Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2013 i SAVEUR

When, at the age of 11, I was packed off from my London home to boarding school, I was apprehensive about a lot of things: being away from home, making new friends, and—given my prodigious appetite—eating. Boarding school food, after all, had a reputation for being bland and stodgy, something akin to the inedible slop served to children in Victorian novels. Yet as soon as I arrived at Wycombe Abbey, a school founded in 1896 in Buckinghamshire, England, I realized my fears had been unfounded. Break-fasts consisted of fluffy scrambled eggs and crispy bacon, accompanied by baked beans. Dinners were battered cod and tartar sauce, followed by a sherry trifle for dessert. But the best meals came in the middle of the day, when, at the sound of a bell,…

Recently, after a party, I was left with an unfinished keg. I couldn't drink all that beer and didn't want to waste it. Then I realized I could cook with it, so I called up Cosmo Goss. The executive sous chef at Chicago's Publican restaurants had won Brewery Ommegang's Hop Chef, a beer-centric cooking competition I had judged, with a dish of tuna and tesa, Italian bacon. He had cured the pork in citrusy hops and wort—the steeped malt that becomes beer. For me, he devised an easier recipe for a salad of arugula, pears, and pork belly braised in Hennepin beer. It wasn't what was in my keg, but still, I love the bittersweet balance of Ommegang's creamy farmhouse ale. I knew it would tie together the rich pork,…

I've never been crazy about New Year's Eve in the United States, with all its boozing and forced jollity. So when I got an invitation last year to celebrate the holiday in a tiny French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, I jumped at the chance. My hosts were winemakers I'd met on an earlier visit to France's rural southwest, a region for which I have an abiding affection. They'd urged me to come when the village, Viella, holds an annual festival called Les Vendanges du Pacherenc de la St-Sylvestre at the end of December. The name confused me at first. I knew that pacherenc—officially known as pacherenc du vic-bilh, “vine rows of the old village” in a local dialect—was a delicious sweet wine made in very small quantities…

Nisreen Ghanem's kitchen in the village of Burqin in Palestine's northern West Bank is as up-to-date as most any home kitchen I've seen in a small town. The floor is vinyl tile, the counters are Formica, the five-burner stove runs on gas. Nonetheless, when it's time to prepare m'sakhan, Ghanem, a youthfully agile, middle-aged mother of four, spreads a plastic sheet over her floor so that she and her sister-in-law, Mai, can get right down to business, as countless Palestinian women over the centuries have always done, kneeling almost prayerfully over the task. M'sakhan—juicy, bonein chicken glistening with olive oil, tinted maroon by tart sumac and piled high on just-baked flatbread smothered in caramelized onions—is quintessential Palestinian feast food, present at all manner of celebrations. Ghanem and a small army…

Braised Cabbage with Slab Bacon 86 Cabbage and White Bean Soup with Duck Confit 60 Cheese Blintzes 46 Creamy Chestnut Soup 61 Flatbread with Ground Beef and Tahini Topping 83 Herbed Butterflake Rolls 86 Middle Eastern Spiced Rice with Toasted Almonds 82 Potato Gratin 88 Sautéed Mixed Mushrooms 88 Sour Eggplant and Lentil Stew 83 Meat & Poultry Baked White Bean and Duck Casserole 42 Balinese Roast Duck 42 Beer-Braised Pork Belly 26 Crispy Duck Breasts with Glazed Carrots 42 Duck Confit 58 Gascon-Style Beef Stew 58 Palestinian Couscous with Chicken and Chickpeas 82 Pappardelle with Duck Sugo 42 Roast Boneless Prime Rib 88 Roast Chicken with Onion and Sumac Flatbread 83 Roast Duck with Mandarin Orange Sauce 44 Sichuan Tea-Smoked Duck 44 Upside-Down Rice with Cauliflower, Eggplant, and Lamb…

December 2013 New Orleans Some of the earliest New Orleanians. Catholic Creoles, celebrated Christmas Eve with a Réveillon (“awakening”) feast, common throughout the Francophone world. Following midnight mass, families would break a daylong fast with a lavish meal at home, featuring gumbos and turtle soups. These days few in the Crescent City celebrate Reveillon at home, but many restaurants, including Tujague's (established in 1856) and Brennan's. Have brought back the tradition, offering Reveillon dinners featuring traditional dishes like alligator bisque and shrimp rémoulade, throughout December. Info: 504/522-5730 Young, Australia At the height of Australia's cherry harvest, Young, an agricultural town in one of Australia's largest cherry-growing regions, celebrates the local cultivar: the sweet, darkred Rons Seedling, developed by Australian horticulturalist S.A. Thornell in 1928. Revelers can try their luck at…

I awoke to the pleasures of duck, that most gloriously fatty of fowl, some 20 years ago at La Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris. In a borrowed suit, on a friend's parents' dime, I ordered the famous restaurant's signature dish: caneton à la presse, or pressed duckling. I watched, slack-jawed, as the server ceremoniously carved the aiguillettes, or tender breast meat, from a roasted Challandais duck and placed the rest of it in a fearsome-looking silver screw press. He spun the wheel, crushing the carcass and sending the juices down a little spout into a pan set over a flame, to which he added a glass of cognac and another of madeira. He reduced the mixture until it was as thick and dark as chocolate syrup, then poured the sauce…

Dinner for two with drinks and tip Inexpensive Under $20 Moderate $20–$80 Expensive Over $80 Auberge Labarthe Rue Pierre Bidau 64290, Bosdarros (3355921–5013; restaurant-gastronomique.info). Moderate. Chef Eric Déquin grew up in the small town of Bosdarros, traveled to Paris and England to study, and returned to open this cozy restaurant, which has since earned a Michelin star. Generous portions of straightforward dishes such as grilled fresh fish and poached eggs over asparagus have made it a local favorite. Les Clefs d'Argent 333 Avenue des Martyrs de la Résistance, Mont de Marsan (3355806-1645; clefs-dargent.com). Expensive. Christophe Dupouy, the chef at this one-star Michelin restaurant, worked under famed French legends like Alain Ducasse, but his restaurant is far from stuffy. It's a family enterprise: His wife, Eugénie, greets you at the door,…

It's a mild sunday afternoon in late December and I'm driving my car southbound on the Garden State Parkway to my home in Cape May, New Jersey. Christmas is two days away, and as an old Bing Crosby carol comes on the radio, my mind shifts into Dickensian mode, delivering me back to Christmas Past. Suddenly there I am, a long-haired teenager in the 1960s, pilfering sips of homemade red wine from the grown-ups in the crowded confines of my grandparents' row house in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia. It's Christmas Eve, and my grandfather, Michael DiRenzo, a tailor by trade, is dressed to the nines, while my grandmother, Nancy, labors in the musty basement kitchen (there's a nicer kitchen upstairs, but she enjoys the privacy). She's soaking salt cod…

A Guide to Resources In producing the stories for this issue, we discovered ingredients and information too good to keep to ourselves. Please feel free to raid our pantry! To make spotted dick (page 18), use a traditional English steamed pudding mold from Pastry Chef Central ($18 for a 4-cup mold; 561/999-9483; pastrychef.com). Mix a cocktail with our favorite gin, Green Hat, available from Potomac Wines and Spirits, Inc. ($36 for a 750-ml bottle; 202/333-2847; potomacwines.com). Purchase one of Les Blank's films on DVD ($20–$30; lesblank.com). To stamp out cookies like Chris Tan, order the polvoron mold from Amazon ($6; amazon.com); springerle molds from Springerle Joy (prices vary; springerlejoy.com); and pineapple tart cutters and fish-shaped moon cake molds from Brown Cookie ($6/$9; browncookie.com). Try fine chocolate gelts: London's Artisan du…

When I was growing up, I couldn't wait for Hanukkah. I looked forward to lighting candles on the menorah and to oil-crisped potato latkes topped with applesauce. But more than anything else, I yearned for the chocolate. My parents would give my brother and me mesh bags of foil-wrapped chocolate coins as gifts, which we'd use as edible ante while spinning the four-sided Hanukkah top, the dreidel. I indulged heartily in my winnings, littering tabletops with piles of glinting wrappers and savoring the snap of each delicately molded coin between my teeth and the rush of sweet chocolate that followed. We were delighting in a centuries-old tradition. The practice of exchanging these chocolate coins, known as gelt (“money” in Yiddish) can be traced to 18th-century Eastern Europe, where Jews gave…

Four years ago, I found myself in Manhattan's diamond district, a midtown block of mostly Jewish wholesale jewelry dealers that's a busy Kasbah to the polished glamour of Tiffany's. I was looking for an engagement ring for my girlfriend, Lauren, and when I had trouble deciding on a ring at one of the stalls, the dealer shooed me away. “Go next door to the Diamond Dairy,” he very strongly suggested. “Have the blintzes. Come back when you make a decision.” I found the narrow kosher diner perched on a catwalk above the rear of one of the diamond malls, like the flying bridge of a container ship. While researching a book on Jewish delicatessens, I had eaten dozens of blintzes, thin pancakes wrapped around a sweet or savory filling. Some…

It's the beginning of a brutally cold crab-fishing season in January off the coast of Alaska, and the sea is steaming from the clash of 18-degree air and 33-degree seawater. Freezing spray coats every inch of our boat with a translucent layer of ice. On days like this, crabs must be landed quickly and sorted into the onboard holding tanks before their limbs freeze and snap off like deadwood. Our ship, the Rollo, is 107 feet long, with a royal blue hull that towers above the water, guarding against the notoriously huge waves of the Bering Sea. The six-man crew, of which I am a deckhand, includes a cook, an engineer, and a deck boss, but all double as fishermen during the harvest. Our first crab pot of the day—a…

My mother always baked her famous cherry snowballs for Christmas. I still remember how those buttery almond-scented cookies, swathed in sugar, sparkled like fresh snow. To this day, I follow the same handwritten recipe, but now I bake the snowballs with a grown-up twist. While my mother's cookies hid green and yellow maraschino cherries inside, these decidedly adult holiday cookies are stuffed with liqueur-soaked Luxardo cherries from Italy. —Elizabeth Morris, Toronto MAKES 2½. DOZEN 2 cups flour 1 tsp. baking powder ¼ tsp. kosher salt 16 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened ¼ cup confectioners' sugar ½ cup almond paste 1 tsp. vanilla extract 1 egg 1 cup (about 30) pitted Luxardo cherries, drained (see page 94) 2 cups coarse decorating sugar (see page 94) Heat oven to 350°. Whisk flour, baking…