• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1275 0

of the cake), and bake for another 45 minutes. Do not overbake. These fruitcakes should be slightly underdone and very moist; remove them from the oven as soon as they resist the pressure of your fingertips or show the barest sign of pulling away from the sides of the pan. Let the fruitcakes cool in their pans on a rack, unmold them and remove the paper, wrap tightly in plastic, and refrigerate for at least a few days and as long as 3 weeks before cutting them into thin slices while they are still cold. This recipe makes 16 cups of cake batter, enough for two 8-cup loaf pans. Or you can make a dozen small fruitcakes in miniature nonstick loaf pans; decrease the baking time accordingly.

December 1991

Fries

For weeks I had been preoccupied with horses. Every time I saw a horse dragging tourists across the snow in Central Park, or standing under a policeman on the cobblestones of SoHo, I began to salivate. In truth, it was the fat of the horses, the fat around their kidneys, that excited me.

It had all started several months before, when a friend in Paris telephoned to announce that Alain Passard, chef of the famed Michelin two-star restaurant L’Arpège in the Seventh Arrondissement, cooks his French fries only in horse fat. “They have a not-disagreeable horsey flavor,” he told my friend Frédérick Grasser, a prodigious cook and food writer, “a lightness and a true crispness you cannot obtain with other fats and oils.”

Lightness, crispness, savory flavor—the words instantly put my appetite on alert. Isn’t it a miracle, I reflected, that French-fry lovers the world over—which includes nearly everybody the world over—share the same standards for greatness in fries? I noticed this again when reading a manual for French-fry professionals. Crispness, a golden-brown color, tenderness (instead of toughness), a fine fried flavor, lightness (instead of a soggy interior), and absence of greasiness—these seem to be cultural universals, like the fear of snakes.

Only texture gives rise to argument. Americans look for a dry, granular, “mealy” interior, and so they usually choose high-starch, dense Idaho russets. Europeans prefer a moister, smoother texture, which comes from a “waxier” tuber of lower density and starch content—but not as waxy as the small, yellow-fleshed rattes, fingerlings, and new potato varieties they generally use for mashed potatoes. In America, this would describe the BelRus, Centennial Russet, Chieftain, Katahdin, La Rouge, Sangre, Sebago. All but the Katahdin are difficult to find in American supermarkets, where six starchy varieties command 80 percent of the business. Unless your nearest farmer’s market sells yellow fingerlings or other boutique potatoes, you will have to settle for a round, white boiling potato from the supermarket if you are not particular about flavor and want to go in the waxy direction.

Frédérick went on to explain that Alain Passard’s preferred potato is the Charlotte de Bretagne (whose mealiness or waxiness I have not yet ascertained). He cuts it into the pommes Pont-Neuf shape—classic French fries about one centimeter square and eight centimeters long, or three-eighths inch by three inches. He uses a kitchen knife, not a French-fry cutter or food processor, because this produces a slight irregularity in the fries. Passard poaches the potato strips in rendered horse fat, a clear and golden liquid, kept at a relatively cool 265 degrees Fahrenheit, for ten to twelve minutes; drains the potatoes; waits six minutes; and immerses them again in the horse fat, this time raised to 365 degrees Fahrenheit for the two or three minutes needed to make them crisp, golden brown, and a little puffy.

Frédérick had barely hung up when a fresh sense of purpose and drive animated my spirit. Someday soon, I was sure, I would cook my own French fries in the fat of a horse. When and how this would be accomplished were questions that made the future seem alive with prospects and possibilities.

And then I was having a drink with Nora Pouillon, whose two restaurants in Washington, D.C. (Nora and Asia