Chef at Cafe Alain Knows How to Take Stock

Auguste Escoffier, the great codifier of French culinary techniques and by and large the Hammurabi of 20th-Century cooking, made it clear that meat stocks are the basis of French cuisine.

“When your stocks are perfect, the rest of the work that follows (in any given recipe) is simple,” he wrote.

One of his main points was that once stocks have been reduced to one of the “mother” sauces, such as brown ( espagnole ) and demi-glace , thousands of dishes can be created simply by adding a special flavoring agent or two to a portion of the mother sauce. Brown sauce becomes sauce Madere by adding Madeira, for example, or sauce perigordine by adding chopped truffles, and so on, ad infinitum. Most have multiple uses, and by adding a special garnish to the plate, one creates hundreds of potential combinations out of what is essentially meat in brown sauce.

This ability to create variety out of a relatively limited number of ingredients is the real genius of French cooking and can be used to great advantage by humble eateries that wish to make their menus larger and more diversified than their pantries would seem to allow. One restaurateur who understands this is Alain Caminade, chef and co-proprietor (with his mother and brother) of the new Cafe Alain in Rancho Bernardo.

Fleshing Out the Menu

By making use of what evidently is a large supply of demi-glace (brown stock reduced to a remarkable glaze, the true essence of meat), Caminade has fleshed out what essentially is a very limited cafe menu into something grander. The changes he can ring on his basic sauce allow three styles of sauteed duck breast, five of filet mignon, a pleasant veal with morels, and any number of specials.

To find duck breast (magret de canard) in a shopping center cafe is in any case a surprise, but especially so to find it in three versions. The style sampled, with cepes, the succulent mushrooms that flourish in the area around Bordeaux, was simple but nice. The breast was tossed in hot butter, then sliced and fanned out on the plate while demi-glace, cream and cepes deglazed the saute pan and simmered into an unctuous, robust sauce. The same treatment attended the duck breasts flavored with Roquefort cheese and green peppercorns.

Among the steaks, the filet in Roquefort sauce made a happy enough meal, the strongly flavored sauce making up for some of the richness that has been lost by modern cattle-raising techniques. Other choices in this category would be a filet with cepes, and one with green peppercorns--in other words, at Cafe Alain, what is sauce for the duck is sauce for the filet mignon. (The steak choice does expand beyond the brown-sauced versions to include a grilled sirloin in herb butter, a filet with sauce bearnaise, and a Chateaubriand with sauce Choron, which itself is merely bearnaise flavored with tomato.)

The brown sauce reappeared in the piccata de veau aux morilles (a rather lengthy title for sauteed slices of veal leg finished with creamed brown sauce and black, savory morel mushrooms), and in one night’s special, poulet Robert. This dish of sauteed chicken pieces involved a more pungent sauce than typically moistens domestic fowl; sauce Robert calls for brown sauce flavored with mustard, vinegar and chopped gherkins.

Competent Handling

In all cases, the dishes had been handled competently but not brilliantly, quite in keeping with the cafe’s unassuming nature and its relatively modest prices. Basically, these dishes should appeal to diners bound for a casual meal who feel like “eating French,” as opposed to stopping off for burritos, sushi, moo goo gai pan, ravioli or any of the myriad ethnic foods now commonly available in shopping plaza restaurant rows.

Chef Caminade’s repertoire does, of course, extend beyond dishes finished with brown sauce. A notable example in this case would be the veal Pojarsky, a Soviet-French treatment of ground veal in which the meat is shaped into a large patty, breaded and briskly sauteed. Caminade gave the veal an unusual finish by topping it with a rather nice sauce of chopped tomatoes flavored with tarragon.

Among other entrees are a bouchee a la reine, the classic creamed chicken served in a puff pastry shell; a chicken crepe; salmon in sauce bearnaise, trout with almonds and basil and crevettes Monte Carlo, or shrimp flamed in whisky and finished with a tomatoed white sauce.

Meals include the choice of soup or salad, both of which are passable. The salad’s main interest comes from the tarragon vinaigrette, because the selection of greens is at best pedestrian. Caminade’s soupes du jour probably make better choices than the rather weak onion soup, which is a la carte; a creme Crecy, or carrot puree, had a good color, texture and flavor.

The cafe doubles as a bakery and pastry shop, a definite bonus for diners. The crusty French bread is the equal of any in town, which makes the butter served in those dreadful plastic “portion control” pouches more lamentable than usual, and the dessert tray features a good selection of common French fruit tarts and pastries, including eclairs of above-average quality.

The refrigerated pastry counter supplies much of the cafe’s decor; this is an extremely informal and plain establishment. The service is perhaps well-intentioned but perfunctory at best.

Cafe Alain does not have a license to sell wine, but it does have wine glasses, and a neighboring shop sells whatever might be desired to fill them.

CAFE ALAIN

Suite K-9, The Plaza, Bernardo Center Drive, Rancho Bernardo

487-6772

Lunch served Tuesday through Sunday, dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Closed Monday.

Dinner for two, including tax and tip, about $20 to $45