Feasting "en Famille"
My cousins Boris, Douglas, Conrad aka Miki, and Bruno Harington.
In her column "Good Food" from Taconic Press Weekend, Jennifer Brizzi tells us about some French food she enjoyed recently that was almost as wonderful as the twenty people she shared it with.
As a local food fanatic, I hated to have to miss the first annual Hudson Valley Food & Harvest Festival not long ago. But my consolation was an opportunity to sample the cuisine of another beautiful food-bountiful area of rivers and hills, when I recently attended the 9-9-99 Harington Family reunion (postponed to a month later) in France.
Our last reunion was 8-8-88 in Arkansas, and while it was great to spend time with long unseen family members on that occasion, the hamburgers we had that day had nothing on the goodies I sampled this trip, like wild mushrooms and seafood-studded paella.
Although on this trip I tasted some of the regional specialties of Provence, Burgundy and Alsace, the best part (and the best food) was at my cousin Bruno and his wife Nuria's house in Laverune. The tiny ochre-hued town is just outside Montpellier in Languedoc, a beautiful sun-drenched spot just north of the Mediterranean Sea and just west of Provence.
All 21 of us, coming from Los Angeles, Chicago, Rhinebeck and various parts of France, stayed at the house over a whole weekend. As we shared meals and memories together we felt the kind of bliss you feel when you fall in love, that heady senses-sated feeling of discovery. Many of us had not seen each other for years.
My sister Katy, my husband and I arrived Friday afternoon, too late for the lunch of snails, whose own cousins still crawled around in a chicken-wire covered box outside the front door of the stucco house. But we were just in time for a divine dinner that spanned the regions of France, cooked and served by a couple of my four French boy cousins, all of whom are witty, handsome, charming and fantastic cooks. Of course I admit to a little bias. They also have plenty of savoir-faire, which in France is called "le know-how," one of them told us.
We began with what my cousin Miki called a "naked degustation" of several fine wines. By "naked" he meant not that we would strip down first, but that we would taste them without food, before the feast. I leave the wine critique to my fellow columnist M. Levin, but they were all excellent and included a fine Margaux plus a few selections from Languedoc, a region that is coming into its own in the wine department.
Then we began the meal with a platter of freshly opened oysters from the Mediterranean, whose topping of vinaigrette served to accentuate perfectly the sweet-salty balance of the mollusks.
Then came the piece de resistance: Puff pastry shells (also known as vol-au-vents or bouches-à-reine) that were filled with sautéed girolles mushrooms (similar to chanterelles) and bone marrow and topped with crème fraîche. Miki told me he couldn't find foie gras locally or that would have been in there too. The sumptuous dish was as decadent and rich as a savory dessert, with the subtle meatiness of marrow and mushrooms nestled in the flaky pastry. I told Miki it was the best thing I ever had in my life, which was true until the next day when I had my cousin Douglas' paella.
After the deadly vol-au-vents we ate grilled garlicky sausages, accompanied by a chunky ratatouille of fresh Mediterranean vegetables with a touch of diced blood sausage for flavor.
The next morning, Saturday, while people relaxed with beer or pastis and posed for photos, Doug cooked up a batch of paella in a huge paella pan outside over an open fire. The same giant paellera was used at my cousin Bruno's wedding in '92 to cook Spanish garlic shrimp for 65 guests (which I was lucky to be able to attend).
Now paella is not French, as we all know, but Spanish. But Doug and my other French cousins grew up in France within a stone's throw of the Spanish border and had many an opportunity to sample the dish. Doug's paella was amazingly good, for something cooked in such quantity. Aromatically flavored rice cradled fat fresh heads-on shrimp, squid, mussels, sausage and peas. At three sun-drenched paper-covered tables put together on Bruno's back patio, we all happily washed down the tasty stuff with plenty of wine, enjoying the combined delight of great food and each other's company.
To give the cooks a rest, that night we went out to a restaurant in Montpellier, a charming and chic university city. Our rowdy, happy bunch had a whole room to ourselves, with high-ceilinged stone walls and the musty odor of decades of wine bottles.
For our entrée, which is what they call our first course, we chose between a fish soup, salty as the sea but good, or a terrine of layered pieces of poultry en gelée bejeweled with sweet red pepper.
For the main course, we had to choose between roast guinea hen or filets of red mullet artfully arranged with dollops of brandade, a velvety, garlicky salt cod and potato puree.
Dessert was a choice of an orange-flavored cake that I didn't try and a coconut mousse that I did: pillows of the luscious stuff were sandwiched between thick slabs of chocolate leaves.
We told jokes and stories as the four young children in our party played happily on the floor when the meal bored them. We made many toasts, and drank to each other and the ones who couldn't be there but were there in spirit. We vowed to not wait eleven years for the next reunion, and scheduled one for 4-4-04 in California at my cousin Charles'.
Sunday night's dinner, when we'd dwindled down to only seven, was two perfect quiches cooked by Bruno's wife Nuria: one ham and gruyere and one ham and gruyere with tiny round flavorful wild mushrooms picked in the Pyrenées mountains.
Every morning we had a lovely French breakfast en famille, with lots of creamy strong café au lait served in huge bowl-like cups, accompanied by long crispy baguettes fresh from the patisserie. Our tartines were topped with sweet butter not far from the cow and Nuria's sweet and luscious apricot jam. When we told her how wonderful it was, she gave us four jars, so we told her we liked her car.
As a local food fanatic, I hated to have to miss the first annual Hudson Valley Food & Harvest Festival not long ago. But my consolation was an opportunity to sample the cuisine of another beautiful food-bountiful area of rivers and hills, when I recently attended the 9-9-99 Harington Family reunion (postponed to a month later) in France.
Our last reunion was 8-8-88 in Arkansas, and while it was great to spend time with long unseen family members on that occasion, the hamburgers we had that day had nothing on the goodies I sampled this trip, like wild mushrooms and seafood-studded paella.
Although on this trip I tasted some of the regional specialties of Provence, Burgundy and Alsace, the best part (and the best food) was at my cousin Bruno and his wife Nuria's house in Laverune. The tiny ochre-hued town is just outside Montpellier in Languedoc, a beautiful sun-drenched spot just north of the Mediterranean Sea and just west of Provence.
All 21 of us, coming from Los Angeles, Chicago, Rhinebeck and various parts of France, stayed at the house over a whole weekend. As we shared meals and memories together we felt the kind of bliss you feel when you fall in love, that heady senses-sated feeling of discovery. Many of us had not seen each other for years.
My sister Katy, my husband and I arrived Friday afternoon, too late for the lunch of snails, whose own cousins still crawled around in a chicken-wire covered box outside the front door of the stucco house. But we were just in time for a divine dinner that spanned the regions of France, cooked and served by a couple of my four French boy cousins, all of whom are witty, handsome, charming and fantastic cooks. Of course I admit to a little bias. They also have plenty of savoir-faire, which in France is called "le know-how," one of them told us.
We began with what my cousin Miki called a "naked degustation" of several fine wines. By "naked" he meant not that we would strip down first, but that we would taste them without food, before the feast. I leave the wine critique to my fellow columnist M. Levin, but they were all excellent and included a fine Margaux plus a few selections from Languedoc, a region that is coming into its own in the wine department.
Then we began the meal with a platter of freshly opened oysters from the Mediterranean, whose topping of vinaigrette served to accentuate perfectly the sweet-salty balance of the mollusks.
Then came the piece de resistance: Puff pastry shells (also known as vol-au-vents or bouches-à-reine) that were filled with sautéed girolles mushrooms (similar to chanterelles) and bone marrow and topped with crème fraîche. Miki told me he couldn't find foie gras locally or that would have been in there too. The sumptuous dish was as decadent and rich as a savory dessert, with the subtle meatiness of marrow and mushrooms nestled in the flaky pastry. I told Miki it was the best thing I ever had in my life, which was true until the next day when I had my cousin Douglas' paella.
After the deadly vol-au-vents we ate grilled garlicky sausages, accompanied by a chunky ratatouille of fresh Mediterranean vegetables with a touch of diced blood sausage for flavor.
The next morning, Saturday, while people relaxed with beer or pastis and posed for photos, Doug cooked up a batch of paella in a huge paella pan outside over an open fire. The same giant paellera was used at my cousin Bruno's wedding in '92 to cook Spanish garlic shrimp for 65 guests (which I was lucky to be able to attend).
Now paella is not French, as we all know, but Spanish. But Doug and my other French cousins grew up in France within a stone's throw of the Spanish border and had many an opportunity to sample the dish. Doug's paella was amazingly good, for something cooked in such quantity. Aromatically flavored rice cradled fat fresh heads-on shrimp, squid, mussels, sausage and peas. At three sun-drenched paper-covered tables put together on Bruno's back patio, we all happily washed down the tasty stuff with plenty of wine, enjoying the combined delight of great food and each other's company.
To give the cooks a rest, that night we went out to a restaurant in Montpellier, a charming and chic university city. Our rowdy, happy bunch had a whole room to ourselves, with high-ceilinged stone walls and the musty odor of decades of wine bottles.
For our entrée, which is what they call our first course, we chose between a fish soup, salty as the sea but good, or a terrine of layered pieces of poultry en gelée bejeweled with sweet red pepper.
For the main course, we had to choose between roast guinea hen or filets of red mullet artfully arranged with dollops of brandade, a velvety, garlicky salt cod and potato puree.
Dessert was a choice of an orange-flavored cake that I didn't try and a coconut mousse that I did: pillows of the luscious stuff were sandwiched between thick slabs of chocolate leaves.
We told jokes and stories as the four young children in our party played happily on the floor when the meal bored them. We made many toasts, and drank to each other and the ones who couldn't be there but were there in spirit. We vowed to not wait eleven years for the next reunion, and scheduled one for 4-4-04 in California at my cousin Charles'.
Sunday night's dinner, when we'd dwindled down to only seven, was two perfect quiches cooked by Bruno's wife Nuria: one ham and gruyere and one ham and gruyere with tiny round flavorful wild mushrooms picked in the Pyrenées mountains.
Every morning we had a lovely French breakfast en famille, with lots of creamy strong café au lait served in huge bowl-like cups, accompanied by long crispy baguettes fresh from the patisserie. Our tartines were topped with sweet butter not far from the cow and Nuria's sweet and luscious apricot jam. When we told her how wonderful it was, she gave us four jars, so we told her we liked her car.
