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Cepes, Bordelaise
Open a pint can of cepes, drain on a sieve, then wipe well and slice them. Heat a tablespoon oil in frying pan, add four finely chopped shallots, cook them one and a half minutes, then add the cepes. Season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, toss them well and briskly fry for six minutes, tossing them once in a while.
Finely chop together a half bean garlic and two branches well-washed, fresh parsley, add to the cepes, toss well while heating for two minutes, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A persillade of mushrooms, cooked hot and fast. The whole point is dryness: canned cèpes carry a great deal of liquid, and if it is not driven off first the garlic and parsley go into a stew rather than a sauté.
- CèpesThese are Boletus edulis, sold as porcini in Italian shops and penny buns in older British books. Canned cèpes still exist but are uncommon; about 1 lb of fresh porcini, or 2 to 3 oz dried and soaked, stands in for a pint can.
- Drain, then dryWiping is not fussiness. Canned mushrooms hold brine in every pore, and wet slices will steam in the pan and never take colour. Press them gently between towels before slicing.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper against half a teaspoon of salt. That is a deliberately peppery dish by modern taste; start with half and adjust.
- "Half bean garlic"Apparently a literal rendering of a French phrase using gousse (pod/clove): half a clove, not half a head. With four shallots already in the pan the garlic is a seasoning note, and it is added at the end so it perfumes rather than browns.
- Branches of parsleyTwo branches means two sprigs, stems and all, chopped with the garlic into what a French kitchen calls a persillade. Flat-leaf parsley is closer to what was meant than curly.
- Fat and heatOne tablespoon of oil for a pint of mushrooms is lean; the pan must be genuinely hot and the mushrooms in a single layer or they will crowd and weep. Cook in two batches rather than adding more oil.
- TimingSix minutes is right for drained canned cèpes, which are already cooked and only need browning. Fresh porcini want longer — closer to ten — to release and re-absorb their moisture before the persillade goes in.
- YieldServes two to four as a side dish; in southwest France cèpes are often served with a steak.
À la bordelaise is one of those regional tags that means different things depending on what is under it: with beef it points to a red-wine and marrow sauce, but with mushrooms it means the Bordeaux treatment of cèpes — sliced, fried hard in fat, finished with garlic and parsley. The mushroom itself is so tied to the region that one of its French market names is cèpe de Bordeaux, from the pine and oak woods of the Landes and the Gironde that fruit heavily after autumn rain. The recipe's assumption that a cook reaches for a pint can rather than a basket is telling: Boletus edulis resists cultivation to this day, so the wild season is short, and preserved cèpes — canned or dried — were how a New York or London kitchen could have them in February. This book's international sweep depended on exactly that trade in imported tins and jars, which is why a southwestern French woodland dish could be set down for a household kitchen an ocean away.