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French Café Food

June 14, 2016 - Radio Kitchen - French Café Food

Well I've gone and done it again.  I've dashed off to Paris, looking for a mighty fine time, and I found it.  Vickie and I just spent a week there and a lot of time was spent, very pleasantly, in the cafés of Paris.  Chef Jerry Pellegrino of Schola Cooking School agrees, there are few more evocative locales than a French café.

One of the most famous, and beloved, offerings at a café is the fabulously tasty "croque monsieur."  This Gallic take on the ham and cheese sandwich is frankly irresistable.  Have one for lunch, and you may not need dinner.

Here's the deal:  a slice of good bread, a slice of good ham, a dollop of creamy mornay sauce, and a sprinkling of grated gruyere on top. 

Cook it under the broiler and you have a superb snack.  Plop a fried egg on top and "monsieur" becomes "madame."  Incidentally, this French proclivity for putting eggs on top of things is becoming very noticeable.

Onion soup requires a few things.  You need very good beef broth, carefully caramelized onions, a good sized piece of toast floating on top, a lot of gooey gruyère cheese, and perhaps most important, a good oven proof soup crock to cook it in.  This is perhaps the most restorative dish on the planet.

A few weeks ago we were talking about spring herbs, and nobody does herbs better than the Parisians.  A simple omelet aux fines herbes is a light and fluffy joy.

The classic blend of parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil make the dish sing.

My girlfriend Vickie can't get enough of a very simple dish, "eggs mayonnaise."  You take a few hard boiled eggs, cut them in half and slather them with mayonnaise. 

And I'm not talking Hellman's.  To make this dish stand up and say howdy, make your own mayonnaise. It's slightly tricky, but easily mastered.

And you want that mayo well chilled and fresh.

Hold onto that mayonnaise because you'll want it for the next dish.  This is a classic: celery root salad with spicy mayonnaise.  You can get celery root at the farmers markets, although nobody knows what to do with it. 

Well, if you clean it up, and trim it up so that you're working with the snowy white interior of the root, all you have to do is coarsely grate it into a bowl.  Mix your mayo with tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and Dijon mustard and you have lovely dressing to pile on top of the celery root.  Very light, very tangy, and a great side dish.

Shop the markets for young green and yellow squash and a few bulbs of fennel.  Here's what you can do with that.  Cut the fennel bulbs in half and gently cook them in olive oil for a half hour.  Make 3" long match sticks out of your squash, and sauté them in oil until they brown up.  Drain the fennel and mix it with the squash for a tasty simple side dish.

A final dish that I encountered was something of a revelation.  I have never steamed chicken, but it can be done.  Working with a chicken breast and thigh, you de-bone them and pop the meat into a steamer. 

You gently steam the chicken for a half hour or so, and then it's ready for the pièce de résistance, the sauce.  What you've done is put those chicken bones into a pot of water and added cut up carrots, leeks, onions, celery, garlic  parsley... oh, and a cup of white wine and 2 cups of heavy cream.  Simmer this broth until it reduces by half, then pour it over the chicken in a nice soup bowl.  So simple and so Parisian.  

Al Spoler, well known to WYPR listeners as the wine-loving co-host of "Cellar Notes" has had a long-standing parallel interest in cooking as well. Al has said, the moment he started getting serious about Sunday night dinners was the same moment he started getting serious about wine. Over the years, he has benefited greatly from being a member of the Cork and Fork Society of Baltimore, a gentlemen's dining club that serves black tie meals cooked by the members themselves who are some of Baltimore's most accomplished amateur cooks.
Executive Chef Jerry Pellegrino of Corks restaurant is fascinated by food and wine, and the way they work in harmony on the palate. His understanding of the two goes all the way to the molecular level, drawing on his advanced education in molecular biology. His cuisine is simple and surprising, pairing unexpected ingredients together to work with Corks' extensive wine offerings.