French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [49]
When wine is added to a quickly cooked dish such as fried steak, chops, veal escalopes or fish steaks, it is also thoroughly cooked, but much more rapidly; as soon as the meat is seized on each side, the wine is poured into the pan and the heat turned up, so that the wine bubbles and reduces, fuses with the juices already in the pan and in a matter of minutes produces a small amount of thick and syrupy sauce. Examples of this system are the côtes de porc Vallée d’Auge, page 361, in which cider replaces white wine, and saumon poêlé au vin blanc, page 311.
Even simpler are certain fish dishes, such as the grey mullet with black olives on page 289, in which the fish is baked in an open dish in the oven in a little bath of white wine, but this applies only to thick fish which take a little time to cook. If it were a question of sole, which needs only a few minutes’ poaching, the wine in which it has cooked would be subsequently reduced by fast boiling over a high flame, and the resulting essence incorporated into a ready-prepared cream sauce, or thickened with egg yolks and/or cream.
Instances in which wine is not cooked are those occasions when Madeira (infinitely superior to sherry for this purpose) is added to a hot consommé or to a clear broth destined for aspic jelly. A very small quantity is added when the consommé is already hot, and, in the case of a jelly, after it has been clarified as explained on page 72. It is all too easy to overdo this final addition of Madeira and to spoil a beautiful consommé by pouring the Madeira straight into it from the bottle instead of measuring out a tablespoonful—and a tablespoonful, or two at the most, is enough for about six cups.
There are other dishes in which a negligible quantity of wine, uncooked, makes all the difference; one example is the pêches au vin blanc, page 440, which calls for a soft or sweetish white wine.
The following points with regard to the use of wine in cookery may be useful to the beginner:
(1) Many reasons are advanced for cooking with wine—that it helps the flavour of second- and third-grade cuts of meat and elderly boiling fowls, that it breaks down tough fibres and so lessens cooking time, that a wine marinade is a help in preserving meat, fish or game in warm weather or on occasions when you wish to postpone the cooking of a given dish for a day or two. All these reasons hold good but, in the last resort, the best reason for using wine in cooking is because you like the taste it gives to the finished dish.
(2) Experiment is always worth while. Suppose that you have no bottle of white wine and no Madeira handy but the ingredients of a Martini are in the cupboard. Then try a small quantity of vermouth; or, for that matter, Dubonnet or any of the other apéritif drinks. They are really only fortified wines treated with aromatics; sole cooked in vermouth is a well-known French chefs’ dish; and there are French cooks who prefer to flame their lobster in whisky rather than brandy, presumably because whisky is much more expensive than brandy in France, so that the snob value of the dish is enhanced, and as a matter of fact once the alcohol is burnt out I doubt if many people would know the difference.
(3) This brings us to the question of the flaming, flaring, flambéing or whatever you like to call it, of brandy or other spirits. The spirit or liqueur in question should first be warmed in a soup ladle or in a very small saucepan, otherwise it may not light. Having set a match to it, pour it flaming over your dish of meat, lobster, pancakes or whatever it may be and shake and rotate the pan so that the flames spread. By the time they have died down the alcohol will have burnt away, and with it any excess of butter or trace of greasiness in the sauce