The culinary memoir has to be one of my favorite genres of both cookbooks and books in general. Combining anecdotes, family history and delicious recipes, and spanning literature and cuisine, there’s really nothing better than a cookbook that you can actually read, that’s not just a selection of quick and easy recipes by some personality-laden stand and stir TV show host, and from which you learn the context of the food and about why traditions and patience in food are important. With the holiday season upon us, I can heartily recommend you give the gift of a copy of Food & Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine by Simone Beck, to your nearest and dearest this year.

Madame Beck is best known as having been Julia Child’s collaborator on Mastering the Art of French Cooking volumes I and II, in which she was both originator and chief tester of the majority of the recipes contained therein. Beck and Child met through a mutual friend while Child was first in Paris with her spy-husband, Paul, in the late 1940s, and struck up a friendship that was to last until Beck’s death in 1991. In spite of her crucial role in these historic cookbooks, many Americans could be forgiven for never having heard of Simone Beck, since Julia Child’s television career and her bright and breezy personality are what most people remember. This is a pity because Beck is a superb raconteuse, whose life, spent in various parts of France, spanning two World Wars, a trans-Atlantic career, and the birth, life and death of nouvelle cuisine, is truly fascinating.

The first half of this reissued book – first published in 1991 – is a charming, rose-tinted memoir, interspersed at key points with beautifully-constructed period menus complete with recipes from the principal events she tells of – dinners with local Norman families, dinners for liberating Canadian soldiers, and lunches made for her Provencal cooking school. The second half is rather more of a straight-up compendium of French recipes, many of which feel, in all honesty, rather old-fashioned and frumpy when deprived of Beck’s evocative descriptions of French country life we find in the first half of the book.

If you are looking for a cookbook full of recipes that you’re immediately going to want to make, then this might not be the book for you, as although there are plenty of recipes that will make you salivate, many feel rather overly ornate for the typical American home cook. For the purposes of quality control, I tried her Poulet de Varvannes a l’estragon et a la creme (chicken in tarragon cream sauce) (recipe to follow in a later post), and found it to be not only completely delicious, but a very straightforward recipe to take on, even for a week night, so one can definitely pick through this books contents for more approachable dishes. However, even if you never make any of Simca’s food, there is plenty to enjoy in her book with its variety of delightful tales of her gastronomic pursuits and friendships with many of the 20th century’s most celebrated bon vivants. For further reading of this kind, I can also recommend Jacques Pepin’s The Apprentice, M.F.K. Fisher’s A Long Time Ago in France and the unsurpassed When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman.

Once he’s managed to obtain said lucre though, Mayle is remarkably restrained in his descriptions of how best to prepare them. Of course, he says, you can stuff a pigeon with them, or combine them with cream and mushrooms as a sauce over beef or veal medallions, but the way to enjoy them at their best, most pungent, earthy and flavorful, is to do as little to them as possible. His preferred recipe is to grate a generous amount of black truffle into and over a simple, loose, French-style omelette, and enjoy with a glass of champagne, for breakfast.

Well, since our good friend Nuria at Spanish Recipes challenged us to submit our favorite omelette recipe to her Blog Your Omelet contest, we felt that we had to produce something pretty grand if we were to compete with her amazing range of eggy treats. So, here it is, both simple and sophisticated at the same time, not to mention being about the best breakfast imaginable, especially with the champagne!

The key to a good omelet, the great Jacques Pepin reminds us, is to keep it a bit “wet” or “loose” by not overcooking it (which Americans seem to hate, for some reason) and to never complicate the flavor of what should be the star of the show – the egg.  Americans know how to do this best – kind of similar to how we can complicate the simplicity of a pizza by weighing it down with a million toppings.  Look at the average diner omelet in America – it’s often stuffed with a lot of veggies and/or meat and oozing with cheese – perhaps the only way of saving the old diet “egg white omelet” from being boring and tasteless, however.

Regardless of how you usually make your omelet, and whether or not you have truffles, we urge you to try a simple and loose one next time. For ours we simply added butter to the warm pan and poured in our whisked egg and dash of cream, salt and pepper mixture.  Stir or whisk the egg while it’s cooking in the warm pan until it begins to come together. Then, stop stirring and let it sit and cook. When it looks mostly cooked but still nicely moist and with a bit of looseness on the top layer, you’re done. (Remember, eggs continue to cook in their own heat, so you can undercook it and it should still be good within a minute or so.)  If you so choose to, add some chopped chives and sliced mushrooms sauteed in some truffle oil (if you’ve got it) to the middle and then slice some black truffle (again, if you’ve got it) on top. No ketchup or hot sauce necessary, we promise.

Wow… that title is a bit long, but it’s the best description I could come up with. This meal is absolutely delicious, quick and cheap. It is adapted from our favorite master chef – Jacques Pepin. On his PBS show Fast Food My Way (WATCH IT!!!), Jacques creates seemingly difficult and creative dishes in no time. He never attempts to wow you with his personality (charming, sweet, truly charismatic), made-up stories to keep you interested (unless you count recollections of his mother’s cooking in France growing up which you really know are true and actually want to hear) or his K-RAZY catch phrases (only at the beginning with a “Happy Cooking!” in his lovely French accent). Jacques is a true master in the food world and every time I watch him I not only immediately relax, but I always learn something new. I am in awe of him and I not-so-secretly wish he was my grandfather (no offense to my real grandfathers whom I love/loved very much).

Jacques original dish is called Bowtie Pasta with Fried Egg and Cheese. His recipe is very, very nice, but I tweaked it a bit. We love garlic and had to add it. Jacques uses gruyere cheese, but we’ve also done this dish with shredded mozzarella and fontina cheese. Both melt extremely well and give the dish an excellent flavor. Topping the pasta with a runny, fried egg brings this dish to another level. Make SURE you don’t overcook the egg! You’ll want that yolk to run all throughout the pasta, mixing with the other ingredients, almost creating a sauce. I’m salivating thinking about it now.

I’ve also entered this recipe in Real Epicurean’s “In The Bag” May event.  Check out this blog for some delicious recipe!

PASTA WITH LEEKS, ASPARAGUS, MUSHROOMS, GRUYERE AND A FRIED EGG

• 1/2 – 3/4 of a box of short pasta, whole wheat if you so choose (gemelli, penne, rigatoni, cavatelli, etc.)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 shallot, minced (optional)
• 1 leek, cleaned and thinly sliced
• 6 asparagus spears (make sure to cut off the woody bottom), grilled and then sliced into 2 inch pieces (you can also boil them or saute them if you don’t have a grill pan)
• 5 white button mushrooms, thickly sliced (1/4 inch slices)
• 1/4 pound shredded Gruyere cheese (or mozzarella, fontina)
• a palmful of shredded Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
• 2 tablespoons butter
• olive oil
• salt and pepper
• peperoncino (optional)

What to do:

1. Heat up your grill pan (if you have one, if not, skip to #2)
2. In a medium-high heated pan, suate your mushrooms in some olive oil. Sprinkle with a bit of salt. As soon as they take on bit of color (about 2 minutes), add your leeks and saute until soft. Mushrooms should not be mushy, but have a bit of give. If you over-saute them, no biggie. I just like the taste of a bit of firmness along with the asparagus… you may not care. Reserve in a bowl on the side.
3. Grill your asapargus spears on your indoor or outdoor grill. Allow to cool and then cut into 2 inch pieces. (NOTE: If you do not have a grill pan, cut your raw asapargus into 2 inch pieces and saute in a bit of olive oil until cooked through – 3-4 minutes or so).
4. Boil your water for the pasta and cook for alloted time until al dente.
5. While pasta is cooking, in a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil, gently saute your shallots and garlic on medium-low (if you have the time, do it on low), so that they not only cook, but the flavor infuses into the butter/olive oil (5-8 minutes).
6. In a separate pan, fry an egg in some olive oil. Make sure to only fry it on the other side for a second in order to keep the yolk runny! That makes the dish! Keep warm until ready.
7. Drain your pasta, reserving about 1/2 a cup of the cooking liquid. Add your pasta to the pan with the shallots/garlic/butter/olive oil mixture (pan should be on low/medium-low heat. Add one more pat of butter (about a tablespoon) and toss. Next, add a dash of pasta water (about 1/4 cup at most), add back the other veggies and toss. Add a pinch of salt to your liking (always taste!). If you would like a stronger garlic flavor, add a pinch of garlic powder (NOT garlic salt if you’ve already added salt). Toss again.
8. Add your gruyere first and then the parmagiano cheese. Continue to toss pasta until cheese is completely integrated into the dish and melted.
9. Serve immediately, top each dish with a fried egg and some optional peperoncino if you want to add a kick to it.

CHECK OUT SOME OF THESE OTHER POSTS YOU MAY ENJOY:

• WATERCRESS & RICOTTA RAVIOLI WITH A RADICCHIO BUTTER SAUCE
• GNOCCHI DI PATATE WITH A BROWN BUTTER, SAGE, BREADCRUMB SAUCE
• PERFECT BROCCOLI DI RAPE WITH SWEET SAUSAGE
• LA RIBOLLITA (Tuscan Vegetable and Cannelini Bean Soup)
• AVGOLEMONO SOUP (Greek Lemon-Egg Chicken Soup w/ Orzo)
• SWEET ANISE-FLAVORED SALMON IN A POUCH (SALMON EN PAPILLOTE)

You go, Sara! Can’t wait to watch you again. We know you’ll be better off with this move.

CHECK OUT SOME OTHER POSTS YOU MAY ENJOY:

• NOOOOO! Could it Be? (Mario Gets Fired?)
• Rachel Ray – Maybe Hate is a Strong Word?
• The Wrong Message from a Former Prophet (Delia Smith Jumps Ship)
• Does Hollywood HATE Food?
• The REAL Cocido of Spain
• Diversity Finally Comes to The Food Network

So maligned are pressure-cookers that it seems almost sacrilegious of a food blog like this, that likes to extol the virtues of fresh ingredients and traditional cooking methods, to even consider adding a recipe that calls for using one. Undaunted, here we are flaunting convention and defying the culinary thought-police once more with a recipe for red wine and herb braised lamb shanks made in our brand spanking new pressure-cooker. Of course, this is but an exaggeration. We’re perfectly happy to try almost any food and any cooking method, and since we’d got given a pressure-cooker for a wedding present, and yesterday was the first autumnal feeling day of the year, we thought, why not give it a try?

Pressure-cookers got their bad name originally for two principal reason. Firstly, they were fundamentally quite dangerous contraptions that were liable to explode and inflict either physical injury by launching scalding lumps of food at those in the kitchen, or enduring damage to your kitchen decor, or both. And secondly, because they tended to stew food, boil out it’s goodness and turn everything to mush. However, advances in design and therefore safety mean that modern pressure-cookers are regaining popularity for their astounding ability to cook dishes that normally take several hours, within forty minutes, while preserving the food’s goodness.

We were first put on to the beauty and convenience of the pressure-cooker by the humble, and vastly underrated, Jacques Pepin. On more than one episode of Fast Food, My Way, Monsieur Pepin gets out his trusty pressure cooker and makes a delicious braised dish (beef, mushrooms and pearl onions, from memory) in about half an hour, while describing how he was inspired by his mother who used to use her pressure cooker on weekday evenings to create a hearty family meal in under an hour. Apparently, Maman Pepin would chop the vegetables and meat while still in her coat, and then slap the lid on the pressure-cooker, while she did various other household chores, and while we used our pressure-cooker for the first time last night (a Sunday) we can definitely see how using it on a weekday meal in the winter would work extremely well.

Here’s the recipe for the dish we made, but there are probably hundreds of different things you could make, all of them inside forty minutes. Next time, we’re going to make lamb rogan josh curry.

Check out some of our other pressure-cooker recipes: Lemongrass Beef Shortribs, Korean Style Pork Ribs and Lebanese Fatteh Blahmeh.

Wine-Braised Lamb Shanks with Rosemary and Thyme in the Pressure-Cooker

1 1/2 – 2lbs lamb shanks (probably 2 shanks)
1 spanish onion, roughly diced
3-6 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
1 large carrot, roughly diced
1/2 lb mushrooms (whichever kind you like) quartered, halved or whole depending on size
3 sprigs fresh rosemary
7-10 sprigs fresh thyme
1/4 bottle red wine (whatever you like drinking)
1pt chicken or vegetable stock
3 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp flour
kosher salt
fresh ground black pepper

1. add a couple of good pinches of salt and pepper to the flour in a bowl and dredge lamb shanks until lightly coated.
2. add half the oil to pressure cooker at medium-high heat and brown lamb until colored well on all sides. Remove and set aside.
3. reduce heat to medium and add onion, carrot and mushrooms to pot and remaining oil. sautee until onions go opaque and carrots soften a bit and get sugary. add garlic and sautee for three more minutes.
4. add herbs and the lamb shanks back to the pot. turn heat back to high and add wine and about 3/4 of the stock.
5. bring liquid to a boil then place lid on pressure cooker. keep heat turned to high until pressure monitor shows maximum pressure has been reached, then follow manufacturer’s directions for keeping pressure at the right level for the right amount of time. On our model, I turned the heat to medium, and cooked it for 35 minutes.
6. release pressure and stand back until steam clears.
7. season to taste before plating, but be careful! I burned the sh!t out of my mouth tasting the sauce
8. Enjoy.

I served the lamb with a smoked provolone, cream and parsley polenta and wilted broccoli di rape, and it worked very well indeed. It’s worth noting that the whole thing tasted much better the following day, as is often the case with sauces – they improve until finally they go off.

Do any of you have good pressure-cooker recipes? And, if so, are you brave enough to come out and say that you too appreciate the noble pressure-cooker for what it is – a much-maligned invention of genius? Well, come on then, let’s have them!