Clementine in the Kitchen

by CHAMBERLAIN, SAMUELREICHL, RUTH

• ISBN13: 9780375756641
• ISBN10: 0375756647
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-02-20
• Publisher: Modern Library

Summary

The Chamberlain family spent a dozen blissful years in pre World War II France, with their beloved cook, Clementine, learning the gustatory pleasures of snail hunting in their backyard and bottling their own wine. When war rumblings sent them scurrying Stateside, Clementine refused to be left behind and made a new home for herself in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where she introduced the initially suspicious Yankees to the pleasures of la cuisine de bonne femme. First published in 1943, Clementine in the Kitchen is a charming portrait of a family of gastronomic adventurers, and a mouth-watering collection of more than 170 traditional French recipes. This Modern Library Food series edition includes a new Introduction by Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for Vogue and author of The Man Who Ate Everything, winner of the Julia Child Book Award.

Author Biography

Samuel Chamberlain was the author of nearly fifty illustrated books on European, American, and gastronomic subjects. After living for more than a dozen years in France, he and his family settled permanently in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1939. He and his wife, Narcissa, were frequent contributors to <i>Gourmet</i> magazine.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Modern Library Food Series	vii
Ruth Reichl
List of Illustrations	xii
Foreword (Pbineas Beck, 1942)	xv
CLEMENTINE IN THE KITCHEN	3	(150)
RECIPES	153	(108)
Extracts from Clementine's Notebooks (Pbineas Beck, 1942)	155	(2)
Mrs. Beck's Extracts from Clementine's Library (Diane Beck, 1987)	157	(104)
Hors-d'Oeuvre for Aperitifs	161	(3)
Hors-d'Oeuvre	164	(7)
Cold First Courses	171	(3)
Soups	174	(8)
Eggs and Cheese	182	(4)
Shellfish and Snails	186	(5)
Fish	191	(9)
Poultry	200	(9)
Beef	209	(6)
Veal	215	(7)
Lamb	222	(5)
Pork, Ham and Sausage	227	(8)
Vegetables	235	(10)
Potatoes	245	(4)
Rice, Beans, Macaroni and Semolina	249	(4)
Desserts	253	(8)
Recipe Index	261

Excerpts

Chapter 1

Twelve years of living in France made the transplanted Beck family
blissfully, incurably conscious of good food. When the initial novelty of
representing an American firm in Paris in the Roaring Twenties had begun to
wear off, and as French schools, taxes, politics, red tape, and bicycle
races began to puzzle us less, one towering realization dawned upon us:
These French people know how to LIVE!

With great enthusiasm we had begun serving our apprenticeship at the art of
graceful living in a Paris apartment in the Faubourg-St.-Germain. By the
time we moved to the sleepy country town of Senlis in the Ile-de-France,
where we had bought an eighteenth-century stone house, we were well along
the gourmet's path, from which there is no turning back. And when the final
blessing of a perfect French cook appeared to make our domestic picture
complete, we became utter sybarites, frank worshippers of the splendors of
the French cuisine. Now we would rather talk about a good sauce béarnaise
than football, finance, or infidelity. Our French table has been the scene
of endless gastronomic adventure and gustatory improvisation. Our library
shelf of well-thumbed cookbooks has yielded secrets that have given us
rapturous hours of research into "new taste thrills" altogether unknown to
the advertising men who coined the phrase. Our kitchen is the most
important shrine in the house, and our nostrils are instinctively strained
in that direction any time after ten in the morning.

Much as we appreciate oil heaters, air conditioning, electric
refrigerators, and other creative comforts of the American way of life, we
admit, without shame, that we are hopelessly Francophile on the question of
food. We will run a mile from ham and pineapple, jelly and lamb, sweet
potatoes and marshmallows, but will warm right up to sweetbreads and peas,
snails and Burgundy, radishes and butter. We like wine with our meals and
think that beef steak and ice water is a barbarous combination. We don't
think cranberry sauce helps turkey or that catsup is a necessary companion
of well-cooked meat. We would rather have a few leaves of crisp lettuce,
properly seasoned with olive oil and wine vinegar, salt, pepper, and a
sprinkling of chopped chives, than any of the exotic tea-room salads that
are rightly the targets of wise-cracking columnists. I hope our patriotism
won't be challenged when the truth is told about daughter Diane, for
example, who has all the qualities of a good American girl of sixteen, but
who remains entirely indifferent to fudge cake, baked beans, pancakes,
tomato juice, and corn fritters. But she's a fervent enthusiast of tripe à
la mode de Caen (Hemingway or Faulkner would call it cowbelly, I suppose).
She prefers the grey-green portugaise oysters of France, aromatic with
iodine and sea water, to our placid Cotuits. She adores cervelle de mouton
au beurre noir, those delicate little mounds of sheep's brains swimming in
black butter. At one sitting she has eaten a dozen and a half husky
Burgundian snails before being halted. Sweetbreads, calf's head à la
vinaigrette (including the eye), head cheese, mussels, rabbit stew-all
delight her. She does weaken at eel, almost revolts at squid and octopus,
and puts her foot down when it comes to blood sausage and andouillette, a
Breton sausage the taste and texture of which lead to the blackest of
suspicions.

Well, that's the kind of a family we are. I won't blame you a bit if you
slam this book shut with impatience and dismiss us as a troupe of
gastronomic Fifth Columnists. But if you are still with us, may I take you
back to the month of May 1931 and to our kitchen in France where the
estimable Clémentine, in all her culinary splendor, began her reign of many
years.

We'll never forget when Clémentine came to us, out of the blue, as the
result of a stray telephone number that Mrs. Beck had picked up at a Paris
dinner party. She had just discharged the fifth cook in eight weeks and was
scouting forlornly for a sixth. Clémentine sounded so good over the
telephone that my desperate wife at once sent her fifty francs for
transportation to our little town north of Paris. One look at the smiling,
pink-cheeked Clémentine and we knew that she would be a godsend after the
succession of indifferent cooks who had presided in our venerable cuisine.
Old Amélie had been too cranky. Noëlie could prepare some toothsome
specialties (her cassoulet still haunts us), but she was fantastically
sloppy. Jeanne had made frequent and abnormal inroads into my wine cellar.
But the fair, black-eyed Clémentine seemed to possess all virtues and no
faults. She arrived on the five-o'clock local, a demure and smiling little
person, and was busy preparing dinner within an hour. The Becks heard
snatches of song coming from the kitchen and then sniffed the heavenly
mélange of shallots, butter, and herbs browning in Clémentine's casserole.
Our day of good fortune seemed to be at hand. And when we learned that our
rosy discovery was a genuine Cordon Bleu and a resident of Beaune, the
gastronomic heart of Burgundy, our joy knew no bounds.

The Becks had been in Beaune only a few weeks before and had reveled in the
luxurious cuisine of that epicurean stronghold. Would our newly found
treasure be able to duplicate the memorable Sunday dinner in Beaune, which
we had enjoyed with the Bellon family, par exemple? We wondered. If she
could, our reputation as Lucullan hosts was everlastingly made. Papa Bellon
had spread himself on that memorable Sunday, and the enraptured Becks
remembered every detail of the feast. A bourgeois dinner in Burgundy lacks
finesse, perhaps, but it is glorious in earthy fundamentals. The menu of
Papa Bellon's dinner was simply worded, but it made a more lasting
impression upon us than many an ornamental menu of la grande cuisine
française that we had sampled. Le voici:

Escargots de Bourgogne

Truite de la Rivière Nageante dans le Beurre

Coq au Chambertin

Petits Pois à la Française

Pâté en Croûte

Salade de Laitue

Fromage

Tarte aux Mirabelles

Café

Papa Bellon had ordered the dinner two days ahead of time at the leading
restaurant in Beaune. From his confident air the Becks knew that auspicious
things were in the offing. Besides the plump Monsieur et Madame Bellon
there were with us two buxom daughters, a solemn son-in-law, and a
strapping son of twelve. We sat down for the obligatory apéritif on the
terrace while our host went inside to talk to the chef.

A clink of glasses, a few appraising glances at the townspeople walking
home from church, and we were ready to go into the restaurant, where our
table, decked with red-and-white checkered cloth, shimmering with
glassware, and heaped high with crusty bread, had been set for ten guests.
The prodigal plenty of that dinner saddens us now, when we think of the
daily fare of the Nazi-held Burgundians. At each place were a dozen
beautiful escargots de Bourgogne in their light ochre shells, very hot and
very fragrant, exuding a heavenly aroma of garlic, parsley, and fresh
butter. This rare comestible calls for specially designed platters,
holders, and forks, but how well worth their acquisition! With the snails
we sipped a full-blooded Nuits-Saint-Georges. Some people have the idea
that snails, because they live in a shell, are closely related to seafood
and therefore must be accompanied by a white wine. Escargots de Bourgogne
are land snails exclusively, growing fat on the leaves of the grape vines.
They never get even close to the sea, and Burgundians prefer them with red
wine.

The ancient waiter shifted plates and appeared with a massive oval, copper
casserole containing ten handsome trout, deep in a prodigal bath of melted
butter. Nageante dans le beurre was indeed the expression to use. The wine
was a lighter gold than the butter, a clean, tempting Meursault Charmes of
1926. Coq au Chambertin, the pièce de résistance, could not have been more
typical of Burgundy. It is doubtful if any Chambertin went into that
delectable dish, which usually is content to be called coq au vin, but the
sauce wasn't made from just any bottle of red wine, either. Then came a
rich and fragrant pâté en croûte. Ham, veal, sausage meat, strips of fat,
spices, pistachio nuts, and a symphony of herbs had been mixed and encased
in a golden crust. This was served hot with a salad of plain green lettuce.
We watched the headwaiter with fascination as he mixed the dressing on a
flat plate-five parts of olive oil to one of strong wine vinegar, salt,
ground pepper, and a generous daub of Dijon mustard. The wine was a lusty
Pommard Rugiens 1926, which held over handsomely for the cheese platter, an
impressive plank of Camembert, Brie, Roquefort, and Port-du-Salut.

Individual tartes aux mirabelles after this, accompanied by a rich Château
Chalon poured from its distinctive bottle, then some very black coffee and
a trio of liqueurs: Vieux Marc for those who could take it (papa and
son-in-law), Armagnac for me, and rich purple Cassis for the ladies.

Well, it was quite a Sunday dinner. Do you wonder that we were enthused
about the splendors of gastronomy in Beaune?

Would Clémentine, the native Burgundian, give us splurges such as this?
Could our figures and my pocketbook take it? The answer, we soon found out,
was magnificently in the affirmative. Clémentine was a Cordon Bleu in the
best tradition. My son Phinney and I began to dream of fabulous banquets,
and I began to recall uneasily that one gets gout in Burgundy. Luckily
there were two deterrents to shield us from mad, headlong
gourmandise-Clémentine's mastery of simple dishes, and Mrs. Beck's
insistence upon a sane and healthy fare. Regardless of our curiosity about
exotic dishes and our desire to sample all of Clémentine's sauces, our
daily menu contained the same well-balanced fare that prevailed in
countless conventional French homes. We had no huge dinners à la Papa
Bellon. My unruffled wife saw to that. Our daily living was based, I
suppose, upon no more than twenty-five classic French dishes, all of which
Clémentine handled with the sure hand of a master. They are elemental
dishes throughout France, as fundamental as bread, cheese, and wine. They
vary, of course, from one family to the next. But the following list, taken
from the most thumb-worn pages in Clémentine's notebook is typical, and
eloquent, of the way a civilized French family lives.

eggslamb

Omelette aux Fines HerbesGigot d'Agneau

Soufflé au FromageCôtelettes de Mouton

fishbeef

Merlans FritsPot-au-Feu

Coquilles Saint-JacquesBoeuf à la Mode

Turbot au Vin BlancBoeuf Bourguignon

Moules MarinièreFaux-Filet Rôti

Truite MeunièreEntrecôte Béarnaise

poultryveal

Poulet RôtiBlanquette de Veau

Coq au VinSauté de Veau

Poule au RizRôti de Veau

Poulet SautéPaupiettes de Veau

Poulet CocotteFoie de Veau Meunière

Canard aux Navets

pork and ham

Rôti de Porc en Casserole

Jambon, Sauce Madère

Saucissons aux Pommes Purées

Any one of these dishes serves as the pièce de résistance in numberless
French meals. At lunch time such a plat would be preceded by an
hors-d'oeuvre and followed by the classic légume, salade, fromage, et
fruits. The menu varied little at the evening meal, except that it was
briefer and began with a hot soup. It was accompanied, of course, by plenty
of good crusty bread and an honest, substantial vin ordinaire. In view of
the present plight of France, the use of the past tense is advisable and
eloquent.

Clémentine in the kitchen! The bright-eyed little cook brought new
significance to that part of the house, which had waited so long for a
presiding genius. It was a neat and ample kitchen. Its red tile floor was
worn down in spots but always beautifully waxed. Above the stove was our
pride and joy, a shimmering batterie de cuisine, fourteen heavy copper
pans, polished and tin lined, hanging against the wall in mathematical
progression. They ranged from a huge fellow big enough to roast a duck to
the tiny vessel just about right for poaching an egg. There was an
efficient stove, a commodious and rather ancient soapstone sink, a shelf
for a library of cookbooks, from Tante Marie to Ali-Bab, a massive oak
chopping board, and some well-balanced scales with a squad of neat little
metric weights. A white marble-topped table stood in the middle of the
kitchen, its drawer crammed with sauce whisks, wooden spoons, and a
murderous collection of sharp steel knives. In a low cupboard was a mighty
assemblage of seasoned earthen casseroles, some with handles, some with
covers that could be hermetically sealed. On top of the cupboard was a
husky stone mortar with a dark wooden pestle. Hanging near the door were
the two invariable adjuncts of a French kitchen-a salad basket and a
birdcage.

Here the cheerful Clémentine reigned, not as a despot (like a few French
cooks we had known), but as a genial collaborator who, if coddled by the
right amount of flattery, appreciated our insatiable interest and didn't
mind our incessant intrusions into her domain. Her Burgundian good nature
had to stand for a lot. Each of the Becks had a specialty. Diane interested
herself (far too much) in the desserts. The young man of the house was
absorbed in his vegetable garden and the possibilities for pecuniary profit
that it held. The cheese, wine, and cookbook departments were indisputably
mine. But there is no question, of course, as to who really holds the reins
in a French household. It is madame la patronne, and our house was no
exception. Once the authority and prestige of Mrs. Beck stood unquestioned,
this family of incorrigible epicures went at a gallop, but in safe hands,
down the road to gastronomic adventure.

The marketplace in many French towns is a rather dreary affair, usually an
open-air edifice of ornamental iron, covered with a tin roof and resounding
with the hoarse shouts of local vegetable barons. Numberless early-morning
sightseers have been attracted to Les Halles in Paris, of course, but they
were looking for atmosphere and onion soup rather than architectural
splendor. Even the sad events of 1940 do not dim the memory that most
French markets are unlovely. But one notable exception to the rule is the
market in our little town of Senlis in the Oise. Located in the disaffected
medieval church of St. Pierre, this market is an absolute pageant of the
picturesque. In its cool, white-washed nave the symphony of color caused by
the vegetable and fruit stands and by the brilliantly costumed African
Spahi orderlies, buying provisions for their officers, was something to
delight the eye of an artist. Rare was the summer day, in fact, when an
easel was not set up in some corner of the side aisles, with a painter
working feverishly behind it.

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Excerpted from Clementine in the Kitchen by Samuel Chamberlain, Narcisse Chamberlain
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.