Richard Michel - Sweet magic: easy recipes for delectable desserts

To Gaston Lentre

Contents

I recall a memorable and satisfying meal that was served to a small group at the chefs table in Michel Richards restaurant Citronelle in Washington, DC. We sat down that night at ten thirtyme, Michel, and a gathering of chefs. Thomas Keller had just finished an event in Michels private dining room, where he had presented dishes from his new cookbook to a worshipful crowd. The hush that came over the diners assembled for Thomass event was akin to the collective holding of breath that comes over baseball aficionados when it is the last pitch of a possible no-hitter. Just down the street, at the Four Seasons Hotel, the ever-ebullient Jacques Ppin had finished a book signing for his latest work. Now it was time to eat. Michel had invited them and a few other close friends (also chefs) for supernal cte de boeuf sliced off the bonepotatoes fried in clarified butter, no green vegetables, Epoisses cheese of such pungency that it conjured memories of a trash bin outside a fish market on a hot day. For dessert, Michel set out a bowl of what looked like chocolate-covered almonds: perfect ovals covered in chocolate and dusted with cocoa powder.

I reached for one, bit into it. But instead of the crunch of almond, I encountered the soft flesh of... I couldnt quite place it for an instant and then my brain sorted out the signals from Michels surprise attack on my palate: It was a juicy seedless grape.

Typical Michel , I thought, presenting one thing disguised as another, using dessert as an opportunity to create a trompe bouche , so to speak. As they bit into the chocolate grapes, the assembled chefs expressed their delight with the burbling chuckle that is the only practical way to laugh with full mouth. This recipe would later appear in our book Happy in the Kitchen , but the larger point, that dessert should delight and bring forth a smile, is the guiding principle of this book too.

Another observation from that night: The only thing gourmet about the meal with the top chefs was the perfection of the ingredients and the precision of their preparation. Other than that, the dishes were simple, and the presentation was the opposite of cheffy, by which I mean the components werent piled up in Frank Gehrylike constructions, nor were they adorned with teeny tiny chopped vegetables and plated with artsy brushstrokes of something that had started out as a magnum of expensive wine reduced to three or four molecules.

No foams. No weird frozen nitrogen concoctions. Just great food.

That is the idea behind this book: to share the creative impulses of one of the greatest dessert masters in the world in a way that is simple, light (or at least lighter than traditional recipes), and as quick as technology and practical shortcuts will allow.

In the course of preparing these fifty desserts, you will make all the basic doughs of the modern pastry chef, but often in a lighter, less labor-intensive way. I can promise that you will never taste a flakier pie crust. You will discoverif you havent discovered alreadythat where tradition calls for double boilers and thermometers, the microwave oven often saves time and cuts down on cleanup while sacrificing nothing in the way of results. You will work with chocolate, fruits, and gelatin. You will learn how to use the most basic meringue to lighten up pastry creams and mousses so that even heavy desserts are light.

These desserts can be fussed over and sculptured to justify a high price tag in an expensive restaurant, but all of them are really designed to be baked (or whipped or chilled) and brought to the table without a lot of bother. Its the texture and taste that matter. Thats what always comes first with Michel Richard.

I know he put his heart and soul into these recipes, because every time he tried something new, at every step of the process, he would lick his fingers clean. If he went back for a second lickthe verdict was a happy one. If he paused after one lickthe underachieving dessert was tossed into the trash and, after considering things for a minute, Michel would start all over again.

Everything in this book got two licks.

Peter Kaminsky

You know the old expression: If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. For me, the kitchen in question felt like I was stepping into an air-conditioned movie theater on the hottest day of August. You see, my first jobat fourteen years of agewas working in a bronze foundry. Forget any complaints you may have heard about working around 500-degree ovens. I was working with 1,000-degree molten metal.

I hated my job. My mom could plainly see that when I dragged myself home after a long day at the inferno. My hands were dry. My skin was dry. I felt that I looked as wrinkled and leathery as an alligator. One evening my mother reminded me I had once told her that I thought I might like being a cook.

Neither of us knew much about how you went about becoming a cook, but Mom had a friend who had an opinion about everything. One of those opinions was that I would be a better cook if I learned how to bake first. As I think back on it, I wonder, even though my parents were separated at the time, could this have had anything to do with the fact that my father was a baker? Such psychology was beyond me. All I knew was I needed a job. A few more links in the Mom-and-her-friends network produced an offer in our little town of Carignan, which is why, on the morning of September 1, 1962, I put on a new white coatI was so proud!and began the first of nearly a thousand days in the shop of Monsieur Jacques Sauvage.

Being a chef, and in particular being a pastry chef, was not a glamorous profession at that time. But I was young and needed to learn a craft, even one that paid ten dollars a month.

In the beginning, Mr. Sauvage had me making deliveries as much as he had me learning pastrysort of a French pastry shops version of the way that kung fu masters would make their disciples carry water up the mountain for a year before they learned the first thing about combat. Like all grown men, as I look back on my boyhood now I find that some little adventures stand out in my memory.

To this day, when winter comes, I still think of the time in 1964 when Mr. Sauvage and I went to deliver cakes in the nearby village of Mouzon. The roads were slick with ice; sleet fell from the sky and covered the windshield. We arrived at the shop of one of our customers and parked across the street. I slipped and slid across the pavement, nearly killing myself. The only way I could make it to the door of the shop was to crawl on my hands and knees. That was all Mr. Sauvage needed to see. Rather than risk the hazardous ice-skating course himself, he moved the car farther up the road, parked directly above me, and, one by one, slid the cake boxes down the icy street. I caught them and handed them to the owner of the shop.

I spent three years with Sauvagemaking pastry creams, puff pastry, clairslearning the most basic of basics and repeating each operation ten thousand times until I suspect I could have performed most of them in the dark.

After Monsieur Sauvage, I was ready for the next step up the chefs ladder, as I had passed my CAP exam (Certificat dAptitude Professionnelle). I could now call myself a pastry chef at the little shop that hired me in Charleville. As any of you who have visited France know, bread is baked in one kind of shopa boulangerie and pastry is made in another, a ptisserie . But there wasnt really enough business in Charleville to be one or the other, so we were both. The work was hard, but my salary went up 700 percent, plus I had a free bed to sleep in over the shop.

Things seemed okay until, four or five months after I went to work in this shop, which out of charity shall remain nameless, I plopped into bed, bone tired after an eighteen-hour day. I was just drifting off to sleep when I felt something big and warm and fuzzy moving around my legs. Terrified, I leaped out of bed, pulled back the covers, and uncovered Monsieur le Rat, who must have been as scared as I was, because he shot across the floor, scampered up the drainpipe, and disappeared.