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.

Memories of Augusta

Our cat Augusta has been dead for two months now, but I still think about her every day. From time to time I write down memories of her. Here are some of them, in the order in which they came to me--no order at all, I guess.

Some unspeakable villain abandoned this tiny six-week-old kitten in deep snow on December 1st or 2nd, 1995, at the head of the driveway of the West Boulder Ranch, my home in Montana, where Elizabeth had only recently come to live with me. We knew that the kitten had come the whole quarter-mile down the drive because later in the day I backtracked, following her little footprint in the snow.

I had been in the tractor barn when I saw a little black animal dart behind something. I pursued it and eventually captured the terrified kitten.

The daughter of our ranch manager was visiting at the time, and she wanted to adopt her. At first we said fine. Then we learned that the little girl already had two cats, and she lived with her mother in what in Montana is known as a trailer house, and her mother did not want another cat. Thus by default the kitten became ours.

We named her Augusta in honor of P. G. Wodehouse’s priceless character Augustus (Gussie) Fink-Nottle. We thought we were going to call her Gussie, but she soon displayed a sort of dignified self-possession to which her full name seemed better suited.

I cut down a cardboard box and filled it with dirt and leaf duff for a temporary litter box, and she knew right away what it was for. When I went to the refrigerator to get some milk and to look for something for her to eat, she stood in front of it with her little stump of a tail vibrating. We now knew she had been raised in a household. Well, I say raised: When we took her to the vet for a checkup and vaccination, he estimated her age at six weeks.

The iron rule was that she would not be allowed to sleep in the bedroom. That lasted two days. We had made her a little bed, but when we moved it into the bedroom—after two nights of the most pitiful mewing—she was not interested. With great politeness she curled up at the foot of our bed, between our feet, and did not come farther toward our heads.

Her two favorite toys both came from a pet shop in Billings. The best of her life, by far, was the Anchovy Mouse, a hardish plastic cylinder with a rattle of some sort inside and covered with supposedly anchovy-scented orange and green fake fur. She adored it. Played with it for years, long after it had lost its smell. I tried and tried to find another one but never could—couldn’t even find anyone who had ever heard of such a thing.

The other was the Spider Ball, an adaptation of the Furry Spider after she had pulled off most of its black pipe-cleaner legs. I wound the legs into a fuzzy black ball that rolled well and bounced well. Hannah Hinchman told us that cats could be taught to retrieve. When Augusta was on the bed in the morning, we would throw the Spider Ball and she would chase it, and sometimes, by God, she would bring it back. With lavish praise, she began to get the idea. She never really learned to retrieve with any consistency, but then we didn’t try to teach her with any real consistency either. But she did continue to love to chase the Spider Ball, and I believe I made at least a couple of others over the years.

She liked to go outside, but she never liked the snow. I remember so well one time when she was quite little when she came back in the back door (through the kitchen bathroom) crying pitifully, with snow packed between the little black pads of her toes. We held them and melted it out.

When Elizabeth and I came back from our honeymoon in July 1996, we found to our immense dismay that our ranch manager’s idiot niece, whom we had hired to live in the house and take care of Augusta, had abandoned the job after five days and gone home to Wyoming. For the rest of the time we were away, the manager’s idiot son came over and fed her and from time to time cleaned out her litter box, but never did anything more. Six-month-old Augusta had basically been ignored for a month, left alone except to be fed. We always believed that this isolation powerfully influence her subsequent fear of strangers.

And as I look back over my appointment calendar for December 1995 and the first five months of 1996, I find that we ourselves were away a great deal. In fact we left Augusta for the first time on December 19—seventeen days after we first laid eyes on her. We left her in the care of the little girl who had wanted to keep her, in fact, in that cat-packed trailer outside of Big Timber.

We went to New York for what seems to have been a week in February 1996. We went to Mexico for a week in March. San Francisco, a week in April. New York in May. It seems we bear some responsibility for Augusta’s loneliness too.

Shame on us. And yet—we could have been worse. Many cats have suffered much worse fates. Yeah, and so have said, through the ages, jailers, sadists, freaks, pederasts, torturers....And yet: However much she may have been neglected, mayn’t she have slept through much of the time in those times—hours, days—in some confidence that we would be coming back, that she was loved, that love was the fundamental condition of her existence?—because her existence was fundamentally social and we were her society in toto. She did seem to be able to sleep through dull nothingness, like long car trips. Can we say that she could do the same in our long absences. Well, wishes are horses and beggars can ride. No?

I can say that she never knew resentment, never showed anger or peevishness on our return, only gladness: going up and down between the dining room chair legs on tiptoe, back arched, wanting to be pulled out (even if gripping the rug with her claws) and held and touched and talked to—shy, but so glad to see us.

Sometimes when we came home, especially in later years, she would wake up from sleep so deep that she would appear at the top of the stairs blinking as if coming out of a dark cave. Is that really you, at long last? And then she would find herself, get into gear, bop down the stairs, full of beans, shining gladness, herself again, Augusta. Good kitty. Happy kitty.

Sometimes she would hide behind the dining room curtains with her tail sticking out.

Sometimes she would be stuck in a closet all day and never let out a peep. When you opened the door, out she would stroll.

When I was sick or sad, she always knew, and always came to be with me on the bed. If I felt broken-hearted, her manner was especially gentle. The worse I felt, the closer she would come—even to my face.

She was always gentle. Gentleness may have been her essential quality.

Lying in the sun. How when the sun came from behind her it showed that she was in fact, secretly, a striped cat! Brown and darker brown. This always amazed me.

She did not much like being picked up until her last couple of weeks alive, but sometimes, despite herself, she would put a paw over your shoulder and let herself be carried like a baby. In early years, she would really struggle, no matter how benign your purpose.

Motel insanity. Kitty Valium in Nevada: bumping into the furniture, falling off the bed, yowling all night.

Sniffing your extended index finger as a morning greeting in bed—always almost as if it were new.

Walking the upstairs banister tra la la, no slightest worry of falling.

Rarely: locked out of the house and hollering like a banshee.

In a quiet room, the unmistakable sound of Augusta coming at a trot: bup bup bup bup.

Concomitant: She always knew the sound of either Elizabeth or me or both coming up the front steps, and always would come to greet us.

Especially when she was young, she would plunge into laundry fresh and warm from the dryer and bury herself inside. She always loved to lie in laundry even when it wasn’t warm.

In middle years, when I peed she would put her paws on the rim of the toilet and watch where the stream hit the water. When it stopped, she jumped down immediately.

When she was really licking her butt good, she would raise one back leg to a perfect vertical, as if in yoga, beautifully displaying those four little black pads.

Augusta knew when and how to look you in the eye—in what I think of as a human way, to connect, to see what you’re thinking, not the “animal” way which is a challenge: She would check to see how you were feeling, what was going on between the two of you.

Sleeping in a near-perfect circle with her head totally upside down. Even, sometimes, on the bed next to me: That was real security.

When she saw the brush in your hand, more often than not she would “assume the position.” You would say, “brushing?”—she knew the word well—and you could see her whole body relax into that sphinx posture, facing away from you, head high, ready.

Jumping up on the dining table and biting the flowers, especially if they were tulips. She didn’t want to eat them—she just wanted to annoy us slightly. It was like messing with the rubber monkey on my desk when I was working, just to bug me.

So many times, in Montana, my heart would sink when I, or we, called and called, “Augusta! Augusta! Au-gusss-taaaa...!” and she would not come, damn her. The heart-sinking was always premature, of course, because she always did come (except for the few times when she was stuck somewhere—up a cottonwood tree all night, chased into a culvert by coyotes, etc.).

At last, in the sunset light, she would come bounding, glad, and oh! I was gladder (she had no idea), in arcs over the tall grass, black arcs over the gold green, her eyes at the top of each arc calibrating all the necessary information: where I was, the house, the fence, the light, the distance, perhaps her joy, perhaps even the joy between us, the joy we shared in those moments as she came closer, closer. Those eager eyes. Augusta! Piece of shit! Do you realize how we’ve been worrying? Well, of course not.

Especially once we had moved to Bush Street, Augusta particularly liked to have company when she used her litter box. Often she would wait until both Elizabeth and I were in the kitchen, especially if she needed to poop.

There came a time in her last couple of years—it may have had to do with some change in the food we were giving her—when her shit smelled unbelievably foul. Sometimes, moreover, it was liquidy, goopy. The stench could fill the kitchen and soon the whole downstairs within minutes, and so naturally we would scoop up the poop and bag it up and get it the hell out of the house in a hurry. This embarrassed Augusta, and often then, after delivering a particularly stinky one, she would dive through her cat door, fleeing outside. I don’t think it was that she minded the smell herself—she was ashamed that it bothered us so much.

Augusta loved a sandbox freshly scooped and combed smooth. Best of all was when, roughly monthly, we threw out the old sand, washed the litter box thoroughly, and filled it deep with new, preferably unscented Arm & Hammer cat litter. She could hardly wait to get in and christen it with a big fresh poop.

She loved cereal milk—the milk left when we finished our breakfast cereal. Elizabeth believed that her particular vocalization when she knew it was coming—and she did have one—actually sounded like “milk,” and, well, it sort of did. Sometimes she would sneak onto the table and start lapping it up right there if she thought she could get away with it, and sometimes she could.

Augusta never bit anybody, except Elizabeth, and that was only for fun. Elizabeth was actually somewhat horrified, and yet she also played along, half playing, half serious. This was almost always in the morning, when Elizabeth would be wearing a robe and slippers. Augusta’s favorite targets were her ankles or, if the slippers were backless, her heels. She would follow with her tail straight up and her head already cocked sideways and her mouth partway open, ready to nip. Oh, how she loved to do it! At other times, when scolded or otherwise discouraged—sometimes Elizabeth would drop a newspaper on the floor in front of her, wham! which really did set her back—Augusta would then settle for biting the hem of Elizabeth’s robe. Never once did she try this with me, or anybody else.

Sometimes, when Elizabeth bent over her, Augusta would bite her hair.

There was a particular look on her face when she was thinking about starting a round of the biting gam . We called it, naturally, bitey. Uh oh, she’s looking bitey.

Of course she loved to hunt, especially when she was young. In Montana there were mice and voles and other little mammals, which she would often torture before finally gulping them down in two bites. In San Francisco, when we first moved to Bush Street in 1998, the basement of the house next door was infested with rats, and Augusta kept coming into our house with tiny baby ones in her mouth, very not dead. It was an unspeakably filthy place, full of rotting old furniture, broken bicycles, darkness. We soon closed it off so she couldn’t get in.

In both Montana and San Francisco there were always birds, and she loved to kill them too. She could bat a hummingbird out of the air on the fly. And would chomp it and swallow it quickly. Other birds took a little more work, and she would ultimately pull them in half before swallowing them; she never really chewed them particularly, just got them in her mouth and swallowed them down, beak, feet, feathers and all.

My favorite one was the mourning dove she brought into the house one day very much alive but firmly clamped in her mouth. It looked as if it was three-quarters as big as she was, and she held it with such grace and pride she reminded me of a retriever dog. It wasn’t long before she released the bird, and the epic chase began. She caught it repeatedly, and released it again and again. At first it was fun to watch, but after a while the poor bird was bleeding all over everything and I was seriously trying to catch it. I didn’t want to spoil her hunt altogether, but I did think that the coup de grace might just as well take place outside. In the event, I was able to catch the dove only as it was near death from shock, perched on the rim of the bathtub.

Augusta did not appreciate the interference, but politely followed her dove outside and made swift work of its dispatching. She didn't eat it.

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.

MEMO TO WRITERS, RESTAURATEURS, CHEFS, AND WAITERS

Please, ladies and gentlemen:

1) My heroine, mentor, and sweetheart Dorothy Kalins recently told me she was making a list of certain words that need to be flushed entirely out of the food world. Mine, or a beginning of one, is below. I’m sure there are others besides the ones here, and I’d love to hear from anyone who’d like to contribute to this Hall of Shame:

über-[anything] (usually misspelled “uber-” without the umlaut)
program (e.g., “cocktail program”)
crispy (the word is crisp, people)
veggie
rustic
decadent
eponymous
[anything]-centric

2) There are also words that every person in the food world damn well ought to how to pronounce and even to spell. And yet, it seems, rather many do not know:

sommelier: In a highly regarded new restaurant in San Francisco the other night, the waiter repeated what seems to have become the egregiously widespread howler in which the word sounds like that benighted nation on the Horn of Africa. It is pronounced, in American, roughly, súmmle-yay. Not Somalia.

mascarpone: In a restaurant review in the New York Times of October 6, 2010, under the byline of the rightly renowned Sam Sifton—I must believe that this was not his but an editor’s error—the word was misspelled as it is so often so painfully mispronounced, as marscapone. Whether or not you decide to append the Italian é sound at the end, please just pay attention to the order of the consonants at the beginning: mas-car, preferably with a broad a so as not to rhyme with NASCAR.

restaurateur: There is no n in this word. If you’ve been saying it wrong all your life, it may take some practice, but you will feel a great endorphin rush when at last it becomes effortless.

granità: As the grave accent, so often missing from menus and hence from minds, makes clear, the emphasis is on the third syllable, not the second.

panino: An Italian sandwich. Two of them are panini. No matter how many of them you’re talking about, they are never paninis.

ravioli et al.: Here admittedly things get complicated. In Italian it’s a plural word, as is spaghetti. In American, however, by long usage, both have become pretty much singular. “Ravioli is one of my favorite dishes” doesn’t sound wrong to me. But “He makes these great white truffle raviolis” hurts. An American person wishing not to sound subliterate would do well to treat the word ravioli as both singular and plural according to context, and never to tack on that tacky s.