. And the good news is that quail is far easier to find these days, both in France — where the birds are farmed now — and in the States (there was a recent New York Times article on where to find quail in Manhattan). In this recipe, the birds are basted with a marinade of olive oil, cumin, ground coriander seeds and garlic and roasted in a very hot oven to produce a crispy, juicy, flavorful dish. A dish that could be served on Thanksgiving with pomegranate relish — far lighter than cranberry sauce — and perhaps some couscous.
Cailles rôties / Roast quail
Grenade en salade / Pomegranate relish
This is the second installment of my proposals for Thanksgiving with a French/Mediterranean twist, and I’d like to use it to pay homage to my favorite American writer on French food, Patricia Wells, who over the years has been an absolute inspiration to me. The quail recipe described above is similar to one in her wonderful cookbook Patricia Wells at Home in Provence, which I’ve been using since it came out in 1996. An earlier book by Wells, Bistro Cooking, has gone around the world with me, allowing me to produce French meals with panache in places as farflung as Moscow and Manila. Patricia Wells and I were colleagues at the International Herald Tribune in the 1980s and ’90s. Like me, she grew up in Wisconsin. If you have not yet tried out her cookbooks, I encourage you to do so — they’re well-written, informative and the recipes are fantastic.
Just as a reminder, this site’s first Thanksgiving offering was stuffed pumpkin, perfect for vegetarians, and you may also want to take a fresh look at sweet potatoes with herbs. On Friday, the third and final installment of this Thanksgiving special, The Everyday French Chef will be offering a recipe for homemade mayonnaise — perfect for turkey sandwiches, and not nearly as hard to make as you may fear. In fact it takes about three minutes. If you’d like to shop for this ahead of time, get some very fresh eggs, free-range or organic, as well as a lemon, Dijon mustard and some salad oil — sunflower, safflower, whatever, but not olive oil, which is too heavy for this sauce. Happy Thanksgiving!
I first tasted this dish in the home of Valérie Lapierre, a superlative cook. She and another friend, an artist, had concocted a fabulous meal but refused to say what the main course would be. And then they arrived bearing dinner plates, each with its own small stuffed pumpkin. The pumpkins’ caps were lifted. An amazing aroma escaped. Spoons were dipped in. Out came succulent baked pumpkin and a filling of mushrooms, onions and cheese. It was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted, and quintessentially French.
This is a cold-weather dish most commonly encountered in the Alpine ski resorts of eastern France: potatoes, onions, bacon and flavorful reblochon cheese baked together to make a mouth-watering one-dish meal. But tartiflette has become so popular that restaurants from Burgundy to the Pyrenees now serve it. The name derives from a word for potatoes, tartifla, that is used in Italy and Provence — but, oddly, not in Savoie…
This is an apple tart for taking the chill off a cold autumnal evening. It comes from Normandy, where the salty wind off the sea can whip right through the warmest clothes. Normandy, France’s dairy land, where the fresh cream is as sublime as it comes. Normandy, where apple trees dot the countryside, and the apple tart is as French as, well, apple pie is American.
Why should the word kir be associated in my mind with the word decadence? The cocktail originally known as a blanc-cassis has nothing particularly decadent about it. It’s the most natural of apéritifs, made of dry white wine — Burgundy is traditional — and crème de cassis, or black currant liqueur. Served throughout the Burgundy region long before it was named after the priest Félix Kir, a resistance hero and mayor of Dijon, this drink is heady enough to liven up any cocktail party, and even temporarily to keep one’s mind off an election taking place thousands of miles away. Oh, and by the way, I first tasted a kir back in the 1970s, with a Paris friend who was taking me to a party. On the way over, he taught me a new dance he said everyone would be dancing. It was called la décadanse.
