Catch-up post #2: My Waterloo

I do understand the challenges of writing a recipe for a dessert as rococo as a napoleon, but on this one Rose Levy Beranbaum gets a D-.

The napoleon episode started last week when, in an attempt to entice my grandmother to come for dinner, I promised to make napoleons. My grandmother often alludes to napoleons. Based on passing remarks, I would say that her vision of an elegant and delicious meal consists of an old fashioned with a cherry, cheese souffle, and, for dessert, a napoleon. Someone will pay for the meal with a Charga-Plate.

So, last week, using Beranbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible, I made the fondant and the pastry cream that are essential to a classic napoleon. Then I mixed and rolled and chilled and rolled and chilled and rolled etc etc. the puff pastry. All was well and I had a beautiful slab of buttery dough. Beranbaum calls for weighting the puff pastry with a cookie sheet as it bakes and while I suspected a piece of parchment belonged in there somewhere, she's Rose Levy Beranbaum who wrote her master's thesis on sifting flour and who am I to question? I forged ahead. As I feared, when I tried to lift the top cookie sheet off the baked puff pastry, I ended up with torn, buckled shards.

My grandmother came to dinner anyway. We rued the failed napoleon as we ate hamburgers and Stir french fries.

Aside about Barbara Lynch's fries: excellent. In case you are wondering, the Stir fries are on the left, loathsome frozen Safeway fries on the right.

Since I still had the pastry cream and fondant, I made a new batch of puff pastry the other day -- this time using Jacques Pepin's recipe -- baked it up, and assembled the napoleon according to Beranbaum's directions. I greatly admire Beranbaum, but it is wrong to assume that just because her recipes are written in obsessive, maddening detail they will actually work. The pastry cream was soupy. Her formula for making the chocolate drizzle: addled.

That said, just pouring that fondant and watching it harden into a glossy pearlescent shell on the pastry gave me a thrill I don't get anymore from making a rustic fruit cobbler. Tackling an absurd French pastry dessert was exciting, however lame the results. I want to do more of this.

A Homemade Life: And so it is, but you might need a mandoline to make it

Molly Wizenbeg's recipe for zucchini noodles requires a mandoline to julienne squash into long threads that resemble spaghetti. I don't remember how we got our mandoline (wedding present? present present? did I buy it?) all I know is that we've had it since before we moved into this house eight years ago and never once used it. Look at it. Thing is sharp and crazy complicated.

My mother is mechanically minded and manually dexterous with these nimble, bony hands that love to pick wrong stitches out of a needlepoint and assemble a VCR  just for the exercise. She has what my father calls "possum" hands. (He has "pancake" hands, as do I. "Pancake" is the vastly inferior type of hand, but fortunately there's more to life than hands.)

My mother had the mandoline julienning zucchini in under ten minutes. 

You saute the finely cut zucchini in olive oil until soft, then toss with hot spaghetti and pesto. 

Elegant bowl was also made by mother's hands.

 

The spaghetti was tasty, if not as tasty as traditional pesto-sauced pasta without zucchini. I know it is healthier and makes everything less fattening, but we all felt the watery, flaccid strips of zucchini got in the way.

 

For dessert: Wizenberg's vanilla bean buttermilk cake with glazed oranges and creme fraiche. She introduces this recipe with a story about buying too many oranges then having a vision of a white cake with poached oranges, "a little like a Creamsicle in cake form." After much experimentation, she finally settled on a buttermilk cake out of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible as the perfect vehicle for glazed oranges and syrup. Excellent choice. What appealed to me was how the cake itself -- tangy from buttermilk -- tasted like cheesecake but was, in fact, cake cake. Even without the oranges, I instantly loved it.

So, here's the weird thing. I just pulled out my copy of The Cake Bible to see how much Wizenberg tinkered with the recipe (almost not at all) and noticed that I'd already baked this cake once before. On 2-11-01 I wrote: "Fluffy, golden, buttery -- but there IS a tang and I don't like it."

I can not explain.

Rethinking Rose Levy Beranbaum

Yesterday, I saw Scate Bakes' admirable resolution to read Rose Levy Beranbaum's master's thesis, "Sifting Flour Affects the Quality of a Yellow Cake." I thought this was a joke until I clicked on the link. It turns out that there is such a thesis* and it's fascinating, not so much for the science of sifting as for what it reveals about the mental processes of the woman who wrote it. If you don't want to read the whole thing, though I recommend skimming it, you should do as Beranbaum suggests and scroll down to her addendum. 

I own Beranbaum's Cake Bible but have never warmed to its stiff and prissy perfectionism. I grow weary even thinking about halving egg whites. But yesterday afternoon I was at Barnes & Noble and, inspired by that strange thesis, pulled out Beranbaum's Bread Bible. The whole tone was different, looser, funnier, more effusive. She still comes across as obsessive and kooky, but in a charming way. I almost bought The Bread Bible, but have forbidden myself new cookbooks. 

Today, I read this Believer Q&A and like Beranbaum even more. 

*I just pulled out The Cake Bible and see that Beranbaum writes in the introduction about showing her master's thesis to her husband on their first date. Oddly, she says she got an A+ on the thesis, when in fact she only got an A. That's a revealing little slip, not something you'd expect from such a perfectionist. Except, of course, it makes complete sense.