sevenswells | [BONUS] The Art of Love and Cooking : Second amuse-bouche (ENG)

Here below is the (much overdue) bonus post to Chapter 2 of The Art of Love and Cooking (it's a PuckxKurt WiP that I'm writing where Puck is a chef. Yeah.). First of all, I'M SO SORRY GUYS. I'm unforgivable, I shouldn't have let so much time go between updates, it's just not done; but the good news is, I'm working on (the true nightmare that is) Chapter 3 as we speak, since I'm almost done with Rhapsody's script (at long last!). There will be about six chapters all in all for this fic I think, so please bear with me and my excruciatingly slow writing, I swear I'll finish it, I just don't know exactly when. Thank you to the people who have recently discovered and read the fic and left the sweetest comments, and thanks also to the regular readers, you all give me courage to wrestle my crappy English and get down to writing at last.

Careful, the post below might be a teeny bit image-heavy.

1 - Puck's scones

One of my betas, the very sweet and most helpful

drgaellon , who's well-versed in the art of cooking, had a remark about the recipe: This is an odd recipe to me. Do you make your scones this way? Usually you cut the butter INTO the flour to form pea-sized lumps, not just rub the butter up and toss it in. Also, baking powder biscuits (which scones are) should never be left to sit; they have to be baked right away or the gas from the baking

[edit] Re: about the butter: it was actually my mistake, I misread the original recipe and that resulted in the wrong interpretation in the fic (see drgaellon's comment below), but it's corrected now

The thing is, I've never actually tried this recipe. The scones are real and I've tasted them, but I did not make them: what I described in Chapter 2 were the scones I ate at a tea house in London, near Kensington Palace in Hyde Park, called The Orangery. I had the best afternoon tea I've ever had there; the fruit scones, warmed to perfection, were served with an excellent orange-flavoured Rooibos tea, and absolutely gorgeous clotted cream along with homemade strawberry jam. Trust me, if you ever go to England, you MUST try this; it's not cheap, but oh-so worth it.
Here are some photos I took to convince you:

(oh, Orangery scones. If I could, I would marry you. Good God and that clotted cream...! *0*)

Not related to the scones, but gorgeous anyway: Victoria sponge cake and some kind of decadent chocolate cake. I didn't eat all that all by myself of course, this was

berylia 's menu (yes, I was in good company too ^^ it helps creating the perfect ambiance I must say!)

(and that was Berylia's wife's menu, a little bit of everything, including finger sandwiches)

Of course I didn't get the recipe for those scones, so I just made a research on the interwebs and found this recipe, supposedly the World's Best Scones. Haven't tried it yet, but the ratings are numerous and all of them really good, so that must mean something, right? Be sure to let me know if you've tried and liked it!
>>> http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Worlds-Best-Scones-From-Scotland-to-the-Savoy-to-the-US/Detail.aspx

2 - Puck's brigade de cuisine

A brigade de cuisine is a system of hierarchy that separates the tasks amongst the kitchen staff, creating specialization for each person who's part of the brigade. The chef de cuisine (Puck) and the sous-chef (Gill) escape that specialization, though it is important to note that, as a general rule, every great chef during his training has, at least once, occupied every position in the brigade, because he's supposed to master them all.
In a small brigade, it is not uncommon that the same cook would be responsible for two specialties: Anthony, for example, is a fish cook and an entrée preparer (he's in charge of everything fish and seafood, but also prepares soups and other dishes not involving meat or fish, including vegetable dishes and egg dishes). You can't occupy positions that are too different from one another at the same time though; it's very rare to be a fish cook and a roast cook at the same time for example, because both take a lot of time and preparations separately.

***Frédérique

As Gill said, pastry chefs are considered a little apart in the brigade, because all the others tend to work together as a group, whereas pastry is a huge program by itself and quite different from everything else going on in the kitchen. When I said that great chefs have at least once occupied every position in the kitchen, that doesn't necessarily include pastry. Chefs who own a restaurant can ask pastry chefs who don't belong to their brigade to prepare the desserts, more like consultants than people who are under their direct orders. If you are familiar with Top Chef, you must know how the contestants are always nervous and uncomfortable when the challenge is about dessert and pastry; that specialty really is no small matter.
I don't know if I'll manage to include it somewhere, so I prefer to say it here: in this fic, Frédérique is supposed to be a disciple of Pierre Hermé, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) French pastry chef. Pierre Hermé is very famous, among other things, for his macarons. If you're wondering why I felt the need to specify all this, well, just know that it's interesting information for the end of the fic.

3 - The best chocolate éclairs ever

I wanted to include them in the fic no matter what. If you ever come to Paris, you MUST taste the chocolate éclairs from Le Furet Tanrade. They're like I described them in the fic: the filling is made from very dark and bitter chocolate, and only the icing is sugary, so the éclair is just perfect, not too sweet, perfectly balanced. Here is a review in English, not about the éclairs but about the whole shop, which is actually specialized in selling chocolate
>>> http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/01/chocolatier-le-1/

4 - Kurt and Aurélien's engagement party menu

Here's the menu Puck and his team put together:

Hors-d'œuvre: Langoustine ravioli
Soup: White gazpacho
Seafood dish: Lobster with three types of beetroot (chioggia, red and yellow)
Meat dish (/Main course): Duck breast rubbed with espelette, and caramelized gingerbread sauce
Salad (/Entremets): Green apple mille-feuilles with blue cheese
Dessert: Florilège

Above is what you would call a multiple-course classical French menu (repas gastronomique à la française), which is now part of the intangible world heritages to preserve, according to the UNESCO.
Nothing much to say about the langoustine ravioli, except that "langoustine" is a type of crayfish if I'm not mistaken, and that an hors-d'œuvre is the equivalent of an appetizer. It's a bite-size dish that's generally served at the beginning of the meal.
The white gazpacho was inspired by one of Hubert Keller's signature dishes (FYI, Hubert Keller is a great French chef who lives in the States; he was also a Top Chef Masters contestant). It's a refreshing cold soup that Keller prepares with cucumber, almond and rice milk (well, pretty much what Puck explained in the fic).
The vanilla sauce that goes with the lobster was inspired by many viewings of Top Chef; vanilla in other dishes than dessert has become very trendy in haute cuisine these days, but everytime it was used in Top Chef, no matter how skilled the chef was, the judges never liked it -- so I thought that maybe Jeoff, if he's such a great sauté cook (sauté cooks can also be in charge of preparing sauces) could nail it. As for the three types of beetroot, it's an idea I took from a high-end gastronomy magazine; here's what chioggia and yellow beetroot look like (so you can imagine how pretty they must look on a plate). Red beetroot is just your usual beetroot, nothing special about it ^^
About the duck breasts; espelette is a special type of pepper from the Basque country in France (from a place called Espelette, actually, hence the name): it's dried, grounded and turned into a very tasty powder that's very often used in French cuisine to add a little fire. Caramelized gingerbread sauce is pretty much self-explanatory, and delicious; its sweetness goes really well with the duck.
I wanted to include the green apple mille-feuilles in the menu because it's a very simple but incredibly tasty recipe that you can do at home. I took it from a very famous French culinary blog called Beau à la Louche. Here's the recipe in French (I'll translate it below but take a look at it anyway because there are pictures; they're gorgeous and might be helpful too):
>>> http://beaualalouche.canalblog.com/archives/2007/08/20/5900862.html (scroll down the page, the recipe is at the end)

For 5 mini mille-feuilles, you will need

2-3 Granny apples (or just green apples with enough acidity)
A squeeze of lemon juice
A good piece of blue cheese (if you can, make it bleu d'Auvergne)
A few leaves of lamb's lettuce
A fistful of pine nuts
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of cider vinegar
Salt, pepper
Mustard

Peel the apples and take out their core, then slice them in rather thin slices (see photos in the recipe). Then pour the lemon juice over them (not too much though, otherwise it will be too acid, it's just to prevent the apple slices from going black). Between each slice of apple, put one piece of blue cheese (its size should be equivalent to a third of the apple slice it's on, more or less) and finish your little tower of apple slices with blue cheese on top(see photo). Each apple slice that you add to the mille-feuilles should be smaller than the precedent. You can maintain the whole with a toothpick, but it's entirely facultative. Add the leaves of lamb's lettuce on each plate; dry-roast the pine nuts in a frying pan and sprinkle them as you like. Mix the mustard, the oil, the vinegar, the pepper and the salt to make your dressing, then pour some on each mille-feuilles.

5 - Soundtrack

When I write multipart fics, I like to put together a music mix to go with it too. So here's the "sound" of The Art of Love and Cooking, its title is "Alchemy" (in French, "alchimie" also means "chemistry", and I think that's precisely why Puck and Kurt make such a great pairing: the chemistry between them). The songs I chose either fit their characters separately, or define them as a couple. Some songs I think would suit their respective voices beautifully, so I chose some classic songwriter songs for Puck (with guitar parts of course), and more lyrical and dramatic ones for Kurt.
And of course some songs are directly included in the fic. Enjoy! ^^
>>> http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1848AC02C2B19C75