The Escoffier Series: Chapter 13 Vegetables and Farinaceous Products
The Escoffier Series continues as we move into chapter 13.
Vegetables is a massive category. Escoffier makes no efforts to be complete simply because there’s always innovation that he could never account for.
We start the chapter with his list of vegetables (gnocchi and polenta and noodles is for later). Boiling, blanching he calls it, is the first cooking method. Is salted water really necessary? Is it important to keep the water boiling?
The text of the show, the script as it were, is at the bottom of the page.
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Text from the episode
The Escoffier Series continues with chapter 13, vegetables and farinaceous products. That’s rice and potatoes and gnocchi and polenta and noodles, which he calls macaroni.
Vegetables is a massive category and it would be impossible to account for them all. He does get to a few, however, and I’m going to read them to you.
Artichokes
Asparagus
Eggplant
Cardoons
Carrots
Celery
Cepes, or flap mushrooms
Mushrooms
Morels
Chanterelles
Chayote
Endive
Belgian Endive
Cabbage, white and green
Cabbage derivatives
Kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, turnip, Brussels Sprouts,
Cucumbers
Japanese Artichokes
Spinach
Fennel
Broad beans
Okras
Green beans and various dried beans
Lettuce
Corn
Chestnuts
Onions
Sorrel
Sweet Potatoes
Peas
Pimetoes
Potatoes
Rice
Salsify
Tomatoes
Jerusalem Artichokes
They are listed in alphabetical order by the French word, not the English.
I’ll wager you were surprised by at least two vegetables listed in the cooking part: cucumbers and lettuce.
You might have thought of one vegetable he didn’t include. You might have noticed mushrooms were segregated by Cepes or flap mushrooms, most of the rest and morels and chanterelles were identified particularly.
With all of that, there are some basics about vegetable cookery that are the beginning of the process.
Green vegetables should be cooked in enough salted boiling water so the water never stops boiling even when the veg is added. you might be thinking that’s a lot of water. It can be. Or it’s only a few pieces of veg at a time. The green vegetable should be refreshed or shocked if it is to be held for later use like in a restaurant. Shocked means lifting the veg out of the boiling water and placing it in ice water to stop the cooking. Shocking the veg ends the cooking process and preserves the nice green color.
As is so often the case, we’re in a conflict. If you are preparing a case of green beans for service, that’s a lot of green beans and that’s an hour or so boiling and shocking green beans. Blanching too many vegetables at once does risk color loss. It also risks nutrient loss. The longer the vegetable is in the water the more what’s in the vegetable, the green beans, moves out of the bean and into the water. That includes water and sodium, which is why the water should be well-salted before blanching vegetables. If the sodium level in the water is at least the same as in the vegetable, that’s an equal environment so the bean doesn’t surrender its own sodium to balance the water. That’s a lot of words to say salted water keeps the flavor in the bean or pea or asparagus.
Nutritionally, boiling vegetables depletes at least half of the available nutrients, particularly vitamin C in broccoli. There’s a whole rabbit hole about what various cooking methods do to vegetable nutrients. Escoffier might have had nutrition in mind, but his first focus seems to be appearance and flavor.
Escoffier uses the term blanching since he’s mostly talking to a restaurant cook audience. The goal of blanching is to partly or mostly cook the vegetable, green beans let’s say. During line service, this is handy since all that needs to happen is the green bean needs to be heated, seasoned, buttered, and plated. In the process of getting those things done, the beans will be cooked properly. Blanching is often thought of when skinning tomatoes or peeling pearl onions and when you can vegetables.
Escoffier has a section about cooking dried vegetables. I don’t know what the circumstances were in France when he wrote that. Nowadays, preppers may have dried vegetables on hand. I recently did some recipe development using dried vegetables and it’s different. One seemingly important tidbit was that Escoffier writes that dried vegetables of good quality and not more than 12 months old should not require soaking. Cook them in cold water on low heat bringing them slowly to a boil.
Braising vegetables is also mentioned. He offers a very particular procedure for braising which includes pork fat back and white stock. What is missing is any suggestion of a stewed vegetable. Stewed tomatoes, in fact. It’s not there.
I’ve made stewed tomatoes and a lovely stewed fennel dish that was an excellent accompaniment.
Braising would be done in an earthenware pot. Put thin fat back on the bottom, diced mirepoix in that, the veg to be braised which has been blanched, celery hearts for example, more fat back, and place it on low heat on the stove to loosen the fat and extract some of the vegetable juice. Add just enough white stock to barely cover the veg, affix a lid, and finish the veg in the oven.
I don’t think I’ve ever once done that cooking procedure. It sounds good. Parsnips is one of my all-time favorite vegetables and they would certainly benefit from low and slow cooking. Overgrown fennel bulbs and celery and woody carrots would also all be made better with this process.
Stewing, at least as I do it, starts with a fat, usually butter, then an aromatic, leeks or onions, the primary vegetable, flavoring of spices or herbs, and liquid, if it’s necessary. We made something called melted leeks which was leek rounds, washed of sand, and sweated in a decent amount of whole butter and salt and pepper. It takes about half an hour to make them wilt to look like they’ve melted and what you end up with is the sweetest pile of leeks you’ve ever had. They nearly disintegrate in your mouth and are an excellent accompaniment to a charred steak or something grilled and a touch bitter.
Home cooks have a different challenge. First of all, we are not, happily, cooking cases of green beans at a time. And while I’m here, let me add this confusing phrase.
Some restaurants use a green bean that’s pretty uniform in length and width. They look like thin pencils and are wonderfully green. They also have the very confusing name of Haricot Verts. Haricot means bean and vert is green. If you ask a Frenchman for haricot verts be prepared for a confounded expression. You may find such green beans packaged in small plastic clamshells for a rather tidy sum. They’re tasty, but I don’t value them for the price.
Our challenge is to get everything ready at mostly the same time so all the food is hot. To do that, there are ways to achieve flavor and appearance that don’t have entries in this book.
I never boil spinach. Ever. I always cook it on the stovetop in whole butter. Near the end, I’ll add a small amount of garlic and just before service, grate some nutmeg on top. Spinach tastes salty even when you don’t salt it. I salt it lightly because I know that flavor is a trick. Depending on what fats you have on hand and what the protein is, a complimentary fat is fine.
Asparagus can be grilled or roasted on medium-high heat. Fat asparagus should be peeled, in my opinion, since the peels start to develop a woody texture and the skin on thick asparagus stays stringy. Very hard to bite and not a pleasant dining room table experience. Plus, peeled asparagus has a wonderful light green color. I use extra virgin olive oil to coat the asparagus spears, salt and pepper them, then place them on a sheet pan and roast till done. They may need to be turned or rolled to get even browning on the asparagus.
If you are going to boil your asparagus, I recommend an extra step. Tie the asparagus with butcher twine near the end and near the tip. As many as you can hold in one hand is a good-sized package. Those two extra steps make getting the asparagus out of the hot water so much easier and also, then removing it from the ice water if that’s your plan. Why would you shock boiled asparagus after I just talked about home cooks not needing to do that? Cold asparagus with orange mayonnaise is an absolute delight. Cold asparagus and prosciutto ham or with salami is also dandy.
There’s a lot more to get to. This is a good start. There is a lot of repetition in the recipes. Potatoes may be an episode by itself since there is a lot that can happen with a potato. The starches will also be a separate episode. There’s too much to cover without getting dizzy.
I have no doubt I’ll mention this at least one more time in talking about vegetables. The French, especially in the 1980s, were all about al dente vegetables. That took on a very broad interpretation and each chef guarded his or her specific idea of what that was with passion. Those veg had crunch first, flavor second. The Italians are far more interested in flavor first and flavor comes from slightly overcooked vegetables. That’s not a hard and fast rule, of course. It’s simply an observation from eating a lot of food. I tend toward the overcooked vegetables since I also think they have more flavor.