Ann Mah - Instantly French!: Classic French Recipes for Your Electric Pressure Cooker

Classic French Recipes for Your

Electric Pressure Cooker

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For my parents,

who introduced me to the world of

pressure cooking

My thanks to Michael Flamini, Gwen Hawkes, and all the team at St Martins Press, including Jordan Hanley, Justine Sha, Michelle McMillian, Eric C. Meyer, and Kerri Resnick. Heartfelt thanks to Deborah Schneider, Penelope Burns, Cathy Gleason, and the team at Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners for their unflagging support.

Thanks to Ashley McLaughlin, who is a pleasure to work with. She perfectly captured the spirit of this book with her beautiful photographs.

Thanks to Jrme Avenas, Shamroon Aziz, Kristen Beddard, Soisick Gaonach, Christian Conley Holthausen, Allie Larkin, Michael King, Erin Reeser, Thomas Regan-Lefebvre, Steve Rhinds, and Lucy Vanel, who offered cooking advice, suggestions, and ideas.

Thanks also to Karen Kornbluh, Fernando Laguardo, and Anne Schwartz, who provided valuable feedback.

Special thanks to David Lebovitz for his generous encouragementand for allowing me to adapt his chocolate cake recipe.

My love and thanks to Christopher Klein and Lutetia Klein, who make meals a joy.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Paris ten years ago is that time moves more slowly in France. Shopping in the open market, ordering coffee at the caf, or even dropping off clothes at the dry cleaner are all tasks that proceed at a stately pace. This sense of leisure extends to the kitchen, where les cocottes de MmGrannys slow-simmered dishes, like cassoulet, boeuf bourguignon, or blanquette de veauform some of the earliest childhood memories. Above all, French people adore small indulgencesand time is, perhaps, the great luxury of all.

As an ardent Francophile and enthusiastic home cook, I have long loved preparing French meals, elegant affairs that unfurl over four courses of entre (appetizer), plat (main course), fromage (cheese), and dessert (a universal word of joy). But when my husband and I welcomed a baby daughter, my time and patience for lengthy meals grew short. Cooking became a form of survival, and eating solely about sustenance. I would look at my beloved cast-iron Dutch oven and give a wistful sigh for all the hearty French braises, soups, and stews of yore.

And then my dad sent me a multifunction pressure cooker. I admit, I was skeptical at first. Too many viewings of the exploding dinner scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys had made me wary of pressure cookers. Also, like anyone who lives in an urbani.e., crampedenvironment, I am averse to single-use gadgets. And yet my friends raved about them, swapping recipes and tips with an almost cultlike devotion.

One Saturday morning, I finally gave the thing a shot, pressure-cooking a pot of beans with the tentative push of a button. Thirty minutes later, I had a batch of astonishingly delicious, uniformly creamy beansthey were, in fact, the best beans I had ever cooked. I began experimenting with other recipes, my delight and amazement growing with each dish. Hard cubes of winter squash softened in ten minutes. Tough cuts of meat became fork-tender in less than half an hour. And in almost all cases, the pressure cooker made food that was more deliciousmore tender, more velvety, more luxuriousthan I could produce from hours of simmering.

When I began talking to French friends about this newfangled device, I was surprised to find that their passion for the pressure cooker matched my own. As I discovered, French households have relied on the conventional pressure cooker for decades. In fact, they seem to regard it with a nostalgia more powerful than Prousts emotions for the madeleine. I grew up with the constant whistling of the pressure cooker, and I find the music of it pretty soothing, said my friend Thomas.

Called la cocotte-minute, the pressure cooker was invented by a French physicist, Denis Papin, in the seventeenth centuryand it has long been considered a secret weapon among French home cooks. As a busy parent, my maman would use her pressure cooker every day, my friend Jrme told me. Indeed, with its ability to speedily render tough cuts of meat spoon-tender, the pressure cooker is ideal for the hearty braises that are the hallmark of great French cuisine. Savvy French cooks also use it as a kitchen shortcut, to quickly soften winter squash for a gratin, for example, or endives for endives au jambon. In many French home kitchens, the pressure cooker is always at handeven at the expense of precious real estatebecause its such a useful tool. Rather than keep the device in the back of a cupboard, its stored on a convenient shelf so its always ready for use.

The beauty of the multifunction cooker, however, is that its more than a pressure cookerit also offers options to saut, steam, slow cook, and even make rice or yogurt. Aside from meaty mains, the device can help prepare vegetarian dishes, elegant starters, soups, and dessertswith ease and speed. In this book, the chapters are organized by courses, but all the recipes (except desserts) are designed to work as stand-alone dishes, satisfying enough for a meal, paired with cheese, bread, or a simple salad on the side.

These days, I divide my time between Paris and Washington, DC, and my appetite for French cuisinewith its appreciation for home-cooked, seasonal foodremains undiminished. And though Ilike most working peoplestill struggle to find the time and energy to cook every day, the multifunction pressure cooker has allowed me to reclaim all the recipes that felt too laborious to tackle. In this book, I share these recipes, along with tips from French pressure cooker aficionados, shortcuts, observations on French culture, and advice for using the multifunction pressure cooker to create authentic French food. Finally, elegant French fare is accessible every day!

For a generation of French people, there is a similar childhood memory of the stainimprinted on the kitchen ceiling, an indelible reminder of that time Mamans pressure cooker terrifyingly exploded. Happily, todays modern technology means electric pressure cookers have built-in safety functions that ensure explosions never happen. There is absolutely no need to be afraid!