Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [109]
We think of formal meals as the only way to properly honor a great wine in its prime. But that’s not necessarily so. I once carried home from Paris a single magnificent bottle of Burgundy, a 1961 Musigny from the Comte de Vogüé. I don’t mind saying that I have never, before or since, paid so much for a single bottle of wine. It awaited only a suitably lofty occasion to open it. For a long time, that opportunity never presented itself.
Then, for a birthday dinner, my wife prepared a favorite dish, potato and salt-cod purée, or what the French call brandade de morue. Its smell flowed from the oven and filled the house. As it came out of the oven, I heard a crash. Dashing in from the dining room, I found our beautiful old oval ceramic dish on the floor in shards, the brandade splashed everywhere and my wife in tears.
“This calls for the best bottle in the house,” I said as we cleaned up.
Our abbreviated birthday dinner consisted of a salad, some good country bread, a wedge of Gruyère—and that Musigny. It gave me the greatest pleasure of any wine I’d ever uncorked. Except, perhaps, for that Corton-Charlemagne drunk at roadside from a plastic cup.
Radishes
I love radishes, especially the long and slender kind known as French breakfast radishes, which are a little less sharp than the regular variety. I love radishes with a big blob of tapenade; I also like them alongside hard-boiled eggs, aioli, and slices of pumpernickel; I like them thinly sliced on a buttered baguette as a sort of tartine; and I even like them sautéed. But my favorite way to eat radishes is to dip chunks in softened, unsalted butter (preferably French) and then in flakes of fleur de sel—wow.
Molly Wizenberg loves radishes, too, as anyone who’s read A Homemade Life already knows, and recently I was happy to discover that Kate McDonough, editor of one of my favorite Web sites, the City Cook (thecitycook.com), and author of The City Cook (Simon & Schuster, 2010), does as well. After I read McDonough’s essay “Spring Cooking” on her site, I asked her if she would permit me to share it with readers of this book. She kindly agreed:
While radishes may not be the first ingredient you think of when it comes to spring cooking, they are for me.
On my first trip to Italy, a trip filled with memory-searing experiences, I tasted my first risotto. It was in Florence, at a small ristorante located alongside the Arno, about two bridges down from the Ponte Vecchio. The chef had spent a few years living in California and loved to guide Americans through his menu, and he convinced me to try a spring radish risotto. About thirty minutes later (every risotto was cooked to order; none of this half-cooked-then-finished-later risotto done by most U.S. restaurants) the waiter brought me a plate filled with almost soupy, pale pink rice. Its flavor combined the sweetness of butter and garlic with Parmesan’s salt and the pepper of spring radishes. The pink, of course, was from the radishes’ red skins. And the tender rice, combined with the crunchy cooked radish, was the chef’s genius.
A few years later my now husband and I were again traveling, this time to the Normandy region of France. We had rented a car to drive the coastal towns where the Battle of Normandy was fought and where, nearly nine hundred years earlier, plans were laid for the Battle of Hastings depicted in the extraordinary Bayeux Tapestry. Today Normandy is home to some of the best apple groves and dairy farms in all of Europe, a kind of bucolic disconnect from the area’s violent past; it is common to see cows roaming among the remains of concrete artillery pillboxes in the grass-covered hills over Omaha Beach.
We arrived in Bayeux just in time for lunch and spotted its weekly farmers’ market under way in a parking lot not far from the Bayeux Tapestry museum. Since we always traveled with basic picnic tools, we headed to the market with a corkscrew and a Swiss army knife. We spread our lunch on the hood of our rented Peugeot, making sandwiches