Dinner 9—In Which Carnards are La’ Oranged like a Mofo

“French Valentine”

Menu:

Toast: Absinthe cocktail

Starter: La Terrine de ris d’Agneau

Soup: Potage Tour d’Argent

Main: Carnard a l’Orange Entier avec Pommes grille

Dessert: Gateau Grand Marnier

About Love

This was a valentines menu but some people had trouble seeing the hearts and cupids embedded in the dishes. That’s because I took a different approach to love. My idea was about resonance and luxury.

Love is luxurious—not in the sense of something arch and unnecessary, but in the sense that it is rich and overwhelming. We fall in love, we swoon, we die into it. These are dramatic, luxurious emotions wherein joy and fear elide into something indefinable. In every case, it is about a union, even if only briefly, that saturates our senses: Sweetbreads and pork cheeks are joined in a terrine; duck confit is married to a citrine glaze; cake is infused with brandy. It is the rich and the mundane; the solid and the volatile; the fruit and the bird.

However, those dishes are all just heavy petting. True love is unconditional, simple, and timeless. For true love in this menu, we look to the soup, Potage Tour d’Argent, the chef soup from a restaurant that’s been serving it since Henry IV sat at their table in 1582 (the year William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway—and he knew something about love). This soup, so plain, so normal, nearly unculinary in its simplicity, was surely the first thing the chef ever loved. I imagine his grandmother made it for him when he was a boy.  She used just a miripoix and two kinds of beans in a pot. But it tastes so good, so unchallenging, so embracing, how could it not be his favorite? Prepared with love, received the same way, a lasting symbol of care in its highest form: to feed someone something delicious because they matter to you more than the whole world. That soup was true love.

Murphy’s Law Prevails but We Don’t Care, We’re Busy.

So many little things went wrong with our most recent dinner I thought I was being pranked. I briefly wondered if Chef E was secretly testing my ability to deal with minor inconveniences and the ever-present Murphy’s Law of cooking.

The first inconvenience: Chef P was in the process of dying and could not prep or make it day of. She lived, thank God, but was not there for the critical part of cookingat an EVP event wherein Chef E wants to do something wildly unconventional, something ungodly and against the laws of Escoffier and Chef P has to wrestle him into at least nodding toward the classic techniques. In the midst of this quiet riot, yours truly trying to figure out to learn.

This left Chef E and I on our own, like two mischievous nine-year-olds left at home when mom’s away. We promptly had beer and glazed pork belly for our kitchen lunch and dressed like this:

Chef Efrain chopping onions.

More things cropped up at every step.

• Nobody has sweetbreads.
• A couple hours before serving, we find out the tables are locked in the van at the mechanics and might not be available.
• Sous Chef Willy the Pimp is lost in northern Illinois at a drunken redneck cousin incident involving pistols.
• We misjudged the roasting time for squash and did not realize until the last minute they would not cook through.
• Some guy at table one was sick. I mean, like, nineteen bathroom trips sick.

But, like always, we blew through it all like we were on fire, falling off a cliff. Once 40 people have paid their ticket and are en route, you can’t stop and regroup. You just make shit up.

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