Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

I am very much intrigued by the unique food of Alsace, the tiny region that shares a border and many culinary similarities with Germany. My love for Alsatian food stems from my visit a few years ago to The Modern, which is run by Alsatian chef Gabriel Kruether. There I enjoyed many traditional Alsation dishes, among them a tarte flambée, a simple pizza-like tart. It is also known as flammekueche in Alsatian or flammkuchen in German. It's fundamentally a very simple combination of smoky bacon, sautéed onions, and rich cream on a crispy bread that forms a most amazing salivatingly savory meal.

The flavors I experienced that day still linger in my memory. I knew then that I would try and re-create this Alsatian tart at home. But it wasn't until last week that the thought crossed my mind once I discovered my local supermarket sold crème fraîche, the French sour cream, which is a necessary ingredient for this recipe. To recreate the flavor profiles of the tart I enjoyed at the restaurant, I also searched for applewood-smoked bacon, which I was also luckily able to procure. With all the ingredients in hand, I was now absolutely ready to bake and devour a traditional tarte flambée.

From the NY Times

The 1940s were a good time for drinking; eating, however, could be a dicey affair. Grapefruit fluff, published in The Times in 1941, was like a shining beacon in the sea of dull food. When looking for recipe inspiration in the paper’s archives, I moved right on by the date icebox pudding made with evaporated milk and the fruit turnovers that called for canned fruit. (A footnote, which only further proves my point: the original recipe had the uninspiring name “Grapefruit Dessert.” I changed this to fluff, for reasons you’ll understand when you make it.)

This fluff, the love child of broiled grapefruit and baked Alaska, is as joyful as it is unexpected. After assembly, you set the grapefruits in a pan filled with a bed of ice, then send them under the broiler for a quick singeing before the ice and everything else melts. To eat it, you pierce through a crisp, sugary snowcap to discover first a layer of warm, floppy meringue, then a pocket of vanilla ice cream and finally a well of tart and boozy slivers of grapefruit macerating in the grapefruit shell. It’s the perfect impromptu treat: you may already have all the ingredients in your pantry and fridge.

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November 15th is National Bundt Day. Duty calls. I need to make a bundt. I am trying to stay seasonal, so what would make the most sense? You guessed it, pumpkin! When I want to make a bundt, my first stop on the internet is always Mary’s blog. She could be considered the queen of bundts and boy does she love pretty much all things bundt related.

She recently posted this recipe for Sour Cream Pumpkin Bundt which she got off of the Libby’s website. I would never in a million years think to pull something off of a branded website.

Since reading Mary’s post, I have actually perused a few of the sites, just to see what their ideas are for the holidays. Some interesting, some not so interesting. Yet, none the less, good info and always inspires new ideas.

Regardless, this cake is a winner. And as I have mentioned in the past, bundts are easy and they are always a crowd pleaser. This one certainly pleased a crowd. I made three minor alterations to the recipe. I added dried cranberries to the streusel, cut back a little on the streusel ingredients, and replaced sucanat with white sugar.

We are having friends for brunch Thanksgiving weekend. I may just have to make this again!

“…definitely the tuna tartare, and the hazelnut crusted chicken, and… then a nice, big crudite platter…”

My client was reviewing my menu suggestions for her 150-guest cocktail party, adding the last one on her own.

“NO”, I said, a little more aggressively than I had intended. “No”, softer now, but with the same sentiment. “I just can’t do crudite anymore.”

My client paused. The phone was silent. “Ok”, I caved, “we’ll figure something out. Maybe a small crudite is alright.”

Years ago, I worked as a free-lance chef for a big-time catering company in Los Angeles. We would cater colossal parties for the astronomically rich, where every display was over the top. There were epic platters of food – with sausages and cheese flown in from other countries and cupcake towers the size of New York brownstones.

We would cut vegetables for days, whittling jicama and carrot wedges into little pointy daggers, nipping the tops off radishes, and blanching broccoli and sugar snap peas into the brightest green they could be. It was a thing of beauty for sure, but we had to buy and cut three times more veggies than anyone could ever eat.

Catering is all about making platters look full at all times – which means there has to be tons of coverage. We have to make sure that if someone suddenly goes on a Persian cucumber binge, the display still looks abundant. Hey, nothing says success like excess, right? Well, 75% of the cascading peppers, baby tomatoes, and asparagus would wind up in the garbage. It was heartbreaking.