Mme Pépin's simple cheese soufflé

As I've said, I'm re-reading Jacques Pépin's 2003 autobiography. He's America's best-known French-born chef. His autobiography includes some of his family's old recipes.

One recipe is for a cheese soufflé that his mother made when he was growing up. It's pretty simple, and "although it is slightly less airy than a standard soufflé," Pépin writes, "it is delicious... No one had told [Maman] that the eggs should be separated, with the yolks added to the base sauce and the whites whipped to a firm consistency" before being folded in. So Mme Pépin invented her own version of the fancy soufflé. It's quick and good.

This is an easy cheese soufflé that doesn't require
beating any egg whites. Sprinkle some of the grated
Swiss (or Cheddar) cheese on top before baking.

"Ignorance is bliss," he says, and in this case I agree. This soufflé does rise "to a golden height" even though it is just beaten whole eggs and grated cheese mixed into a béchamel sauce and then baked in a hot oven. I made the béchamel sauce according to Jacques Pépin's instructions and it worked perfectly. Usually I add the milk gradually to the butter-flour base, to avoid lumps, but now I see that that isn't necessary.

Here is the recipe for a soufflé that will serve three or even four hungry people, depending on side dishes.

Jeannette Pépin’s Cheese Soufflé

6 Tbsp. butter + butter for the pan
6 Tbsp. flour
2 cups milk
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. pepper
6 eggs
2½ cups grated Gruyère (Swiss cheese)
2 tsp. minced fresh chives

Preheat oven to 400ºF. Butter a 6-cup gratin dish and set it aside.

Melt six tablespoons of butter in a saucepan, and then add the flour and mix well with a whisk. Cook for a few seconds and then add the cold milk all at once. Turn the heat up to high and keep stirring until the sauce thickens and comes to a strong boil (about 2 minutes). Remove from heat and stir in salt and pepper. Allow about 10 minutes for the béchamel to cool.

Break the eggs into a bowl and beat well with a fork. Add the beaten eggs, grated cheese, and chives into the cooled sauce, mixing well. Pour all into the buttered gratin dish and cook for 30 to 40 minutes, until puffy and well browned on top. Serve immediately.

As you can see from the pictures, this really is a soufflé, despite its simplicity. As with all soufflés, it deflates fairly quickly when it comes out of the oven. The soufflé does not wait for you, I've heard Jacques Pépin say on TV — you must wait for the soufflé.

"Stewed" green beans with lardons and onions

To go with the cheese soufflé, I made U.S. Southern-style "stewed" green beans. In California cuisine, green beans are served basically raw — just very slightly steamed — and while that can be good, I have never lost my taste for the Southern (and French, I might add) way of cooking green beans long and slow, seasoned with salt-cured or smoked pork, onions, and maybe a bay leaf or two.

I used frozen green beans in this case, because
it's not yet haricots verts season in France.

I have to say this was one of the best lunches we've had in a while. You can see in the pictures how much the soufflé puffed up despite not having beaten egg whites folded into it. By the way, I cut all the ingredients down by a third because I just wanted to make a four-egg soufflé, and that worked fine.

2003 memories and tornadoes

I'm thinking about the poor people of Joplin, the tornado-devastated city in Missouri. I can't say I've ever been there — not really — but I did spend night once on the outskirts of the town. It was in May of 2003.

Walt and I were driving across the United States, from California to North Carolina via Champaign, Illinois, where we were going to visit old friends Harriett and Tom. We might have gotten farther that day, but for a truck accident up ahead of us on the highway between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We had started out early from Tucumcari, New Mexico, that morning. I think our goal for the day might have been Springfield, Missouri. That's a trip of 650 miles — more than 1000 km.

The interstate highway in Oklahoma went from this...

...to this, in the blink of an eye, and we didn't know why.
This is how I remember American traffic.

Anyway, after sitting in stopped traffic for an hour or more on I-44 in Oklahoma, we were exhausted. We didn't even know why traffic had come to a standstill. It was hot and the dog was restless — Collette was 11 years old then, and had never spent so many days in a row in the car. We had put her new kennel in the back of the Jeep. She didn't know it, but she was going to travel to France in that kennel a few weeks later, in the baggage hold of an airliner.

For weeks Collette had been treating the new kennel as if it were a prison cell, refusing to go near it, much less inside. But on the cross-country trip she curled up in it and slept tranquilly, starting on the second day on the road. It was comfortable — a refuge — and she had made peace with it. That was a relief for us, given the long, stressful trip she was going on.

Collette, unlike Callie, loved going for rides in the car, but that day in Oklahoma she didn't enjoy sitting in a car that wasn't moving. She wanted to go outside and sniff around, but we couldn't get out of the car. We didn't know when traffic might start moving again. We all had to pee, actually, but we were stuck in the traffic jam behind the wreck, and we weren't getting status reports.

The State Capitol building in Oklahoma City

Anyway, we finally made it as far as Joplin MO and called it a day. We found a room in a motel that accepted dogs in the rooms. It was a Motel 6. We stayed mostly in Motel 6s as we crossed the country, because of the establishments' dog-friendly policies. Motel 6 is part of the Accor hotel chain. That's a French operation, and you know how dogs are not just tolerated but welcomed at most French restaurants and hotels. At Motel 6 too, and that's exceptional in the U.S.

Walt and Collette at a rest stop in Oklahoma, May 2003

Speaking of restaurants, we were hungry. We needed to find a place for dinner, and the first one we came upon was a Ruby Tuesday, a typical American franchise restaurant. It was near the intersection of 32nd Street and Rangeline Road in Joplin. I wonder if it survived the tornado on Sunday. I know from looking at maps that Sunday's tornado caused great destruction along Rangeline Road.

It was May 2, a Friday night, when we were there in 2003 (I won't explain how I remember that — another long story). Friday night is "date night" in America, of course, and in a little Midwestern city like Joplin that was obviously a big deal. The restaurant was packed with young people on dates. They were all dressed up and obviously having a fun evening. Maybe it was prom weekend or something similar.

Walt and I locked Collette in the car out in the parking lot — no dogs allowed in restaurants in America, of course — and went in to see if we could get a table. We got one, and it seemed to be located squarely in the middle of a sea of tables occupied by couples or groups of spiffed-up, fresh-faced 20-year-olds, or even teenagers. We ordered barbecued ribs, or at least I did. I don't really remember what Walt ordered.

By the time we got to Joplin, it was too dark to take photos.

The thing that drew everybody's attention to us traveling codgers was the wine. We ordered a bottle. Red. We were coming from California, after all, where the wine flows freely... and, paradoxically, expensively. We were used to having that thick, slightly sweet, very alcoholic California red wine with our dinners. "A whole bottle?" the very young waitress asked, astonished.

Yes, I said. She had to go see if they had any bottles of red wine behind the bar, and what kind it might be. I don't remember what label it had on it, but she did eventually bring a bottle to the table. She had a lot of trouble figuring out how to use the corkscrew to open it. She was very nervous. By then, all heads had turned and everybody in the place was watching these two old guys waiting to get their glasses filled and start drinking wine.

There was whispering. The crowd had never seen anybody open a bottle of wine before — much less drink one. At least that was my impression. Some of them were drinking beer, of course. But not vino. I didn't see any in glasses on any other table. There were smiles and amusement all around, mind you, not hostile or scandalized reactions, as we tasted the wine. Everybody was impressed, I think, in a good-natured Midwestern kind of way.

Walt and his Jeep somewhere in Oklahoma in 2003

So that's my memory of Joplin, Missouri. That night, tornadoes were predicted to touch down nearby, and soon. We headed out early the next morning, driving toward St. Louis and beyond, into the wilds of the Illinois prairie. In Champaign that night, or maybe it was the next, there were strong thunderstorms with sharp lightning, but no tornadoes. Thankfully.

Back in southwestern Missouri, near Joplin, the May tornadoes were disastrous. I'm talking about 2003, not 2011. In Pierce City (pop. 1400), just 35 miles east of Joplin, a powerful tornado destroyed or damaged many structures in the town, including most of the buildings in the old downtown, which subsequently had to be torn down. Five people died. There's a Wikipedia article about it.

Those tornadoes chased us all across Illinois and Indiana, into Kentucky, for the next few days. We saw funnel clouds in the sky as we drove south toward Tennessee, and listened to storm warnings and alerts on the radio. It rained so blindingly hard that we had to pull off the road at certain points and wait for it to let up. But we eventually made it to another Motel 6, this one in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, still in a driving rain.

White wine and duck fat. Oh, and greens.

The garden is going in, little by little. Walt has planted tomatoes, bell peppers (poivrons), summer squash (two varieties), and little French pumpkins called potimarrons. These last are, like other pumpkins, a winter squash — a variety of Cucurbita maxima — and are also known in France as courges chataigne — "chestnut squashes." Each one weighs between one and three kilograms and, as the names suggest, the flesh has the flavor of chestnuts. Potiron means pumpkin in French, and marron means chestnut — poti+marron.

Walt has done all the work of growing seedlings in little pots, nursing them along with frequent squirts of water, uncovering the cold frames as he judges best for sun and warmth, or protection therefrom, and then transplanting the seedlings out into the garden. I just watch, mostly. My part of the job was tilling up the garden plots and getting them ready for the new growing season.

The vegetable garden seen through some artichokes

I've adopted a little plot in the back corner of the yard as my own special project. It's the spot where the previous owners of the house had their compost pile, so the soil there is very rich. It's loose and almost sandy, compared to the hard clay soil of the rest of the yard. The only problem with it is that weeds grow in it very quickly, and in profusion. That means extra work weeding.

Last year I planted potatoes there, but this year I decided to plant "bitter" greens. I sowed seeds for both collard and mustard greens under a cold frame (une mini-serre, or "miniature greenhouse," in French). back in early March. In April I took the cold frame away and one day I transplanted half a dozen mustard plants and a dozen and a half collard plants into the open section of the garden plot, to give them room to spread and grow.

Two photos of my patch of collard and mustard greens

We cooked greens at that point. Mostly we harvested and cooked the mustard greens, leaving a lot of the collards where they had grown, in a big bunch. I figured if the plants I moved didn't survive, then I'd still have some left and I'd be able to try again. They all lived and are doing well, and I still have a thick cluster of crowded collards growing out there. One day soon, I'll harvest and cook those too.

Collard greens, as you probably know, are a southern U.S. specialty. They were always available in California too. Collards, a malformation of the word colewort, meaning "cabbage plant," according to what I've read, originally came from Africa and the Middle East. They feature prominently in Ethiopian cooking, and in Portuguese and Brazilian cooking too. I remember being pleasantly surprised to find collard greens on my plate in an Ethiopian restaurant in Washington DC years ago, when we lived there.

Walt also has a nice little row of frisée lettuces growing.
That's sometimes called curly endive in the U.S.A.
It's about time to thin the the plants and make
salads with the tender young leaves.

Some people find collards and the other plants of the Brassica family — turnips and turnip greens, kale, mustard greens, broccoli, and other cabbages — to be too bitter for their palate. In North Carolina, we always thought collard greens were better in late autumn and winter, after the plants had been touched by frost. In spring and summer, some people put the freshly picked leaves in the freezer for a few hours before they cook them, to simulate that phenomenon.

What I'm growing will be spring or summer collards, and I think I'll plant a new crop in August for the fall and winter. In my tradition, collards need to be cooked for a long time. The greens are meaty and can stand up to that kind of treatment. They are usually flavored with bacon "grease" — in much of America, grease is a negative term, but not in this context. You can also cook them with a ham hock (un jambonneau in French) or with sausages, smoked or not.

Mustard greens added to collards give them a mustardy flavor.

Since I've been living here in Saint-Aignan, I've taken to flavoring greens with duck fat. I guess I should call that "duck grease" to be authentic about it. In the U.S. South, sometimes people will add some sugar to the pot when they cook collard greens, to cut the bitterness. I used to put some apple juice in mine in California, for the same reason. Here in France, I put in some white wine. Collards in white wine and duck fat — it doesn't get much better than that. I also like them poached in chicken broth.

You don't find collard or mustard greens here in France. The closest greens, really, are chard and spinach, but they don't have the same texture or flavor. A woman from Kentucky who lives in the Auvergne region of central France recently asked me if I could send her some collard seeds. I did. I hope she and her husband have got greens growing in the garden now. Years ago, I worked with a French woman in Washington whose father, on a visit, thought collards were excellent. He took seeds back to his native Champagne and started growing them there.

Callie and a tall me out on the road through
the vineyard early today

It's time for me to go out on a walk with Callie. I'll go take some pictures of my collard patch and include them in this post when I get back. The patch probably needs to be watered again, since we didn't get any measurable rain over the weekend. Now the weather is back to sunny and hot. The next chance for rain seems to be Thursday.

Flowers and life

We're not getting any rain but we've got a lot of flowers all around. Here are three that I've seen and photographed on my recent walks with Callie the border collie.



I'm re-reading Jacques Pépin's autobiography and enjoying it again. He started working in restaurant kitchens when he was 10 years old — his parents' restaurants — and at 13 he was officially an apprentice in a kitchen in Bourg-en-Bresse. That was when he quit school.

What a different life — actually learning how to do something. The only thing I learned how to do after more than 20 years of formal education was to understand and speak French. And teach it. My apprentissage shaped my later life the way Pépin's early restaurant experiences shaped his.