1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (33 page)

Fresh radishes are enhanced by salt and butter.

Although you’ll find far more complex appetite awakeners in the pantheon of French hors d’oeuvres, few are as refreshing or as surprising as this one to the uninitiated. It is comprised merely of three simple ingredients: sharply pungent, ice-cold ruby-red radishes, a hearty sliver of smooth and creamy sweet butter; and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt.

To put it all together, cut off a small piece of butter, keeping it on the knife blade. Draw that blade right through a whole radish, leaving the butter behind. Sprinkle with salt, and bite in. That’s all there is to it. The ingredients may be ordinary, but the mix—crunchy and smooth, radish-peppery, and butter-creamy—is pure sensory pleasure.

The only trick lies in getting the butter to stay put on the radish as you draw the knife through. For his NoMad restaurant, the inventive chef Daniel Humm cleverly molds the radishes in thimblelike cups of sweet butter, so all a diner has to do is dip into a tiny mound of sea salt. When you’re making
radis au beurre
at home, look for the long, tender, white-tipped French variety at farmers’ markets in large cities or create an absolutely acceptable proxy with the ultra-common red American radish.

Where:
In New York
, NoMad, tel 347-472-5660,
thenomadhotel.com
.

This softly succulent vegetable stew has grown so common on restaurant menus we well might consider it a cliché, too often underappreciating its aesthetic appeal. Yet to anyone who delights in the sensual aspects of cookery, ratatouille offers irresistible rewards, not least of which is the fun of pronouncing its name. It begins with the ingredients, all candidates for a Dutch painter’s still life—the shiny, black-purple eggplant contrasted with small gray-green zucchini, deep emerald peppers, scarlet-hued tomatoes,
amber-skinned onions, paper-white slices of garlic, and flurries of forest-green parsley.

Next come the tactile elements, as one washes, cuts, slices, and dices each vegetable into its proper form. Once all is in the stew pot, sprinkled with coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper and anointed with good olive oil, the simmering begins. That’s when the olfactory sense kicks in, as the garlic, oil, and vibrant freshness of the vegetables begin to blend and waft up the very essence of summer in Provence.

To know if the stew is cooking at the right speed, one need only listen for the
pil-pil
of burbling juices. Too strong a sound, and the flame is turned down; too faint, and the heat gets turned up. Finally, the sense of taste takes over. More salt? A few leaves of fresh basil? A drizzle of oil to smooth out flavor and texture? A dab of tomato paste to bind the whole, in case the vegetables are watery.

Now for improvisation and possibilities. Serve the fragrant ratatouille hot, warm, or cool, but never refrigerator-cold. Steaming hot, it provides a harmonious contrast to grilled or roasted lamb; add whole capers, chopped anchovy fillets, or pitted Niçoise olives for meaty texture and a zesty tingle. Combine room-temperature ratatouille with clumps of the best Mediterranean olive oil–packed tuna for a sustaining salad or as part of an hors d’oeuvre assortment. If the mix is juicy and hot, toss it into any cooked short pasta, such as penne, rigatoni, or fusilli, for a richly satisfying sauce. Or consider the Italian variation known as
cianfotta
, in which potatoes and celery add sustenance.

Further information and recipes:
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1
, by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (1961);
saveur.com
(search ratatouille provence).

A fresh and airy flavor with a gentle pungency accounts for the widespread popularity of reblochon, an orange cheese with a pink blush, a slightly fluffy rind, and an unctuously supple pâte, developed in the mountains of Savoie. Although today it’s one of France’s best-known cheeses, it wasn’t always so.

Locals in its region of origin tell an age-old story about the days when farmers were taxed on the amount of milk they sold. Under the watch of the taxman, they’d pretend to drain their herd’s supply, paying dues on their stock. Once the law enforcers departed, a second, secret milking was conducted, drawing milk that was higher in butterfat—and the farmers’ wives used this richer milk to make the delightfully toothsome, creamy cheese that was eventually dubbed reblochon, from the verb
reblocher
, literally, “to milk again.”

Intended for consumption at home rather than for sale, the cheese was aged quickly and washed with brine, which accounts for its light piquancy and nutty overtones. Today, the proper aging period for A.O.C. Reblochon is between fifty and fifty-five days, which makes export tricky; U. S. Federal Drug Administration laws require that raw-milk cheeses age a minimum of sixty days. Some importers, drawing on the improvisatory thinking to which we owe the mountain cheese, have been known to ask producers to age reblochon just a few days longer
to enable legal stateside import. If some of the resulting products make their way to you, look for a dry, light-brown rind and a creamy, ivory paste when making your selection, then allow the cheese to soften and ripen at room temperature for about two hours before serving.

Where:
In France
, visit the farms where reblochon is produced:
reblochon.fr
(click le Reblochon Fermier, Carte des Producteurs).
Further information:
French Cheeses
by Kazuko Masui and Tomoko Yamada (1996);
Cheese Primer
by Steven Jenkins (1996).

This classic Belle Epoque dish, a savory blend of sweetbreads in a crisp pastry-shell mold, is as delectable today as it was in the heyday of Maxim’s in Paris and Delmonico’s in New York, and is often available on advance order from the most serious and traditional-minded French chefs. Though most of its ingredients are relatively easy to come by, it does contain a couple of surprises. Among its fixings are calf or lamb sweetbreads (the tender white thymus glands are blanched, sautéed in butter, then cut into supple nuggets), chicken or veal (to be shaped into tiny, light quenelle dumplings), fluted button mushroom caps and slivers of truffle, sautéed chicken livers, the makings of the puff pastry
bouchée
that houses it all, and as the finishing touch, cockscombs, the orangey, fleshy crests that crown roosters’ heads (blanched and skinned to tender toothsomeness). That last component may sound exotic, if not downright lurid, but cockscombs are beginning to appear again at a few tapas-style restaurants around the U.S..

Bound with a rich brown Madeira sauce and dotted with minced black truffles, it does indeed make for a dish worthy of a financier.

Further information and recipes:
Larousse Gastronomique
(2009);
A Guide to Modern Cookery
by Auguste Escoffier, H. L. Cracknell, and R. J. Kaufmann (2011).

Rocamadour clings to cliffs above the Alzou River.

Just about two inches in diameter and a mere quarter inch thick, with an earthy, nutty flavor and a luxurious, dry yet spreadable interior, the tiny cakes of Rocamadour cheese deserve to be eaten crust and all for maximum appreciation.

Each Pentecost season in Rocamadour, a medieval town in the South of France, a distinctive sound rings out: the clip-clop of hooves clattering on stone streets as herds of small goats file in to receive their blessing, an event that signals the start of the annual Fête des Fromages, the region’s largest cheese festival. These are the goats whose rich milk is the basis of about a dozen raw-milk cheeses that have distinguished the region of Quercy since the fifteenth century. There and in surrounding areas, these cheeses are known as
cabécou
(dialect for “a little goat”), and they are popular throughout south and southwest France. Rocamadour is the only
cabécou
to bear the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée label that gives the cheese and its production techniques the serious imprimatur of French law.

When aged a mere two to three weeks, the soft, bite-size cheese develops a distinctly chestnutlike flavor; the longer it ages, the chewier it becomes and the more its exterior comes to resemble an actual chestnut shell, transforming from light beige to golden brown. Unfortunately, because rocamadour is aged for less than sixty days, it is unavailable in the U.S. When you’re lucky enough to sample it in France, allow it to soften and ripen at room temperature for at least one hour before serving.

Further information:
French Cheeses
by Kazuko Masui and Tomoko Yamada (1996);
Cheese Primer
by Steven Jenkins (1996).
Special event:
Fête des Fromages, Rocamadour, France, May or June, tel 33/5-65-33-22-00,
fromages.rocamadour.free.fr
.

Roquefort is aged for a minimum of three months.

The contrast of its teasingly sharp, salty blue-green mold with its firmly mellow white mass makes Roquefort one of the world’s most sophisticated cheeses—and one that is oftentimes much too strong for novice palates. The mold also imparts a look of evil that, as is said about the oyster, makes one salute the brave man who first took a taste.

That act of bravery might have happened eons ago. According to a local legend, Roquefort was born of a happy accident in medieval times, when a smitten shepherd abandoned his lunch in a Combalou cave to search for a shepherdess. No one knows whether he found the lady, but when he returned to his cave some time later, he found
his cheese covered in a blue-green mold—the distinctive
Penicillium roqueforti
fungus that gives Roquefort its hue. Amazingly enough, these caves are still the sole incubation point for the cheese’s requisite mold. Today, all of the world’s Roquefort emerges from the mythical shepherd’s spot, a mile-and-a-half-long section of limestone caves near Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France; that tiny stretch of caves also houses an intricate, modern network of offices, cellars, and ripening rooms occupied by seven cheese makers.

Roquefort’s production is never left to chance. In preparation for cheese making, the native Lacaune sheep are strategically mated. Special loaves of rye are baked, left in the caves to rot, and broken in order to capture the necessary
Penicillium roqueforti.
As a product with Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée status—France’s first cheese to receive the prestigious designation—Roquefort’s point of origin, ingredients, and processing are also tightly regulated by French law. It’s a complicated system for a complex cheese with a flavor that is at once spicy, tart, and salty. But not everything about Roquefort is difficult. Serving it is easy. When ripe, Roquefort deserves to be appreciated as a main event, at the end of a meal, when it can deepen the flavor of anything with which it’s paired, most successfully pears, grapes, walnuts, and Sauternes. When selecting Roquefort, look for copious blue-green streaks running to the edge of the bone-white, crumbly cheese.