1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (37 page)

Tourte de blettes
in official French becomes
la tourta de blea
in the dialect of Provence, which claims this verdant creation as its own. It can also be made in a
salée
, or savory, version that omits the sugar, liquor, and raisins and incorporates rice and Parmesan cheese. Eaten as an appetizer, a main dish, or en plein air as a picnic item, the dish is usually served at room temperature.

Tourte de blettes
sucrée
may seem like a cutting-edge dessert, now that parents are trying to get their children to eat more healthfully and following the advice of cookbooks that tell them to sneak in the veggies using culinary subterfuge (contaminating brownies with the addition of spinach, for instance). But parents may be so carried away with this enticing pastry that there will be little left for the kids.

Further information and recipes:
Flavors of the Riviera
by Colman Andrews (1996);
epicurious.com
(search swiss chard raisin pine nut tart).

There probably is no flavor more difficult to describe than that of the whole, fresh winter black truffle—
Tuber melanosporum
—associated with France’s Périgord region. For what a great black truffle tastes like is a great black truffle. Dug up from the ground between November and January in damp, leafy forests by trained pigs and, more often now, by dogs, this costly fungus looks like a mottled lump of coal and has a somewhat wet and earthy flavor. Its mysterious, sweet but musty essence and firm but yielding texture link it to its mushroom relatives, but it has a nose-twitching aroma all its own.

Because of the black truffle’s high price, one often sees pâtés and sauces, pastas, salads, and even ice cream flavored with the tiniest of its shavings or peelings (or, unfortunately, with a synthetic truffle oil with an overpowering, nauseatingly larger-than-life scent)—contributing perhaps less, in these cases, to flavor than to a perception of value that allows restaurateurs and chefs to charge more for their truffle-infused offerings.

Practically, of course, it makes sense to use whatever one can to impart the truffle’s exquisite flavor—even its aroma can be harnessed to the cook’s advantage. Place a truffle or any part of one in a closed container with whole raw eggs for two or three days and the scent will permeate the shells and deliciously perfume the eggs; try them softly scrambled with a touch of cream, or fried in butter. Similarly, a truffle buried in raw rice and kept in a tightly closed jar seasons the grains, which can then be worked into a savory risotto. The truffle itself remains available for other uses, protected by the rice so that it stays dry, its precious fragrance intact.

But practicality has its critics. Expounding on the scourge of scrimpy truffle tactics, the inimitable Colette had this to say: “You pay its weight in gold, then in most cases you put it to paltry use. You smear it with foie gras, you bury it in poultry overloaded with fat, you chop it up and drown it in brown sauce, you mix it with vegetables covered in mayonnaise.… To hell with thin slices, strips, trimmings, and peelings of truffles! Is it not possible to like them for themselves?”

Not only possible, but essential. The only way to really understand the truffle’s magic and firmly fix it in your mind’s palate is to have one whole, perfect specimen all to yourself. It should be brushed or peeled of its rough outer surface, then coated with a bit of goose or duck fat and wrapped in cooking parchment to be roasted under white-hot ashes—
sous cindres.
Or simmer the cleaned whole truffle in butter, goose fat, and Madeira. Taste that once, and you will surely make plans to taste it twice.

Tuber melanosporum
is not the only variety of truffle, but it is by all accounts the finest. Italy’s white truffles of Alba—
Tuber magnatum
(see
listing
)—have their own vibrantly dazzling attributes, but cannot approach their French cousins when it comes to elegant complexity and a gloriously decadent richness. And as for the so-called summer truffle—
Tuber aestivum
—the name is a euphemism for bland impostors dug up between May and September, and very short on flavor and aroma. As romantic as they sound, summer truffles are usually the
ones you find for sale in jars at airport gift shops.

Though not all of the so-called Périgord truffles are actually dug up in that southwestern region of France (most come from surrounding areas but are processed and marketed at the big truffle fair held in Périgord every December), that regional stamp still holds sway. Anything simply called a “black winter truffle” is probably the product of another region or country altogether; these days, truffles are being cultivated “in the wild”—close to the trees that best nurture them—in places as far away as Oregon and China.

Where:
In Paris
, La Maison de la Truffe, tel 33/1-42-65-53-22,
maison-de-la-truffe.com
.
Mail order:
urbani.com
(search fresh black winter truffles).
Further information:
The Oxford Companion to Food
by Alan Davidson (1999);
thenibble.com
(search types of truffles: a glossary, black truffles).
Tip:
Explore truffle lore, cultivation, and cookery at two truffle museums in France—Maison de la Truffe et du Tricastin in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, tel 33/4-75-96-61-29,
maisondelatruffe.com
; Écomusée de la Truffe in Sorges, tel 33/5-53-05-90-11,
ecomusee-truffe-sorges.com
.

The trout must be handled briefly and skillfully.

Timing is all, in the preparation of this striking dish, which translates to “blue trout.” In order for the trout to turn the proper shade of brilliant sapphire, it must be alive until it is eviscerated, and then sent to the
poissonnière
within ten minutes at the most. The chemical reaction between the traditional vinegar bath and substances on the fish’s skin creates the azure tone—proof that the fish indeed was alive moments before it was cooked. Another piece of proof: The trout’s body forms a circle, indicating the final response of its still-vibrant nervous system to contact with the simmering water.

What may seem like gratuitous ghoulishness is really a necessary path to the sweet-flavored tenderness that this most delicate of freshwater fish deserves. Lightly poached, then doused with a little lemon juice, melted butter, and flakes of freshly grated horseradish, blue trout is an elegant dish. At the Mönchs Posthotel in the little Bavarian spa town of Bad Herrenalb, a net full of live trout is held in a stream that runs by the premises so the fish can be caught as they are ordered as Blaugekochte Forelle. In a city or restaurant, the trout must swim in a tank in the kitchen.

Connoisseurs of this dish are on to pseudo blue trout, presented with its tail tightly clamped in its mouth—a sign that the long-dead fish was thus arrayed by a cunning chef prior to cooking. To say nothing of the fact that the
impostor fish’s skin is more silvery than blue.

Where:
In Bad Herrenalb, Germany
, Mönchs Posthotel, tel 49-7083-7440;
in Strasbourg, France
, Maison des Tanneurs, tel 33/3-88-32-79-70,
maison-des-tanneurs.com
;
in Queens, NY
, M. Wells Steakhouse, tel 718-786-9060,
magasinwells.com
.
Further information and recipe:
The German Cookbook
by Mimi Sheraton (2014);
cookitsimply.com
(search truite au bleu).

Call it snatching a culinary victory from the jaws of defeat. The apocryphal story has it that Napoleon’s Swiss cook, flustered as the French army was losing the Battle of Marengo to the Italians in 1800, searched for ingredients he could combine to take the general’s mind off his troubles. Some say he came up with veal, others say it was chicken, but all seem to agree that he magically also found tomatoes, small white onions, and mushrooms, and threw them into the sauté pan, adding white wine so the whole could braise into what we now consider a stew.

No matter which meat is used, much of this dish’s deep, rich flavor comes from the slow sautéeing of individual ingredients. Thus onions and mushrooms are gilded in hot butter and then set aside while the browned meat simmers for a while with tomatoes, thyme, garlic, parsley, bay leaf, and crushed shallots. The browned mushrooms and onions are added for a final heating before the stew is served with thin slices of bread that have been skillet-browned in olive oil, a finishing touch highly recommended in
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
, a delicious collection of recipes that Toklas prepared for her life partner, Gertrude Stein, and their famous guests.

According to
Larousse Gastronomique
, the chicken version requires garnishes of crayfish, deep-fried eggs, truffles, and croutons. One wonders where even the wiliest cook would find all of those amid post-battle disarray—but then, of course, they were in Italy. Origin stories aside, we prize this dish not for its colorful history, but rather for its temptingly aromatic appeal and the soothing sustenance it provides, to say nothing of its convenience as a main course that can be prepared well ahead of time, if desired.

Further information and recipes:
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
by Alice B. Toklas (2010);
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1
, by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (1961);
cuisine-france.com
(search veal marengo);
epicurious.com
(search chicken marengo).

Alongside such lush coffee-dessert drinks as the Italian
affogato
(see
listing
) and the Viennese
einspanner
(see
listing
), this Belgian counterpart holds its own. Its requirements are good, strong, slightly bitter coffee syrup, mocha ice cream, and a cloud of freshly whipped heavy sweet cream. The ice cream goes into a tall parfait glass, with syrup poured over and whipped cream crowning the effort. As the ice cream melts and mingles with the coffee syrup, additional reward comes by way of an excruciatingly delicious sauce. Although it’s not traditional, a shot of dark rum or aged brandy adds sophisticated overtones, and a thin, crisp
gaufrette
wafer adds textural contrast.

Contrary to its name, the
café liégeois
was not created in Liège. In fact, it was originally known in France as a
café viennois
(Viennese coffee). However, during World War I, with the Battle of Liège in full swing and Vienna representing the enemy, Parisian cafés started renaming the dessert café liégeois in honor of Belgium’s embattled forts. Curiously, for a while at least, in Liège itself it continued to be known as café viennois.