1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (25 page)

One cylinder requires 6.5 gallons of milk.

With its silvery-blue veins and warm ivory pâte, Fourme d’Ambert is considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the French blues. That title bears tribute to its sharp, smooth, and salty complexities, and to a more subtle tasting experience than that offered by the stronger, less nuanced, and better known Roquefort. Amazingly enough, historians posit that Fourme’s origins predate the Roman Empire, and that it has been made for centuries just the way it is today.

The ancient cheese is based on raw milk from cows in the Auvergne region, southeast of central France. Traditionally, these cows roamed the pastures nearest Ambert, from which we get the second half of the cheese’s name.
Fourme
refers to the mold—not a fungus, in this instance, but a form—which shapes the cheese into tallish, narrow cylinders. Standing about eight inches high, Fourme d’Ambert is something of the tall, blonde bombshell of cheeses. Its beige-to-straw-colored paste is beautifully marbled with blue-gray mold, visually striking against its dark brown rind. The pâte should be firm but supple, making Fourme a more than suitable companion for bread, fruit, and salads. When shopping for this cheese, try to have it freshly cut, and avoid any that has a green tinge to the blue veins, that has a cracked rind, or that show soft, tannish edging between the pâte and the rind.

Further information:
French Cheeses
by Kazuko Masui and Tomoko Yamada (1996);
Cheese Primer
by Steven Jenkins (1996);
cheesesoffrance.com
.

For food lovers, neither blooming crocuses nor cherry blossoms are as welcome a sign of spring’s arrival as the tiny, wild woodland strawberries known as
fraises des bois.
Of course, “wild” has not been quite accurate for at least seven centuries.
But even when cultivated, as they are in France or in terra-cotta planters in any sunny garden, the diminutive oval berries are still memorably flavorful.

No larger than shelled almonds, they have just enough acidity to add interest to their juicy, sweet, slightly almondy essence. Pinpoint seeds add crunch to rosy berries that need nothing more than a light splash of heavy sweet cream or a dab of crème fraîche. In Italy—where they are known as
fragole di bosco
—they are sprinkled with a few drops of aged, sharply sweet balsamic vinegar, or tossed with a pinch of sugar and a dash of freshly squeezed lemon juice.

Although fraises des bois are sometimes simmered into a luxurious jam, cooking them should be considered a culinary felony. But placing them atop vanilla-scented pastry cream in a prebaked tart shell is a fine idea, and one not at all compromised by a dab of whipped cream.

Mail order:
For info, plants, and seeds,
fraisesdesbois.com
.
Further information and recipe:
food.com
(search barquette de fraises des bois).

Fresh wild strawberries, a simple pleasure.

A well-traveled mining engineer by profession and an obsessive cook and gourmand by preference, Henri Babinsky, known as Ali-Bab, was a Frenchman of Polish descent who lived from 1855 to 1931 and used his spare time to put together a 1,281-page compendium of French cuisine. His
Gastronomie Pratique: Études Culinaires
was published in 1907 and is to this day considered a classic reference.

Most of the recipes are too complex for the average cook, but the lovely springtime ode to strawberries remains a tempting exception. Few desserts are simpler to prepare or more delightful at the end of an early-summer’s meal. For best results, it should be made with small, perfect berries, ripely red and fragrantly juicy all the way through. (Our usual gigantic California strawberries, with their pale and hollow insides, should be a last resort.) Although Ali-Bab did not suggest any liqueur as a finishing touch, the orange flavor here adds a certain sophistication, as do the bright green color and pleasing aroma of a mint leaf or two.

Serves 4

1 quart best strawberries available, preferably from a local farmers’ market

2 to 3 teaspoons fine sugar

A few drops of lemon juice

1 to 2 teaspoons Grand Marnier (optional)

Mint leaves (optional), for garnish

1.
Rinse the strawberries under cold running water. Trim and drain the berries, then set aside about one quarter of them, choosing the least attractive ones. Leave the remaining berries whole if they are small. If large, cut them lengthwise in half or quarters. Refrigerate the berries until serving time.

2.
Using a blender or a food processor, puree the reserved one quarter of the berries with 2 teaspoons of sugar, the lemon juice, and the
Grand Marnier, if using. Taste for sweetness, adding more sugar as necessary. Place the strawberry puree in the freezer for 1 hour before serving.

3.
Just before serving, divide the whole or cut berries among 4 individual serving bowls, preferably glass, and spoon some of the semifrozen puree on each portion, stirring gently to mix. Garnish each serving with a mint leaf or two, if desired. Serve at once.

Further information and recipe:
Encyclopedia of Practical Gastronomy
, by Ali-Bab, translated by Elizabeth Benson (1974).

Grand aïoli is an essential taste of Mediterranean France.

To be worthy of its name, a
grand aïoli
requires so many types of fish and vegetables that it would be difficult to serve for only a few guests. A Christmas Eve specialty along the Côte d’Azur, it can be ordered a few days ahead from many of the seafood restaurants in that region. On Christmas Day, the same combination of garnishes might be gathered, either with seafood or a moistly tender poached capon, for another stupendous meal.

The centerpiece of this enormous dish is fluffy chunks of well-soaked, gently poached salt cod. Around the fish are amassed steamed new potatoes in their earthy jackets, hard-boiled eggs, steamed baby artichokes, chickpeas, silver-gray sea snails called periwinkles, cooked squid, green beans, and pearly onions or green leeks. The main event, however, is the magical aioli, the garlicky mayonnaise that may be blushed with saffron or spiked with cayenne pepper.

Once a favorite on Fridays, this beloved monster of a dish was also served at communal affairs during the summer in Provençal villages. The culinary still life would be set out in public squares for all to share, probably to be washed down with a local rosé.

Less ambitious cooks present more limited versions of the grand aïoli, offering perhaps only snails or poached vegetables with the garlicky mayonnaise. The aioli sauce has so many food-enhancing uses (as a dip for cold seafood and raw vegetables, or as a spread on chicken or turkey sandwiches) that the following recipe is worth mastering.

Makes about 2½ cups

2 cloves garlic, peeled

3 or 4 extra-large egg yolks (see
Note
)

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

2 cups extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Cayenne pepper (optional)

1.
Place the garlic in a mortar and crush it using a pestle. Or crush the garlic in a garlic press. Place the crushed garlic in a medium-size mixing bowl and add 3 of the egg yolks and a pinch each of salt and white pepper. Begin to blend
the egg yolk mixture gently with a wire whisk.

2.
When the yolks are runny, very slowly trickle in a thin stream of olive oil, whisking constantly until the mixture begins to thicken.

3.
When 1 cup of the oil has been beaten in, stir in the lemon juice along with 1 teaspoon of warm water to prevent the yolks from curdling. Keep adding olive oil a bit more quickly, again beating constantly, until all of it is absorbed and you have a thick mass that is about the consistency of soft pureed potatoes.

4.
If the aioli curdles, remove it from the mixing bowl and set it aside. Beat an additional egg yolk in the mixing bowl; then, using the whisk, gradually add the curdled mixture with a spoonful or two of warm water and slowly beat it into the egg. Taste for seasoning, adding a pinch of cayenne, white pepper, and salt as needed. The aioli can be refrigerated, covered, for 1 week, and will require only a brief stir before serving.

Note:
Anyone worried about eating raw egg yolks, or who finds the process of making aioli from scratch too complex, can arrive at a passable substitute by starting with 2 cups of a good commercial mayonnaise and stirring in 2 cloves of crushed garlic, then slowly trickling in a thin stream of olive oil, all the while beating with a wooden spoon. The 2 cups of prepared mayonnaise should absorb about 1 cup of olive oil. Stir in 2 to 3 teaspoons of lemon juice at the end and taste for seasoning, adding salt, white pepper, and cayenne as desired. If the mixture curdles, beat in warm water, 1 teaspoon at a time, until smoothly blended.

Further information and additional recipes:
Roast Chicken and Other Stories
by Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham (2007);
Simple French Food
by Richard Olney (1974);
saveur.com
(search grand aioli).

One of the cinematic hits of 1973,
La Grande Bouffe
featured three wealthy, handsome, and bored bachelors determined to eat themselves to death over a long weekend in a villa outside of Paris. One by one they succeed, and the film is remembered for the stellar performances of Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, and Hugo Tognazzi as the suicidal gourmands. But to many serious eaters, its real star is the
sumptuous, nonstop avalanche of dishes prepared by the chef, played by Michel Piccoli.

One of the most memorable “snacks” of that found-and-lost weekend was a garlic-infused gigot of lamb spit-roasted over a wood fire, kept moist by intermittent brushings with olive oil–soaked branches of herbs. The meat was sliced down blood-rare and placed alongside slabs of golden, soothingly piquant
pissaladière
(see
listing
), with its crisp yeast bread crust and a piquant topping of silky onions, salty anchovies, and black Niçoise olives—a perfect complement to the gentle flavor of the young lamb. The director may have failed to add a glass of Provence’s chilled, roseate Bandol wine, but you should not.

Mail order:
La Grande Bouffe
, directed by Marco Ferreri (1973), DVD, barnesandnoble.com.