Demi-Moussaka

The first time I came to Greece I was 15. We had a book- Greece on $5 a day, and maybe a let's go. Although this was not uncharted territory, there was a remoteness then, something exotic, something closer to the lost world captured by Robert McCabe than to now. The guidebook had all kinds of advice- one thing was that printed t-shirts, of literally anything- were the most welcome of gifts. 

There was a rich, fully realized culture- one of centuries instead of just decades like my own- but it remained for us, probably largely because of this, impenetrable. Even the cuisine was impenetrable- a tremendous variety of dishes, of cuisines within a cuisine, but we could not access them. We had moussaka, almost every night. I sometimes ordered a pepper steak, maybe on the menu for French people?- to add some variety, if not authenticity. 

You shouldn't think we didn't eat well- we had strained yogurt with honey every morning, melons and nectarines, the juiciest tomatoes, and I at least had a couple of chokofreta every day- the package, unchanged, reminds me still of wandering around Kos in the shade while my parents sketched. The kiosk kept them in the refrigerator next to little bottles of bold cloudy lemon soda that was nothing like the virginal 7 - Up I grew up drinking. Crisp, airy, not too sweet, there is no finer candy bar than a cold chocofreta in the shade.

But it was years, actually decades, before I would order a moussaka, and still more years before I would make one. 

In truth, despite the forced start, this is one of my favorite dishes- all the comfort of red sauce Italian with the sweet exotic spices of the east, a thick layer of puffy bechamel, yielding eggplants. Assembled of slabs of fried potato, more slabs of salted, drained and fried eggplant, a long- simmered sauce, and the bechamel, and the layering of everything and the baking, it takes all day to make. The last time I made one was for a dinner- the "composed dish" was much praised.

The flavors and texture are captured in this very approachable shortcut. We dispense with the deep frying (don't worry at all- the dish is lush with oil), and alas with the potatoes too (I have tried roasting them but it is not the same as those golden, fried slabs). 

For a nice large dish, we will need:

6 eggplants

lots of olive oil

For the filling:

2 onions

2 cloves of garlic

500 g/ 1 lb. of ground beef

1 can of whole tomatoes, pureed in the blender (not sauce, not diced tomatoes- the richer flavor  is worth the step)

cinnamon

cloves

black pepper

a bay leaf

some strong red wine

For the bechamel sauce:

Scant liter/ 3 1/2 C whole milk

60 g/ 1/4 C butter

60 g/ 1/2 C flour

salt

nutmeg

2 eggs

This is a much easier dish to put together than classic Moussaka because we have just 2 hands-on things to do in succession. The eggplants will be taking care of themselves while we make the meat filling.

1. Slice the eggplants in half lengthwise and score them deeply end to end, concentrating on the tough area near the stem. Salt them like crazy and let the moisture seep out.

2. Chop the onions, saute them in olive oil, add the garlic, let it soften, then add the meat, salting it and seasoning with pepper, and let it brown, stirring occasionally. 

3. Rinse the eggplants, given them each a squeeze, and massage them with oil, making sure it goes into the slits and especially the stem end. Arrange them cut side up in rimmed dish and bake them at 170 C/ 350 F until they are quite soft and have collapsed a little- about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, add wine to the browned meat- a small glassful, and the tomato, and a pinch of clove and a pinch of cinnamon and the bay leaf. Simmer until the oil floats free.

5. Stuff the eggplant halves with the meat.

6. Melt the butter, add the flour, and whisk over medium heat until it turns loose and puffy. Add the milk all at once, whisking fast and hard to break up any lumps, and keep whisking, bringing it  to a full boil- it will be thick and the whisk will leave lines in it. Taste and make sure it is silky with no flour texture on the tongue. season with salt and (gently) with nutmeg). Beat two eggs, temper them with a little sauce bit by bit, stirring all the while to not scramble the egg.

7. Pour the sauce over the eggplants. It would be nice to keep them separate with a tidy pool of sauce atop each one, but I have never been able to do this.

Bake until the top turns golden and blisters in one or two places. Since the components are warm, this will take just 20- 25 minutes.

Drink wine. 

Some other very simple Mediterranean dishes-

Briam- Roasted Ratatouille a la Greque-

Mussels with Ouzo in Spicy Red Sauce

Mediterranean Roast Chicken-

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Creme Patisserie- Makes Everything Fabulous

This is worth learning- not difficult, the most rewarding building block of the pastry world, and delicious on its own.. It is simply a pudding, enriched with egg yolks and finished with butter. If quality had a flavor, this would be it- you can taste everything- creamy, rich, subtle. You will be unable to use packaged substitutes after trying this; it is so simple you will not need to.

We will need:

450 ml/ 2 C whole fresh milk

4 egg yolks

50 g/ 4 T corn starch

130 g/ 2/3 C sugar

pinch salt

vanilla, or better still a plumped bean to steep in the milk

50 g/ 4 tablespoons butter

Heat the milk to simmering in a heavy-bottomed pan, with the vanilla bean if you are using one. Beat the yolks, add the sugar slowly and carefully as you beat, and then the cornstarch and salt. Very slowly spoon warm milk into the yolk mixture, whisking as you do, to bring it slowly up totemperature. When you have added half of the milk ad the mixture is quite hot, you can add it all back into  the pan with the warm (not boiling) milk. Continue to whisk over medium heat- making sure the whisk makes contact with the bottom of the pan all over, until it thickens, which will happen all at once at the end. Keep whisking and let it nearly boil another minute. Remove from the heat, and genty whisk in the butter in small pieces, one at a time. Squeeze the seeds from the vanilla bean into the cream if you are using one, or add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into a bowl (even with the most careful whisking) into a dish and cover with a round of non-stick parchment. Cool, then chill, then use as you like for instance in a creme chibouste to fill a meringue.

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Apple Pie with Beurre Noisette and Rum in a Classic Lattice Crust.

The casually Baroque galette has become our pie of choice in its single-crust simplicity. With the first of the pink ladies though, only this classic lattice topped americana will do.

Any apples would be delicious, but these are our new favorite. For years we favored the granny smith for its tartness, but these have all that too, plus they are complicated and spicy. Apples collapse when baked- in a lattice pie this leaves quite a gap. Sauteing the apples briefly in butter does two things- the apples collapse into dense suppleness, and they become infused with the flavor of butter. So much butter also changes the pie's direction. There is just a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg in a nod to the classic combination. The fullness of the favor is carried by the browned butter. With that, rum is a natural pairing (Trader Vic's hot buttered rum, butter-rum lifesavers... ). A little vanilla adds even more depth.

             

 

We will need (for our largest pie tin), for the crust:

300 g/ 2 1/2 C flour

1/2 tsp. salt  

1 tablespoon sugar

250 g/ a little over 2 sticks butter, frozen

1/2 C ice water

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, grate in the frozen butter n the large holes of a box grater, tossing occasionally to keep them each as separate flour-coated strands, and then sprinkle in the water, slowly, with one hand as you toss with the other (as we did here). Shape into two disks, one slightly larger than the other, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate.

For the filling:

2 K/ 4 pounds apples- about 15-16 medium apples

100 g butter

a shot glass full of rum

vanilla extract or the seeds from a vanilla pod (homemade here)

a small pinch of cinnamon, a light grating of nutmeg (marvelous with the rum)

a  pinch of flaky salt

250 g/ 1 1/4 C raw demerara sugar (white  sugar would be fine if that is all you have but the raw sugar is perfect here), plus more to taste

50 g/ scant 1/2 C flour

Divide the apples into fourths, remove the core from each piece, and slice crosswise, like this:

It will seem like more apples than you could ever need,but they will cook down in this step and be just right. Melt half of the butter and brown it over medium heat, stirring all the while so none of the brown specks have a chance to blacken. Add half of the apples and saute until they are evenly wilted. Add the sugar, rum, vanilla, salt, and spices.

Transfer the apples into a large bowl to cool. Rinse the pan clean, and repeat with the other half of the apples, transferring this batch to the same bowl. Blend and test for seasoning and sugar. 

When the apple mixture is cool, add the flour and mix gently. Heat the oven to 200 C/ 400 F.  Roll out the larger disk of chilled pie  crust and drape it into the pie dish. Use scissors to trim  the excess and put it aside.

Squash the second disk into a rectangle and roll it out longer rather than wide, to cut strips from for the lattice, using a fluted cutter if you have one:

Arrange the strips as you like- we use a traditional weave, lifting strips as necessary to get the desired effect:

Your weave can be as close or as open as you like, the strips of dough wide or narrow. When the weave is complete, trim again, fold the crust into a neat edge, and crimp as you like:

The crust will puff beautifully as it bakes and any imperfections, as you see  here, will be perfect when gold from the oven. I wet the strips with water and dust a little more sugar over for extra sparkle.

Bake the pie on a  low rack, checking often after a half an hour to make sure nothing blackens, but do not be  surprised if your pie takes as much as an hour to be golden all over:

We had ours warm with vanilla ice cream, then cold for breakfast.

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Chocolate Mousse, La Grenouille, Long-Stemmed Red Roses, and the Only Dessert You Will Ever Need.

I have to be honest- I do not prefer long-stemmed red roses to any other flower, and I think that Valentine's Day causes perhaps as much anxiety as joy. But I love classic things (like this book) for two reasons- there is a reason they are classic, and enjoying a classic is nice for its own sake. It gives us an absolute standard- no innovative flourishes, just excellence, the starting point for all the other versions of this one pure thing.

When I graduated from High School my parents arranged for us to have a festive lunch not at one of the dozens of restaurants of the moment- excellent though they may have been- but rather at the East Side Midtown's La Grenouille- at that time it had been open just 22 years but back then 22 years saw the passing of several eras. The restaurant was not so much of a time capsule as it was a timeless capsule- its own era encapsulating so ideally the classic. 1962 remained untouched by time in the grand room and I hope it still does. You would think I would remember what we ordered, but I do not. I do remember that the waiter gave me some of every single dessert from the cart so Mademoiselle could see what she liked best, and he beamed at me as though his true calling was not service so much as it was indulging.

Perhaps the specifics of the meal have been outshone by their perfection. Everything there was perfect- the perfect version of the perfect thing in the perfect setting. This memory inspires me to recommend that on the most classic of romantic days you try not some fabulous dessert of the moment, that you don't experiment, but that you make the most classic version of the most classic chocolate dessert, timeless (like love itself!).

We will need:

6 nice large super clean and fresh eggs
300 g/ a generous 10 oz. chocolate- all dark or a combination of milk and dark, as you like.
pinch salt
100 ml/ very scant 1/2 C hot water or hot coffee, as you like.

These eggs will not be cooked, so get the best ones you can find.

Separate the eggs, making sure that not a speck of yolk is in the whites (use an egg shell to scoop out any yellow from a broken yolk). 

Beat the yolks for a long time- even 10 minutes. Although they do not rise in volume nearly as impressively like whites do, it is a stabile volume, not like whites that deflate if you look at them wrong:

A ribbon of them will stay on the surface a moment-
alas not long enough to photograph.

Meanwhile, melt the chocolate and water or coffee together over hot water and stir to help it along. Remove at once- we want it completely melted but not at all too warm, or it will cook the yolks and curdle them. Blend them together:

Now beat the whites with clean beaters and add a small pinch of salt. Whip until fluffy, but not too stiff. Billowy whites are easier to blend in. I fold in half to lighten the mixture, then the other half:

Stop just when there are no traces of white:

At this point, you will think the whites have deflated too much- it is a thick, pourable mass, and not a light creamy fluffy thing. Do not worry, just pour it into whatever vessels you like:

and know it will set up beautifully in the refrigerator. Beautifully! In six hours, it will be creamy and light, and the second day it becomes a little bit spongy- my favorite way of having it. Both are fabulous. It makes several portions so you can try it both ways.

Serve with freshly whipped cream and make sure to sweeten it enough, especially if you have used all dark chocolate.

More recipes for Valentine's Day

Butter Ganache Truffles

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