The Militant (cum Romantic) Epicurean

Yesterday I thawed on the steps inside that close heat, today I attempt the opposite by drawing nearer to the fan…

I am goddamn sunburned and swallowing, just started reading this book about a tiny inn in Savoy — The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth by Roy Andries De Groot. It’s sort of a travelogue with gorgeous recipes for menus that manage to be humble, rustic and profound at once, and are indeed well balanced…

From page thirty-one:

“A menu is the script of a dramatic performance. It builds, step by step, to a climax. Then it quiets down, before rising again to a secondary, smaller climax. Finally it closes in peaceful relaxation. I learned from my mother that harmony is the key to a great meal.”

And, like a proper menu-based cookbook should, they clue you on timing. For hopelessly nervous people like me.

Mme. Ray (of the Auberge) describes the piece de resistance of their fancypants meals which is, of course, a several-foot-tall, flaming, mountainous cake. Duh.

Homemade pistachio ice cream as the rolling soft green foothills, hazelnut ice cream as rock, pillowy whipped cream as snow, all over a base of Genoise doused in booze (local cherry liqueur). Then — uh — the whole thing is bathed in génépi (brandy. again, local — “made from the long yellow roots of the mountain gentian”) and lit on fire. Note to Maureen whom I will vainly assume reads my bullshit: this, or some variation of it, must happen.

Mme. Vivette on using their view of the Savoy mountains as guide for the mountain-cake:

“As I help in sculpturing it, I look out the window… so as to copy exactly the sweeping curves of the grass-covered lower slopes…”

Good gracious. The “sculpting” of it sounds disarmingly sensuous and reminds me of this Weston nude:

I read that the author of L’Auberge is blind. Incredible. Written with all sorts of exquisite sensory titillation…

I’ve also managed to find one of the thickest books in the SFPL Main branch — and I am thankful this time for the leafy newsprint-weight of the paper. It is a veritable culinary bible. The Escoffier — which is Mister Escoffier’s Imer-i-quee version of the Guide Culinaire — has, for example, at LEAST seventy different ways to prepare tournedos, a cut of bouef — Madeleine, Nicoise, MIrabeau… totally overwhelming to say the least.

I will persevere and get through this beast of stocks, aspics, and compounds, and I shall then be thoroughly schooled in the art of French cuisine.

more later…