Bastille Bash

By Temple Ligon

 

This past Tuesday, July 14, two of us had our Bastille Day dinner, but we ate leftovers from Saturday night’s much bigger do. A group of 18 of us agreed on Saturday’s Bastille Day observance simply because Saturday makes for an easy schedule. Actually the cooking began on Wednesday night. Ever make Duck a l’Orange? How ‘bout Coq au Vin? Boeuf Bourguignon? Ever prepare all three for one meal?

Well, we couldn’t agree on which national dish of France fits Bastille Day best, so we settled on all three. And to get a little carried away, we also saw foie gras as a great start to a great meal. Problem is, cost hits pretty hard.

Food purchases for 18 people came to more than $400, and incidentals and floral decorations and the like came to another $100. Typically wine is half the cost of a great dinner, but in our case we left the wine purchases up to the individual diner. BYOB, as it were. We can guess, however, that each person who had Champagne with foie gras and a red Bordeaux with the three main courses probably spent at least $30 to drink, which times 18 can mean we spent altogether more than a thousand dollars on dinner, food and wine.

The host/chef – that’s me – was getting good financial support from the group, so hosting wasn’t so horrible, after all. Contributions came in for all corners.

Dessert was donated by one of our guests, and she served crepes with syrupy strawberries and French vanilla ice cream.  We also offered mango and raspberry sorbet.

Yeah, yum.

Our appetizer foie gras struck a chord with me because I have always been a fan of architect Philip Johnson. On a personal level I don’t think I would ever care to meet the guy, but as a designer, as the dean of post-WWII American architects, Johnson was hard to beat. He died a little while ago well over a hundred. In 1979 when the Pritzker Prize was first awarded to the world’s greatest living architect, Johnson won the prize.

Johnson shared design credit with architect Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, opening in 1959. Also opening that same year inside the ground floor of the Seagram Building was the Four Seasons Restaurant, which is still there. The Four Seasons Restaurant interior design was solely Johnson’s responsibility.

Beginning on opening day in 1959 and continuing for almost the next fifty years, upstairs tenant Johnson had his own lunch table at the Four Seasons. I know that because my travel companion and I sat next to Johnson’s table when I asked the waiter what did Johnson regularly prefer for lunch. The waiter said, “Foie gras every day for lunch. Always foie gras.”

We Bastille Day celebrants found two sources for foie gras at the last minute. One was D’Artagnan on the banks of the upper Hudson River in New York State. The other was in Five Points, the Gourmet Shop on Saluda. D’Artagnan came fresh frozen, shipped overnight. The Gourmet Shop sells it in the form of a mousse, refrigerated in the can. Figure on something short of $40 per pound for either, but we had no choice in the matter when we were told we called D’Artagnan too late. Fine. What the Gourmet Shops sells is superb, just great.

Coq au Vin I have made many times. I can do it by memory. Duck a l’Orange I have also made before, but maybe only four or five times. I still have to follow the cookbook. Boeuf Bourguignon I have never made for guests, so that I made first a week earlier as a sample, just to test it out. I passed.

Inspiration for Boeuf Bourguignon came from the movie Julie & Julia, when New Yorker Amy Adams challenges herself to make every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking inside of one year. Boeuf Bourguignon she thought she should master early on because her mother did it back in Dallas to impress her father’s business associate when Adams’s character was a little kid.

Adams sets the oven timer to come on while she slept, cooking the Boeuf Bourguignon. Problem was, Adams slept through the end of the oven’s cooking period, and she burned the dish.

I didn’t burn the dish, but I did get a late start on Saturday afternoon, so the Boeuf Bourguignon barely made it in time for serving around eight o’clock.

The duck, meanwhile, waited on its sauce. To do the duck sauce right is to work half the Publix produce section through three different stocks and sauces to get at where the final sauce is perfect. And it was.

The Coq au Vin, done since Wednesday, steeped refrigerated in its own juices for the three following days, spiked with house red wine, and came close to perfect, too.

Next year, then, you know what you might want to do. You don’t have to prepare the three major French national dishes. That’s a bit much, I can tell you. But one will do fine.

Remembering the early Huguenots moving to Charleston beginning in 1685 at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Lafayette’s participation in our War of Independence and that of the French Navy at Yorktown, we can drop the WWII French Assault Rifle jokes and thank the French every July 14, Bastille Day.

Besides, you get to sing La Marsellaise, the world’s most bloodthirsty national anthem.

 

Sign up here to start your free subscription to MidlandsLife!