A Meal Observed by Andrew Todhunter

Author:Andrew Todhunter [Todhunter, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424426
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Le Plat

While we are finishing our sorbet, Legendre calls for the lobster and the sea bream amidst a stream of other courses. “Chef!” confirms Romain Marzet, a twenty-four-year-old chef de partie, who prepares the fish for cooking. Marzet pulls a large fillet of bream from a covered tray in a refrigerator beneath the fish-preparation counter. The gilthead bream is perhaps the most highly prized of the sea-bream family, a group that includes the porgy, the scup, and the Atlantic sheepshead. The flesh is white and flaky and very delicate in flavor. Marzet prepared the fillets earlier in the day from a whole fish delivered on ice that morning. No fish served at Taillevent has been out of the water more than two days.

Born in Sens, Burgundy, Marzet completed a bac in economics before turning to cooking. He finds Taillevent much better organized and much more harmonious than other kitchens of his experience, its food notably, and relatedly, superior. He attributes this to Legendre. “A kitchen’s ambience,” he says, “comes from the chef.”

Marzet lays the fillet of bream on a plate and hands it to Vincent Dautry, a demi-chef de partie who helps work the stoves. There are two chefs de partie in the fish department on this particular evening, Frédéric Simonin and Lionel Durand. All three have a hand in the cooking. Between them, working on a number of dishes at once, they sauté the daurade in olive oil, drain it briefly on a white cloth, and plate it, skin up, over sautéed tomatoes and basil. The glittering black-and-silver-scaled skin of the daurade is one of the most beautiful things I will see in this kitchen. The daurade ’s preparation could hardly be simpler, a variation on a classic Mediterranean recipe employed for centuries. The important thing, Davy later tells me, is to cook the fish à point, and to use an olive oil that is flavorful without being overpowering. “You need to respect the balance of flavors,” he says. “There are excellent oils, but some of them are very potent, and when you cook with them you taste nothing but olive oil.”

Marzet now passes the lobster meat—a tail, cut in slices in its green-black carapace, and a large claw—to Dautry. The lobster goes into a pan on the stove and in moments is spattering in oil.

In Crete, the winter before we were married, my wife and I came across a small olive-oil factory beside a narrow road south of Chania. We had been passing olive groves for days, women beating the trees while the olives rained down upon cloths stretched beneath them. We had rented a car, to traverse the distances between eastern and western Crete, and we parked at the sight of this small, bustling factory shimmering in a haze of olive oil. The air around it was dense with the smell, and when we stepped through the open door the scent became so potent that you could taste it in the air on your tongue. Over the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.