Authenticity can be a fine line to tread when it comes to cooking. Dishes and recipes originate in certain parts of the world and are often deeply rooted in local traditions. But then people emigrate, they travel, they adopt, they adapt, they improvise, and the same dish gets recreated in a different kitchen at a different time, with the same name but a completely different face.

Naturally, food and recipes are meant to be played with and built upon, and it would be a sad life for our taste buds if no one ever dared look authenticity in the eye and say, “you know what? I think I’ll do this my way”. But however playful and inventive and even irreverent we want to be, I think we owe it to the generations of cooks before us to at least know what we’re doing. Feel free to stray from the authentic path and go do your fun, fusion and quite possibly genius thing in the wilderness, but be aware that you’re doing so and make sure you understand the how and the why.

I love the simplicity of this salad and how the bread soaks up the juices, blending in and softly coating its companion ingredients, making a humble tomato and cucumber salad something more substantial and satisfying.

Granted, following this rule takes quite a bit of effort, research and curiosity, and more often than not it is hard to pinpoint what the authentic recipe exactly is. It can vary from one village to the next, from one family to the next, and even locals get into terrible street fights about whether ratatouille should include eggplant or not.

And we are probably all guilty of the occasional sloppiness, giving in a little too easily to the temptation of naming a dish in a cool and interesting way just because it’s somewhat related to another (“Hey, it’s cut in thin slices! I say it’s a carpaccio!”). We certainly mean no harm or disrespect and most cases could be endlessly argued upon, depending on how conservative or tolerant you want to be, but I believe that a big part of learning to cook is to read up and learn about the history and the culture and the people behind the things you make and eat.

These thoughts were brought about by the fact that I wanted to make panzanella, a Tuscan salad that will gainfully employ good-quality stale bread. While researching recipes, I found an article from 1998 in which the author, appalled by a recipe published in a cooking magazine, explained what was wrong with it (a majority of ingredients that had nothing to do in there, and the unacceptable toasting and cubing of the bread), and went on to share a pared-down version, translated from a Tuscan book, that he considered to be capital-A authentic. This is the recipe I followed, changing a couple of things along the way (sorry, can’t be helped), but trying to stay true to the spirit nonetheless.

The resulting salad was very tasty, unusual, and fun to make. I loved the simplicity of it and how the bread soaked up the juices, blending in and softly coating its companion ingredients, making a humble tomato and cucumber salad something more substantial and satisfying, with which you could simply eat a slice or two of freshly sliced ham and call it a meal.

It is however a most unforgiving salad, one with which you can’t cheat, one that will be exactly as average or sublime as the ingredients you put into it. If your tomatoes are rock-hard, your olive oil tasteless and your bread substandard, well, this salad won’t do anything for you. And I suspect that this is why most recipes feel the urge to add in something — anything — to jazz it up, be it anchovies, garlic, capers, eggplant, peppers, olives, mozzarella or all of the above, making it a delicious salad without a doubt but not, apparently, the real McCoy of panzanella.

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Today’s recipe is for cacao-nib-topped raspberry muffins.

I see raspberries as a sort of baking commodity, like chocolate chips or almond meal, and I usually keep a bag of frozen framboises in the freezer: in Paris, fresh raspberries come at too high a price for too tiny a basket to drown their delicate taste in a cake, so I have taken to buying Picard‘s framboises brisées for my baking. Framboises brisées, as you may have guessed, are raspberries that were smushed at some point in their lives, so they can’t be labelled as whole raspberries and can hence be bought for a little less. For me though, it’s not so much the price thing as the idea that I’m saving those poor flawed raspberries from disdain and oblivion, giving them their proverbial fifteen minutes.

As for the cacao nibs (éclats de fèves de cacao in French), they are simply tiny bits of roasted cocoa beans, not sweetened or processed any further. I am pleased to say that mine have flown across one continent and one ocean to reach my kitchen: they were a gift from one of my favorite food bloggers, Derrick, who was kind enough to send me this specialty from the Berkeley-based chocolate maker Sharffen Berger. I have always loved chocolat noir aux éclat de fèves de cacao (oh, the texture, the aroma, the flavor packed up in those tiny flecks!) and was a big fan of Scharffen-Berger’s Nibby Bar when I lived in California, but I had never actually thought of purchasing the cacao nibs themselves. Derrick mentioned that they worked wonders in savory dishes and this idea is simmering somewhere on the stovetop of my mind, but these raspberry muffins were my first impulse to use them.

I love baking with yogurt, as some of you may have noticed by now, as I think it lends a delightful moistness to the finished product without using truckloads of butter. I normally use plain yogurt or fermented milk (which can go by the name of kefir or lait ribot) indifferently (depending on what’s in the fridge) and here used both — buttermilk would work fine too.

These raspberry muffins were a popular item in the sunny brunch spread we laid out for our friends last Sunday. They were just the right sweetness in my opinion (read “not very sweet”) and this was confirmed by a quick table survey, but if you like your sweets to be very sweet you may want to up the sugar a little. As for the raspberry and cacao nib pairing, it worked particularly well, their subtle flavors melding together harmoniously without stepping on each other’s toes or competing for your attention.

Note that the basic recipe (minus the raspberries and cacao nib topping) is easy-breezy and can be adapted to welcome any other ingredient/topping that you would like in/on your muffs.

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Fraises des bois du jardin

High up on my life list is to one day have a garden, a vegetable patch and an orchard.

In the meantime, I have to settle for windowsills and tiny balconies on which Maxence, who is The Official Gardener around here, plants and pampers a lush jungle, making the absolute most of every square inch of space and railing. I have little patience for that sort of thing, but I am certainly grateful for his efforts and happy to enjoy the benefits — green, green, green through every window, flowers and herbs and, most recently, fruit.

I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Last spring on the Quai de la Mégisserie where gardening and pet stores abound, I was the one who insisted we buy a small pot of fraises des bois, those teeny strawberries that grow mostly in the wild and which the observant little girl (if properly trained by her mother) can spot and feast on in the mountain underbrush.

To be truthful, I didn’t think ours would ever bear fruit. Not because I doubted Maxence’s skills, but simply because I couldn’t imagine it actually happening. Still I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Despite my doubts, the plant we bought developed into a healthy-looking little shrub on our bathroom windowsill; delicate flowers soon started to bloom.

And do you know how this works? When the petals fall from strawberry flowers, their heart keeps swelling and then droop under the weight of their elongated shape. It takes them just a few more days to blush and blush until bright red, at which point Maxence harvests them and comes to share the minuscule bounty with me — usually one or two strawberries at a time, each of them softly sweet, uniquely acidulated and astonishingly flavorful for a thing so tiny.

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In French, a portrait chinois (literally “Chinese portrait”) is a kind of riddle in which one person tries to guess a famous person’s name by asking a set of questions and working by analogy: if he were an animal, what would he be? And if he were a flower, a city, a song, a color, a movie?

Since this is incredibly difficult (I mean really, if Charles de Gaulle were a flower, what the heck would he be? I’m telling you, you don’t want to be trapped in a car with people playing that game.), the portrait chinois is more often used as a poetic way to ask someone about his own personality.

It is also a popular interview pattern, although it has been used so much now that the interviewer is obligated to come up with clever questions, otherwise everyone (interviewee and readers alike) will be bored to tears.*

And the reason why I am telling you this — yes! there is a point to this! — is that while I was making this nectarine gratin for our dinner party the other night, lovingly coring and quartering these plump ripe nectarines, the juices running down my wrists and the occasional bite accidently flying into my mouth, I came to the following realization: if I were a fruit, I would want to be a yellow nectarine.

I’m not sure what it is about it exactly, but it has been my favorite summer fruit for as long as I can remember. White nectarines and peaches are fine, but the yellow nectarine is really something else — smooth-skinned and warmly sweet and the color of sunshine.

I am quite content to eat them out of hand, or paired with redcurrants in my mother’s fruit salads. But they lend themselves really well to baking too, so I prepared this simple dessert, in which the nectarines are thinly coated with a bit of cream and sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts, before going into the oven for a bit of flavor-deepening, flesh-softening, roasting action.

*Now that I think about it, maybe this would be a fun idea for a food blog meme, short and sweet — if you were a condiment, a kitchen gadget, a spice, a herb, a pantry staple, a food chemistry phenomenon, a dish, a cookie, what would you be? Hm. I’ll have to think about this.

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