Gluten Free

We champion this generalization: gentlemen eat their beef with steak sauce—the brown type, thick and sharp. Although we support Heinz ketchup and we think it calls for respect and pride, we don’t use bottled steak sauce. Here is an easy and tasty alternative. It is delicious with Filet de Boeuf (page 248).

Montreal institutions like Gibbys and Moishes have been selling their own classic steak spice for decades. Here’s our take on the Montreal steak spice. This is an all-purpose seasoning used in many Montreal-style beef, pork, and steaky fish dishes.

If you’re a fervent practitioner of the nose-to-tail thing, you probably scoff at tenderloin, favoring instead oxtail or udders. In a hypothetical dystopian foodist nation, animals will be bred in humane ways to produce more spleens, livers, and guts than loins and legs. No joke. The meat business wanted pig with more bacon and less shoulder a few years ago, a disturbing enough thought. It’s a common dichotomy and funny somehow. The rich feast on what was once peasant food. Think about it: risotto, polenta, offal, eggs are everywhere. Once again, we don’t omit ourselves from the criticism. In fact, it’s the stuff that keeps us up at night. The fillet comes from the small end of the tenderloin, from a muscle inside the ribs called the psoas major, which reportedly has the function of providing the quadruped with an efficient humping motion. We put filet mignon on the blackboard, get sick of it, and a week later put it back on the board. Cut into thick chunks, hog tied, and roasted, tenderloin is great. One of my favorite dishes, beef Stroganoff, is also best made with tenderloin (I omitted it from this book for fear of being ostracized by the cool chef gang). Also, the River Café Raw Beef (tenderloin, too) is still one of my favorite cookbook recipes.

Sauce Vin Rouge is our mother-ship sauce, good on all matters of protein. When seasoning this sauce, or any sauce, keep in mind that it won’t be consumed like a soup, so go ahead and be relatively liberal with the salt.

Here is another of our kitchen staples, which tastes like an extraction of the essence of onion soup. Awesome on liver, veal, beef, or even schnitzel, it’s the taste of winter in Paris.

We owe it to Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson at Balthazar for the revival of the plat pour deux in restaurants. It’s great for the passionate cook, and great for the passionate diner, as it denotes a more willing, yet easygoing approach. Nicolas Jongleux used to do a guinea hen for two, the breast on the bone with jus truffé, in fine china; vegetables in a silver casserole dish; and a second service of legs with squash gnocchi and mimolette cheese. It was beautiful food made perfect by the antique tableware. Alain Ducasse once said that if you go with a date to the cinema, you don’t go to different movies; the same applies to dining. If you and your companion agree, it can be heaven. Why another book with a côte de boeuf? Because this is the Joe Beef côte de boeuf. A côte de boeuf is a majestic cut. It is 2 1/2 pounds (1.2 kilograms) of natural, aged, carefully butchered steer goodness. In our mind, a côte de boeuf has to be cut by hand, leaving the bone intact. (One, if not the main, difference between European and American butchery is the use of the meat saw. In North America, the cuts are based on sawing parts; in Europe, the cuts are made by knife, every muscle separated.) At Joe Beef, the side dishes keep coming when you order a côte de boeuf: green salad, fries, horseradish, red wine sauce, and marrowbones. This, in addition to the quality of the meat, is why we cannot justify lowering the price.

Fred once threatened to reveal Monsier Jean Charest’s dislike of beets to the world, along the lines of President George Bush’s broccoligate. “He stared at me while his goons were considering my removal—not funny, not funny at all.” This way of making beets is delicious. Fred prefers red beets; he finds the yellow ones taste like house-brand diet soda.

We can’t explain why this helps cure hangovers, but it does. It’s like a vitamin with a sugar coating (the coating being the bacon and butter).

Every year we buy a large jar of herbes salées in Kamouraska. It’s a typical Bas Du Fleuve product that lets you enjoy the taste of garden fresh herbs when the temperature is –4°F (–20°C) and your backyard is under a blanket of snow. It is essentially a big spoonful of herbs with carrots and onions that stay fresh because of the brine. You can use this traditional northern condiment with anything: potatoes, soups, seafood, lamb, gravies, terrines, and meat pies.

Here is a simple way to enjoy big Paris mushrooms. I like chanterelles, morels, and even matsutakes, but these common white mushrooms—the kind you see in supermarkets—remind me of culinary school; they smell like la bonne cuisine française. We use banker watch–size mushrooms—as big as you can find. If you’re looking for an upscale alternative, porcini will also work. This dish is best prepared in a cast-iron frying pan, served family style at the table. Bring it out hot and bubbling.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

Back in the day, when there was Sally Wong, when there was yellow pepper, and when there was tuna, David was doing endive salad and roast chicken. Although nonrevolutionary, this salad is always delicious. It’s on the menu often, especially in the winter when the garden is under a snowbank and the Parc Vinet Salad (opposite page) is a distant memory. Use Stilton in this salad; it works much better than other blues.

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?”.