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Articles by ” “Heat
How to Season Your Food Like the French
I thought I knew what pepper was. It obviously pairs with salt. It tastes better if you grind it yourself. And it introduces a certain quality to a dish, usually a modestly spicy heat. But how important is it, really? You would notice if your food had no salt, but would you notice if it had no pepper? My education, as such, began fifteen years ago, when I was living in Lyon with my family and training to cook French food at l’Institut Paul Bocuse.
A Very French Way to Poach an Egg
To my mind, an egg perfectly poached is among the great, essential pleasures of one’s eating life. The protein (the white) is fluffy and textured, shaped by the currents of the water it has been cooked in. The fat (the yolk) is held in place, just, by a thin membrane, looking like a piece of tropical fruit, and always a little surprising when it bursts under the tines of a fork.
How the French Dress a Salad
For most of my adult life, I never knowingly ate a vinaigrette. I never made one unless explicitly told to do so by a recipe. I liked salads, but I prepared them in what I regarded as the Italian way, with good olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and sea salt. In this, I was arrogant to a point of self-righteousness; after all, I’d say, what tastes better than good olive oil? Then, about ten years ago, after moving to Lyon with my wife, Jessica, and twin toddlers, I was changed by two events.
How to Make a Classic Bistro-Style Steak Tartare at Home
Most of us who enjoy steak tartare, preferably with a high pile of hot fries on the side, know it from eating it in a restaurant or a bistro and not from preparing it at home. But the dish is not difficult to make—after all, it involves zero cooking. In fact, making a batch doesn’t require much more than a butcher you trust, a very sharp knife, clean hands, and freezingly cold bowls and plates.
A Thanksgiving Dinner That Longs for France
Between 2008, when I moved with my family to Lyon, and 2013, when we moved back to New York, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a loose confederation of American acquaintances. Many were there because they had fallen in love with a French partner and settled in the city. Some had married people of other nationalities. For us, the city was an appealing mix of what seemed like everyone from everywhere, and no Thanksgiving ever felt simply American, except, possibly, the one we hosted.
A French Answer to American Apple Pie
The first tarte aux pommes that I came upon in Lyon, and on only our third day in the city, was inside the doorway of a bouchon and was so large that, having just been removed from the oven, it was put on its own dining table to cool. A typical French tart consists of three concentric circles of fruit slices.
The French Secret to Ratatouille, a Last Taste of Summer
“Ratatouille”: the word evokes French vegetables, meatless health, sunshine, and a jolly Pixar film that, for about six months, my young twin sons watched, seated at the kitchen table, while waiting for their dinner. The word also evokes memories of disappointment. I’ve always loved the idea of the dish but was never thrilled with what I made, and eventually I stopped trying.
The Summer Magic of a Classic Salade Niçoise
A salade Niçoise, named after the city of Nice, is among the perfect foods to be eating for lunch or dinner today, in the month of August, when your skin is sticky from sweat, and the air is once again filthy, and you can’t stop yourself from daydreaming about the Mediterranean and the particular lazy blue haze that hovers on the horizon when it’s hot, even though you know that you’re not going to the south of France anytime soon, even if you had the wherewithal to get there, because, owing...
Perfecting Roast Chicken, the French Way
It is often said that the best test of both the professional and the home cook is a roasted chicken, that, if nothing else, a good cook should always be able to serve up a beautiful bird—crispy, appetizingly fragrant, the skin deeply golden, with meat so moist that you’re tempted to tear it off the bone with your fingers.
Béarnaise, the French Sauce That Makes Ordinary Food Spectacular
Watch Bill Buford’s technique for making sauce béarnaise, a classic French sauce of clarified butter, egg yolk, vinegar, and herbs, that’s hollandaise’s bolder cousin. On a quiet summery Saturday evening several years ago, when I was living with my family in Lyon, my wife and I arranged a last-minute babysitter to look after our twin sons. Then we took off, got out of the city, and drove south along the Rhône, looking for a place for dinner. The roads were empty, and the light was a fading orange.
Mastering the Art of Making a French Omelette
Watch Bill Buford demonstrate his technique for making an omelette in the French style, with some help from the family cinematographers. A student presented his omelette. The instructor poked it and shook his head. He didn’t bother to taste it; he just tipped it into the trash. An omelette must be soft in the middle, pillowy to the touch. It should have bounce. This one was hard. The next student’s omelette was too voluminous. The instructor admonished him. It was like watching a movie without sound.
Baking Bread in Lyon
For most of my adult life, I had secretly wanted to find myself in France: in a French kitchen, somehow holding my own, having been “French-trained” (the enduring magic of that phrase). I thought of Lyon, rather than Paris or Provence, because it was said to be the most Frenchly authentic and was known historically as the world’s gastronomic capital.
The Presidential Clean-Plate Club
Just after the sun came up one recent Sunday, a group of people assembled on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue. They were cooks. Several had chef’s jackets rolled up under their arms like sleeping bags. They were about to be escorted into the United Nations to prepare a “working lunch” for forty world leaders. Except for the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for John Kerry, the leaders were Presidents.
Lucinda Williams’s Songs | The New Yorker
It’s a damp Delta night in January, and we’ve pulled into Lambert, in Quitman County, Mississippi, at one time a modestly prosperous cotton town, now reduced to a rather curious thing. The railway station—stripped down and operated in an only-one-man-needs-to-run-it kind of way—is still functioning as an agricultural freight stop, more or less as it always has, but it seems to be the exception.
Talking Turkey
J oe Hutto, who is sixty-one, has spent most of his waking life looking at wild turkeys. He may have looked at more of them than any other living American, with the “possible exception” of Lovett E. Williams, Jr., a wildlife biologist, and the bird’s principal, and probably only, life-long authority. Hutto is a trained wildlife biologist, too. He is an archeologist as well.
Mario Batali’s Secret of Excess
Mario Batali has become the city’s most widely recognized chef, changing the way people think about Italian cooking in America.Photograph by Ruven Afanador On trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, Batali has been known to share an entire case of wine during dinner, and, while we didn’t drink anything like that, we were all infected by his live-very-hard-for-now approach and had more than was sensible. I don’t know. I don’t really remember.
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