The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season. Richard Olney
My kitchen I love, but would recommend to no one else. It contains more equipment and fewer conveniences than most home kitchens, and the organization of space is totally impractical. The largest room in the house, it is the one in which I live, work, cook and receive.
Weather permitting, meals are served out of doors, but during a good half of the year the dining table automatically finds its place before the immense fireplace, which dominates the room and is the only source of heat. Before it, all roasts are turned on a spit; in it, meats, fish and vegetables are grilled. Buried in its ashes, such vegetables as potatoes, beets and eggplant are baked, and often an earthenware pot is half buried in the ashes to pass the night. From time to time, when intense heating is not necessary, I climb to the roof top and suspend a marinated, rolled boar’s belly or other delicacy in the chimney to be smoked, and over a period of several days I regularly nourish the smoldering olive wood with bundles of rosemary.
Beside the fireplace is a small professional cookstove. Its top is a cast-iron plate heated from beneath by a system of gas flames and refractory bricks, permitting one to move pans all over the surface, exactly as with old-fashioned wood- or coal-burning cookstoves, in order to find the precise degree of heat desired. To the side are two open gas flames, and the oven, deep, solid and hermetic, is also heated on the same principle as that of the old-fashioned cookstove. The flames are beneath, but the heat is circulated through hollow walls that encircle the oven.
The work table, chopping boards and refrigerator—alas—are at the other side of the room, the heart of which is blocked by the dining table and, worse still, beyond the table, by a huge and encumbering pillar that supports the main beam of the room. Despite the size of the room, space is lacking. Earthenware casseroles are piled seven or eight deep, the mantel of the fireplace is hung heavy with omelet and crêpe pans, the copper pans, for lack of a better place, are hung the length of the room, including above the stove (which prompts rapid tarnishing), the soup tureens and sauceboats are kept on shelves so high that a ladder is necessary to reach them, and the largest of the marble mortars, far too heavy to be easily displaced, has never found a permanent place and needs constantly to be shifted.
The following suggestions, then, often represent, in terms of organization, that which my kitchen lacks and which I miss bitterly. As to small equipment, I have contented myself with describing a selection from my own kitchen, excluding those articles common to all kitchens.
A kitchen should be as spacious and as light as circumstances permit. A basic work table or surface and a chopping board should ideally be placed between the sink and the stove, but should, in any case, be as near to the stove as possible. The surface of the chopping board should be at such a level that, standing before it, one may without either straining or bending one’s elbows easily place one’s hands flat on it (thus, the height of the table should be conditioned to the individual who will most often be working in the kitchen). Most table tops and chopping boards are too high, and one’s work is consequently less efficient and more tiring.
Electric ovens, well regulated, are very good for pastries, slow gratins and so-called casserole dishes, and ideal for the many preparations that require a very slow cooking process over a period of many hours. They are suitable for roasts, though I prefer a spit before an open fire. For rapid gratins and grilled meats they are less than satisfactory. As to cooking on top of the stove, I personally find electricity impracticable. A naked gas flame is imperfect, but with the use of asbestos pads and other insulating devices one can arrive at a fairly delicate regulation. A small professional or semiprofessional gas cookstove, similar to that described above, is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfactory solution. A system, whether it be incorporated into the stove or apart, of intense overhead heat for rapid gratins and glazing is useful. The broiler common to most American household stoves never gives a sufficiently intense heat for glazing. There should be some arrangement for heating plates.
In most home kitchens a fireplace such as mine is out of the question. Nevertheless, a small fireplace built into the wall at tabletop or stove-top level is altogether conceivable in a modern kitchen. Several of my friends have built such fireplaces in their kitchens, and others, impressed by the simplicity and the practicality of the arrangement, are in the process of doing so. They are people who are not city dwellers but live in comfortable, centrally heated houses equipped with small modern kitchens, and who, unlike myself, have no desire to recapture living patterns of the past with an of the attendant discomforts. They simply understand that the superiority of a roast on a turnspit before an open fire or of fish and meats grilled over fruitwood embers is pertinently real and not merely part of a past mythology.
Such a fireplace should be large enough to contain a small grill or to permit a spitted chicken or leg of lamb to be turned before it. An opening 25 inches wide by 20 inches high with a depth of 20 inches is sufficient. A platform approximately 15 to 18 inches deep—large enough to easily support the turnspit (tournebroche) and dripping pan (lèchefrite)—should extend outward from the fireplace floor. The corresponding space beneath the fireplace is used for storing wood.
Accompanying equipment (for Shopping Sources) should include: a heavy WELDED-IRON GRILL for meats and poultry, a large DOUBLE-FACED GRILL of heavy hinged steel wire for small fish, and a SPECIAL DOUBLE-FACED GRILL, oval and swelled in shape, for large fish, a TURNSPIT (the most practical are electrically operated), a selection of SPITS, and a DRIPPING PAN designed to be placed beneath the roast to collect the drippings with which it is basted and from which the sauce or juices are prepared. It should be of a heavy material—steel or cast iron rather than the flimsy, tinned affair most often found on the market. I have opted for a huge steel frying pan—a large skillet, propped slightly higher at the fire side with a fragment of brick or stone, will do.
SMALL EQUIPMENT
The CHOPPING BOARD should be large (2½ by 3 feet is a good size), thick (1½ to 2 inches), absolutely flat, and unjointed. It should have its place near the stove and always be in place. It should be kept impeccably clean and occasionally scraped. A butcher’s chopping block is a handsome object but expensive, and must be bought new or its surface will not be flat. Small boards are impractical, except for serving cheese or cutting sausage, and frustrating.
One should have at least six or seven good razor-sharp knives (the single most exasperating thing about most kitchens is that they almost never contain a single knife that cuts): a couple of small PARING KNIVES (couteaux d’office), a BONING KNIFE (couteau à désosser), a medium-sized knife for fine slicing (couteau à émincer), at least one of those knives commonly called FRENCH CHEF’S KNIVES with a blade approximately 10 inches long (couteau à hacher), one larger of the same form, and a long, narrow CARVING KNIFE (couteau à trancher). A SHARPENING STEEL should be kept in place near the knives so that it becomes an automatic thing to sharpen knives regularly as one uses them. The most practical place to keep the knives is in a rack behind one’s work table so that they are constantly in view and at hand and do not risk being rubbed against. Magnetic knife racks are dangerous and impractical. Knives should be rinsed or merely wiped clean as one uses them, then replaced in the rack. Until recently, stainless steel knives were generally flimsy and impossible to sharpen, and most cookbooks rightly discouraged their use, but it is now possible to find good, solid stainless steel knives that take well to sharpening, are much easier than carbon steel to keep clean, and do not blacken certain foods (notably artichokes) on contact as do the carbon steel knives. Good professional knives under the brand “Sabatier-Trumpet” and described as “full-forged stainless steel” are available in America.
A good,