Alsace - the way it was

Click above for: highlights of the last three months in Alsace ......

Phones, Proust and Madeleines

First published Canberra Times, Wednesday 25 May 2011.

Bearing the scars of previous battles with telephone companies, it is with some apprehension that we make the journey to the larger city of Strasbourg to buy a French SIM card for our mobile phone.

Our poor French cranks the degree of difficulty up by several notches. Our hope is that jumping on a train and heading to Strasbourg will increase our chances of finding an English speaking salesperson to assist us.

We do our research and decide that Orange France is the go. We locate the OF shop in Strasbourg and wait our turn for an English speaking shop assistant. Unfortunately, none are available. After lots of head nodding, paperwork and conferring between staff, we are told our newly installed card will work within 15 minutes and we leave the shop feeling fairly confident. As we walk out the door I hear; “just come back here if you have a problem”. Somehow, it all seems too easy.

Just down the street is a patisserie with a window brimming with Madeleines, those gorgeous petite French tea cakes. I make a note to pick some up before leaving Strasbourg today.

We happily bounce off to do some shopping and sightseeing and don’t think to check the phone until a couple of hours later. Much to our chagrin, the phone remains stubbornly unresponsive. Reluctantly we make our way back to the friendly OF shop who redirect us to their technical department in another outlet around the corner. We receive convoluted directions and our confidence is now waning.

Which is why we’re now sitting in the upstairs office of the OF technical department, with a bunch of people who are also there to sort out their telephony problems., We have found, generally speaking, that the French are incredibly patient while waiting for a service, seemingly a resigned acceptance of convoluted bureaucracy.

It’s hot and stuffy in this tiny room and there is no obvious system or queue, and as people arrive they stand and wait their turn with a fragile patience. This patience is tested by the chaotic comings and goings in the increasingly crowded space. Some are sent back downstairs and return only to serve their time again from the beginning. Staff constantly emerge from below to interrupt the only available technician and the phone continually rings. In between these interruptions, he sees people one by one, “ums” and “ahs” as he examines their phone; turns it over, switches it on and off, stares for small eternities at his computer screen and ultimately decides that there’s nothing he can do.

We watch this performance until it’s our turn. Our French is poor, and the technician has little English, so with a combination of sign language and a little “Frenglish” the whole room concludes that it is our Australian provider that is the problem. Our worst fears are realised - we now have to deal with both our provider at home and Orange France in one day.

To mull this one over; we head back to the patisserie where the shell-shaped Madeleines are piled high in the window. We order a much needed cup of coffee and seek the comfort of these petite and buttery traditional cakes. Sadly, as we have come to expect in France, the coffee is atrocious, but our Madeleines are perfect. They are light and golden with a hint of vanilla and just a whisper of lemon icing across the top.

As with many of the traditional French dishes, there are conflicting views of their origins. One version has it that Madeleines originated in the little French town of Commercy in Lorraine, where bakers sold the little cakes packed in oval boxes as a specialty of the area. Another theory involves that noted cake lover, Louis XV, and the legend of a servant girl named Madeleine who made the sweets for the deposed king of Poland who was exiled to Lorraine.

Maybe the last word should go to Marcel Proust who writes in his unfinished autobiographical novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu:

“She sent for one of those squat plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses …”

These are great little afternoon tea cakes and easy to make. To achieve the traditional shell shape you will need to bake them in fluted Madeleine pans which are easily available.

Although not entirely in keeping with the traditional spirit of Madeleines and the whole Proust thing, I made mine using silicone moulds bought at the local supermarket and translated the recipe from the back of the pack.

In case you were wondering, we fixed the phone ourselves. 

Recipe makes 24 Madeleines

Preheat oven at 210C

Madeleines

90g sugar

3 eggs

240g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

90g unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

80mls milk

few drops vanilla essence

pinch of salt 

Lemon Glaze

2 cups of sifted icing sugar

juice of 1 lemon

1 tbsp water

Grease and flour the Madeleine pan moulds, shaking off excess flour. Place moulds in the freezer while making the mixture.

In an electric mixer combine the sugar, vanilla, eggs, salt,and half the milk. Beat until foamy and thick, about 5 minutes.

Remove bowl from the mixer, and sift the flour and baking powder into the egg mixture. Fold in by hand with a metal spoon. Pour in the remaining milk and the melted butter, again folding gently until just combined.

Remove pans from the freezer and fill each mould with mixture, about ¾ full. The less you play with this mixture, the more your Madeleines will rise.

Bake in the top half of the oven for about 7 to 10 minutes or until just cooked and golden topped. While the Madeleines are still hot, dip them into the lemon glaze and allow to drip dry. They are best eaten the day they are baked.

To make the lemon glaze, mix the icing sugar, lemon juice and water until free of lumps.

Alfresco in alsace

First published Canberra Times 18 May 2011.

After a long, hot afternoon browsing the markets of Strasbourg, we take a break in a weinstub and order a local Alsatian specialty, Tarte Flambée. The Tarte Flambée has its roots in the Bas Rhin region of Alsace, where the close proximity to Germany and the history of floating frontiers means that Alsatian food often straddles the balance between robust German fare and more subtle French cuisine. Germans know this dish as Flammekueche.

It arrives on a piece of thin plywood and our tarte is still bubbling and trembling from the heat of the wood oven. The dough crust, licked by the flames and slightly blackened is cardboard thin and crispy with a sparse but piquant topping, perfect with our aperitif, a couple of icy, cold beers.

The Tarte Flambée entered the Alsatian recipe repertoire through the creativity of farmwomen who used this dish as a thermometer for bread baking in wood ovens. The tarte was inserted into the oven and if it was cooked in a few minutes, the oven was hot enough to bake bread. The key ingredients of bacon, onions, cheese or quark, cream, and flour were all staple farm foods and readily available.

This dish is taken so seriously here, that in 1979 the La Confrérie du Véritable Flammekueche d'Alsace was formed to preserve the tradition and ensure the quality and standard of the Tarte Flambée or Flammekueche sold in Alsatian restaurants is maintained.

The majority of houses in Alsace are constructed with a steeply pitched roofline to deal with the snow, and are of double or three storey construction with a cellar. In the yard you will also usually find a large, solid brick wood-fired oven for cooking, among other things, this regional specialty dish.

When we first arrive in Alsace, we are struck by the number of household ovens in yards, and how carefully they are looked after. Most have a blackened patina on the bricks indicating their regular use. The ovens sit dormant, lovingly protected by plastic jackets for the colder parts of the year and as soon as spring arrives they’re unveiled and primed to do their job. Many ovens sit proudly in the front garden or alongside an outdoor eating area while others sit beneath a purpose built roof structure.

The trigger for the unveiling seems to be around Easter, when the weather warms and people are preparing to entertain family and friends, and readying their alfresco eating areas. The locals call their ovens BBQs and, coming from the land of aussie BBQs it took us a while to realise that they were referring to their wood ovens.

It’s been a warm couple of days here, 25c and above, and the evening is very still. We can see people sitting in their gardens, talking and laughing and the smell of wood ovens cooking, mixed with orange blossom, floats in the air.

We decide to make Tarte Flambée in our wood oven to entertain guests for the following evening, so head to the local timber yard the next day, to buy some wood. The miller asks immediately if it’s for our BBQ and we are supplied with two bags of wood, one of kindling and the other more solid.

Our small but adequate wood oven is steel and resembles a tall combustion stove with a chimney. Red Box Pizza has left me with plenty of experience in cooking in wood ovens, so I light it and in no time at all, it’s chugging and roaring like a steam train ready to accept our tarte.

The Tarte Flambée is a simple, tasty starter that’s ideal for sharing, similar to a thin-crust pizza. Although I suspect I might be hunted down by the Confrerie for making this comparison, and that could be scary.

The piquant topping consists of fromage blanc, very thinly diced onion and bacon pieces, seasoned with salt, pepper and nutmeg. The key is to ensure the crust is as thin as you can make it, to retain its crispiness, and the topping is sparse and spread right to the edges. It is not cooked as long as a pizza, as it should be only lightly browned.

There are variations to this tarte, and some use the local Munster cheese in the topping. I adapted this one for Australia using a light, sour cream and cream cheese mixture. For the base, you could use a frozen bread dough and roll it out very thinly, although I made my own very easily, a simple yeast free dough.

If you don’t have a wood oven, use a pre-heated pizza stone in a hot oven or cook the tarte on a tray at a very high oven temperature.

Tarte Flambée

Dough

400g plain flour

250ml milk (extra if needed)

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp vegetable oil

Combine all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until combined into a loose dough, adding extra milk if too dry. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until it comes together into a ball, about 2 or 3 minutes. It should be firm and not too wet. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate while preparing the topping. This quantity will make four 35 x 25cm tarts. You can seal and freeze any leftover dough if needed. If you don’t have a food processor this can all easily be made by hand.

Topping

1 onion, diced finely

6 slices of bacon, rind removed, diced finely

¾ cup of cream cheese

⅓ cup sour cream or crème fraiche (you can use light sour cream)

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp salt

freshly ground black pepper

drizzle of olive oil

Preheat the oven to 230c.

In a food processor, combine the sour cream (or crème fraiche), cream cheese, nutmeg, salt and pepper, until smooth. Set aside.

On a floured surface, roll the dough as thinly as possible, and fit onto a heavily floured baking sheet, to the size needed to fit your tray (mine was 25cm x 35cm). Roll the edges of the dough up slightly to form a low ridge to contain the topping. (If cooking in a wood oven, prepare on a board, as you would a pizza).

Using a spatula spread the cream cheese mixture onto the dough right up to the dough ridge, so you have all-over coverage, spreading a little thicker than for a tomato pizza base. Sprinkle the onions and the bacon sparsely over the cream cheese mixture. Drizzle the top lightly with olive oil.

Bake for approximately 7 to 10 minutes in wood fired oven or slightly longer in a conventional oven, about 10 to 15 minutes or until crisp. Serve straight away as a starter or with a green salad as a main. Enjoy with a crisp riesling or cold beer.  Photos by Steve Shanahan