À Votre Goût - elda eats

“A splash of red wine vinegar can pull things together like a pinch of salt.” ~Alex Guarnaschelli
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.” ~Charles M. Schulz

I’ve always loved Snoopy. And while I’m not sure about the chocolate part, I do agree with Snoopy’s creator that love is all you need. I was raised on it.

Well, maybe love and food.

Chocolate is food, after all. Mr. Schulz wasn’t too far off.

To Your Liking

À Votre Goût. To your liking.

It’s a French phrase that is important to understand if you’re ordering a nice steak in Paris, or perhaps if you’re deciding between fried or poached fish in Marseille. For me, the phrase also symbolized how I modified (a bit) the next two recipes in the “Cook the 40” challenge featuring Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes.

Photo of the magazine cover. — Best-ever recipes? Let’s see how the next two measure up.

Cook the 40

Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Well, after making the first recipe (featured in an earlier blog post), I will admit that the magazine knows what it’s doing.

I was truly looking forward to making the next two recipes, all the while knowing I would be adding my own twists to them.

40 Years of Food & Wine

According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.

I am not sure what kind of stories these 40 best-ever recipes will tell from my kitchen’s point of view, but I am excited to find out.

Photo of the chocolate mousse recipe. — Chocolate mousse is not my thing, so I knew I would have to modify it for whom I made it: the chocolate lover in my life who is no longer partaking of sugar.

The Second Recipe

I chose the second recipe of my Cook the 40 year based on my choice of the third recipe (the chicken dish that is featured below) because it seemed like it would fit within a French theme. The poulet au vinaigre is French, and so why not also make the very French chocolate mousse for dessert.

One of the modifications I mentioned above would be that, for the dessert, I’d make the mousse keto-friendly so that Peter could eat it. I’d have a little taste, too. (Again, chocolate mousse really not my thing.)

Ne plus ultra

Craig Claiborne, whose recipe this is, was The New York Times restaurant critic in 1984—the year this recipe appeared in the magazine—and wrote at that time, “Once in a rare while, I discover a formula for a dish that seems the ultimate, the definitive, the ne plus ultra. I am convinced that the finest chocolate mousse creation ever whipped up in my kitchen is the one printed here.”

Ne plus ultra? Basically, the ultimate.

High praise, in any language.

Mr. Claiborne’s recipe called for the following ingredients: semisweet dark chocolate, eggs, water, sweet liqueur (such as Amaretto), heavy cream, and sugar. I cut the recipe in half because I didn’t need to make so much of it, and I used Lily’s sugar-free dark chocolate and a stevia erythritol blend instead of sugar.

(I also substituted bourbon and a little cherry extract instead of the called-for Amaretto. Not because I don’t like Amaretto but because I thought I had some but didn’t and so had to improvise. My improvisation worked out really well.)

Ultimate Chocolate Mousse by Craig Claiborne

Photo of chocolate melting in a double boiler. — First up was to melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Yeah, I had to make my own double boiler… (hey, another improvisation of mine that worked!)

Photo of the egg yolks tempering. — Next, after cooking the egg yolks and water very slowly (so as not to get scrambled eggs) and adding my liqueur mixture per all of the instructions, I poured the mixture through a strainer to discard all solids.

Photo of the chocolate mousse. — This beautiful chocolate mousse was the result of combining the egg yolk mixture with the melted chocolate and freshly whipped cream. Everything folded in beautifully before this bowl went into the refrigerator to chill for a few hours. (Note that the chocolate mousse only got better the longer it chilled in the fridge as Peter ate the leftover mousse in the next two days.)

Photo of the finished chocolate mousse. — As suggested, I topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. I will say, while not my thing, it was pretty tasty. Peter loved it!

1984

Honestly, and even though I didn’t read The New York Times or Food & Wine in the year this recipe was published, I am certain I like their version of 1984 more than what George Orwell wrote that year would look like.

Clocks strike thirteen? Give me a break.

I started the year at age thirteen, though, in the small Lone Star State town of Texas City. We then moved to Bryan, Texas where I got my first job that summer and celebrated my fourteenth birthday. My family didn’t travel much that year but we did move back home to San Antonio before the year ended. It was a good year.

1984 was also when I had lasagna for the first time. I decided to make it myself after reading about it for so many years in the Garfield comics. Using a lasagna recipe from one of my mom’s cookbooks, it became a new favorite food. Also for that same meal, I made my first (and most perfect ever) lemon meringue pie. Ne plus ultra, indeed.

Photo of Elda with her siblings in 1984. — 1984. The last time my siblings and I had a professional photo taken together. Also the year I got my first job, and the year my family moved back home to San Antonio.

The Third Recipe: Paul Bocuse’s Poulet au Vinaigre

Chef Paul Bocuse’s recipe called for the following ingredients: clarified butter, unpeeled garlic cloves, one whole chicken cut into ten pieces (I had the butcher cut into the usual eight pieces because I wanted full chicken breasts), salt, pepper, mild white wine or rice vinegar, very ripe tomatoes, fresh parsley and butter.

What did I change about this recipe? The main change was that I used red wine vinegar. One, because it’s what I already had on hand; and second, because I thought it would work better with the chicken, garlic and tomatoes.

I wasn’t wrong, but I better not get ahead of myself.

I was sure this Chef Paul Bocuse recipe would be tres bien!

Oh, I was very excited to make this chicken recipe. The mousse had been in the refrigerator by this time and I had cleaned the kitchen in order to prepare for the next French dish.

I just knew that the poulet au vinaigre would turn out well. It was French, after all, and I learned a lot in the last year about the wonders of vinegar.

Photo of food to make the poulet au vinaigre. — Some of the prep for Chef Bocuse’s poulet au vinaigre.

Sour Puss

Before last year, I hated vinegar. And except for pickles and a few other things that I know it positively contributes to, I avoided it. Except for once in the summer of 2001 (a subject for another blog post, perhaps) I had never myself personally bought any vinegar and to be honest, with one exception in Italy in 2014 (also perhaps a story for another blog post), the smell of any vinegar had always turned my stomach.

When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes use vinegar to clean with or to cook with, and I would stay far, far away. It was high on my list of hated substances to smell or consume.

Until last year, that is. As I’ve written about before, last year saw me go well out of my food comfort zone via many different recipes (52 things!).

I made my own pickles, for one thing, and used vinegar in many new recipes. All with superb results. Vinegar, as the French—and many of you, no doubt—have long known, adds a nice quality to many a well-made dish.

Poulet au Vinaigre by Chef Paul Bocuse

After preheating the over where the chicken would later stay warm, I followed the recipe by heating the garlic cloves in the clarified butter and then added the pieces of chicken and cooked them until brown.

Next, added the vinegar and let boil before adding the tomatoes and parsley. This cooked for a while before I then removed the chicken and put it in a dish that went into the oven to stay warm.

Chef Bocuse then called for the sauce to continue to cook until reduced (the recipe did call to skim off the fat, but I didn’t do that, because, well I like the fat…); followed by removing the cooked garlic cloves from their skins and mashing the cloves into the sauce. You can probably imagine how good it smelled.

The sauce was then poured over the tender pieces of chicken. The chicken was oh, so tender and the sauce was amazingly good. The French did it again!

1980

Besides having this recipe published in Food & Wine this year, I don’t know what else Chef Bocuse was doing in 1980. Where was I? Living in New Orleans, and learning a lot about local politics and how some parts of government work. I also later learned—the following year in 1981— to hold a sign on a picket line.

My dad, you see, was an FAA air traffic controller, and president of their local PATCO union. You may remember that there was a big strike that year and all controllers were fired. My dad among them, was also part of a small group who was prosecuted in federal court.

The strike and its aftermath is a long story that I won’t get into here, now.

Our lives changed a lot during and after that strike. My dad held down a variety of different jobs after that year, including but not limited to restaurant management, car sales, security, pizza delivery driver, income tax auditor, and basically anything he had to do to provide for me, my mom and my brothers and sister.

While 1981 was the year that I saw proof that my dad was a man of principle, a man of influence, and a hard worker, 1980 was the year that it started since we had to move back to New Orleans that year because the struggles at my dad’s job had already begun.

While I don’t know if I would say it was a good year, 1980 was a year that changed the direction of our family’s future. A future that, despite many ups and downs, would always include food and love at its center.