Betty Lives!

The Hundred Glories of French Cooking

Robert Courtine

1973

I have lived in Paris during two different periods of my life, the last being cooking school in 1993. Since then I have gone back every year for at least one week to visit my friends, walk the city end to end, eat like I haven’t seen food for the previous 51 weeks of the year, pretend I am French, and, since the arrival of my children, to retrieve my balance. I know it has become out-of-fashion to love France (Spain being the new France), but without this single and singular week in Paris I would lose my mind. Adam Gopnik writes in his brilliant Paris to the Moon:

“The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re you’re ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken, confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bust stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river…you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts.”

My one week in Paris is transforming in exactly that way.

I got back last Saturday and, as usual, my heart is aching from the rupture. I decided to soothe the pain with a traditional French recipe for Boeuf à la Ficelle which Courtine describes as having an “uplifting effect on the spirit.” Bingo. Courtine was considered one of the most famous French gourmands of the 20th century, known primarily through his column “The Pleasures of the Table” written for the newspaper Le Monde. The Hundred Glories is less a cookbook than a paean and if you’ve never gone to cooking school in France, I wouldn’t attempt to actually prepare a dish from it. But Courtine’s prose is beautiful and I certainly agree with him on everything. Sorry Señor Adria, all the molecular cuisine in the world can’t hold a candle to honest, old-fashioned French bistro food.

Boeuf à la Ficelle (beef on a string) is crazy easy but also rich and deeply flavorful when done right. I made a stock, as Courtine suggests, with leeks, carrots, turnips and herbs, but also added onions, celery, and also some veal bones I had in the freezer. Courtine says to simply let it come to a boil and then submerge your meat (on a string, of course), but the point is really to create an exceptional stock that lends its flavor to the beef during cooking. For this reason I let the stock simmer for two hours and then added a big dose of salt. I let my kids cook their own beef (I used fillet) and served it along with the simmered vegetables, some steamed, buttered potatoes, cornichons, and good French mustard.

It’s not much to look out so forgive me, I mostly took pictures of the kids. Later that evening Doug and I enjoyed our own fillets and then finished off the meal in the traditional way with a bowl of the broth. Comforting yes, but not quite Paris.