The Man Who Ate Everything (49 page)

According to the FDA’s labeling standards, “natural” bitter almond oil and almond extract can be made from caccia bark, with a result somewhere between artificial benzaldehyde and the real thing. “Pure” oil and extract must be made from bitter almonds, or from peach, plum, or cherry kernels, which, though they may be chemically distinguishable from bitter almonds, come extremely close. Most commercially available almond pastes on the market today—even those made in Europe—substitute an inferior artificial bitter almond oil for true bitter almonds.

Now it is child’s play to prepare an authentic almond granita—look for the word “pure” on the almond extract label, not the word “natural.” Or start from scratch with peach pits.

1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract, or 30 peach or
apricot pits

2
/3 cup raw shelled almonds, without their skins

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup plus 4 tablespoons hot water

3 cups spring water

If you are using peach or apricot pits, put five at a time into a plastic bag, crack them open with a hammer, and remove the kernels. You should have about 1/8 cup (2 tablespoons) of kernels. Blanch the kernels in boiling water, uncovered, for 1 minute and slip off their skins. Drain, and toast in a preheated 300° F. oven for 10 or 15 minutes until they turn light brown. Reserve. This procedure will eliminate the prussic acid while leaving much of the bitter almond taste.

Put the skinned almonds, sugar, and pure almond extract—or the blanched, roasted peach or apricot kernels instead of the extract—in a food processor and grind to a fine powder, alternating 30 seconds of pulsing with 30 seconds of steady power, for a total of 6 minutes or more, scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl halfway through and at the end. Then, with the processor running, add the 4 tablespoons of hot water, a tablespoon at a time, letting the machine run steadily for a minute after each addition. The result will be an incredibly delicious almond cream.

Gradually add the cup of hot water to dissolve the almond cream. Pour and scrape into a 2-quart bowl and add the 3 cups of spring water. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Roasted-Almond Granita from Modica

Follow the previous recipe for Maria Grammatico’s Almond Granita, but substitute shelled, unskinned raw almonds for the skinned raw almonds, and dark-roast them as follows: spread the unskinned almonds
in a heavy baking pan (or several thin pans stacked together), and roast in a preheated 300° F. oven for 5 hours, stirring every hour or so to keep the almonds on the bottom from burning. Let cool before proceeding.

Mandarin Orange Granita

Gorrado Costanzo in Noto

5 mandarin oranges, Clementines, tangerines, or satsumas (or
more if they are small)

3 cups spring water

1 cup superfine granulated sugar

Juice of 1
1
/2 lemons (about 6 tablespoons, or 3/8 cup)

Vigorously grate the skin of the fruit (unlike lemons, there is no bitter pith) into a 2-quart bowl containing the water and the sugar. Swish around the grater in the liquid to recover all the zest. Juice the fruit into a measuring cup and pour 1 1/4 cups of it into the water-sugar mixture. Add half the lemon juice, mix well, and taste. Remember that the granita will taste much less sweet when it freezes; the lemon flavor should not be assertive in itself, but should add enough acidity to balance the sugar. Add more lemon juice until you can nearly—but not quite—taste the lemon flavor.

Strain the liquid through a medium or coarse strainer so that only a little of the zest and fruit pulp passes through. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Black Mulberry or Wild Strawberry Granita

Gaffe Sicilia in Noto

Gelsi neri—
“black mulberries”—grow on great trees, not on bushes, as the nursery rhyme would have it; are rarely the object of commerce because they are fragile and easy to squash; and are not in season in most parts of this country until summer. This did not trouble me at first, because I needed to find only
one
part of the country where they are in season. The day I returned from Sicily, in mid-spring, I telephoned the most reliable hunters of produce and other delicacies, without success. Then I telephoned a friend in Tucson, renowned for its mulberry trees and early growing season. After what I learned, it should be renowned for its cruelty to mulberries: within the Tucson city limits, mulberries are an endangered fruit, threatened by the vanity of man. Planting new male mulberry trees is prohibited by law because their pollen is a powerful allergen, and Tucson gains profit and riches as a refuge for allergy sufferers and hypochondriacs. Female mulberry trees must be maimed and crippled each year by chemical spraying to prevent them from fruiting (if they somehow get pregnant without the male pollen) because the people of Tucson become very cross when ripe mulberries fall on their parked cars, splattering them with crimson. I am making plans to sue the Tucson allergy and parking lobbies for keeping me from my
gelsi neri.
But for now, I turned to wild strawberries and quickly found an importer of costly but excellent
fraises des bois
flown in from Perigord. I can still taste and smell the results.

1/2
pound of black mulberries or
fragoline
(wild strawberries,
known in France as
fraises des bois;
see Note)

2 cups spring water (see Note)

1/2 cup superfine granulated sugar

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Puree the black mulberries or
fragoline
in a food processor. You will need 2/3 cup of puree. Scrape into a bowl and mix well with the other ingredients. Pass the mixture through a strainer coarse enough to let through just a few seeds and a little fruit pulp. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Note: Black mulberries are available from Oregon in the summer. A small quantity
of fraises des bois
is grown in the United States; excellent imports from France can be purchased from the Mushroom Man in Los Angeles, (800) 945-3404, and are available from May to October. Do not use either unless they are completely red, juicy, and full of aroma.

I have tried a similar recipe calling for 3 cups of water instead of 2. Though less intense in flavor than Gaffe Sicilia’s version, it was more transparent and refreshing. Though once I pursued intensity as the ultimate goal of granitas, I have found that added water increases the crunchiness of the ice crystals and gives you another, more panoramic, vantage point on the flavor—like stepping back from a painting.

Espresso Granita from the Isle of Salina

24 fluid ounces espresso
lungo

1 scant cup granulated sugar

A “long” espresso contains more water than usual. In an espresso machine, you will need to make 7 or 8 cups of espresso. Each time, use one dose of coffee (7 grams, or
1 1/2
tablespoons), but a larger cup, and let the hot water run through the espresso until you have 3 to 3
1/2
2 fluid ounces (6 or 7 tablespoons, or a scant half cup). Pour into a 1-quart measuring cup and repeat until you have 24 fluid ounces, or 3 full cups. With a drip machine, substitute dark-roasted espresso coffee for your usual brand and triple the amount of coffee you would ordinarily use to obtain 3 full cups.

Let the espresso or drip coffee cool for 15 minutes in a 2-quart bowl. Stir in the sugar. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Chocolate Granita from Catania

None of the chocolate granitas we sampled on the way to the Catania airport was perfect, but back home in New York a few days later, with guidance from Luca Caviezel’s
Scienza e tecnologia delgelato artigianale
(Caviezel was a Catanian pastry chef renowned for his ice creams), I was able to turn the recipes I had collected into a good granita that includes a little milk.

1 1/2 ounces “Dutch-process” cocoa (1/3 cup very densely packed
or 3/4 cup very lightly spooned)

2 3/4 cups water

3/4 cup superfine granulated sugar

1/2 cup whole milk

Pinch of ground cinnamon (optional)

Sift the cocoa into the water in a pan, bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring frequently, lower the heat, and simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. Pour and scrape into a 2-quart bowl and let cool for 30 minutes. Add the sugar and stir until it dissolves. Add the milk and stir well. Add the cinnamon if that taste pleases you. Chill in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight. Then proceed to turn the liquid into a granita by following one of the methods explained on pages 370-372.

And if you would like to convert your granita into a famed eighteenth-century treat known as chocolate
in garapegra,
a “holy and noble elixir of fresh life,” add vanilla, orange zest, and a few drops of distilled jasmine.

June 1996

With a napkin of creamy starched linen, my wife wiped some wild mushrooms and a crepinette of lamb from her chiseled chin, gulped down a half glass of fourteen-dollar Bordeaux, and, referring I think to the six-course meal we had just shared, said, “Poetry is tradition compressed.”

I could not have agreed more, though my way of putting it would have been slightly different. But one thing I have learned after thirty visits to Paris is never to trust your reaction to the first night’s dinner, befuddled as you are by jet lag, the romance of Paris, and your half of the wine bottle. These distortions disappear nearly overnight. After drinking two bottles of wine a day, you quickly come down with, I find, a case of temporary alcoholism. You know that this has happened when you wake in the morning and reflexively feel around the night table for a glass of wine. From then on, your judgment is faulty only between meals.

And it
was
amazing food.

I do not remember which restaurant we were at on the night of my wife’s revelation. I have been eating these days on the edges of Paris, because that is where my favorite food is,
la cuisine moderne
at
les bistrots modernes.
It could have been La Verriere or La Regalade, L’Epi Dupin or even Chez Michel. But I suspect it was L’Os a Moelle because dinner there is always six courses, and the
wine list offers mainly 70-franc bottles, $13.60 at July’s exchange rate of 5.15 francs to the dollar, which, I predict, will only improve until the November election. On the other hand, if
I
could foresee exchange rates, I would be rich enough to buy this publishing house. And then you would see some changes! But even rich as Croesus, I would still eat at these five
bistrots modernes
and others like them.

Dinner averages 170 francs ($33) plus wine—lunch is less— the food is delicious, and it maps out a new path for the future of French cuisine. In case you have not been paying attention, haute cuisine in France is skirting the edge of calamity.

The origin of these things is always obscure, but we can start in 1992 with Yves Camdeborde, then twenty-six, one of four young sous-chefs at Les Ambassadeurs, the formal, sometimes transcendent, two-Michelin-star restaurant at the Hotel Crillon. As a teenager, Yves had come to Paris from Beam in southwest France to apprentice in the great kitchens of the Ritz Hotel, the Relais Louis XIII, and Tour d’Argent before he was hired as a sous-chef by Christian Constant, the esteemed chef at the Crillon.

Constant is a fine teacher, but after six years
,
Yves was ready to move on. In earlier years he might have stayed in haute cuisine as the second in command at one of the grand French gastronomic shrines or as chef at a dressy hotel dining room. Instead, he decided to open his own bistro in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, or, as he now considers it, a small restaurant as might exist in the provinces, attracting customers from both the neighborhood and around town. He would offer a limited choice, draw on the recipes of southwest France, charge just 165 francs ($32) for every meal, and call the place La Regalade, which refers to the practice you once saw in Spain and southwest France, where drinkers would squirt wine from a leather bag into their mouths. I suppose it was their way of having fun, like getting a bull to step on your foot in Pamplona.

Yves was taking a great gamble. His fellow sous-chefs at the Crillon helped out now and then, and watched to see if he would
succeed. And he did, completely and famously, both in the quality of his food and in his clientele. Soon it was impossible to get a dinner reservation at La Regalade unless you telephoned three weeks ahead. Yves’s business has never slackened.

I have visited La Regalade on nearly every trip to Paris since it opened, with its bright, creamy walls and six-by-ten-foot kitchen. The menu changes a little every week, so by the end of a month nothing is the same but for some specialties whose disappearance might cause a riot among the regulars, like the
cochonnaille—
a wooden board of salamis, sausages, pate, and cornichons, some made by Yves’s father. And the perfect little Grand Marnier souffles Yves learned to make at the Tour d’Argent.