I KNOW HOW TO COOK

I KNOW HOW TO COOK, a French cookbook by Ginette Mathiot

This ‘’bible’’ of French home cooking since the early thirties is finally translated and nicely adapted to suit the needs of the English-speaking average cook


Stéphane,

My grandmother, my aunts, my mother were all very good cooks and I learned a lot from watching them in their respective kitchens in both Geneva, Switzerland and in the various French cities where we lived in the fifties.
But I have never seen them looking at a cookbook. Their knowledge of the ‘’cuisine’’ was transmitted from generation to generation.
As far as I am concerned, I knew how to cook a few essential dishes when I was a student like a steak, an omelet, sautéed potatoes, or pasta. But it was not until we got married in Paris in the sixties, that your mother and I started to cook. In fact we had so little time in Paris and such a small kitchen, that our cooking and entertaining was relatively limited.
It was not until January 1970, when we moved to Chicago and got a large kitchen that we started to entertain friends and colleagues during long and elaborate dinner parties, which implied cooking more complex and varied dishes.
Your mom, who turned out to become a very good French cook, had an old copy of Julia Child’s first masterpiece and also had brought her small book of Provençal recipes written by her Provençal cooking class teacher in Aix-en-Provence where she was studying when she came from the U.S. in 1961.

Me, I had only brought from Paris a very modest pocketbook version of Ginette Mathiot’s LA CUISINE POUR TOUS published in1955. I still consult it from time to time even though it is falling apart and is covered with handwritten notes, and seriously stained.
It contains all the basic recipes and cooking tricks that any French home cook should know. I had bought that book because it was a best-seller and it was cheap. At that time I could not afford Ginette Mathiot’s most famous big book, JE SAIS CUISINER that was offered to practically every new French bride between 1932 when it was published for the first time and the late seventies. Since that time it was re-edited and amplified many times and more than 6 million copies have been sold. During my last trip to Paris in September, I have seen many copies on my favorite bookstore shelves. It still sells like cupcakes.


Ginette Mathiot, who was born in 1907 and passed away in 1998, even though she published more than 30 books, was essentially a teacher. She taught not only cooking, but also what I would call ‘’home management’’ in public schools for many years. She ended her career as the General Inspector for House Cooking and Management for the French Ministry of National Education. She was rewarded with the medal of Officer of the Legion of Honor.

The reason of her immense popularity is very obvious: She managed to calm down the anxieties of generations of French women who were very apprehensive about cooking home meals and feared the disapproval of their husbands, mothers in law, and guests, by explaining in very simple terms what they should know about making basic dishes, sauces, condiments, pastries, etc, as well as how to use cooking utensils and choose the right product at the market, as well as how to set-up the table. Her motto was: Let’s simplify everything and suppress any info that is not essential to the preparation of a dish.
The application of this principle is very obvious in the way she write her recipes that never contain anything more that what is important to know in order to be able to complete the task.
In some ways she was sort of an anti-Julia Child who wanted every American home cook to be as well-versed in every food specialty as a French scholar would be, and therefore discouraged many readers who felt totally submerged by the over-abundance of information that she supplied for every bit of food to prepare.

Anyway, I had completely forgotten the existence of Ginette Mathiot when an American friend of mine, Shirley Baugher, presented me last week with a wonderful and unexpected birthday present: a copy of the recently published English version of Ginette Mathiot’s Je Sais Cuisiner, I Know How To Cook.
I was taken by surprised because I was completely ignorant of the fact that this book, published by Phaidon, had been released.
But knowing Shirley, who is a very good cook herself and knows a few extra things about French cooking since she studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, one of the most famous cooking schools in the world, I should not have been surprised.
The shelves in her beautiful kitchen in Old Town in Chicago are literally filled with hundreds of cookbooks. It is almost an addiction. She has herself published a very nicely illustrated recipe book that is a compilation of her famous and sometimes less famous neighbors and friends in Old Town: ``A Taste of Our Old Town``.
I spent some time last week-end to go through the 975 pages of I KNOW HOW TO COOK and I have to admit that the English adaptation of that beautiful book is very well-done, and should encourage many American home cooks to try and prepare French dishes. I should mention at this stage that this enormous task of not only translating, but also adapting its content to suit the abilities of any American housewife (or man), and modernizing it, has been accomplished by CLOTILDE DUSOULIER, the French woman who since 2003 has delighted millions of English-speaking Internet visitors worldwide with her famous blog ‘’Chocolate and Zucchini’. She started it when she was a computer software engineer based in MountainView, CA in Silicon Valley. She lived there 3 years and then went back to Paris where she published 2 best-sellers in English : Chocolate and Zucchini in 2007, and the marvelous ‘’Clotilde’s Edible Adventure in Paris’’.
Clotilde therefore knows what the American cook likes and can or cannot and will not do.
And she is a very creative cook who loves to innovate with recipes that are bold and healthy at the same time.

My first impressions:

On the plus side:

This book is very easy to read because its print is very sharp and very black , on a good quality very white paper. Its typesetting is practically perfect and leaves lots of space between recipes.

It keeps the essence of Mathiot’s original French recipes, but adapts them for Today’s busy contemporary cook and uses Anglo-Saxon measurements and description of food components and utensils

The 1400 recipes are very clearly organized in 15 distinct groups: Sauces and Basic recipes, Hors d’oeuvres, Milk, eggs, and cheese, soup, fish, meat, poultry, game , vegetables and salads, legumes rice and pasta, fruit, milk and egg desserts, ice creams, cakes and pastries, candies, preserves and drinks.

The cuts of beef are described the American way, not the French way.

The recipes cover a very wide spectrum of products and dishes from very old-fashioned like Garbure soup, ‘’Croquettes of calves’s sweetbreads’’, Rice puddding, or Eel ‘’matelote’’, to more traditional like Coq au vin, Fish quenelles, Bouillabaisse, and Norwegian omelet.

These chapters are preceded by a very useful glossary, description of herbs and flavoring agents, explanation of various cooking methods, utensils, wines, and a very interesting month by month chart of seasonal food products that you can use all year long.

The last section offers recipes of well-known French and Foreign chefs both in France, the UK and the US.

There are also some good practical pieces of advice about Table Setting, and Dining Etiquette

Last but not least there is a very useful index at the end.

Once again everything is very simply explained in plain English.

The book contains several beautiful photos of various types of dishes.


On the Minus side:

The recipes, in my opinion, are sometimes a bit to simplistic and cryptic for somebody who has absolutely no notion of what French cuisine and cooking is all about. Often it becomes obvious that the original version of this book has been written by a French woman assuming that all her readers (French women) have already a basic traditional French cuisine knowledge in their genes.

The new American cook will sometimes have to do a lot of guessing work before figuring out how to move forward to the next step.

Some American home cooks will certainly regret that there are no more precise step- by- step explanations on how to proceed with some recipes.

The lack of technical ‘’how to’’ illustrations might be of concern to many users, especially for more unusual or complex preparations.

The photos are too often blocked in one section instead being shown directly after the dish that has been described in the corresponding recipe

Some translations are perhaps too ‘’British’’ or still too ‘’French’’

The book cover is rather ugly.

But altogether it is a very informative and useful book that fills a void that Julia Child had left open.

Crus du Beaujolais

Crus du Beaujolais: These very flavorful and quite distinguished red wines are unjustly unknown and underrated in the U.S.

On November 19, forget about the overblown celebration of Beaujolais Nouveau, an often not very exciting unfinished wine, and open instead a good bottle of Morgon, Chiroubles, Julienas, or Moulin à Vent.

In June I had the good fortune to attend a very professionally organized wine tasting of “BEAUJOLAIS CRUS”, at the very pleasant wine shop and wine seminar center of JUST GRAPES located on West Washington Blvd. in Chicago. That event that was repeated in 2 other U.S. cities in 2009, Washington DC and New York City, is put together under the sponsorship of EXPRESSIONS D’ORIGINE, Domaines et Châteaux en Beaujolais, a trade and promotion association comprised of 14 privately-owned wine-growing estates located in the 10 Crus du Beaujolais AOC production areas.

I was very happy to participate in that event since it allowed me to get reacquainted in a very positive perspective with the wines of some of these ‘’crus’’ that I did not have many opportunities to taste over the last 10 years in Chicago. Most of them unfortunately are not very commonly found in local wine stores and shops.

A very different and much more complex and interesting wine that the ‘’ Beaujolais Nouveau’’ that Americans enjoy so much for no valid reason, which will be pour on Thursday November 19.

It is very unfortunate that the “Crus du Beaujolais” are relatively unknown by the American public at large since they are very flavorful, well made, and in any case gazillion times more interesting that the over-hyped and over-marketed ‘’Beaujolais Nouveau’’ that you find in every store and bistro in town every year, when it is released on the third Thursday of November after midnight.

Beaujolais Nouveau is a fresh,fruity, sometimes aromatic, wine but, for my own taste, it is deprived of any real personality and structure. It first appeared in French cafés and bistros after its production was approved by the French government in 1951. In the fifties and early sixties, it was quite amusing and charming to drink that ‘’new wine’’ pressed a few days after harvest time, from a small barrel or a glass jug located at the end of the bar. You would drink a glass while eating some ‘’charcuterie’’ or a piece of cheese, and it would be an occasion to chat and laugh with other regulars of the café in a merry and relaxed atmosphere.

That tradition started in the bistros and cafés of Lyon, Villefranche sur Saône, and of course in the nearby producing villages of the Beaujolais region. But pretty soon it became popular first in Paris and then in other large cities where the ‘’négociants’’ (wholesalers and brokers) of Beaujolais wines where commercially active.

In the early 50s you did not find Beaujolais Nouveau in its present bottled form in wine stores. And its consumption was limited to a few cities in France, in Geneva, Switzerland, that is close to Lyon, and whose citizens have loved Beaujolais for several generations, and a few cafes in Brussels, Belgium, and that was it.

In 1966 the famous NICOLAS company, that has hundreds of wine stores all over France, organized for the first time special ‘’Beaujolais Nouveau’’ events in its 250 Paris stores.

Pretty soon, the famous advertising slogan ‘’ Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé’’ was posted on the windows and counters of every café and wine shop of France.

That type of wine is made by wine-growers producing the regular appellation ‘’Beaujolais’’ in 72 villages of the Southern and Eastern portion of the Beaujolais region, and in lesser proportion by wine-growers of the appelation ‘’Beaujolais- Villages’’ located in 38 townships . These wines are sold with a ‘’Beaujolais-Villages Nouveau’’ label.

It is in fact, like all the red Beaujolais wines, made exclusively from GAMAY NOIR à JUS BLANC grapes. The Nouveau is hand-harvested. The not-destemmed whole bunches of grapes are then macerated for a very short time, 4 or 5 days at the most. (‘’Beaujolaise’’ vinification is almost always done through carbonic maceration).

After a first fermentation, the juices drawn from the vats and those resulting from pressing are assembled, an put in vats for a second cycle of fementation. The vinification last about one month from harvest time.

The well-known “négociant’’ Georges Duboeuf built a large part of his reputation in the U.S. on that Beaujolais Nouveau, when in fact several of his ‘’crus du Beaujolais’’ wines are much better and more interesting to drink all year long

In fact I am sad to say that the craziness about Beaujolais Nouveau, which started in the U.S. in the mid-seventies and lasted until the mid-nineties, probably killed the reputation of Beaujolais in general and of Crus du Beaujolais in particular.

Many trade people started to wonder where all this “Nouveau” consumed from Melbourne to Tokyo and from Vancouver to Rio was coming from, since simple math could allow you to calculate that more of that mediocre stuff was drunk than the legally allowed production would permit.

Several scandals regarding dubious production,blending, and distribution methods, (the most infamous one touching Georges Duboeuf, the largest négociant of that area), that were revealed in the 80’s and 90’s, had a negative impact of the marketability of good Beaujolais and Crus made by serious small producers.

Even in France the consumption of Crus du Beaujolais has been on the downside for more the last 15 years and has suffered from that unjust drop in reputation and favor on the part of wine lovers.

To be honest the fact that some of them have become increasingly expensive at the retail level did not help them either.

And that’s a shame since Crus du Beaujolais are excellent wines that deserve the same respect as wines from the Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Loire, Alsace, Languedoc, Southwest, or Provence areas.

When I was much younger my father would often open a bottle of Moulin à Vent, or of Saint Amour to accompany a good roasted chicken or some “vols au vent”, for birthdays or special occasions. I think he got that taste and tradition from my Grand Papa Laplanche, his father in law, in Geneva, where as I said earlier, this kind of wines have always been loved by the locals.

When I was a student in Paris in the eraly sixtes and did not have much money I would sometimes treat myself to a good camembert with a bottle of Morgon, almost a luxury for me at the time.

I remember that when I was an adolescent in Reims a well-known couple of ‘’’clochards’’ (hoboes) in our neigborhood, when they had collected a few coins, would go to the nearest café and order a glass of ‘’Beaujolpif’’, the somewhat vulgar knickname that was often used by blue-collar people to call Beaujolais after the war.

But later on, during trips to Lyon, I would enjoy drinking that wine in the traditional ‘’pot’’ de Beaujolais (a small bottle of around on pint) when eating charcuterie and other Lyonnaise specialties in the famous ‘’bouchons’’ (small bistrots in Lyon), like the Café des Fédérations.

A few facts about Beaujolais:

The vineyards of this AOC (Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée) officially recognized in 1936, have been producing wine since the days when the Roman legions occupied Gaule and planted vineyards.

The AOC Beaujolais-Villages was registered in 1950. It was the firtst time in the old history of French wines that the word ‘’village’’ was coupled with the name of an appelation. 39 villages were registered in that particular segment of the Beaujolais production.

The Beaujolais was named after the city of Beaujeu in the Western part of this area that was created by some local dukes in the 10^th century. Beaujeu was for several centuries the capital of Beaujolais.

Nowadays it is accepted that the city or Villefranche, located more or less at the center of the appelation, is the main hub of that region.

It is located on a relatively narrow strip of land, South of Burgundy per se, 34 miles long and only 8 miles wide. The Southern part of the zone of production is located in an area just Northwest of Lyon, and the Northern part touches the region of Macon.

The vineyards are found in the Northern part of the Rhône Department and the Southern part of the Saône et Loire department.

The climate not as cool as in Burgundy, offers a good mix of sun and humidity.

The soils of the Northern hilly part of the region consist maily of schist, granite, and a little bit of limestone. The Southern part has more sand and clay.

The whole ‘’vignoble’’ covers about 55,000 acres. A little more than 20,000 acres poduce the basic Beaujolais.

There are approximately 3,000 producers

98 to 99% of the wines are red and made from the Gamay Noir à jus blanc.

The relatively rare Beaujolais-Villages Blanc is made of Chardonnay and sometimes Aligoté, and comes from vineyards way North not too far from the Maconnais. The even more rare rosé are made from Gamay.

There are 12 appellations of Beaujolais in 3 groups: Beaujolais, Beaujolais Villages, and the 10 Crus du Beaujolais appellations.

Most regular (basic) Beaujolais (half of the total production) are produced in the Southern area (Bas-Beaujolais).

Some of the best Beaujolais-Villages and the 10 Crus are produced in the hilly areas of the North (Haut-Beaujolais).

In years when the alcoholic level might be too low winegrowers are authorized to add sugar, a process called ‘’chaptalisation’’.

All together these wines represent an average yearly production of 130 millions of bottles

Les Crus du Beaujolais

From South (north of Villefranche) to North (at the border with the Maconnais) there are only 10 of them:

Brouilly, and Côte de Brouilly,

Régnié,

Morgon,

Chiroubles,

Fleurie,

Moulin à Vent,

Chénas,

Juliénas,

Saint-Amour

Each of them have a different type of aroma and flavor. Some like Chiroubles , Fleurie and Saint-Amour are softer, fruity, and are considered as ‘’tender’’, elegant charmers easy to drink, and some would say ‘’feminine’’.

All of them are very fragrant

Chiroubles, the highest in altitude, is very ‘’gouleyant’’, meaning that it goes down your throat in a very easy and soft manner. It is calles a very tender wine.

Fleurie is very elegant and has a velvety body. It often develops a lovely aroma of violet.

The Saint-Amour, with its very seductive blend of cherry, peach, red berries, aromas, and a definite floral nose, is called the ‘’lovers wine’’

Some like the Morgon, Chénas and Moulin à Vent are more assertive, have a stronger structure and body, and could be called ‘’masculine’’.

Morgon is perhaps the most often found Cru in bistros and wine bars both in the U.S and in France. It has a very dark purple color and its aromas can be a powerful mix of prune, and dark cherry. Very robust, it can in good years be cellared for 5 to 10 years. It has such typical ‘’terroir’’ characteristics that people say sometimes ‘’that wine morgonne’’.

Some of the best are harvested around the Mont du Py.

Chénas It was Louis the XIII ‘s favorite wine. I love its sometimes explosive mix of aromas and spicy tones that change from year to year. It can be very floral, slightly woody, often spicy, and alays very fragrant. With a good body structure, it can age gracefully for 5 to 7 years. But it always remain pretty elegant and suave.

Moulin à Vent It always had the most prestigious image. It is in some ways the closest to a Burgundy. It can be quite tannic and spicy. Always quite strongly structured and complex in its finish. But it never loses its typically floral and fruity ‘’Beaujolais’’ qualities. Can aged for up to 10 years.

The new kid in town: Regnié: This appelation was created in 1988. This very aromatic and mineral wine is produced by only 80 winemakers from soils composed essentially of pink granite. Very long finish. Nice tannins. I love its subtle but very sexy aromas of small red berries. A well balanced wine practically ignored by most wine merchants in the U.S.

Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly

The first one is a very pleasant wine that is as aromatic, soft, and subtle without being too floral or jammy. It got its name from an officer in the Roman legions, Brulius,who was posted there. It is the largest (in terms of hectares) of all the crus du Beaujolais. Redolent of small red fruits and prunes, it reflects perfectly the fresh qualities of the Gamay. Its tannins are quite soft.

The second one has a much smaller acrage. It is a rather elegant wine with fresh aromas and a delicate finish. To be honest it is not one of my favorites.

Julienas One of my 2 favorites. It has lots of muscle and an ever changing personality, due in part to the large diversity of its soils. It offers a very good balance of structure, spice, aromas, and has a great finish. It is much better after 3 or 4 years.

Good vintage years: The 2007 is very pleasant

I would recommend the 2005 and the 2003.

What kind of food to eat with crus du Beaujolais

Pot-au-Feu, Poule-au-pot, Coq-au-vin, Roasted chicken and turkey, Rabbit stew, Charcuterie, Partridge, Quail, and small birds, stuffed baked vegetables, Hachis Parmentier, Camembert cheese .

Service temperature:

Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages should be served slightly cool, around 55-56 degrees, and Crus du Beaujolais, especially the more robust and full-bodied ones, at 60-62 degrees.

Beaujolais wines do not need to be decanted.

An 8 year-old Moulin à Vent will benefit from being opened 30 to 40 minutes before pouring.

Some producers of crus du Beaujolais I can suggest:

Morgon:

Domaine Marcel Lapierre

Domaine Dominique Piron

Domaine Louis-Claude Desvignes (Côte de Py)

Domaine Jean Foillard

Georges Descombes

Thevenet

Brouilly :

Château de la Chaize

Côte de Brouilly :

Château Thivin

Fleurie :

Domaine du Vissoux

Domaine Michel Chignard

Domaine de la Madonne ( perhaps not yet distributed here)

Domaine du Clos de la Roilette

Moulin à Vent:

Domaine du Vissoux

Chateau des Jacques

Paul Janin

Julienas:

Michel Tête

Clos de Haute Combe

Regnié:

Domaine de Colette

Chenas:

Domaine Piron (Chenas Quartz)

Saint-Amour

Clos de la Brosse- Paul Baudet

Chiroubles :

Georges Duboeuf

Availability and prices

As far as prices are concerned, you can, in the Chicago area at least, find Crus du Beaujolais for prices varying from $ 14.00 for a Morgon to $30.00 for a Moulin à Vent.

But as usual Trader Joe's offers a decent Morgon ( producer unknown) for $ 5.99. Quite a deal.

Unfortunately, once again in the Chicago area, it is getting more and more difficult to find Chiroubles, Côte de Brouilly, Regnié, Chenas, and Julienas from independant producers.

Several wine stores managers told me that there is practically no more regular demand for these wines.

If all you can find are wines bottled by some of the ''négociants'' try and limit your choice to good houses such as Tête, Jadot, Fessy, Mommessin, Latour, and Duboeuf.

Cru de Beaujolais

Hi Dad,

Last month while in Chicago you poured us a very flavorful Morgon that I quite enjoyed.You mentioned it was a "cru du Beaujolais".I'm familair with regular Beaujolais especially Beaujolais nouveau, but not with Cru du Beaujolais. On our vacation in Cape Cod last week I found a couple bottles of Cru du Beaujolais and it went over well with our friends.

What does this appelation cover? What are you favorites? Which one can you find in an American wine store?What food pairing you recommend? We had it with a nice light pasta and it seemed to pair well.

Thanks for the intoduction to this delightful appelation!

Stephane

JULIE and JULIA

JULIE and JULIA: A nice but very frustrating little film

Where is the (French) meat?

Stéphane,

2 days ago you asked me over the phone if I had seen Julie and Julia.
I have to admit that I did not want to see this film, for several reasons:

I was afraid that it would be focusing too much on another of those Streep vocal circus numbers. I was not that excited about the idea of watching another Hollywood fantasy about an American in Paris. From what I read there would be too much time devoted to Julie’s agenda, solo gig, her own and her husband’s frustrations, and not enough to the ascent of Mrs. Child as a culinary expert and to her extraordinary free-thinking and “modern” personality. After all, in the repressive times of the fifties in the U.S, she was a breath of fresh air and a real free spirit. No wonder she loved Paris so much. And last but not least, I have never been that impressed by the talents of Nora Ephron as a film director.

But Yesterday, when we had a very a muggy 93 degrees day in Chicago, It was too hot in our small kitchen to cook the ratatouille that I had planned to do with the vegetables I had bought the day before at the farmer’s market in Evanston. So the alternative was to go see a movie.
But our personal choices were limited to 2 bleak films, an Austrian ‘noir”, Revanche, that both previews and reviews encouraged us to see, and a tense war drama from the very talented Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker.
So, since we felt like seeing something lighter, we thought: Why not Julia after all.
At least it will be interesting to see how they reconstituted the Paris of the late forties early fifties, and there surely will be some fine food buying and cooking scenes to watch.
And as you know your mother has been a Julia’s faithful follower since the early seventies. How many times when we ask ourselves a technical question about something we are in the mood of preparing she still announces "let see what Julia says about it" and goes to the pantry to retrieve our very tired and stained “Mastering the Art of French Cooking"
And, as a blogger, food and wine consultant, and person who loves to cook, I was personally intrigued by the treatment of this story.

The result: The film was better than we expected and we sort of enjoyed it as it is: a very traditional piece of Hollywood entertainment. But unfortunately it also had a lot of holes, superficialities, and, above all, unbalances in the script, the editing, and the actors directing, that it sometimes made some sequences almost boring or just too loose-ended to be fully enjoyed.

On the plus side:

The concept of creating a parallel montage between the personal lives and the cooking experiences of Julia Child and the young blogger Julie Powell works after all in a bit more successful way than I thought it would be. We managed to progressively get used to, and from time to time interested in, the very deep differences between these two couples, the personal motivations and objectives of the two women, the support or exasperations of their respective husbands and friends, and their very different integration in their social or professional environments.
The cinematography is very pleasant and astute, particularly in managing to “expand” the physical aspect of Streep.
The casting of the four main actors is also quite acceptable: Stanley Tucci provides a very complex and subtle personalization of Paul Child. To me his performance is the most impressive of the whole cast. And the image that he helps projecting of their couple is quite realistic. We believe in them.
The light musical score by French Oscar-winner Alexandre Desplat is a perfect fit for re-creating the mood of Hollywood films taking place in Paris in the post WWII and early fifties period.
The sets and costumes are, once again, good replicas of those seen and worn in the movies of that time frame.
Meryl Streep performance is one of her best in recent years: pretty restrained, expressive and often touching, especially in the scene when she learns about her sister’s having a baby. Sometimes it is on the verge, but not falling into, of becoming a bit too cartoonesque. But we manage to often forget about the fact that she plays and almost accept her as Julia. And Julia’s enthusiastic persona is very nicely projected.

On the minus side:

Many of the scenes between Julie and her husband are overstretched and too conventional. The sequences where she writes her blog on her computer are way too long. We wait impatiently for Julia and Paul to return, only to be often disappointed by the shortness of substance in their dialogs. There is really an unbalance in the cutting and editing of their scenes.
An other factor contributing to this impression of unbalance: Even though Amy Adams is a quite charming and competent actress, and Chris Messina does a more than an adequate job as her frustrated husband, they cannot stand the comparison in terms of “on screen quality level of presence”, with a couple of old pros like Streep and Tucci. Besides the “mise en scene” (cinematic directing, camera movements, etc.) is much more elaborate in the case of the two stars. The scenes in Julie’s apartment and at her office are shot in quite a pedestrian lazy way.
I was very frustrated by the minimal approach to food scenes. There are practically no sequences were you can actually feel that any actual cooking, tasting, or eating is taking place. It is quite obvious that the two actresses are not cooking themselves.
And their respective ways of shopping are quite unrealistic. By the way, I wondered all the time where Julie secured the funds necessary to buy all those, sometimes very costly, food ingredients, and cooking ustensils, considering the obviously modest financial status of her household.
The scenes taking place in Parisian restaurants (very probably shot entirely in studio in the U.S., since I did not notice any mention of a Parisian eatery in the credits) look and sound phony. Even the waiters do not act or speak in an authentic fashion. The French fish mongers, bakers, and butchers even less.
I was particularly horrified by the depressing look of that poor "sole meuniere", (that Julia Child tasted for the first time after her arival in France, in a restaurant in Rouen, and which would become her epiphany) presented to her, whole in the pan, by a waiter. Instead of the delicate "beurre noisette" and a few specks of fresh parsley and a slice of lemon that should have been covering that delicate Dover sole, I was under the impression that the butter that surrounded that fish had been burned to a point of no return. The food consultants must have been taking a nap at the time this scene was shot.
I would have loved to have a complete sequence devoted to Julia preparing a whole dinner for her husband and to watch them at the table enjoy and discuss the whole thing.
At one point when the 3 gourmandes (Child, Beck and Bertholle) have lunch on the terrace of a Parisian bistro, I thought for a split second that the front of that bistro looked like Astier’s in the 11th arrondissement, but I’m not sure. Anyway, Astier does not have any terrace.

Only the boeuf bourguignon looked authentically French. But Amy Adams keeps calling it “bouff bourguignonn’’.
Also I cannot believe that there were so few scenes shot in real Paris locations.
But I had a nostalgic smile on my face (in the dark) when I saw the entrance of the house where the Childs move in when they arrive in Paris: 10 rue de Seine, in the 6th arrondissement, is just a few numbers down from were we lived in that street until we moved to Chicago, and where you spent the first months of your existence Stéphane.
And later on, there is a long shot of the windows of the apartment, Quai aux Fleurs in the Ile de La Cite, where I rented a room when I was a student at la Sorbonne in 1963.
I found it totally ridiculous to have not cast any French actors or actresses in some of the supporting roles. This is particularly crucial for the part of Simone Beck, aka Simca. Linda Emond is a fine stage actress, but I had a very hard time accepting her, and her phony accent, as being Simone Beck.
But my biggest objection is to the over-simplification in describing Julia’s personality and relation with others. This portrait lacks psychological and socio-cultural complexity.

But is the film supposed to include the portrait of a hyper-dimensioned star and human being or just a sort of gimmicky montage of the separate and not even parallel itineraries of two women, who just find “something to do with their lives”, and in so doing attained celebrity status. That is the question I often asked myself.

To capsulate my impressions of this movie: I think that it is an entertaining little film that would have required a tighter script, the “savoir-faire” and always very efficient directing talent of a Stanley Donen, or a Blake Edwards, and a larger budget to film more scenes on location in Paris, to have a chance to reach greatness.

Brandade de Morue de Nîmes

The real Brandade de Morue à la Nîmoise : A very special treat.

When I was in my teens, in Reims the capital of the Champagne producing district, my father often said at the end of a good meal when everybody was thanking my mother for another of her culinary accomplishments:

“ La morue à la brandade, le gigot et la salade, tout était bien chez l’ami du cousin Barthélémy’’. This sentence, that he would pronounce slowly, was a quote of a phrase that one of his older parishioners when he was the Protestant (Calvinist) minister of our little town of Saint-Hippolyte-du- Fort, near Nîmes, had used several times to describe to my father a very good meal he had at a friend of his cousin’s house. Its translation is: ‘’the cod prepared in the style of a brandade, the roasted leg of lamb, and the salad, everything was fine at the house of the friend of my cousin Barthelemy’’

I do not know why this sentence was stuck in my father’s memory, but I would invariably ask my mother why we never had ‘’brandade de morue’’ at home.

I do not remember the answer, but I would be ready to guess that my mother, a Swiss from Geneva, was not a big fan of salted dried cod fish, and that this dish never entered her vast cooking repertory, even after 10 years spent before and during WWII in Saint- Hippolyte.

When we left Saint-Hippolyte in 1947 to move to Reims, I was barely 7 at the time. And in those days, when we had been deprived of most regular food necessities since 1942, I do not think that this fish specialty was easily found in our town.

So, I cannot remember having ever tasted that dish in Saint-Hippolyte, a town located only 35 miles from Nîmes where it is still the only really local culinary specialty of that old Languedocian city. And believe me, you would never find an ounce of brandade in a Northeastern city like Reims. As a matter of fact, until the late 70s, it would have been very improbable to find any brandade in a restaurant outside the areas of Nîmes and Marseille.

It took me 19 years before I could taste my first brandade in Nîmes

So I had totally forgotten the brandade when I moved back, alone without my family for the first time, to my native town of Nîmes in 1959, to get my baccalaureate degree there.

To secure room and board and make some money while studying there I was hired by a small private boarding pension to take care of young middle-school and high-school age boys from villages outside Nîmes who would live, eat lunch and dinner, and do their home work at night there during the week.

And what was served for lunch the first day I was there? You guessed it: Brandade de morue. I do not remember if it was home-made by the pension’s cook, or if it was one of the two locally-made commercial brands, whose names were Mouton and Raymond Geoffroy,

but I remember that I found that dish totally revolting, both in terms of structure, gooey and fibrous, and of taste, very fishy and oily.

I promised myself never to touch that stuff again.

I changed my mind several years later in the 70s when I was now living in Chicago and traveled to France often on business. With my best friend, who is also from Nîmes, we would regularly drive there from Paris to attend bullfights, and spend the week-end in his country house in a village near Saint-Hippolyte, called Lasalle. But once I flew to Nîmes on business, and was invited for lunch at a restaurant called Le Magister. The chef-owner, Martial Hocquart, whom I believe still cooks there, was not from that area, but he managed to produce an authentic Brandade de Nîmes, that was a pure delight: Light, very aromatic, unctuous but perfectly balanced. I became a fan of the real brandade and I still love it today when it is well prepared with good ingredients.

Nowadays, you find brandade in many good Parisian restaurants, as well as in several good eateries in Chicago. It is offered in several variations, but never according to the original and authentic recipe from Nîmes.

In Paris: I used to like the brandade at:

La Bastide Odeon, Rue Corneille in the 6^th,

Le Bistrot de l’Olivier Rue Quentin Beauchart in the 8^th.

But I have to admit that I did not visit any of these restaurants for quite a long time

In Chicago I would suggest:

Le Bouchon at 1958 N. Damen (very close to what it should be)

Bistro Campagne 4518 N. Lincoln (they serve it in the form of “croquettes”)

Mado at 1647 N. Milwaukee

Avec at 615 W. Randolph

Now, let’s talk a bit about the origins of La Brandade de Morue à la Nîmoise.

Just for the fun of it, I would say that this old and beautiful city, located 706 kilometers South of Paris, 123 Km North of Marseille, and only 42 km North of the medieval city of Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean sea, is known for two other things, besides brandade: Its famous Roman arena in the shape of a round amphitheatre, where some of the best bullfighting festivals in Southern Europe take place between May and late September, and the famous Denim fabric, that was invented there under the name of "serge de Nîmes" in the 18^th century. It was eventually colored in that well-known blue indigo color. But Denim means ‘’De Nimes’’ (from Nîmes).

The big question is: How did cod, a fish that has been for centuries caught in the cold waters of the North Sea and around Newfoundland, close to the Eastern coast of Canada, mostly from boats anchored in Normandy and Brittany’s ports, found its way to the Southern city of Nîmes, that is not even a port on the Mediterranean Sea?.

The reason is purely commercial and logical. In the 18^th century, there was no refrigeration or freezing equipment on fishing boats. The French fishermen who left on fishing expeditions for several days in the North sea, or sometimes weeks when they were sailing as far as to the North Atlantic fishing grounds of Iceland or Terre Neuve (Newfoundland) needed a way to preserve the ‘’morue’’ (cod) they caught. Fresh cod is also called ‘’cabillaud’’ and it has never been found in the Mediterranean Sea.

The only way they knew was to completely cover the fish with salt.

In those days the best source of salt was the ‘’salines’’ (salt works) from the Provençal coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and more particularly the Camargue area and Aigues-Mortes, a port city totally surrounded by tall walls and ramparts, from were the crusades departed in the 13^th century.

The fishermen would bring salted cod as payment, in a bartering system, for the tons of salt that they brought back in large bags to their Northern ports like Saint-Malo or Boulogne.

That is how that salted fish became, once desalted and cooked, a very common food on the tables of the department du Gard where Nîmes and Aigues-Mortes are located, as well as cities like Uzes and Alès. Over the years it became a very convenient, cheap and easy way to keep, source of protein for poor people in rural areas not only of Languedoc, but also Auvergne, and the Southwest all the way to the Spanish border, who could not afford to buy meat or pork belly.

It is precisely the cook for the archbishop of Alès, Charles Durand, born in that city in the Cévennes in 1766, who was the first to have the idea of blending desalted cooked cod with other major ingredients of Mediterranean cuisine like olive oil, thyme, laurel, and garlic, to make a paste that was continuously stirred with a wooden spoon during the whole process. The verb ‘’brandar’’ in the old Occitan or Provençal language means to stir or to vigorously shake or agitate. The result is a ‘’brandado’’ a product that has been stirred or shake.

The ‘’brandade’’ was born.

As I said earlier, there are many versions of that dish, especially since it has been adapted by chefs with various backgrounds all over the world.

Nowadays, most traditional brandades are a mix of cod, milk or fresh heavy cream, olive oil, boiled mashed potatoes, garlic, salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and sometimes a bit of lemon juice.

Most often it is served with slices of baguette bread pan-fried in olive oil, sometimes rubbed with garlic. It is in fact the Marseillaise version of the dish that is found all over Provence.

Brandade started to be a very popular in Paris after 1830. Even more when the well-known writer Alphonse Daudet (Les Lettres de Mon Moulin) started a very popular “Diner des amis de la brandade” (brandade lovers dinner) at the Café Voltaire in 1894. Daudet suggested that cooks rubbed some garlic in the cooking pot rather than incorporating it in the preparation itself as it was done in Provence.

Soon la brandade nîmoise became a very common dish all over the Languedoc on Fridays. But even at the time of the French revolution in 1789, it is said that Parisian foodies would go to a restaurant called ‘’ Les 3 frères Provençaux’’ to eat the real brandade de Nîmes. So maybe it was already a regional specialty even before Durand.

Anyway, it seems that it is the Chef Durand who launched the commercial success of the brandade nîmoise that was made according to his own recipe and sold in jars or closed pots.

Brandade de morue is now very popular in many bistros and home kitchens all over France.

• It can be covered with breadcrumbs and some cheese and finished to look like a “gratin” in the oven for a few minutes.
• It can be stuffed in red or yellow peppers, or mushrooms.
• It is delicious in mini-tartlets as an amuse-bouche.
• Some people add a touch of sophistication by serving it warm with thin slices of truffles.
• Others mix the cod with halibut, sole, or even lobster and add an egg yolk for a richer texture and taste
• In Languedoc it is often garnished with black olives and ‘’croutons à l’ail’’and accompanied by a salad of ‘’frisée’’ dressed with a good olive oil and sometimes pinch of crushed garlic.

You also now find frozen brandade in ‘’magasins de surgelés`’ (stores specializing in all kindsof frozen foods). One of them, brandade parmentier, is a very popular item at Picard Surgelés. But personally I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole.

And of course you can buy Brandade de Nîmes RAYMOND, from RAYMOND GEOFFROY, a company started in Nîmes in 1879, in containers from 100 grams to 1 and 5 Kilos. It will be closer to the authentic original product that any frozen stuff.

All of this can be delicious and creative but it is not at all the authentic Brandade de Nîmes, that does not contain any garlic or potatoes. And remember that Nîmes is not in located in Provence but in Languedoc.

Here is the way an authentic Brandade de Nîmes should be prepared:

First you have to find good quality dried salt cod, what we sometimes call stockfish in Europe. The best is sold in wooden boxes. The ideal is to buy about 2 pounds if you want to prepare brandade for 4 persons.

The best piece would be close to the head of the fish since it is meatier. Cut it in 2 or three parts.

1. Desalt the fish for at least 24 hours by getting rid of as much salt as you can from the surface and then putting it in a pot, skin up, containing cold water and change that water at least 4 times. When its over, rinse the cod in cold water and drain it.
2. Poach the fish in cold water where you add 1 bay leaf and 2 sprigs of thyme. But this addition of aromatic herbs is optional.

Put the heat on and poach the cod very gently until the water starts to simmer. 8 to 10 minutes.

The cod should NEVER boil.

3. Drain and put the fish on a board. Delicately remove the bones and the skin rapidly before the fish gets cold so that it does not get gelatinous or look like glue. In Nimes originally some cooks kept the skin on because it would increase the taste and the texture. Then coarsely flake the whole thing and keep it at lukewarm temperature in a pot in a corner of the stove.
4. In the meantime you will have warmed in two separate little sauce pans some very good extra-virgin olive oil (just about 1 and 1/4 cup) and about I cup of whole milk. Make sure the oil is lukewarm, not hot, and to remove the "skin: of the milk that should be warm but not hot either.
5. Put the pot containing the cod on very low heat and add a spoonful of olive oil to the pot and, using a wooden spoon, stir it into the cod and crush the pieces of cod again the walls of the pot, then add a spoonful of milk and stir. Continue the process for 12 to 15 minutes by alternating spoonfuls of olive oil and milk until none is left in the saucepans. Never stop stirring. When the mixture is reaching a creamy consistency, add some salt and freshly ground white pepper. Add a pinch of freshly ground nutmeg, and a few squeezes of lemon juice. Make sure there are no lumps in the brandade.
6. Stir again and serve the lukewarm brandade in the shape of truncated flat cone on a plate. Place a couple of black olives on top to decorate. Surround the mound with slices of French bread cut in triangles, lightly fried in olive oil and rubbed with garlic.

That’s it. No potatoes, no garlic in the brandade proper. Just the sweet taste of mild cod puree emulsified in good extra-virgin French olive oil.

• If you want to make a modern version, follow the same instructions up to stage 4.

Then in the bowl of a food processor put 2 or 3 cloves of garlic and puree them, then add 4 warm large boiled potatoes and the cod and puree them, while slowly incorporating alternatively your warm olive oil and your warm milk through the funnel of the food processor until both are totally absorbed. Season with the same ingredients as above and make sure that the brandade that you obtained is smooth, not liquid, and not too thick, and without any lumps.

Serve with a slightly cool wine like Costières de Nimes rosé, Tavel, or a white Bandol.

Bon appétit.

Alain

Provencal Lamb Stew and Camembert

Provencal Lamb Stew, a new French Camembert, and a flavorful Vin de Pays de la Principauté d’Orange.

A comforting Sunday night dinner in rainy and depressing early May in Chicago

Hey Stéphane, hope everything is going well as far as barbecuing in your backyard in MountainView is concerned, and that you can still find that delicious locally fished fresh salmon steaks at your beautiful farmer’s market before once again a temporary ban may be imposed on that kind of catch off the coast of Northern California .
Here in Chicago it is still rather grey and cold for the season with lots of powerful showers. I wonder what we will be able to find at the first farmer’s market in Evanston next week-end because I suspect that these deluges of rains that we have been exposed to since early April did not allow a normal spring planting process.

Anyway I’m dreaming of sunny days in Southern France, and as it is the case every year, in early May, when the first leaves start to grow in a more assertive way on the sycamores facing our dining-room windows which look a bit like the platanes (plane trees) of my youth, I get a serious case of nostalgia. There is no “muguet” (lilly of the valley, the flower traditionally sold in the streets of Paris on May 1) growing in the park in front of our building, but my nostalgia nevertheless often focuses on our May Day (Labor Day in France) rustic and very proletarian picnics or lunches in Reims and Paris in the fifties and sixties where saucisson, pâté, camembert, œufs durs mayonnaise (hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise), baguette, and Beaujolais or Côtes du Rhône red wine were generating many moment of pure and simple pleasure. You could read my piece on the Chicago origins of May Day celebration published last year on this blog to get a refresher course on what these Premier Mai celebrations in France were all about, especially regarding the food aspect of them.

The other dining nostalgia I develop in early May deals with more elaborate lunches around Easter that always included some delicious spring lamb based dishes that we enjoyed in small restaurants in Aix-en-Provence or Avignon when I lived there.

That is why at this time of the year I always love to prepare a simple Sunday lunch or dinner that reminds me of these happy days in Provence or in Paris and includes at least 5 major components that bring some sun to my heart:

Some charcuterie as an appetizer, a good salad made of Boston lettuce, Dijon mustard vinaigrette, with chives (or crushed fresh garlic), a small leg of lamb (the shank part), or small loin lamb chops grilled with herbes de Provence. It could also be a more rustic lamb stew with tomatoes and olives. To finish the meal I need a good Camembert and a piece of good quality Roquefort, and for dessert a Tarte à la Frangipane (almond tart). As you know I am not a pastry specialist. So I let your mother be in charge of that marvelous provençal dessert which is one of her many specialties.

Hors d’œuvre: Pâté de campagne et saucisson sec


So this year we started our May 3 Sunday dinner with some “Pâté de campagne au Champagne” from Marcel & Henry , the French charcutiers from South San Francisco, a very peppery, strongly seasoned, very flavorful and very authentic-tasting pork pâté that they sell in individually wrapped thick slices at Fox and Obel for around $ 6.25. And some saucisson sec (dry pork sausage) from independent producer John Volpi in St, Louis (no connection with the better known and more commercial other Volpi).
Since I cannot find in Chicago the delicious French Saucisson Sec from Fabrique Délices in Hayward, CA that we buy at your farmer’s market, I found that cheap but very tasty Italian-style and additives-free hard salami made with Chianti to be a perfectly edible alternative treat to French saucisson. It is sold at Trader Joe’s for $ 3.99 for the whole sausage. Of course this first course was accompanied by the traditional garnish of French ‘’cornichons’’ and pickled tiny onions, as well as authentic Dijon mustard, once again all from Trader Joe’s.
The baguette is a crusty and well made affair from the very expert baker of Fox& Obel at a relatively acceptable price of $ 2.75.

Plat principal (Main entrée): Lamb.

But, why is American spring lamb so different from its French cousin?

The problem that I find every year is with the quality of the so called ‘’spring lamb`’ that I can purchase in Chicago. In France ‘’Easter lamb’’, as it is sometimes called, either in the form of chops or leg, is very small, with a very delicate flavor, and the color of the meat is a light pink. It is practically impossible nowadays, or if you place a special order for it at your butcher it will cost you a fortune, to find authentic baby milk-fed lamb. That is a real delicacy. The baby lamb in this case is usually 4 to 6 weeks old when it is slaughtered and has not been weaned from his mother’s milk. Its meat’s color is almost white. Over here some very good Greek restaurants might offer it occasionally round Easter and it is spit-roasted. Baby lamb’s weight is around 20 pounds.
In France a real spring lamb has usually been slaughtered between 70 days and 5 months after his birth. The meat’s color is a light pink and its taste is quite delicate. Not at all muttony as it is the case sometimes with so called “spring lamb” sold in some American supermarkets. A French spring lamb grew on grass exclusively. It never weighs more than 50 or 55 pounds. You usually find it in good butcher shops between February and June.
French ‘’regular’’ lamb is most often 6 to 9 month old. You find it in retail points of sale between September and January. A whole animal is normally not heavier than 70 pounds and the color of its meat is a light red. Its taste is a bit more assertive that spring lamb, but normally still very tender

But in Chicago when I buy a small leg of lamb in April or May, it is quite large compared to its French counterpart, its meat has already a relatively dark red hue and is not as tender as it should be. Besides the texture, the taste of the meat, as well as the weight of the piece, lead me to think that this lamb might have been put in a feed-lot for several weeks after it left the pasture and fed some cereal-based industrial feed in order to boost its maturity and weight more rapidly, and of course increase its meat yield.
In any case I have rarely found a light-colored small delicate-tasting spring leg of lamb in a shop here.
Even though I buy good quality lamb produced by Chiappetti, a reputable family-owned Chicago veal and lamb packer and processor that owns its own growing sites somewhere in Colorado or the Rockies, I’m always frustrated by the rather disappointing results I obtain when I get the leg of lamb out of the oven and into my plate and eventually my mouth.
It is never as tender and mild as it was with the “gigots” that we ate in France.
My favorite lamb was the lamb from “Pré-salé’’ (salt marshes or meadows) from Picardy and Normandy, especially at the Mont-Saint Michel ,




the ‘’Agneau de Sisteron’’ from the area of Haute Provence near the Durance River, or Agneau des Pyrénées (from the mountains separating France and Spain).

Here is my way of doing a roasted half leg of lamb (shank part) with ratatouille
I usually insert a 3 or 4 slivers of fresh garlic in the meatiest parts of the leg and coat it completely with a creamy ‘’pomade’’ (paste) of Dijon mustard, Olive oil, and Thyme that I have slowly whisked to the point where it is heavily emulsified and transformed into a paste. The meat should be at room temperature.
I cook the leg (shank part) on a steel rack in a Pyrex dish with a mix of water and white wine at the bottom in a pre-heated oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes and then at 350 degrees for 80 more minutes in the case of a leg weighing between 3 and a half to 4 pounds. The meat internal temperature should be 135 degrees for medium-rare when you remove the leg from the oven. You should cover it with aluminum foil and let it rest for 15 to 20 minutes before carving. I usually do carve the leg in round slices around the bone.
I serve it with a home-made ‘’ratatouille’’ made of 1 large eggplant that has been cut in 1 inch cubes that you let drain its acrid liquid and some seeds with coarse sea salt in a colander for 20 minutes, 4 sliced unpeeled zucchinis, 4 chopped seeded and peeled fresh tomatoes, slices of 3 yellow medium onions, 4 sprigs of dried thyme, 2 bay leaves, 4 chopped cloves of fresh garlic, and about 6 Tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil. I sauté all ingredients separately in olive oil, before mixing them in a Le Creuset ‘’cocotte’’. Then I season with salt and pepper from the mill, and simmer the whole thing covered slowly at low heat for 35 to 40 minutes and then reduce the juice for 15 minutes with the lid off.

But on May 3, the leg of lamb in the meat dept. of my supermarket was too red and fat for my taste, So I decided to cook one my favorite Provençal lamb dishes:

Lamb stew with tomatoes, onions and black olives

I buy already packaged cubed pieces of lamb stew from Chappetti’s (8 dollars for 1 pound) at Treasure Islands supermarket, trim all the apparent fat, dry the pieces with a paper towel and let it stand for 15 minutes at room temperature.
I use either a Le Creuset cocotte (a French enameled cast iron Dutch oven with a lid) or a Fagor heavy steel gage pressure cooker from Spain.
Meanwhile I slice 2 medium-size yellow onions and 3 large cloves of fresh garlic (chopped), and I sauté them at low heat in extra-virgin olive oil until soft but not browned with some herbes de Provence. Then I add the meat and brown all pieces (about 5 minutes). I deglaze the bottom of the cocotte by stirring in 2 Tablespoons of a good quality red wine vinegar. Then I add the content of one large can of San Marzano Italian peeled plum tomatoes, juice drained, that I have seeded and coarsely chopped. I add one tablespoon of olive oil.
Then I put in about 20 to 25 small pitted Greek black Kalamata olives that I have gently simmered for 5 minutes in boiling water to remove part of the oily brine and soften the taste.
Then I pour a cup of low-sodium low-fat chicken broth (usually I use Swanson’s because I find the organic broth from Whole Foods overpriced and bland) and 1 cup of dry white wine (I use the Sauvignon blanc from Shaws at Trader Joe’s. I would never drink it but it is perfect for cooking), or even better of a dry rosé ‘’vin de pays’’ wine from Languedoc, like the Domaine de Gournier.
I season the whole thing with salt and freshly ground pepper and add a few more sprinkles of dried Herbes de Provence.
Then I add 2 tablespoons of tomato paste blended in some hot water.
I stir well and bring the content of the pot to a gentle boil, then cover and let it simmer for 90 minutes. Check for tenderness after one hour, adjust the seasoning, and add wine if necessary.

I usually serve this dish with ‘’farfalle’’ pasta (usually the good Italian one sold under the Trader Joe's brand) sprinkled with chopped parsley at the last minute.

If you do this dish in a pressure cooker set up at high pressure, do everything in the same way as described above, then close the lid and bring the pressure up on high heat. Once you hear the hiss from the valve and see a continuous wet steam coming out of the valve reduce to medium heat and cook for 15 minutes. Then remove the cooker from the burner, release the steam according to the instruction manual, wait until the pressure is completely out of the system and open the lid carefully. Then pour the content in a rustic looking earthenware dish.

Salade à la ciboulette (ou à l’ail): Boston lettuce with chives (or fresh crushed garlic)

The French love to have a green salad course after the main dish. I keep with that tradition that I find not only refreshing but also it helps your digestive track to adjust as a transition between a meat-based dish in a sauce and the next course of cheese.
I would love to have a ‘’mesclun’’ (mix) of various fresh greens including ‘’frisée’’, ‘’roquette’’ (arugula), feuille de chêne (oak-leaf lettuce), Bibb, and radicchio. But in early May in Chicago it is difficult to find good quality fresh greens of this sort.
So I limit myself to a single Boston.
I wash it well and dry it in my OXO salad spinner that works pretty well without breaking the leaves.
In the mean time I prepare my dressing, a simple vinaigrette, the following way:
In a large ceramic bow I put 1 teaspoon of salt, some freshly ground black pepper, and 2 tablespoons of Dijon mustard at room temperature. Then I add 2 Tablespoons of a good quality red wine vinegar (I usually use the Pompeian brand) and whisk that mix well to make sure there are no more lumps of mustard left. Then I progressively add the extra-virgin olive oil (I use the 100% Kalamata Greek extra-virgin olive oil from Martini’s from Trader Joe’s) . That oil is the best I could find so far for a full liter at $8.99 a bottle. The date of expiration, usually 2 years after bottling, which in my opinion is way too long, is engraved on the bottle and that allows me to make sure the oil is still fresh. I whisk the oil continuously while holding the bowl at an angle so that the oil easily gets emulsified in the mustard and vinegar mix without separating. It creates a very nicely smooth vinaigrette dressing. You should stop when you get about 1/3 of a cup which should be enough for a large Boston.
Add the leaves of lettuce to the bowl and some freshly cut chives and mix them well with the dressing with a large fork and spoon made of wood. I personally use French ustensils made from the wood of olive trees.

The cheese plate

You can find practically all kinds of good quality French cheeses nowadays in Chicago. But most of them have become too expensive for my limited budget. So I can no longer afford the kind of cheese plate that I used to prefer. It included Camembert, Reblochon, Cantal, Tomme de Savoie, and Roquefort or Bleu d’Auvergne, and a Pyramide of goat cheese.
At least I’m relieved to know that the U.S. government has reached an agreement of principles with the E.U and will no longer apply a 300% tax on Roquefort cheese.
So these days I am content to find a good French Camembert from Normandy, if possible only ‘’thermisé’’ and not fully pasteurized in order to keep some of the original aromas of the real thing made with ‘’lait crû’’ (raw milk) that you no longer find legally in the US.. "Thermisé" means that the milk has been heated enough to kill bacteria but not at a temperature as high as in the pasteurization process that really diminish the real flavors and taste that a camembert au lait cru would offer.
If you remember my piece on camembert published in this blog 2 years ago, the only two brands I had found that were satisfactory were Le Châtelain, and Isigny.
But recently I found one that is even closer in taste and texture to the kind of Camembert I buy in France. It is sold exclusively by Whole Foods with a label saying: Selected by Hervé Mons.



Now, I have done some research and found out that Hervé Mons is a very reputable négociant-‘’affineur’’ (cheese ager) of cheese who sells from his specially designed ‘’caves et ateliers d’affinage’’ (specially designed cheese aging warehouses) in Roanne all kinds of ‘’artisan’’ cheeses to good restaurants, specialty shops and outdoor food markets.The company was started in 1965. They do a very good business with export.
His importer in Washington state had asked him to produce a real camembert from Normandy that would be able to travel well to various points of the U.S market and keeps its intrinsic qualities of aroma, texture, taste, and appearance, while remaining fresh enough to avoid getting this unpleasant ammonia taste of many French camemberts that have been improperly aged or stored in U.S. warehouses, or in over-refrigerated conditions for too long. Hervé Mons worked for a whole year with local cheese makers in Normandy to reach this goal. The result was so impressive that Whole Foods Fromagerie asked him to be his exclusive point of sale to the public in the U.S.
The Hervé Mons camembert I bought was perfectly aged, ’’à coeur’’ (ripe in the middle but not over ripe) and its rind was perfect in color (still bloomy with light golden colored strips) and texture. What a moment of pure pleasure we had. I paid $ 6.99 for it but its normal price is 8.99 dollars
I also had a very small piece of a very good raw milk Roquefort from Binny’s cheese shop but I do not remember what brand it was. It was fine, freshly cut, but not spectacular for the price:
$ 25 a pound.

Dessert: Tarte à la Frangipane (almond paste tart)

Since I did not bake it I will only mention the basic ingredients and instructions: Pie pastry dough in a buttered mold after being rolled. In a small sauce pan mix by stirring well over low heat 3 whole eggs, half cup of sugar, 1 stick of unsalted butter, and one small can of almond paste cut in small pieces (Solo brand I believe). Pour the whole thing into the dough-covered mold. Bake at 400 degrees. When frangipane filling is firm (about 30 minutes) brush top with egg yolk.
Stéphane: Ask your mother if you need more specific instructions.

And last but not least: The wine:


Domaine Grand Destré 2007 Vin de pays de la Principauté d’Orange.
A selection of Ravoire & Fils in Lauris, Vaucluse

The country wines from that district usually come from grapes harvested in several townships in Vaucluse such as Orange, Valreas, Vaison-la-Romaine and Bedarrides, to mention the most well-known of them.
I do not think that this blend of 80% Grenache and 20% Syrah is a ‘’vin de propriétaire’’ (from a specific vineyard owner) but, I know that it is bottled by the family-owned Ravoire Company, a good wholesaling company also from Vaucluse whose president has a long tradition of winemaking in his family.
Stephen Gaucher, the very competent president of the importing company, Wine Adventures in Iowa, that imports good and exciting French wines since 1999, told me that the grapes are harvested in the Sainte Cécile aux Vignes area, a few miles Northeast of Orange, in the beautiful Département du Vaucluse.
In this medium-body red charmer you can feel the sun-drenched terroir of the Southern Rhône. It offers very pleasant notes of ripe plums and red berries, and develops well in the mouth with secondary touches of leather and licorice.
It is indeed a very well made, but not too complex, wine who was awarded a gold medal at the Concours Agricole of Paris in 2008, it has a very good balance of fruit and acidity and would be an ideal companion for any lamb-based dish, grilled eggplants, zucchinis and tomates provençales. Also it can be a perfect wine for summer barbecues.

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. I bought it at Binny's for a special "end of bin" price for Binny's club members, but the regular price is around 8 or 9 dollars.

Bon appétit.

French Charcuterie in the United States

French Charcuterie in the United States

What exactly is ‘’charcuterie’’ and where can you find some close enough to the French original in the U.S?

I’m really sorry Stéphane to be so late (3 months) in answering your question about ‘’la charcuterie’’. I’ve been quite busy over the last three months giving myself a refresher course on various types of French wines, essentially Corbières, Minervois, Vins de pays du Languedoc, Alsace, and Bordeaux, that I had to promote during wine tastings in wine and fancy grocery stores in the Chicago area. So I have to confess that my attention was not too focused on French charcuterie.

Besides I went through a period of intense “blogging fatigue”, a disease that, from what I read, affects most bloggers at one point or the other.

The questions you asked me are related to a subject that holds a special place in my life as a French "gourmand".

So I'm going to try to answer them in 5 groups:

• My personal memories as a ''charcuterie fan'' since I was a child in France in the 40s and 50s.
  
• Trying to define French charcuterie
• Various types of French regional pork specialties
• 3 main categories of ''French-style'' charcuterie products in the U.S.
• Where to find good French charcuterie in the U.S
  

I have been a big fan of the pig since I was a kid

A few weeks ago when I was having lunch with my friend Kiki at his eponymous restaurant as we do every Friday, we ate a very nice ‘’choucroute garnie à l’alsacienne’’, and the vision of these sausages, salt pork, and ham over the steaming sauerkraut, not only reminded me that I had not written anything about the subject of your inquiry on our blog, but also made me think about my Grand-Maman Laplanche.

As you know, choucroute garnie is one of my favorite ‘’met de brasserie’’ and I’m happy that from time to time during our long winters Kiki’s Bistro has it as a ‘’special de la semaine’’. Besides the sauerkraut, ideally cooked in Riesling, my favorite Alsatian wine, but any not too acidic dry white wine will do, and the small boiled potatoes, this dish at Kiki’s is served with a slice of warm French ‘’jambon de Paris’’, some ‘’cervelas’’ (knackwurst), a wiener, a piece of veal bratwurst, and salt pork. I wish they could add some pork shank.

From time to time my Swiss Grandmother in Geneva would prepare a spectacular choucroute garnie, a dish as popular in Swiss brasseries as in their Alsatian French counterparts, but she would make it from scratch. It means that she would slowly cook raw sauerkraut for two days with the appropriate wine, juniper berries, caraway seeds, and spices. As a result her apartment would be permeated by a very foul smell that would remain for at least a whole week after the feast, and everybody in her building would know what she had been cooking. But boy, was it a good choucroute garnie. Sometimes she would add ‘’saucisse de Morteau’’ or “ de Montbéliard’’, very flavorful sausages from the Jura, a mountainous area on each side of the border between France and Switzerland where she was born and raised, as well as pieces of ham shank or pork shoulder. And I believe that she cooked the sauerkraut in “saindoux” (lard), providing an extraordinary smoothness to that cabbage. She used a very fragrant but dry inexpensive Swiss white wine from the Geneva area that provided the adequate balance of acidity.

I felt even more guilty about my lack of follow-up to your questions when, a few Fridays ago, as an appetizer, Kiki produced a very good ‘’saucisson sec’’, made in the U.S. but I do not know where, that was almost as good as the beautiful rustic one made by Fabrique Délices in Hayward, Ca on the other side of the SF Bay, that we bought at your MountainView farmer’s market last September. That saucisson ‘’pur porc’’, in its natural pig intestine skin, is as good as any one I ever had in France. And, believe me, I tried practically almost every kind of ''saucisson sec'' produced in the French regions since I grew-up in Saint-Hippolyte where we had great ''saucisson de montagne'' from the nearby Cévennes mountains, that was a bit hard to chew, but so full of robust rustic flavors.

My godfather Jean Saint-Martin would take a piece of this kind of ''saucisson sec de montagne'' in his hunting bag along with some “ jambon cru” (raw ham) and a big piece of country bread when we were gone for the whole day in these Cévennes, that are so dear to my heart, to hunt rabbit, wild boars, or more simply game birds. At 10 in the morning we would stop and eat this ''casse-croûte'' (snack) while listening to the exciting sounds coming out of the forest and a marvelous little river called ‘’le Bonheur’’ (The Happiness), near the Mont Aigoual (the second highest point in the Cévennes mountains with an elevation of 1,565 meters). Those are great food memories of my youth.

I am not ashamed say that even as I write this I am still a fan of the pig, and that I have a special taste for pork meat and charcuterie since my early days.

Speaking of my youth, since I was 7 years old I always loved ‘’charcuterie’’, even more than red meat. I was a boy scout in the mid-fifties, and when were camping for a couple of days or a week, in some remote rural areas of France, the base of our diet was bread, hard- boiled eggs, paté, jambon (ham) and saucisson sec (dry sausage). In those days charcuterie was much cheaper than fresh red meat or chicken. And lots of people, especially in blue-collar and rural environments, ate a lot of pork products, especially various types of fresh pan-fried or grilled sausages and ‘’boudin’’, either blanc (white, made of veal, chicken, bread, cream and egg) or noir (black, in fact a very tasty blood sausage seasoned with herbs, onion, and spices).

My favorite pâté was ‘’ les rillettes’’, a very fatty, but tasty, spread of minced (or pulled) fragments of lean cooked pork mixed with pork fat.

Most of the time rillettes were of the cheap canned variety, and it was so fatty and its quality was so mediocre, that at least 3 or 4 other scouts on my team did not finish most of their portions. So I would finish theirs. I was eventually nicknamed ‘’ le père la rillette’’ because of my peculiar ability to eat enormous quantities of that greasy but very tasty stuff.

And my favorite piece of meat was of course ‘’ la côte de porc’’ (pork chop), that my grandmother slow-cooked for me in butter. She reduced the natural cooking juices with a touch of white wine after sometimes adding a few slices of sautéed wild mushrooms. I loved it and ate the external fat of the chop first.

No wonder that 30 years later, my doctor in Evanston was horrified to discover an extremely high level of cholesterol in my blood…

In our country house near Geneva, “Gonvers”, where you have been a couple of times, my great aunt Mathilde Laplanche would sometimes cook, on a wood-burning stove, on Sundays or special occasions a rôti de porc (pork roast) that was very flavorful but, for my taste, cooked way too long, as it was customary in these days. It would be accompanied again by a marvelous mushroom sauce made of locally-picked flavorful cèpes (boletus or porcino mushroom) or delicate ‘’ mousserons’’ in reduced natural juices from the roast, white wine, and shallots. My grand-papa Laplanche was an expert ‘’mycologist’’ (somebody who knows a lot about mushrooms) and he would take me on long walks in the forests around Gonvers to gather cèpes, chanterelles, oronges, and coulemelles. A few times he almost died from trying mushrooms that he was not too sure were edible or poisonous, but he could not resist their color or smell. We had lots of books on mushrooms in the Gonvers house.

During these summer week-ends in Gonvers when everybody would bring something from the city, I was always hoping that my grand-mother would bring a few slices of an amazing ‘’pâté en croûte’’ an extraordinary rich and complex ‘’ terrine’’ of veal, pork, and forcemeat with peppercorns and sometimes pistachios, cooked in aspic and totally wrapped in a buttery crust that is usually rich in eggs and coated inside with lard.

There were always long discussions around the table covering the various merits or defects of the two ‘’charcuteries’’ where they bought these marvelous goodies: Chouet in downtown Geneva and Goy another one in Onex, a suburb of Geneva, close to our house of Gonvers.

I also was very jealous of the ‘’cervelas’’ (a cooked knackwurst sausage) that my great aunt Suzy would bring, and eat with her own potato salad seasoned with an eggy dressing with parsley and shallots, because she would rarely shares it with anybody. So once I asked my grand mother to buy me one and I ate it all by myself with some Swiss (German type) mustard and ‘’cornichons’’. It was a pure moment of paradise.

Nowadays, when I am too nostalgic of that ‘’cervelas’’, I buy a couple of pieces of the very good but a bit too garlicky knackwurst that they make at Paulina Market on Lincoln avenue in Chicago, and we eat it with a lukewarm potato salad doused with a splash of white wine, a Dijon mustard vinaigrette, and chopped parsley. I then feel transported back to Geneva 50 years ago…

I never had a chance to find any ‘’pâté en croûte’’ in Chicago though… but I’m still looking. I know that Marcel & Henri, a French charcuterie in San Francisco (see farther down for their address) make several types of pâtés en croûte. But when I asked the deli department manager at Fox and Obel, the gourmet shop that recently started to sell a few of the Marcel and Henri pâtés, and if they ever sold pâté en croûte, I was told that it does not sell well in Chicago.

Killing the pig: A fascinating ritual in French villages. Not a single part of the animal was left unused

In French rural areas, when you killed the pig, usually under the direction of the local butcher, all the neighbors, especially women, congregated with all kinds of utensils, buckets, knives, etc to participate in the rituals: making a bonfire of wine shoots, installing a cauldron on a tripod, boiling water, collecting and processing and spicing the blood, cutting and slicing the lard, grilling some pieces of fat, cleaning the intestines to be used in sausage filling, removing the pig’s hair and cleaning its his skin, dressing and boiling the head, slicing the tripe, cutting the meat, etc. Not a single part of the pig, not even the feet or the tail was rejected as non edible.

I remember one day of 1947 when my parents had let such a pig killing event take place in our backyard in Saint-Hippolyte du Fort , since they knew the butcher who was a friend. I observed the whole scene from my bedroom located just above the board were they had hung that poor pig. The noise of his agony when they sliced his neck to kill him and collect the precious fresh blood, is still vivid in my ears. Later on when they started to fry some pieces of skin with some fat on it, it smelled so good that I ran down to the garden to eat some.

But, to get back to the core of our topic:

What exactly is CHARCUTERIE in France?

The best way to learn interesting facts about the history of charcuterie in France is to read the first part (The history of pork and charcuterie) of chapter 13 of the marvelous book by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, whose English translation was published in paperback in 1994 by Blackwell. This masterpiece is 800 pages long but should be in the bookcase of anybody really interested in food.

This term comes actually from two words, “chair” (meaning flesh) and “cuite” (cooked). It refers to the fact that in the Middle-Ages in France, there was a difference between the butcher who had the sole right to slaughter and sell the carcass and meat of animals, including pigs, and the CHAIRCUITIER, who would buy raw pork meat from the butcher and cook and prepare it in various products such as hams, sausages, and bacon. It should be noted that the term ‘’bacon’’, that is not used in contemporary French, comes from an old French word, or more precisely Frankish, ‘’bako’’ that meant ham. The French translation for bacon is ‘’lard de poitrine fumé’’.

But the ‘’charcutiers’’ in Paris battled for centuries with the ‘’ bouchers’’ to be accepted as the sole and recognized pork meat specialists. At the end of the 15^th century the charcutiers started to organize to defend their rights, among them to be able to slaughter pigs and they founded their own “Guild” (brotherhood or trade association). According to Toussaint-Samat, their recognition as multi-tasking charcutiers was finally granted in 1705. In 1741 they obtained the exclusive right of preparing and curing hams and to sell various innards such as tripe.

So to summarize: Charcuterie is a word that:

1. Defines the various techniques used in cooking, preparing, salting, smoking, drying and processing, food products deriving from pork meat cuts: hams, pork butt, sausages (both raw, cooked, and dry), salt pork and bacon, pâtés, terrines, galantines, mousses, confits, headcheese, etc.
2. Is the name of the store in which a pork butcher, the ‘’charcutier’’, prepares and sells these products

Nowadays a charcutier also sells a large variety of prepared, cured, salted, smoked, cooked, or processed meat specialties deriving from other sources than pork. This is the case for terrines, pâtés, confits, sausages, made from meat such as rabbit, hare, venison, wild boar, duck, chicken, turkey, pheasant, other game birds, lamb (like in merguez sausages), ostrich, etc.

A charcutier also almost always sell rotisserie chicken. And often, in smaller towns and villages, he prepares and cooks special dishes for families when they celebrate a wedding or a baptism at their home and have lots of relatives and friends coming for the occasion. In the same manner the local “ boulanger-patissier” (baker and pastry maker) will prepare the cakes and festive cookies and candies.

When and where did the process of making charcuterie start?

According to Toussaint-Samat, the first people to eat pig meat, simply cooked (boiled) or, in special festive occasions, stuffed with herbs and spices, and roasted, were the ancient Greeks.

But it was really during the Roman Empire that the art of preparing pork dishes was really fully developed and that charcuterie the way we know it, including sausage making started. The Romans were very good at curing techniques such as smoking and salting to preserve pig’s meat.

The Romans loved ham. And it is probable that they first imported some hams from the region that is now Westphalia in Germany, an area that was populated more than 2000 years ago by large herds of wild pigs.

The Germans were experts at drying and salting the hams of these wild pigs and sold a lot of them to the Romans.

But when the Romans conquered parts of Gaul (now France) they were delighted to find out that the Gauls were also preparing succulent hams.

The origin of this particular good flavor was found in the type of acorn that the pigs from Gaul ate in the forests. The same excellence was found in other areas where Romans expanded their domination like Corsica and some regions of Spain. Nowadays the “jamon” from Spain, like the ‘’pata negra’’ has become a very expensive delicacy in the U.S., and the Parisians love Corsican restaurants that sell ham and dry or semi-dry sausage such as ‘’figatelli’’.

All over Gaul, charcutiers made all kinds of beef and pork sausages, some kind of ‘’andouillette’’ (chitterling sausage), ‘’boudin noir’’ (black pudding made of pork blood), tripes flavored with onion and garlic, cooked stuffed pig`s heads, etc.

The French continued to eat lots of pork products between the Middle-Ages and the Revolution. Many very strict laws were progressively instituted not only to regulate the rules of the trade but also to ensure safe and healthy ways to prepare and cure pork meat. From the end of the Middle-Ages special inspectors were trained to make sure pigs were not carriers of diseases by checking their tongues. Some other inspectors would check the way farmers fed pigs. And centuries later very strict rules were imposed by the French Ministry of Agriculture after several scandals involving tainted cheap charcuterie products were found in the rations of soldiers at the beginning of the 20^th century and at the outset of World War I.

Nowadays most rules regarding charcuterie products are set by European Community commissions and are strictly enforced.

One of the problems nowadays is that most “charcuterie” sold in French supermarkets and even in local smaller pork-butcher shops is of the industrial or semi-industrial type, and not made by local “artisans-charcutiers” anymore.

In most small towns and villages when I was young there were separate ‘’ boucheries’’ (butcher shops) that sold all kinds of meat, and ‘’charcuteries’’ that sold pork products exclusively .

Nowadays, with the unfortunate disappearance of the majority of family-owned retail stores in such small communities invaded by franchises of national chains of super and hyper-markets that offer huge selections of fresh and cured or canned meats and charcuterie as well as prepared meat-based carry-out dishes, there are only, in most villages, only one or two ‘’boucherie-charcuterie’’ that sell all kinds of meat and charcuterie as well as rotisserie chicken, and ‘’plats de traiteur’’ (carry-out ready to cook or eat dishes). But too many of these ‘’bouchers-charcutiers’, lacking time or trained staffers, do not prepare their own hams, pâtés, terrines, boudins, or saucissons secs, any more but sell only fresh sausage and fresh meat and poultry. Most of the charcuterie products that they sell come from national brands, or regional distributors of semi-industrial charcuterie. Only in small artisan shops in villages or in ‘’gourmet shops’’, in big cities will you find authentic artisan charcuterie products made in various regions of France, famous for their specialties.

Practically every region of France has its own ‘’spécialités de charcuterie’’. But some are better known for one or two specialties.

Région Lyonnaise:

When I used to travel often to Lyon (the big and lively city South of Geneva, where eating well is almost a religion) I loved to have lunch in one the famous ‘’bouchons’’ (small bistros), like Le Café des Fédérations (Rue du Major Martin) where you would eat a few authentic specials and start with some charcuterie Lyonnaise produced locally by good artisans. Enormous dry sausages were hanging from the ceiling.

Typical charcuterie are ‘’rosette de Lyon’’ a kind of semi-hard salami from Saint Symphorien; ‘’cervelas de Lyon’’, a smoked, truffled or pistachioed uncooked pork sausage with a very fine textured meat, that is usually boiled. Its name is due to the fact that it used to include ‘’cervelle’’ (brains); ‘’saucisson à l’ail’’ ( garlic sausage) served hot with a warm potato salad. My favorite way to prepare that kind of sausage is ‘’saucissson en brioche’’. Delicious and served in some of the best restaurants of the Lyon area.

Sow’s ears, tripe sausage with veal, pigs’ trotters, are loved by locals but less appreciated outside of the Lyon area. But the famous ‘’jambon persillé’’, a very flavorful ham specialty originally from Burgundy, is appreciated all over France. If prepared by a good artisan charcutier it is made from good quality uncooked ham slowly poached in a cloth in a well seasoned (with wine) court-bouillon. After being chopped it is formed in a round shaped terrine and covered with a parsleyed aspic. Delicious.

Some old-fashion bistos also serve “grattons”, little pieces of pork fried in lard, that some people love in an omelette.

But the most uncommon spécialité lyonnaise is ‘’la ferchusse’’ a dish based on pig’s lungs, spleen and heart cooked in red wine and flavored with garlic, that was traditionally prepared at the time when the pig was killed at the farm. I do not know if that specialty is still popular.

All of the aboveare eatenwith good Beaujolais crus like Morgon or Chiroubles.

Auvergne:

In this beautiful rural and mountainous area, many good traditional rustic and flavorful pork-based bistro dishes were created such as:

Pommes de terre au lard à l’auvergnate (potatoes baked with bacon and garlic)

Petit salé aux lentilles (salt pork, likethe pork butt, spare ribs, or lean belly portion, cooked with lentils)

Potée auvergnate ( boiled pork shoulder with salt pork and ground pork, vegetables and cabbage)

Grattons (see Lyon)

Rissoles auvergnates (deep-fried pork turnovers)

Personally I love ‘’Jambon cru d’Auvergne’’ which is a raw dry cured mountain ham, that, along with Cantal cheese from the same region, is delicious in a sandwich

on buttered country or rye bread. And of course the very popular “saucisse sèche’’, a thin and pretty hard to chew rustic u-shaped sausage made of very flavorful hand-chopped piece of pork stuffed in small intestine and air-dried for a very long time.

The rarely found ‘’galantine of cochon de lait ’’ is also a delicious pâté made from very tender and flavorful pieces of suckling pig.

Jura and the French Alps:

I love both the Saucisse de Morteau which is delicately flavored with caraway seeds. A small wooden stick is woven in and out of the skin at one end of the sausage to close it. Morteau sausage is usually gently warmed in simmering water,

I also like the Saucisse de Montbéliard that has a slightly smoky flavor . The region of Savoie in the French Alps offers a beautiful mild and nutty Jambon cru (raw ham) and a very tasty Saucisse au choux ( pork sausage with cabbage) that is so good cooked slowly in a ‘’potée’’ or served with a ‘’gratin au fromage’’. The ‘’Diots au vin blanc’’ are small pink sausages flavored with white wine that are usually pan sautéed

Provence:

As a matter of fact, this is not a region where pork dishes are in favor. Lamb and beef dishes are much more prevalent. Even the Saucisson d’Arles, a dry sausage that used to be made from donkey meat a century ago, is nowadays made of beef and pork fat with some garlic and black pepper .

Saucisson d’Arles, along with ‘’saucisson chasseur’’ used to be a very popular item in the ‘’ casse-croûte’’ (snack or lunch based on bread and charcuterie) taken from home to work or to school by blue-collar workers, housewives of large families with limited income, and low-on cash students (like me in this particular case), because it was cheaper than ‘’saucisson pur porc’’ or other specialties.

Also, in the Marseille area where for many years many people originally from North Africa (former French territories or colonies of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco) have settled, many charcutiers produce the very flavorful and spicy orange-colored “merguez” sausages, made of beef and mutton.

Alsace :

In that paradise for solid eaters, ‘’goose foie gras’’ is king. But I personally do not include foie gras in this piece since I consider it to be just a cousin to charcuterie, even though most charcutiers sell foie gras. Most foie gras is made of 100% duck or goose liver. It is only in cheaper grades of industrial ‘’pâtés or galantines de foie gras’’ hat you find a forcemeat made of pork.

But Alsatians have other interesting ways to accommodate pork meat: Roasted with small mirabelles, plums, or cabbage. Suckling pig in aspic.

And of course pork sausage, ham, salt pork, including portions of the shank or shoulder, are essential components of the famous ‘’Choucroute garnie à l’Alsacienne’’ often mentioned in this blog.

And the ‘’petits lardons’’ (small pieces of bacon or slices of salted or smoked breast) play a major role in the taste of the traditional ‘’Tarte Flambée Alsacienne’’ (Flammekueche) , a very exciting kind of cheese, cream, onions, and bacon flatbread that is cooked in a baker’s wood-fired oven and often eaten by Alsatian families on Sunday night in a restaurant.

Pork spare rib is another major component of the Baekoffe, another traditional stew of beef, lamb, pork, potatoes, onions and wine, cooked in a clay pot in a baker’s oven.

The most famous sausage from this area is the red-colored “saucisse de Stasbourg”, that in look and taste is close to the “wiener”. But many of the industrial types of these sausages sold in supermarkets or as hot-dogs in cafes and cafeterias, are unfortunately made with just a little bit of cheap ground meat or powdered pork rind emulsified with lots of starch and additives. Only the real thing made in artisan charcuteries in Alsace or Paris are worth trying.

Languedoc and Midi:

Everybody loves a good ‘’cassoulet’’ (the name comes from the earthenware container in which it is cooked and served called ‘’cassole’’), whose meat components vary if it is made in Toulouse, Carcassonne or Castelnaudary (my favorite version). But one thing is sure: this most famous of all comfort food dishes made of kidney beans, tomatoes, herbs, garlic, and various pieces of meat (duck or goose confit, lamb breast, pork loin, pork shoulder, ham ) and sausages, always contains pork sausages and salt pork.

One of the most well-known sausage of this region is the ‘’saucisse de Toulouse’’, a fresh pork sausage whose meat encased in pig’s intestine, is supposed to be chopped by hand with a knife. Its diameter is a bit larger than most other fresh pork sausages.

And I will not forget my dear ‘’fricandeau’’ made by good artisanal charcutiers in the villages of Cévennes, and more particularly in Lozère, that is a delicious round-shaped type of paté made from various lean and fat parts of the pork, including ‘’abats’’ (organ meats) cooked slowly in a ‘’crépine de porc’’ (caul fat) in the oven, and served either warm or cold with pickles. And I'm sure Stephane that you will recognize the following photo.It shows a jar of that very flavorful ''pâté de foie pur porc'' (pork liver pâté) that we ate at Jean-Paul's house in Lasalle in the Cévennes when we visited there in July 2007. This delicious pâté, made by the local ''artisan-charcutier'', Monsieur Chardenon, reminded me of the pâté my mother used to buy a few miles down the road in Saint-Hippolyte and spread on slices of rustic bread for my ''goûter'' (afternoon snack).

The Southwest ( Aquitaine, Périgord, Quercy, Bearn, Pays Basque)

I will take a pass on the famous Foie Gras du Périgord as well as all the other duck or goose-based specialties of this area, including the delicious ‘’confits’’ , to limit myself to

‘’pig focused’’ specialties such as the marvelous Jambon de Bayonne.

This very aromatic dry-cured ham, when it is truly a ham produced from pigs raised with special care in the Bearn area, is rubbed with a mixture of salt, sugar, and peppers and then dried in ventilated rooms for about 6 months. Unfortunately, many so-called Bayonne hams are not necessarily produced in that area close to the Pyrénées mountains.

In some areas, a delicious roasted stuffed suckling pig is served on special occasions.

Touraine and Loire Valley

Two of the best known specialties are the “rillettes de Tours” (see description above in 2^nd paragraph) and the pungent-smelling but very sweet and delicate tasting ‘’andouillette’’ that you find in the Vouvray area.

This particular tripe sausage made of chitterlings, is in fact found in various regions of France such as Beaujolais and Lyon (with the andouilletttes produced by the famous charcutier Bobosse), the North (in Cambrai), Champagne (particularly in Troyes), Burgundy (in the Chablis area) and Auvergne (the very good charcutier Duval). The best ones are awarded the well-known AAAAA label by an association called Association Amicale des Amateurs d’Autentiques Andouillettes (Association of Connoisseurs of Authentic Andouillettes).

Andouillettes that can be flavored with various wines, spirits, and spices. They are usually grilled, and sometimes cooked in wine-based sauce.

Brittany and Normandy

Brittany counts a very large number of producers (artisan as well as industrial) of various types of pâtés, particularly ‘’ pâté de foie’’ (liver paté) and ‘’pâté de campagne’’ (country paté).

The two cities of Guéméné in Brittany and Vire in Normandy are recognized as the 2 capitals of ‘’Andouille’.’ It is larger and slightly more smoked than the ‘’andouillette’’, made from pieces of chopped small pork intestine. The andouille is already cooked and usually served cold in slices.

The ‘’jambon de Morlaix’’, rarely found outside of Brittany, is a very tasty cooked smoked ham.

Champagne- Ardennes

Le Jambon des Ardennes, from the woody area in Northern France near the Belgian border, is a delicious raw smoked ham. In this same area which counts lots of hunters, they used to make a very tasty ‘’ pâté de sanglier’’ (made from wild boar meat) and a special headcheese made from young boar’s head , la ‘’hure de marcassin’’

In Champagne they make some of the most delicate ‘’feuilletés à la viande ’ (forced meat cooked in champagne in puff pastry), ‘’petits pâtés chauds’’( pork, veal, and chicken liver hot pâté in pastry dough) served hot, and marvelous ‘’pâté en croûte’’ made from all kinds of pork parts combined with meat from game birds, rabbit or venison.

But one of the more interesting pork specialties from Champagne, that is unfortunately rarely found nowadays, is the “pieds de porc à la Sainte Menehould, made of grilled pig feets, that have been slowly cooked for several hours (for 48 hours many years ago) then coated with melted butter, breaded, and grilled. This very tasty dish is served warm with Dijon mustard. A real treat that I have not had a chance to taste since I left Reims in 1958.

Ile de France (the area around Paris)

In good charcuteries and ‘’boutiques de produits régionaux’’ (shops specializing in food specialties from a specific province or region) in the French capital, you can practically find all kinds of specialty hams, sausages, and pâtés.

The famous "Jambon de Paris’’, which is also called ‘’jambon blanc’’was originally produced there .

This cooked ham has a very delicate pale color and is very lightly salted. French people use it in the most popular baguette-based sandwich: "jambon-beurre-cornichons".

A very popular, and very good brand of Jambon de Paris, Madrange, . is now found in good delicatessen and gourmet food shops in the U.S. I personally buy mine at Fox and Obel in Chicago, and, though it is not cheap (14 dollars a pound) I have to say that since it is sliced on demand, it is always fresh and moist.

I have not tried yet the jambon de Paris, made from Amish pork by Les Trois Petits Cochons ( 3 little Pigs) a famous French charcuterie in Brooklyn, NY. Only one retailer, BINNY'S sells it in Chicago.

(see later where to buy it)

• I sometimes use the Madrange ham to make a simplified ‘’croque-monsieur’’, a grilled sandwich made of two pieces of white bread, buttered on the outside, between which you insert 2 slices of ham, and 2 slices of Swiss cheese. You grill it for a few minutes until the cheese is about to melt.In French bistros they add some béchamel sauce between the ham and the cheese.But I usually like to do mine "open face". I brown a slice of Italian bread in olive oil and then spread it with Dijon mustard and put one slice of ham on it and cover it with shredded Jarlsberg cheese. I place it on a cookie sheet under the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes.
  

Some of the best Jambon de Paris sold in Paris charcuteries are called ‘’ au torchon’’, since after a delicate brining process, it is wrapped in a cloth and cooked, bone in, with its rind and external white fat intact in a broth of home-made court-bouillon. When it is cool, it is then deboned and trimmed.

If you cannot afford ‘’jambon au torchon’’ in a charcuterie or at the deli counter or your supermarket, make sure at least that you buy a ‘’jambon supérieur’’ with a red label.

(The very interesting book ‘’French Regional Cooking’’ by Anne Willan can provide you with additional info about specialties from all French regions.

The 3 main categories of French Charcuterie Products that you can find in the United States

1. Pâtés, terrines, rillettes, mousses and galantines.

Some of the most commonly found here are :

Pâtés de campagne, a country-style pâté made of coarse and finely ground pork meat, seasoned with spices and often black peppercorn

Pâté forestier, a pâté made of minced pork with small pieces of fresh mushroom

Mousse de foie, made of finely ground and emulsified pork, chicken, duck or goose liver, sometimes flavored with cognac, armagnac, or port wine. It can include tiny pieces of truffles, prunes, etc..

Pâté de lapin, made of coarse and finer pieces of rabbit and pork meat, often flavored with hazelnuts or prunes.

Terrine de canard a duck pâté cooked in an earthenware container called ‘’terrine’’, that has been lined with pork fat. It often contains pieces of pistachio nut. This type of terrine is sometimes flavored with port wine or armagnac. It can also be seasoned with green peppercorns.

Rillettes de porc ou de lapin (see above for description) made of shredded lean pork or rabbit meat, mixed with fat.

Galantine de canard, poulet, faisan, etc (sometimes with pork or veal). Boned and relatively coarse pieces of lean meat rolled and cooked in fat with a glaze of gelatin. Most often the main ingredient is from poultry meat, but it may also come from more sophisticated game bird like pheasant or from venison.

2. Sausages and boudins,

1. Saucisse fraiche (fresh sausage)

Saucisse de Toulouse, a major component of cassoulet

Merguez (made of beef and lamb, red-colored, spicy,) usually grilled and eaten with couscous

Boudin noir (blood sausage), often served with cooked apples

Boudin blanc, made of veal, chicken, pork, cream, egg, bread, white wine, and sometimes seasoned with truffles or chives, usually grilled

2. Saucisse sèche (dried sausage)

Saucisson sec (various types)

Saucisson à l’ail (dry garlic sausage)

3. Jambons (hams)

Jambon de Paris

Jambon blanc

• To know more about the various types of French sausages, pâtés, boudins, galantines, etc I suggest that you visit www.thenibble.com and look for Marcel and Henri Charcuterie where you will find a complete and very clear description of all the specialties, how they are made, and how to pronounce their names.

Where can you find decent French-style charcuterie in the United–States ?

When we arrived in Chicago in January 1970 the first 3 items I immediately started to look for in local stores were French camembert, French wines, and French pâté and saucisson.

I did not have problems to find the wines, but had lots of difficulties to find camembert (see my posting from 2007 on that story). The first few years I had to be content with Danish canned camebert and a much better American ‘’camembert’’ from KOLB made in Lena, Il. But the worst problem was to find decent pâté and saucisson. Only Polish, Hungarian, and German types came a bit close. Once again I had to rely too often to canned Danish paté.

It took me years to discover great salamis and dry sausage in very good Italian shops in far-away Italian neighborhoods.

Nowadays though, I have to admit that I sometimes buy very good Italian Salumis made in the U.S by companies like FRA MANI, from Berkeley, CA, JOHN VOLPI, in ST. Louis, or MOLINARI in San Franciso.

In the seventies I sometimes found very small cans of mediocre ‘’French pâté de foie’’ (pork and chicken liver pâté) but most of the time they were probably outdated and their quality was at best mediocre. I have to admit that in those days I did not check the very few very expensive so called ‘’gourmet’’ grocery stores like Stop and Shop where I would have found French canned foie gras from ROUGIE or some "imported" camembert sold under the Ile De France label.

The Danish canned pâté was not good. And in the seventies the wine stores like Gold Standard or Zimmerman’s did not have the very satisfying, if not sublime, cheese and deli departments that they have now in 2009.

Besides the FDA ( Food and Drug Administration) had very strict rules prohibiting most French meat-based products, including Hams, Sausages, and Pâtés from being imported in the U.S..

It is unfortunately still the case, at a time when many Italian and Spanish Hams are imported .....

The only good pâtés that you could eat in the sixties and seventies were made in French restaurants and bistros where French or French-trained cooks knew how to make them. They were numerous in New York City and there were a few good ones in San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC, Boston, and Chicago. Here in Chicago I remember some good pâtés and terrines at La Fontaine, Le Perroquet, La Bastille, and l’Escargot.

We had to wait until the mid-eighties to find decent charcuterie sold in gourmet shops, at caterers like Mitchell Cobey, and places like Le Chalet, a division of the Gold Standard liquor stores group, now called BINNY's. Some of them came from French charcuteries like Les Trois Petits Cochons in New York City.

Treasure Island sometimes had also decent pâtés. But you had to watch their color carefully to make sure they were still fresh enough to be edible.

In 2009, one of the best selections of French-style charcuterie can be found at BINNY’S, (several stores in the Chicago area), and more particularly at their South Jefferson St. Store. I also sometimes find decent deli products at Marcey’s St. Market in SAM’S on Marcey St. in Chicago, and at WHOLE FOODS too.

In New-York City, of course, ZABAR and DEAN & DE LUCA, are still reliable addresses that have much wider selections.

1. French commercial Charcuteries with ''artisanal'' roots.

The first French charcuterie in the U.S. was started in 1960 by a French expatriate, Henri Lapuyade, who opened a small shop on Russian Hill in San Francisco and, using some traditional recipes from his native country, launched a real trend on the West Coast with his pâtés and a few sausages. His charcuterie rapidly became very popular and with his partner Marcel they created a very profitable company, MARCEL & HENRI that eventually moved to a large plant in South San Francisco.

They offer a very wide line of products, including fresh sausages, and pâtés en croûte, that are sold through a large network of regional distributors, in retail stores, and on line at www.marcelethenri.com . and through other gourmet food sites.

You can find some of their product in restaurants, and at catering companies all over the United States

A visit to this site, with all the descriptions and photos, literally make your mouth water.

They sell their pâtés in bulk loaves, in terrines, and in prepackaged slices.

In Chicago, their distributor is European Import on North Elston avenue.

A few M&H products are on sale at Fox and Obel.

I tried their Pâté de Campagne au Champagne and black peppercorns (around $6.50 for a slice weighing approximately 8oz). It was well seasoned, with lots of black peppercorns, and very tasty. But I thought that the texture was too smooth for a country pâté, and that the proportion of pork liver and pork fat was too high and that there were not enough little pieces of pork meat. But nevertheless it is a good pâté.

They also sell the same pâtét at Fox and Obel in a small 7oz plastic terrine for about 6 dollars.

F& O also sells Rillettes de Tours, Boudin Blanc, Mousse de canard, Boudin Basque, and other prodducts from Marcel & Henri.

415 Browning Way South San Francisco, CA 94080 Tel: 1-700-227-5426

When Alain Sinturel and Jean-Pierre Pradier, another pair of French expats, opened LES TROIS PETITS COCHONS (Three Little Pigs) in Greenwich Village in NY city in 1975, they would never have guessed that this modest neighborhood shop would be, for a long time, the “reference” in the United States when you talked about French pâté, and that this company would become, as an article in the New York Times on French patés would call it in 1996, the ‘’General Motors of the industry’’. Their pâtés and sausages got very good reviews from such food luminaries and critics as James Beard, Mimi Sheraton and Craig Claiborne, that brought them a very faithful following from East Coast restaurants and gourmets.

Their pâtés, made without nitrates or Nitrites, were the first good ones I was able to discover in Chicago in the mid-eighties.

They sell a wide line of pâtés and sausages, including merguez.

As I said earlier, they also produce a Jambon de Paris, made from Pennsylvania Amish pork, that you can order normally on their website, or on www.igourmet.com , and of course from European Import. In Chicago its is only available at the Binny`s store on South Jefferson.

Nowadays I still think that their Mousse de Foie de Canard au Porto (duck liver mousse with port wine) is one of the best you can buy in the U.S. It sells for $ 13.90 a pound at Sam’s in Chicago. But you find many of their products at Binny’s, Whole Foods, etc. and they even sell a very decent truffled mousse (pork and duck), again without any chemical preservatives, in small plastic terrines at Trader Joe’s for only $ 5.69. It’s certainly the best value-oriented French charcuterie item money can buy this side of the Atlantic.

SAM's sells, among several items, a Pâté de Campagne for $ 11.99 a pound, and I think it is very good, as well as a Mousse Royale au Sauternes, also good, for $ 14.99 a pound.

LES TROIS PETITS COCHONS moved their plant to Pennsylvania, keeping their headquarters at 4223 1^st Avenue, Brooklyn , N.Y, 11232 Tel: 212-219-1230 e-mail: elodie”3pigs.com

Their website (www.3pigs.com) is presently in a stage of reconstruction.

Their main distributor in the Midwest is once again European Imports in Chicago. ( 2475 N. Elston Ave. Chicago, IL 60647 tel: 773-227-0600 Website: www.eiltd.com )

The story of Josette Leblond, another French expatriate in the Los Angeles area, is another fine example of French entrepreneurship in the French charcuterie business in the U.S..

The daughter of a French charcutier in Normandy and an apprentice in her father’s shop since her youth, she butchered her first pig at age 7 on her family farm

She later took over her father’s business and in 1981 added another trade to her professional experience by making bread and starting a ‘’boulangerie’’. She eventually sold both businesses and went on a vacation in the United States with her young son. She loved L.A and decided to live there. The French chef of the Queen Mary, docked in Long Beach, hired her as a cook. That is when she started making beautiful pâtés and foie gras. A local distributor started to sell them and she created her own business NORMANDIE PATE in 1985. It became a big commercial success. At one point she was selling around 60 different kinds of pâtés, many being her own creations, to grocery stores and restaurants as well as taking phone orders from customers of that region. In1988 she was managing a 12,000 sq.ft plant in LA. She added a bakery business and sold baked goods and charcuterie to most of the big hotels including Disneyland’s, fancy department stores, and international airlines from her NORMANDIE company, now a multi-million dollars business.

Eventually her core business evolved towards bakeries and small restaurants. She owns several of them in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas where she moved in 2001. She still manages all these companies from there but her main activity is her famous Josette’s Bistro on Flamingo Boulevard in Vegas.

Obviously one of the companies of NORMANDIE still produces pâtés, since her distributor GOURMET FOODS in Rancho Dominguez, CA, Tel: 310-632-3300

www.gourmetfoodsinc.com sells an enormous line of pâtés according to its website. And they look gorgeous.

I never found any of the NORMANDIE pâtés in Chicago, and I regret it because I love that French woman story. One of these days, if I go to Vegas, I certainly will make a refueling stop at Josette's Bistro.

Back to early eighties, once again in San Francisco, the owner of several local restaurants, La Bourgogne, Ernie’s and l’Etoile, started a small charcuterie in San Mateo so he could supply his own eating establishments with fresh authentic French charcuterie. A French company called SAPAR, that had been making very sophisticated pâtés in Meaux, France, since 1920, purchased that ‘’charcuterie’’ which was named FABRIQUE DELICES. In 1985 SPAR sent two French guys, Marc Poinsignon and Antonio Pinheiro, a Portuguese immigrant and a professional charcutier who started as an apprentice in France at age 14, to be respectively CEO and plant Manager of FABRIQUE DELICES in San Francisco. Both became partners and bought Fabrique Délices in 1986 from Sapar and developed it rapidly. They moved to a new plant to Hayward, on the East side of the Bay, in 2002.

They kept 90 % of the original French traditional recipes and secured the best producers of raw meat products even going all the way to the Hudson Valley for certain types of duck. They also created products that would better fit the specific demand of their local Californian market and of their distributors nation-wide (low-cal, vegetarian, etc). They also had to adjust to the way American meat purveyors cut their carcasses and prepare the cuts, which is quite different from what is done in France. The characteristics and structures of animal fat are also different.

But as much as possible they always try to produce all-natural charcuterie and to limit the use of preservatives to very few specialty sausages.

And they rightly define their company as making ‘’charcuterie artisanale’’

Their line of fresh and dry sausages is great and they make all the classics: Toulouse, Morteau, Andouillette, Boudin blanc and noir (blood sausage), Merguez, and a beautiful ‘’saucisson sec’’ that is the best of its kind I have ever tasted in the U.S.

Their pâtés and mousses are also ''First class'', including a garlic sausage en croûte, duck rillettes, and pâté en croûte. Unfortunately I never had a chance to taste their pâtés en croûte that are not sold, as far as I know, in California's farmer's market nor in Chicago.

FABRIQUE DELICES also makes all kinds of mousses, galantines and pâtés from pheasant, duck, goose, venison etc.

They offer a line of prepared food like cassoulet as well as dried and cured meat.

They sell to distributors, restaurants, airlines, caterers, gourmet food stores, all over North, Central, and South America as well as in Asia. And of course to many Internet purveyors of gourmet foods, as well as directly from their own website: www.fabriquedelices.com

Their references go from the Concorde Service on Air France to the White House .

I have no problems finding a few of their pâtés in retail stores in Chicago, such as WHOLE FOODS,where I bought good duck liver mousse with Port wine for $ 14.99 a pound and duck rilletes for $24.99 a pound. I thought that the rillettes were a bit overpriced and that their texture was much too fine, not as ''rustic'' as they should be. You can also buy a decent Pork and Chicken Pate with pistachios, and a Pate Provencal based on Pork meat ($ 14.99 and $12.99 a pound).

I also found some rabbit and prunes pâté for $ 14.99 a pound, and Pâté forestier for $13.99 a pound at SAM's

But unfortunately, most of their other attractive sausages and pâtés or the cassoulet have to be ordered in quantities too large for a 2-person family. And that would be a very expensive proposition. Fabrique Délices is very good but not cheap.

They also sell on the web through www.igourmet.com

But my favorite place to buy their products remains on their own booths in farmers markets in the Bay area.

1610 Delta Court Unit 1, Hayward, CA 94544 Tel: 510-441-9500

I cannot end this gallery of French expatriates who became successful entrepreneurs in the U.S in the field of fancy food and charcuterie without telling you the story of Ariane Daguin, the owner of D'ARTAGNAN, who will always be remembered as the woman who was perhaps the most influential person in the U.S in making Foie Gras the gastronomic and social phenomenon it became over the last 20 years.

Ariane is the daughter of André Daguin the famous chef and ‘’propriétaire’’ of the renowned Michelin 2 stars restaurant Hotel de France in Auch, the capital of the département of Gers, in Gascony, well-known for its multiple ways to prepare ‘’foie gras’’, the typical specialty of that particular area.

When she was barely 10 years old Ariane was already helping in that famous kitchen working on all aspects of making foie gras and other duck pâtés and terrines, and learning all the tricks of the trade, including deboning the birds and cooking their fat and meat.

But for unknown reasons she left that cozy cocoon and flew to the U.S to attend classes at Columbia University. While she was there she worked in a French charcuterie in New York City. Once a farmer from the Hudson Valley stopped by that shop and brought with him a whole fresh foie gras from one of the ducks he raised. That was a revelation. She was totally surprised by the quality of that American product and decided to not only distribute the foie gras from Commonwealth Farms but to start a company with a French friend who, like her, quit his job and invested his savings in that venture. That company, D’ARTAGNAN, the name of the famous ‘’mousquetaire (musketeer) from Gascony’’, was started in 1985.

Ariane and her partner decided eventually to go their separate ways and she bought back his shares. D’ARTAGNAN established its reputation first as a top producer and distributor of fresh and cooked foie gras in the U.S..

Later it also became a well-established purveyor of all kinds of relatively exotic meats, most of them organic, cured and smoked, from game bird, free range poultry, to rabbit, as well as venison, lamb, beef, pork, and later truffles, wild mushrooms, and condiments. She also got involved in making and selling various ‘’ charcuterie’’ products made from pigs, ducks, geese, and other meats, such as confits, terrines, patés, sausages, etc.

She developed special business and personal relationships with independent farmers, cattle raisers, and sustainable producers of pigs, and sometimes their unions or co-ops, all over the United States and encouraged them to increase the quality of their animals and of their feed.

You can buy D’ARTAGNAN’s pâtés, terrines, confits, and sausages either from gourmet food stores (none in Chicago unfortunately, as far as I know), distributors, and on line on their own website: www.dartagnan.com , as well as on other gourmet websites.

In Chicago, it is difficult nowadays to find D'ARTAGNAN sausages and pâtés in retail stores. It seems that she may prefer to sell directly to the trade.

Nervertheless not too long ago you could find her Saucisson sec at Binny's for $ 15.99 a pound.

D’ARTAGNAN INC. 280 Wilson Avenue Newark, NJ 07105 Tel: 800-37-8246

2. French charcuterie found on various Internet websites

I also found a very complete line of charcuterie products from a brand called TERROIRS d’ANTAN’’ U.S.A. They do not have their own website, and do not seem to be imported from France, something that would be difficult anyway considering the import restrictions from the FDA.

But I found several fine and gourmet food purveyors that sell their products on their website.

MARKY’S (www.emarkys.com ), GOURMET FOODSTORE (www.gourmetfoodstore ), CAVIAR & MORE (www.caviarmore.com ), sell the following products from that mysterious company, that ‘’might’’ be located in Santa Barbara, CA.:

Pâté de campagne forestier, Duck rillettes, Duck foie gras mousse, Duck confit, Duck breast, Duck fat, Duck liver mousse, French country pork pâté with black peppers, French truffle mousse, French hazelnut Cognac Pâté, French garlic sausage, Boudin blanc, Boudin noir, Merguez, Andouillette, Saucisse de Toulouse, Duck and Pork galantine with pistachios, Goose and duck liver mousse, and many others. MARKY’s has the largest selection

of their products. But I have never seen any of them in Chicago.

Another site, www.frenchselections.com sells some ‘’Pâté du Périgord’’, Cassoulet Toulousain, Duck pâté, Duck mousse, and Foie gras, made in Quebec by a company called PALME d’OR. The prices look attractive.

Bon appétit Stéphane. I cannot wait to go again with you to the farmer`s markets in MountainView and Los Altos to buy some of these ''bonnes choses'' I just mentioned. I wish we could find them at our own farmer`s markets in Chicago.

Charcuterie in the US

Hi Dad,

As you remember from your visit here earlier this month we found some nice saucisson sec at the Mountain View farmer's market. Fabrique Délices was the purveyor of Chacuterie who also make a pretty solid pate. We had the truffle mousse I believe which you found to be pretty good. I'd say it's as good as any US made pate I've had but still doesn't beat those in France.

I've found in the US that the only place to get great pate and saucisson is in fine restaurants who make it themselves. I'd love to get your take on the best brands and types of saucissons and pate we can find here in the US.

In the world of chacuterie my favorites are goose mousse, duck liver mouse, pate de campagne, saucisson sec, duck rillettes, rabbit pate and of course fois gras. If you can suggest the best brands found in the US in each category I'd enjoy seeking them out to refresh my memories of summers in southern France.

As long as I'm asking about chacuterie It would be great if you can give me the span of meats considered chacuterie. I'm imagining anything from Boudin Blanc to salt pork is considered chacuterie. That way I can follow up with more french meat questions. C'est Chouette! I'll also want to here more about what chacuterie is used in winter dishes given the season is upon us :(

Love

Stephane

Salade Niçoise: Simple and Easy to Make

This very colorful and inexpensive salad does not need to be authentic to constitute an ideal late summer one-course lunch.


Stéphane, I’m sure that the tomatoes you find at these beautiful Mountain View or Los Altos farmer’s markets, that you are so lucky to have nearby all year long, must still be superb, sweet and juicy in early September. And I also guess that the time that you will be able to spend in your kitchen or outside at the barbecue to prepare meals will be limited for next few months. You even can forget about those olives and the anchovies that somebody close to you does not like and rename it the "deconstructed the summer vegetable and tuna salad"

So I would like to remind you of a simple to fix late summer lunch or early dinner dish that your mother and I have been very fond of since our student days in Aix-en-Provence: La Salade Niçoise.
It is a meal in itself and with a few slices of a good baguette to mop the olive-oil based dressing, and perhaps a couple of pieces of goat cheese, your appetite will be satisfied.

I just made a simplified version of this salad last week-end for our Sunday lunch after finding nice plump tomatoes and fresh small red potatoes at the Evanston Farmer’s market and, along with a bottle of Bandol Rosé, we enjoyed it a lot while our dining room table was still bathed in the sunlight peering through he leaves of the plane-tree in front of our building. I have to admit that the quality of the sunlight was unfortunately already pre-autumnal, something that always makes you mother a bit sad.

But to get back to the salade niçoise and the way I prepare it;

As you can guess its name derives from the city of NICE, on the French Riviera, close the Italian border. In this area that used to be Italian until it was reunited with France in 1860, the food has always been influenced heavily by its neighbor, the seafood found in the Mediterranean Sea, the olive oil harvested in its back country, and the plentiful sources of locally-grown vegetables and fruits. I’m referring to red and green peppers, white (coco), grey, broad, green, and small fava beans, all kinds of onions, tomatoes, baby purple artichokes, miniature zucchini and their blossoms, boletus mushrooms, purple asparagus, small potatoes, chard, purple garlic, and of course these famous anf flavorful tiny black ‘’niçoise’’ olives. And of course it is the area where the ‘’mesclun’’ of various types of lettuce and greens was born. But some people (Patricia Wells among them) think that this type of blend has its origin in nearby Italian Liguria. As well as lemons, clementines, black currant, peaches, etc.

A few things to know about the original and perhaps authentic way to prepare Salade Niçoise:

They are several dozens of recipes for making a salade niçoise, and I am not even sure that a single one can qualify as authentically ‘’niçoise’’.
I checked in several books of recipes from both Provence and the Côte d’Azur, the area between St. Tropez and the Italian Border, and the only thing I can say for sure is that originally in NICE this salad consisted of only RAW vegetables. You would never find potatoes, or vinegar in it.
And the old Niçois NEVER MIXED tuna and anchovies; it was either one or the other.
The only cooked ingredient was the hard-boiled eggs.
The raw vegetables used were: Twice salted seeded, drained, and then quartered tomatoes, thinly sliced red and green peppers, small purple baby artichoke hearts, some hearts of celery, tiny fresh fava beans, young spring green onions, small black olives, and that’s it. Later they added some slice of cucumbers and a mesclun of lettuce and green herbs like parsley, chervil, and chives. Some chopped fresh basil could sometimes be added at the end.

Now, another point of contention is the type of beans that you use. In most French restaurant nowadays a salade niçoise include cooked small green beans. That is what I use.
But in the ‘’authentic salade niçoise ‘’ only raw fresh small green fava beans, called ‘’fevettes’’ there, or ‘’coco’’ (fresh white) beans coming from pale green pods, were used.
As far as onions are concerned, most people use very finely sliced small red or white onions as a garnish. But in the real niçoise you should use ‘’cébettes’’, very young spring green onions whose white bulbs are very small. They look a bit like very small leeks, and over here their counterparts would be scallions.
I personally use thin slices of red or torpedo onions in the summer.

Now as far as choosing the kind of flaked tuna you will put in the middle of the serving dish, it should always be CANNED TUNA, and if possible Italian canned tuna packed in olive oil. Never seared fresh tuna like too many American restaurants have taken the habit to do since the early 80`s under the influence of the new Californian Cuisine.
If you use anchovies, instead of tuna or in addition to tuna like most French restaurant do, use flat canned unsalted Italian or Portuguese anchovies packed in olive oil. Not the Danish or Norwegian type.

Now, as far as the dressing is concerned: In the original Salade Niçoise, they seasoned the various raw vegetables with salt and pepper, and doused the sliced boiled eggs and the vegetables with a good quality extra-virgin French olive oil. No vinegar was used. But nowadays most restaurants, as well as me, pour some vinaigrette on it before serving. See my own way of preparing a vinaigrette down below.

Lastly, never mix your Nicoise Salad in a salad bowl, like you would do with another lettuce-based salad. Serve it on an oval porcelain or ceramic platter where it is much easier and prettier to assemble the various components. The platter should be rubbed with one clove of freshly peeled garlic.

Also use only black olives and not green olives to garnish the salad.

My own recipe for an easy to make Salade Niçoise:

For 2 people:

Ingredients:

6 small red potatoes
4 ripe medium size field-grown tomatoes (no Roma or beefsteak type)
¼ Lb fresh small French green beans, left whole but trimmed at both ends.
One medium size red onion, or two small red torpedo onions, thinly sliced
2 fresh large eggs, hard boiled or semi-hard boiled, quartered when cold
About 12 leaves of l Boston or Red leaf lettuce, washed and dried
1 clove of garlic
Some fresh parsley, chives, or chervil, minced
I can of Italian tuna packed in olive oil, drained and flaked with a fork
About 6 flat fillets of canned anchovies, drained and patted with a paper towel
10 black olives with the pits: Niçoises or oil cured Moroccans, or Kalamatas (I use these)

Optional: chopped fresh basil (5 leaves) instead of herbs

For the vinaigrette: About 2 Tbsp of Red wine vinegar, 2Tbsp of Dijon mustard, 1/3 cup of extra-virgin olive oil
Salt & Pepper

Preparing the ingredients:

Steam the red potatoes for 20/25 minutes with skin on. Set aside on a plate to cool. Remove skin and slice them 1/4 inch thick

Wash, dry and cut the tomatoes in 6 segments. Salt them and let them drain for 20 minutes. Remove seeds delicately.

Cook trimmed green beans in salted gently boiling water for 12 minutes. They should remain firm. Drain rinse under cold water and let them cool down,
Before using gently pat them dry with paper towel

Thin slice one medium size red onion

Boil 2 eggs in salted water for 10 minutes. Cool then down in cold water, then peel and quarter them.

Rinse the olives under cold water for 2 minutes (except if oil cured)

Chop fresh parsley and chives (or chervil)


Preparing the vinaigrette:

In a large bowl put 2 Tbsp of Dijon mustard at room temperature, Add some salt and black pepper to taste.
Wisk 2Tbsp of red wine vinegar in the mustard until you obtain a smooth mix
Slowly incorporate, while whisking all the time, 1/3 of a cup of Extra-Virgin olive oil. Continue to whisk until all the ingredients are emulsified into a smooth sauce without letting the vinegar separate from the oil.

Assembling the dish:

Rub a medium-size porcelain platter with fresh garlic.
Arrange leaves of lettuce to cover the platter entirely
Alternate slices of potatoes and quartered eggs on the upper side of the platter
Arrange the segments of tomatoes on a lower rank
Alternate hem with fillets of anchovies
Place a mound of flaked tuna in the center of the dish
Intersperse with olives
Dispose sliced red onions over the vegetables
Sprinkle chopped herbs all over
Just before serving drizzle the vinaigrette on each component


Bon Appétit

PASTIS, the perfect summer drink

This successor to absinthe has been France's favorite apéritif since the mid 50's. It has a long and sometimes difficult past.


You know, Stéphane, it’s magic. Just reading the word “pastis” and I not only get thirsty but also very nostalgic of my native South of France, where it is the object of a quasi-mystic cult.
Especially between May and October when it is associated automatically with ‘’pétanque’’ the games of boules that everybody plays outside in small towns and villages, and also with bullfights. It is the king of drinks during the ‘’ferias’’ (bullfights festivals) in cities like Nîmes, Arles, Dax, Béziers, Vic-Fezensac, Mont-de–Marsan, and many others. In these towns, during these ‘’ feria de toros’’, ''afficionados''' (bullfight fans, and I am one of them) get very easily overboard by drinking pastis not only at the time of the ''apéritif'' (cocktail hour, from around 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM and from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM), but all day long until the wee hours of the morning.
In my native town of Nimes, the French capital of bullfighting where these events take place in a beautiful Roman amphithéâtre called Les Arènes in the middle of the city, the ferias last several days, especially in May (Pentecost Feria) and in September (Harvest time Feria). In the early sixties and seventies, along with some of my school buddies and later with a few close friends, it happened at times that we drank up to 20 pastis a day between 11:00 AM and 2:00 AM during the ferias.
But we went only to a specific bar, across the street from my high school and half a block from the bullfight arena that was essentially serving CASANIS, and where the ‘’Chicuelo II pena’’ (band), supporting a young local matador (NIMENO I) was rehearsing… and drinking pastis.
I have to admit that the quality of the music started to decrease substantially after the 10th pastis.
In fact in those days in Nîmes, some people chose their bar according to the brand of pastis that they served, and there was sometimes (but rarely) a real animosity based on contempt between the patrons of bars serving RICARD or PASTIS 51, and the CASANIS followers




I was talking about a cult. However, that particular religion’s followers belong to separate churches: The RICARD congregation, the PASTIS 51 parish, the CASANIS denomination, the old BERGER BLANC sect, the JANOT true believers, the new apostles of BARDOIN or BOYER, to mention some of the better known brands.

My personal favorite brands of pastis:

Me? I do not drink much pastis too often anymore for 2 reasons: 1. It contains licorice that is not recommended to people who have to watch their blood pressure. 2. It has become too expensive an aperitif for my modest financial means.
But when I drank pastis several times a month in the seventies and early eighties, you could find a bottle of Ricard for 13 dollars in Chicago. And I would buy full-liter bottles on Air France on my way back to Chicago for 40 francs until the early nineties.
Nowadays, you have to spend between 28 and 30 dollars at large liquor stores like Binny’s or Sam’s for the same bottle of Ricard. It has become a luxury item and I’m afraid that the Euro-dollar exchange rate is not going to make it cheaper in the coming months.
Too bad. Your question gave me a furious envy of pastis, especially since we are going through a hot period here in Chicago in late August.
But as far as my brand preferences go, I would say that when I was living in Nîmes in 1959-1960, I was a fanatic believer in CASANIS, a brand created by a gentleman named Casabianca in the late forties. It was based on green anis instead of the star anise (called “badiane” in the South of France) used by most of its competitors. It is a very good pastis, usually a little cheaper than RICARD and PASTIS 51, but that you rarely find North of Valence. As a matter of fact I have never seen that brand of pastis served in bars and brasseries in Paris.
But when I went to study at the university of Aix-en-Provence in 1960, I switched to RICARD, a brand that was much more common than CASANIS in the cafés where I went.
I tried PASTIS 51, made by the old company PERNOD, but I did not like it as much.
And for the last 15 years , when I occasionally drink a pastis I order the marvelously aromatic and natural-tasting pastis made by HENRI BARDOIN at the Distilleries de Provence in Forcalquier, in the Alpes de Haute Provence. This latecomer, launched in 1990, is made from a blend of 50 different plants and spices, most of them harvested in Provence or near the Mediterranean Sea. In France it is more expensive that the traditional commercial brands. But surprisingly, in Chicago, you can purchase a bottle (slightly smaller than its competitors I have to admit) for around $ 27.99 or $ 29.99. at SAM’s or BINNY’s. Its taste is much more distinctive and its flavors more complex than its competitors.
By the way, RICARD and PASTIS 51 do not reveal their ingredients, especially what aromatic components and possibly mixed compounds they add, besides the anis, fennel and licorice.
It is one of the factors that led me to switch to HENRI BARDOIN that I find has a very natural favor

Another good brand is JEAN BOYER, a very elaborate pastis, without any sugar added, made from 72 various plants and 6 spices in a religious community in Fatima.
It is the most expensive pastis that money can buy I France. But I do not think that it is exported to the USA.
I used to like pastis JANOT, made in Aubagne, the capital of those so pretty Christmas figurines: The Santons. But I did not see any in bars for many years.
Two cheaper brands are DUVAL and PRADO 45 . You can find PRADO in some liquor stores like Binny’s where it sells for 10 dollars less than RICARD. It is O.K. but not as good.
I cannot stand PERNOD, that has an almost chemical taste and whose anis taste is almost bitter.

Before Pastis was invented, its predecessor, Absinthe, was the most popular drink from 1865 to 1914

PERNOD FILS was the most popular brand of absinthe, the ancestor of pastis, before 1915. That brand was created in PONTARLIER, in the French JURA mountains that are at the border between France and the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In fact it was a Swiss gentleman named HENRI LOUIS PERNOD. At the end of the 18th century a doctor from Neuchatel, PIERRE ORDINAIRE, concocted the original recipe of ABSINTHE made of a distilled drink based on wormwood spirit mixed with green anis, hyssop, melissa and chamomille. Another Swiss man, named DUBIED, built the first absinthe distillery in COUVET, Switzerland using Ordinaire’s recipe. Later DUBIED partnered with his son in law, HENRI LOUIS PERNOD, and they built a second one on the other side of the French border precisely in Pontarlier.
It became so popular that many other French distilleries started to produce absinthe.
In 1830, the French troops sent to French colonies in North Africa, started to mix some absinthe in their water to protect themselves from all kind of medical problems. And of course they loved it so much that when they came back home they talked a lot about the benefit of this 68% strong alcoholic beverage, that became instantly popular, especially after 1865 when French wine producers suffered a lot from a massive attack of the phylloxera parasite that damaged a lot of vineyards and reduced by 75% the consumption of wine.
At the end of the 19th century, the French were consuming annually more than 13 million liters of absinthe. That is when several French scientists started to do experiments on the effects of wormwood on both the nervous system and the social behavior of heavy absinthe drinkers, and concluded that it could provoke all kinds of possible dangerous side effects, including hallucinations (something that that was never proven). At the outbreak of WORLD WAR I the French government banned all drinks whose alcoholic content was above 16 %.
And in 1915 efforts by various temperance and political lobbies obtained a complete ban of absinthe. This is when Pernod opened a distillery in Spain. But it never gained the success that it had in France and Northern Europe and closed after World War II. So they went back to France and started to produce an anis-based alcoholic drink.

The real birth of the Pastis de Marseille

But is only in the late twenties that a young salesman from Marseille by the name of PAUL RICARD started the actual commercialization of an anis-based aperitif under his own name. He had to fight a lot until 1932 to obtain through a lot of political lobbying and after paying many taxes and fees, the right to legally sell the first PASTIS de MARSEILLE.
It became even more popular during the period of massive social reforms voted by the “Front Populaire” in 1936, that legalized the “congés payés’’ (vacation time paid by employers), to be ranked the No1 favorite ‘‘apéritif’’ in France. Especially after the government granted Paul Ricard in 1938 the right to raise the alcoholic content of his pastis from 40 to 45 degrees...
But, once again, the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain at the beginning of World War II banned the use of any drink whose alcoholic content was above 16 %.
We had to wait until 1951 to be able again to drink legally our favorite apéritif.
Eventually the two major brands, RICARD merged with its competitor PERNOD to form in the nineties one of the world leaders in the field of spirits and wines.

“Pastis” is a provencal word, a diminutive form of “pastisson”, meaning “mix or blend” as well as, figuratively, “a mess”. In the beginning, the production of Pastis was concentrated in Southern France, and more particularly in a region between Marseille and Avignon. Pastis had more or less the same anis-licorice-herbal taste as absinthe, but did not contain the so called “dangerous” wormwood.
But contrary to many beliefs, more pastis is consumed in Northern France than in the South.


The right way to drink pastis:

In a tall narrow conic-shaped glass, pour one part of pastis, then slowly add ice-cold water (five parts) from a pitcher containing water and ice cubes, but do not add ice cubes in the glass.
If you really want to do it the right way but also use ice cubes: Pour the water first, then add the pastis and observe the beautiful visual effect of the golden-yellow liquor giving progressively to the the water an opaline-like cloudy slightly greenish hue.
Then add a couple (but no more) ice cubes.

If you drink 1 part pastis, with 3 parts water in a small cylindrical glass it is called ‘’ une mominette’’, that in some bars in France they call ‘’ un petit jaune’’.
I you add some mint syrup to the pastis it is called a ‘’perroquet’’, with pomegranate syrup it becomes ‘’une tomate’’, and with orgeat (almond-flavored) syrup ‘’une mauresque’’.

Drink slowly, with slightly salted almonds, pistachios, olives, and possibly some slices of mountain ham.

A ta santé.

THE ROAD TO FRENCHTOWN

IN SEARCH OF A BEAUTIFUL BUT LITTLE-KNOWN CEMETERY OF
FRENCH IMMIGRANTS IN SOUTHERN WISCONSIN.

HOW THEY MANAGED TO PLANT VINEYARDS IN THAT AREA

This is a story that will interest you Stéphane, as an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with a particular fondness for the state of birth of your mother.

MIMI, in her always interesting stories relating the lives and cooking habits of her French ancestors in Wisconsin posted on her “très sympathique’’ blog ‘’French Kitchen in America’’, often talked about their old neighborhood of Frenchtown.

It always tickled my curiosity, and every time I asked myself where exactly was that mysterious ‘’Frenchtown’’ located? My impression was that MIMI’s Frenchtown was perhaps located somewhere between Green Bay and Marinette on Lake Michigan, perhaps Oconto, since she alludes to fishermen and seagulls. I had found a Frenchtown in Michigan on Lake Erie, near Monroe, and several roads and neighborhoods named Frenchtown in areas like Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, and Withee, Wisconsin. But I could not locate any place close to Lake Michigan or to fishing grounds.

So I decided to find out how many Frenchtowns I could find in the Midwest and more specifically in Wisconsin, and if they actually had been populated by French people from France, or by French-speaking Canadians or Belgians, as it is often the case in Wisconsin.
Searching for reliable historical sources, I first consulted ‘’ The Time Of The French In The Heart Of America’’ , a very good book published in 1996 by Charles Balesi, a former French teacher and historian from Chicago. It contained interesting pieces of info on French explorations and military expeditions in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. But they did not mention any Frenchtown.
Then, as I was browsing through a website of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, I found a very interesting project sponsored by a group of professors of French that studied 400 years of connections between Wisconsin and French-speaking countries. That report, “Wisconsin French Connections" was published in 1999, to mark the 150th anniversary of that state in 1998.

It is useful to remember that it is a Frenchman from Normandy, Jean Nicolet, who landed in a canoe near the site that is now Green Bay with a small group of Hurons in 1634, coming from Quebec. He was in fact searching a passage to the ocean that would allow him to sail to China. He was also acting in an unofficial capacity as sort of an ambassador trying to establish in the name of France good relations and commercial partnerships with the local Indian tribes. He met with Native Americans members of the Winnebago tribe, along the Menoninee River, that first he thought were Chinese people. He engaged into a good relationship with them.
In these days the French called Green Bay the “Baie des Puants” (the stinking bay) .

Reading this report I was very excited to learn that there was an area, located in what was called Montrose Township in Dane County, near Belleville, that was actually called Frenchtown because it was populated by French people who came from France between 1850 and 1870.

What fascinated me the most is that they were all coming from the same region in France, the Département of Haute-Saône, in the region of Franche-Comté.
That district located about 240 miles southeast of Paris, is situated southwest of the Vosges Mountains and Alsace, and 30 miles northwest of the Swiss border.
More precisely most of them came from the tiny town of Saint-Germain, north of the city of Lure, and from other villages nearby.
It just happened by coincidence that my good friend Georges Cuisance (Kiki) the owner of KIKI’S BISTRO, my favorite eatery in Chicago, is precisely from Vesoul, the major city in Haute-Saône, that is less than 20 miles due southwest from Lure. You can read Kiki`s story in an interview on this blog.

Why and how did so many French people of the same region ended-up settling in such a rural area of Wisconsin?

The reason for that migration of French people from the same area to create such an important “ethnic”concentration so far away from their home base is very unusual since the French in these days did not expatriate themselves so massively, especially to the United-States.
But in fact the explanation to this quite unique phenomenon is simple.
The first Frenchman from Saint-Germain who came to Montrose was named Jean Roi.
By the time he arrived in Belleville he already had anglicized in name into John Roy.
Before settling there in 1850, he had lived in the upper New York state since 1835 and had fought as an enlisted soldier in the Mexican war until 1848.
According to Jerry Remy, the local ‘’historian’’ of Belleville, who is a direct descendent of the original French first settlers, Roy was probably given a ‘’land grant’’ when he was discharged, and perhaps was persuaded by another soldier to travel West to Belleville to purchase a piece of land from one of the early American settlers who lived in the Belleville area and were always eager to sell their property to go farther West.
These early settlers in Belleville were not German, Swiss, Norwegian, Scotch or Irish like most of the other settlers in the surroundings towns of Dane County and Montrose township , but rather ‘’Yankees’’ from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New England, and New York state, and a couple of Kentuckians. In fact the gentleman who founded the city of Belleville in 1851 was an English-speaking Canadian, Mr. Frederick, who gave to the new town the name of the city in Ontario he came from, Belleville. And the man who put Montrose Township on the map in 1840 was one John Kendrick, from Kentucky, who named Montrose after a town in Pennsylvania. The founder of Paoli also came from Pennsylvania.

Roy, whose wife who joined him later was also from Canada, was so happy to live on a small piece of land where he cultivated hops a few miles northeast of Belleville that he wrote to his former neighbors in Saint-Germain to tell them how easy and cheap to buy good-size parcels of agricultural land in this area. That is how the immigration of whole families from the region of Saint Germain to Belleville started to reach a total of 32 families before it ended around 1870.
Many of them probably benefited directly or indirectly from those land grants attributed to ‘’Yankee’’ families who has settled in Montrose Township that allowed them to purchase land that they sold later to the new French settlers. Some of the ‘’Haut-Saônois’’ families to follow Roy’s bear names like Tisserand, Garvoille, Remy, Genin, Tourdot, François, Carteron, Viney, Pernot, Gehin, Henry, Frelin, Menigoz, Faivre, Lamboley, Laroque, Carteret, Dubay, Pillar, Germain, Clerget, Leclerc, Petitot, Carteron, Grillot, Durand, Perrin, Begey, Grosjean, Fleury, Gerard, and many others.

The French newcommers were poor but very hard-working and good farmers, who did not mind relaxing with some songs and a glass of wine

The majority of the new French settlers were poor, but honest hard-working people. They had a great sense of what their community should be in order to survive and prosper, and they helped each other toward that common goal. Before they came to Wisconsin, they had difficult lives, trying to survive from farming a few acres on land disseminated in small parcels in and around Saint-Germain.
In their early years in Frenchtown they lived in very simple log houses deprived of any kind of basic comfort. Their clothes were of the same simple kind that they wore in France and they walked in wooden ‘’sabots’’ (galoshes).
Their way of life and day- to- day habits and routines in those days were very modest and frugal. They relaxed from their hard labor regimen with lots of singing.

They also were devout Catholics and had many children, that they either brought with them or who were born and raised in Frenchtown. Some of these French families counted up to 10 or even 12 children.
They knew how to plant, grow, and harvest barley, oats, and hops, and to process small grains.
And what I was amazed to learn about, and that fact was confirmed by Jerry Remy, is that they brought from France their native habit of drinking wine, even though the Haute-Saône area is not a wine-growing region. So they planted vineyards at the edge of some of their farm’s back plots and harvested substantial amount of grapes, mostly Concord, that they transformed into wine. Jerry Remy told me that not only his ancestors produced wagon-loads of grapes, but that his great grandfather drank a glass of his own wine every morning for breakfast. And his grandpa must also have been a strong man since he died at the age of 103 in Frenchtown in 1965 after having lived there for 100 years. He arrived to Belleville from Saint-Germain in 1865. Perhaps the red wine produced on his family farm had helped him to maintain his coronaries in good condition.
I do not know if, when in the 1860s some bad insect infestation ruined lots of wheat and other cereal crops in Southern Wisconsin, those French farmers started to raise dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep, and poultry like many of their Swiss, German, Scandinavian, and American neighbors did.
A very interesting historic map of Montrose Township dated 1899 shows the different land properties belonging to French settlers with their names clearly marked.

The early French settlers did not speak English of course, but got along well enough to be accepted by the other ethnic groups of Montrose Township and the city of Belleville. The French that they spoke at home was not ‘’high French’’ but rather a regional ‘’patois’’.
Much later the new generation of children and grandchildren of the early settlers born in Frenchtown, who had married among themselves, became English-speaking Americans but some of them continued for a while to speak their original patois at home.

A few descendants of some of these families are still living in the Belleville area: Several members of the Remy family are listed on Remy Road in Belleville and the name of Francis (François) can also be found in a few places.
But nowadays the few direct descendants from these early French settlers still living around Belleville do not speak French, or have a very limited knowledge of it, according to what Jerry Remy told me.

Where exactly was Frenchtown? How to get to its cemetery?

The name of Frenchtown referred to a five-square-mile area northeast about 3 miles northeast of Belleville where Jean Roy started his farm, and where all the other families from Haute-Saône settled and bought pieces of land as large as 80 to 100 acres. Three of the early French immigrants, Olympe Genin, Auguste François et Xavier Garvoille (whose name was changed to Gavoille) were forced to serve in the army during the civil war. Their tombs are in the French cemetery on Frenchtown Road.

Some local historians have estimated that the 32 original French families had so many children (sometimes 10 to 12 ) that around 1902 the size of the French settlement, Frenchtown, had expanded to 400 or even 500 souls, according to an article written by August Roden in the State Journal, published in Madison in 1902. By that time the new generation spoke English.
This is why many of the more recent headstones in the Frenchtown cemetery, that used to be called Saint Raphael cemetery in its early years, bear many English first names, even though the last names are the same as those of their elders. Some original names were anglicized many years later. For example, François became Francis.

The French town cemetery’s early name of Saint-Raphael referred to the catholic church of Saint-Raphael that was erected in 1869 near Paoli, a charming little village a few miles north of Frenchtown, that welcomed catholic parishioners from the French and Irish nearby communities. Saint-Raphael was replaced by a larger church in 1900 in Paoli and was renamed Saint William.

The early French settlers to die in Frenchtown were initially buried in the Belleville cemetery, along with mostly protestant folks.
But in 1870, 20 years after the arrival of Jean Roi, one of the settlers gave a parcel of land to the Frenchtown community to be used as a catholic French cemetery that would be blessed and dedicated by a catholic prelate.
The cemetery was formally organized in 1925. And the few people who had been buried in the Belleville cemetery were exhumed and buried again in Fenchtown cemetery.

It is a well-groomed and peaceful place with beautiful trees on a slightly hilly meadow bordered on side by a dense forest and on the Frenchtown Road side by cornfields.

To get there from Belleville drive North on Highway 69 for 2 miles, then turn right on the very pretty Frenchtown Road and drive east for 1 mile. The cemetery is clearly marked and cannot be missed since it is directly on the right side of the road.

Several markers explain the history of both the settlement and the cemetery.

Exploring the lives of these French settlers in Wisconsin and visiting that peaceful site is a beautiful and moving experience and I strongly recommend that small trip to anybody who has an interest for the history of the French in the Midwest of the United States

Sources:

University of Wisconsin at Green Bay www.uwgb.edu/wisfrench
State Historical Society of Wisconsin
The Capital Times
www.belleville.k12.wi.us/community/village/hist
http://bellstmarys.org/history
http://www.historicmapworks.com/

Pastis in the Summer

Hi Dad,

As it's been quite hot here recently I've turned to having a glass of Pastis over the past few days. I was explaining to someone that there are lots of different brands and that there is many better brands than Pernod and Ricard. Can you reccomend a few brands of Pastis I can get in the US that are good? What makes a good Pastis? I'm also curious to understand it's origins and if it's always been a drink that is mixed with water? Finally, Absinthe is a very trendy liquor to mix into swanky cocktails these days. I've tried a few in the US and they are not really Absinthe since they dont contain wormwood. The wormwood-less exportable Absinthe seems quite similar to Pastis and is made by the the same companies that make Pastis. Is this a new phenomenon or have they always had 2 types of absinthe?

Hope your cooling off with a little Pastis!

Stephane

Chateau HAUT-SARTHES, MONTRAVEL ROUGE, a very exciting wine from a little-known AOC worth discovering


Stéphane,

During the 10 days we spent in California last month, both at your house and in the Sonoma County wine district, your mother and I drank several very interesting Californian reds, and I have to admit that some of the Rhône-type wines produced in the Dry Creek district are sometimes as satisfying as the “real thing” from Vaucluse.
But,as it is the case everytime we travel to California, when I come back home, I cannot wait to uncork a bottle of Bordeaux, or anything good coming from the Southwest of France.

It just happened that 2 days after our return to Chicago, I attended a very interesting wine tasting at one of my favorite wine stores in the Chicago area , The BOTTLE SHOP, in Wilmette, IL, whose very astute and decently priced selection of wines from all over the world, is organized by type of varietals. The Bottle Shop always offers some very original and not often found wines from lesser-known producing areas from France. Joe Alter, the shop’s very competent wine director is always happy to guide his regular customers in selecting one that would please their palate without damaging their wallet too much. A couple of weks ago he suggested a very cheap (under 8 dollars) Tempranillo-based Spanish red (if my memory is correct from Navarra) that proved to be the perfect comapnion to a roasted duck breast that evening.

The night I attended that tasting, the wines were from CHATEAU HAUT-SARTHES, from the area of BERGERAC, in the Southwest, not far from BORDEAUX, and more specifically their MONTRAVEL ROUGE 2005, a ve
ry recent AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) since it was officially registered in 2001The white MONTRAVEL had been a registered AOC for several years.
But strangely enough these very good wines are not only relatively rarely found on American wine stores, but also not even widely distributed in France where they are under-estimated and under-rated by professional wine critics.

Vincent Ehret, from FINE VINES in Melrose Park, IL, the regional importer of HAUT -SARTHES, came with the owner of that estate, the very knowledgeable and charming Monsieur Daniel Hecquet, a well-known oenologist who was very instrumental in obtaining the AOC label for the red wines of the MONTRAVEL appellation. Monsieur Hecquet owns and manages CHATEAU PUY-SERVAIN in the MONTRAVEL and HAUT-MONTRAVEL areas, a medium size property where tthe HAUT-SARTHES wines are produced.

I had tasted their very fragrant (perfect for summer picnics) HAUT-SARTHES BERGERAC ROSE, several times before this wine-tasting where it was served along the other dry white MONTRAVEL and sweet HAUT- MONTRAVEL, and it has become one of my favorites rosés when I have lunch at KIKI’S BISTRO, on Franklin St. in Chicago, my most pleasant unwinding event of the week every Friday. I also love to drink it as an ''apéritif'', before dinner while I am cooking a leg of lamb and ratatouille.
I also think that the HAUT-SARTHES BERGERAC ROUGE 2005 (60% Merlot, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and 20% Cabernet Franc exclusively from high-density plantation, hillside, estate vineyards) is as good if not better than many small Bordeaux. This dark-colored but well-balanced and soft wine with good body and good fruit is very satisfying with a wide spectrum of earthy bistro dishes, including lamb stew with black olives, boeuf Bourguignon, and veal stew Marengo. It is a very comforting wine on a cold winter day in Chicago.

Mr. Hecquet conducted the ‘’degustation’’ of his wines in very good English with a lot of very precise comments reflecting both his enormous technical and practical knowledge of wines and his obvious pleasure to talk about them, since he is very proud of his own production.
Creating new approaches and improving the methods for planting and harvesting, as well as the process of vinification per se, to obtain very remarquable wines reflecting the intrinsinc qualities of their terroir and the integrity of their winegrowers and winemakers have been his passion and quasi-obsessionnal objective during his whole life. A life that he spent, since he was a child learning to plant vines, in the vineyards and some famous chateaux of the Bordelais and Bergerac areas (Yquem and Figeac among them).
The man is totally immersed in his passion for the defense of good and traditional wine-making in the Bordeaux and Bergerac zones of production, and was at the avant-garde of the legal fight to obtain a new and less ambiguous classification of ‘’crus bourgeois’’ that should better reflect the actual value of some of these Bordeaux wines.
The 2003 classification was annuled in court in 2007. The new one should be published in 2009.
As I said, Monsieur Hecquet is not only a château owner, but also an oenologist who, for several years, was involved in various expert or executive capacities in trade associations and unions as well as technical and legisalative committees, working very hard to defend the rights of serious owners to make decent wines of good character without interference or pressures from official, political, or trade organizations.
At the end of his studies towards a degree in oenology at the Oenology Institute in Bordeaux he wrote a well-received study while doing his internship at the famous Château d’Yquem, the best-known of the great Sauternes wines.
Perhaps this experience explains his particular taste in developing and strongly fighting for improving the quality of the sweet and semi-sweet white wines of the HAUT–MONTRAVEL and COTES DE MONTRAVEL appellations that are different from the whites from the MONTRAVEL appellation that are dry (made from Sémillon, Sauvignon, and Muscadelle the three main white grapes of the Aquitaine region)

The 3 MONTRAVEL appellations belong to the same family and region as the BERGERAC wines, an area in the département of DORDOGNE, whose AOC was recognized in 1936, located about 50 miles East of Bordeaux.
The wine-producing area of MONTRAVEL, that is comprised of 14 ''communes’’ (townships), is located at the extreme Western end of the BERGERAC area (called Bergeracois) and of the Dordogne departement and many of its vineyards are on small hills that are bathing in the sun while exposed to the sweet and humid influence of the nearby Atlantic ocean.

MONTRAVEL is truly the best wine-growing district of the BERGERAC appellation, and it deserves its own recognition.

The voluptuous MONTRAVEL ROUGE

At the end of these vineyards, if you drive a few miles West, you are within a few minutes at the heart of the COTES DE CASTILLON and COTES DE FRANCS, and a few more miles farther you enter the SAINT EMILION district.
HAUT-SARTHES MONTRAVEL ROUGE is in fact, like a Saint Emilion, made of 70% or 80% of Merlot, and 20 to 30% of Cabernet Franc (sometimes called ‘’Bouchet’’ in the Bordeaux region).
That results in a perfect mix of fruit, fragrance, roundness and structure, like you would find in a good St. Emilion. And the tannins are so well integrated that they add a marvelous complexity to the wine.
But for such a great and well balanced wine, you will pay much less than what you would pay for a St.Emilion Grand Cru offfering the same qualities of elegance and richness.

Two vintages are available, the 2003 that is very intense and aromatic, with notes of ripe berries, and provides a very long finish, and the 2005, that offers a nice balance of fruit and acidity, with a great nose, and has a very pleasant (still a bit short to my taste- the wine could have been decanted that night, but was not) finish. It is ready and easy to drink now but its great terroir qualities should improve even more from a few years in the cellar. The 2004, a vintage that proved to be much better than initially thought, had some cabernet sauvignon (10%) in it. But it is not available over here.

I was very impressed by both vintages and would strongly recommend it with any kind of beef stew or duck-based dishes like ‘’confit de canard’’, or perhaps even a Cassoulet.

The 2005 is sold for $25.00 a bottle at The Bottle Shop in Wilmette. It is available in a few other stores in the Chicago area.

What is an authentic French brasserie?

After a downturn in the nineties, brasseries are gaining a new popularity in France. They constitute a new trend on the American restaurant scene.

Your comments on the great dinner we had last month at the very good “Old Town Brasserie” in Chicago, as well as your doubts that this restaurant is typical of a French brasserie were right on target, Stéphane.
As you correctly noted in your post that restaurant, although a very good one, was not at all a typical brasserie neither in terms of decor and ambience or of the type of food served in a French brasserie. It is too fancy, the atmosphere is a bit too cozy, and the composition and presentation of the dishes are closer to what you would find on your plate in a 2 Michelin-star restaurant than in a brasserie. But we should not be surprised knowing the enormous and proven talent of its executive chef Roland Liccioni, who, as you rightly mentioned, authored so many marvelous dishes at both Carlos and Le Français in suburban Highland Park and Wheeling and more recently in Chicago at Les Nomades.

It has become trendy over the last 10 years in several large American cities (like New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and Philadelphia) to try and recreate French brasseries.
But quite often they are either too fancy, to "Americanized" , too sophisticated or too eclectic in the formulation of their menus to qualify as real brasseries. I am thinking of places like Daniel Boulud Brasserie in Las Vegas, Brasserie Ruhlman in N.Y.C and Chicago, “ Mon Ami Gabi” in Chicago and Las Vegas, Brasserie Perrier in Philadelphia, or French-American brasserie in Atlanta

You told me that you were not very excited about “ Left Bank” in your own area of Silicon Valley. But I have to admit that the menus of the Left Bank restaurants that I read on their web sites do look a bit similar to the menus that you would find in a brasserie in France. Also, I've not been there but it seems to me, again from visiting their websites and reading comments on Gayot, that Balthazar, in New York , and the Brasseries Les Halles in NYC, Washington and Miami are probably, in terms of menus, wine lists, decor, and continuous service from morning to evening, the closest you can find to the real thing.

In the early eighties, Un Grand Café in Lincoln Park in Chicago, where we used to celebrate your birthday for several years, had a decor and an atmosphere that in some way tried to imitate those of a French brasserie or “grand cafe”, with its leather banquettes, and racks for hats and umbrelllas, as well as hanging newspapers. And a few of its dishes, like pâté de canard, leek terrine, duck confit, moules marinières, oysters, steak-frites, grilled salmon, and roasted chicken, were of the same type that you would find in any French brasserie.
For the last 13 years Brasserie Joe has been the closest to the real thing you will find in Chicago.
No wonder: its menu that includes the most traditional French brasserie dish, “choucroute garnie” (sauerkraut cooked with white wine, and served with various sausages, salted pork, ham, and boiled potatoes) was created by the famous chef Jean Joho (Everest in Chicago, The Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, Brasserie Jo in Boston ) who was born, educated, and trained as a chef in Alsace, where the first brasseries started. He was a sous-chef at the celebrated Auberge de l’Ill, in Illhaeusern, a temple of haute-cuisne and one of the best
restaurants of Europe, whose founder Paul Haeberlin passed away a few weeks ago.

But as you also noted, none of these American restaurants,except for Les Halles and Balthazar serve food all-day and that peculiarity disqualify them as true brasseries.

From what I read, I have the feeling that the new Haussman Brasserie, that just opened a few days ago in Northfield, even though it is the creation of Jacky Pluton, a French chef with a long experience, will not ressemble a traditional French brasserie either and that it’s menu is designed to please a typical Northwest suburb-type of client base.


So what is a real French brasserie?

First of all, let me remind you that that word means “brewery”, a place where “brasseurs” (brewers) brew beer. And by extension it became before the French revolution, a place where you could drink beer.
The main regions of beer production have been Alsace, and Lorraine, in the Northeastern part of France near the German and Swiss border, and in the North near Belgium and Luxembourg. Paris was also a zone of production.
No wonder then that the first large brasseries at the end of the 19th century in Paris were created by wealthy Alsatians, many of them not very eager to become German after their native province was once again taken over by the Germans at the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. They emigrated to Paris and launched with an enormous amount of success, this new type of restaurants that served Alsatian specialties as well as fish, steaks, and good desserts. Their names became synonymous of brasserie:
Wepler (a large brasserie on Place Clichy, still famous nowadays for its seafood and shellfish),
Dreher (closed),
Runtz (rue Favart in the 2nd),
Zimmer (beautiful recently redecorated brasserie on the Place du Chatelet),
Zeyer (still very popular, Place d’Alesia in the 14th arrondissement),
Bofinger Place de la Bastille (with its spectacular art deco glass dome),
Flo (with its very impressive art-nouveau decor in a picturesque alley in the 10th arrondissement)
Lipp in Saint-Germain des Prés, where generations of politicians, celebrities, and just regular French and Foreign tourists are still flooding the place to eat a relatively mediocre choucroute, marinated herrings with potatoe salad, stuffed pig trottters, and drink their famous but not that great beer. Lipp is typically one of these places where you go to see people and be seen, or because you are on a nostalgia trip. It is nevertheless a great place to visit at least once in your life, but if the Maitre D’ does not recognize you
you will have to show some clout or inventive cleverness, or to be with a very well-dressed companion to be seated downstairs.

Other famous brasseries were started (and are still in operation in 2008) by French businessmen from other regions, principally Auvergne.

La Coupole, the largest and to me the most beautiful of Parisian brasseries, was open on Boulevard Montparnasse in 1927, and completely redecorated to its original splendor in 1997. So many famous artists, writers, musicians, draw sketches. wrote pages or scores, did some wild partying there that you could create a museum with all the memories and photos attached to this lively place. The food is O.K. but nothing to write home about.
Le Dôme, the other “grande dame” of Boulevard Montaparnasse, well known for its seafood and shellfish. But since it is very expensive I prefer it’s smaller sister-brasserie Le Bistrot du Dôme, in nearby rue Delambre.
L’Européen next to the Gare De Lyon train station. Impressive room, but I believe that nowadays the food is just O.K.
Charlot Roi des Coquillages (well-known for its shellfish) on Place Clichy. I never ate there.
La Brasserie Lorraine (an overpriced and over-rated fancy restaurant Place des Ternes in the 8th),
Chez Jenny in the 3rd, Julien in the 10th, (used to be good but I believe it is no longer the case although the decor is still spectacular)
La Closerie des Lilas in the 5th (a very charming restaurant and bar that welcomed a wole world of famous artists and writers, including Hemingway).
Thoumieux, rue Saint-Dominique in the 7th is a traditional meeting place, with lots of wood and a comfy decor. But I was told by some friends that the quality of the cuisine is not what it used to be.
Also Brasserie Balzar in the 5th where I used to drink beer and eat croque-monsieur and wieners when I was a student at la Sorbonne. It is still one of my favorites and when I used to go there often in the early sixties was at the time owned by Brasserie Lipp, of which it was sort of a more democratic replica. Later on, it was taken over by the FLO group in the nineties. but is still a pleasant place.

The FLO Group,(200 restaurants in the world) recently acquired by a Belgian equity company, owns and manage some of the best known brasseries in Paris and in several cities: Brasserie Flo, Bofinger, Julie, La Coupole, Le Boeuf sur le toit, Le Vaudeville, Terminus Nord, Balzar, Brasserie du Théatre, Les Beaux-arts, Brasseries Flo in Nancy, Metz, Reims, Nancy, and Barcelona.
I love Brasserie Flo-L’Excelsior in Nancy, and had a few decent choucroutes over the years at Bofinger, Flo, and Terminus Nord.
Another, but less important restaurant group, also sold recently to a financial company, is Les Frères Blanc, that owns Le Procope, Charlot Roi des Coquillages, and La Fermette Marbeuf, near the Champs-Elysées. I have not eaten in any of these for years.

Some other brasseries in Paris:

Au Chien qui Fume in the old Les Halles district , remains one of my favorites. They have fixed price menus offering a good quality-price ratio
Vagenende, a beautifully appointed old brasserie on Boulevard Saint-Germain, a couple of blocks from Rue de Seine, where you spent the first 6 months of your life, is a perennial favorite of American tourists. The food can be very good, especially during the winter months, or quite mediocre during the tourist season from June to September.
So is Le Grand Colbert Rue Vivienne near la Bourse, in part because of the famous restaurant scene between Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in “Someting’s Gotta Give”. I never ate there, but I love the environment of that place. And they have an attractive menu
In the same district two other brasseries have their strong regular supporters: Gallopin and Le Vaudeville, but I never ate at Vaudeville and I’ve never been too impressed by the food at Gallopin.
La brasserie of Hôtel Lutetia in the 6th, at the heart of one of the best fashion district (ready-to-wear) is very pleasant for lunch and is usually full of very elegant people. The menu is a bit more refined than in most brasseries.
Terminus Nord, a great but expensive brasserie in front of the Gare du Nord train station is a favorite of travelers who want to have lunch or dinner before boarding the Eurostar train to London. Very good shellfish and foie gras.
Chez Georges, Boulevard Pereire, in the 17th . I used to love this place and they had a superb “pâté en croûte’’ and a very good “gratin Dauphinois”.

But let's not ignore the many more modest cafés-brasseries in various neighboroods of Paris, like my dear Café de la Tour Eiffel rue du Commerce in the 15th, where we ate last summer. There, you can order typical “mets de brasserie” (brasserie dishes) for less money than you would spend in the above-mentioned “grandes brasseries”.

Some typical mets de brasserie :

Very often large brasseries offer a good selection of oysters and other shellfish. Usually an “écailler’’ (a person in a special type of uniform and wearing a fisherman cap who opens the oysters with a special short knive, his hands protected by heavy gloves and prepare them for you on a platter in a special booth outside next to the entrance of the restaurant.

Poireaux vinaigrette (leeks with a vinaigrette sauce)
Oeufs durs mayonnaise ( hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise)
Céleri rémoulade (shredded celeriac in a spicy mayonnaise)
Harengs Baltique (marinated and pickled herrings)
Escargots de Bourgogne ( snails baked in a garlic and parsley butter)
Pâté en croûte (baked minced meat in pastry)
Charcuteries variées (various cold meats, pâtés, terrines, saucisson like dried sausage, rillettes, hams, etc)
Assiette anglaise ( Assorted cold meats with cornichons, sliced tomatoe and a leaf of lettuce)
Foie Gras frais de canard (fresh duck foie gras with toast)
Smoked salmon
Soupe à l’oignon (onion soup)
Various omelettes
Various types of steaks with pommes frites and possibly sauces (béarnaise, peppercorn, mushrooms, marrow)
Choucroute garnie à l’Alsacienne (sauerkraut cooked in Riesling wine or beer, with various types of sausages, salted pork and chops, bacon, ham, and served with boiled potatoes)
Andouillette grillée AAAAA (grilled sausage made from finely chopped chitterlings or tripe) AAAAA means : Association Amicale des Amateurs ‘Andouillettes Authentiques
Foie de Veau poêlé (pan sauteed veal liver)
Blanquette de veau (veal stew in a creamy white sauce)
Boeuf Bourguignon
Coq au Vin (chicken in a reduced wine sauce with bacon and mushrooms)
Pavé de thon (sauteed tuna steak)
Sole ou Truite (filet of Dover sole, or a whole river trout, served with a lemon, parsley, and hot liquefied butter.
Coquilles Saint-Jaques (sea scallops)
Salades composées ( mixed salads with ham, gruyere cheese, eggs, croutons, olives etc)
Frisée aux lardons ( chicory curly lettuce topped with a soft boiled egg and pieces of fried bacon)
Plateau de Fromages (assorted cheeses on a platter)
Tartes aux fruits (fruit tarts)
Mousse au chocolat
Poire Belle Hélène (chilled pear served with ice cream and hot chocolate sauce)
Crème brulée (vanilla creamy custard topped with burnt sugar)
Sorbets

Brasseries de Province

Of course most major cities in the French provinces have their own famous brasseries. Some of my favorites are:
La brasserie Excelsior-Flo in Nancy, whose decor is an architectural landmark.
La Cigale , that you can see in “Lola”, the beautiful film by Jacques Demy shot in the early sixties, in Nantes.
La Brasserie André in Lille.
La Brasserie Georges in Lyon.
And of course Le Boulingrin in Reims (where we had lunch last summer),and its great Art-Déco decor.


What are the main differences between a restaurant and a brasserie?

Contrary to most restaurants and bistrots that are closed at least 2 days per week, and sometimes closed for lunch on Saturday, brasseries are open 7 days a week and, except for a few that are not serving food between 2:00 and 6:00 PM, usually offer continuous service from breakfast time to late at night. In Paris several well-known brasseries like La Coupole, Brasserie Lipp, or Le Grand Colbert,serve dinner until 1:00 AM.
Most brasseries are open 365 days a year.
In provincial cities brasseries are often located and concentrated around busy point of passage like a railroad station, city hall, post office, main church, or more generally speaking on the main drag of the town.
Their lighting is usually much brighter, and the sound level higher, than in regular restaurants and bistrots.
Sometimes, especially in old-fashioned brasseries, the waiters still don a long white apron, a black jacket, and a black tie. In newer brasseries their attire is more contemporary but always include a white dress shirt with a black tie and a black or white waiter jacket.
The brasseries have a less extensive and less expensive wine list than in traditional restaurants.
But they often offer interesting regional wines in carafes or by the glass that you don’t find in regular restaurants.
In most brasseries, you do not need a reservation, (not true anymore for the most famous ones in Paris) but sometimes you have to wait for a table.
Not all brasseries have bars, but some have a counter where you can grab a sanwich and drink a glass of wine while reading your paper.
Contrary to most restaurants, you can show up at any time and order a simple dish, or sandwich, and a glass of wine, beer, mineral water, a coke or a coffee, without having the waiter making a face at you...
It is not uncommun to see people ordering only an omelette, a croque-monsieur (grilled sandwich of ham, cheese and bechamel sauce), or a hot dog with fries, or a simple ice-cream with a coffee at 11:00 AM, 3:00 PM, or 11:00 at night.
But sometimes you can also observe whole families, usually visiting from some province, having a full lunch in the middle of the week, starting with oysters, foie gras, mussels marinière, melon and prosciutto, or smoked salmon. This would be followed by a chateaubriand (a thick piece of filet of beef) with béarnaise sauce, or a “steak tartare’’ (freshly knife-chopped raw beef mixed with a Worcester sauce, chopped shallots, capers, lemmon juice, finely chopped parsley, and a raw egg yolk), or an andouillette A.A.A.A.A.
(chitterlings sausage), or sauteed veal liver, or a filet of Dover sole meunière (in a light butter sauce), or veal kidneys in a mustard sauce.
The desserts would often consist of poire Belle Hélène, mousse au chocolat, crème brulée, fruit tart, or sorbet. Some members of the family might also order cheese before or instead of dessert.

Like restaurants brasseries generally offer a couple of plats du jour (specials) that can run from coquelet au Riesling (cornish hen in an Alsatian Riesling wine sauce), carré or gigot d’agneau aux flageolets (leg or rack of lamb with beans), or Cassolette de Coquilles Saint-Jacques (baked scallops in butter and wine reduction). But usually the selection is less sophisticated than in regular restaurants.
In Brasseries, dishes are most of the time traditional and do not require long cooking time and elaborate preparation.
The average brasserie customer wants to have a tasty but relatively fast lunch or dinner.

Me, I love to have a slow leisurely lunch in a brasserie with friends, eating some of my favorite dishes:
Pâté en croûte, terrine de lapin, or poireaux vinaigrette, followed by confit de canard et pommes sarladaises or bavette aux échalottes, and cantal cheese as a dessert. All of this washed down with a good bottle of a small Bordeaux or a carafe of a good regional vin de pays, red of course.

Bon appétit.

Premier Mai (May Day), la Fête du Travail, in France and in Chicago.

Today, May 1, 2008, many immigrants will organize parades in the streets of Chicago to focus the attention of the public on their various problems in this country.
But very few people know that this day is in fact celebrated all over the world as “Labor Day” , an international workers holiday, and that it has its (tragic) origin in some events that took place in Chicago between May 1 and May 4, 1886.

Every year on the first day of May I feel very nostalgic of the way the “Fête du Travail’’ (Labor Day) was celebrated in France in the fifties where it was one of the most joyous national holiday. I enjoyed watching the marches and parades organized by the major labor unions in the large cities with its colorful banners and loud slogans, the traditional bountiful picnics or lunches with friends, and sometimes the music and dances on public squares. And of course it was also a celebration of Spring with the tiny bouquets of muguet (Lilies of the Valley) that you would buy from street vendors for a few francs, and that men and boys would offer to their girlfriends, mothers or favorite female teachers. Some years the muguet was scarce and expensive, but most often its powerful fragrance would overpower the living room of the house or the bar room of the neighborhood café-restaurant.

It was really a day of popular joy and good humor, even in socio-political environments not too fond of any left-wing connotations, or very remote from workers rights and demands, and it was even observed in conservative and bourgeois families who read the Figaro rather than L’Humanité.

Of course I remember the food that was simple but flavorful: Deviled eggs (oeufs durs mayonnaise), quiches, omelettes aux fines herbes ou au lard (omelettes with parsley and chives or with bits of fried bacon), cornets de frites (french fries), poulet rôti et jardinière de légumes ( roasted chicken with fresh spring peas, baby carrots and pearl onions), and sometimes when they were already available, fraises au sucre avec de la crème Chantilly (fresh strawberries sprinkled with powdered sugar with whipped cream).
At the end of the day lots of young people had initiated their first serious amorous, or just flirtatious connection, and many were not walking that straight after a few too many glasses of pastis or rosé wine.

In those days the Premier Mai’s workers parades were rather good-humored, rather than charged with hard political chants and slogans, except during periods of strikes or social discontent when they became a perfect occasion to remind the population and the government of their “revendications” (demands), protests, and rights.

But I am ready to bet that if you had asked any marching worker what was the origin of the Premier Mai or the Fête du Travail, very few would have been able to say that it was a commemoration of some tragic events that took place in Chicago on May 1, 1886.
On that date workers, including members of unions, socialists, a few anarchists, and more generally members of organizations demanding reforms, got together to launch a national movement towards obtaining an eight hours working day. Following several days of marching in various streets Thirty five thousands workers walked off their plants, workshops and stores, joined by many thousands more the following days, calling other workers to go on strike. There were several rough contacts with the police, some including shooting episodes. The most serious of them occurred on May 3 at the Mc McCormick plant (the famous farm implement manufacturer) that had been on strike for a while when policemen shot 2 or 3 striking workers. This provoked more violence and some anarchists called for revenge at a protest meeting that they had organized at the Haymarket square on Randolph Street. Initially that meeting that took place on DesPlaines St, half a block north of Randolph, was rather calm, under the watch of the police department. But an encouragement to civil disobedience by one of the speakers motivated a police force of 176 men to march into the crowd and try to disperse the meeting. Someone threw a bomb that killed a police officer and that event prompted the police to open fire in every directions, killing and wounding many people. Sixty police officers were wounded and eight killed.

The Haymarket episode was regarded by big business owners as a proof that the workers movement was infiltrated by radicals and anarchists that threatened the future of the American enterprise system.
The mayor of the city banned all meetings and marches. Any kind of picketing was immediately dispersed by police. The local press published very tough articles against anarchists and foreigners accused by the police of being responsible for all the trouble.
In spite of hundred of arrests, the Chicago Police Department never found the person who had thrown the bomb. But this conspiracy theory that everything was caused by anarchists and foreigners did nothing to calm things down. In 1887 eight anarchists were arrested and found
guilty by a biased judge and preconditioned jury. Half of them were hanged, one committed suicide in jail, 3 were eventually pardoned by the Governor of Illinois in 1893. The involvement of these men in the events of May 1886 was never proved.

But this movement for a shorter workday initiated by the American Labor movement on May 1, 1886, is at the origin of using May Day as a holiday celebrating labor, all over the world... except in the United States where that holiday was considered after World War II as a “communist” holiday by many
Americans.

Additional Source: For more info on the Haymarket story consult the marvelous " The Encyclopedia of Chicago", Published in 2004 by The University of Chicago Press, where I refreshed my memory on this event

Brasserie Comparisons

Hi Dad,

Thanks much for the info on inexpensive Bordeauxs! I'm in the process of placing my orders to have a good stock on hand at home.

Our dinner for Mom's birthday last week at Old Town Brasserie last week is still on my mind. I thought the quality and creativeness of the menu were unsurpassed for the price. Clearly, Roland Liccioni has brought a taste of les Nomads and le Francais for a 3rd of the price.

That said, one thing that has left me perplexed is why it's called a Brasserie. In the US it seems the term Brasserie is used to refer to restaurants with a french slant but do not reflect the true definition of Brasseries in France.

Last summer, we all had the opportunity at a classic french brasserie in Reims called Le Boulingrin. My understanding is a Brasserie is a restaurant that serves all day long and does not requirement reservations like at Le Boulingrin. Brasseries tend to be less formal and have simple menu's with many choices.

Old Town Brasserie requires reservations and is only open for dinner. It is also a lot fancier than any Brasserie I've been to in France. While there were some aspects of Old Town Brasserie that resemble a french Brasserie such as a reasonably priced wine list and a less formal service it seems most french visitors would not recognize it as a Brasserie. It seems the term Brasserie, as well as cafe and bistro, are very loose terms in the US as compared to France. Can you shed any light on if there is any rhyme or reason to the term Brasserie in the US to describe a restaurant?

Dreaming of another trip to the fanciest Brasserie in Chicago nonetheless!

Love Stephane

Nice red Bordeaux for less than 10 dollars in Chicago

Do not expect miracles; But, to my taste, some offer better value in that price range than their Chilean, Californian, or Australian competitors.

I’m glad you asked me that question Stéphane since in recent months I have been tasting a few of them and I intended to write about my findings on this blog.
As you know, even though I have been advocating for years the good value offered by red wines from my native Languedoc, like Costières de Nimes, Corbières, Côteaux du Languedoc, or Minervois, since it is probably the area of France where wine growers and producers have accomplished the most obvious progress in vinification, I still have a deep loyalty to small red Bordeaux.
And since this terribly long and depressing winter we had this year in Chicago forced me too often to limit my outdoor activities, I used that occasion to often cook French ‘’comfort food’’ type of dishes on week-ends. So, with simple ‘’cuisine bourgeoise’’ dishes like Fricassée de Poulet (chicken) aux Champignons (mushrooms), Veau Marengo (veal stew), Sauté d’Agneau (lamb) aux Tomates et aux Olives, Boeuf (beef) aux carottes, Gibelotte de Lapin (rabbit), or Filet Mignon de Porc (pork tenderloin) au Thym et à la Moutarde, there was no doubt in my mind that small Bordeaux would be ideal pairs for this kind of food.

So from late December to late March I decided to test as many red Bordeaux as I could find for less than 10 dollars . But this time I did not visited my favorite smaller wine shops (The Bottle Shop in Wilmette, The wine Seller in Geneva, Randolph Wine Cellars, South Loop Wine Cellar, Howard Wine Cellar, Wine Discount Center, and Fine Wine Brokers, in Chicago) because I suspected that my chances to find Bordeaux in that price range would be more limited there.
Instead I decided to limit my search to the two largest retailers of wine in the Chicago area, Binny’s and Sam’s, since I knew that their choice of smaller Bordeaux is wider. So I went to 3 different Bynny’s wine stores on N. Clark St., W. Grand Avenue, and the most recent one on Jefferson St. in the South Loop, as well as to Sam’s main store on Marcey St, and their new one on Roosevelt Road, South of the Loop.
I have to say right away that I found much better deals at Binny’s than at Sam’s, where I could spot only 3 Bordeaux in that price range. So I ended up buying most bottles at Binny’s. I tested 20 Bordeaux, but only 8 of them were, to my taste, interesting enough to be listed here. (see list below).
And as usual, I checked a couple of cheap Bordeaux at Trader Joe’s and I selected one of them in this list.

I was a bit apprehensive to start with, since a few months before I started this particular search I had bought a few remaining 2003 small Bordeaux and I found their merits sometimes inconsistent, even though I have to admit that some were very good. I was hoping to find some good 2004, a year that has been a bit underrated and that produced some very decent Bordeaux sold at very reasonable prices. In fact I think that 2004 might prove to be a very interesting vintage.
But for some reasons 80 % of the wines I found on the shelves of these 2 retailers were already 2005’s.
Now, everybody is claiming the charms of this vintage and some say it might prove as good if not even better than the 1982, 1990, or 2000, in red Bordeaux. Some writers even used, once again, the famous ‘’vintage of the century’’ superlative, which in my opinion is a bit far fetched now. The weather was so warm and dry during the growing season that the grapes, a bit smaller than usual, were very mature at harvest time, but with a high ratio of skin to juice, resulting in wines with a high level of concentration. It also meant a higher level of tannins, especially in the Cabernet-Sauvignons.
Fortunately nights were cooler for a few weeks before harvest time, allowing to keep enough acidity in those grapes for good balance.
So I think that for the great wines from the Médoc or the Graves, it will be a good idea to wait a few years before we can have a precise idea of the level of greatness of the 2005 vintage.

I would like to point out however that nowadays, Bordeaux growers who have been suffering from the competition of ‘’New World’’ wine makers, mainly from Australia, Chile, and the United States, are sometimes trying to imitate them. These “New world” wine makers were successful in their effort to please the taste of the new generation of younger wine drinkers, especially in Europe and in the U.S., who enjoy softer, fruit-forward but too often jammy for my taste, easy to drink mellow red wines. So some Bordeaux wine growers have started to vinify their wines to satisfy this new demand. They now offer wines that do not need long cellaring, can be drunk young, have softer tannins, and unfortunately have much less originality and ‘’terroir’’ personality that their predecessors.
To me it is a bit of a shame that not only a few Bordeaux start to taste like their Australian or American Merlots or Cabs counterparts, with no real balance (too much fruit and not enough acidity), but also that so many French liquor and wine groups, have invested massively in these new world countries to produce there what is becoming a large chunk of their main competition in their own turf.

However, a few small independent ‘’propriétaires-viticulteurs’’ (small vineyards owners) have continued to make more traditional Bordeaux, with a good fruit-to acidity ratio, some nice tannic properties, and a minimum of body and structure. They do not try to systematically produce soft, immediately pleasing wines, that do not require any effort to appreciate. They still believe in the merits of their own soil and weather, a minimum of aging, often in small oak barrels, and in their own inherent ability to create a balanced blend of Merlot, Cabernet-Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, perhaps a bit of Petit-Verdot or Malbec (a grape that seems to come back in fashion these days, after its success in Argentina).
That is the kind of ‘’petits Bordeaux’’ that I was looking for. They are usually simply labeled as ‘’Bordeaux’’. If you are very lucky, you can sometimes find a Bordeaux Supérieur, and even less often a Côtes de Bourg or Côtes de Blaye, ‘’on sale’’, in that price category.
But I have to admit that you cannot expect them to compare to a Médoc, a Saint-Emilion or a Graves. The finish of many of them is a bit short. You will not jump out of your chair in ecstasy after the first gulp...and chances are that most of these wines will benefit from a few minutes of oxygen.

In any case: Long life to these brave small producers... And let’s enjoy these wines that are neither for the elitists, snobs, sophisticated “foodies”, or fashionistas, but simply for people who enjoy well-made wines with character and personality. And believe me, dollar for dollar they provide more clean satisfaction and pleasure than some of their presently popular competitors.

Here are a few small Bordeaux that I found in Chicago which in my opinion are decently made. Most of them can be drunk now. The numbering corresponds to my own preferences in decreasing order after only one tasting.

1. CHATEAU COMBRAY
Bordeaux 2005
Produced by Ginestet, Bordeaux, a large old distribution house that owns vineyards and has its own winemakers to blend wines.
Imported by Glazers, Dallas
Distributed locally by Chicago Wine Merchants
7.99 dollars at Binny’s

Gold Medal at the Concours General Agricole, Paris 2006
Merlot 70%
Cabernet Sauvignon 20%
Cabernet Franc 20%

Seductive dark ruby color
Pleasant nose, slightly smoky
Good balance fruit-acidity
Relatively soft tannins
Some body . Rather dry structure.
Notes of ripe black cherry and black currant
Decent but finish is a bit short
Altogether a nice little wine that will please the more “traditional” palates, as well as the more “contemporary” American wine drinker.

2. CHATEAU LESTRILLE
Bordeaux Supérieur 2003
Estelle Roumage, viticultrice (wine grower)
Imported by Fine Vines, Melrose Park, IL
8.99 dollars at Binny’s (The 2005 to come out now will be a bit more expensive and will be a bit over this present price range)

100% Merlot

Great nose
Good body and structure
Very smooth tannins
Good fruit but well balanced.
Notes of cherry
A touch of leather
Very nice finish
A very pleasant wine that will satisfy young American drinkers.

3. CHATEAU ROLAND LA GARDE
Premières Côtes de Blaye 2005
Produced by Bruno Martin in a legendary castle where Roland, Charlemagne’s favorite Knight who was killed while passing the Pyrenees Mountains.
9.99 dollars at Binny’s

Hand harvested
67% Merlot
33% Cabernet Sauvignon
Aged in new French Oak barrels

Very rich dark color
Pleasant earthy nose with notes of dark cherry and a touch of coffee
Rather tannic but no harshness
Some elegance that should develop with age
Still a bit thin in terms of structure and complexity but full bodied
Nice finish
Obviously the result of good vinification, this wine is already quite drinkable but it should improve considerably in a couple of years .

4. CHATEAU MICHEL DE VERT
Lussac St. Emilion 2006
Produced by Vignoble Laubie in Lussac. But bottled by Ginestet.
Imported by Plum Ridge
7.99 dollars at Trader Joe’s

80% Merlot
20% Cabernet Sauvignon

Nice dark ruby color
Decent structure for such a young wine
Good Fruit-acidity balance
Still a bit thin
Not as good as the 2004 but still a very good value.
In spite of its youth is quite drinkable

5. CHATEAU NODEAU
Côtes de Bourg 2005
Vignobles De Pardieu
7.99 dollars at Binny’s

Essentially Merlot.
Very good feeling of ‘’terroir’’
Tannins are rather masculine but relatively soft
Some notes of berries
A ‘’real’’ Côtes de Bourg’’
Will certainly mellow a bit over the next 2 years, but quite drinkable now.

6. CHATEAU NICOT
Bordeaux 2005
Vignobles Dubourg
7.99 dollars at Binny's

Merlot and Cabernet-Sauvignon

A very pleasant, well balanced, round wine with soft tannins.

7. CHATEAU DES JUDES
Bordeaux, 2005
Vignobles Lavaud
Imported by Glazers in Dallas.
Distributed locally by Chicago Wine Merchants.
8.99 dollars at Binny’s

Gold Medal at the Concours General Agricole, Paris 2006
Merlot 70%
Cabernet Sauvignon 20%
Cabernet Franc 10%

Dark purple color
Pleasant nose
Good body
Relatively soft tannins
Notes of dark red cherry and some licorice
Pleasant to drink now but short on finish
Has potential. Will probably improve in a couple of years

8. CHATEAU BOESSIE
Bordeaux 2005
7.99 dollars at Binny’s

Merlot 60%
Cabernet-Sauvignon 40%

Dark color
Rather bland nose
Powerful but already softening tannins
Strong body
Notes of grilled bread and ripe black berries
Will probably develop nicely but needs at least 2 more years
Again, good potential but still lacks distinction and finesse at this time


Some other low-priced Bordeaux wines that I tasted, but that for one reason or another did not seduced me enough to prompt me to go back to the store to buy a second bottle. However they are quite drinkable.

Château la Raballe
Château Mylord
Châteu Val Darel
Château de Lisennes
Château Grand Montet
Mouton-Cadet
Château de la Taille
Château Prignac
Château les Remises

Bordeaux's with good value for the money

Hi Dad,

I've been digging around for low priced Bordeaux's here in silicon valley but come up mostly empty. Given there are many places online to order wine I'd love a few suggestions on a few low cost bottles of Bordeaux I can enjoy! I am still drinking various California meritage's and clarets' from time to time but they are no match in terms of value for the money with a lesser known Bordeaux. The California Bordeaux style blends are so pricy and still lack the complexity of many a low-cost Bordeaux you've poured for me over the years.

Any Bordeaux's you can reccomend that are in the $5-$20 range would be perfect.

Love

Stephane

Pommes Frites, commonly called “Frites”:
What a treat, when they are made the right way.

But lots of doubts still exist about the “French” origin of their American cousins, the so-called “French fries”.

Ah Stéphane... your question a few weeks ago about your difficulty to find good ‘’fries’’ in the Bay Area that would be as good as those ‘’ frites’’ that you eat in French restaurants brought back many fond images and memories into my poor half-frozen (from our Chicago very cold winter) brain.
As a matter of fact it is true that nowadays it is not that easy to find very good ‘’frites”, made the traditional way, in American restaurants. Most of them use frozen fries, which does not mean that they cannot generate decent fries. As a matter of fact, it is also the case in most French restaurants.
About 12 years ago, we were visiting a very amusing flea-market in Montpellier, France where we were on vacation. At one point your brother Théo complained that he was hungry and thirsty. So I went to the concession at the end of the market, a simple trailer, and ordered some ‘’frites’’ and a coke. And of course we could not help but stealing a few fries from him. They were so good that I immediately went back to the food concession to buy some more, and both your mother and me agreed that they were the best fries we had since we arrived in France. So I asked the manager of the concession if they were freshly cut fries. He said: "are you kidding... we do not have the time to cut fries ourselves. We buy them frozen". So I asked him who was his supplier. He took me to the garbage container behind the trailer and said ‘’ Here is the empty carton, read by yourself’’. I read and I could not believe what I saw:
"Made by Mc Cain, Illinois, USA..." Coming to France to eat American frozen fries; That was quite a shock. But perhaps those good fries were produced in France where Mc Cain has some of its largest European plants

Speaking of fries sold by street vendors: When I was about 12 year-old, my mother decided that it was time for me to learn how to defend myself since I was the subject of too frequent attacks by bullies at school who enjoyed kicking and punching my, at the time relatively frail, body for various reasons.
So she sent me to take judo lessons 2 times a week after classes from an older man, who had a ‘’black belt’’ ranking in that sport. He lived in an apartment about 20 minutes walking from our house in Reims. I detested those lessons, but... if I had a few coins in my pocket , I bought myself a nice treat on my way back home. After I left the man’s place I had to cross a bridge over some railroad tracks, Le Pont de Laon. I would run on the bridge knowing that at the end of it was TOTO FRITES’place. It was one of these small trailers, much smaller than their pizza counterparts in French southern villages, where a gruff man, Toto, who was always smoking a cigarette and whose nails were as black as a piece of coal, was cutting, washing, drying and frying potatoes that were very greasy, but incredibly tasty. In fact even Today they still rate in my memory among the best I ever ate in my life. This type of mini-trailer which was in fact stuck for good on jacks and no longer had wheels, was called a ‘’baraque à frites’’, and every town in Northern and North-East France had many of them. Toto’s baraque was poorly lit by a kerosene lamp, whose fumes added to the marvelous odor of the bubbling ‘’friture’’ that you could smell 300 yards away.
Toto served his beauties in a paper cone made from pages from the local newspaper, ‘’l’Union’’, and after I added more salt from the big tin shaker available on the counter, I would eat them as fast as I could before the grease would run through the newsprint. Boy, were they good. Sort of thicker-cut that the average ‘’frites’’ that we ate when we went to the carnival on the nearby ‘’Place du Boulingrin’’, but much tastier.
My mother who once discovered my secret when I came to the dinner table with my mouth still shiny from the grease, yelled at me for eating such bad food, and explained to me that they were probably fried in a mixture of cheap animal fats, like ‘’saindoux’’ (lard), beef fat or suet, and perhaps horse fat. In any case it was not good for me, even though in 1952 the word Cholesterol was nowhere to be found in the Larousse dictionary. My father, who was born in Northern France near the Belgian border from a Belgian father, and who lived part of his adolescence in Antwerp, loved ‘’pommes frites’’ like all Belgians do. He would come to my defense and argued with l my mother that if she would prepare ‘’frites’’ more often I would not have to buy cheap and poor quality ones from dirty street vendors. He also told us that whenever he was in that neighborhood near the Pont de Laon he would himself have a ‘’cornet de frites ’’ chez Toto.
Just thinking about it make me drool and I can hear in my head the marvelous song ‘’ Un cornet de frites’’ that Yves Montand sang so nicely in the early fifties.
Anyways. My mother made some beautiful pan-sautéed potatoes, but the rare times when she accepted to make ‘’frites’’, they were of a very different style: light, crunchy, good but not greasy enough for me . My nutrition-conscious mother would fry them in a traditional black metal fryer in either ‘’Vegetaline’’, the equivalent of Crisco, or ‘’huile d’arachide’’ (peanut oil), like they have been done in most French restaurants and families since 1947. Peanut oil in those days was produced in some French African colonies, and was not as expensive as it is now, especially in the U.S.
Nevertheless, after the actual frying was done, she would let the fat cool down and somewhat solidify at the top if it was Vegetaline, which allowed the ‘’graillons’’, these tiny particles of burnt fat and potatoes, to get up to the surface and to be removed easily. Then she would cover the fryer and it would stay that way in the pantry until the next ‘’friture’’.

Personally I use peanut oil when making ‘’pommes de terre sautées’’ at home. But your mother's delicious "frites" are in fact "fausses frites" since, once she has cut hem with a knife, she put them in a bowl containing and mix them well in a mix of 3 Tb of Greek olive oil and garlic salt. Once they are well impregnated but not soaking wet, she lay them on a baking sheet and bake them in the oven, at 425 degrees , for about 20-25 minutes, turning them over once.

The other great frites of my youth were found at ‘’ Chez Francis’’, a French brasserie that was on the opposite sidewalk of my grand-parents building on the Boulevard James Fazy in Geneva, Switzerland. They were served ‘’à volonté’’ (as much as you could eat), as a vegetable accompaniment to their marvelous ‘’entrecôtes’’ (rib-eye steaks). Between 1950 and 1970, I probably ate thousands of these golden-hued thin ‘’pommes-frites’’ that were never greasy, slightly crispy outside and soft inside as they should be, and always kept hot on their tin plate that was put on a small ‘’meta’’ burning dish-warmer in the middle of the table.

Some years later in Paris, in the mid-sixties, I found the same kind of perfect ‘’frites’’ at L’Entrecôte, Rue de Verneuil in the 7th arrondissement. It was the same formula as Chez Francis in Geneva, with the same ‘’frites à volonté’’ placed on their dish-warmer. I do not think that the original Parisian ‘’Entrecôte’’ still exist in 2007, or it has probably changed ownership many times. But I thought it was reborn in America when some summers ago, your mother and I had a delightful steak with ‘’frites à volonté’’ in San Francisco. The restaurant was called ‘’Café de Paris L’Entrecôte’’, on Union St., and the fries were almost as good as at the original "Entrecote" restaurant in Paris. But I learned that in fact their model was in Geneva, Switzerland, and that they had an exclusive right to use the original recipe for the famous butter sauce of the entrecôte that was created in 1941 at the Cafe de Paris... in Geneva precisely.

During my last year of college, in Paris, the famished and poor student that I was at the time in 1963 used to go to '' Les Palmiers", Rue des Halles at the heart of what was then ‘’Les Halles’’, the huge and lively vegetable, fruit, and meat central market of Paris, just north of la Place du Chatelet. There I would eat enormous "saucisse de Toulouse" (pork sausage) sandwiches with ‘’pommes-frites’’. The frites would be placed above the sausage inside the open piece of fresh baguette. It was greasy but delicious and comforting after an evening spent working on a philosophy essay due the next morning at La Sorbonne. In Northern France, this very popular type of sandwich is called "Un Américain Saucisse''.

In recent years, when I was craving for traditional “pommes frites” I would go to La Biche Au Bois, Avenue Ledru-Rollin, near the Gare de Lyon in the 12th arrondissement. And if I did not have the time to go that far from my regular Paris home-base in the 15th arrondissement, I would be happy with a side order of frites with my ‘’Salade Auvergnate ‘’ (that includes country ham, and Cantal cheese) at my local regular neighborhood café-restaurant ‘’ A la Tour Eiffel’’, Rue du Commerce in the 15th. (see ‘’My French Gourmet Vacation’’ on this blog for details). And I have a pleasant memory of the frites at ‘’ Le Chien qui fume’’ in the old Les Halles district.
I haven't gone there in years , but I understand that the ‘’pommes frites’’ at the good old Bouillon Chartier, an old- style restaurant for employees of the nearby businesses Rue du Faubourg Montmartre in the 9th are still good.
Most old-fashioned "brasseries" and large " traditional bistrots" like Chez Georges and Gallopin in the 2nd arrondissement, Terminus Nord and Brasserie Flo, in the 10th , La Coupole in the 14th, Thoumieux in the 7th, Balzar and La Closerie des Lilas in the 5th, La Rotisserie d'en Face in the 6th, Le Ballon des Ternes and another Chez Georges in the 17th, Le Boeuf Couronné in the 19th, used to have very decent fries. But I cannot garantee that it is still the case in 2008.

In Chicago, when I arrived in January of 1970, my favorite fries were served with a very good hamburger at the long defunct Brief Encounter, a small but very clean and pleasant store-front diner in the 360 North Michigan building. They were thin-cut but always well fried and not soggy. But the best ‘’pommes frites’’ I ever tasted were at Le Bastille restaurant that unfortunately closed its doors forever in the mid-eighties.
You will find here below a list of some restaurants that still offer good ‘’pommes frites’’, made the right way that I will explain later.

Grandson Sebastien enjoying his fries at the brasserie "A la Tour Eiffel" in Paris during our summer vacation last July

So, what exactly are real ‘’ Pommes de Terre Frites’’ and where do they come from?

Real ‘’pommes frites’’ should be called "pommes de terre frites" (fried potatoes) are pieces of potatoes cut in elongated sticks about 1 cm thick from a relatively large tuber with a high level of solid dry matter like a Bintje in Europe, or a Russet from Idaho or Wisconsin in the U.S. Once they are cut, with a butcher knife or a special fries cutter, in a very consistent length and thickness, the fries are washed in cold water for a few minutes to remove as much starch as possible from their surface. Then they are dried thoroughly in a cloth or paper towels. They are pre-cooked (a little more than blanched) in a bath of frying oil, like peanut oil, at a temperature of around 328 degrees F or 165 degrees C for 6 or 7 minutes. Then they are removed to a strainer. The final frying is done for about 5 minutes once the oil temperature reaches 356 degrees F or 180 degrees C. When they are nicely colored, they should be removed from the fryer and immediately drained and blotted on several layers of paper towels. Then they are salted and served very hot. If they are eaten while they are still hot, they will remain crusty outside and soft inside and will be light, not greasy, and easier to digest, since the moisture will not have the time to come out from inside the potatoes through steam and make them slightly soggy and greasier.
Most food historians agree on the fact that the idea of frying the potatoes in two successive baths of fat, comes originally from Belgium. And most connoisseurs still think that the best Belgian fries are fried in animal fat.

But there is still a big controversy between the French and the Belgians about the real origin of the ‘’pommes frites’’.

According to the ‘’Belges’’, in the early part of the 18th century relatively poor people living on the banks of the Meuse River, in cities like Namur, Huy or Dinant, used to fish small fishes in the Meuse River and deep-fry them to complement their meager food supplies. But when the river got frozen, they had the idea of cutting pieces of potatoes imitating the shape of fishes and to fry them. So were born the first pommes frites. And since small fishes were called ‘’fretin’’ in this French speaking part of the Belgian Netherlands, some people even think that the word ‘’frites’’ may in fact be an adulterated version of ‘’fretin’’. It seems a little far-fetched to me.
What we know for a fact is that many French ‘’proscrits’’, citizens who had been banned in France after 1850 and the political coup d’état by Louis Napoleon, who had fled and started a new life in Brussels, as well as political refugees, including several chefs, in 1870, popularized the fries in Belgium. The many ‘’friteries’’, eateries devoted to fried potatoes, that you find in Belgium would be in fact a French import.

The French date the origin of the pommes-frites back to the time of the French Revolution of 1789, just 3 years after Parmentier started to promote the virtues of the potato that most French people were not really interested in eating at that time, when their Spanish neighbors had been consuming them since the end of the 16th Century, and the Belgians since the end of the 17th century. But several years of bad wheat harvests, and periods of real famine, between 1785 and 1788, contributed to put the ‘’pomme de terre’’ on most French dinner tables. In fact the largest part of the potatoes grown in Europe until the 18th century were given as food to farm animals.
In 1789, a man whose name I could not find started to sell fried potatoes under the famous Pont Neuf over the Seine river, located at the west-end of the Ile de la Cité. It became an instant success and those fries became known as ‘’Pommes Pont-Neuf’’. Nowadays, many traditional French restaurants and brasseries still call their ‘’pommes frites’’ ‘‘pommes Pont-Neuf’’.

Several variations of ‘’pommes frites” are found in restaurants, both in France and in the U.S.:

‘’Pommes pailles” are “shoestring potatoes”. They are cut with a mandoline and fried in a single bath.
“Pommes allumettes” are thin-cut fries known as “Matchstick potatoes”. They are cut with a knife and fried in two baths.
“ Pommes gaufrettes” are shaped like thin, round, mini waffles.. They are cut with a mandoline and fried in one single bath

• Most French people, especially from the older generations, and that includes me, like to eat their ''frites'' au naturel, meaning as is. Some younger French people love to use ketchup or even mayonaise, like they do in Belgium. In Northern France, and even in some small ''friteries'' in Paris, lots of fries lovers enjoy a splash of vinegar on them.

Now, let's clarify a few points about the origins of the so-called French Fries in the U.S.

When some American political opinion-makers decided to punish the French for condemning the U.S intervention in Iraq in 2003 by renaming French Fries Freedom Fries, I had a good laugh.
Obviously, most of these pundits ignored the fact that the term French does not refer to our country, but to a special way to cut vegetables in sticks, or in a julienne fashion, called ‘’frenching’’. This same culinary term is also used in the U.K to define the trimming the fat from lamb chops when used to form a rack of lamb.
But this origin is disputed by some food historians who claim that in fact the use of ‘’French’’ actually relates to the French origin of these fries.
Some note that Thomas Jefferson discovered them when he was the U.S ambassador in Paris, and that he loved so much these ‘’ Pommes de terre frites à cru en petites tranches’’ , according to his own manuscripts, that he brought the recipe back to Washington.
My favorite explanation is that during World War One, several battalions of American, British, and Canadian soldiers fought in the Belgian region of Yser, in French-speaking western Flanders. This is where they discovered fried potatoes. And since the locals spoke French in that specific area, when the soldiers brought the recipe back home they naturally called them French Fries because they were told in French how to prepare them.


A few restaurants in Chicago where you can eat good “pommes frites” cut by hand and fried in two baths:

Chez Joel: 1119 W. Taylor St. Chicago, IL Tel: 312-226-6479

La Sardine: 111 N. Carpenter St. Chicago, IL Tel : 312-421-2800

Le Petit Paris : 260 E. Chestnut St. Chicago, IL Tel : 312-787-8260

Marché : 833 W. Randolph St. Chicago, IL Tel : 312-226-8399

D& J Bistro: 466 S. Rand Rd. Lake Zurich, IL Tel: 847-438-8001

Hot Doug’s: 3324 N. California, Chicago, IL Tel: 773-279-9550

I was told that ''Hopleaf'', a Belgian gastropub at 5140 N. Clark Street, Tel: 773-334-9851, that sells more than 100 different Belgian beers, makes very good traditional frites in the "Belgian style". But I have never been there myself.

Other interesting ‘’frites”

At the 4 star EVEREST, one Financial Place Chicago, Tel: 312-663-8920, famous Alsatian-born chef Jean Joho told me that when from time to time he has a "côte de boeuf'' on the menu he serves it with pommes-frites fried in clarified butter ... Must be something extra special.

The new Old Town Brasserie 1209 N. Wells St. Chicago Tel: 312-943-3000 is the only one that lists “ Pommes Pont Neuf” on its menu. Knowing the talent of his chef, Roland Liccioni, I am pretty sure that they are made the traditional way.

Kiki’s Bistro, 900 N Franklin St. Chicago, IL Tel: 312-335-5454 serves deliciously crunchy “pommes pailles” with its steak. They are very tiny but fresh cut and fried in two baths.

Le Café des Architectes, in the Sofitel Hotel, 20 E. Chestnut St Chicago, IL , Tel: 312-324-4000 makes good hand-cut “matchsticks” fried in one bath.

Good food ingredients in the U.S. ? Yes, they exist but you only will get what you pay for...

Story of a lost “ lapin chasseur”.

As you know, Stéphane, I too frequently complain, when I cook , that the results I obtain here are not as good as those that I get when I cook the same dish in France. The dish rarely reaches the same level of flavor and personality and too often turns bland. And I always add: ‘’It is because the ingredients are not as good as in France’’.
Last summer, every time I went to shop for food, I was amazed when I bought various ingredients, like meat, chicken, eggs, cheese, and especially vegetables and herbs, how expensive they were compared to what I pay in Chicago. But when I cooked with them, it really smelled good in the kitchen, and when we ate them it really tasted much better. So, I would say to your mother: ‘’ Au moins, on en a pour son argent’’ (At least, what I got is worth what I paid for ’’).

Anyway, as I told you a few weeks ago, since we have a really rough and depressing winter, I feel like preparing old French bistrot-type winter dishes, that are most of the time cooked in a sauce. As we say in France, ‘’ Des plats roboratifs qui tiennent au corps’’ (invigorating and filling dishes). And now that I have a ‘’cocotte-minute’’ (pressure cooker), thanks to you... Er... Santa Claus, it is less a time-consuming event to prepare them, even during the week.

So, this week-end I had decided to do a ‘’Lapin Chasseur’’ (Rabbit stewed in ‘’hunter’’ style, meaning with mushrooms and wine). To me rabbit is the ultimate ‘’comfort food’’ and I have been an avid rabbit eater since childhood. To the point that for my Fiftieth birthday, I had asked my friend Yves Roubaud, who was the executive- chef at Shaws at that time, to prepare a provençal lunch for my friends and I, that would include a ‘’lapin à la provençale’’. That was 18 years ago, but I still have the exciting aroma of his rabbit on my taste buds. I have no idea where he had found that rabbit, but it was quite a tasty and meaty animal.

So, since a good fresh rabbit is very difficult to find in Chicago nowadays, and when you find it, like at Fox & Obel, it is so expensive that you give up, I went to this huge Korean super-market in Niles, where you not only find an amazing collection of fresh fish, shellfish, and mollusks, but also tons of frozen rabbit, for a ridiculously low price. Since it was only for your mother and me, I bought a small rabbit, barely 2 Lbs, for only 4.75 dollars, instead of the 18 dollars a fresh one would have cost me at Fox and Obel. .
Problem is, it took a whole day to thaw, and like almost any rabbit that you buy in a U.S. supermarket, it had no head, no liver, no heart, and worse: no kidneys. Besides it was way too lean. The kidneys are very important because of the very white pieces of fat attached to them that gives a special taste to the sautéing.
I tried to ask a butcher where their rabbits were coming from, domestic or from some Asian country, but got only a very evasive answer from the giggling man who tried to tell me that they were American.
Once my rabbit was defrosted, I had serious doubts that it was an American rabbit, since this poor anemic animal looked like it had been deprived of nourishing herb and carrots, and was probably the product of an industrial production chain.
Some years back, I used to buy fresh American rabbits raised in Arkansas or Mississippi, that I found at Treasure Islands, and they were quite meaty and tasty, not as much as a ‘’Lapin du Gâtinais’’, but they were quite edible.

Anyway, since the color of the meat was totally adequate, and it was smelling OK, I hoped for the best and decide to proceed with my initial cooking plan, that involved a simplified and quick formula.
I cut the rabbit in 7 pieces, browned them briefly in a pan in a mix of butter and olive oil, while I was sautéing 2 chopped onions, 3 shallots and the “lardons” (small pieces of sliced thick-cut bacon) in the cocotte-minute. Then I added the pieces of rabbit, 2 pinches of dried thyme, a bay leaf, 2 cloves of garlic (diced ), 1 sliced carrot, and 1 small can of already cooked white mushrooms (what we call in France ‘’champignons de Paris’’), + one spoonful of tomatoe concentrate diluted in warm water. Then I covered everything with one and a half cup of dry white wine (Sauvignon Blanc), and mixed in one Tb spoon of cornstarch diluted in warm water. After stirring everything , I covered the pressure cooker with the lid , turned the flame a little higher, and once the steam came out with a hissing sound from the safety valve, I cooked the dish for 20 minutes at relatively low heat.
But when I opened the pot, I was quite surprised by the very limited amount of aroma that came out of it.
I served the sauce, that looked like it should be, over farfalle pasta.
The meat was very tender but totally bland and could not hold the comparison with my fresh rabbits of a few years back.
What a disappointment. I think that the quality of the rabbit was at fault. And that I should have used salt pork instead of bacon. And that the dish would have been tastier if I had used fresh sliced mushrooms instead of the cheap generic can from Jewell that I bought in a hurry. And that a little flour instead of the diluted corn starch I used to go faster would have made a more unctuous sauce.

After dinner I said to your mother: ‘’ After all, you get what you pay for’’. But we could not find an exact equivalent of this saying in French. So, the always biased me told her : ‘’ It is because in France the ingredients are much better’’. So, over there we say the reverse: ‘’ At least, what I got is worth what I paid for ...’’

Next time I will try to put to practice what I learned again for the 100th time last night
Don’t be cheap with the ingredients. And if you cannot afford the right ones, cook another dish.

My favorite movies of 2007 on DVD

MY FAVORITES MOVIES OF 2007 (part 2)

Films I rented or saw on my DVD player:


1. ESPIRITU DE LA COLMENA (THE SPIRIT OF THE BEHIVE)
Victor Erice (Spain, 1973)

I always wanted to see this film that has been for a long time the object of a real cult among the European film critics that I respect. Unfortunately, it never benefited of a large commercial release in the U.S., although a new copy was re-released in a very few venues in 2007, including in Chicago. It is a very important film in the history of modern Spanish cinema, since it was one of the few in that delicate transition period that dared to brave the censorship of the Franco regime towards the end of his dictatorship in dealing with the painful subject of repression and fear during the terrible Spanish civil war. The story takes place in 1940 precisely at the end of the Civil War in a small Castilian village where to young sisters, Ana, the youngest played by the marvelous Ana Torrent, who was 7 year-old at the time of filming and became famous 3 years later in Carlos Saura’s “Cria Cuervos”, and 10 year-old Isabel, live in a big country house with their parents. We soon find out that the father, who’s life revolves entirely around his caring of and writing about bees, and the mother who writes letters to an unknown far-away lover and dreams of a more fulfilling life, do not have a happy life together and are not very caring about their daughters who spend a lot of time by themselves. The parents relationship obviously has been seriously impacted by the war. The visit to the village of a traveling picture show featuring the famous “Frankenstein” shot by James Whale in 1931 with Boris Karloff, is going to excite Ana’s imagination and phantasms to the highest point, since her sister makes her believe that a monster like Frankenstein’s lives nearby but is in fact a spirit, and can be met by being called by anybody who cries his or her name. Ana will look for him and find instead a wounded young man, a fugitive Republican soldier probably shot by the Guardia Civil, in an abandoned barn . She will believe that he is the reincarnation of the monster and will feed him and help him, until her parents bring her back home while she is traumatized by the experience. This beautiful but very melancholic film, shot by a great director of photography, Luis Cuadrado, who was progressively turning blind during the filming of this movie, is very lyrical and poetic, and sometimes flirts with an eerie expressionism. You will be haunted for a long time by the very moving musical score. It is too bad that Victor Erice shot only 3 feature films in 34 years. This one, his first, was followed by El Sur (The South) in 1983, and “Quince Tree of the Sun”, a beautiful essay on art in 1992. But “Spirit” is probably one of the most authentic masterpieces of the European cinema in the Seventies.


2. TOKYO EYES
Jean-Pierre Limosin, (Japan-France, 1998)

I had read a lot about this director who made only 5 feature films, but is well-known for a few very good made-for-TV documentaries including portraits of famous Iranian director Kiarostami, and of legendary Japanese actor-director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, who has a very funny cameo appearance as a not too bright Yakusa gangster in Tokyo Eyes. I had rented his interesting NOVO (2002), that tells in a very glossy and stylish way the sex and love adventures of an amnesic young man. But I did not expect such a thrilling and creative movie. TOKYO EYES , written by Limosin, was supposed to be shot in France with French actors. But Limosin, who is fascinated by Japan but does not speak the language, decided suddenly to instead shoot it entirely in Japan, with Japanese actors, and in Japanese. He took with him his very gifted director of photography Jean-Marie Fabre who created a very exciting and fast moving cinematography that reflects perfectly the local urban environment, and recalls the style of imagery and rhythm the great Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle had created in “Chungking Express” in 1994. The story line is very entertaining: A young computer and video games programmer, K, played by the impressive Shinji Takeda, is a vigilante during his free time and shoots people, like bullies and night club bouncers, whose behavior he disapproves. But before shooting them he modifies his gun and wears very thick glasses that confuses his vision, so that he voluntarily misses his targeted victims. The sister of the policeman who is tracking this “faux-serial killer” nicknamed “four eyes”, a very sexy and alert young hairdresser played by Hinano Yoshikawa, a Japanese model and singer, is fascinated by this case that her brother does not seem to eager to solve. She manages to identify and to meet K, becomes his friend and gets romantically involved with him. He will eventually be fatally shot by his own gun in the hand of the small time gangster played by Kitano who fires it by accident. But K. seems to survives and will be reunited with Hinano in a very mysterious ending.
The whole film is reminiscent of French New Wave films, especially Godard’s. At one point the girl is dressed like Anna Karina in a “Woman is a Woman”. This film is a pure cinephile’s delight.

3. LE PETIT LIEUTENANT
Xavier Beauvois, (France, 2005)

Xavier Beauvois, whose 5 feature films have not been widely released in the U.S , is a 40 year-old man who left his native working class environment in Northern France to come to Paris to learn cinema, with the help of the great Jean Douchet, a famous movie critic and professor. After being the assistant director of André Téchiné, he reached relatively rapidly a good level of recognition in 1995 with his second feature film ‘‘ N’oublies pas que tu vas mourir’’, that was rewarded the coveted Prix Jean Vigo and the Jury Prize at the Cannes film fest, that touched both critics and general audiences with his lyrical but very restrained story of the daily life and relationships of an HIV-positive student in Paris. With this film, that was nominated for 6 Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscars), Beauvois reaches an almost perfect level of balance between a very precise narrative process, and a very efficient directing style, sometimes reminiscent of Techiné and Tavernier, but in a much more contemporary and austere way. His story describes the evolution of a charming but tough and ambitious young man, Antoine, played very convincingly by the very good Jalil Lespert whom we had discovered in ‘’Human Resources’’ who, as soon as he graduates from the police academy and after some work in a small provincial town’s police station, decides to go to Paris and volunteer to work as a detective (he has rank of lieutenant) in the crime department of a commissariat (district police headquarter). He leaves behind his young wife and his parents and friends. The first part of he film focuses on his discovery of the tough but sometimes boring routines of his new job, and his relations with other cops, among them Solo, played very efficiently by Roschdy Zem (‘’Indigenes’’). The description of his work and of his new life is described in a almost documentary style. It is probably one of the best depiction of what is really the daily life of a police station ever filmed. The second part is more focused on a specific investigation about the death of a poor immigrant Polish homeless man, found in the Seine river. And essentially about the relationship that Antoine develops with his boss, a veteran female police inspector who is recovering from alcoholism and the death of her son, who was the same age as Antoine’s. This role is perfectly played by Natalie Baye who was justly awarded the Cesar of the best actress. The cinematography by the super director of photography Caroline Champetier, one of the best in France, is very precise and avoids all easy clichés often found in the ‘’noir’’ or ‘’policier’’ genres.



4. FREE ZONE
Amos Gitai, (Israel, 2005)

I consider this Israeli director as one of the best story-teller in the present international cinema landscape. I still have vivid memories of the intensity of emotions I felt while watching some of his best films such as “Kippur”, “Kadosh”, “Kedma” or “Yom Yom”. Once again we are sharing the complex relations between individuals within the framework of the turmoils linked or derived from the Israeli-Palestinian, or Israeli-Arab conflicts. This time it is almost a “road movie” involving a very strong Israeli woman, Hanna, who drives a taxi, and her American passenger, another strong but emotionally disturbed woman called Rebecca, who insists to accompany Hanna to the “Free Zone” , a strange no-man’s land between the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, where all kinds of not necessarily legal business deals are negotiated. Hanna needs to drive there to collect an unpaid debt to her wounded husband from a former partner who sells military vehicles in that strange Free-Trade Zone. Rebecca needs some perspective to distance herself from her separation with an Israeli boyfriend who might have shown some nasty behavior against Palestinian refugees. They will find, when they finally reach their destination that both the man they are looking for and the money are gone. Hanna forces a Palestinian woman who works for him to drive with them and help in finding him. The rapidly changing nature of the relationship and of their initial personal objectives between these 3, culturally different, women is fascinating to follow.
The Palestinian actress Hanna Laslo won the Best Actress at Cannes for her role as Hanna, but both Natalie Portman, and Hiam Abbass (“Paradise Now”) are equally convincing. At the beginning of the film that takes place near the famous Wall in Jerusalem, there is an extraordinary long take, in one shot, of Natalie Portman crying alone in the car, that is a piece of cinematic anthology. Besides, the shooting in this Arab zone by an Israeli film director constitutes in itself a premiere.


5. QUAND LA MER MONTE (WHEN THE SEA RAISES)
Yolande Moreau and Gilles Porte (Belgium, France, 2004)

Sort of a masterpiece in a minor genre, this gem of a very touching, and beautifully written and directed film, was perhaps my best surprise of the year when I rented it from Netflix. I knew Yolande Moreau, a Belgian comedian with both an unusual physical appearance and a unique way to phrase her sentences, after having seen her many times on French Television in the very popular farcical short sitcoms series “ Les Deschiens". In the early eighties she also wrote, directed , and played in a one-woman travelling show, “Sale Affaire, du sexe et du crime” (Dirty business, sex and crime). She personified a very plain, low-middle class woman who has just killed her lover and shares her feelings about it with the audience. In this film, her first that she co-directs with Gilles Porte, a director of several short films, she recreates her life when she traveled from cities to villages in Northern France and Southern Belgium, on both sides of the border. She plays her original role in front of real audiences that are filmed live by Porte. She talks at night from her modest hotel or motel rooms on the phone with her husband about redecoration he tries to do in their house, and with her child. At the same time she develops an intriguing and almost surreal relationship with a member of her audience, Dries (played by Wim Willaert a very good Flemish actor with a strange accent), who is a “giant carrier”, drinks a lot, and starts to follow her from town to town. They will have a brief but complicated romantic liaison. The job of “giant carrier” (porteur de géant) is unique to this part of Europe where giant folkloric and comic figures made of papier-maché and light wood are walked around during local festivals and celebrations of all kinds. Dries’s giant, name Totor, plays an important part in the story. The cinematography by Gilles Porte himself captures in a very authentic way , and visually stunning style, the particularly lively atmosphere (and cheerful behavior of its people) of this region around Armentières, Béthune, and Lille. A very heart-warming experience.


6. LES TEMOINS (THE WITNESSES)
André Téchiné, (France, 2006)

This film that just got its first theatrical release in New-York City in February 2008, should be available from Netflix, and released in some theaters, pretty soon. I obtained a DVD from Europe through a friend.
The 21st film of Techiné’s very interesting and consistent career, is perhaps, along with ‘’Wild Reeds’’ (Les Roseaux Sauvages, 1994), his most personal work . According to some comments he made to the press when the film was presented to the Berlin Film Festival in January 2007, he had to do this film as a reflexion on that period in the mid eighties when AIDS became a pandemic worldwide, including France, when several of his personal friends were affected by the virus and died, but he was himself spared from that curse. What he witnessed at that time left a deep mark in his perception of why some people survive and some die. In some ways you already find this subject treated at a different level in both “Wild Reeds” and the very moving “Les Egarés’’ (‘’Strayed’’, 2004). Here we have a story in 3 phases: 1. In Paris in 1984 Sarah (beautiful Emmanuelle Béart) writes children books but has a problem to adjust to her new condition of mother. Her husband, Mehdi (Sami Bouajila) a tough vice-squad policeman of Maghrebian origin has a problem understanding her lack of focus and patience with the newborn child. At the same time a very naive and charming provincial young man Manu (Johan Libéreau), arrives in Paris and decides, against her will, to live in his sister’s room, ana aspiring opera singer (a very convincing Julie Depardieu) in a cheap hotel full of prostitutes while he looks for a job. In fact he spends more time looking for brief sexual encounters in gay meeting places. That is how he meets a doctor, Adrien (Michel Blanc) a very close friend of Sarah, who falls in love with him and takes him home.
2. Manu is introduced by Adrien to Mehdi and Sarah. During a week-end in the Mediterranean villa of Sarah’s parents Mehdi saves Manu from drowning, and later engages in a very passionate relationship with him. But Manu gets sick (HIV Aids) without knowing exactly what happens to him and while continuing his sexual affair with Mehdi. Adrien, the Doctor, tries to help Manu who does not seem to care. Adrien becomes the leader of a medical research team that works on the new pandemic and tries to fight it and inform the public. He gets through rough times with Mehdi.
3. Manu dies. Mehdi finds out that he is not infected. He tells the truth to Sarah about his relationship with Manu and she decides to write a novel about it after reading his journal relating the progress of his disease. Life goes on.
In spite of such a painful subject, Techiné tells his story with restraint and precision, without a trace of moral or social judgment. The film is never a tear-jerker and avoids ambiguous situations or elliptical editing. It is not a masterpiece, but it is a model of story-telling and professional directing.



7. TOSCA
Benoit Jacquot, (Italy, France, Germany, 2001)

I am usually totally allergic to filmed opera, especially the Franco Zeffirelli type. But I do not mind an intelligent cinematic adaptation of a good opera, as it was the case with Joseph Losey's "Don Giovanni", or Bergman's "Magic Flute". In the case of Tosca, Benoit Jacquot who is a very competent, sensible, and eclectic director with a 30 year-long career (La Désenchantée, La Fille Seule, l’Ecole de la Chair, A Tout de Suite, Sade, Intouchable) who openly confessed that he strongly disliked Italian Opera, has taken a very different approach: making a good film for cinephiles who do not have to be opera-lovers to appreciate this fully cinematographic reflexion on melodrama, a bit like Resnais did it in Private Fear in Public Places. But it never reaches the point of becoming too didactic or a caricature of the ultimate melodramatic opera, precisely because the cinematic qualities of the melodrama are given a more important priority than its purely operatic ones. His idea was to shoot in beautiful natural settings, located mainly in Germany, very good professional opera singers, ‘’acting’’ the opera and at the same time showing us black and white video clips of the same artists in ‘’civilian’’ clothes, recording the music in a studio, under the direction of conductor Antonio Papanno. Sometimes when the singers-actors are shot in close-ups, some too obvious post-dubbing and lip-synch problems become a bit annoying. But the quality of the cinematography by Romain Winding, the elegance of the direction and the intense acting performances of Angela Gheorghiu (as Tosca), of Roberto Alagna (as the painter Cavaradossi) in less convincing way, and above all of Ruggero Raimondi, in a scary very impressive almost Shakespearian interpretation of Scarpia, the nasty Rome’s Chief of Police who wants to exchange the life of the painter for an affair with Tosca, make us actually ‘’feel’’ their respective passions and torments. Raimondi was also a great actor in Losey’s Don Giovanni, and in the "Carmen" made by Francesco Rossi, a good Italian director.


8. BLISSFULLY YOURS
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand, 2005)

I was totally mesmerized by the serene but almost mystical and hallucinated beauty of "Tropical Malady", the third film by this young Thai director, who studied cinema at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. A large part of it was taking place in a tropical forest in Thailand, and the sound track was spectacular. It was No. 7 in my list of favorite films seen in 2005 published on this blog. This time we are again watching a very sinuous, very slow moving like in a dream, progression of three people, one man and two women, in a heavenly Thai forest. A couple, a man suffering from a terrible rash all over his body who might be an illegal Burmese worker and a woman who tries to both obtain a work permit for him and to relieve his anxiety and pain, go for a picnic by a river and some sexual interlude, in the forest. They will be joined by a second woman and engage in a strange and sometimes sad relation with her. .
It is impossible to really describe a story that is so unconventionally told. But I can assure you that the lighting, the sounds, the rhythm of the camera movements in this film are incredibly beautiful. But you need to accept the ‘’ mood’’ of this movie and be patient, otherwise you may hate it, and that would be too bad.


9. GABRIELLE
Patrice Chéreau (France, 2005)

For many years Patrice Chéreau was better known in France as a stage and opera director. He is also an actor and a script-writer, But since his first feature film in 1975, ‘’Flesh and the Orchid’’ an adaptation from the famous J.H Chase’s ‘’No Orchids for Miss Blandish’’ with Charlotte Rampling, Simone Signoret, Alida Valli and Bruno Cremer, he has become a darling of both critics and spectators, for his great ability to direct actors and particularly actresses in very complex, uneasy, passionate, and generally tense and dramatic love stories. He also got very good response in the U.S, where he taught film on the East Coast for a while, for films such as the beautiful ‘’Queen Margot’’ (1994), Intimacy (2001) and "Those who love me will take the train" (1998). "Gabrielle" is only his 10th feature film (he also directed several plays and operas for Television), but to me it is one of the most brilliantly ‘’ mis en scene’’ (directed). Adapted from ‘’The Return’’, a short novel by Joseph Conrad, is very precisely describing the catastrophic tragedy of errors that occurs when a ‘’bourgeoise’’ played perfectly portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, tries to leave her wealthy but vain and pretentious upper-class husband (great actor Pascal Gregory) after 10 years of a loveless marriage. She leaves a letter for him in their luxurious mansion explaining that she is leaving him for another man (a pretentious journalist whom her husband hates), but for no reason changes her mind and comes back home to retrieve it before he reads it... but too late. Their ensuing confrontations will be terrible, even during a fancy party where they entertain high-society guests, including her lover. Like in a Bergman or Visconti film, the tensions are going up, and down while the mansion’s servants try to keep the situation under control. All this is beautifully orchestrated in sumptuous framing and camera movements, and the acting is so painfully precise that it leaves you nervously exhausted at the end that I will not reveal. Quite a job...



10. MARIE-ANTOINETTE
Sofia Coppola (USA, 2006)

Why did almost half of the American film critics (a few even booed at its premiere at the Cannes Festival) pan this very creative, beautifully shot, and very astute movie goes beyond my comprehension...
As a matter of fact I did not see the film when it was released in Chicago’s theaters in 2006, in spite of my being intrigued by the trailers, because I was influenced by some bad reviews. It was a poor decision on my part. I would have enjoyed it even more if had watched those splendid shots and bold camera movements in glorious colors on a big screen and listened to the great soundtrack, with its provocative mix of baroque and pop music from a good sound system.
Perhaps some critics did not like the film because Sofia Coppola dared to do something completely different than in her previous successful pictures, especially ‘’Lost in transaltion’’. But is it really so different from the point of view on modern young women she ha s been trying to give since the ‘’The Virgin Suicides’’ . As Roger Ebert rightly wrote in his 4 stars review of Oct 20, 2006: "Nobody cares if the film does not always respect the real historical facts. It is a very contemporary reflection, made by a film-maker, not an historian, about a teenager ahead of her time, who is in a state of complete refusal of the role court people and her family expect her to play, and at the same time wants as a sort of revenge against the decadence and the moral corruption that surrounds her, to find an escape in a passionate search of pleasures". Kirsten Dunst is very charming in the title role. But I enjoyed Rip Torn as Louis XV, Danny Huston as Marie-Antoinette’s brother and Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry even more. Needless to say, the scenery is stunning. The film was actually shot on location at the Versailles Palace, and in other castles of the Paris area. some scenes were even shot inside the Opera Garnier in Paris. The dialogues are often very funny, and the numerous pastries, actually baked by the famous Parisian pastry chef Ladurée , are mouth watering.


Alain Maes, February 2008

Pommes Frites

Hi Dad,

I've been craving pommes frites like we have when in France and have not found any that really fit the bill here in silicon valley. Ironically, some of the best "french fries" are from a well known west coast chain of fast food joints called "In and Out Burger". They slice the potatos right in from of your eyes and then throw them directly in the deep fryer. The french and california french restaurants in silicon valley don't duplicate the hot and crispy outside with soft flavorful potato innards. I find myself sending the fries back very often at such places as the "Left Bank" because they always arrive cold and have no semblance to the fries in France. In Chicago, places like Kiki's make fantastic pommes allumettes which I've not found here.

So what makes a good Pommes Frite and why is it so hard to find ones that are like we have in France? And on top of that, why are they called "French Fries" here in the US? Did French Fries even originate in France.

Love

Your Pommes Frites deprived son

MY FAVORITES MOVIES OF 2007


Stéphane,

As you know, I am not too fond of Hollywood blockbusters, but that does not mean that I do not like well-made and original American films, on the contrary.
But, last year, more than ever, I badly missed my regular trips to France that used to give me opportunities to see the major French, Asian, South-America, Middle-Eastern and European films that are rarely distributed here, and that NETFLIX does not necessarily acquire rapidly after their public release in theaters. I missed several good films from China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, France, Germany and Italy, that were shown in Europe and won awards in international festivals. They appear in most ‘’ Ten Best” lists in European film magazines, like “Les Cahiers du Cinema” that I suscribe to. I am on the waiting list at Netlix for several of them: "We own the night"(James Gray), "Still Life" (Jia Zhang Ke), "Chansons d'amour"-Love Songs (Christophe Honoré), '' Alexandra'' (Alexander Sokurov), ''Paranoid Park'' (Gus Van Sant), ''Secret Sunshine'' (Lee Chang Dong), Honor de Cavalleria (Albert Serra), '' The Man from London'' (Bela Tarr), ''Ne Touchez pas à la Hache'' (Jacques Rivette), '' La Forêt de Mogari'' ( Naomi Kawase), '' I don't want to Sleep Alone'' (Tsai Ming Liang), ''My Blueberry Nights'' ( Wong Kar Wai), '' Syndromes and a Century'' (Apichatpong Weerasethakul).
5 of them are to be released within the next two months.
So, once again, it was not a great year for good foreign films in Chicago movie theaters.
The MUSIC BOX that used to have a very interesting selection of foreign films seen in important festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, or Toronto, does not show them anymore, or very rarely.
The best three venues for foreign movies are the CHICAGO FILM CENTER that benefits from the very astute and knowledgeable programming from Barbara Scharres, in the Loop, FACETS on Fullerton avenue, and LANDMARK CENTURY on Clark St.
Our favorite venue for films, CENTURY and FILM ARTS, in Evanston, that was always showing interesting foreign or indie films, has been acquired by a new company, CINEMARK, that is more interested in showing blockbusters. Therefore their programming policy has become totally risk-free and boring. What a pity.
But, anyways, we managed to see a few good American, French, German, and Asian films, either in commercial venues or from FACETS, or I rented them from NETFLIX.

Like it was the case last year, I compiled two separate lists. The first one, that I am publishing Today on the blog, consists of films I have seen in Chicago theaters. The second one is made of films, not necesarily recent, that I rented, or borrowed, and screened at home from my DVD player. That second list will be published within a couple of weeks.


LIST 1: Films I have seen in Chicago theaters:

1. CLIMATES
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey, 2006)

I loved Ceylan’s last film, UZAK (Distant), a very somber, claustrophobic, but beautiful and thought-provoking movie that obtained the Grand Prize at the Cannes film festival in 2003. I loved this new one, his fifth feature film, even more. It starts with a very painful end of a relationship between a professor (Ceylan himself, who in real life is also a very gifted photographer) taking pictures of ancient Roman ruins, during a very hot summer afternoon, and his wife, or mistress, (Ebru Ceylan, his own wife who is also a very beautiful and convincing actress). She observes him and silently starts to cry. One of the most powerful scene expressing solitude and despair I have ever seen in a film. After many episodes, one of them involving a very unusual and somewhat funny sex scene with another mistress, the film will end in an almost surreal winter landscape in a mountainous area in Western Anatolia, where the professor travels to visit with his former lover (or wife) who is involved in some kind of social work in a little town, perhaps with the hope to restart their extinguished passion . The cinematography, that integrates perfectly the protagonists of this story in the landscape, as Antonioni used to do so well in some of his best films, is superb. Ceylan is both the producer and the script writer of this haunting movie, that, for me, places him among the top ten most interesting directors of our time.


2. LADY CHATTERLEY
Pascale Ferran (France, 2007)

To me, the real sunshine of last summer, was Lady Chatterley, a very powerful and intelligent piece of cinematic beauty that was directed in 2006 by Pascale Ferran, a very gifted film maker who, unfortunately, does not make films very often.I was very moved but a bit disturbed by her first feature film, "Petits arrangements avec la mort"(Coming to terms with death), an intimate study on grieving the death of loved ones, that revealed a real ‘’auteur de films’’. From the first 5 minutes of Lady Chatterley I felt a pure cinephilic joy. This film is so intelligently composed, framed, and directed, that you do not SEE the ‘’mise en scene’’, you are literally swept by the rhythm and the beauty of each scene, and forget about its construction. That for me is the proof of a very clever ‘’mise en scene’’.
Marina Hands is stunning as Constance: Her beauty is luminous,and I am looking forward to see her again in "Le Scaphandre et le Papillon" . Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, a non-professional actor has the necessary physical presence as the gamekeeper, and his awkwardness is often very touching. Hippolyte Girardot, as Sir Clifford, is perhaps the most surprising choice of the casting. Pascale Ferran was very successful in establishing a perfect balance between the sensuality, that is never too erotically charged, of the couple and of the situations in which they evolve, and the powerful impact of the environment in which they move. Rarely a director has used natural settings, like forests, meadows, rivers, rural houses, etc. as authentically as Pascale Ferran did in this movie. Nature, beautifully shot by Julien Hirsh, and the protagonists of the story are totally and perfectly intertwined, and never appear as being two different elements of the same film. What is also incredibly strong in this film, is the respect that Pascale Ferran has for the characters and her actors. Everything is perfectly honest but restrained and the sensuality remains beautiful and exhilarating all the time, never threatened by any faux-pas or risqué move. Whatever your age, you can project yourself in these two marvelous characters without feeling embarrassed or voyeuristic. D.H Lawrence would have been proud of her.



3. PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES (COEURS)
Alain Resnais (France, 2006)

I can’t believe that this man, one of the greatest French living directors (Hiroshima Mon Amour, On Connait La Chanson, Mon Oncle d’Amerique, La Guerre Est Finie, Providence) who is pushing 86, is preparing to shoot his 18th full length feature film in 2008. He also directed many extraordinary shorts and a very moving documentary on the Holocaust, Night And Fog in the late fifties and early sixties. Resnais's cinematographic creativity is fresher and more satisfying in its honest simplicity, but brilliant style, than the efforts of many younger, and more commercially susscessful, contemporary film makers. This time, he has the nerve to shoot a whole film,supposedly taking place in the newly built and already very “in” sections of the 13th arrondissement in Paris, entirely in a studio’s sound stage. And practically the whole time, he makes us believe that it is really snowing outside. Once again he adapts a play from the very popular British playwright Alan Aickbourne ("Smoking-No Smoking" was already an adaptation from the same author). The story is typical of this genre of very British “théatre de boulevard’’, but it is completely “Frenchified” . The characters could not be more French: A shy real-estate agent secretly in love with his colleague who is not as repressed and prude as it looks, a depressed and lonely bartender and his nasty sick and bed-ridden old father, a young woman looking desperately for a lover through classified ads, an alcoolic veteran mourning the separation from his beautiful Italian mistress. All these people, most of them played incredibly well by some of the veteran actors of Resnais ‘’ensemble” (Sabine Azema, André Dussolier, Pierre Arditi, and Lambert Wilson) and two newcomers, Isabelle Carré and the beautiful Laura Morante (who was so moving in ‘’The Son’s Room’’ of Nanni Moretti) come and go through all kinds of chance encounters and dramatic situations interspersed with very funny but always a bit melancholic episodes. The camera work of Eric Gautier is stunning.
But it is the very efficient ‘’mise en scene’’, that reminds you of the charm and elegant visual style of some Hollywood romantic comedies of the forties and fifties. You cannot help but thinking about Lubitsch, Walsh, or Capra.
A must.


4. LIFE OF OTHERS
Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (Germany, 2006).

It is difficult to believe that this very disturbing story, a fiction but so realistically told that it might be based upon real facts that happened in Berlin a few years before, and a couple years after the fall of the wall, is a first film. The 30 year-old (at the time of shooting) German director shows an incredible assurance and know-how in both writing a very well constructed script, shooting and editing with a very tight and precise technique. He avoids the usual spectacular and artificial ‘’show-off” shots so common in political thrillers, and directs very good actors with an obvious respect for their characters and personalities. Ulrich Muhe, in particular, is brilliant as a captain of the infamous Stasi, the state police of the former East-Germany, whose assignment is to do a complex surveillance job on a very popular playwright, played by Sebastian Koch who was very good in ‘’Black Book”, and his girlfriend, a famous actress,played by the beauttiful Martina Gedeck ("Mostly Martha"). He is under pressure from his boss, who himself is a minion of the Minister of Culture, a strange and ambiguous fellow who is madly in love with the actress and calculates that he could get rid of the playwright by finding something politically bad about him. All this takes place in the turbulent context of the approaching end of the communist regime in East Germany, and the acceleration of the the repression by the Stasi. Sadly enough Ulrich Muhe, a well known stage and TV actor in East-Germany who was a militant of the liberation movement from the communist regime there, died of cancer a few months after the film’s release. This little masterpiece of efficient cinema won many awards in international film festivals and ended up with winning the Oscar for Best Foreign film in Hollywood in 2007. The musical score by the French composer Gabriel Yared ("The English Patient") is a perfect accompaniment.


5. ZODIAC
David Fincher (U.S.A, 2007)

I had not seen Fincher’s 1995 "SE7EN", a serial killer story, that got good reviews.
But I was very impressed by the innovative storytelling process, the superb, mostly digital, cinematography, and a very tight editing that keeps your attention focused, in spite of a slightly overlong 2 hours and 38 minutes running time, of this new serial killer story, an adapatation of the autobiographical and very successful book by Robert Graysmith. But the length of this movie is totally logical if we consider that this true story of the maniaco-obsessive search by newspaper cartoonist Graysmith, played very efficiently by Jake Gyllenhaal, of the famous self-nicknamed Zodiac serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco area in the Sixtes and the Seventie is taking place over an almost 20 years span. Graysmith is helped, during the first ten years or so by a colleague, a chain-smoking alcoholic crime reporter played very convincingly by Robert Downey Jr., and a policeman played by a good Mark Ruffalo, who becomes progressively skeptical about the elusive pursuit of this murderer-provocateur who sends clues to the newspaper about his crimes, and in the end was never charged for any of them. And even though Fincher takes the unusual decision to keep the same physical appearance of the major protagonist from the beginning to end of the movie in spite of the number of years that elapse between them, the atmosphere of the wole film remains extremely realistic the whole time. This film is a great study of what real police work and investigative reporting are about. And it also describes almost clinicallly the effects that such an obsessive beahavior can have on a marriage (Chloe Sevigny is very good as the wife of the cartoonist who dumps him and takes her children away when she realizes that a normal family life with him has become impossible ) and on relationships with colleagues and friends. But once again, what makes this film one of the most creative American movies of the last couple of years is his masterful directing and editing.


6. EASTERN PROMISES
David Cronenberg (U.K- Canada, 2007)

This very interesting Canadian director is probably,along with Scorsese, one of the most original storytellers working in the North-American film industry over the last twenty years. Not all of his films are equally good, and some of them (Crash, Videodrome) border on a sometimes shocking taste for the horrific and the macabre. But his best movies, like "History of Violence" (2006), "Naked Lunch", "Dead Ringers", or "Spider", are very powerful material and visually stunning. The very complex script of this film, shot in beautiful dark colors by his regular director of photography Peter Suschitzky, was cleverly written by the British screenwriter Steven Knight. It tells the story of a midwife Anna (excellent Naomi Watts) in a London hospital who finds a diary, written in Russian, and a business card for a fancy London restaurant “The Trans-Siberian”, in the belongings of a drugged and severely beaten adolescent who dies in her arms while delivering a baby girl. Anna decides to track-down the family of the girl and this process, that will prove very dangerous for people aware of the existence of the diary, put her in contact with the owner of the restaurant, Semeyon, (Armin Mueller-Stahl in one of the best roles of his long career),and his neurotic and violent son Kirill, played by French actor Vincent Cassel at his scarriest. She will also meet with Nikolai, the mysterious and somewhat sexy driver, bodyguard and dead bodies “cleaner”, played in a very deadpan and seductive way by Vigo Mortensen, who already delivered a superb performance in "History of Violence". It turns out that Semeyon is the godfather of a very powerful Russian crime organization in London, who has played, we will learn later, a very nasty role in the death of the adolescent girl. We will also find out that Nikolai is a Russsian government agent working with the London police to infiltrate the Russian gang. That gang has also to battle Chechen killers from another gang seeking revenge. All kinds of violent and sometimes very touching episodes mark this film in both very dramatic and suspenseful ways. One of them involves one of the most spectacular and hair-raising battles between naked men in a Turkish bath that I have ever seen in a commercial film. For film buffs I will mention that the role of Stepan, Anna’s Russian uncle, who will translate the diary against his own judgment, is played with lots of gusto by Jerzy Skolimowski, one of my favorite Polish directors of the sixties and seventies ("Walkover", "Le Depart", "The Shout", "Rysopsis" , "Deep End", "Ferdydurke", etc). Do not miss this minor but very satisfying masterpiece of precise storytelling and directing, that forces the viewer to ask himself uneasy questions about some serious moral dilemmas the characters, especially Anna and Nikolai, have to face. Besides, the whole experience is pure cinephile’s pleasure.


7. I’M NOT THERE
Todd Haynes (U.S.A, 2007)

This film was perhaps the nicest surprise of the year. I never expected such a risk-taking experience where the director, Todd Haynes, embarks on a very creative cinematic and musical essay trying to define some of the many contradictions found in the persona of Bob Dylan in the early stages of his career. So, instead of a traditional linear and chronologically correct itinerary illustrating the various battles and complicated relationships that the singer had to live, fight, or passively refuse, with friends, co-workers, lovers, managers, fans, or with his own internal demons, Haynes prefers to reflect in an impressionist, or sometimes expressionist, style, on the importance of some fragmented episodes of his life, as if they had been perceived by different parts of his personality. That is why these various elements of who he might have been at different stages of his life are played by half a dozen different actors or actresses. The most surprising performances are offered by Cate Blanchett as a rock star in London, Ben Wishaw as a poet, Marcus Carl Franklin as a very young black guitarist, and Heath Ledger as an actor. Both Julianne Moore and the French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg manage to create some very moving characters too.
The music score is very rich and helps recreating some sense of the different periods involved. The sets also play a very significant role in establishing links with Dylan various social or cultural environments in the sixties. And of course there is a plethora of original recordings of Dylan’s own songs played and sung by himself or others.
A very complex and precise cutting job, and the alternance of equally beautifully shot sequences in black and white and color, add an almost surreal atmosphere (like in very strange scenes in an old Western village with Richard Gere as Billy the kid) to this haunting film that should be seen more than once. At the end of two hours and 15 minutes of projection, you feel a bit dizzy but are ready to ask for more



8. THE SAVAGES
Tamara Jenkins (U.S.A, 2007).

Another very nice surprise. When I saw the trailers, I thought that it was sort of a comedy. But believe me, it is not. Despite some much needed very humorous sequences, this is a film that deals with a dead serious topic: How can two adult sibblings, a brother and a sister in their mid-forties, who are both confronted by serious personal problems ranging from different types of failure to achieve their goals to inability to make serious decisions about their own lives, deal with the sudden decline of their father who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and starts to have episodes of dementia, They are called by the management of a retirement home in Arizona, where he causes some difficult situations for the other guests and staff members, and where he obviously is not welcome any longer, to take care of him. The dual problem that they have is that that father abandonned them earlier in life, is not particularly happy to see them, and that they have little choice but to find a nursing home closer to where they live on the East Coast to be able to take care of him. This experience is a very painful but self-revealing one for both of them. Both actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a more sober than usual and very touching performance, and Laura Linney, who plays a very different character than in her previous films, are very convincing in their expression of pain, annoyance, frustration, and difficulty to communicate honestly with each other and with the dying father (great Philip Bosco). The very nuanced cinematography adds an authentic feeling of winter depression to the atmosphere. This movie deals in a very non-Hollywood honest way with those serious matters that are aging and its related miseries, fear of dying, solitude of non-married middle-age persons, and honesty in communicating with other family members in times of crisis.
The whole treatment by Tamara Jenkins is so perfectly balanced that, at the end of the movie, you are very grateful to her for helping you to accept certain difficult situations that might affect you someday with a more healthy and humane perspective. And it is true that several really funny well-paced moments, help a lot.


9. THE COMEDY OF POWER (L’IVRESSE DU POUVOIR)
Claude Chabrol (France, 2005)

I have been following the very prolific career of Claude Chabrol (56, and soon 57, full length feature films in 50 years), who was associated with the early stages of the French New Wave in the lates Fifties, since his first film “ Le Beau Serge” . This ‘’classic’’ was shot in black and white with a limited budget in his native rural Creuse in 1958. I have to confess that after a first decade of very good films, his work was marked by ups and downs, as far as originality and quality are concerned. And frankly, I disliked several of his movies produced between the mid-seventies and the early nineties. But then, over the last 15 years, the 77 year-old veteran director, has been progressively climbing back to the top of his art. I did not see his last film, “La Fille Coupée En Deux”, but “The Comedy of Power” is probably one of the most typical examples of the ‘’Chabrol style’’, a mix of irony, ferocious observation of the hypocrisy and double standards of the French bourgeois class, and passion for strong women. Chabrol has always recognized being influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, and once again this influence is obvious in this film. Not only because of his way to depict the darkest and most evil inner secret sides of his protagonists, but also because of his very fluid and precise framing of each sequence, where shots and camera moves actually mean something and reflect the intentions of the director. Sometimes, like in Hitchcock’s films, they can be deceptive and lead you to a false perception of a situation or of the intentions of the character. His way of directing his leading actresses, in this case the always very expressive Isabelle Huppert with whom he worked in 7 other films, is also somewhat Hitchcockian. This particular story involves a very tenacious, honest but ambitious, female judge who is in charge of a case involving corruption of high-profile executives of a large French oil group that, under the cover of the state, conducted some illegal operations for their own profit. This film obviously refers to the famous Elf-Aquitaine trial, and its hero the judge Eva Joly. It will also remind you of course of the Enron affair in the U.S. Isabelle Huppert plays a role that is very different from her previous impersonations of bad, neurotic, or criminal women. But you completely believe in both her moments of strength and of weakness, when she realizes that her obsession with success in prosecuting those powerful men at the same time threatens to ruin her marital and family life. François Berléand is great as the powerful corrupt and sick executive. Eduardo Serra’s photography is as efficient as ever.


10. LETTERS FROM IVO JIMA
Clint Eastwood (U.S.A, 2006)

One of the most claustrophobic and depressing films that I ever seen. But what a piece of great cinema. I consider Clint Eastwood as one of the most important American film directors of the last two decades. I think that " Unforgiven" (1992), for which Eastwood was awarded an Oscar for best director, remains one of the best American movies of the early nineties. But here, he creates a very important rupture both in terms of style and theme, with the rest of his work. He is taking an enormous risk in filming from a Japanese standpoint and in Japanese (with sub-titles) the famous 1945 Iwo Jima battle between American soldiers trying to invade this tiny inhospitable island in the middle of the Pacific, and the Japanese soldiers who have orders to defend it at any cost including their lives from their government that believe that the US might use it as a launching pad to invade Japan. In fact he makes us share the terrible intimacy of these soldiers in their very uncomfortable underground bunkers and tunnels as they wait for the American attack and progressively realize that they will all die in the name of the Emperor, but also for a stupid lack of intelligent strategy and rationale on the part of their top military brass. The ambiguity of the situation is that we cannot help but feel empathy with the general Kuribayashi, played by the great actor Ken Watanabe, who has been assigned as a commander of the island to punish him for incorrect political and pro-American sentiments, whose strategy to defend the island is not shared by his staff and some soldiers. We also feel sympathy for one of his officers, the aristocratic former olympic champion Baron Nishi, and a couple of simple soldiers like this baker, Saigo, who did not want to go the battle and writes painful letters to his wife. In fact the whole film is constructed around the letters written by these soldiers, that were unearthed 40 years later, some of them read in voice-over by the general and the simple soldier.
But at no time does Eastwood let himself be trapped in moral or political judgment. His cameras, that do a superb job in black and white and sometimes color under the masterful direction of cinematographer Tom Stern ("Million Dollar Baby" and "Mystic River") capture the essence of the emotions of these men, and the rough terrain around. The battle scenes, with the help of savy computers, are hyper realistic. This film, that was shot in Iceland, at Iwo Jima and in Californian studios, is everything but hollywoodian. It demonstrates the senseless stupidity and the ambiguities of wars, where so many millions of people die without real reasons. It studies without pretensions the complexity of the moral fights and contradictions that notions like honor, pride, heroism, patriotism, duty, fear, resentment, and blind obedience, in wartime, can generate in individual as well as collective consciences. And it is a great example of cinematographic freedom.


10.(tie) NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Joel and Ethan Coen, (U.S.A. 2007)

I have not always been a fan of the Coen brothers films, but out of the 12 feature films they made together I really enjoyed "Fargo", "Miller’s Crossing", and "The Big Lebowski". To me this one is their best so far. I often thought that their approach to script-writing, directing, and editing was a bit too simplistic, heavy-handed, and formulaic at times. But I have to admit that I had a lot of pleasure watching this “Neo-Western” taking place around 1980 in Western Texas. Anyway I've always been a sucker for any film including lots of small Texan towns and desertic landscapes, especially if they are treated well by one of their natives, Tommy Lee Jones who did a splendid job, both as director and actor, in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" in 2005.
Here TLJ plays, with great gusto and empathy for his character, an aging sheriff about to retire, who is very depressed about the rising crime rate in that area of Texas, and tries without great energy to do his job. He will be soon facing a demoniac serial killar, who uses a cattle stun gun to execute his many (I lost count halfway throough the movie) and mostly innocent victims. This smiling but terrifying psychotic guy, sporting a very strange hairdo, played with sometimes overzealous mannerism by Javier Bardem, is tracking down a bag containing 2 million dollars that was taken by pure chance by a poor welder (Josh Brolin) who discovered it while hunting at the site of a terrible massacre resulting from a botched drug deal in the middle of the desert.
The whole story, sometimes a bit complicated to follow, revolves around this guy trying to escape some Mexicans and the serial killer who tries to get the money back, his wife whom he tries to protect and send away, the sheriff who tries to arrest the killer and prevent the welder’s wife from being killed, and a bounty chaser who tries to get that same money back for his corrupt corporate big city clients. Lots of violence, lots of chases, lots of spectacular landscapes, and lots of bravura acting moments, as well as incredibly beautiful and efficient cinematography, coupled with a very smart editing job.

Runner-up:

DANS PARIS
Christophe Honoré (France, 2007)

Dans Paris: Like so many films of the early sixties, it is a film about ruptures. Ruptures between generations, ruptures between life styles, ruptures between sexual tendencies, ruptures within families, ruptures between men and women. In this case two brothers are involved. Paul , the oldest beautifully played by Romain Duris is returning to Paris, in an advanced state of depression, to live in his divorced father’s apartment, after the end of a difficult love affair with a beautiful, but demanding, young woman. He spends his days in or on the bed of his younger and much livelier brother, Jonathan, played by Louis Garrel. The father, played by the great Guy Marchand (remember him in "Cousin Cousine"?) does what he can to help. The brief visit by the mother (still stunning Marie-France Pisier) called to help in a crucial scene, is a very emotional moment. The relationships between the characters are described with a lot of finesse and maturity, that sometimes remind us of Eric Rohmer’s style.
All these movements inside and outside of the apartment are filmed with an evident cinematic pleasure and great elegance by Honoré. But do not count on seeing much of Paris.This is a not a film about Paris, but about characters whose lives evolve within a restricted area of Paris. And for a cinephile it is a real treat to detect all the references to all these directors of the New Wave that Honoré loves so much: Godard (who in some way could be partially identified with Paul) and Truffaut, or more specifically his ‘’projection’’, Antoine Doinel- Jean-Pierre Léaud, who sometimes can be partially identified with Jonathan. But the marvelous sequence where Paul sings on the phone a love duo with his former mistress, is a direct homage to Jacques Demy.


Other films I liked a lot this past year:

BLADE RUNNER , THE FINAL CUT
Ridley Scott (U.S.A, 1982, 2006)

LA TOURNEUSE DE PAGES (The Page Turner)
Dennis Dercourt (France, 2006)

DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGENES)
Rachid Bouchareb (Algeria, 2006)

MICHAEL CLAYTON
Tony Gilroy (USA, 2007)

I saw THERE WILL BE BLOOD, the glorious epic by Paul Thomas Anderson in early January 2008. Otherwise it would have been No, 4 or 5 on my ten Best List

French Olive oil

French Olive oil: A very expensive golden elixir, but worth its price.
Some brands are available in the U.S.


Hey, Stéphane,
I apologize for having waited so long to answer your request on French olive oil, but several recurrent nasty colds in October and November slowed me down quite a bit.

I confess: I am an olive oil addict.

But believe me, it is a topic that is dear to my heart of ‘’méridional’’ who was born and raised in an area full of olive trees, as you were able to see in July during our vacation in the département du Gard. We always used olive oil at home, even though my mother used a commercial brand, usually the very decent Puget, a very old family-owned company from Marseilles, that in the fifties and sixties sold its olive oil in conic containers made of carton that were both pretty and useful since they protected the oil from various sources of light. Light and heat are the worth enemies of olive oil, along with oxygen. This is why you should always keep a bottle of olive oil tightly capped or stopped, store it away from direct sunlight, and away from any source of heat, especially in the kitchen. Olive oil, especially the cheap kind, can become rancid very rapidly. In fact never keep an opened bottle of olive oil for more than 3 months. Nowadays, Puget is owned by a megagroup, Lesieur, and it is probably the best selling French brand of commercial olive oil. Among its 3 extra-virgin oils I prefer the ‘’fruitée’’, that I used to prepare the baked fresh thyme and garlic chicken that we ate in the house we rented in Pompignan in July. But, even though Puget is still quite fine for everyday use, its quality is not the same as it used to be and it does not have the subtle, and exhilarating aroma of a 100% French olive oil. The reason is that it is no longer made exclusively from French-grown olives, but probably from a blend of olives coming from other countries from the European Community.
The French production (4,000 metric tons) is so small that it does not even cover 5% of French domestic consumption. So France imports 95% of the olive oil it needs from Spain, Italy, Greece, and North-Africa.

As you know I use a large amount of olive oil in my cooking, since we would never use a different oil to make salad dressings, bake or broil chicken-based dishes, or even fry eggs. I love making mashed potatoes with olive oil instead of butter. And naturally, between May and October, I pour it liberally on tomatoes, and other cold or warm vegetable dishes, fresh mozzarella cheese, and crusty baguette. I use it, along with Dijon mustard and thyme, as an emulsion to coat a leg of lamb or a pork tenderloin. And of course it is a very important component of my ratatouille. So you will not be surprised that I buy about 2 full liters per month during the summer months. But if you want to know the truth, I do not use French olive oil in my everyday cooking, it would be too expensive. I use a very decent Greek olive oil, made 100% from Kalamata olives, that I buy at Trader Joe’s for 7.99 dollars a full liter. I tried other cheap extra-virgin olive oil from Spain and Italy, like the ones you find at Whole Foods, but none, except maybe the Spanish Zoe, of them was as flavorful as my Greek oil, which by the way is always sold in a slightly greenish glass bottle, and has an expiration date clearly marked on the bottle. It is very important to buy an olive oil that is very young, no more than 18 months after harvest time. As a matter of fact the optimum taste of an extra-virgin oil lasts only a few months. That is why you should never buy an olive oil that does not have a date either of production, or of limit of consumption.

Before you choose one that you like, go to a store where they have open samples, and try a few different oils. Remember that a fine olive oil, like a fine wine, needs to be looked at, smelled, and tasted very carefully. It is best to taste it straight from the bottle in a small plastic spoon, and not on bread.
Once you put the content of that small spoon in you mouth, do not swallow it right a way. Let some air enter you mouth and roll it around your tongue and back to your taste buds, and let the full power of the fruit slowly invade your palate and your soul. If you close your eyes you can actually hear the provençal cicadas sing in your head.
Learn to recognize the different aromas and organoleptic characteristics of the oil: Is it peppery, fruity, herbaceous, bitter, complex, very mild or very ripe? Does its bouquet (like for a wine) have notes of fresh artichoke bottom, of anise seed, of raw almonds, of lavender, of apples, or is it slightly citrussy? It will take time, but eventually, you will enjoy the ‘’degustation’’ of fine extra-virgin French olive oil as much as you derive a lot of pleasure from wine tastings.


About that delicious olive oil that we bought at the farmers market in Saint-Hippolyte-du Fort last summer

Me too Stéphane... I mourn the end of that great bottle of ‘’L’Olivette’’, this very silky and fruity extra-virgin olive oil that we bought at the farmer’s market in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, during our summer vacation.
I wanted to call the very informed salesman who took care of us, since I was curious to know what variety of olives were used to produce that oil and in what village they were harvested. But I could not find any phone number corresponding to the address mentioned on the bottle: L’Olivette des Garrigues, 34690 Fabrègues. Fabrègues is a very small town a few miles West of Montpellier. But we cannot be sure that this ‘’brand’’ of oil, that is not sold in stores, is made from olives harvested in the Fabrègues area, even though some olive trees planted around there produce good fruit. I would guess that this guy, who is probably a small broker or wholesaler, buys its oil from a cooperative or independent ‘’moulin’’ (mill), bottles it and stick that fancy pretty label bearing the rather common name of ‘’L’olivette’’ on it . Anyway, it was very smooth and probably barely filtered. Its very low level of acidity, less than 0,5% according to the label, and the fact that it had been extracted and bottled just a few months before we bought it, were the main reasons for its suavity and fresh fruity aftertaste, with just a faint note of spice in the finish. Judging by that taste, I would say that this oil was not produced in the neighboring area of Nimes, the youngest (2004) of the 8 government-certified AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) areas of production of French olive oils. These AOC ‘’ Huile d’Olive de Nimes’’ oils that are produced by 7 coops or privately owned mills, derive for more than 70% from ‘’Picholine’’ olives, that give them a more assertive, slightly bitter and peppery flavor, than the one we had in l’Olivette. Its aroma reminded me more of a ‘’huile d’olive de la Vallée des Baux’’, another AOC located between Maussane-Les-Alpilles and Les Baux-de-Provence, not too far from Saint-Rémy (where Van Gogh painted some beautiful olive trees). In any case it did not bear any mention of the area of origin, which would indicate an AOC, or even the label ”Huile d’Olive de France“ guaranteeing that it was a 100% French olive oil. But I am ready to bet that it was an authentic French olive oil and not one of these cheap blends of dubious origin that too many unscrupulous traveling salesmen sell to ignorant tourists during the summer at their stands in open and farmers markets in Provence and Languedoc.
My friend Kiki last year brought me back a bottle of a very silky olive oil from the well-known Moulin Jean-Marie Cornille from Maussane, in the Alpilles, near Les Baux-de-Provence. It is one of my favorite French olive oils and belongs to the category of ‘’fruité noir’’ (fruity, coming from mature black olives). This oil was awarded the Gold Medal at the 2007 Concours Général Agricole in Paris, in that particular category of oil.

What make French olive oils different from olive oils from other producing countries?

To answer the second part of your question as to what make French AOC olive oils different from olive oils from other producing countries I would say:
To me they are better because they are produced in much smaller quantities than in other countries, under very strict production and quality standards.
These standards are as diverse and constraining and deal with several factors such as the density of olive trees planted per acre, or plot, the yield, the method of harvesting, and the production techniques guaranteeing the non usage of heat and chemicals in the process, etc.
Also because, like it is the case for French AOC wines, these oils are made from specific varietals of olives grown in very well defined geographic areas that reflect very distinctive terroir tastes and aromatic characteristics. The olives are harvested in the fall, then crushed, usually within 24 hours, between two granite wheels to create a paste, that is then pressed according to very old traditional methods to extract a mix of water and oil. Then this fluid mix is decanted or more ad more often centrifuged to separate the oil from the water. The oil will be stored first in metallic barrels and later bottled. So, French olive oils are made of pure fruit juice extracted by only mechanical means within a few hours after harvesting, at low temperature under 80 degrees Fahrenheit. They are not subjected to any heat or chemical treatment. The only accepted treatments are: sorting, washing, crushing, mixing to obtain a paste, extraction by pressing or other purely mechanical means, centrifugation, and decantation.
They have a very low level of acidity (percentage of free oleic acids content per weight). In Huile d’Olive Vierge Extra, it always has to be inferior to 0,8%. And in most very good oils this acidity level goes down to under 0,2 to 0,5%. This very important factor, and the total absence of organoleptic defects, contributes to their smoothness and fruitiness. Most of the time, the olives are harvested by hand, which preserves their structural integrity and original characteristics. They fall on nets or plastic tarps placed on the ground under the trees. Nowadays, a few growers use mechanical harvesting means, but more often in larger groves. And when a year turns bad, for climate or infestation-based reasons, some small traditional producers prefer not to extract oil at all from their olives.

One reason for the high price of French Extra Virgin olive oils, especially the AOC is the need to use between 5 and 7 kilos of olives to obtain one liter of oil. And the mills still crushing olives through granite wheels and using traditional presses rather than more modern, efficient and productive centrifugation-based systems, need to be even more selective in their mostly hand-picking of adequate olives with a low water content.
Besides, in French stores most of the time you will find only Extra-Virgin Olive Oil, and sometimes “Virgin” (a blend of extra-virgin oils with a higher level of acidity but less than 2%). But no so-called “pure”, “refined”, or ”light” olive oils that you find in American stores. These inferior oils are in fact blends of various low-quality olive oils containing very little extra-virgin oil, and a large percentage of refined oils, that most of the time have been chemically processed trough non-mechanical means, and heated. This is a big ‘’no-no’’ for connoisseurs and serious professionals. I will not elaborate on pomace olive oil (huile de grignons), produced from pulp, skin, and solid materials like broken pits, left after pressing or centrifugation, mixed with a little virgin olive oil, and processed with heat and solvents, that is often used in cheap restaurants offering Indian or Middle-Eastern cuisine.

You should also know that nowadays, the label ‘’première pression à froid’’ (first cold pressing) does not mean much any more since no serious oil producer, especially in AOC zones would proceed with a ‘’second pressing’’, and in any case all bona fide Extra-Virgin oils are cold- pressed. Besides as said earlier, many modern oil mills do not use traditional hydraulic presses made of ‘’scourtins’’ (round discs) any more, but other types of mechanical and centrifugal extractors.
So, in 2007, most of the time the label of an AOC French olive oil will bear that description: “ Huile d’olive de qualité supérieure obtenue directement des olives et uniquement par des procédés mécaniques’’ (Olive oil of a premium quality obtained directly from olives and only through mechanical process).
You no longer will necessarily find the mention of ‘’first cold pressed’’ on the label.
The essential info that you must find on the label, besides the name of the mill or the grower, are a geographical origin (Provence, Nimes, Nyons etc. or more simply ‘’Huile d’olive de France’’), the level of acidity , the year it was harvested or a date indicating when the oil will no longer be considered as fresh, the number of centiliters or milliliters contained in the bottle or the can, and the quality description mentioned earlier.

On the label of some AOC oils, you might also see the following indications: ‘’fruité vert’’, ‘’fruité noir’’ or ‘’ fruité mûr’’, indicating that the type of aroma, specific flavor, and fruitiness of the oil comes from ‘’ripe black olives’’, ‘’ripe green olives’’ , or simply ripe olives that have reached a perfect level of maturity. Some of them might have been crushed and pressed a little longer than 24 hours after being harvested to increase precisely that ‘’mature’’ and extra-rich aroma and taste. Always keep in mind that the color of an olive is the result of its degree of maturity. They are no such things as varieties of green, purple, and black olives. They all start as green fruit.


France’s production of olive oil is very limited, and it is concentrated in areas close to the Mediterranean Sea.


The fact that French olive oils are produced in small quantities partially explain their high price. France produces only 4,000 tons of olive oil per year, making it only the 15th producing country in the world. Per comparison, the largest one, Spain, produces 1,179,100 tons (43,3% of the world’s total production). Italy come second with 550,000 tons (20,2% of the world output). Greece, which is the largest consumer of olive oil per capita in the world, is in third place with 367,000 tons (13,5%) and Morocco 4th, with 280,000 tons (10.6%). Olive growers from Turkey, make an enormous marketing effort to promote their olive oil in the U.S (they have a beautiful store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago), are the 5th world producer with 120,000 tons (6,6%). The next largest producers in decreasing order of gross annual tonnage are Tunisia, Syria, Algeria, Portugal, Jordan, Argentina, Libya, Lebanon, and Croatia. Brazil intends to become a major producing country in the near future.
As you can see, even though California’s production is expanding rapidly, the United States are not yet ranked among the top 15 producing countries.

There are approximately 30,000 olive growers in France located in 12 départements : Alpes-maritimes, Alpes de Haute Provence, Var, Bouches du Rhône, Gard, Hérault, Aude, Pyrénées Orientales, Ardèche, Vaucluse, Drôme, Corse. But not all of them produce oil. A lot of their olives are either used as edible food, or in condiments and apetizers. The others are used to make commercial oil used in the soap and cosmetic industry.
Except for a microscopic production of olive oil, used exclusively by the locals, in the tiny Island of RÉ, just off La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, practically all the French “oliveraies” (olive groves), ‘’domaines et coopératives oléicoles” and “moulins” (olive growers, cooperatives, and privately-owned mills that process the oil) are in the south of France between the Italian and the Spanish borders, often a few miles off the Mediterranean coast. Two areas of production, the region of Nyons in the département of Drôme, and the Southern part of Ardèche, are a little farther north, about 50 km north-east and north-west of Avignon.
Even though it is not yet recognized as an AOC, the region of Languedoc , including the areas of Minervois, where very good red and rosé wines are also produced, the area around Montpellier, and the Roussillon near the Spanish border, are other areas where very good and fruity extra-virgin oil producers can be found. The Minervois area is located north of Narbonne and East of Beziers, in Southern Languedoc.
In fact, the whole Languedoc-Roussillon region is the 2nd largest producing area of olive oil representing 16% of the total French production.


Some of the best are produced in specific areas, and it shows on the label

At this time, there are only 8 areas of production awarded the official AOC (Appellation d’origine Contrôlée) by the official French Institute of Registered Appellations of Origin (INAO). The 8th one, Huile d’Olive de Provence was officially recognized in March of 2007. And in 2008, a 9th AOC, Pays d’Oc, might be introduced

But very good French extra-virgin olive oils can be produced or distributed without having an AOC label. The ‘’Huile d’olive de France’’ certificate granted by AFIDOL, the official French Association of producers of olives, olive oil, and olive-based products, is a guarantee that they are produced in France from exclusively French-grown olives, and according to strict standards. They are perfectly fine and some of them earn big prizes at the Concours Général Agricole de Paris, a very serious national show and competition for agri-food products.
But for the AOC oils, the most prestigious competition, is the Concours des AOC, that is organized by AFIDOL in NYONS in May.
According to AFIDOL, more than 220 mills extract olive oil in France, but only 75, for now, are certified as producing AOC-labeled oils.

But many mills produce different qualities of oils: Some are Mono-varietal, some result from a mix of varieties of olives, sometimes from different French areas. Some bear the AOC label, some not, but it does not mean that the non AOC oil is not as good. Several of the mills mentioned here below produce both AOC and Non-AOC oils

The 8 regions recognized as AOC are:

Nyons (and more particularly the area of Les Baronnies) in the département de la Drôme, North of the Mont Ventoux, about 50 miles due north-east of Avignon.

It was the first AOC officially recognized in 1994. The main variety of olives used there is the Tanche, that is pressed when it is very black, ripe to the point of having a wrinkled skin.
They are well balanced, mild, and can be paired with practically every type of food.
About 20 mills, coops, and private growers are producing good olive oils there but only 12 have the AOC ‘’huile d’olive de Nyons’’ label.
One of the best is Moulin à huile DOZOL-AUTRAND. http://www.moulindozol.com/ (available in the U.S,) . It got the gold medal at the Nyons competition for this AOC in 2007.
The Coopérative oleicole du Nyonsais www.coop-du-nyonsais.fr/olives , in Nyons, Le Vieux Moulin in Mirabel les Baronnies (not an AOC), Huilerie RICHARD http://www.huilerie.com/ , in Nyons, Moulin Jacques RAMADE (http://www.moulinramade.com/) in Nyons, Ferme de BLUYE in Plaisans, that obtain the silver medal at the Nyons competition this year.
The Moulin de Haute Provence in Buis les Baronnies, are also very good producers. RICHARD, Cooperative oleicole du Nyonsais, and Le Vieux Moulin are available in the U.S.

Vallée des Baux-de-Provence

This AOC, that was recognized in 1997, is located in the northeast part of the département des Bouches du Rhône, in a very pretty hilly area called ‘’Les Alpilles’’ ,near the charming medieval village of Les Baux. This zone of production uses a larger panel of varieties of olives: Salonenque, Aglandau, Grossane, and Verdale, are the most common, along sometimes with the Béruguette. Most of these oils are made from several
(often 5) varieties of olives which give them complexity and richness. They can be herbal, or peppery, always ‘’sexy’’.
Some of the best producers are:
CASTELAS (owned by a provençal couple, the Hughes, who lived for many years in Arizona, in Les Baux http://www.castelas.fr/
Moulin Jean-Marie CORNILLE in Maussane-Les Alpillles http://www.moulin.cornille.com/
Both are available in the U.S. (see: Retail sources later)

Other very good oils from that area are: Moulin Saint-Michel in Mouriès, http://www.moulinsaintmichel.com/ and Chateau d’Estoublon, that produces also very nice wines, http://www.estoublon.com/ in Fontvieille (available in the U.S.)

Aix-en-Provence

This area is not exclusively centered around the beautiful city of AIX, in the département of Bouches-du-Rhône, but expand to villages and small towns such as La Fare les Oliviers, Eguilles, Miramas, Berre, Lançon de Provence, or Salon de Provence.
The AOC was recognized in 1999.
The main varieties of olives used in that area are the Salonenque, Aglandau, Verdale and Grossane, along with the Cayanne and the Bouteillan.
Pretty close to Les Baux in taste and texture, but with a little more spice.
Some of the best producers are:
Moulin des Costes, in the charming village of Pélissanne. http://www.moulindescostes.com/
Château Virant, in Lançon de Provence http://www.chateauvirant.com/
Mas des Bories in Salon de Provence http://www.masdesbories.com/
(These 3 oils are available in the U.S)
The oliveraie du Mas Mérici, in Berre, is another fine oil, but not available in the U.S..
Same for the oils from Moulin à huile de La Fare Les Oliviers in La Fare les Oliviers, and the Château Calissanne, that as far as know are not sold in the U.S.

Haute Provence

Recognized in 1999, this beautiful area is located along the Valley of the Durance River, Giono’s country, not far from the famous lavender fields, a little higher up.
The main variety of olive there is the Aglandau. The oils are very sweet, floral and fruity, with a light touch of bitter almonds. I love them.
One of the better known “moulin” is le Moulin de l’Olivette in Manosque http://pagesperso-orange.fr/moulinolivette , in the département of Alpes de Haute Provence, that you can sometimes find in the U.S.. It got a gold medal in Nyons in 2007.
Another good one is le Moulin des Pénitents, in Les Mées, but I do not think it is available in the U.S.

Nice

Recognized as an AOC in 2001, this small area is concentrated in the Département des Alpes Maritimes between Vence and Menton.
The main variety of olive used is the Cailletier, a small olive harvested when it is quite ripe (black). The oils are very aromatic, almost pungent, but soft and with a low level of bitterness.
Some of the better known Moulins are: Le Moulin de la Brague http://www.moulin-opio.com/ , in Opio, a very pleasant oil in a tin can widely available in the U.S, and ALZIARI, http://www.alziari.com/ in Nice a very old mill that also produces olive oils from other regions than Nice. Available in the U.S.
Also André Giauffret, in Colomars, who got the gold medal in Paris in 2007.
And let’s not forget the the Oliveraie de la Sirole, in Colomars, that obtained the silver medal in Nyons in 2007.

Corse (Corsica)

This AOC, recognized in 2004, is comprised of