Last night, we hosted a dinner for 85 visiting students attending the Pembroke-King's summer school. We decided to use recipes from Bouchon, a cookbook by Thomas Keller, owner of the famous French Laundry Restaurant in Yountville California. We often use Thomas' French Laundry, Bouchon, and Ad Hoc cookbooks when preparing special College Feasts, and dinners for The Master.
We began last night's meal with a watercress and endive salad, garnished with Roquefort cheese, walnuts bacon lardons and croutons. Roquefort, sometimes spelled Rochefort in English, is a sheep milk blue cheese from the south of France, and together with Bleu d'Auvergne, Stilton and Gorgonzola is one of the world's best-known blue cheeses. Legend has it that the cheese was discovered when a youth, eating his lunch of bread and ewes' milk cheese, saw a beautiful girl in the distance. Abandoning his meal in a nearby cave, he ran to meet her. When he returned a few months later, the mold (Penicillium roqueforti) had transformed his plain cheese into Roquefort.
Following the salad, we served a free-range chicken breast (cooked sous-vide) with summer squash, tomatoes and Parmesan gnocchi. The word gnocchi means "lumps", and may derive from nocchio, a knot in the wood, or from nocca (knuckle). It has been a traditional Italian pasta type of probably Middle Eastern origin since Roman times. It was introduced by the Roman Legions during the enormous expansion of the empire into the countries of the European continent. In the past 2,000 years, each country developed its own specific type of small dumplings, with the ancient gnocchi as their common ancestor. In Roman times, gnocchi were made from a semolina porridge-like dough mixed with eggs, and are still found in similar forms today, particularly Sardinia's malloreddus (although they do not contain eggs).
For the sweet, we served a fromage blanc pannacotta with rhubarb and an almond tuile.
Panna cotta (from Italian cooked cream) is an Italian dessert made by simmering together cream, milk and sugar, mixing this with gelatin, and letting it cool until set. It is generally from the Northern Italian region of Piemonte, although it is eaten all over Italy, where it is served with wild berries, caramel, chocolate sauce or fruit coulis. It is not known exactly how or when this dessert came to be, but some theories suggest that cream, for which mountainous Northern Italy is famous, was historically eaten plain or sweetened with fruit or hazelnuts. Earlier recipes for the dish used boiled fish bones in place of gelatin; sugar, later a main ingredient, would not have been widely available as it was an expensive imported commodity. After years this treat evolved into what is now a gelatin dessert, flavored with vanilla and topped with fruit or spices, and served chilled. Similar versions of this dish are also found in Greece, France and Finland.
Bon Appetite!
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