Tag Archives for creme fraiche

Eggplant Gratin with Herbs and Creme Fraiche

Late-summer crops are always full of memories.  Perhaps because I spent so much of my childhood summers in Louisiana with my grandparents, or perhaps just because summer cooking took over my grandmother’s life and filled her house with the steamy scents of roasting okra and frying catfish, or perhaps because summer afternoons were spent among endless jars of pickled okra, tomatoes, and peach preserves.  These are the taste memories that are strongest for me, and summer is the time I most often remember that I am a Southern girl, one who grew up on the sandy soil of Southwest Louisiana.

Not long ago, I discovered the lush and deeply evocative writing of Edna Lewis.  Her classic, The Taste of Country Cooking, is a gorgeously written history (in the guise of a cookbook) of a vanished time and place. Lewis, the granddaughter of freed slaves who went on to become a hugely successful New York city chef, recounts growing up in Freetown, Virginia—a place and time captured for us in the gorgeous prose and dreamy amber of her memory. Her recipes and stories are divided into seasons, and she recounts the joys of the first asparagus in spring—the taste must have been so alive, so green after months of winter when the ground yielded nothing fresh to eat. She talks about catching shad—fish that came from the ocean to the inland waterways to spawn in the spring. That was the only fish they ever had, and it only appeared in the spring. It was such a treat that it was served for breakfast. Summer brought watermelon cooled in the spring, and hand-churned ice cream. Fall brought earthy root vegetables and game, while winter meant long evenings near the fire and long-simmered holiday dinners. Each season had its rhythms, its joys, its celebrations, and its inevitable losses as one season waned to make room for the joys of another, the pain of loss forever salved by the glorious recompense of nature.

Read Edna Lewis and remember that summer is a season to be celebrated too.  As enchanted as I often am with the cuisines and dishes of far-off places, and while many writers assert that the United States has no food traditions or culture of its own, I am truly grateful to Miss Lewis for reminding me that I am from a place that has deep roots and taste memories, a place I am forever glad to call home.

Eggplant Gratin with Herbs and Creme Fraiche

2 medium to large eggplant, sliced 1/2″ thick

salt & pepper

olive oil

1 quart simple tomato sauce

3 Tbs. minced chives

3 Tbs. minced parsley

1 Tbs. thyme leaves

12 oz. creme fraiche or heavy cream

4 oz parmesan cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 375.  Season eggplant slices with salt and pepper.  Brush lightly with olive oil.  Heat a large skillet or griddle pan over med-high heat and fry eggplant slices in batches until golden on both sides.  Set aside while you prepare the creme fraiche.  Place creme fraiche or cream in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat.  Reduce to about 1 cup, then stir in half of the grated parmesan and all of the chopped herbs.  Season with a pinch of salt and pepper and set aside.  Oil a 9″ casserole or gratin pan and place eggplant inside in a single layer.  Cover with a thin layer of simple tomato sauce and a sprinkle of parmesan.  Make two more layers of eggplant and sauce, covering the top with tomato sauce.  Ladle over the reduced creme fraiche or cream and sprinkle on a final layer of parmesan cheese.  Bake uncovered until browned and bubbling, about 25-30 minutes.  Let rest briefly before serving.  Also delicious at room temperature.

Toffeed Fig Tart

Childhood is as much a place as it is a time.  When I remember my childhood, it is often not events that I call forth, but rather pathways, shortcuts, hedges, fences, nooks, forts and treehouses.  The map of my grandmother’s backyard is still firmly etched in my mind–it was the landscape of time itself–dreamy afternoons that stretched on forever, days caught in a glittery web of make-believe.  I can’t remember anything from eye-level then, only from the bird’s eye vantage of the ironwood tree or, most magical, from the froggy perspective of underneath hedge or elephant ear, drops of caught rainwater spilling off the sides.  The most magical space of all was under the fig tree.  Space and time shifted entirely inside the embrace of its far-reaching branches, heavy with fruit and leaves as big as my face.  It was dark under the tree, cool and hushed as a church, and the branches bled white when we broke off figs to eat.  Grownups voices couldn’t penetrate there, and if you were still, no one would ever see you, and time would stop, and you could live in your fig tree kingdom forever.

Toffeed Fig Tart

adapted from Artichoke to Za’atar by Lucy & Greg Malouf

10 sheets filo pastry

1 3/4 sticks butter, melted

1/2 c sugar

1/2 c water

12 figs, halved

2 Tbs. sugar

1 extra Tbs. butter

3/4 c. hazelnuts, toasted and roughly crushed

1/2 c. mascarpone or creme fraiche

Make a sugar syrup by combining sugar and water in a small saucepan and bring to boil, making sure the sugar is completely dissolved.  Lower heat and simmer for five minutes.

Brush each sheet of filo dough with melted better, stacking one on top of the next.  Cut out four 4-5″ circles from the stack of pastry.  Place pastry circles on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 10-12 minutes.  Remove from oven and immediately drizzle a little sugar syrup over each pastry circle.

Sprinkle 2 Tbs. sugar in a small skillet and cook over medium high heat until sugar caramelizes.  Swirl in the butter and stir until smooth.  Place each fig cut side down in the caramel, then remove from the pan and set aside.

To assemble, lay a circle of pastry on each plate and stack the figs, then top with mascarpone or creme fraiche, sprinkle with hazelnuts and drizzle with additional sugar syrup.

Summer Fruit Pavlova

I have a lot of cookbooks.  Some people might consider that an understatement, especially my husband, who has hauled them from house to house a ridiculous number of times, but I feel like I can never have enough.  I sleep with cookbooks piled by my bed, dreaming of aioli and brioche, gelato and soffrito. I have spent many hours in deep conversation stove-side with M.F.K. Fisher, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Judy Rodgers, Suzanne Goin, and more.  Cookbook authors and chefs have been my mentors, teachers, and colleagues.  I have traveled with Naomi Dugid and Jeffrey Alford to Asia, learned how to bake bread from Nancy Silverton; Mario Batali has whispered his polenta secrets in my ear.  Cookbooks took the place of cooking school, and they have fueled my passion for food through countless family meals and nightly specials.  Take any one of my books off the shelf and the pages fall open, sticky with sugar and egg on my favorite recipe for banana bread or splattered with tomato sauce on the best bolognese recipe ever.  For the past month or so, we have been living in a (pretty fabulous) “temporary” place, and all my cookbooks are packed away, out of reach.  I’m not a big recipe follower, so I had no idea how much I would miss them for ideas and inspiration, enlightenment and expertise.  In fact, I feel a little adrift.  I’ve always thought of food as narrative–what we eat tells the story of who we are, where we come from, the life we want to live.  For me it isn’t just dinner, but another chapter in the story of my life, a story I share with the people I love, with my community.  All these books that I’ve read cover to cover connect me to that narrative, define who I am.  The spiral bound Many Hands Cooking began the story.  A Christmas gift the year I turned seven, its illustrations of children from all over the world made me feel cosmopolitan and worldly and connected to the larger world through food.  Later on, I read Roy Andries De Groot’s The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth and saw that a cookbook could capture a very specific time and place.  To this day, when anybody mentions Chartreuse, I have to stop myself from saying, I’ve been there. Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking followed, then Sam & Sam Clark’s Moro East and The River Cottage Books.  I fell in love with books about homesteading, growing food, canning, preserving, curing.  I loved the idea that I could create a life of quality, with every tiny detail becoming more connected to this land that feeds us.  Food always tells a story–there’s human narrative in every GMO factory-produced corn chip, every heirloom tomato planted and harvested by a hand that you know.  Every bite represents epic, Shakespearean greed or love or determination, human cruelty or the rebirth of hope.  My cookbooks are really guidebooks about living.  Thomas called yesterday to tell me that it would be another month before we could get into our new house.  My silence must have been expressive, but anyway, he knows me better than anyone.  “I’ll bring you eight boxes from storage,” he said, and I could feel my life falling back into place.

Summer Fruit Pavlova

adapted from Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors

3/4 c. sugar

2 tsp. cornstarch

4 egg whites, room temperature

pinch sea salt

1 tsp. cider vinegar

1 tsp. vanilla

1 c. blackberries

3 small peaches

sugar for sprinkling fruit

1/2 c. cream

1/2 c. creme fraiche

2 Tbs. honey

1/2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 300.  Mix 1 Tbs. of sugar with cornstarch and set aside.  Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add the sugar a little at a time until thick and glossy.  Add the sugar-cornstarch mixture, then fold in vinegar and vanilla.  Make six mounds of meringue on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  Using a large spoon, create a nest or bowl shape in each meringue.  Bake for 1 hour, then turn off the oven and let them sit until cool.  Gently pry them off the paper and place on serving platter.  Gently wash berries and peaches.  Slice peaches and place in a bowl, then sprinkle with sugar.  Toss berries in carefully.  Whip cream and creme fraiche with honey and vanilla until it holds soft peaks.  Fill each meringue with whipped cream and top with fruit.  Serve right away.