A few weeks ago, I read Tara Austen Weaver‘s book The Butcher and the Vegetarian, a memoir in which she writes about being brought up as a vegetarian and the challenges she faced as an adult, when she had to start cooking meat for herself to try to recover from a serious health issue.

It’s a very good read, witty and honest, and even for readers like me, who don’t share her dietary background or meat-handling angst, there are a lot of elements to relate to in her story. I especially enjoyed the sections where she addresses the political and ethical sides of the meat question in a remarkably level and dispassionate way.

A number of things she wrote stayed with me after I’d turned the last page, but there is one short passage in particular, early on in the book (p.31), in which her brother gives a technique for testing the doneness of red meat. It’s a small thing, but I liked the tip so much I thought I would, in turn, share it with you:

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My first brush with tetragon — a.k.a. New Zealand spinach, warrigal greens, sea spinach, and a few assorted nicknames — took place six years ago: Nicolas Vagnon, the chef of the now long defunct La Table de Lucullus, had invited me to join him on his Saturday morning market run at the marché des Batignolles and hang out in his teeny kitchen afterward, watching him cook for the handful of customers who had come to lunch that day.

You can handle tetragon in much the same way you would spinach, keeping in mind that it is a pity to overcook it, even more so than other greens, because you want to retain a slight crispness in the leaves.

Among the things he bought and prepared was an alien-looking plant with diamond-shaped leaves attached to thick stalks. It and I were properly introduced: “Tétragone, meet Clotilde. Clotilde, meet Tétragone — it’s a little bit like spinach.”

Tetragon leaves are in fact more succulent — thicker, juicier — than spinach, and for someone like me who still hasn’t managed to get over a fierce childhood dislike for spinach, it is superior: it tastes green and marine (iodé, as we say in French, like the seaside air, or oysters) but without the bitter metallic aftertaste that bothers me so much in spinach.

Nicolas served it raw that day, drizzled with an olive oil dressing and paired with thinly fileted marinated sardines (see picture below, circa July 2004). And raw is definitely the way to go if the tetragon is young and its leaves spry; it pairs well with fish or shellfish then, but also with cured ham or burrata, and fresh almonds.

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Vinegar barrels photographed by Rebecca Bollwitt.

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s expression is, “Tourner au vinaigre.”

Literally translated as, “turning to vinegar,” it describes a situation or a conversation that’s taking a bad turn and may get ugly. It can be likened to its English cousin “going (or turning) sour.”

Example: “Il a vite changé de sujet avant que la discussion tourne au vinaigre.” “He quickly changed the subject before the discussion turned to vinegar.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

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Menu Fretin is a young French independent publishing house that specializes in culinary books*. Considering the teeny size of the organization, and how crazily difficult it is for an indie to carve a space for itself among the Goliaths of publishing, its book list is impressive, featuring daring projects that straddle the old and the new.

This, to me, is the perfect sablé: a crisp-then-crumbly cookie that tastes of vanilla and butter, with a touch of salt and a caramel undertone.

Menu Fretin has published such historical gems as an augmented edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, a biography of Grimod de la Reynière and other assorted texts of nineteenth-century food writing, but also new works by contemporary chefs Olivier Nasti in Kaysersberg, Juliette and Jean-Marie Baudic in Saint-Brieuc, or the twenty-six expatriated French chefs gathered in a collective called Village de chefs.

Late last year, three titles were added as part of a new collection called Menu Festin (small feast). [Update: the 11 slim volumes of the collection have now been reissued as a single book.] For each of these little books, the clever concept is to have a chef come up with a five-course menu (appetizer, first course, main course, dessert, mignardise or pre-dessert) around a particular theme, then lay out the full cooking timeline throughout the book, with a countdown from the first prep steps to the time of serving. Step-by-step pictures and check lists of tasks and ingredients round out the cook’s game plan.

One of these books is called Dimanche en famille and is authored by Yves Camdeborde, the famous Béarnais chef who’s often credited for fathering the neo-bistro trend in Paris, where he now runs the über-popular Comptoir du Relais and the hotel it’s attached to.

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