A grapefruit drink from Chef David Tanis

Grapefruit. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

I’ve come to believe that home food is best, but it’s not often an opinion that you will hear expressed by a world-class chef, in this case David Tanis, chef of Chez Panisse.

Tanis is living a foodie dream – working six months of the year at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and living and cooking and writing in Paris the remainder of the year. That's France, friends, not Texas. Tanis' first cookbook, “A Platter of Figs” was a selection of the Gourmet Cookbook Club and focused on entertaining at home. In his newest cookbook, “Heart of the Artichoke and Other Culinary Journeys,” Tanis writes about cooking for small gatherings at home. The menus are for small groups of  2 or 3 people, medium-size groups of 3 to 6, and seasonal feasts for large crowds.

One of the most charming aspects of “Heart of the Artichoke” is the first section, “Kitchen Rituals,” short essays about food in his everyday life – chopped jalapenos in pancakes, a foodie travel kit with chilies and a tube of harissa, easy apricot jam, a quintessentially French sandwich – baguette, butter, ham. His essay on eating oatmeal will make every mother of a quirky eater smile. 

Chef Tanis talked about his new book and his culinary life over lunch this week at Atlanta’s Holeman & Finch Public House. Chef Linton Hopkins prepared the meal with recipes from the book – a crab-stuffed deviled egg to start, followed by a terrine of pork and duck liver, vegetables a la Grecque, a flat-roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, cabbage with potatoes, Sea Island red peas cooked with bacon,. And for dessert, molasses pecan squares. 




photo of David Tanis by Joe Vaughn

 

David Tanis is a low-key guy with gray, wavy hair and cream-colored glasses who looks very much like the artist he says he intended to be. He didn't learn to cook at home. Growing up in Ohio, he was only allowed to set the table each night. He learned to cook in college and taught himself to bake. Eventually, he found his way to Berkeley and Chez Panisse. After working as a dishwasher and baker, he rose through the ranks to chef. At first, he and fellow Chez Panisse chef Jean-Pierre Moulle split the work week. When Tanis decided to take a Paris apartment, Alice Waters offered to let he and Moulle split the year, a genius moment in job-sharing. (Moulle spends his half-year in France, aussi).

Unlike many in the restaurant trade, Tanis cooks at home every night after work, eating pasta at midnight. “Eating at home cements the culture,” he said. He laments that children who know only restaurants are missing out, both in the preparation of food and conversation at the family dinner table.

The recipes in “Heart of the Artichoke” cover the culinary globe, but the American and European influences are prevalent. “I’m a cultural chameleon,” Tanis said, “Everywhere I travel to becomes something else in my culinary bag of tricks.” When traveling, Tanis doesn't visit many restaurants, instead, he books accommodations with a small kitchen and seeks out local markets. 

Tanis claims no direct Southern connection to his cooking. “Any Southern influence comes from Southerners I’ve known or Southerners I’ve imagined,” he said. With ingredients like pecans and pork and field peas in his book, I think he's a Southerner at heart.

I especially like his use of grapefruit in the winter menu. Go into any local market this time of year and you will find the fruit, mellow yellow on the outside, ruby red on the inside. The taste is tart and refreshing, a counterpoint to heavy and creamy winter meals. Tanis employs grapefruit juice in his winter feast titled “Auspicious and Delicious” - a menu that includes black-eyed peas and ham, those crab-stuffed deviled eggs, bread and butter pickles, a relish plate and corn sticks. 

Champagne Mimosa. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Hair of the Dog, Salty Dog, and Other Grapefruit Drinks

There you are in the middle of winter, in a cold, harsh season, and a little sunshine is only too welcome. Citrus is the true gift of winter and there’s something wonderful about freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, mixed with Champagne for a Grapefruit Mimosa, or mixed with vodka for a Salty Dog.

Count on 1 grapefruit per serving; 1 large grapefruit will yield about a cup of juice. There is a world of difference between fresh juice and flash-pasteurized store-bought juice. This is a drink that’s all about the freshness, and no, you can’t squeeze the fruit the day before. And if your New Year’s resolution is a month without alcohol, enjoy a delicious glass of fresh grapefruit juice. You’ll feel virtuous and satisfied.

The proportions for a Grapefruit Mimosa are 1/3 grapefruit juice to 2/3 Champagne. Pour the juice into a Champagne glass, then slowly add the Champagne.

To make a Salty Dog, pour 5 ounces grapefruit juice and 1and 1/2 ounces vodka, both well chilled, into a glass with a salted rim. Without the salt, the drink is called a Greyhound. To make a Pamplemousse, add the same amount of Pernod to the juice instead of vodka and don't salt the rim.

 

(Excerpted from HEART OF THE ARTICHOKE by DAVID TANIS (Artisan Books)

Copyright 2010.)

I will add that while you’re serving grapefruit mimosas to your grown-up friends, pour grapefruit juice with lemon-lime soda for the children, they will love it.

Corn madeleines. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

To accompany: In what I consider a forehead-slapping, bloody brilliant idea, Chef Tanis suggests baking corn stick batter in a Madeleine pan. I just happened to have Madeleine tins and made these beautiful little cakes. And I have to call them cakes because they have sugar in them – true Southerners do not put sugar in their cornbread. They will sugar everything else, including the greens beans (a practice I find unpalatable), but never cornbread.

Corn madeleines and grapefruit mimosa. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Just a note on the china in the pictures: this is my wedding china, Orleans Blue by Lenox, and crystal, Classic Laurel, also by Lenox. My 20^th wedding anniversary is this month, so I’ve had this china for two decades. It’s true what I was told – I really don’t use it very often. But it makes my heart happy to pull out the bone china and the gold-rimmed crystal for company and special occasions, such as an Auspicious and Delicious holiday feast for family.

Text and images copyright 2010, Lucy Mercer, with the exception of the recipe, excerpted with permission from Artisan Books. The jacket cover and author photo by Joe Vaughan were also provided by Artisan Books.

New Year, New Hope

I feel the truth of what older friends and family have been telling me -- the years speed up as you go along. It seems like last month, I swear, that we welcomed 2009 with the prayer that it be a better, more stable and peaceful year for our families, our jobs, our country. Many feel like that hasn't happened. Yet there remains, as always, hope, and that's why today I'm eating black-eyed peas, soaked overnight and braised in the oven; and collard greens, this year the pre-chopped kind in the 2 lb. plastic bag, so much easier than rinsing fresh greens, cooked with a smoked turkey leg and served with red wine vinegar and coarse black pepper; cornbread baked in my cast-iron skillet; and homemade buttermilk-brined fried chicken.

I will take a moment to express sorrow for those non-Southerners without the grand tradition of this humble feast. The black-eyed peas are for good luck and the greens for lots of "greenbacks" during the year. The fried chicken and cornbread are because I can and I will.

So, I raise a fried chicken leg to my friends and family and readers and wish all of you health and happiness in 2010. May at least some of our wishes come true this year. And no matter what the year brings, may we still be able to afford black-eyed peas and greens when we welcome the new decade January 1, 2011.

New Year's Day 2009 Menu

Oven-Braised Black-Eyed Peas

Crispy Bacon

Skillet-Sizzled Buttermilk Cornbread

Collard Greens

Make Your Own Ice Cream Sundaes

We're starting the New Year with the traditional Southern meal of Black-Eyed Peas and Greens. For those not familiar with the tradition, the peas bring you good luck and the greens ensure a pocket full of greenbacks throughout the year. I usually cook the peas on the stovetop, but due to a gas leak, my stove is shut down temporarily. I cooked the peas in the oven instead, and I have to say they were the best I've ever made. The gentle oven braising ensured the peas didn't break open and the broth was unmuddied from vigorous boiling.

This is how I made the peas:

1. New Year's Eve, I opened a one-pound bag of dried peas and poured them into a shallow baking pan. After picking out the duds, I covered the peas with about an inch of water and left the pan on the counter overnight.

2. The next morning, I poured off the excess liquid and tranferred the peas to a Dutch oven. I covered the peas with water up to an inch above the pea-line. To the pot, I added one frozen smoked turkey wing, one chopped Vidalia onion, two smashed garlic cloves, salt and pepper.

3. I placed the pot in the oven and set it on 250 convection for four hours. I checked throughout the cooking time to make sure the liquid didn't get too low. After four hours, the peas were luscious and the house smelled warm and wintry.

4. I let the peas continue to cook in a low oven for a few hours. And that's it. How easy can it get? There was a lot of liquid, which made the peas more like soup, which was ok by me, especially nice to crumble the cornbread into.

Cornbread Salad Days

There are few things more satisfying for a Southern cook than a freshly baked pan of cornbread, steaming and golden on the inside, crispy and bacon-scented on the outside. It's the natural go-with for a pot of chili or soup in the chilly days of winter. In summer, it sets off a meal of garden fresh vegetables. Sadly, my family doesn't share my love of cornbread and I can't bring myself to make less than a full pan, so I needed to reinvent cornbread today. I looked no further than Crescent Dragonwagon's masterwork, Cornbread Gospels, and the chapter entitled "Deja Food."

The recipe for Patsy's Cornbread Salad caught my attention, but since I was low on bacon (oh, the horror), I opted for Elayne's Southwestern variation, but inevitably came up with my own, might I say delicious, version. Here's what I did:

I crumbled up the remaining cornbread into big chunks and added one can of drained red kidney beans and two finely chopped leeks. I get wonderful young leeks from the CSA, otherwise I would use about a half of a chopped storage onion. I dressed this mixture with a half-cup of mayo mixed with 1/4 cup of barbecue sauce, 1/4 cup of sweet pickle relish and just the slightest bit of apple cider vinegar (to get the remaining barbecue sauce out of the bottle). I stirred this together and served it for lunch, to myself, of course, because the girls would rather have pb&j. They just don't know what they're missing. Elayne adds cheese to her salad, which I may do to individual portions, but I left it out of the big salad because I don't like the texture that cheese gets when left in a dressing. All told, the salad was a good excuse to make a pan of cornbread.