This month's IMBB theme, hosted by Derrick at Obsession With Food, triggered a Frost Street flashback. A little over a year ago I was browsing the fish counter at Citarella when I came across something I had never seen before. Up in the front of the display was a pile of huge sea scallops. All of them were faintly yellow, which meant they were "dry" scallops: most commercially-marketed scallops are soaked in a brine solution to preserve them, which turns them milky white. But what struck me most about these particular scallops was not that they were big, nor that they were ivory-colored, but that each of them had a coral-pink pod attached to its side. Citarella was selling dry sea scallops, with roe.

The summer of 2003 was the first and last time I ever tasted scallop roe. I bought a few and prepared them different to understand their flavor and their behavior in the kitchen. I found they were best poached, retaining their striking color while taking on a firm but tender texture. Their flavor is round but subtle, similar to that of the belly section of a clam. Having decided that scallop roe were best poached, and having no way to obtain them other than in conjunction with fresh, sweet sea scallops, an ideal use of these rare treats immediately suggested itself: I would make them into a terrine.

This photo was taken with a film camera, so I didn't know until it was developed that I had failed to capture a sharp image of my proudest achievement in the kitchen. This is a mousseline terrine: the body of it is a fine forcemeat enriched with heavy cream and bound with egg whites. For this I cribbed a recipe from the CIA's Garde Manger textbook, provided after the jump. [There's also a primer on terrine assembly using a roasted vegetable terrine recipe also derived from a recipe in the CIA textbook]. I folded in some finely-chopped chives to provide some visual appeal and a pungent flavor to offset the sweet richness of the scallop farce, and I dropped in the roe as garnish for the terrine. I had originally planned to line the terrine with prosciutto, since I've often paired scallops with cured pork (usually bacon) in the past, but in the end I decided the ham might overpower the delicate flavor of the roe, and used blanched leek leaves instead.

This turned out to be the right call. I dressed the plates for service with rosemary-infused olive oil and some ten-year-old balsamic vinegar. The balance of flavors was the most sublime thing that has ever come out of my kitchen. I served the terrine as the third course in a six-course meal I was putting on for some guests. Most of them took an extra helping of the terrine after the fourth and fifth courses.

Recipe: Sea Scallop Mousseline Forcemeat

Ingredients:

• 2 lb. sea scallops
• 2 tbsp. salt
• 4 egg whites
• 26 fl. oz. heavy cream
• 2 fl. oz. lemon juice
• 1/4 tsp. white pepper

Make sure all the ingredients and equipment are cold (you can store the bowl and blades of your food processor in the freezer in advance). Process all the ingredients in a food processor until very smooth (but no longer), and press through a medium-gauge sieve into a stainless steel bowl in an ice bath. Keeping the ingredients cold and passing the farce through a sieve ensures a smooth texture in the finished dish. Test the farce for flavor and texture by wrapping a small amount in plastic wrap, sealing by tying or with rubber bands, and poaching in simmering water to an internal temperature of 145 degrees Farenheit. Adjust seasoning and thin with more heavy cream as necessary.

To make a terrine, fill a terrine mold (lined with plastic wrap and an edible liner, such as blanched leek leaves) with the mousseline and a desired garnish (such as scallop roe). Bake, covered, in a water bath to an internal temperature of 145 degrees. Press the cooked terrine under a 2-lb. weight and refrigerate overnight. Invert the terrine onto a serving plate and slice into cross-sections.

Basic Terrine Assembly

The great thing about terrines is the visual effect created by a cross-section of layers. This terrine, made from pre-cooked vegetables and bound with a vinaigrette thickened with dissolved gelatin, is an example of how a professional-looking dish can be created with just a few dollars worth of ingredients (and a mandoline for slicing the vegetables).

	Start by lining the terrine mold with plastic wrap (to allow for easy unmolding). Then line the mold again with the "skin" of your terrine, leaving overhang to cover the top of the mold when you're finished building the terrine. In this photo, you can see the use of lengthwise slices of cooked carrots as liners, and the first layer of the terrine (roasted eggplant).
	Continue layering the terrine with an eye to the look of the finished product. For example, laying lengthwise garnishes will create interesting visual effects in cross-section, like these stalks of asparagus punctuating a layer of fresh chevre.
	When you've finished layering, fold over the overhang of your liner, cover with the overhang of plastic wrap, and weigh down in the fridge to firm up the finished product. A press plate cut for this purpose is usually helpful: you can cut one out of sturdy cardboard to fit your terrine mold and wrap it with tin foil and plastic wrap so it can be reused. Two pounds of weight is generally enough; you can use cans or sacks of beans.

When you slice the finished product, you can see your layers at work. A terrine made of brightly colored vegetables - such as red peppers, zucchini, and yellow squash - creates a bold effect and is very inexpensive to make. If you have the time and a terrine mold, there are few more impressive presentations available.

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There are some very fancy markets in this town. They stock all manner of rare and exotic ingredients for a generally curious, often pretentious, and usually profligate clientele. There's a saying attributed to P. T. Barnum about the kinds of people who shop in these places, and God help me, I'm one of them.

There are some scams even I won't fall for, though. Consider the poultry section at Whole Foods Columbus Circle. Wandering around the store, I got the idea to make a dinner of seared duck breast with roasted shallots and acorn squash, sauteed wild mushrooms, escarole, and a thyme-infused red wine pan sauce.

I started thumbing through the individually-wrapped magrets de canard, the skin-on boneless breast of moulard duck. They are priced between twelve and fifteen dollars apiece. One magret would be enough for two appetizers, but probably only one entree. I'm facing the prospect of dropping over thirty dollars just for the protein component of a one-course meal for two.

Then I look down and see whole moulard ducks in the bottom of the poultry case. They all cost around twenty-five dollars. It takes a while for me to realize that this isn't a mistake, that Whole Foods is actually charging its customers more for two duck breasts than for the whole duck.

There are different kinds of decadance. There is decadence in which we take pleasure in a sense of our own sinfulness; where we do things we know we probably shouldn't, because it just feels good. As long as nobody gets hurt, I have no problem with this. But there's another kind of decadance, which is just flat-out immoral. It consists of a sort of willfully wasteful luxury. Of spending more than you should on something and then throwing most of it away, not because it's useless, but just because you don't care enough to extract its full value. It's the field full of skinned buffalo carcasses in Dances With Wolves. It's Marie Antoinette's cake. It's the magret de canard at Whole Foods.

For less than the price of two magrets you can get a whole moulard, and after a little knife work and a little time at the stove you can extract the two magrets and more. Cut up the excess fat and skin around the neck and body cavity and you can render it into cracklings and pure duck fat. Remove and bone out the duck legs, cook them in the rendered fat, and you have confit. Roast the bones and simmer them with aromatic vegetables and herbs, and you have two quarts of duck stock (reduce it and you have a quart of concentrated stock; reduce it some more and you've got a pint of rich, gelatinous duck glaze).

When you can have all these things with just a little extra effort, paying more for less isn't only foolish, it's a sin.

Posted by jeremy at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

A wise man once observed: "everything in New York City comes back to real estate". Anyone who has lived here for any appreciable period of time recognizes the essential truth of this statement. We come back to real estate as surely as we desire things we cannot have; obsessing over apartments is the New Yorker's way of reaching beyond our grasp.

Lisa and I make a good living by any reasonable standard. But we have little hope of ever owning a real home in this city, where the average apartment runs a cool million. So we compromise. We rent slightly below our means, saving our pennies and waiting -- praying -- for the bubble to burst. We have a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment on a convenient Upper West Side block. It has everything we need, none of the things we dream about: it will do for now. It has ample closets but faces an airshaft; the bedroom is larger than the one in my old apartment, but -- and this is finally the point -- the kitchen is smaller.

New Yorkers know a lot about square footage; how it gets eaten up by bathtubs, hallways, and retrofitted "conversion" walls. Very few of us think about cubic footage though. My old kitchen not only had a six-foot-long counter, it had cabinet space above and below the whole six feet, plus a closet-sized pantry and above-sink cabinets. (It also had a gas range, but that's another story). In a room with nine-foot-high ceilings, each square foot you give up a loss of three square feet* costs you a cubic yard. So to make room for the detritus of a wandering, accumulated life, you have to think vertical. You cram every cubic inch of headroom with storage, you make more of less.

This is how we made room for all my pots and pans in our new apartment; we hung them from the ceiling. Suspended in mid-air, waiting on the chance that I might come home in time to use them. It's not ideal, but for now, it will do. And Lisa seems to be happy with the arrangement, even though these pots and pans are hanging just beyond her reach.

*Thanks to Felix for pointing out my faulty arithmetic.

Posted by jeremy at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)