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Skriven 2014-12-26 14:24:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: Christmas dinner 504
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Anything interesting happen to you yesterday?

Annie and I were invited to the home of Anne the dowager
lady up the alley, head of the prominent family in town -
apparently this is a bit of an honor, as these people kind
of keep to themselves. Also present were her sons Dan, with
his wife and two twenty-something sons, and Charles and his
wife (with whom he is in the midst of an acrimonious and
expensive divorce, but she had noplace else to go). The
dynamic was, shall we say, interesting; I suspect that we
were invited in part as a buffer, as open warfare would be
frowned upon with guests in earshot.

Anne is a good but formulaic cook, and her almost chemist-
like methodicalness has been well transmitted to her sons
and stood Dan in good stead when he was making auto parts
that were being sold to BMW and VW and Porsche and Charlie
to this day when he's doing surgery. Dan is the sous-chef
in the house when he visits, and things work pretty well
except when his method has evolved away from his mother's
over the decades. This happens.

Started off with a 1950s version of consomme that started
off with Campbell's and was augmented by (oddly, fresh)
vegetables and cubes of chuck pot roast meat. The flavor
was really intense, but it was (having started off with
Campbell's) dead salty. Luckily the cups were not too big.

The main course was 3 3.5-4" porterhouses cooked according
to Cooks Illustrated - you roast them partway and then
finish them in a skillet rather than the other way round,
an interesting way of doing them. Dan said that he would
cook them to 110F, which I enthusiastically endorsed; I
was unaware of the second cooking, and if I had known,
I would have suggested 90F instead. When they came out
they were perfect medium-rare, with one thinner one being
a perfect medium. I was disappointed, but the meat was
very tender and pretty tasty. I asked for the bone of one
of them, and I relatively genteelly cut the meat off the
bone instead of my usual gnawing technique. When we left
several hours later a doggy bag with the other two bones
awaited us.

Accompaniments were horseradish, a thinnish and mildly
tarragoned Bearnaise, mushrooms cooked in that same
Campbell's, baby peas, and the rather untraditional
spaghetti carbonara, which had been made with an admixture
of pecorino, which I didn't care for. The mushrooms were
very good, surprisingly, and provided enough salt to take
care of anyone's cardiac and taste needs for a while.

Louis Latour Gevrey-Chambertin 09 with the consomme (I'd
have started with a white) - it was hearty and stood up
well to the deep salty flavors of the soup. Just the right
age, with spices and fruit in balance - a quite fine wine,
though Dan, who had chosen it, spoke dismissively of it to
me; apparently I'd once brought one of my precious ancient
bottles of Gruaud-Larose to a previous dinner years ago,
and that had blown him away, and my reputation had been
made thereby.

Dom. Chofflet Valdenaire Givry 09, a much lighter but a
little spicier Burgundy, with the meat. It was a bit over
the hill - fine with the beef itself, but if you used any
of the Bearnaise, you couldn't taste much of the wine any
more, and it became a brothy slightly sour nonentity in
the background.

Dessert was a steamed figgy pudding made from scratch with
a very fluffy hard sauce. Somehow my serving had something
fibrous in it; it seemed to be a piece of pork loin or
something. I inquired and was greeted with incomprehension.

Anne has 25000 cookbooks. This came up in conversation.
When she was a young mother she had resolved to never make
the same version of a dish twice. It didn't really work, as
one does find favorites, plus kids want the same thing all
the time. Both Dan and Charles do have more adventursome
tastes than most, though. Funny thing is that their children
do not - they have expensive but conservative preferences.

We chatted pleasantly (as civilly as possible for the soon
to be divorced couple), then retired to the living room for
brandy, which nobody had.
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