Of course I didn't win.

Big, handsome, ever-smiling, famous Marcus Samuelsson won the James Beard award for best food book of the year.  He's on television all the time, he's got a couple of booming, very good restaurants in New York and all the food people in New York know who he is.  He has an amazing life story--born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, bootstraps-to-glory in Manhattan.  Nice guy too.  Naturally I hate him.

MY CLAIBORNE BIOGRAPHY IS ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S "BEST OF 2012: 50 NOTABLE WORKS OF NONFICTION"

Holy smokes!  I just found out today that they published the list more than two weeks ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/best-of-2012-50-notable-works-of-nonfiction/2012/11/15/4f55d43a-116b-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story_1.html

THE DISH THAT CRIED, "WHY ME?"

Sorting through the thousands of recipes that Craig Claiborne published to come out with 100 or 125 "greatest hits" for a cookbook to come, I face an unruly host of hard decisions.  I can't just choose Craig's own favorites--he already published those in his memoir, A Feast Made For Laughter--and there's no way to know which dishes have been most popular with his readers, so I'm left with subjectivity.  That's fine with me.  I'm picking some things that seem indispensable, others for their flair, and some just for fun.

In the last category came last night's Creamed Mushrooms with Dried Beef.  This is the same thin-sliced Armour beef in a jar that is the main ingredient in Chipped Beef, a thing that generations of students and soldiers have abhorred, calling it Shit on a Shingle, but which I particularly liked when I was at Yale.  Since the recipe began with a simple white sauce--equally essential to chipped beef--I thought, Hey, this may well be great.

Craig calls for cutting regular white mushrooms into julienne strips, which I found impossible.  They break.  So I ended up with some batonnets and some smaller chunks. These you sauté in butter.  I was surprised that Craig didn't call for the stiff discs of reconstituted beef also to be julienned, but the recipe leaves them whole, and, obliged on first try to be faithful in every possible way to the original, so did I.  The recipe also calls for prepared pimentos, the kind you also get in a jar, a little grated nutmeg, and a pinch of cayenne.  Craig cautions you not to add salt, good advice, because the beef is stunningly salty.  Craig doesn't tell you how long to cook it, but a little while suffices to soften the beef.  What you have at this point is a gooey gray glop flecked with red. 

At the end, off the heat, you stir in the cheese.  I'm in Montana this summer, so I'm doing many of these recipes the way Craig's readers would have had to do them when they were published--you don't see many fancy foodstuffs here.  At the Big Timber IGA you have your choice of Kraft Cracker Barrel Cheddar and Crystal Farm (since 1926) Sharp Cheddar.  I'd never heard of the Crystal Farm cheese, but it had fewer non-cheese ingredients.  Both are the unearthly orange-yellow of annatto.  The result, once I added the cheese, ws one of the most revolting-looking things I've ever seen.  You serve it on toast or English muffins.  I chose the latter.

It didn't taste revolting, but it wasn't good.  The meat was so salty it ruined everything.  There was way too much of that godawful cheese, and good cheddar wouldn't have made it much better--a less lurid color, I suppose.

I love being wrong--I say this a lot--because if you're right all the time you never learn anything.  Choosing this dish was wrong.  I suppose I ought to have known that, but now I've learned.

STACKING

When did this start?  I remember the Gotham Bar & Grill in Greenwich Village in the middle 1980s putting out vertiginous assemblages that fell down at first touch.  Alfred Portale’s food managed to be delicious nevertheless.  For a long time in my neighborhood in San Francisco there was a tiny place called Café Kati that was best known for its ready-to-tip architectural craziness, and even there things tasted pretty good in spite of the silly stacking.  The idea, presumably, was that if you could slice down successfully through the layers you would have a pleasing, perhaps surprising combination of flavors and textures.  The problem was that when the whole thing collapsed, as it always did, that was impossible.  It was like one of those absurd Dagwood sandwiches that only Dagwood Bumstead has ever had a big enough mouth to get a comprehensive bite of.

So today, up here in the nowheres of Montana, I’m reading the San Francisco Chronicle online, to wit, Michael Bauer’s review of a new restaurant owned by the well-known coast-to-coast restaurateur Charlie Palmer, whose other places have nearly always been both critical and popular successes, which baffles me.  Aureole, his flagship in Manhattan, always seemed insanely expensive for the quality of the food—it looked good but didn’t come together (perhaps a definitional description, now that I think of it).  His great-looking Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, California, has the same characteristics—handsome food that doesn’t taste like much.  Bauer seems in general relatively sympathetic to stacking, but in today’s Chron he writes of Palmer’s new Burritt Room that the “cornmeal-crusted oysters ($16) were poorly fried and quickly became sodden atop fennel slaw.”  Now why, I beg you, would you put fried oysters on top of the goddam slaw?  Put your fried oysters on a nice hot plate and your slaw in something else, preferably cool, maybe a little bowl, and you have one of the world’s fine combinations.  Put 'em together and you have—sodden.

In the Ninth Arrondissment of Paris there’s a superb little restaurant called La Carte Blanche that seems to get the stacking thing gloriously right.  What they do is simple, unfussy, and logical.  Here’s a prime example, a recent fish dish:

So obviously there’s nothing inherently wrong with stacking: If you can actually get a bite in your mouth and its tastes good, great.  But crisp fried oysters on top of wet slaw?   Bleah.

COOKING CLAIBORNE IN MONTANA

This is more like real life.  For all of June and July, I'm in Outer Greater Metropolitan Melville, Montana--as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in this country.  Melville is not really a town; the post office and the snack bar constitute its one commercial building.  Big Timber, a town though not much of one, is 28 miles away.  The one grocery store there is lousy--forget the produce--though there is an excellent organic butcher with superb local beef and pork.  For real supplies I have to drive to Bozeman, a hundred miles.  Thank God for audiobooks (just now, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, beautifully performed by the late Frederick Davidson).  Bozeman has its Community Food Co-op, where if you hit it on the right day you may find excellent organic produce, or you may not.  What they have that's consistently great, surprisingly, are salmon and other seafood.  They have a direct relationship with a salmon boat in Alaska, which I find rather amazing.  The other day we had Copper River king salmon, the ne plus ultra of the whole salmonid family.  Damn stuff cost thirty bucks a pound, though.  Helps you keep the servings small.  And there's a brand-new Safeway with a lot of organic things, good olive oils, and so on; a nice place.

In Montana you learn to live by the freezer.  Almost everybody I know has a huge one, often full of last fall's wild game--pronghorn antelope the best, though hard to hunt; elk delicious and abundant; deer insanely superabundant and child's play to kill one, but it's nobody's favorite meat.  And there are the birds: grouse of various sorts, Hungarian partridge, pheasant, ducks.  All these are wonderful food, and, not a hunter myself, I mooch them whenever I can.  At the Co-op you can get domestically raised bison, which is mild and nice and somewhat uninteresting.  One learns also that beef and chicken and pork and salmon all freeze pretty doggone well.  If you want a domestic duck, you can get it only one way: hard as a rock.

So in cooking my way through Craig Claiborne's Greatest Hits, as I'm doing this summer, I'm in a situation much closer to that of most Americans, with difficult access to good ingredients and making do with a lot of not very good ones.  In San Francisco, a weekly visit to the best farmer's market in the United States yields wondrous produce all year round, and you can get just about anything you want.  For the meal I'm about to write about, I decided to see if I could find live snails, and I could.  In the event, they're an amazing pain in the neck to deal with, and people tell me the canned ones are just as good.  In any case, planning to use them in Montana, I had no choice but canned.  And I had to bring those.  Otherwise I'd have had to order them shipped in.

Elizabeth was here until yesterday, and night before last we made an all-Claiborne dinner for two dear friends.  I wanted to revisit one of the first appetizers that my young bride and I made when we were learning to cook from Craig's New York Times Cook Book, in the early 1970s in New York: Mushrooms Stuffed with Snails.

You need large mushrooms, regular white ones, and my guests were diligent in finding some, at Costco in Helena, nice and fresh.  You make snail butter by chopping parsley, garlic, celery, and shallots very very fine and then creaming that mixture with room-temperature butter.  I couldn't find any shallots, so I used onion.  Craig's recipe calls for a quite a lot less garlic than the other ingredients, and I found that it could have used more, so I suggest you use equal amounts of all four of those, and do please keep chopping till they're teeny-tiny.  This would probably be a good place to use your food processor, actually.  Smush the vegetables with the butter and season it.  Eyeballing the amount you make seems to me just as good as following an instruction--make as much as you think you want to use for however many mushrooms and snails you've got (at one snail per mushroom).  French tradition is to really drench the snails in the snail butter, but American diners may find that excessive.

So you pull out the mushroom stems (use them elsewhere, as I did below), roll the caps in melted plain butter, and splooch some snail butter into each cavity.  Top it with a snail and smear a little more butter on top of each.  Bake for fifteen minutes at 375, and there you are.

Craig serves only two mushrooms per person, and for once I think his servings are too small.  Three or four look much better on a plate.

I wanted to try something adventurous and somewhat difficult for the main course, and that's where the duck came in: Canard au Citron, from the New New York Times Cook Book, published in 1979 when Craig was discovering, and loving, the French Nouvelle Cuisine, which this dish is a fine example of.  Thanks again to our guests, who got a duck early enough to have it fully thawed by the time I went to work on it.

First you pull out all the goodies inside.  Save the delicious liver for something else, then chop up the neck, the heart, and the giblets, also the wingtips, and brown them over high heat.  Add onions, carrots, and celery and cook till they soften.  Then add a quite large amount of chicken stock--Craig says three cups--along with parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and peppercorns.  If you've made the mushroom dish above, you could throw in a few of the mushroom stems as well.  Don't worry about the size of the vegetable pieces, you're going to strain all that out.  Cook that for an hour or so while the duck is roasting.

Craig trusses the duck and turns it from bottom to side to top to side every half hour.  I find, however, that you get a much nicer finished duck, more evenly cooked and with crisper skin, if you don't truss it at all.  (Please do not use the non-word crispy, okay?)  Also you don't need to turn it.  Just salt and pepper the bird and roast it for two hours at 375, pouring off the accumulated fat every half hour or so.  (That fat is great for frying potatoes, by the way--essential, in fact, to the great dish Pommes de Terre Sarladaise.)

After an hour or so, strain the stock, pushing hard on all the solids to get the last best juices. Craig says you should have two cups; I say if you do, there's going to be too much sauce, and you should reduce it by half.  Other than that, there's a lot of down time during all this roasting, for everybody to stand around and drink wine and yak.

Then toward the end you have to get moving.  You make a gastrique by boiling down a quarter-cup each of sugar and wine vinegar and set that aside.  You peel a lemon, getting as little pith as possible, cut the peel into julienne, blanch it for a minute in boiling water, and set that aside as well.  Then squeeze the juice out of the lemon and keep that at hand.  Also have at hand a fine strainer, a half-cup of Sherry or Madeira, and a quarter-cup of Grand Marnier.

Transfer the duck to a fresh roasting pan and put it back in the oven.  If it's not nice and brown, though I think it will be, turn the oven up to 400 or 450.

Now pour off all the fat and deglaze the roasting pan with the Sherry or Madeira.  You're going to have a lot of delicious though very adhesive gradu to scrape up, and please get it all.  Reduce the Sherry by quite a lot, then add it to the gastrique.  The latter may have hardened into something resembling glass, but don't worry, it will melt.  Combine with the reduced stock.  You may want to thicken this sauce, and cornstarch or arrowroot would be best, in order to preserve its quite lovely transparency.  Strain the sauce through your fine sieve.

With any luck, you've got somebody there to carve the duck while you finish the sauce (tip of the hat to my pal Bob Kiesling).  Add the lemon juice and cook as long as it takes to get the duck ready to serve.  Then at the very last minute add the lemon julienne and the Grand Marnier--don't boil off the alcohol--and you will have a rather wondrous, gleaming, fragrant sauce.

I served wild rice lightly flavored with orange peel (I thought Pommes Sarladaise would really be too much duck fat for one meal) and some nice frozen Birdseye peas cooked with lettuce.  And red Burgundy.

For dessert I made, for the first time in my life, one of the great dishes I remember from growing up in Memphis, Chess Pie.  The story of that name's origin is this.  Yankee goes into a restaurant, finishes his main course, and asks what's for dessert.  Waitress says, "We got pie."  Guy orders apple pie.  "We ain't got apple pie."  Then he'll have peach pie.  "We ain't got no peach pie, neither."  Well, he demands, what kind of pie do you have?  "Jes' pie."

Basically it's a baked-custard pie flavored with lemon--a nice harmony with the duck.

Make a pie crust with a cup and a half of flour, six tablespoons of butter, a little sugar, and enough ice water to make it right.  Put the dough in the fridge or the freezer while you make the filling.

Grate the peel of a lemon--a Microplane rasp is good for this--then squeeze out the juice.  If that's not a quarter-cup of juice, squeeze another lemon, but you've got enough lemon zest already.  Cream a stick of room-temp butter with two cups of sugar, beat in a tablespoon or two of flour and an equal amount of cornmeal and then four eggs, adding them one at a time.  You probably will want to taste it at this point and add some salt.  Then add a quarter-cup of milk, your quarter-cup of lemon juice, and the zest.

Roll out a single crust and settle it neatly in a nine-inch pie pan.  Crimp the edges.  Pour in the batter, and bake at 350.  Craig says 45 minutes, but after 45 minutes at this elevation--we're at 5500 feet above sea level--the filling would still slosh back and forth like soup.

Here is a delicate aspect of making custard pies.  You'd like it to be firm enough to stick a knife in and have it come out clean, but mine never did reach that point even after half an hour extra of baking.  And if you over-bake it, the custard is going to get watery.  So if you're lucky you'll have nice firm custard.  Otherwise you're going to have to take a chance on it firming up in the refrigerator.  Which mine did, by the grace of God.  You want it fairly cold.

It comes out a beautiful, warm brown.  Grate a little nutmeg over the top.  The cornmeal you added lends the texture a gentle crunch.  Some whipped cream is good against the boldly assertive lemon flavor, though with the snail butter, the duck, and naked Chess Pie you may feel you've had enough fat for one dinner.

A glass of the Sherry or Madeira you used in the duck sauce is terrific with jes' pie.

GODDAM NOISY RESTAURANTS

If Craig Claiborne were alive today,  and he walked into The Slanted Door in San Francisco, I believe he would turn around and walk back out without tasting the food.  He would find the noise unbearable.  I spent more than two years researching a book called The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance (just out, by the way), so I’m pretty confident in saying that.  Craig was the first food editor of the New York Times, having started in 1957, and he is the father of the food world we now inhabit.  Some of his legacy would appall him.  Civilized conversation was something he prized.

Yet The Slanted Door is very popular—it is the highest-grossing restaurant in San Francisco, so clearly a lot of people can tolerate the racket and do like the food.  I don’t, but I wouldn’t eat there again anyway, so that doesn’t matter.

New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles—every major American city is chockablock with painfully noisy but nonetheless popular restaurants, each full of bellowing men and screeching women.  To my ear the women are worse, owing to two factors: the relatively recent ascent of baby-talk voices so piercing they almost could cut glass; and the increasing tendency of some women to imitate men in laughing with their mouths wide open.  Woo hoo! is their aural signature.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant reviews do their readers a particular favor by bestowing not just the usual star ratings for food but also noise ratings that rise from one bell for “pleasantly quiet” to four bells, “can talk only in raised voices,” and finally to a little icon of a bomb, indicating “too noisy.”  It’s not unusual for the Chron to give a place three stars and also a bomb.  Why so many people willingly go to a restaurant in the full knowledge that they will have to shout to be heard throughout the meal, and and still may not be heard, would be a mystery to Craig Claiborne.

Why are things like this?  I can think of several causal factors.

    —Managers and servers know that turning up the music makes a crowd louder, and they conflate the resultant shouting with “having a good time.”  The New York restaurateur Tony May was quoted thus in the Wall Street Journal: “I don't think of it as noise.  It's excitement.  The new consumer is looking for energy, a good vibe.”  In France and Italy, meanwhile, people laugh and have a great time in restaurants without yelling.

    —Owners tend not to mention this, but the din makes people drink more, eat faster, and leave sooner.

    —Many restaurants are physically designed to be noisy, with hard surfaces and no sound-deadening materials.  Of The Slanted Door the Chronicle’s Michael Bauer wrote, “When the metal legs of the formed wooden chairs drag across the floor as patrons scoot in or away from the table, it's the 21st century version of nails scraping across a blackboard.  All through the night, the already explosive noise level is pierced by the screech of metal against stone.”

    —A small number of very noisy people raise the noise level throughout a restaurant.

    —The belief is widespread that we must show happiness and that raucous laughter is an index of happiness.

    —Ear-splitting noise increases the secretion of the “fight-or-flight” neurotransmitter epinephrine, and the edgy sensation that that induces can be perceived as an exciting “buzz.”

    —Many American children are no longer instructed in civil behavior.  When they grow up, they do not know the difference between public and private space.

    —People with empty lives crave overstimulation—hence not only noise but obesity.  People with empty lives have nothing to say anyhow.

    —There are fewer and fewer alternatives.  In the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants,” ratings of one or two bells are scarce.

No doubt you can supply more reasons.   In Craig’s last years—he died in 2000—he published a slim little book titled Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World, and in it he decried the increasingly boorish behavior he saw around him in restaurants.  If he were still among us, I am certain that he would be raising hell about it, in print and often, and he would undoubtedly get results.

The big question for the rest of us, now, without Craig to speak on our behalf, is, What can we do about it?   One thing I’m sure of is that if enough of us complain, things will change.  So complain.  Assertively.  Just not too loudly, please.

THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: TRAVELS AND PLEASURES

So much great stuff happening for my new book.  Wonderful pub party in New York.  Amazing coverage in the New York Times on the very day of publication: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/dining/craig-claiborne-set-the-standard-for-restaurant-reviews.html?pagewanted=all

--Not only the big piece by Pete Wells but additional ones by Jacques Pépin and Bryan Miller, plus two memorable pieces by Craig himself.

And now I'm in the plush comfort of Southern hospitality--readings, radio, TV, friends old and new.  Best of all has been a party given for me by Marion and Claiborne Barnwell in Jackson, Mississippi.  Claiborne Barnwell is Craig's nephew, and he and his wife brought together a splendid crowd of fascinating people. 

Mississippi is an amazing place: Lemuria in Jackson and Turnrow Books in Greenwood are two of the finest bookstores I've ever seen, both run by dedicated lovers of good writing.  Tomorrow I'll be reading at another of the state's extraordinary literary crossroads, Square Books in Oxford--cheek by jowl with Faulkner's house and Ole Miss.  It was John T. Edge of the latter, head of its Center for the Study of Southern Culture, who gave me the push I needed to get going on The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat, back in 2009.  And it was John T.'s grad student, Georgeanna Milam Chapman, whose master's thesis on Claiborne saved me many months of research; Georgeanna's generosity in sharing it with me warms my heart every time I think about it.

And oh, Memphis barbecue!  Without question the best in the world.  Leonard's my hangout since childhood, iconic, still the best of the best.  Central Barbecue new to me, with a uniquely powerful sauce and delightful staff.  Today will be lunch at the Barbecue Shop, another temple of barbecue greatness.

CHICKEN VALLÉE D’AUGE

Some recipes for this famous old dish call for apples, many for mushrooms.  Craig Claiborne’s has neither.  What is indispensable in his and all the others is the lovely apple brandy of Normandy called Calvados.

Having acquired some highly aromatic Calvados for the tripes à la mode de Caën of last week, I set out in quest of something worthy of it, and found chicken à la Vallée d’Auge in The New York Times International Cook Book, of 1971.  Craig, cooking for eight people, roasts two whole chickens in butter at 400º, but for just Elizabeth and me I did it with two thighs (skin on, bone in) at 450º.  He adds chopped onion partway through the roasting, a good idea, which I forgot to do.

In the old-fashioned way, he cooks each of the companion vegetables separately in its own pot of boiling water—carrots, turnips, green beans, and peas.  (Craig almost always had his friend Henry Creel nearby to wash dishes, or somebody else, hence his profligate use of pots.)  Because green beans are out of season, I left them out, but we do have beautiful early carrots, turnips, and peas right now, and I thought that if I watched them carefully I could roast the root vegetables in a cast-iron frying pan with the chicken.  I had pinky-skinny carrots that only needed peeling, and I cut the turnips into half-inch chunks, and although I did have to remove them before the chicken was done, they came out just beautiful.  The roasting probably helped compensate for the sweetness I’d lost by forgetting the onions, and the vegetables also contributed handsomely to the fond in the bottom of the pan.  I cooked the peas in a little water and butter, covered, till they were good and cooked—I don’t hold with underdone peas.

Remove the chicken and the vegetables to a hot platter, season them, and keep them warm.  Pour most of the accumulated fat out of your roasting pan, and deglaze it with a couple of tablespoons of Calvados—you may need to add a little water or white wine to get up all the little crunchy bits, and of course you do want to get them all—and then add some cream and reduce it to whatever consistency you want the sauce to be.  The cream needn't be much, maybe a couple of tablespoons per person.  Correct the seasoning.

Because the chicken skin is nice and crisp, you may not want to turn it in the sauce at this point, or maybe you do.  The vegetables are so pretty that I think they look best served unsauced.

A last splash of Calvados adds real panache to the sauce—don’t boil off the alcohol, you want that tang.

The way I think this dish looks best, which Craig Claiborne would never have done, is with the chicken on top of the sauce and the vegetables mixed together next door, maybe with a wee bit of sauce under them too.  Craig specifically directs you to heat up the vegetables in the sauce and then pour the whole kaboodle over the chicken.

MY CLAIBORNE BOOK IN TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES

Kind of a miracle.   Frank Bruni's op-ed column in today's New York Times is all about Craig Claiborne, and nearly all of it derives from my book, The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance.

ROGNONS DE VEAU À LA MOUTARDE

They do not taste like pee.  Veal kidneys with mustard sauce are one of the great classics of French cooking for a reason: The dish is fantastic.

Ingredients, per person: one kidney, a couple of mushrooms, a couple of teaspoons of finely chopped shallots, a little Cognac, about a quarter-cup of cream, butter.

What is indispensable is that you have the freshest of kidneys.  Craig’s recipe, like nearly all others, specifies a whole kidney per serving, which is about half a pound.  (An American veal calf is like the kid in the back row repeating sixth grade for the third time who can’t fit into his desk anymore and whose secondary sexual characteristics belie his claim to “childhood."  A French or Italian calf tends to die younger.)  But I’m sorry, having looked a whole American veal kidney in the eye, I say a whole one is too much for one serving for any but the biggest of eaters; and half a kidney is probably too little.  You almost certainly are going to have to order kidneys in advance, so there will be waste, including quite a lot of fat.  (It’s the best-tasting fat on the whole critter, however.  A devil-may-care gourmand might fry potatoes in it, but for a gift of that fat and the organ trimmings your cat or dog will deem you a god.)

Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey’s recipe was first published in their very-non-best-seller Veal Cookery, of 1978, and Craig republished it word for word in his memoir, A Feast Made for Laughter, which included his one hundred favorite recipes.  Like many of his recipes, there’s a great deal it doesn’t tell you.

First of all Craig tells you to cut the kidneys into cubes “of one inch or slightly smaller.”  That happens to be geometrically impossible.  In any case Julia Child, in volume one of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, insists that unless you cook your veal kidneys whole, “the juices pour out and the kidneys boil and toughen.”

But in chunks is how I’ve always had them in French restaurants, and in chunks, says Jean-Pierre Moullé, the distinguished chef of Chez Panisse, is the classic way.  “But you’ve got to pay attention when you cook them,” Jean-Pierre told me.  “High heat, so you’ve got to be quick.  Butter and oil, or just oil.  Hot, quick, keeping them moving.  But too rare and it’s disgusting, and overdone and it’s rubber.”

Then you absolutely must get rid of the cooking fat altogether, because—Julia’s right about this—they will have oozed out some very unpleasant gray juice.  Dump the cooked kidneys into a sieve over the sink, wipe out the pan, melt a little fresh butter, and hold the kidneys barely warm.

In another pan sauté some sliced mushrooms in butter—regular button mushrooms—adding shallots halfway along, and then a splash of Cognac (which may burst into flame for a second, which is fun), and then a generous pour of cream, or a nice whack of crème fraîche.  Craig assigns to each of these phases a certain number of minutes along with the instruction to “keep stirring.”  He gives you no idea whatever of how much heat to use, or what the result is supposed to be like.  I will tell you.  You want to cook the mushrooms over lively heat so that they give up their liquid and start to brown—without burning the butter.  Then you add the shallots and cook them over a gentler heat till they’re translucent but not browning.  When you add the cream you want to turn the flame back up and boil it softly till it looks like a sauce and tastes good.  You stop a little short of the right thickness because it will continue to thicken somewhat.

I’m not specifying quantities, because you might like more or fewer mushrooms than I would; same with the cream.  Brandy too, but do go easy on it.

At the end you need to move quickly and have everything else already on the—warmed, please!—plates.  Potatoes sautéed in butter are perfect.  Elizabeth says young escarole would be good, and we’ve tried pea greens too, which weren’t so great.  Spinach maybe?  Peas would be perfect if you could ever find perfect peas (shoot me, but I think Green Giant frozen ones are the best).  I don’t know, maybe the whole American insistence on something green with everything is out of place here.

Anyway, hot up the sauce to boiling, fold in the kidneys quickety-quick along with a good dollop of Dijon mustard—taste it at this point and make sure it’s all in balance.  Have I said anything yet about tasting the food?  Taste your food.  Don’t worry about trichinosis or whatever it is your mother may have scared you about.  Taste the food, keep tasting it, and never serve the dish unless you’ve tasted it in its final form, in a right-size forkful and at the proper temperature.

Then salt and pepper, and taste it again, and swirl in some butter to smooth the liaison.  That’s it.

No, wait, Craig says to serve it on toast, and he’s right, it’s a great idea—good texture, and a great soaker-upper of the sauce.

A young red Burgundy is the ideal accompaniment.

TRIPES À LA MODE DE CAËN, part two

In further preparation, I found that this dish is the subject of virtual cult worship in France.  My friend Annie Jacquet Bentley, emailing from the old country, turned me on to the Confrérie des Tripaphages—the Brotherhood of Tripe Eaters—one of those only-in-France organizations fanatically devoted to a cultural obsession, in their case not only tripe but all the abats (offal, the beloved orphans of refined gastronomy): brains, head, muzzle, cheek, tongue, sweetbreads, breast, spinal marrow, tail, udders, liver, lungs, heart, testicles (also known as frivolités), kidneys, ears, spleen, and, supreme above all, tripe; and supreme above all other tripes, Tripes à la Mode de Caën.

The Grand Master of the Confrérie, M. Jean-Claude Guilleux, is, please note, suitably bedight in ancient costume, including what seems to be a velvet beanbag for a topper and, in lieu of a prince’s mace, a big wooden tripe-stirrer. 

This devotion to offal isn’t just a French thing.  The ideals of good gastronomic citizenship increasingly hold that we owe it to the animals we kill to make the most of them—as my father’s and Craig Claiborne’s families in Mississippi used to say of their pigs, to use everything but the squeal.  The British chef Fergus Henderson has a serious best-seller in his The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, and here in San Francisco Chris Cosentino draws hordes of carnivores to his restaurant Incanto, where beef heart on a skewer is a gentle introduction to the more challenging stuff.

The compendious Larousse Gastronomique, quoting the culinary historian Philéas Gilbert, informs us that the ancestry of Tripes à la Mode de Caën

goes back far into the past.  Athenaeus praised this dish.  The father of Greek poetry, Homer, noted the excellence of tripe....Rabelais tells us how Gargamelle gave birth to Gargantua after having eaten a huge dish of godebillios.

The more modern but equally obscure version of that word is gaudebillauds—a local dialect name for none other than Tripes à la Mode de Caën.  For those of you not up on your French literature, Gargantua was a big scary giant in a series of five satirical and quite dirty novels by François Rabelais—so we know that the dish was already held to have magical powers five hundred years ago.

By the nineteenth century France was full of triperies, and most people bought their tripe already cooked.  Auguste Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine, which gives recipes for virtually everything in all of French cuisine, has only this to say about Tripes à la Mode de Caën:

The preparation of tripe in the Caën manner calls for special treatment which it is not always easy to give.  It is preferable, in the circumstances, to go to the people who specialise in its preparation.

Well, thanks a lot, Auguste!  I should note that despite the best efforts of the Confrérie des Tripaphages, there remain today fewer than six  hundred honest-to-God triperies in France.

So to hell with Escoffier.  Henri-Paul Pellaprat and his academy’s-worth of fellow chefs in L’Art Culinaire Français tell us that the tripe of Caën is “the glory of Norman cooking...famous throughout the world,” and I’m damned well going to make it at home.

Following Craig’s instructions, I’ve blanched my calf’s foot, and I’ve soaked my tripe.  Supposedly the latter was going to require several changes of water till it ran clear, but it was clear right away, very nice.

I laid the calf’s foot at the bottom of a heavy Dutch oven (Jean-Pierre Moullé said it would do just as well as his tripière), cut the tripe into two-inch squares, and layered those on top.  Then came a carrot, a peeled onion, a stalk of celery, a leek, and a bouquet garni (bay, thyme, parsley, a clove, peppercorns, a clove of garlic).  Salt, pepper.  I poured in water to cover—some recipes call for Norman hard cider, which would be lovely, but Craig said water and I was trying to stick to his gospel.  Finally, blanching a little myself, I blanketed the whole thing with beef fat.  I brought it to a boil on the stove and then stuck it in a 300º oven.  Because my pot was not hermetically sealed, I did top up the liquid a few times.

Twelve hours later I had one of the most god-awful-looking messes I had ever laid eyes on.

Well, onward.  The big thing at this point was to get rid of all that fat, most of which had now melted down to a glistening inch or more of hot grease sloshing around on top.  The easy way to degrease the dish—which Craig’s recipe never mentions—is to strain the liquid out and leave it in the fridge overnight.  You can then just pop that huge cap of fat right off. 

Meanwhile you need to hunt around in the remaining mess for the various bones and get rid of those.  Also the vegetables, some of which will have cooked so far down they won’t be easy to identify.

And here’s something really creepy.  The actual hoofs?  They’re gone.  They’ve dissolved.

Add some good aged Calvados to your liquid.  Craig says then to strain it back into the dish through the double thickness of cheesecloth, though it’s hard to see the point of that, given what you’re pouring it into looks like.  Taste, and adjust the seasoning.

“Serving piping hot,” writes Craig, “with boiled potatoes on the side.”  Most authorities counsel a white wine, though cider would be excellent.

And, well, okay, let’s eat.  Boiled potatoes.  A bottle of Vouvray.  The tripe carefully degreased and re-hotted.  The calf’s foot has made the liquid unctuous indeed, but there’s still a lot of liquid, so a spoon comes in handy.

It’s very good.  Very good indeed.  But also a reminder that truly to appreciate a dish like this, to experience the deep-seated craving that brings citizens to form societies of devotion, you have to have grown up with a dish like Tripes à la Mode de Caën, or at least have eaten it many times.  If I were served my mother’s tuna-fish salad—heavily sweetened with pickle juice—for the first time now, at my age, I don’t know how I would take to it.  And do you remember your first raw oyster?

There are a good many reasons this dish is worth the work—one of them being how it links us through the centuries to our gastronomic forebears.  Another is that, strange though it may at first seem, it really does taste good; and in a way that nothing else does.

TRIPES À LA MODE DE CAËN, part one

This is something I’m writing about in advance because I sense that I will have been changed in some mysterious way afterwards.  The thing is tripes à la mode de Caën, one of the classic dishes of French cooking.  The city of Caën, in Normandy, is famous for its tripe, and for being the resting place of William the Conqueror.

The tripe dish is among those I’ve chosen for Craig Claiborne’s Greatest Hits.  It’s significant in his career because it was one of the first recipes that Craig really challenged his readers with—in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times of December 8, 1957, when he had been working for the paper for less than three months.  He had just begun to show off his wicked wit, quoting this from the Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery: “Tripe, like certain alluring vices, is enjoyed by society’s two extremes, the topmost and lowermost strata.”

“Alluring vices” were a constant theme in Craig’s mind, and life, and he kept them almost entirely secret in those days.  But that has nothing to do with this.

I’m making only a quarter of the amount he goes for in his New York Times Cook Book of 1961.  That recipe calls for four pounds of honeycomb tripe and four calves’ feet.  Even from my very wide-ranging butcher in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Meat Company, tripe and calves’ feet have to be ordered.  When I went to pick up my one pound of tripe and my single calf’s foot, I was stunned: This was no foot, this was a whole goddamned lower leg!  It weighed four pounds, and cost twenty-three dollars.

Contemplating the monstrous thing at home—hoof and all, we’re talking—I felt that something was wrong.  I returned to the butcher, and explained my position.  Sympathetic as they always are, two of the guys at Golden Gate split the leg with their saw, longitudinally, so that the marrow and connective tissue would do their job of gelatinizing and silkifying the sauce; and they kindly took back half, saying they could easily use it in their weekly batch of (superb) veal stock.  They also sawed it in half the other way, so that it would fit in—what?  I still have no idea.  I do not own a tripière.  Yes, of course, the French batterie de cuisine includes a glazed earthenware pot dedicated to the baking of tripe:

I’ll spare you the rigamarole of prep—a good deal of washing, soaking, and blanching.  You layer tripe and vegetables on top of the calf’s foot and blanket the whole thing with—I kid you not—slices of pure beef fat.  But where the recipe starts to get really, um, unusual is in step five: “Cover the pot with the lid and prepare a thick paste with flour and water.  Seal the cover with the paste.  Bring to boiling point on top of stove, then place in oven.  Bake twelve hours.”  You read that right: twelve hours.

If you’re Craig Claiborne, send Con Ed bill to New York Times.  If you’re housewife in Caën, in nineteenth century, take tripière to neighborhood baker at end of day and leave in oven all night.  If you’re me, or you, make on cold day and prepare for major spike in utility bill.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

BILLI BI

My new book, THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: CRAIG CLAIBORNE AND THE AMERICAN FOOD RENAISSANCE, will be out in early May, and so this seems like a good time to wake up my long-sleeping blog.  I’ll be posting several times a week now.

I’m already at work on what I’m pretty sure will be that book’s successor, Craig Claiborne’s Greatest Hits.  Since Craig published about twenty books and literally thousands of recipes, deciding on a hundred or so greatest hits is something of a challenge.  Ultimately it has to come down to my own choices, my own favorites.  I’m now cooking my way through them—finding errors sometimes in the originals, realizing that I have access to ingredients now that Craig didn’t thirty or forty years ago, and sometimes seeing that classic perfection is just that.

One of the great classics of the once-great Paris restaurant Maxim’s is a mussel soup called Billi Bi, which has the particular distinction of having no mussels in it.  Nevertheless, as Craig wrote in the original New York Times Cook Book, it “may well by the most elegant and delicious soup ever created.  It may be served hot or cold.  This is the recipe of Pierre Franey, one of this nation’s greatest chefs.”  Until 1960 Pierre was the chef of Le Pavillon, the best French restaurant in the United States, and thereafter was Craig’s professional partner for twenty-eight years.

The main idea is to create an intense mussel-flavored broth.  For four people, Pierre steamed two pounds of mussels with shallots, onions, parsley, pepper, a little cayenne, a little butter, half a bay leaf, a smidgen of thyme, and a cup of white wine.  He also added salt, but you need to go easy there, because mussels usually have quite a bit of their own.  I would suggest that you use a pretty good wine, because it is a significant contributor to the flavor.

In 1961, when The New York Times Cook Book was published, mussels were amazingly cheap, but they were also unbelievably onerous to clean—they came with scraggy, shaggy beards attached, and the beards were often clogged with sand and various little sea critters.  “Certain restaurants,” Craig wrote, “place them in the electric machine that is used for removing potato skins, but such equipment is rare, of course, in the private home.”  Rare, Craig? 

He recommended going at the shells with a plastic mesh scrubbing ball and then soaking them in fresh water for at least an hour so that they would expel whatever sand remained inside.  Mussels these days—one of the few examples of virtuous aquaculture—nearly always come beardless and sand-free.

Shallots were nearly impossible to find, even in New York.  Most home cooks, in fact, didn’t know the difference between shallots and scallions, and they probably made do with the latter.

So you steam the mussels and then strain the broth through cheesecloth.  You bring the broth to a boil and combine it with two cups of cream.  Pierre, with his classical training and no fear of cholesterol, then thickened it with a lightly beaten egg yolk—and sometimes went even further, stirring in two tablespoons of hollandaise.  Billi Bi was not a soup for the faint (or sclerotic) of heart.  Craig said you could serve it hot or cold, but I think hot is much better.

(With the strained-out mussels you can make a nice salad the next day with a simple vinaigrette, or, because mussels reheat quite satisfactorily, a delicious pasta—spaghetti or linguine—with olive oil, garlic, parsley, and a little tomato.)

The thing that you’ve got to be sure of when you make your Billi Bi is the intensity of the broth.  Once upon a dreadful time, not long ago, with seven people coming for dinner, I doubled the recipe, and, having had perfect success previously with Pierre’s proportions, I just went ahead and poured in a quart of cream.  Big mistake.  What I got tasted like straight cream with only the faintest hint of mussels.

My solution was to unshell all the already cooked mussels and simmer them for half an hour in a small amount of water, which gave me a very intense broth—just enough to bring the soup up to precisely right.  Partly because I was serving steak with sauce Béarnaise for the next course, I decided to forego the thickening with egg yolks, and I don’t think that hurt the billi bi at all.  It was plenty rich.

Speaking of rich.  The leading legend of the origin of Billi Bi, completely unverifiable, is that it was named by Louis Barthe, the chef at Maxim’s (the Maxim's, in Paris) in the early 1900s, for his spectacularly wealthy regular customer, the American tin-plating magnate William B. (Billy B.) Leeds Sr., who spent a lot of time in Paris in the first decade of the century and died there in 1908.  His son, William B. Leeds Jr., was married to the exiled Princess Xenia of Russia and spent most of his time in Paris in 1922 and 1923.  So the soup’s eponym could have been either of them.

But: Waverly Root, in his Paris Dining Guide of 1969, wrote of Maxim’s Billi Bi that he “ran into blank incomprehension there when [he] tried to delve into the origin of a specialty in which the house takes particular pride.”  Root nevertheless asserted that “actually it was invented at Maxim’s,” and went on to say—without citing any authority whatever—that it was “named for an American bon vivant, William B. Beebe, whose friends called him Billy B.”

But but but: In Chez Maxim’s: Secrets and Recipes from the World’s Most Famous Restaurant, Presented by the Countess of Toulouse-Lautrec, published in 1962, that estimable noblewoman wrote that

It was Louis Barthe, the former chef at Maxim’s, who told me the story behind the Potage Billy By.  In 1925, he was working in the kitchen at Ciro’s, a restaurant in Deauville known for a special mussels dish with a particularly succulent juice.  One day a very good customer, Mr. William Brand, decided to invite some American friends to Ciro’s.  Mussels are generally eaten with the fingers in France, using one double shell as tongs to scoop the meat out of the others.  As Mr. Brand wanted to spare his friends this delicate operation, he requested that the juice be served without the mussels.  It was such a success that during the days that followed each of his guests returned separately and ordered the “Potage Billy Brand.”  For the sake of discretion, it was placed to the menu as Potage Billy B., and thus was born the Potage Billy By which has since become a classic of the French culinary tradition.

So who the hell knows.

Forward into the Past in Quest of Craig Claiborne

I've been continuing to cook my way into Craig Claiborne's mind. Amanda Hesser's new Essential New York Times Cookbook reprints a ton of his recipes, and she has done an excellent job of choosing particularly evocative ones. For some longtime Brit friends last night I did Claiborne's roast filet of beef with bordelaise sauce. Filet is generally deprecated as mushy and flavorless, but that which I got from the Golden Gate Meat Company--which really does have the best of everything--was dry-aged and firm and luscious (and organic and amazingly expensive).

For the sauce I cheated a bit by using Golden Gate's veal stock, which they make completely according to the rules. It's a very easy sauce once you've got that. You just reduce some red wine with shallots down to a goo, combine it with the stock, and reduce that slowly till it's saucy-ish. At that point it seemed a little sour and a little bitter, so I strained out the shallots, which had gotten kind of pickly; then I added a wee tad of sugar, which did the trick.

The meat cooks very fast indeed--I barely caught it at 125 in the fat end after only fifteen minutes. After a good twenty-minute rest, however, it was uniformly rosy straight through. A few tablespoons of butter gave my bordelaise the body it needed, and bingo, that was one hell of a roast beef.

Per person I served also one carrot roasted golden brown and one ratte potato roasted crisp in butter, and that austere plate looked like something that Craig would have approved.

And now I've been thinking in the opposite direction--toward a future, this one most likely altogether hypothetical because it looks as if we're not going to be cooking a Thanksgiving dinner this year and even if we were, Elizabeth would never tolerate this menu. My idea was not one of these deconstructions that are so fashionable these days but rather an extrapolation of the basic American Thanksgiving stuff into classical French dishes. Or mostly or sort of. Hence this menu, which also postulates a bunch of staff, which of course is not in the cards either:

*

Consommé de dinde aux gnocchi di ricotta, di potiron, and de truffe noire.

Salad of “sticks”—puntarelle, celery, carrot, fennel, maybe fried bucatini, all dropped haphazard on the plate like “52 pickup” and dressed with walnut oil, lime juice, and salt.

With the first two courses, Champagne.

*

Blanquette de dinde à l’ancienne, aux trompettes de la mort; sauce à la crème et à la truffe blanche.

Three purées: chestnut, turnip, and carrot.

Candied crisp-roasted cranberries.

Cornbread “crackers.”

With this, a Rhine auslese.

*

Three blue cheeses: Humboldt Fog, Roquefort, and Stilton, each with a different honey; plain bread. With a young Port or an older Sauternes.

*

Warren pear, candied huckleberries, licorice. With eau de vie de Poire.

A nice nap.

CULINARY TIME TRAVEL

Research for my biography of Craig Claiborne, if I’m really going to have a feel for the world he knew, entails quite a bit of cooking—cooking the food that Craig knew and loved.

His tastes were wide-ranging. He was the first to bring authentic regional Italian cooking to this country: He introduced an unknown housewife named Marcella Hazan to the American public. He co-wrote (with Virginia Lee) the first American cookbook of genuine Chinese cuisine. Before Craig, the only Americans who had ever heard of the food of Sichuan were those of Chinese heritage. Vietnamese, Indian, Brazilian, and a dozen more—they were either unfamiliar or entirely unknown before Craig Claiborne wrote about them in the New York Times.

The way he did it, most of the time, would be to write features about experts raised in the particular traditions, like Marcella. They would come to his house and cook, and he would take meticulous notes. For all but his earliest years at the paper, the translation of those notes into recipes manageable in a home kitchen was mainly the work of Pierre Franey, a French chef who had been trained in the pure classic tradition but who could cook absolutely anything, and beautifully. It took Craig years of struggle to persuade the Times to give Pierre a co-byline, and even then it always read, “by Craig Claiborne [then a second line in a smaller font] with Pierre Franey.”

Because Craig was gay, a lot of people just assumed that he and Pierre were a couple, which drove Pierre and his wife and his three kids nuts. But they were a great team nonetheless, and although they enjoyed their adventures in the foods of the world, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey considered traditional French cuisine to stand above all others.

And so that’s what I’ve been cooking. It is not easy to do. I started learning it—from Julia Volume One and the New York Times Cookbook (by C. Claiborne)—forty years ago, and I am still very far from mastering the art. But I dare say that a great many young tatted, shaved, and hardwared chefs who pride themselves on dazzling the palates of San Franciscans and New Yorkers couldn’t do a much better sole in white wine with mushrooms than...well, okay, maybe they could do it as well as I can, but they’d never try. Too boring. Too tame.

Of course they couldn’t really taste it. Their own palates have long since been bludgeoned into near-insensibility by overdoses of salt, capsaicin, and other toxins otherwise useful when modestly used.

They can throw together fried pig’s ears and peach confit, pasta with cockscombs and barely dead crustaceans, they can build towers of color, layers of ooze and crunch, shocks of habañero in smears of maple syrup, and maybe you’ll still taste whatever the dish is allegedly about—was it duck, was it fish?—but let ’em try sole with white wine and mushrooms and get it just right.

I got it just right the first time. I’m not bragging; I was lucky. Then there was the second time, to be described in due course. A dish like this is so sensitive to even the smallest errors. There is nowhere to hide. You can’t amp it up with fennel pollen and asparagus foam.

Okay, here’s the dish. For two.

I got glistening-fresh filets of petrale sole from the San Francisco Fish Company, in the Ferry Building, where they sell nothing but the sustainable and best. I had always been rather a snob about Pacific flatfish—too flabby, too soft compared to Atlantic flounders, which in turn of course can’t hold a candle to Dover or Mediterranean sole—but petrale is great if you treat it like the delicate princess it is. Never has a foodstuff been worthier of the warning Don’t Fuck It Up.

Across the aisle is the mushroom place. I bought a couple of king trumpets, which really aren’t all that different from regular white mushrooms, just prettier and a little less earthy-tasting.

The most beautiful cooking vessel I own is an oval stainless-steel-lined copper...would you call it a dish?—I don’t think it’s a casserole, it’s too shallow—with handles at each end. Elizabeth gave it to me, and I remember absolutely swooning over it. In it I cooked some fine-chopped shallots in butter and then the mushrooms, sliced fine along the vertical axis. I poured in white wine—an unoaked nowhere-near-D.O.C. French chardonnay that we get cheap but is delicious—in about the amount I was guessing would come about halfway up the fish, and boiled off the alcohol.

I let that cool all the way down and then laid in the fish. I had to add a little more wine to get the level right. Fish stock would have been better. Then you do this cool French thing of cutting a piece of wax paper to fit, buttering it, and laying it over the top. Oh, and I had put some bits of butter on top of the fish as well. Tiny sprinkle of salt, no pepper.

You bring it to just short of a boil on top of the stove and then move it—gently, gently—into a 350-degree oven. After four and a half minutes I poked it with a knife and it was already just about done, but still nice and firm. Whew.

I have a big wide spatula that I almost never need to use, but for this it was perfect: I lifted the filets onto a warm plate and covered them with foil to keep warm, and they did not break, which for me with sole, I believe, was a first. Some of the mushrooms stuck to the fish, while most of them I just poured into a saucepan along with what turned out to be a ton of juice—I mean, maybe two cups? a lot more than I expected—which I proceeded to boil down as fast as I could to two or three tablespoons. To that I added crème fraîche, maybe a quarter of a cup, and it thickened up nicely. Tasted great. I mounted it with a tablespoon of butter just for the French hell of it, and it tasted even better.

Your sole doucement, doucement onto hot plates, sauce it up, sprinkle with a few snips of chive, and praise the Lord.

Then last night I did it again, except with a couple of shrimp chopped up and added at the very end. Well, I didn’t do it again—I tried to do it again, and I Fucked It Up.

I must have cooked the mushrooms too long, first of all, because they were meaty and tough. I put the oven on 400 instead of 350 and kept the fish in for five minutes instead of 4.5, and those two factors together made it soft and fall-aparty, no resistance to the tooth at all—yucko. The wine I used—some Argentinian torrontés-chardonnay blend—must have been too harsh, and I didn’t use enough cream, and I didn’t reduce it enough either, so the sauce was both too acidic and too thin. I could have corrected that, I suppose, but I forgot to even taste it. Also I didn’t add any butter.

I mean, everything was just this close to right, but the combination of those relatively small errors made what had been a truly sublime dish kind of a mess. Not bad, really, but precisely the kind of thing that gave old-fashioned French cooking a bad name back in the day.

Sorry, Craig.

Summer's Sweetness on the Sweet Grass

Monday, July 19, 2010.
Praise to the common yarrow!
Achillea millefolium, beauty of wilderness meadows and trash-strewn vacant lots from American coast to coast—no, more: of the whole Northern Hemisphere. It is our floral equivalent to the robin, all-summer companion, ever-dapper, ever-cheerful, all too easily taken for granted. Our dear Lauren always makes a point of petting the first yarrow she sees, gently, as if it were a good but sensitive dog. Achilles carried it into battle to stanch his soldiers’ wounds.

The summer’s most beautiful and most fleeting flower has come and is already going: Calochortus gunnisonii, the Gunnison’s Mariposa lily, rising like a risen soul above the prairie grasses.


Other flowers new to the scene:
Cicuta douglasii: water hemlock
Heracleum lanatum: cow-parsnip
Ligusticum filicinum: fern-leaved lovage
Oenothera hookeri: Hooker’s evening-primrose
Ratibida columnifera: prairie coneflower
? Lactuca pulchella: wild lettuce? (3' h., pink dandelionlike fl.)
Monarda fistulosa: wild bergamot
Erigeron pumilus: shaggy daisy
Senecio [triangularis?]: some kinda groundsel
Rudbeckia laciniata: coneflower
Rosa woodsii: wild rose
Solidago [multiradiata? gigantea? lepida? missouriensis? nemoralis? velutina?]
Solidago nana: low goldenrod
? Viguiera multiflora: showy goldeneye?

Also a rather rare new bird: the prairie, or Richardson’s, merlin, a low-flying, unbelievably fast small falcon of vision-blurring acrobatic skill, at whose approach all the little birds panic and dive for cover. At least one of them each day must fail to find cover, for they are his entire diet.

The Sweet Grass is finally low enough to fish. On my first cast of the morning, about ten o’clock, of a little bead-head hare’s-ear nymph, I hooked and landed the biggest trout I've ever caught in this creek, a prodigious brown, twenty inches, a good pound and a half, with a great hooked jaw—the signature of an alpha male—and skin of blazing gold. He was tired, and hung panting as I held him till he had his breath back, and then shot away into the green deep.

The pool was newly scoured out by this spring’s ferocious runoff, basically the new home pool, straight across from the little one-board footbridge that takes me from the house over an irrigation ditch to the creekbed, which now looks, misleadingly, like a scene of devastation, with towering black-and-white logjams of burned and bleached cottonwood trees and limbs washed down from the 2007 fire. The logjams and all the débris they have caught have played havoc with the old channels. Just here, once the water was falling and no longer a single all-drowning sheet, there were five channels, each essentially new, braiding in and out, smashing into the jams and one another, purling back on themselves, grinding out cutbanks deeply enough to uproot tall trees, which now have fallen into the creek (their leaves still green and fluttering) to found further logjams and yet more new channels, convergences, islands, rockbars, beaches, mudflats, riffles, rapids, backwaters, standing waves, sluices, vortices. Each has its own contending voice: You turn your head this way and that and every degree of rotation composes a different chorale. The rushing shallows are hunting grounds for great blue herons, ospreys, bald eagles.

I have been trying not to think about Craig Claiborne, but it’s impossible. As though compelled by his ghost, I bought a big, gross, pimpled beef tongue, boiled it, skimmed the grotty stock, peeled the now gray and rigor-mortised upper surface and tip, carved off the tendons and unnameable attachments of the underneath. With store-bought—but organic!—beef stock and vegetables and a fresh for-the-purpose bottle I made Madeira sauce. I sliced the meat, braised the slices, didn’t like the sauce’s thin consistency, made a roux, overthickened the sauce, forgot to add the final schplup of additional Madeira, and, oh, to hell with it, voilà, langue de boeuf à la madère. I considered myself lucky, in Montana, to have found a langue-loving guest in my neighbor, fellow Greater Yellowstone Coalitionist, and longtime pal Farwell Smith, who lived in New York in the glory days of Le Pavillon, when sauces were almost as thick as the glop I put in front of him. On rice, by the way, not the mashed potatoes I had had in mind but was unable to produce owing to lack of potatoes.

Farwell kindly brought a bottle of Columbia Crest cabernet, from Washington, which tasted just right with the tongue, but Lord, Lord, why must these American wines be so goddam thick? Well, anyhow. For dessert—I don’t make desserts, especially baked ones, those are Elizabeth’s domain, but damn it, she’s not here, is she?—I attempted a clafouti aux cerises, a recipe for which had been in some online newspaper or other a couple of days ago. I was encouraged to give it a shot by the facts that 1) greatly to my surprise there is in this generally under-equipped kitchen a cherry-pitter and 2) I had some very good cherries. It’s easier than pie. You pit your cherries, you make the world’s simplest batter (flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla, milk, salt), you melt some butter and sugar in a frying pan, throw in the cherries, cook ’em a little, pour on the batter, and bake the thing brown and that’s it. Bam.

CRAIG CLAIBORNE: DIGGING IN

A week and a bit ago, I spent eight days in New York and one in East Hampton, Long Island, where Craig (we're on first-name terms now) lived for most of his professional life. My mission was to interview some of the people who knew him best and who knew him as it were from different angles. It was an illuminating experience, and already, here only at the beginning of my research, I can see that he presented often dramatically varying versions of himself to different people. And so what is developing is, you might say, a sort of cubist portrait.

Just to mention three of the people I talked with:

Arthur Gelb, now 87, was for many years the managing editor of the New York Times, and if ever there was a Grand Old Man of that Great Gray Lady, he's it. He started from almost nothing, a poor kid from the streets of the Bronx, and rose to what is of course one of the most powerful positions of influence in the world. (He tells his own story with vigor and wit in his memoir, "City Room"--a wonderful book redolent of cigarette smoke, strong whiskey, fedoras, all the classic appurtenances of the good old days of reporterdom; his is a story also of courage and integrity.) Gelb was CC's protector and defender at the Times. He created a wall of safety around Craig that meant, effectively, that the food editor and restaurant critic didn't really have a boss. He was free to write as he chose, travel where he chose, make a culinary star of whatever clever home cook he chose, condemn a restaurant as he saw fit (and a Claiborne condemnation could be a restaurant's death sentence). It was Gelb who saw to it that CC and his columns were treated, at the Times, with a seriousness and respect equal to that accorded the paper's critics of books, art, film, and the theatre.

Gelb is still a strong-willed, strongly opinionated powerhouse. He and his wife, Barbara, wrote a biography of Eugene O'Neill when they were quite young, and now they're writing another one. "Covering the same ground?" I asked, a little mystified. "With the benefit of improved perspective," he said, from a height (both figurative and literal; he's very tall).

Ed Giobbi is as diminutive as Gelb is towering. An artist by trade, a very good one indeed, he is also widely known as a brilliant cook; and has published several cookbooks. He was a friend of Craig's from way back and all the way to the end. Unlike many of the others in CC's orbit, Giobbi never wanted anything from him--they were simply friends. Like the truest of true friends, he saw Craig whole, and did not shrink from criticizing him. He struggled with Craig's tragic weaknesses--especially his drinking, which grew worse and worse as Craig grew older and sicker. He also had many funny stories to tell about Craig's less troubling weaknesses, most of them harmless enough to call mere eccentricities. The more we talked--and we talked for hours--the more eccentric I realized Craig Claiborne truly was. And the more intriguing this project became.

The richest interview of all was with Diane Franey, the daughter of the late Pierre Franey, who shared a byline with Craig Claiborne for many years. Pierre was not really a co-writer--he was French, for one thing, with an imperfect command of English--but he was certainly a co-creator of the many joyous occasions that formed the basis for the best of CC's writing about food and food people. Craig discovered Pierre in 1960, when he was chef at what was then indisputably the best restaurant in the United States, Le Pavillon. When the tyrannical owner of the restaurant demanded concessions from the kitchen staff, Pierre led the whole staff out on strike, Craig got wind of this unprecedented scandal, and the story got major play in the New York Times. Suddenly a new category of star had been born: the star chef, an idea that had never before existed in America. And Craig and Pierre became friends for life, and, before long, collaborators--Pierre at the stove, Craig at the typewriter.

What I had not known till meeting Diane was how Pierre's wife and children became Craig's family. For years Pierre worked with Craig without compensation--he literally refused to take money--and so Craig, in gratitude, would shower the whole Franey family with gifts. They often went on vacation together, all on Craig's dime. They were so comfortable together that even though Pierre and his wife Betty knew that Craig was gay, they had no problem with little Diane being Craig's roommate aboard ship or in a hotel (the children were too young to know what it even meant). (It was a source of some irritation through the years that people who knew that Craig was gay but didn't really know him or Pierre just assumed that they were a couple.)

Diane's mother died just a year or so ago, and she now lives in the house she grew up in, a short distance from Craig's East Hampton house. She was just a kid through some of the most important years of Craig's and Pierre's collaboration, but she has a most remarkable memory. She went to nearly every dinner party, knew the regulars, knew the food, knew her father and Craig inside and out. She also has an extraordinary collection of memorabilia, which I didn't have nearly enough time to go through with her. I'll be going back and setting aside much more time for that. One of the real treats of that trip to East Hampton was going with Diane to Craig's first beach house, where many of her fondest memories are set. It has been remodeled, but the dazzling view across Gardiner's Bay remains the same, and she could re-create in her mind where every piece of furniture, every pot and pan used to be. It was the first time she had been there in over forty years, and she was clearly moved.

I had a number of other conversations and will have many more. It is fascinating to see a person taking shape this way. When I have finished writing this book, I believe I will be the one person in the world who knows Craig Claiborne best, because I'll have seen him through so many eyes. And what a gratifying opportunity, and honor, it will be to share that portrait.