On Forgetfulness

There is something of a joke in my household that it's not possible to host a dinner party without forgetting to serve some small item of food or other at least once in the course of the night. Inevitably, after all your guests have gone home and the dishes are washed and the last of the wine is drunk and you are drunk as well, you open the fridge to find the carefully picked chervil sprigs which were meant to finish your grilled snapper course. I say it's a running joke at home because it happens every single time we have people over. Once, as our last guests walked out the door, my wife asked, eyebrow raised: “How did you enjoy the warm roast vegetable salad?” It was still in the oven, where I'd left it in a warmth holding pattern. This sort of forgetfulness isn't limited to home.

In fact, there are several recognized species of kitchen mental vagueness, one of which is the professional equivalent of my home malady. One of my head chefs broadly refused to include little finishing garnishes like crisp sage or fried eshallots, as he consistently failed to put them on the finished dish. At another establishment, we once had a fixed-menu, six-course dinner for 100 customers. Among many other responsibilities I had to take care of the onion rings for the beef course, two per serve. I had to cut 200 rings, plus a few extra in case of breakages, soak them in milk, flour them, batter them in a yeasted beer batter, and blanch them, six-at-a-time, in a tiny benchtop fryer, as the restaurant had no commercial fryer. During service someone else was to re-fry them at a higher temperature and serve them. Preparing the rings took hours. At the end of service, whilst packing down, I found tray after tray of blanched onion rings in the cool room. “Must have forgot those,” responded Matt when I presented him a tray or two in silent indignation. “Feed them to staff.”



Another such specimen of chef forgetfulness is related to our recipes. Overconfidence is endemic in professional cookery, and this flows over into the way we treat the recording of work methods. When a given dish is on the menu, all of it's components have to be prepared several times a week, and they have to be exactly the same every time. This sort of forced repetition, instead of encouraging careful recording, fosters a sense of deep knowing, as in: “I've made this pommes dauphinoise a million times, I don't need to write the method down.” Two years later, when it comes up as a possible menu item again, the recipe you find you eventually jotted down is more of a shopping list, full of cryptic abbreviation like “bppcns” and instructions such as “cook till done.” The worst example in my collection are lists of numbers followed each by a single letter; ingredient weights followed by the first letter of the item to be weighed. No method. No oven temperature or times. If I've had the foresight to include a title, a name of what the cypher represents, I have a chance, but I usually fail to include even this clue.

My favorite of the widely recognized kitchen forgetful moments is what I've always referred to as Cool Room Amnesia. It goes something like this: you stride confidently to the cool room, step inside, and then spend thirty seconds looking around at the shelves blankly, trying in vain to remember what in god's name brought you here in the first place. The only cure, really, is to admit temporary dementia and head back to you section for a good look at your workspace, which always reminds you of what send you walking in the first place. It happens to the most focused of chefs and is a result, I think, of knowing that you next task requires your body to be in one place or another and you feet automatically taking you there, and is not limited solely to the cool room. I often find myself standing in a corner of the kitchen, wondering silently what I am meant to be doing, or how I got there at all.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what I was thinking the other day when I found a lid-dented, dust-covered jar of brandied kumquats in the back of my pantry, buried beneath jars of chutney from summers past. “How,” I muttered aloud, did you get here?”

It turns out that I put them there, a couple years ago thinking I'd find a good use for them someday. I went flipping through my recipe folder, looking for some clue as to my intention or even when I produced them and found an equally dusty and dented, folded little scrap of a former docket upon which I'd scribbled the word “kumquat” along with some numbers, a few letters and dots, and an arrow or two. Great work there, Jerad.



I also forgot to mention last week that OHC is celebrating it's third birthday. I'll cook something celebratory for next week's post.

Brandied Kumquat and Grand Marnier Ganache Petit Fours

This is precisely the sort of tiny food item I would forget to serve at the end of a meal with coffees. Try not to do the same.

Brandied Kumquats

As I mentioned above, my recipe for these is a bit vague, but I'm sure this will produce a delicious result. There are nor real quantities here, just relative amounts.

salt
kumquats
sugar
cinnamon stick
bay leaves
brandy

Dissolve about 1 tbsp salt in a litre of water and add the kumquats. Soak overnight. Drain and rinse. This step removes some of the bitterness from the fruit.

Fill a jar just large enough to fit the kumquats ¼ of sugar. Add the rinsed fruit, a cinnamon stick or two, and a couple bay leaves. Close the jar and tip a few times to coat the fruit in sugar. Add enough brandy to fill the jar. Seal and store for at least a month. Or, alternatively, completely forget about the kumquats for years. (Remind me to tell you how long I've had cherries in brandy sitting around....)

Remove the kumquats from the brandy, cut in half horizontally and remove any seeds and pith inside, creating tiny little cups.

125 ml water
125g sugar

Combine the sugar and water together in a small pot and bring to a simmer. Add the kumquat halves and simmer gently for about 20 minutes. This softens the skins a bit and gives them a translucent appearance. Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature in the sugar syrup.

Remove the kumquat halves from the syrup and drain. Press them gently onto a sheet of baking paper, flattening the end so that they sit open side up. Pipe full of grand marnier ganache. Refrigerate until serving.

Grand Marnier Ganache

Calling this “Grand Marnier Ganache” is a bit of what we in the profession call “menu poetry” which is to say “a lie.” I used a couple tablespoons of the brandy in which the kumquats were preserved to flavor my ganache. The liquor tastes surprisingly like Grand Marnier.

50 good quality dark chocolate
50 ml cream
2 tbsp kumquat brandy

Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place in a small bowl. Heat the cream on medium heat until almost, but not quite, boiling. Add the hot cream to the chocolate in the bowl and stir until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is well combined. Add the brandy and stir again. Refrigerate until cold – the mixture should be firm but soft enough to pipe.

If you find the mix too bitter (I quite like bitter chocolate) you can soften it a bit by adding a tablespoon of the sugar syrup that the kumquats were cooked in. Be careful, however not to add too much, as this will prevent your ganache from setting up enough.