[Aunt Amélie’s Smooth Chocolate Cake]

None of my aunts are named Amélie, I thought I should make that clear from the start. And if I am to explain the origin of this recipe, I will need to rewind the tape back to early January, when French food writer Thierry Roussillon asked if I would answer a few questions for one of the interviews gourmandes he publishes on his blog.

A few days after I did, a severe bout of procrastination found me browsing through other people’s interviews. I happened upon that of Augustin, of Michel et Augustin fame, who made a passing mention of “le fondant de Tante Amélie, un gâteau au chocolat épatant cuit au bain-marie” — “Aunt Amélie’s smooth cake, a stupendous chocolate cake cooked in a water bath.”

Stupendous? Smooth? Chocolate? And a novel technique? My curiosity itched so badly it had to be soothed with tiger balm. I called Augustin and asked in my sweetest voice if he was willing to share the recipe — provided it didn’t break any sort of culinary omertà of course. He was, it didn’t (Amélie is in fact the aunt of Augustin’s wife, Victoire, which leaves us with a pretty daisy chain of French names), and I gave the recipe a whirl at the first opportunity.

It is indeed an unusual, and very easy recipe that begins with a sirop de sucre (a syrup of equal parts water and sugar) in which you melt the chocolate and butter. As for the hot water bath, its role is to conduct the heat gently around the pan, resulting in a smooth crustless texture that swathes your tongue.

And so I had made the cake and set it to cool, the kitchen counter had been cleared and I was taking a minute to admire the finished product, my head slightly tilted to the right, when it occured to me that something was missing. My cake looked naked.

Now, as regular readers may have noted, I rarely submit my cakes to the suffocating torments of frostings, icings, or glazes: I prefer the looks of a simple cake, and I don’t enjoy the mouthfeel (nor the extra work) of most frostings. But if I was going to serve this one to company — and company was expected any minute — it really needed some sort of headdress.

This is when I remembered that Les Petits Mitrons — a pastry shop on rue Lepic that specializes in beautifully old-fashioned but excessively caramelized fruit tarts — sells a similar chocolate cake that is decorated with a shiny topping of sliced almonds.

I wasn’t certain how they achieved that finish, but I opted for an abricotage, the trick that makes classic French fruit tarts so glossy: you combine two parts apricot jam with one part water, heat gently until thin, fish out any bit of apricot skin, and brush lightly over your tart or cake or body.

I didn’t have apricot jam on hand, but I did have a half-eaten (no: half-full) jar of Christine Ferber‘s strawberry and mango jam, and that worked splendidly. I toasted a handful of sliced almonds, stirred them into the mangofraisage, and spooned that atop the cake, which I served with mango sorbet, to soft moans of approval from my dinner companions.

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[Tomato Feta Dip]

Every once in a while I get the sudden impulse to hop on a stool and spring-clean my pantry. The urge strikes with no warning, often at the most inconvenient moment, and I get pulled into the task like those cartoon characters who slip a finger into a spinning cogwheel.

I will be looking for an item that time has pushed to the hinterlands of the cabinet, and I will encounter all sorts of forgotten jars and neglected cans along the way. I will let this distract me for a second (“Mmmm! Goose gizzards! Pear and chocolate jam!”), check a few best-by dates, and freak out. Such good ingredients! So close to their official dying day! How, oh how could I let this happen!

I will clear all three floors of the exceptionally ill-conceived cabinet we use for food storage, ask the evicted inhabitants to wait on the kitchen counter as I give their lodgings a good scrub, and reorganize them by kind and by seniority, so that the ones that need to be used pronto will stand at the front.

During my most recent campaign I couldn’t save the chestnut purée or the canned ceps — their time had come, there was nothing the paramedics could do — but a large jar of organic whole peeled tomatoes did appear in extremis, and its contents were rescued into this tangy feta dip*.

I am not familiar enough with Greek cuisine (feel free to recommend a good reference book) to say if this resembles any member of the traditional mezedes family, but it was well received at the apéro, served with wedges of fresh pita. The leftovers made a fine spread for a chicken pita sandwich the next day, and when the pasta salad days return I will try it as a dressing.

* I buy my feta and pita from Pelops, a Greek deli that has locations on rue des Martyrs and rue des Abbesses, or from Heratchian on rue Lamartine, a shop that specializes in foods from the Balkans and the Near-East. Both make a fine tarama, too.

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[Spoon-Tender Braised Veal Shank]

May I introduce to you my new favorite dinner party recipe, a recipe of the sort hosts and hostesses ardently wish for, a recipe that requires minimal effort and produces spectacular results?

Yes, I thought that might interest you.

The recipe in question is a recipe for veal shank that one braises for three to four hours in sweet white wine (vin blanc moelleux), surrounded by a benevolent court of onions and/or shallots, until the sauce has turned to a simmering amber, and the meat is so mellow and succulent it can be served and eaten with a spoon — hence the name.

You may recall the veal shank from osso buco recipes, where it is sliced into rounds: it is a cut taken from the back leg of the animal, it includes lobes of lean and gelatinous meat as well as a big fat central bone filled with pulpy marrow, and these features make it an admirable candidate for slow cooking methods.

The seeds of this particular recipe were first planted in my mind during a conversation with the wonderful Meredith, who works in the kitchen of the restaurant Les Ormes in the 7th, a conversation during which she spoke highly of her chef’s signature jarret de veau à la cuiller. I have yet to taste Stéphane Molé’s version and I was too shy to ring Meredith and ask if she would walk me through his method, so I just did a bit of online research instead.

Among the great many recipes that turned up, the one that inspired me the most was Tarzile’s, which she herself had gotten from a Quebec cooking show. What immediately drew me to this recipe, beyond Tarzile’s lively prose, was that it required very few ingredients — meat, shallots, wine, spices — and even fewer steps — salt the meat, peel the onions, slip into the oven, et voilà!

I have made this twice in ten days — something I seldom, if ever do — and served it to two different panels of diners. Both times the dish was lauded in such a way that I felt compelled to reveal how straightforward and easy the recipe was — unlike magicians, I take pleasure in sharing my sleights of hand — and both times I had my tasters shake their head in wonder as they took mental or, in some cases, written notes.

At Les Ormes, the jarret is served with homemade potato gnocchi, and fresh pasta would be wonderful, too, but I chose to serve mine with a mix of carrots and Jerusalem artichokes the first time, and with mashed celeriac (boil it in salted water and mash it with a little crème fraîche and lots of pepper) the second time. Whatever side you choose, it should be something that will take kindly to a liberal dousing of the thickened, caramelized juices.

The original recipe called for Vin de Muscat or Vin de Samos; I used a bottle of late-harvest Tariquet, a Gascony wine of which I am very fond. As for the drinking wine pairing, my favorite caviste could not have made a more spot-on recommendation than a red 2004 Sancerre from the Domaine des Caves du Prieuré.

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I don’t really do milk. I don’t drink it, I don’t cook with it, I don’t add it to my cereals, and I like my coffee black, thanks. As a result, I rarely have any in the fridge, and when I do buy a bottle for a recipe, the leftovers usually sit in the fridge and spoil with boredom.

But I hate to toss food as much as the next girl (or perhaps even more than her), and it recently occurred to me that I could salvage leftover milk and make Maxence happy in one easy step by baking œufs au lait (literally, “eggs with milk”, more or less pronounced as “uh-oh-lay”), a sort of flourless vanilla pudding that was one of his favorite childhood treats.

I rang up Maxence’s maternal grandmother for the recipe (the same grandmother who provided the gâteau au yaourt recipe and whose madeleine recipe I’ve been meaning to request) and barely forty minutes later there it stood, my very first batch of œufs au lait cooling on the counter, unphotogenic as can be and proportionally delicious. Silky and innocently sweet beneath a lightly chewy skin, it is the sort of dessert for which you will want to change into your pajamas.

Oeufs au lait did not exist as such in my family when I was growing up, but my mother did make a mean crème renversée, which is essentially the same thing as this, except the bottom of the dish is first coated with a light caramel, and the custard is flipped before serving. And if you can’t be bothered to flip it, you still have a crème caramel.

Endless œufs au lait variations can be obtained by flavoring the milk with cocoa, coffee, syrup, etc., as you heat it. Next time, I may follow this suggestion and steep toasted oats in the hot milk for an hour before straining them out; the poster reports it is a traditional dessert from Loire-Atlantique called pain d’avoine.

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