I arrived at the hotel late at night but my companion, who'd been to
Paris before, knew a restaurant
that was open 24/7, one she was fond of, and we went there.  It
was at the edge of Les Halles, the site of the legendary produce
market.  The market had long since been moved to the outskirts of
Paris and was then
just a ghost of itself, but the restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon,
which had been there in the glory days of Les Halles, remained.  It opened in 1946 and has not closed its doors
since.  Once, obviously, it served the all-night workers and
truckers of Les Halles when it was a functioning market but people
still made their way to it at all hours of the night.  There was a
small crowd there when we arrived sometime after midnight.  I had
a sense that many of them were musicians grabbing some food after an
evening's gig, though I'm not sure at this remove what made me think so.  Perhaps
one of them was carrying an instrument in a case.  Perhaps one of
them pulled out a guitar and sang some snatches of a song.

It had a wide selection of raw oysters, and I ordered a dozen Belons,
the small, tangy oysters of the Breton coast that have a considerable
reputation.  When the round tray of them arrived at the table,
they created my first intense visual memory of Paris.  The opened
oysters and some cut lemons were nestled on a bed of ice decorated with sprigs of
seaweed.  The tray was placed on a
wire rack directly in front of me, giving me a good view of and
easy access to the oysters.  On a plate in a holder built into the wire rack beneath the tray was a
small bowl of red wine vinegar and finely chopped
onions, some slices of brown bread and some butter.  The oysters
in the picture below are not Belons — I offer it just to show the
general set-up.

I revere oysters extravagantly.  To see them served in such an
exalted way stirred my deepest admiration.  (I had never seen such
a presentation in an American restaurant, though now it's fairly common
in upscale French eateries.)  They were the
tastiest, most mysterious oysters I had ever eaten.  I ordered
twelve
more.

Next February, it will no longer be possible to smoke in Parisian
restaurants, so I will most likely never go back to Au Pied de
Cochon.  This is not altogether a bad thing.  The places you
love that you can never return to are also places you can never
leave.  They become part of your own small portion of eternity.

And so the time of leftovers begins.  From the look of things this should last quite a while.

Loup grillé au fenouil, translated precisely from the French, means wolf
grilled with fennel. Those familiar with Mediterranean cooking will
recognize, however, that the wolf, the loup, referred to here is loup
de mer, the wolf of the sea, or sea bass. Sea bass grilled with fennel
is one of the glories of southern French cuisine.

I first encountered it in one of the restaurants facing onto the harbor
of Villefranche, a small town just east of Nice — a restaurant called
Mère Germaine. There are several restaurants just like it facing the
harbor, and loup grillé au fenouil is not prepared better in Mère
Germaine than in any of the others, but Mère Germaine is where I first
had it, and so that must remain the center of my nostalgia for the
dish.

It has certainly never tasted better anywhere else — except perhaps on a
terrace barbecue in Seattle once. A friend living there had discovered
wild fennel growing near him in a vacant lot, and used its seeds to
season the fish, its stalks to fuel the fire beneath, resulting in a
wholly satisfying sensory experience.

Nostalgia is a potent spur to culinary ambition. One day while peeking into
the tiny seafood selection at my local supermarket I noticed a
tempting fillet of Chilean sea bass. I bought it, along with some dried
fennel seeds from the spice racks, and decided to see how close I could
come to recapturing the taste of those long ago nights on the Côte
d’Azur.

I coated a small pan with olive oil, salted and peppered the bottom of
the pan, then covered it with fennel seeds.  I placed the fillet of sea
bass in the pan and made two slits in the fillet. I coated the top of
the fillet with olive oil, salted and peppered it, and covered it with
fennel seeds, filling up the slits with extra seeds.

I set it under the broiler in my oven until the fennel seeds
were brown and thoroughly roasted, at which point the fish was cooked through but still moist.

I ate it with a respectable Chardonnay from the Coppola vineyards, and the
wine was fine, but a drier one would have suited the taste of the fish
better. The taste of the fish was miraculous — light but flavorful —
and the toasted fennel seeds gave a pleasant reminder of the dish as
it’s prepared on the shores of the Mediterranean.

It was not by any means loup grillé au fenouil as you’d encounter it there, cooked on a real charcoal fire, seasoned with fresh fennel. But it was poignantly close.

It's sublime stuff.

But that was before I tried Ernest Hemingway's recipe for a cuba libre,
which is something else again.  The key to this recipe is getting
hold of a Mexican Coke, which is still made with sugar, as it was in
Hemingway's day.  You want to taste the rum and its parent
cane sugar all at once.  (If you can't find Mexican Coke, forget I ever mentioned the cuba libre — corn syrup has no place in it.)

At that point, just relax and listen to the sounds of the surf and the wind rustling the palm fronds.

This is just about as easy to make as a hamburger with grilled onions
and way more interesting — Mexican food at its most basic and most
delicious.

Cook the shrimp in the sauce, stirring constantly, until it's as done
as you like.  After about four minutes the shrimp will no
longer be translucent and so ready to eat, but I like my shrimp better done
than that.  You have to keep checking by taste to get it just
right.  Add water or chicken (or fish) broth if the sauce gets too
thick and pasty.

[Original photos © 2007 Lloyd Fonvielle and Harry Rossi]

Admit it — sometimes you just get a taste for Elvis food, for the stuff he really loved, like banana cream pie.  Tucking into an oversized slice of banana cream pie you can almost feel what it must have been like to be a bloated, drug-addled cultural icon and genius on the road to destruction, and sense Elvis’s own childlike bewilderment at it all.

Incidentally, if you live near a Marie Callendar’s, as I do, try their banana cream pie, which tastes old-fashioned somehow, like a pie you’d get served at a 50s-era lunch counter or school cafeteria.  I just know Elvis would have approved.

Sometimes after a long day of writing my mind is gripped by strange ideas about food — strange in the sense that they don’t involve Swiss cheese and crackers or peanut butter sandwiches or frozen meatloaf dinners.

One day, as it happened, I was reading a piece by Mr. Ernest Hemingway about trout fishing in Europe. In it he described a method of cooking trout he had encountered in Switzerland at rural inns. It involved boiling the trout until it turned blue in a liquor made of water, white wine vinegar, bay leaves and red pepper — not too much of any ingredient in the water, says Mr. Hemingway, without further elaboration.

This is not the blue trout described by M. F. K. Fisher, which involves placing the trout live into boiling water, unless the Swiss innkeepers were holding out on Mr. Hemingway, but it sounded fine.

I remembered that my local supermarket sometimes offers fresh
rainbow trout, so I headed over there late at night and found one
handsome specimen in the fish department. I brought it home, filled up
a large pot with water — it was a large trout — emptied about six
ounces of white wine vinegar into the water, added six fragrant bay
leaves and a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper, and set it all to
boil. When it was bubbling I slipped the fish in.

I turned the heat down and simmered the trout for about fifteen minutes. In
fully boiling water, ten or less would have been more than sufficient. I
tested the fish using a method recommended by an old edition of The
Joy Of Cooking — which is to separate the meat from the bone of the
spine at the thickest middle section of the fish. When the meat there
is tender but no longer translucent, the fish is done.

I ate the fish with drawn butter, as Mr. Hemingway says the Swiss did. “They drink the clear Sion wine when they eat it,” adds Mr. Hemingway, but they don’t depend on the beverage department of a supermarket for their wine. I made do with a perfectly respectable Pinot Grigio by Bolla, cheap, dry and light.  I keep looking for the clear Sion wine, though — Sion, pictured below, is the primary wine-producing region of Switzerland:

Even without the Swiss wine, the result was a meal of almost unimaginable delicacy. Trout is delicate anyway, and the light seasonings in the water only emphasized the subtlety of its taste. It all resonated on the tongue like a memory of food — insubstantial and fleeting.

About a five minute walk from my house is a little mini-mall with a
taco shop that serves the best tacos in Vegas, by far — the best
carnitas tacos I've ever had anywhere.  The carnitas is tender but
has crispy, charcoal-flavored edges — the fried fish in the fish tacos
is fresh and moist but crunchy on the outside.  The tacos are two
bucks apiece and two
of them make a fine meal.



The shop opens onto a dingy dive bar next door where they'll serve the
food and where you can smoke and drink.  The bar and the shop are
both open 24/7.  The weirdest people in the world go there, so I
feel right at home.



It's my new favorite joint in Vegas.

If you're like me and get glassy-eyed at the thought of vegetables, if you basically hate the whole idea
of salad, yet still think it would be a good idea to eat these things
from time to time, the key to everything is sauces and dressings. 
The strategy is to come up with a sauce or dressing so good that the
concept of vegetables and greens as food is eliminated — they become simply the means of conveying some sort of tasty topping into the mouth.



For salads, you can't just buy some Paul Newman's gourmet dressing and
think that will do the trick.  This stuff tastes like salad
dressing — salad
dressing.  It's there to “dress”, to tart up, something you don't
want to deal with in the first place.  You need to be
creative.  You need to make something yourself which doesn't
resemble anything you've ever encountered at the dressing station of a
salad bar.



Here's a recipe from Rick Bayless, that guy on PBS who does shows about
Mexican cooking, for creamy queso añejo dressing.  Queso añejo is
a flavorful aged Mexican cheese which tastes a bit like Romano. 
You can find it at just about any Mexican market (look for the kind
that's actually made in Mexico) but Romano, which you can find
anywhere, works just as well.



Start with 3/4 of a cup of olive oil in a mixing bowl or blender. 
Add 1/4 of a cup of rice vinegar.  Add 3 tablespoons of
mayonnaise.  Add 3 generous tablespoons of grated (freshly grated!)
queso añejo or Romano.  Add slightly less than a tablespoon of
salt.  Add 2 to 4 cloves of roasted garlic.



Attention!



Here's the simple way to roast garlic.  Put the unpeeled cloves in
a dry skillet over medium heat.  Roast the cloves, turning them
often, until they're soft and splotchy brown.  It takes about 15
minutes.  Remove them from the skillet and when they're cool
enough to handle, remove the skins.  Put the 2 to 4 cloves into
the mixing bowl or blender — if you're
going to be mixing the dressing by hand, run the garlic through a garlic press before you add
it to the bowl.  (Be sure to roast a good number of
extra garlic cloves to eat while they're still warm — few things are more
delicious . . . mild, nutty and slightly sweet.)


Add some chopped-up cilantro or parsley if you feel like it. 
Mechanically blend or mix (with a whisk) the contents of the
bowl.   Add a little more salt to the dressing if needed then
pour it over Romaine or butter lettuce for a most delightful
dish.  Save what's
left in a sealed glass jar in the refrigerator — but trust me, it
won't last long.  It's just too good.  You'll wonder why you
didn't buy more lettuce.

Mexican Coca-Cola, like Coke in most parts of the world, is still made with sugar, instead of vile-tasting and hard-to-digest corn syrup. Real sugar in a Coke makes for a different drink altogether, and one delightfully familiar to anyone who grew up in the Fifties or Sixties, before government-subsidized corn crops made fructose the more economical sweetener for soda makers in the U. S.

Mexican Coca-Cola costs about twice what regular neo-faux Coke costs, but it’s more than twice as good. It can be tracked down in most areas of the U. S. which have any significant Latino population — which is to say that it can be tracked down most anywhere. Well worth the effort.

[Update — now that Mexican Coke is so ubiquitous, its price has fallen dramatically.  I can get a case of it at a local supermarket for less than $20, down from the $34 dollars I used to pay at a small Latino market, which was the only place I could get it by the case when I first moved to Las Vegas.]

Everybody
talks about French onion soup — it comes to mind unbidden on cold
winter nights, or in the middle of a bad case of the flu — but almost
nobody does anything about it. My sister Lee is a notable exception.
One day after much wheedling and outright begging I got her to pass
along her recipe, modified from a rule in The Joy Of Cooking with her
own refinements. She would not actually send me the recipe, thus
committing it to writing, but gave it over the phone while I took
notes.


Then I did something about it.



To
make this soup you first slice up three moderately large brown onions,
as thinly as possible — don't chop the slices up. (Now is the time for
your tears.) Put three quarters of a stick of butter into a big pot
that can hold six cups of liquor, plus the onions, and melt it.


Now,
as my sister explained, in hushed tones, a terrifying game of chicken
with the onions begins. Your goal is to sauté them slowly, patiently in
the butter until they turn a dark, a very dark brown. When they have
turned the darkest brown possible they will be just seconds away from
burning and turning black — at which point all your slicing, all your
tears, will have been in vain. The onions will try to fool you, by
leaving black deposits on the side of the pot, so you will think they
are as brown as they can possibly get — but they aren't. Not yet — not
quite yet! Bonne chance, mon vieux!


When
the onions are browned to perfection, remove them from the heat and add
into the pot six cups of beef broth. Beef broth can be over-salty,
especially the cubed kind, so it's good to use a mixture of low-sodium
broth with the regular stuff. I used two cans of low sodium and one of
regular broth. Grind some fresh pepper into the pot.


Simmer this slowly for about half an hour, adding a dash of sherry at the very last moment if you want.



To
serve, place the soup in an oven-safe bowl. Take thickish slices from a
baguette of French bread, toast them lightly and then float them on top
of the soup, grate Gruyère generously over the surface of all this and
bake it in the oven until the cheese melts.


Eat it
with a strong, simple red wine and feel the flu, the chill of the
night, the melancholy of the day recede. Rejoice in the fact that, by
following this recipe, you will have plenty of soup left for the days
and nights ahead, when it will only taste better.

How often do we take a moment from our busy lives to think about Gruyere? Not very often, I suspect. And yet it is a cheese of deep philosophical interest, simple, distinctive and useful.

There was a time when I thought of it only in connection with French onion soup, for without the Gruyere that’s melted on the piece of thick toast that floats on top of the soup, it is not French onion soup at all. It’s just brown stuff made out of onions.

I began thinking about Gruyere seriously and appropriately due to a chance remark by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, speaking of dining alone. She observed that it’s just as easy to eat a piece of Gruyere with a loaf of crusty sourdough bread as to down some fast-food alternative, and more nourishing to the soul, more respecting of one’s dining companion — you.

By a simple taste test, I discovered that she was right. Rarely has a philosophical observation been so easy to prove.

I began reading other gastronomical observations by Fisher with a keener interest. I could not test all of them practically, since my kitchen facilities at the time were limited — no oven, just two electric burners and a toaster oven.

But then I read about the first kitchen Fisher presided over, in Dijon in 1931. It had no running water (which had to be carried in from the landing) or ice box . . . and its stove consisted of two gas burners with a tiny cover that could be fitted over them by way of an oven. My excuse vanished, and I decided to make one of her specialities from that time, for which she gives no rule, just a vague description. But it was enough.

You take a head of cauliflower and split the fleurs apart, in clusters that
are not too small or too large — enough of them to cover the bottom of
a baking pan. Boil them for about three minutes, no longer, drain them
and lay them in the pan. Pour heavy cream over each of the fleurs, enough so
that the cream covers the bottom of the pan to a depth at least halfway
up the sides of the fleurs, and then perhaps a little more if you feel
reckless.

Put a lot of fresh grated Gruyere on top of the fleurs and the cream, enough
to make a somewhat less than solid layer of cheese over the whole
thing, part of it floating, part of it on the fleurs. Then grind fresh
pepper over it all.

Bake it in an oven at maybe 350° (Fisher doesn’t say, because her little oven probably didn’t have a thermostat.) Certainly no lower.

When the top of the thing is toasty brown, take it out. (Fisher wasn’t quite
sure why her little oven browned the top of the dish. It must have been
because enough of the Gruyere stayed on top of the bubbling sauce to
get toasted, and it worked the same way in my toaster oven.  In a
real oven you need to place the pan on a high rack to get the same effect.)
Eat it immediately, with some full-bodied red wine of whatever
simplicity. A Cahors would be cool, if you could find it.

Have some good bread to dunk in the strange, rich sauce in which the Gruyere has and has not quite merged with the cream.

This is the meal — barring some salad or desert afterwards, if you care about those things.

When you eat this meal, the word elegant will not spring to mind. The words perfection, miraculous and inspiring will.

First of all you will have a connection with certain evenings in Fisher’s long-vanished life in Dijon — a connection which can only be described as complex. It makes you feel sad and hopeful, all at once.

Second, you will never think about cauliflower again in quite the same way — and I say this as someone who almost never thinks about cauliflower at all.

Third, you will discover a new aspect to the complicated personality of
Gruyere. As with French onion soup, its flavor will make you feel like
a virtuous old peasant. In this dish, it will make you feel like a
virtuous old peasant whose kindness has touched the lives of heroes and
saints. (This is the inspiring part.)

I am perhaps diluting the absolute virtue of the experience by sharing it here, but really, how can I keep quiet about a thing like this? Any more than Fisher could?