Dear Thomas Keller,
It’s almost midnight now, and I can hear the low industrial roar of Vauxhall outside, which seems never to sleep. The lights in my apartment are still on, Air is playing, and my feet ache. Sitting feels like utter bliss and my legs protest when I get up. The kitchen is a haphazard jumble of too many pots and pans spattered with fat. My face is greasy and my clothes sodden with the scent of beef. Almost six hours, good sir, six hours I’ve been standing at the stove skimming away laboriously at this stock, having first roasted five pounds of bones (free from the butcher’s at Borough Market! you might approve.) and tipped away the tallow, made a fond out of the pan juices and begun this slow Saturday night. At least, this is how you told me to do it.
Don’t misjudge this little rant – I’m still a fan, really and truly I am, despite my endless complaints on Twitter about the intricacy of your recipes and skimming this fucking stock. Your confit byaldi (oh Remy, your ratatouille) and French onion soup were, in the vernacular, really fucking incredible, and no one else comes evenclose to measuring up when it comes to those two dishes. Honestly, the height of perfection! But so tedious, so painstaking. Once I could quote passages from your cookbooks verbatim. Now that they’re several timezones away, I can’t. But I still remember the sentiments: skim and strain, skim and strain until perfect clarity – visually, flavour-wise – is achieved. Absolute, methodical perfection every step of the way – something I tried (and failed) to apply to my life too, as you did to yours. One cannot be perfect all the time.
Even so, one can have a perfect onion soup. It’s been five years since I first made my older sister leave the living room in her small Cambridge apartment in complete tears, having released the vapours and juices of 3 kilograms of julienned onions into the air, and stayed up till birds began chirping and dawn broke, caramelizing the onions to a deep mahogany. Goldenizing, really, if one is to be pedantic and use the correct term (because no sugar is involved, and it’s a Maillard reaction). And even with a mix of Bovril and beef stock from a cube – you’d cringe to hear me say that – it was sublime. My sister has never let me live this down, and it’s gone down in a store of family anecdotes as The Time She Stayed Up Till 5 In The Morning Stirring The Onions. And it’s all your doing, Mr Keller.
So while I cannot be a perfect over-achiever – and I think, unlike you, I am learning to be content with that – I can at least seek to aim a little higher in the realms of the kitchen, and actually make the stock for the soup this time round. Goddamn, but it was a deceptively simple-looking recipe – should’ve paid more attention to the part where one skims very, very often for six hours on end. And you really know how to cater to pedants: I’ve come to discover a certain perverse satisfaction in scraping little pools and globules of fat that rise to the surface, all streaky and sneaky, and I’ve come to relish scraping the spoon against the metal walls of the stock pot and pushing them together until there is a significantly-sized clump. Scritch-swish, and the offending impurities are gone. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
It’s 12.30 in the morning. The stock is beginning to look a clear, jewelled caramel – still a little cloudy, but I promise I’ll strain it several times over. And it had better be really fucking incredible, or I’ll have a bone to pick with you. Maybe even a beef bone.
I’m kidding. I’m sure it’ll be awesome.
Bon(e) Appetit!
Your loyal fan,
Flory
P.S. You’re right about the skimming. A frightening amount of fat has been removed tonight.
