Category: Food

There are words floating around in the air that we’ve heard, that we’d love to use in conversation, but whose meaning we don’t know. We feel like we should know. We’ve read them in books or heard fancy people use them. We’re pretty sure that everyone else in the world knows them, but we don’t want to admit our ignorance.

My favorite one of these words is “insouciant.”

Another of them is “frangipane.” Don’t let this intimidate you. It’s just the term for an almond cream that is used in pastry sometimes.

Frangipane-Raspberry Pie

• 1 pre-baked pie shell – you can buy one of these premade and frozen at the supermarket or you can make your own or you can buy premade pie dough and bake it according to the instructions on the box; blind baking (making a pie crust without any filling in it) is a whole angsty topic that requires a much longer discussion than we have time for today; seriously, the premade dough makes a very credible pie crust, don’t feel guilty about using it
• 1 1/3 stick (150 g) butter
• ¾ cup (150 g) granulated sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1½ cup (150 g) almond flour – I like Bob’s Red Mill
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• ½ cup (170 g) seedless raspberry jam – I don’t like raspberry seeds, but if you’re some sort of thrill-seeker, feel free to use the full-octane stuff

Preheat your oven to 325°F.

If you’ve baked a pie shell yourself, let it cool completely.

Using a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugar until they are fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes. Most Kitchen Smart People will tell you to use softened butter, but a stand mixer will beat cold butter into submission and be happy about it. If you don’t have a stand mixer, you should probably listen to the experts.

Add the egg. Because the yolk contains a lot of fat, it will mix in with the butter-fluff without complaining, and bring protein with it to give structure to frangipane while it bakes. Follow this with the almond flour and extract.

Beat the mixture until it is fluffy again.

Meanwhile, glop spoon the raspberry jam into your pie shell and spread it around so that it covers the entire bottom.

Transfer the almond mixture to the pie shell, on top of the jam. Spread it evenly with an offset spatula if you have one. If you don’t, try the back of a large spoon. You’ll say to yourself, “What’s the big deal? I beat this until it was fluffy. Twice! I can spread it around with a butter knife!” No, you can’t. While fluffy and delicious, frangipane is stubborn; it needs to be persuaded to spread out on top of the jam instead of mixing into it. Use the spatula to spread the filling toward you until it reaches the edge of the pie pan, then rotate the pan and repeat, until you’ve covered the whole pie.

Wish your pie well, then bake it for 45 to 50 minutes. Check on it during the last 10 minutes or so of baking. If it’s starting to look a little dark, cover it with a sheet of aluminum foil.

Remove from the oven and let it cool completely before serving. You might want to garnish it with whipped cream and fresh raspberries.

This is a delicious pie. It tastes primarily of almonds at first — rich, dense, and a little pecan-pie-like, but the crispy part where the frangipane has bonded with the side crust is something special. The sharpness of the raspberries cuts through the richness of the pie but adds to its sweetness.

There are two advantages to this pie. One, of course, is the pie itself. It’s a really good pie. The other is social. When you share this — and you really will want to show it off — and a friend asks what it is, you can flip your hair insouciantly, and say, “Oh, this? It’s just some frangipane. How do you feel about frangipane?” HA! Take that, Gertrude!

Featured Photo: Frangipane. Photo by John Fladd.

The stem of a glass — a wine glass, a Champagne flute or a martini glass — is there to help you keep your drink at the proper temperature. Glass is an excellent thermal insulator, and if you hold your glass by the stem very little of the heat from your hands will travel up to the drink, so it will stay cool longer.

Which is very useful for drinks that you want to drink very, very cold, like a sidecar.

Rhubarb Sidecar

Rhubarb Syrup

Rhubarb, chopped and frozen

An equal amount of granulated sugar, by weight

The juice of half a lemon

Sidecar

2 ounces cognac

1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

¾ ounce rhubarb syrup

Cook frozen chopped rhubarb and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally. By freezing the rhubarb, you have caused jagged crystals of ice to form and puncture most of the cell walls in the rhubarb. The sugar is emotionally needy and draws the juice from the rhubarb and bonds with it. It is unclear how the rhubarb feels about this, but it doesn’t really have any choice in the matter, because under heat the sugar is drawn into solution in its juice with a happy sigh. If you want to encourage this chemical matchmaking, you can use a potato masher to hurry the process along.

Bring the mixture to a boil, and wait a few seconds longer to make sure all the sugar has completely dissolved. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice to the mixture, then strain it with a fine-mesh strainer. Leave it to cool. (Don’t throw away the rhubarb solids; they are delicious.)

Wrap a double-handful of ice in a tea towel and beat it vigorously with something heavy (I use the pestle from my largest mortar and pestle, but a meat tenderizer or the bottom of a small pot will work well, too). When you have crushed your ice, fill a martini glass with it and set it aside for five minutes or so to chill. This will give you time to squeeze the lemon juice for the cocktail — unless you’ve got a particularly selfless one that gives generously of itself, this will probably take a whole lemon’s worth.

Combine the cognac, lemon juice and your now-cool rhubarb syrup (cool in a temperature sense; the mere fact that you are making this cocktail makes you cool in a social sense) over ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake extra-thoroughly; you want this cocktail to be colder than a penguin pawnbroker’s heart.

Dump the ice out of the martini glass; you’ve left it in until the last possible instant, to make sure the glass is as cold as possible. Strain the cocktail into it, with a hum of satisfaction at its color, a pinkish shade of apricot, like a bolt of silk in a hidden corner of a Turkish bazar. Find someplace quiet and comfortable — a screened-in porch, perhaps — and sip the drink while thinking about that time at that party when you were actually witty and attractive.

A sidecar is a classic cocktail in the same family as margaritas, whiskey sours and gimlets: a healthy belt of liquor, some sort of citrus juice and something sweet. In this case the brandy works really well with the fruitiness of the homemade rhubarb syrup. Rhubarb’s tartness plays well off the lemon juice. When a sidecar is skull-shrinkingly cold, the cognac takes a leading role in the taste, as it slowly warms up — because you’ve remembered to hold your glass by the stem — and the more delicate fruity flavors become a little more pronounced.

A sidecar is much like many of us, who start out cold and sharp but mellow out a little with age.

Featured Photo: Rhubarb Sidecar. Photo by John Fladd.