A long-lost recipe: Aillade de veau

A week or 10 days ago, my friend CHM wrote to me to say he had found some photos he took two decades ago on a trip to California. Did I want copies of them? He was using a Kodak camera back then, and they were in a Kodak Digital Camera (KDC) format that is pretty much obsolete now. CHM said he could upload the photos and JPG versions of them to the Cloud and I could then download them. I appreciated the offer.

Brown chunks of veal in olive oil. Chicken, turkey, pork, or beef would work in this recipe too.

That set me to searching in my photo archives. I didn't know exactly in what year the photos were taken , but I thought it might have been the late 1990s. We had taken a trip to the Sierra Foothills in California to see our friend Sue, and also to see the new house that a friend who worked at Apple had bought in Nevada City.

Sixteen garlic cloves go into the tomato sauce for aillade. I added some dried tomatoes.

I finally found the KDC photos on a CD that I had recorded way back when, and realized that at some point I had converted them to JPG format. I found a lot more of CHM's photos from back then too — we always used to share the photos we took on trips together, whether in France or in California. I also found an application on my PC called Fotor that will open the KDCs, and then will save them as JPGs.

I added thyme and bay leaves to the tomato sauce, along with a spoonful of honey and some extra white wine.

In all my searching, I also found a scan of a recipe that didn't seem to be in our recipe database. It was for a dish called aillade de veau — veal and garlic stew. At first I thought the recipe must have appeared in an American newspaper, but when I read it for the third or fourth time, I realized that it had both a French title and an indication that it came from the Bouches-du-Rhône, which is the département down on the Mediterranean Coast where Marseille and Aix-en-Provence are located. But the recipe itself was in English. Somehow, that jogged my memory.

Dried breadcrumbs, browned in the veal drippings, serve as a thickener for the tomato sauce.

I thought about a book that we've had for probably 25 years. I found it on a shelf with a lot of other neglected books. It's called Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook. I noticed that it was edited by Richard Olney, who became legendary among U.S. cooks like Alice Waters and James Beard. I also have his book Simple French Food, and I consult it regularly.

We had bow-tie pasta with the veal and garlic stew.

So there was the recipe for aillade de veau in Olney's Provence Beautiful book. I don't think I had ever made it before. I wonder how many other recipes in there I'll make, now that I've re-discovered it. I recently bought both French- and English-language copies of another book that Richard Olney edited, The Good Cook's Encyclopedia. You can be sure I'll be exploring all these books for recipes over the winter. Above are some photos the aillade de veau I made yesterday and here's the recipe for it that I scanned all those years ago.