Posts filed under 'philosophy'
I made Gateau St. Honoré yesterday for Gianna’s birthday. To make it I had to unearth skills I had not used in years or even decades. No part of the job is very difficult, but unless you do some of them all the time, your result, like mine, will not look like a pro’s work. I am not a pastry chef and generally leave pastries to people like Shuna Lydon and David Lebowitz. Birthdays, however, bring out the sugar baker in me. Whether it is a layer cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with marshmallowy frosting and flaked coconut, or a chocolate sponge with raspberry sauce and chocolate ganache, or even nine pumpkin pies, if it is your birthday, you can count on me to make a “cake”.
This particular cake requires what Americans call cream puffs and Italians call beignets, which are made of pate choux. The recipe I chose made so much pate à choux that I ended up making cream puffs and éclairs for the neighbors as well as the cake for Gianna. It’s pretty darned easy to make pate à choux, not so darned easy to pipe it out evenly so it puffs up into predictable balls like those you can buy by the bag n the supermarket. My newest philosophy is quickly developing to be “If it looks sort of crazy and resembles farmyard animals more than pastry, it’s bound to be good.” As you can see many of my puffs resemble chicks more than Peeps do.
What the heck! I know from experience that most people have never had the real thing. Most people have only had this gateau made with ice cream as a frozen dessert or plopped together from a bakery that uses pastry cream from a barrel, stabilizer in the cream and the pate à choux comes in 50 pound sacks and you “just add oil and water”. The real thing takes four hours of steady work if you have one oven.
I don’t expect most of you or perhaps any of you to make the real thing, but you could. I promise you, it is just a series of easy things that then get assembled to become a rather complicated thing. What I do want you to know is how to make and bake pate à choux because it is one of the most useful easy things in the world of cookery. Make them big and stuff them with chicken salad, or shrimp, ham or vegetable and cheese salad. Make them big and use them as shells for a creamed chicken with sherry and mushrooms. Turn them into the éclairs and cream puffs of your daydreams, so much better than bakery ones that you’ll weep for lost years. The bagged beignets from the supermarket do not belong on the same page as these you can so easily make. They are also lovely filled with ice cream and sauced with chocolate, butterscotch or a berry sauce.
Pate à Choux
Preheat oven to 200°C or 400°F
17 ounces or 500 ml of water
4 ounces or 115 g butter
a good pinch of salt
2 cups or 260 g regular flour or farina 00
4 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
Heat the water, salt and butter until the butter melts and then turn the heat up to bring it to a boil. Remove it from the heat and dump in all the flour at once, stirring it vigorously until it forms a thick, smooth and sticky dough. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and yolks in one by one until the dough becomes very smooth and shiny.
Put parchment or baking paper on a baking sheet or placca and then, if you want the easy way, pipe the dough from a pastry bag in the shapes you want. Longish bars make éclairs, round mounds make cream puffs. You do not have to leave a lot of space around your shapes because most of their growth is up, and if they do touch as they grow, they are easily separated.
If you want to do it the hard way, use two spoons to form the shapes. The first time I ever made pate à choux as a young wife I had neither electric mixer nor pastry bag. By the time I finished them I was convinced I would never bother again. With those two inexpensive helpers, it’s almost child’s play. Almost.
Put one baking sheet into the oven on a middle rack and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 190°C or 375°F and cook for 10 t0 15 minutes more. They should be puffed up, dry and firm on the outside. Using a skewer or a sharp knife, pierce each pastry to allow steam to escape. You’ll need to turn the oven up again for the next batch.
As soon as they are out of the oven and have been pierced, cool them on a cooling rack. If they seem too delicate they may be a bit undercooked. Bite into one and see. They can be put back into the oven and cooked a few more minutes with no penalty at all.
This recipe will make about three baking batches. The only time consuming thing is putting them in, taking them out. They mix up easier and faster than brownie mix.
As you can see from the picture above, part of mine had to be piped on to form a border on the base of the gateau. I needed a further 20 medium sized puffs to be glued on with caramel to that border, and then a bunch of little bitty ones to cover the pastry cream center. All of those puffs are stuffed with whipped cream using my trusty pastry bag with an elongated feed that came with it.
Now you all know how to make cream puffs, éclairs, and fancy shapes of choux pastry, all of which have a lovely cavity to be filled at whimsy. If anyone really wants to know how to make the pastry cream and glue this whole thing together, let me know and I’ll oblige. I think everyone ought to have the real thing once in a lifetime, but there’s always Paris, you know. Meanwhile, here it is finished and in a big copper pot about to be hauled off to Gianna’s house.
April 19th, 2008
The subject that this map covers is one that I wonder about quite often. It never occurred to me to actually do the work and make this map, but I’m glad there was someone less lazy than I. It helps if you know the United States fairly well.
What it is is a map of the United States in which each state is renamed for a country of the world with an economy the same size as that of the state. Ergo, Maine, where I was born, is labeled Morocco because the gross domestic product is about the same.
Of course the one I usually think about is Italy and it just isn’t on that map. It’s tempting to compare Italy to California because both are long north to south, have a variety of climates, lots of tourism, lots of coast, an entertainment industry, wine and I know both of them. It is France that resembles California on this map. Other than the shape I can think of many resemblances among those two, too. Italy is a little smaller ($30 bn) than France as measured by GDP, but is too big for Texas, which is next below California.
Some surprises await. It takes the whole of South Carolina to match tiny Singapore, where discipline and focus really pay off. Norway matches Minnesota, whereas I thought with her oil she would be stronger. Ireland is the new tiger of the EU and yet Nevada with her gambling matches her. I wouldn’t have thought of Algeria matching West Virginia in any way. I think I need to go see Algeria.
In spite of the fact that many nations are hard pressed by the new oil prices, being a major producer of oil didn’t make those countries that are into bigger economies. It’s true that they might be completely off the map without petroleum, but with it they still are not giants.
The more I look at that map, the more things come to mind. It shows me, too, that there are lots of questions I ask myself that I never bother to answer and that’s not good.
The biggest question this morning, after looking and thinking for a while, is: how much effort did it take to wreck the dollar when reality is represented by that map?
February 9th, 2008
Here in the International Herald Tribune is a review of the newly published book, “In Defense of Food.”
I’ve been reading reviews of the book and its ideas for over a week now. I think I am sort of on the same page with the author, and I do try to get people to think about real food as much as I can without being insulting. Many people, having been convinced that cooking real food takes too much time, do not want to have the boxes pried out of their hands, but you know that semi-homemade is full of bad stuff. Don’t you?
January 8th, 2008
Lat January I wrote a post about Iris Murdoch after reading a biography of her life as philosopher and writer. I immediately ordered every one of her novels thatr I could find at a price I could pay, and in September eg kindly carted them across the Atlantic to me.
Time passed and I didn’t read them. I genuinely thought that I would need a great deal of calm and fortitude to tackle these books by one who has been proclaimed the Dostoevsky of the 20th century. I remember Dostoevsky.
After more than two months I was faced with either beginning Murdoch or reading some violent modern books that are more noir than “Noir.” I picked up the first book of fiction she ever wrote: Under the Net. I started to read it.
It’s funny! It’s charming, the characters are as flawed as they must be and I found myself both thinking about the underlying principles of what must versus what may be lived while laughing my head off. There’s even a great dog in it. The narrator is a wastrel writer who works hardest at finding people to take care of him. It tells of a short-term adventure at a crisis period when all his balls are in the air and he constantly has to choose to do the decent thing or the convenient thing. The details of 1950s London are wonderful.
Thus armed, I picked up the next in my series, The Nice and the Good.
This is the book I needed a steady head for. Its style is more old fashioned, and because she is trying to tell us much more about good and truth and how they fit into life, there are a dozen plot lines going ahead at all times. It was, at times, heavy going. Some of the evil depicted seemed just silly to me from a viewpoint decades later, but the impulse to seek it, tolerate it, brush it off is still shocking. I think it is a book to read more than once. I found myself too taken up with the psychology of the characters and wanting to send them all to a good shrink to really understand how the theme of the nice versus the good was being played out. And it certainly was being played out, with an ending scene that is both terrifying and settling. In a way I feel the book should end there, but each character gets a final recap scene for those of you who insist on knowing what happened afterwards.
The underlying thread in both these books is that many of us value looking like we are good more than we value good. We omit, we elide, we follow rules in order to show ourselves to be good, and it makes us at best nice. It is only when we allow truth and memory and love to hurt us that we can do one good thing. And then, perhaps one more. The struggle, it seems, is daily. Murdoch makes a point that it is possible that justice is more just when offered by one person struggling for good than by adherence to the law.
Interestingly, Murdoch’s men are much more real than her women. The women seem more like expressions of ideals, each one embodying a type more than feeling like flesh and blood. In each of the two books I have read so far, the protagonist is a man, and in the first one, Under the Net, women can barely be said to exist. There are, handily, equal numbers of men and women in >
The Nice and the Good. There are also children, and really remarkable children at that. They were enormously important.
I will read these books again, because they are worth it. I will buy more of the twenty-six novels she wrote, too.
These pictured are all used and reprints. I bought them at amazon.com because the prices were better than amazon.uk, and they had all been translated into American English. That was disconcerting at times. Both vendors have used book dealers, but the postage from the UK is very high, and when ordering from secondary vendors, you can’t beef up the order to spread the postage out over more books. I struggle to get books, perhaps, more than I struggle to be good. Have to work on that.
November 19th, 2007
