This is the latest addition to my collection. It came out in 1980, but it was one of a series of Time-Life books. If you remember the Time Life music collections advertised on television around that time, you know that the “time” usually focused on was “the past”. This book seems to be looking back over a glorious past where precision in presentation was prized above all, where you could get pretty far on piping skills alone, and everything was arranged like an Annie Leibowitz photo shoot, even if, or especially if, it was supposed to look natural.
Isn’t this loaf amazing? Things are sandwiched between slices of bread, but this is like no sandwich I’ve ever seen. It’s built like a Murano glassworker builds a milliefiori cane. The assembly must take forever, and then you’ve got to slice it without distorting the gorgeous cross-sections, no easy task especially since the dots in between the pink squares of ham are pistachio nuts. By the way the green is asparagus.
At first I assumed the binding agent was some sort of cream cheese, but when I turned to the directions for this dish I found that it was butter. Butter! Each slice must contain like half a stick. I like butter, don’t get me wrong. But that’s a little too much, even for me.
Then I looked even closer. It’s not plain butter. Its beure fermière: butter flavored with wine and egg yolks. So, no problem.
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