Nut Free

You can use any type of carrot for this dish: perfect bunching carrots in midsummer, Touchons in the fall, or large carrots to feed livestock in the winter. Use anything but the dreary, bagged mini carrots carved from larger, less valuable specimens (they have more in common with sea monkeys than food). It’s simple: if the carrots look shitty that day, buy spinach. If not, cook them up like this.

This is a great dressing. We use it on our Parc Vinet Salad (page 190), and it’s also the best with Belgian endive and blue cheese (page 191). Plus, it works to pimp any sauce that needs a sugarvinegar hit, it’s great on top of cold crab or lobster, and it doubles as a verjuice when you need to acidify a jus. If you have easy access to great apples (that is, you live somewhat close to an “apple belt,” as we do), this dressing will become a staple. Just mix it up and pour it into a plastic squirt bottle.

Boil turnips for too long and you’ll have socks juice soup. Cook them just right and you’re being Richard Olney for an instant. Do not confuse turnips with rutabagas; here in Quebec, they hold the same name in French. And if you have some rendered duck fat on hand, please use it in place of the oil and butter.

Fred’s mom is from Belgium, and like most Europeans who lived through the war, she can’t bear the smell of Jerusalem artichokes, which, along with rutabagas, were the readily available vegetables in those years. Supposedly, they are a miraculous food, with some claiming they cure diabetes, and pet-food makers thinking about putting them in cat food so used kitty litter would remain odorless. Says Fred: “I still couldn’t stomach them, until I tried a batch at Toqué! during a staff meal. They were killed in coarse pretzel salt and dunked in ketchup. Another case of the sum being light-years from the parts!”

If you want long sticks of rhubarb, peel the rhubarb first. If you want 1/2-inch (12-mm) chunks, don’t bother peeling it. This is pickle in a small amount, so don’t bother canning it, either. But do keep it in a proper (sparkling clean, tight cap) container in the fridge, where it will keep for up to a month. We serve this pickle with charcuterie and cheeses.

The best image we have of bagna càuda is in the Time-Life Book, Cooking of Italy: a few stocky men and their elegant wives, towels around their necks, are sitting solemnly around a table in a brick vault. You would think they are about to eat ortolans or monkey brains, but no, they are enjoying long sticks of celery dipped in a warm butter-oil-anchovy bath. It’s a strange image, and we were inexplicably inspired by it. Bagna càuda is peasant yet elegant—the essence of Italian food. We love the flavor and the process of trimming the vegetables, and we (bittersweetly) think most people like bagna càuda because it tastes like Caesar salad. We serve our bagna càuda with a dip or aioli and have provided both options below.

This is only a Parc Vinet salad when the garden is lit with the floodlights of the Parc Vinet ballpark directly behind all three restaurants and we’re harvesting enough greens to fill a bowl. Although this light salad seems a bit un–Joe Beef, it is in fact the best partner to a browned-out meal of wine reductions, marrow, and other consorts. We use whatever herbs and greens we have to make it, and this is what you should do, too. Let’s say 40 percent bitter greens, 40 percent sweet greens, and the rest in fines herbes. Just don’t go and put in rosemary. If it’s got woodsy stems, keep it out of the bowl. And do not use commercial salad mix. That’s not the point of this salad.

A note on ricers: For a young boy, a potato ricer is akin to magic. It’s more impressive than planes or satellites; it’s up there with fire trucks, guns, and large breasts. We use ricers a lot at Joe Beef—for potatoes, Madeira jelly for foie gras, fruit preserves, and polenta. One day, a hungover vegetable cook produced a plate of clumpy, amateur polenta. It was on the menu, so we couldn’t send out carrots and apologies. Instead, we just pressed it through the ricer. It came out freaking perfect, the clumps gone and the polenta shaped like rice, slowly falling in the butter. There we were, four grown-ups, as fascinated as ever with the potato ricer. The general rule for polenta is four parts water to one part cornmeal.

David has an Irish friend called Jerry O’Regan who always triple checks whether or not his main course is served with mashed potatoes. In fact, Jerry doesn’t understand why all food isn’t served with potatoes. Sometimes we send him a side of lentils instead of potatoes and he looks at it as if it were alien food. We don’t want to make an “Irish guy potato” stereotype here, but after cooking for Jerry for ten years, we get it. At the end of the meal, Jerry doesn’t say thank you, he says “Feels good to have some potatoes, hey Davey?”.

Most Dijon mustard that is shipped to North America from France is made with seeds from Saskatchewan, Canada. Hence, it makes sense that we make our own mustard. Feel free to experiment with the types of vinegar and flavorings (tarragon, horseradish, dill).

This is our infamous rib sauce.

This is part of our mise en place at the restaurant. We mix it with mayonnaise (page 175), serve it straight up with potatoes or fish, or use it to punch up sauces, soups, stews, or anything raw like tartare. Do not use woodsy herbs like rosemary, thyme, or sage in this purée, and be sure to wash all of your herbs well.

This is a staple in pretty much every professional kitchen, and with this easy method, it could be in yours, too. We like to eat the crudités with our Zesty Italian Tartare (page 245).

We use this for our Scallops with Pulled Pork (page 30) recipe.

We made this dish because we like the “potato” de gallo idea. (In fact, you can make only the rub and eat it on almost anything, especially eggs.) Make certain that the potatoes are tiny and crisp, so you get that salt-and-vinegar potato chip taste.

A classic mayo.

Our favorite sauce is made from chicken skin. It is a delicious gravy that we use for a lot of dishes at Joe Beef—more than we would like to admit. It’s like an extraction of the deliciousness of crispy chicken skin. Ask your butcher for the chicken skin. More skinless chickens are sold out there than skin-on birds, so the skins must be somewhere other than at a schmaltz factory. Serve this on its own or as a sauce on guinea hens or other poultry.

Dear World, We’re sorry food has come to this. Like Richard Pryor said, more or less, the double down is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money. But it’s also really delicious.

This red sauce is a steroid ingredient that we use to pump up wimpy dishes like gnocchi or in chicken gravy for a quick sauce chasseur. Most of our sauces are done this way, baked in a good French enameled cast-iron pot. We’re not too fussy about the type of tomatoes we use, just canned and whole; San Marzano will do. If you cannot obtain pig skin from your butcher, then a pig’s trotter, halved lengthwise, works, too. You could also add Smoked Baby Back Ribs (page 153) to the sauce before serving it with the gnocchi.