Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [39]
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: A 4-year-old could do it.
Cost comparison: Under $4.00 to make a cup of crème fraîche. To buy a cup of crème fraîche at Whole Foods: $6.00. At Trader Joe’s: $3.79.
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon buttermilk
Pour the cream and buttermilk into a jar, cap, and shake. Leave in a warmish place—like beside the stove—for 24 hours, until thick. Refrigerate. It will keep for up to a week.
Makes 1 cup
NAPOLEONS
My parents did not take my sister and me to restaurants except once or twice a year and it was either Chinese or pizza. Ordering dessert was out of the question. And so my every childhood encounter with the world of restaurant food made a big impression on me. When I was about ten, for my birthday my maternal grandfather took me to lunch at a French restaurant where the maître d’ knew his name and sat us at a table in a nook by a window. I ordered soft-shell crabs, which I had never tasted before. For dessert, the waiter brought around a cart displaying the restaurant’s pastries. I chose a Napoleon.
It was the first time I had tasted either puff pastry or pastry cream, not to mention fondant, the sticky supersweet white glaze. Together, they blew my young mind. Have you eaten a Napoleon lately? First you get glossy fondant—barely touched with chocolate—that briefly resists the pressure of your teeth, but eventually yields and then you hit a layer of crisp, buttery pastry, which shatters instantly, dropping you straight into the plush, vanilla-scented cream. For years I carried this Napoleon around in my mind as the platonic ideal of a restaurant dessert. I thought I would grow up to wear high heels and silk dresses and go to restaurants where I would eat Napoleons.
But chefs and bakers today treat classical fancywork pastries as if they’re as passé as crocheted doilies.
When I put on a silk (well, silky) dress and go to a restaurant, dessert is more likely to be a piece of flourless chocolate cake or a thick white bowl of rhubarb crisp. I love rhubarb crisp. But I can make a rhubarb crisp. And even when I see a Napoleon on a menu my heart no longer skips a beat because it is always a riff on a Napoleon, something hip and playful and lazy—like some toasted phyllo dough topped with blueberries and lemon curd. I can toast phyllo and make lemon curd, but I can’t make a Napoleon.
It’s not all farmstead desserts, of course. Sometimes you get Tinkertoy constructions—shards of this and scoops of something else and never a full bite of anything—which are impressive and interesting, but ego-driven. When I’m done eating these desserts, I can never quite remember what happened.
Anyone can make crisps and simple chocolate cakes and cupcakes and rustic cookies with half an hour and an Easy-Bake oven. And chefs can make random collages of delicious dessert components and scatter them, Jackson Pollock–style, on a plate. But it takes skill and discipline and a severe repression of the ego to make a perfect Napoleon. I’ve tried to make Napoleons and I’ll probably try again, but my attempts have been multiday catastrophes. Maybe if we all start making our own cupcakes and crisps, pastry chefs will bring back the Napoleon. I am not holding my breath.
Make it or buy it? Buy it. If you can find it.
OYSTERS
I’ve always perceived eating raw oysters as dangerous, which it certainly can be. But provided you buy them from a reputable fishmonger, keep them chilled, and serve them promptly, the oysters you serve at home are no more or less likely to make you sick than the oysters you order at a restaurant. I have an even harder time paying $3 per oyster at a restaurant now that I’ve eaten them at home for less than a dollar apiece.
Of course, when you serve oysters at home you have to shuck them yourself—unless