That was an interesting experiential confirmation of intellectual knowledge. I knew that Alice Waters’ cuisine grew out of and moved on from French cooking as it was known in the United States prior to 1971. The menu I picked for today was, as I got into the fine print, very notably French (and Northern Italian) in its technical underpinnings.
Which meant, among other things, that the prep was fairly intensive and not entirely thought out in terms of the staging of the three dishes for a home chef without a sous to turn to. I got to a point where an awful lot of pans and surfaces were in play at a mind-boggling range of time frames. It was one of those preps where I needed some serious logistical attention to staging it all out.
This is one reason I really like the addition of a cookbook-creation challenge to Top Chef in recent years—watching professional chefs who are in the early years of their careers in many cases discover that translating a recipe that presumes a supportive kitchen full of employees into something that’s plausible for a single person is hard. (That’s sort of the point of their “quickfire challenges” as well.)
I didn’t really begrudge it—the outcomes were good, on the whole.
I served the consomme and ravioli as a first course. Since I didn’t have salt cod, I decided to use the smoked salmon I had already, along with a bit of sweet potato and some roasted garlic. That combination was great but it wasn’t a great match for a delicate fumet. I tried to up the fish-tasting intensity of the fumet by using two whole fish in it, and that helped a bit. (Side note: getting fish heads and bones is still an enormous pain the in the ass—the only place in my area that doesn’t regard that as an exotic special order is H-Mart in Upper Darby, bless them. Even the regular fishmonger around here gives me blank stares when I ask for fish heads and bones, and the frozen fish broth they have is really weak-tasting stuff.) Anyway, it was good enough, and I know Waters’ salt cod-and-garlic would have been superior if I’d busted my ass and gotten the right stuff.
The ragout was fine. I appreciated the smart attention to keeping the vegetables fresh and crisp, but here the French cuisine classique roots were still perceptibly tethering the dish down—it was bland and bit flabby and that’s with following the book pretty closely. (I tossed in the last of the fresh pole beans from the garden after blanching them for a bit.) Another cycle or two of the cuisine’s development and I think you’d see something like some garlic and preserved lemon and harissa plopped in, or something to punch it up.
The duck was great. I wondered a bit whether the grilling would feel superfluous, but it added a lot (I threw some hickory wood on the coals). The long-cooking confit sauce (and the roasted pecan) were lovely, with a lot of flavor. I need to cook more of those kinds of sauces for roasted or grilled meats, they add a lot.
VERDICT: Sure, yes, of course it survives. I feel a need to cook more from it. I may be a bit more careful about reading the small print as far as a preparation plan for the whole menu goes, though: the kitchen is kind of a disaster in the aftermath of a relatively simple meal.
I would like to try the ravioli with the cod sometime; but the salmon adjustment worked and your homemade ravioli came out beautifully shaped.