First, We Kill All the Chefs

I’m feeling a little ticked off right now, but many of you can probably sympathize. I just spent most of the weekend--a full day and a half--preparing four dishes from three-star French chefs’ cookbooks.

All of you who have had the same thing happen to you, raise a hand. Better yet, raise three. That’s how many you need to keep a couple of chefs’ recipes in the air at the same time.

Of course, this was not my first experience cooking from chefs’ cookbooks. It’s just that--as they say about childbirth--the memory of the last time had faded enough to make me want to try again.

The last time I’d tried something like this was at a big holiday house party in the mountains with 20 or so friends. I’d volunteered to bring a dish, and what seemed appropriate at the time was shrimp bisque from a recipe by French three-star chef Michel Guerard. Don’t ask me why I thought that was a good idea.

The short story is that, after peeling five pounds of shrimp, boiling their shells into a stock and cooking everything with about a cow’s worth of cream for several hours, the thing never came together. I kept tasting and cooking, hoping that as it reduced, the flavors would deepen. One friend got so mad waiting for the soup he got in his car and drove back home. I don’t know why I didn’t.

But that was years ago. I thought I’d give the chefs another try. I gathered a bunch of books by French chefs and started looking for things to cook. My criteria were pretty simple: Nothing by Michel Guerard, no recipes that called for straining something more than once, nothing that needed to be cut into special shapes or arranged in an unnatural way, no demi-glace, nothing that sounded silly (lamb with avocado?), no veal, no foie gras and no lobster (for reasons budgetary rather than ethical).

After a little sorting, I ended up with what seemed like a pretty nice little early spring dinner. From “The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc” (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1987), which I consider the most beautiful chef’s cookbook, I picked a radish soup and a gratin of fennel. From “Simply French” (Morrow, 1991), Patricia Wells’ book of chef Joel Robuchon recipes, which I consider the most cookable chef’s cookbook, a parsley-crusted leg of lamb and a lemon tart.

The radish soup was something I’d always meant to try but had never gotten around to fixing. I fell in love with the photograph the first time I saw it: a Magritte-like image of red radishes against dark earth on one page and, on the other, a bowl of dark green soup with round radishes rising like red moons through creamy clouds.

The fennel gratin seemed a wonderful match for the lamb, and the lemon tart was a natural since my tree is pumping out so much fruit I’ve taken to accosting strangers on the street, handing them bags and running away.

The first order of business was to determine a plan of action. I went over each recipe, figuring what could be done ahead and what couldn’t. The recipe for radish soup specifically said it couldn’t be made in advance. The tart pastry, on the other hand, had to rest overnight.

The fennel, too, had a note saying a certain amount of the preparation could be done in advance; it seemed the best place to start. I could braise the fennel, fix the white sauces and, while they cooked, go on to something else.

*

There was only one problem. While Blanc wanted me to use a dozen bulbs of fennel, I could squeeze only eight into the biggest pot in the house (a 7 1/2-quart cast-iron monster). And I got to thinking: Did it really make sense to fix a dozen bulbs of fennel for only eight people?

But even using only eight bulbs, the amount of liquid was way off. And the timing was, too. The fennel, supposedly done in 30 to 45 minutes, took more than an hour to cook. Although he’s undoubtedly a great chef, Blanc has a whimsical sense of measurement.

The white sauce had what initially seemed like some silliness, too, but it turned out to be a great idea. Rather than sauteing onions in butter, stirring in flour and adding milk, Blanc made the butter-flour-milk combination, then added the cooked onions. I remembered how many white sauces I have ruined with scorched onions; it’s a lot easier to toss out one bad onion than a whole pot of sauce.

Robuchon-Wells’ tart pastry was instructive as well. Rather than quickly cutting the butter into the flour, the recipe calls for creaming the butter and sugar as you would for a cookie recipe. “The butter should be well aerated,” Wells writes, “so that the pastry is very crusty.”

It came together nicely, and I went to bed still smelling the comforting aroma of braised fennel and secure in the faith that all was well with the world.

The next day I started by preparing some of the individual components for the tart. I made the lemon curd-like filling and candied the grated peel of three more lemons in grenadine for the garnish. I carefully peeled and sectioned eight lemons and poached them, a handful at a time, in sugar syrup.

I knew oven space was going to be tight, so I figured I could roast the lamb and bake the gratin in advance and finish them at the last minute. Somewhere in between, I’d fit in the baking of the tart crust.

The gratin would hold best, so it went first. I retrieved the bulbs from their poaching liquid and sliced them about half an inch thick (the recipe said a quarter inch, but a 1/4-inch-thick slice of cooked fennel has the consistency of wet tissue paper).

Two bulbs at a time, I browned the slices in butter. After the first two batches were finished, I arranged them in the bottom of a buttered gratin dish. I spooned over the white sauce and discovered that--even after doubling the sauce recipe--it was skimpy as a hospital gown. Never mind. I made do as well as I could, finished the second layer and stuck the gratin in the oven, hoping it would work out.

By this time, I was getting a little sick of the whole mess, but I figured that since I had to stick around to keep an eye on the gratin anyway, I’d go ahead and roll out the tart pastry.

Wow, what a bad call. In the first place, rolling out pastry is probably No. 1 on my list of worst kitchen chores. No matter what I do, it always seems to stick, or crumble, or craze or mess up in some hitherto unimagined way. And, of course, a warm kitchen didn’t help matters.

The initial rolling went surprisingly well, though I did notice that the dough was getting a little sticky at the end. Rather than being sensible and putting it back in the refrigerator to firm up, I decided, emboldened by my success so far, to press ahead and transfer it to the tart pan.

The result was predictable. I missed the center of the pan, the edges of the rim cut the soft dough, I tried to reposition it and the dough clumped. . . . In short, I ended up doing what I usually do: pressing most of the dough into the pan piece by piece.

By now, I really needed a break. I put the tart in the refrigerator to recover and loaded the dishwasher.

After a couple of minutes collapsed in a chair, I moved on to the initial preparation of the radish soup. I washed the four bunches of radishes until the water ran clear (you’d be amazed how much sand radish leaves pick up), chopped the greens and sliced the radishes as thin as I could.

Cutting four bunches of radishes into slices so thin they’re translucent is not my idea of a great way to spend Sunday afternoon. But when my hand started cramping, I thought about how great those slices would look floating in the soup. It kept me going.

I blanched a couple handfuls of the slices for garnish. At the same time, I brought three quarts of water to a boil in a big soup pot and added a finely chopped leek, the remaining radish slices and the greens and boiled them until the greens were tender (no more than 7 minutes, says Blanc, or the brilliant gren color will fade).

I knew I was going to have to puree the soup in batches--only a restaurant would have a blender big enough to take 12 cups at once. But I didn’t know that the supposedly tight screw-down lid on my blender was less than fail-safe. There’s nothing like that first splatter of boiling soup as it bursts out of the blender under high pressure.

After wiping everything down, I went back to it, this time holding the lid down tight with a kitchen towel. As I finished each batch, I strained the fiber out, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon to get all the liquid. I added the fiber back to the blender along with more soup and pureed again. It took more than a dozen passes to get it all done, and by the end, I had bright red boil-burns on both hands and a work area that looked as if a soggy lawn mower bag had exploded.

I looked at the book again, admiring how those radish slices floated so ethereally on the dark green soup. It would be worth it. And besides, I figured, I was heading for the home stretch. The gratin was all but done, the soup was prepared, the lamb was going to be a breeze and all I really had to worry about was the tart.

I baked the crust, let it cool and spread it with the lemon curd. I began painstakingly arranging the fragile sugar-poached lemon wedges on top, but I got only about halfway through the outside ring when I realized I wasn’t going to have nearly enough to cover the whole tart. At that point I decided again to improvise and started saving the biggest slices to use in the center. Somehow I made the rest stretch completely around the outside and still had five big ‘uns left to make a star pattern in the middle. I sprinkled it all with the minced peel and put it aside.

Now I was only a couple of hours from dinner. I seasoned the lamb and put it to roast with a couple of cut heads of garlic. I set the timer for 20 minutes, so I’d remember to turn the leg. And I loaded and ran the dishwasher again.

After sitting and reading the Sunday paper for half an hour, I returned rejuvenated to a kitchen redolent of roasting lamb and garlic. On the counter the finished tart and the nearly finished fennel gratin were lined up. I organized the components of the radish soup to finish at the last minute, checked to make sure the wine was chilled and pulled the after-dinner cheeses from the refrigerator to come to room temperature. I emptied the dishwasher, boiled some asparagus and chopped some fennel for crudites to serve before dinner (I had to use up some of that leftover fennel).

When the lamb was done, I tented it with foil and set it aside. I ground a couple of slices of day-old bread with a handful of parsley in the food processor for the crust. I started the three quarts of strained radish consomme to boil and, with minutes to spare before the guests arrived, I took a shower.

*

While everyone was out back dipping fennel and asparagus in olive oil, I added the tapioca to my radish soup to thicken it and started stirring.

And stirring. And stirring. After five minutes, there was no perceptible change in texture. So I added some more. And stirred. And stirred. I added some more. Finally, one of the guests came in and helped stir.

I seasoned the soup with salt and tasted it. And I added more salt and still more. No matter what I did, it was still just a very pallid green flavor. Finally, reasoning that butter a) is great with radishes and b) improves any dish it touches, I whisked in a quarter cup. That got it closer.

Now for the moment of truth: the re-creation of the Magritte masterpiece. I ladled the soup into a broad bowl and swirled in some whipping cream. It dispersed more than the cream in the picture, but it was still acceptably cloud-like, given the dim light in the dining room. Carefully, I floated a scattering of radish slices across the surface, adding the moons.

They sank straight to the bottom.

At that moment, if Georges Blanc had been in my kitchen, I would have made roasted French chef in parsley crust, rather than lamb.

In the end, it was the lamb, the simplest of all (season with salt and pepper, roast with two cut heads of garlic at 400 degrees 1 to 1 1/4 hours, pat with parsleyed bread crumbs, return to oven to brown) that was the dish of the evening. The lemon tart was second.

Of the two Blanc dishes, the fennel was the best. Of the soup, we will say no more, except that the guests spoke of it quietly and with compassion.

All of my wounds have healed, though I still break out in a sweat thinking about chef cookbooks. But you know what they say: Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

FENNEL GRATIN (Gratin de Fenouil)

This is adapted from “The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc” (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1987).

Butter

1 carrot, thinly sliced

2 onions, thinly sliced

1 bay leaf

2 sprigs fresh thyme, or 1/2 teaspoon dried

4 large bulbs fennel, 1 inch of branches attached

Salt, pepper

Water

1 small onion, minced

1/4 cup flour

4 cups milk

1/4 cup whipping cream

1 egg yolk

2 tablespoons grated Gruyere cheese

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in bottom of oven-proof casserole or Dutch oven big enough to hold 4 whole fennel bulbs at once. Add carrot, sliced onions, bay leaf and thyme, and cook until just softened, about 5 minutes.

Place whole fennel bulbs on top of vegetables, season with salt and pepper to taste and add water to cover. Butter sheet of aluminum foil and place over fennel bulbs. Cover with heat-proof plate to keep fennel submerged and then cover tightly. Bake at 400 degrees until fennel is tender enough to pierce easily with knife, about 1 hour. Be careful not to overcook; fennel must not be soft or mushy.

While fennel is cooking, cook minced small onion over low heat in 1 tablespoon butter until very soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Do not let brown.

In medium saucepan, melt 1/4 cup butter over medium heat. Add flour and stir to combine. Cook 2 to 3 minutes, then add cold milk. Cook, stirring with whisk, until mixture thickens, about 10 minutes. Add minced onion and whipping cream and cook over low heat at least 20 minutes.

When sauce is thick and creamy and has lost any taste of raw flour, remove from heat and divide into 2 bowls and set aside. When slightly cooled, beat egg yolk into sauce in 1 bowl until completely mixed. (Dish can be made to this point 1 day ahead and fennel bulbs refrigerated in cooking liquid.)

Remove fennel from cooking liquid and set aside until cool enough to handle. Trim away branches and cut bulbs lengthwise in 1/2-inch slices.

Heat nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. When very hot, add 1/2 tablespoon butter. When butter is sizzling, add half of fennel slices and cook until brown, about 2 to 3 minutes. Carefully turn over and brown on second side, another 2 minutes.

When first batch is finished, place in single overlapping layer in large buttered gratin dish. Spoon over cream sauce without egg. Fry remaining fennel in same way and place in gratin dish in single overlapping layer. Spoon over cream sauce with egg and smooth sauce to cover.

Bake at 400 degrees until puffy in center and browned on edges, about 45 minutes. (Dish can be made ahead to this point several hours in advance and refrigerated.)

Just before serving, sprinkle gratin with cheese and broil until cheese melts and crust forms, 2 to 3 minutes. If dish has been refrigerated, bring to room temperature 30 to 40 minutes before sprinkling with cheese and broiling.

6 to 8 servings. Each of 8 servings:

178 calories; 175 mg sodium; 66 mg cholesterol; 11 grams fat; 16 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; 0.30 gram fiber.

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Fennel Tips

Leaving the branches attached to the fennel bulbs during their first cooking helps keep the bulbs together. If the branches are cut away, the bulbs tend to open up and fall apart during cooking.

Gratins are very common in French cooking, but in this country, people tend to think of making them only with potatoes and cream. When made with other vegetables, a flour-thickened white sauce must be used to make up for the starch that is missing.