Cheese Cappuccino

Dear Pickle:

It took a while to choose a recipe for this sucker. I was gonna be crazy ambitious and use my ‘Larousse Gastronomique’ for, uh, the first time since I bought it like 8 years ago, but all the recipes in there are SO in shorthand ('first, make a beurre blah-blah from the master recipe, combining with two quantities of cooked sauce au capitaine, reserving anchovies and pushing the blah blah through a chinoise…' Eek!) Scared souffle-less, I looked instead to ‘The Silver Spoon’, that Italian cooking bible everyone told us we needed about 3 years ago and which I still haven’t used since I bought it (sensing a theme?)

I think maybe the best part of this recipe was realizing how simple it is to make a Bechamel sauce – just a classic, plain white sauce using flour as a thickener. This is the kind of recipe I always mean to commit to memory so I can impress my friends at weekends in the country. I don’t have either of those things, but when I do I’d like to be able to make Bechamel from memory. Did this earlier in the day, which made me feel organized and capable – until, after I’d put Pretzel and Peanut to bed, I realized I had to reheat this sauce to melt cheese into it and THEN cool it again. This meant that Mr. Salty and I did not eat dinner until 9:30. Which I guess is an appropriately French hour.

There were minor dramatics, one when I realized I’d purchased Gruyere instead of the Emmenthal called for in the recipe. (Does thinking all Swiss cheese is alike make me a racist in Switzerland?) The Gruyere is not an especially melty cheese and I only chopped it rather than grating it, which also added time. And a few lumps. The second freak-out was when the beaten whites didn’t get as shiny as I’m used to, I think because there was no sugar and I'm usually making meringue. But as we were hungry enough to eat our own arms, I was not deterred. Perhaps it was slightly under-whipped whites or the fact that I used my nana’s bean pot (which is a hell of a lot bigger than a 6 cup soufflé dish – a VERY small dish! Who knew?), I didn’t get the big, impressive soufflé lifty puffy thing I really wanted to see.



Nonetheless, it was quite tasty. Mr. Salty pronounced it like having cheese cappuccino for dinner, but not quite the taste sensation he'd been expecting – except then went back and ate much of it out of the pot and called it ‘more-ish’. I felt like I was eating very light scrambled eggs. However, as these scrambled eggs took a f*#& of a lot more work than the average scrambled egg, I might not rush to make this again. Perhaps I’ll save it for a luncheon in the country, when I’m dying to impress my friends. Or perhaps I’ll just make them a Bechamel and get loaded on champers.

P.S. As we were starving at 10:00 when dinner was done, we were most grateful for the delicious coconut cake you baked for us and ate two slices each. Then we were much more contented.