Dad’s French Influences – Part II

        Maybe it was just his natural curiosity about all things related to food, but whatever the reason, my small-town father developed a passion for French cooking and baking.

        From Monday to Friday he folded himself into the smallest spaces to tweak and fix the massive factory machines he was charged with maintaining. With the precision and grace of an artist he used tools that he sketched out on scraps of paper and that the tool makers produced for him; (by the time he retired he had a tool box filled with them).

        Come the weekend, though, he used other, simpler tools.  A Saturday afternoon might find him making chow pastry for profiteroles (cream puffs), beating the batter to the proper consistency with a wooden spoon, or using a pastry bag he made from a square of parchment paper to pipe out éclairs or macarons (long before they became today’s trendy sweet).  He loved to make layer cakes with creamy fillings and fresh fruit.

        He also taught himself to make a silken Brandade – that traditional French dish of salt cod, olive-oil and garlic – a rich French Onion soup, Croque Madame sandwiches, and a host of other dishes that I later realized would have been as equally at home in Parisian bistros as they were in the kitchen I grew up in.

        His recipes came from my mother’s magazines or from cookbooks he found at garage sales, their pages often having to be held together with thick elastic bands. He, like me, loved community cookbooks and sometimes found a great recipe in the little gems that I would cart home.  [I recently wrote a piece on community cookbooks for Culinate.com. Here’s the link if you’d like to read it: http://www.culinate.com/articles/features/community_cookbooks]

        Neither of us realized then what a blessing the time he spent in St. Pierre and Miquelon and his having gotten lost in Montreal all those years ago had been. Not only did those experiences open up a new world of food for both of us, they also fostered in me a passion for exploring cultures different than my own and that passion continues to enrich my life.

Lemon Macarons

Great sandwich