Posted on November 13, 2011 - by brooklynfermented

Sunday Provisions, or Why the Kitchen smells like a Barn

Every two or three months or so, a small group of friends and I—Chanterelle alums all of us—convene at a BYOB joint in town to catch up, chow down, and share good bottles of wine.  It’s usually Chinese, sometimes barbecue, and always a kick.

Tonight’s edition is kind of special. Actually, A LOT special, because one of those alums has offered to cook a meal for the group at his home, and that alum happens to be David Waltuck, chef and co-owner of that late, great Tribeca outpost of civility and refinement.

For the occasion it seemed appropriate to bring both wine and a small cheese course.  I ran into David near his home in the West Village the other day and found out what he’s making:  Cassoulet.*  Which means, of course, red wine. Something rustic, dense, autumnal.  Definitely French.  Madiran. Côte-Rôtie. Something Proveçal.  Maybe I can track down a bottle of Château Simone.  Have to think about that one, do a little research, see what I can spend.

The cheese, happily, I already have on hand. I had planned to visit Formaggio Essex yesterday, see what kind of weird and raw and stinky wheels they had picked up in Long Island City this week, but with the F and G lines amputated this weekend, and with the early sunsets putting the clamp-down on my inter-borough wanderlust, I hopped the B-67 to Bklyn Larder instead, and, after a quick hello to manager Tim Solomon—an Alabama native and likely the most cordial cheesemonger you’re  bound to encounter in the lower 48—I asked managing partner Sergio Hernandez for a run-down on the good stuff.

I’m pleased to report that the first item he mentioned, Vacherin Mont d’Or—seasonal Swiss, raw cow’s milk, rustic, wrapped in spruce bark—sent waves of contentment through my being.  I had come to the right place. Not always so easy to find, made only in the cold months—when high-elevation pastures, the flavor source for all those fabled hard, aged mountain cheeses of west central Europe, get a snow break—Vacherin Mont d’Or benefits from the (relatively) high fat content of winter feed: hay, preferably unfermented.  When ripe and ready, the cheese is spoonable, farmy, fruity, and bacony (the slightly smoky influence transferred from the spruce rind).

Sergio told me to keep the cheese out all night to ensure its spoonability. I complied. My roommate told me this morning that the kitchen smelled like a barn, “but in a good way.”

I remember long ago, in fall 2003 I think it was, I had dinner in the basement of Prune with my high school buddy Chris Loyd and my then-girlfriend Liz Thorpe, and I remember thinking how simple (and brilliant) it was that Gabrielle Hamilton served Vacherin Mont d’Or in whole wheels only, accompanied only by slices of apple and pear.  I loved that. And that’s how I am serving it tonight.

I’d like to write a bit more about the other two cheeses Sergio turned me onto—San Andreas from Bellwether Farms in Sonoma County and a new (to me) Swiss hard cheese called Holzhofer, aged by a woman named Caroline Hostettler, whose name Sergio uttered with no small reverence—but, alas, I have probably already written too much and I still have to get ready and purchase wine.

More to come.

*Every time I think of Cassoulet, I think about another David—David Pasternack, and the inimitable way he would announce it at pre-service meetings at Picholine on nights it was a ‘classic cuisine’ special. (This was a while back, when Dave was Terrance Brennan’s Chef de Cuisine at Picholine, before he went on to his own well-deserved stardom as chef-partner at Esca) “Alright guys,” Dave would say in his thick Long Beach accent, “tonight’s classic cuisine is Cassoulet… in the style of Toulouse!,” pausing for a second or two after ‘Cassoulet’ and elongating slightly the final vowel sound in ‘Toulouse’, dropping his pitch to a low guttural scratch at the same time, and sounding a bit like a late-period Serge Gainsbourg trying to sound like a South Shore fisherman.  Awesome.