The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [175]
An hour and a quarter before dinner, preheat the oven to 500° F. Remove the squabs from the refrigerator and season them well on both sides with salt and pepper. Cover and let them warm to room temperature.
Meanwhile, prepare the lentils: Wash them under cold water, pick out any visible stones, and place them in a 3-quart pan with the onion, carrots, and bacon. Add the remaining 4 cups of chicken broth, bring to a boil over high heat, reduce to a simmer, partially cover, and cook for 40 minutes to an hour, stirring every 10 minutes. The lentils are done when they have absorbed all the liquid and are soft to the bite; they should not be al dente. Remove and discard the onion halves, the carrots, and the bacon. Stir in the butter and half (½ cup) of the squab jus. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Simmer over low heat for 5 minutes more; then keep warm, covered, over the lowest flame. The lentils should be unbelievably savory.
Fifteen minutes before dinner, cook the squabs: Place a small heavy metal roasting pan (or two large ovenproof skillets), just large enough to hold the squabs in one layer, over high heat on your stove top. Add the remaining 4 tablespoons of oil and begin browning the squabs, skin side down, flattening them with a spatula. After half a minute, transfer the pan to the preheated oven and roast for 8 minutes (rare) or 10 minutes (medium), with the squabs still skin side down. Check after 5 minutes: if the skin is a perfect, deep shade of brown, turn the squabs; otherwise, leave them as they are. The French and I prefer squab breast meat just this side of very rare, like red meat. It is most delicious this way, and its texture is wonderful. Cut into the breast meat if you need to check—the juices should run a deep pink.
To serve, warm four plates. Warm the squab jus. Stir the lentils and divide them among the plates, in a 5-inch or 6-inch circle in the center of each. Place the squabs on the lentils. Season them with salt and freshly ground pepper. Dribble the remaining squab jus in a concentric circle around the lentils and decorate with a sprig of thyme. Serves 4.
September 1996
PART FIVE
Proof of the Pudding
The Smith Family Fruitcake
I was eighteen when I tasted my first fruitcake, which may explain why I liked it so much. My family never celebrated Christmas, except by watching the first fifteen minutes of Amahl and the Night Visitors on television every year, and nothing in my grandmothers’ repertory had prepared me for that first wondrous mouthful of fruitcake at the house of a friend from college. It was a moist, alcoholic plum pudding, full of dark, saturated medieval tastes and colors—currants, dates, and black raisins, aromatic orange peel, mace and allspice and nutmeg, brandy and molasses—aged for a year and then set aflame at the very last minute, carefully spooned out like the treasure it was, and topped with an astonishing ivory sauce made only of butter, sugar, brandy, and nutmeg. They called it, simply, hard sauce. No more belittling name has ever been conferred upon so massive a culinary triumph.
Nowadays mail-order companies advertise fruitcakes for people who can’t stand fruitcake, which makes no more sense to me than concocting an inferior version of foie gras for people who can’t stand foie gras. I’ve ordered several of them over the years; most are loosely cemented blocks of nuts and hard, dried fruits (no sugar added) with barely any cake in between; one is baked in the shape of the state of Texas. Cookbooks inexplicably offer creative alternatives to hard sauce, and a few years back, Hallmark issued a series of antifruitcake