New cookbooks bring goodies from afar
With the standard North American Christmas dinner about as predictable as a Norman Rockwell rendering, the time has come to borrow from other countries their versions of foods that seem traditionally American: the turkey, the yam, the potato, the pumpkin. For starters, how about pumpkin soup? Or bawd bree, the rich hare broth of Scotland? It might be followed by Colombia’s pato borracho (drunken duckling) or Gaelic roastit bubblyjock wi’ cheston crappin (roast turkey with chestnuts) and rumblede-thumps (creamed potatoes and cabbage). Dessert could be Mexican torta del cielo, or a rum-flavored nut tart from France, or Irish plum cake.
These festive alternatives, along with dishes ranging from peasanty to princely, are suggested by a new crop of cookbooks harvested from Celtic, English, Continental and Latin American kitchens. The five most knowledgeable and digestible:
It may be news to many Americans that the Scots do not live by haggis and porridge alone. As zestfully set forth in A Feast of Scotland by Janet Warren (Little, Brown; 176 pages; $12.95), Caledonia has a rich and distinctive cuisine. Its glories flow from bountiful game, fresh-and saltwater fish, beef and lamb, though the Scots have always relied on grain. Their baps, bannocks, buns, oatcakes and scones are among the world’s finest daily breadstuff’s. Warren provides sound recipes for loaves and fishes, as well as for sturdy broses (porridge soups) and broths like the celebrated co*ck-a-leekie and crab-based partan bree; and, most memorably, the breakfast dishes, like oatcakes and honey, so highly praised by Samuel Johnson.
Many Scottish staples date back to the Vikings, who are believed to have introduced Aberdeen Angus cattle as well as curing and salting techniques—whence such delicacies as kippers, smoked salmon and mutton ham. However, there is a regal and Continental tang to the best of Scottish food, traceable to the nation’s French connection, the “Auld Alliance” that began with the marriage of Scotland’s King James V to Mary of Guise-Lorraine in 1538. Like a fogbound Catherine de Medicis, she arrived at Holyrood with chefs, recipes, wines, liqueurs, desserts and other Gallic trappings then unknown to the Gaels.
Edinburgh court circles became so enamored of haute cuisine that a serious food shortage developed. The rage persisted under James’ daughter and successor, Mary Queen of Scots. Marmalade is said to have been invented by the royal chef as a pick-me-up when Mary came down with a fever after a cold night tryst with her lover; the orangey concoction was named Marie malade. (A more prosaic version traces marmalade to marmelo, the Portuguese word for quince, the original ingredient.) Leg of mutton is still known by its French name, gigot, though it is pronounced “jiggott.” A superb chicken dish that sounds quintessentially Gaelic, how-towdie, is derived from the Old French hutaudeau, meaning pullet.
Regardless of origin, Warren’s choices range enticingly from crofters’ fare through such noble dishes as casseroled venison Macduff, followed by a cheese pâté, and typsy laird, a Drambuie-soused trifle. To precede the feast, she reminds us of a felicitous grace attributed to Robbie Burns: Some hae meat, and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.
From south of Hadrian’s Wall and across the Irish Sea come some of the best ingredients of The Maurice Moore-Betty Cookbook (Bobbs-Merrill; 367 pages; $14.95). Moore-Betty was born in Ireland and owned a successful London restaurant before starting a celebrated cooking school in Manhattan. This is the most satisfactory of his several carefully prepared cookbooks, an eclectic compendium of dishes both plain and fancy.
While he suggests braised pheasant as the Christmas entrée, Moore-Betty does offer a seductive turkey dish: blanc de dindonneau Italien, sliced breasts smothered in a mushroom and Marsala sauce. Dining on his dindonneau, he reports, many guests believe they are consuming high-priced veal; he pulls the same trick with chicken Marengo and chicken tonnato. While, as he points out, chicken is the safest dish to serve people whose tastes are unknown, his goujonnette and chicken pie are neither bland nor cheap. There are several excellent veal dishes, some of which use the breast, the least expensive cut. Naturally, the book has a succulent steak and kidney pie.
Some recipes cherished by Moore-Betty reflect the thrift and imagination needed for gustatory survival in wartime Britain. Included in a top-hole chapter on co*cktail food are such delights as Scotch eggs (hardboiled eggs encased in sausage meat, breaded, fried and served cold) accompanied by a pint of bitter, a piece of Cheddar and a pickled onion. The only trouble with Moore-Betty’s hot cheese profiteroles, vegetable beignets and beef teriyaki is that they make co*cktail guests forget all about dinner.
An expansive, erudite fellow who served as a nonculinary aide to Monty during World War II, Moore-Betty is at his discursive best when describing the rich food of his Irish childhood. His version of plum pudding has been in the family for four generations. He reports that his most popular dessert is floating island, a gooey extravaganza of the Scots and the French as well as the Irish. Another sweet, little known in the U.S. outside the South, is syllabub, a seductive mixture of cream, brandy, white wine and sherry, which in olden times was made by squirting milk directly from cow into cognac. As for people who feel guilty when they succumb to desserts, the author says firmly: “Better to indulge yourself now and again than to spoil your otherwise good nature.”
Marcel Proust gave the best of all reasons for scooping up a dessert. In Remembrance of Things Past, he recalls the “light and fleeting” chocolate cream created by Françoise, the family cook: “To have left even the tiniest morsel in the dish would have shown as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert … under the composer’s very eyes.”
Though he will be forever associated with the petites madeleines that inspired Remembrance, Proust was a sensuous, accurate, compulsive recollector of good food. In the delectably illustrated Dining with Marcel Proust (Thames & Hudson; 160 pages; $19.95), Scholar-Cook Shirley King retraces the references and accompanies them with a recipe collection that embraces the cuisine of the Belle Époque.
There is a recipe for the braised turkey à la Normande that was carved “with sacerdotal majesty” at the Rivebelle restaurant. At the meal Mme. Swann called “le lunch,” there would be creamed eggs en cocotte—and Dining shows the way to prepare them. In Jean Santeuil, Proust wrote of the lobster set before Mlle. de Réveillon, reason enough to provide the formula for homard à l’Américaine. Albertine pleads for skate with black butter; King delivers it. Marcel wrote affectionately of éclairs, marrons glacés, strawberry juice, orangeade, chocolate cake, oysters, petite marmite, roast goose (“superbly limbed and shining with gravy”), hare a l’Allemande and venison that was “dark, brown-fleshed, hot and soused [with red wine and cognac], over which the red-currant jelly has laid a cool, sweet surface.” These and many, many other delights are recollected in tranquillity. Side by side with Marcel, Dining delivers the soul as well as the how-to of the bourgeois Brillat-Savarin.
Contemporary French cuisine is dominated by those superstar chefs who spend as much time writing glossy books and jetting around the world as they do tending their stoves. Because they lack the fame and, probably, the inclination, France’s women chefs stick close to their restaurants, which may explain why they run many of the best bistros in that country. Also, as Madeleine Peter points out in The Great Women Chefs of France (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 333 pages; $14.95), these talented femmes have generally been excluded from the cooking schools and restaurant brigades where the men learn their art. Their training has thus been on the job and their skills are less compartmentalized than those of the men. They may also be more competitive.
Madeleine Peter interviewed 28 women owner-chefs, all of whom parted with special recipes. Marthe Faure, who owns the 72-year-old Auberge Saint-Quentinoise just outside Paris, contributed veal kidneys du prince, which is one of the few French dishes to employ bourbon whisky; it also won her the coveted Grand Prix of the Poêle d’Or in 1968. Though Peter says grandly in her preface that “we are liberated from the potato, which modern industrialization has made tasteless,” her chefs offer five tasty dishes made with the proscribed pomme. An intriguing zucchini soufflé mistral comes from Colette Maudonnet, whose restaurant, Aux Naulets d’Anjou, is 160 miles southwest of Paris. Dominique Nahmias, who at 26 claims to be the youngest woman chef running a restaurant in France, the Olympe in Paris, prides herself on her salmon steaks cooked on a bed of sorrel en papillotes. And then there is Yvonne Soliva, of the Moulin de Tante Yvonne in Bouches-du-Rhône, one of whose favorite dishes is ragout of thrush (18 birds for six people). First catch the thrush.
Before compiling The Book of Latin American Cooking (Knopf; 357 pages; $15), Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz spent 20 years savoring all the latino cuisines from Mexico to Chile. They differ widely from country to country—Maya, Aztec and Inca civilizations were permeated by Spanish, Portuguese, African and even Middle Eastern influences. A prolific cookbook writer who is married to a Mexican diplomat, Ortiz traces culinary origins and remarks on the social significance of almost every dish she describes.
Though many of the materials may seem formidable to the gringo, most of the foods favored south of the border are not too difficult to prepare. Some belong in any gourmet chefs repertory: Ecuador’s beef stew in fruit sauce, for example, or the curiously named steak ragout, roupa velha (literally, old clothes), a popular dish from Cuba to Brazil. Among the Andean countries, Peru offers the most exciting cuisine. The Peruvians developed more than 100 varieties of potato around 2500 B.C. and learned to freeze-dry them. Thanks to the cold Humboldt Current, Chile has the world’s most unusual seafood: erizos, giant sea urchins; picoroccos, beaked shell fish that taste like crab; and the giant abalones known as locos.
Few of Ortiz’s recipes require special ingredients that cannot be found in the abundant latino markets of North America. It may take some getting used to, but for Christmas 1980, why not serve Mexico’s famed mole poblano de guajalote, turkey in chili and chocolate sauce? It was good enough for Montezuma to offer Cortés.—Michael Demarest
