{"id":741,"date":"2010-09-11T23:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-11T23:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elitemporaryblog.wordpress.com\/2010\/09\/11\/before-you-know-it"},"modified":"2016-02-11T15:36:20","modified_gmt":"2016-02-11T20:36:20","slug":"before-you-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2010\/09\/before-you-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Before you know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somewhere, a woman named Corentine is serving leeks vinaigrette for dinner. It\u2019s been ten years, but I know it.<\/p>\n

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\nCorentine was my host mother in Paris, the year that I was 21 and studying abroad. She had the most magnificent name I had ever heard and something a little Jane Birkin<\/a>, just a little, about her looks. Whenever someone asks me how I learned to cook or how I got into food, I usually credit my parents, but I should also credit Corentine. She and I didn\u2019t have a lot in common, but food was enough, and we seized it. I ate at her table for six months, and she taught me what she thought I should know. She taught me how to eat cheese, how to make vinaigrette from scratch, and how to shell and snap the head from a whole cooked shrimp. She also taught me how to peel an apple in one long, curling, ribbon-like strip, which, it turns out, I still cannot actually do. Perhaps most importantly, she taught me that a plain butter cake with pears<\/a>, served on a very cold night, can feel like some kind of miracle. She also taught me about leeks. Poireaux<\/span>, she said.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never thought about leeks before. I\u2019m sure I grew up eating them in things, and certainly in potato leek soup, but I\u2019d never paid attention. I\u2019d certainly never eaten them the way she served them: on their own, as poireaux vinaigrette<\/span>, steamed to a degree of doneness best described as pleasantly comatose and then sent out on a platter, towing a gravy boat of vinaigrette closely behind. She had two little boys, ages seven and nine, or maybe nine and eleven, I can\u2019t remember, and they used to fight over the sweet white part closest to the root. I couldn\u2019t believe that they actually seemed to know something about vegetable anatomy, much less cared enough to call dibs. I couldn\u2019t believe how much I liked those leeks.<\/p>\n

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\nBehold: a mess of leeks vinaigrette, with emphasis on mess<\/span>. (Corentine\u2019s plating was much neater – as, for the record, was her hair.) I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s taken me this long to write about this dish. In the abstract, and particularly said aloud, its name sounds like some sort of unusual plumbing problem, but leeks vinaigrette is a classic, a very common first course in French kitchens. You\u2019ve probably heard of it. Maybe you\u2019ve tried it. It\u2019s one of those concepts that slips quietly into your repertoire, and before you know it, ten years have gone by, and you\u2019ve forgotten the ages of the sons of the woman who taught it to you, and you\u2019re about to turn 32, not 22, and still, you\u2019re making that dish. I\u2019m still making leeks vinaigrette. Sometimes as often as once a week.
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\nLeeks are harvested year-round in some places, but I usually think of them as a cooler weather vegetable. (In the summer, if the temperature gets too hot, they can wind up with thick, woody cores.) They showed up at the farmers\u2019 market here a few weeks ago, and I pounced on them. They\u2019re still young and skinny, about the same diameter as a bottle cap, and they\u2019re very sweet, which makes them ideal for simple preparations like leeks vinaigrette. We put them on the menu for our family dinner at Delancey on August 31<\/a>, and with the help of our friend Olaiya<\/a>, who was cooking with us that night, we tried something a little different.<\/p>\n

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\nUsually I would just steam the leeks, blot them to get rid of excess water, and then lay them out on a plate and drizzle them with dressing, \u00e0 la Corentine. But this time, we decided to boil them in big pots of salted water, both to cook them faster – we had 40 people to feed – and to infuse them with some seasoning. Then, while they were still hot, we tossed them with a good amount of vinaigrette, hoping that they would absorb it as they cooled. Rather than tasting like plain leeks topped with vinaigrette – which tastes fine; don\u2019t get me wrong – these tasted like a third, even finer thing: leeks fused with<\/span> vinaigrette, leeksandvinaigrette, rich and saucy. We served them warm, topped with a little more vinaigrette, chopped hard-boiled egg, and chopped bacon, and it was so good, so properly early fall-like, that I made it again yesterday. Only without the egg and bacon, because I got lazy. Either way, I think you\u2019ll like it.<\/p>\n\n

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Recipe<\/div>\n

Leeks vinaigrette<\/h2>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n
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