Spaghetti Alla Bolognese

If there is one problem I come across when trying to cook out of this book, it is that it is designed for hosting dinner parties and hence many of the recipes require a little more effort than your average week night allows. This recipe for spaghetti bolognese is unlike any I have ever seen before and certainly a far cry from my own quick and easy comfort food. It uses bacon, chicken livers, white wine, and cream. The result is actually quite complex and incredibly rich without requiring too many hours of cooking. This is also the first time I ever bought chicken livers and the first time in twenty years that I purposely ate them! Not a bad recipe at all. The wine I used was an Italian Lamberti Pinot Grigio 2013. A great dry wine with a nice crisp bite to it.

Gateau Grand Marnier

If there is one truism to Mary and Vincent’s book, it is that alcohol features dominantly in many of the recipes. Which is perhaps not surprising for a book published in the mid-sixties. This cake is essentially a simple white cake with a bit of orange zest with is then battered in a Grand Marnier/orange juice syrup. The result was light, fluffy and incredibly boozy! To my tastes, it needed perhaps some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to offset the heaviness of the liqueur. However, a nice dessert regardless. Although I doubt it will come up again in my repertoire.

Quiche Lorraine

This is a very simple quiche recipe with bacon and Gruyere cheese. I cheated and used a pre-made frozen pie crust (for shame!) but the result was still an amazing result. I used to reckon myself a quiche master but in truth this recipe has made me realize how wrong I was. Instead of simply mixing a batch of eggs with the ingredients, this recipe only uses the egg yolks combined with 2 cups of cream. I was skeptical about the amount of liquid but the result was one of the fluffiest, most decadent quiche’s I have ever had. If there was one criticism it would be that 1 and a quarter cups of Gruyere was perhaps too much cheese and distracted from the overall enjoyment of the quiche filling.

Loup Reserve Beaulieu (Baked Stuffed Fish with Wine Sauce)

In substitute for the native ‘loup’ fish of Beaulieu, I used a striped bass as my salt water fish. This was my first time ever buying a whole fish and I made a critical mistake when I acquiesced to the fish mongers offer of gutting and scaling the fish. He did so from the bottom of the fish when, in fact, I needed to remove the backbone from the top. The result was that when I got home and attempted to de-bone the fish I ended up with two fillets as opposed two a whole fish I could stuff. To add insult to injury I completely forgot about the cooking thread I needed and so wouldn’t have been able sew the fish up regardless. I tried to wrap the fish with aluminum–which my mother informed me after the fact that wine and aluminum don’t mix–to hold the stuffing between the two fillets and hoped for the best. The recipe in itself is quite simple: white wine, chives, bread, and butter. The wine I used was a Willm Alsace Riesling 2012 from France which promised to be quite dry but in the end was rather sweet. All in all the result was a rather tangy fillet of fish. I’m not racing to make this dish again but I feel as though I should do it properly one day to get a better idea of what it’s supposed to taste like.

Gateau Marjolaine

The Gateau Marjolaine was one of my first forays into the desserts of Mary and Vincent Price’s book.  It is a meringue nut cake made with three layers of buttered icing–vanilla, chocolate, and praline. I mistakenly thought that the cake was supposed to be rectangular as opposed to round and so ended up with a great deal more filling than the cake could support, making it quite messy. Despite this, the flavour profile I feel was quite authentic to the recipe and tasted even better the second day as the filling soaked into the cake. I might make this again one day, although the praline powder required for the third filling seems an erroneous overkill to an incredibly sweet dessert.