Nut Free

This recipe is a perfect illustration of the Big Mac Theory: It hits everywhere at the same time, it tastes perfect, and it’s so rich but you barely notice it. It’s a bit weird, a bit trashy, and very tasty. Awesome.

Pier Luc Dallaire has worked for us for five years (and counting) as a cook, busboy, bartender, oyster shucker, and now, a real French waiter! His dad, Bertrand, was a kindred soul gardener, and his mom, Huguette, made these killer doughnuts. They rise with baking powder, not yeast. And you will often find them at weekend country flea markets. The Isle-aux-Grues cheese (page 276) is a great Quebec product that we couldn’t resist smoking. Together they sing.

This is Fred’s mom, Suzanne’s, recipe. It is an old Belgian Walloon standard—a quick and tasty pickle that is good with pork roast and sausages. You can also mix the “brine” with nut oil as a dressing for beets. And use it to give a welcome buzz to a bland wine sauce: just a drop or two. This pickling solution works well with almost any stone fruit. The amount of liquid you need will vary according to the stone fruit(s) you use. Here, the amount has been geared to 1 pound (455 g) cherries and/or Italian plums. You may need to adjust it if you use other stone fruits. Because we are deathly afraid of preserves gone wrong (from watching an old episode of Quincy, M.E., where the culprit was botulism), we suggest using superclean plastic containers and always refrigerating the preserves.

The spice and heat in this jam make it more at ease with meats and cheese than toast. As for the Babylon term, it’s simply in relation to the avid devotion that the world’s kitchen has for reggae music!

You know those cheap dinner rolls you eat at your grandma’s house on Sunday nights? The supersoft, semiattached kind you buy in plastic bags? These are those dinner rolls. The base of the recipe is mashed potato, so it’s important to start this recipe as soon as you’ve just finished making mashed potatoes. These are perfect to serve with a pulled pork sandwich or on porchetta.

Porchetta is something you want to eat lukewarm: work on it in the morning, cook it in the afternoon, take it out, and eat it an hour or so later. We’re aware that a traditional porchetta is a whole stuffed pig; this is our version and has little affiliation with the Italian classic. Because you wrap the pork belly around the shoulder, you need a pretty skinny piece of Boston butt. We buy a 5-pound (2.3-kg) shoulder, slice it lengthwise, and use half (freeze the other half for another time). This recipe may look labor-intensive, but it won’t be, especially if you get your butcher to do all of the trimming for you.

When Fred travels, the first place he always goes is to a grocery store. Forget the idyllic markets and the virile butchers; he has this immense fascination with supermarkets. Nothing compares to landing in Paris at 9:00 A.M. and heading to the loaded yogurt aisle of a Monoprix. He feels the same when he’s visiting western Canada, checking out the sausage sections. Far from artisanal anything, we’re sure, but the array is crazy: midget baloney, cotton-sack summer sausage, skinless Mennonite, headcheese, jerky of all kinds, and on and on. It’s a fun challenge to take an old commercial sausage and just make it honest again: good meats and real smoke. This one we made with Emma, who was chef de cuisine at Liverpool House at the time. We suggest the use of muslin bags for this sausage in particular. You might find them online, or, as a proper Joe Beefer, you can sew them yourself (see Note). The penetration of smoke is much better and you don’t need a stuffer. You just do it by hand.

The best fries are done with potatoes that have never seen the cold. It has something to do with starch converting to sugar at certain temperatures. If you’re interested in the specifics, check out Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. At the restaurant, we use a russet potato from the Île d’Orléans in the Saint Lawrence River (which Cartier originally named the Isle of Bacchus because of the native vines that covered the landscape), but you can use anything similar. This recipe really is made to work with a deep fryer. If you don’t have a small one at home, a 5-quart (5-liter) thick-bottomed, highsided pot and a deep-frying thermometer will work. We use half canola oil and half beef fat, which always makes better fries the second day. If you can get your hands on rendered beef leaf fat (the fat from around the kidneys), definitely use that. If this is all too much, you can use peanut oil. We don’t, as we can’t piss off both the vegetarians and the allergics. A few years back we started tossing our fries in escargot butter (its name comes from its use, not its contents; it’s basically garlic butter) and now we can’t stop. We also like to add a little grated pecorino as we toss.

Our use of ribs extends beyond a plate of ribs. We use them in gnocchi and in potato soup, and we will cut them into three, remove the bones, and make a McKiernan ribs sandwich. As lard was a staple at the turn of the century, so are ribs at Joe Beef. We provide two ways of cooking: roasting and smoking. Serve with Good Fries (page 154).

When we wrote “mackerel” on the blackboard menu, it didn’t sell, so we renamed it silver tail and a star was born. Now when we serve silver tail with bacon and sage, or in a breakfast Benedict, it flies out of the kitchen. We sell so much that our supplier thinks we might be feeding farmed killer whales in the backyard. Our guys at McKiernan Luncheonette do a great job of smoking 50 pounds (23 kilograms) every week, which culminates with the Saturday brunch mackerel Benedict, with eggs, hollandaise, maple syrup, and an English muffin.

Of all the crab we receive at the restaurant, West Coast Dungeness and the common crab from the Saint Lawrence (tourteau, brown crab, or Jonah) are our favorites. Many of the same guys who fish for lobster in these areas also fish for crab. But oddly enough, these crabs don’t make it to Montreal. Instead, they’re highjacked somewhere along the way for the Asian market. The crab is typically picked clean and frozen in blocks, shipped to China (for example), sawed, and only then sent back in one-pound (455-gram) packs. Although we make a point of using PEI or Quebec crab, Maine seems to understand the game a bit better. At Portland’s Browne Trading Company, you can buy fresh, handpicked Jonah crab, meat and claws: our dream. Whatever crab you buy (or catch!), make very sure to check the meat closely for bits of shell and cartilage that might have been left.

All of the eels of the world begin and return to the Sargasso Sea: can you imagine a more disgusting place to swim? It sounds like the scariest place on earth. In the course of their journey, some of those eels swim down the Saint Lawrence River, near the shores of Kamouraska, Quebec. And some of those eels get caught in weir traps by guys like Bernard Lauzier. Bernard smokes and brines eels and sturgeon, both of which we use at all three restaurants for many dishes, including this one right here. Eel is so meaty and delicious; Fred refers to it as the “undersea tenderloin.”

According to argumentalist extraordinaire John Bil, these are actually called “stuffies.” Everyone seems to agree that this is a great way to eat razor clams, as it’s not uncommon for us to sell one hundred pounds (forty-five kilograms) per week at Joe Beef. We get our clams from the elusive fisherman John Doyle, who lives on the northern coast of the Saint Lawrence. To our knowledge, no commercial fisheries in Canada sell razor clams. If you want to prepare clams this way, but can’t find razor, quahog will do.

We wouldn’t call ourselves purists (like John Bil), but we tend to agree that steamed clams served with anything other than their own broth and butter is an abomination. We also think PEI might just have the prettiest white sand–dug clams we have ever seen.

Fred worked at Toqué! in the early 1990s, and one of his many tasks was cleaning squid. Every so often, the Anglophone sous chef would order from the Quebecois fishmonger at La Mer, and one day “15 pounds” of squid was heard as “50 pounds.” That week Fred cleaned 150 pounds of squid. He couldn’t smell squid for about ten years without feeling sick, but he’s back on the squid train now. The only way he can bear it, though, is filled with lobster and cooked in lobster juice.

We do not have a story for this recipe. Sorry.