Une quiche lorraine... quelque part

More and more often, I read (or hear people on TV cooking and food shows) that "the real" quiche lorraine does not have cheese in it. The savory pie is filled with a mixture called a migaine that's composed of eggs, cream, milk, and cooked pork lardons. It's seasoned with black pepper as well as, optionally, a grating or pinch of nutmeg. But no cheese.

As you can see, I put cheese in the quiche we made for lunch yesterday. In reading different quiche recipes, I learned something I didn't know before. A quiche lorraine that includes grated cheese in the migaine is more properly known as a « quiche vosgienne » [keesh voh-zhee-ehn]. Imagine! I've been making quiches vosgiennes for years and didn't even know it!

Technically, a cheesy quiche is still a quiche lorraine, because the Vosges [vauzh] are a mountain range in the southeastern part of the old Lorraine province. On the eastern flank of the Vosges mountains is the historical province of Alsace. Alsace has its own quiche, by the way. It's called a quiche alsacienne, and it's like a quiche lorraine in that it is cheeseless, but sauteed onions are put into the migaine along with the lardons to flavor it.

Here's the recipe for the quiche vosgienne.

Quiche vosgienne

1 standard pie crust (pâte brisée), blind-baked if possible

4 large eggs

200 milliliters (7 fl. oz.) of heavy cream

200 milliliters of milk (or less)

a pinch of black pepper
a grating of nutmeg

about a cup of grated Swiss cheese

200 grams (about 7 oz.) of pork lardons, smoked or salt-cured

Mix the eggs, cream, and milk together in a bowl to make the migaine (a custard). Season with black pepper and nutmeg.

Line a pie plate with the pâte brisée crust. Optionally, line it with parchment paper and fill it with pie weights, raw rice, or raw dried beans and bake it in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes until browned. Let it cool. Remove the paper and weights.

Sauté the pork lardons separately and drain on paper towels. Drain and reserve.

Scatter about half the grated cheese on the bottom of the pie shell. Scatter lardons over the cheese. Pour the egg and cream mixture into the pie shell. Scatter the remaining cheese over the top of the migaine.

Bake the quiche in the oven at 350ºF (180ºC) for 45 minutes or until it sets up and is browned on top. If the quiche seems to be browning too fast, keep turning down the heat until it's done the way you like it.

As for all these distinctions between different varieties of quiches, here's what the latest (2007) edition of the Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia says: « Aujourd'hui, on prépare des quiches avec des garnitures très variées. » The older LG (1967) gives a recipe for quiche lorraine that contains neither lardons nor cheese, and its made in a bread dough crust rather than a pâte brisée shell. It also says: « Il est plusieurs sortes de quiches. Chaque région de Lorraine ou d'Alsace a la sienne et prétend que seule sa quiche est la véritable. »

P.S. Did any of you have a mysterious Google and Blogger outage this morning starting at about 6:30 a.m. French time (12:30 a.m. Eastern, 9:30 p.m. Pacific) and lasting maybe 90 minutes? We were completely unable to connect to Google, Youtube, Gmail, or Blogger during that time, though sites like CNN, the NYT, the Washington Post, and others were coming up normally. Very strange.

Sunrise, and a cheese discovery

It's fully 10 degrees Celsius warmer this morning than it was yesterday morning at the same time. That's a difference of nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The cold snap lasted only a few days, and now we're getting back to more normal temperatures. Here's what yesterday's sunrise looked like.

Right after the sun came up behind the trees on our neighbors' property, the sky clouded over and it started raining lightly. It was just warm enough for the precipitation to be rain instead of snow, but for at least a few minutes it was freezing rain. It kept getting warmer toward noontime, so it ended up wet, not icy, outside.

Meanwhile, I discovered a new cheese this past week. I found it at SuperU, in a refrigerated cabinet where the store usually displays goat cheeses more than any other variety — local ones. I admit that when I bought this cheese, I assumed it was made from goat's milk, but when I examined the label at home I learned that it's a cow's milk cheese. It was the coating of wood ash that tricked me, because local the goat cheeses are often ash-covered.

The cheese is called an Olivet cendré — cendres means ashes in French. Olivet is an old town that is nowadays a south suburb of the city of Orléans, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Saint-Aignan. The cheese is named for Olivet because it used to be made there, but I think the town's cheese business died out as the area developed. Olivet cheese, which resembles Camembert except for the ash coating, is apparently made in Normandy and also here in the Cher river valley, over near Selles-sur-Cher, in the town called La Vernelle. Or at least it has been aged or affiné there, as best I can tell by reading the label.

Why are cheeses covered with wood ash? It is partly to give them a smoky flavor, I think, but it used to also be a way to keep the individual cheeses from sticking together when they were being ripened on trays or shelves in cellars, one touching another. Another advantage of covering the cheeses with wood ash, which in Olivet was traditionally the ash left behind when grape-vine trimmings were burned, was that the ash kept insects away as the cheeses aged. Anyway, the cheese is delicious, and I'll buy it again if I see it again. Or maybe I'll drive over to La Vernelle and stop in at the Fromagerie P. Jacquin — I've driven by it many times but never gone in. The web site says Jaquin does make an Olivet Cendré, as well as Olivet cheeses aged in hay or coated with black pepper. I drive through La Vernelle on the way to the big Valençay wine co-op, where I like to go for wine once in a while.

Givrés — frosty

Negative 3.4 Celsius — that's the temperature our outdoor thermometer is displaying right now. It usually reads a little high.

That's about +26ºF and qualifies, I think, as a hard freeze. And it's pretty cold for Saint-Aignan.

I just checked two other weather sites, and they report that the temperature in Romorantin-Lanthenay,

which local people just call « Romo », is –9ºC. That's about +16ºF.

Romo is, along with Aurillac and Nevers, often the coldest town in France. And Romo is only

30 kilometers (18 miles) from Saint-Aignan. I guess the explanation is microclimates.

This cold weather won't last. We might get a little bit of snow this morning,

but then it's supposed to warm up and just rain.

So that's our weekend. We won't be going to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan this morning.

We'll just be huddling. The photos here are ones I took yesterday morning.

“Swiss” steak

First of all, I have to say that the chunky tomato sauce was — is — very good. That's what you cook the steak in to make so-called Swiss steak. It really should be called "swissed" steak, I think. "Swissing" is apparently a process of pounding or flattening either cloth or meat to soften or tenderize it.

You could cook many meats and even vegetables this way. Okra, for example, or green beans. Actually, in this recipe, I'm not sure why the steak needs to be pounded with a batte à viande or attendrisseur to make it into thin slices. The meat is going to cook in the sauce for two to even three hours anyway. It will be tender when it is served — forcément — after long, slow cooking, even if it is not very thin.

I left the steaks whole — they were something like flank steak, which, to tenderize, needs to be  seared just lightly in a hot pan, or cooked "to death" by slow braising. You could make this Swiss steak recipe using what they call bœuf à bourguignon in France — in other words, stew beef. Another name for Swiss steak is "smothered steak" — which you might call bifteck à l'étouffée or estouffade de bœuf aux tomates.

Again, I'm not sure why the steak is dredged in flour before cooking. I did that, but in the frying pan the flour didn't adhere to the meat. It sort of peeled off. It really serves as a thickener for the sauce the meat cooks in. If I made this again, I'd skip the dredging in flour and just sprinkle flour on the vegetables in the frying pan before pouring in crushed or diced tomato, with the juice, and putting the seared steak into the sauce.

So here it is: Swiss steak. Most of us probably remember it as a Swanson's TV dinner when we were growing up. It's better than that, made this way. I looked at three or four recipes, including one in the old Joy of Cooking that my mother left behind and I brought back to France. Another was Alton Brown's version. Some contain more and some contain less tomato. I like more rather than less, especially at this time of year, when the weather is often cold and dreary.

Here's a list of the vegetables I put into the pan to make the sauce: onion, garlic, celery, mushrooms, carrots, bell peppers, and crushed tomatoes (tomates concassées in French). As for spices, I put in some smoked paprika, dried oregano, bay leaves, and powdered fennel, plus a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I sprinkled the vegetables with flour as they cooked before adding broth and the tomato to make a kind of gravy or sauce for the meat to cook in. By the way, the steak was fork-tender — no need for a knife to cut it.

As I said, the sauce was delicious. It wasn't like a pasta sauce, partly because it was slightly thickened with flour. It tasted meatier than pasta sauce, and celery and peppers gave it a distinctive flavor. Oh, we debated whether to serve the Swiss steak with rice, potatoes, wheat berries, millet, or pasta. Finally, we decided just to add some chickpeas (out of a can) to the sauce at the end of the cooking time. I plan to add some okra pods and some olives, green or black, to the sauce to finish it this weekend. We ate all the steak.