French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [50]
A good example of a dish in which the liqueur, in this case Calvados, is flambé is the escalope Cauchoise on page 373, and as I have explained, whisky, strange though it may seem, can be used as a substitute for Calvados.
(4) Until you know that you can trust your judgment as to how much brandy or liqueur any given dish will take, it is wisest to stick to the amount prescribed in the recipe. Liqueurs are tricky things, and too much may well spoil a dish, while too little is simply pointless. ‘A spoonful of Kirsch,’ I read in a newspaper article, ‘will improve your fruit salad. The contents of a whole miniature bottle will make it fit for a banquet.’ If a spoonful is enough, why add more? If it is not enough, then why bother with it? Alternatively, how much fruit salad are you going to make for a banquet, and why should you put more Kirsch for a banquet than for a simple dinner party? Mystery. . . . And talking of Kirsch, it is very expensive, but if you are going to buy it, make sure to get Alsatian, Swiss or German Kirschwasser, the true fruit alcohol, rather than the sweetened variety which is just known as Kirsch, and if you ever cook choucroute try the recipe on page 420 and see what a really astonishing difference a small glass of Kirschwasser makes to this otherwise rather flat dish.
(5) Don’t overdo the wine and liqueurs in your cooking just because you happen to have plenty to hand.
(6) If you have, say, a glass of red wine left in a bottle, pour it into a small bottle, cork it up and it will keep good for cooking for several days. But do not delay using it for too long, for it will go sour and be useless. White wine kept in the refrigerator appears to keep rather longer than red.
(7) When cooking with cider, always use an enamelled or porcelain-lined pan. Iron or tin will turn the cider black, and your sauce will have a somewhat sinister appearance.
(8) The wine to drink with wine-flavoured dishes is entirely a matter of taste, but the problem usually solves itself quite naturally, for white wine more or less automatically goes with fish (although some experts advocate a sound, but not grand, red wine such as Beaujolais, with salmon) and red wine with beef and game, even when white wine has been used in the cooking. For veal and chicken the choice is again a question of taste, the occasion, the time of year, and of what is available; personally I usually prefer white wines with both these meats, with the exception naturally of a dish like coq au vin, which obviously demands a red Burgundy. In France one finds that there are far fewer rules in these matters than are laid down in England, where wine is treated with more reverence because we have less of it.
In France, as far as everyday, rather than high level, great occasion, eating and drinking is concerned, what wine is served with any given dish is largely a matter of what is grown in the district, and whether the production of red or white wines predominates. Thus, in Alsace, where scarcely any red wine is produced, one drinks white wine with all sorts of dishes, even game, usually associated with red wine. Sometimes this is successful, sometimes one begins to long for a change. In the Beaujolais