Don't try this at home

"Don't try this at home" is a book that was sent to me for Xmas by a regular reader of this blog who often posts comments here under the mysterious name of "Mami". I recommend this book to anybody who would love to read some entertaining stories about how small or big kitchen disasters strike famous ("Anglo"-) chefs like Jamie Oliver, Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, etc... I believe Irene would call it "hysterical".

I called the editor on Friday to make sure in the next edition they include a story from our classmate, famous Anglo-chef to-be, Viju, on how he last week prepared the sauce for a dish of our regional "Lyonnais" menu.

The sauce, to be served later for a starter, called quenelles de brochet aux écrevisses (on the picture), and which by the way tasted très delicieux in the end, is prepared similar to a sauce Américaine, which means as part of the procedure Cognac is added to a mix of sautéd crushed crayfish (écrevisses) in the shell, carotts, onions and shallots in a hot pan with the objective to create a flame, "flamber" in French. Before Viju flamed the sauce, I heard somebody shout "Watch out !", so I had the reflex to turn around, my camera in hand and got him seconds after puring a huge amount of Cognac into the pan and having the flame jump right from the burner into the pan. You can notice Irene escaping into a corner, apparently anticipating what would happen. While we were frozen, watching half amazed, half scared to death, Viju appeared to remain cool and in control, not seeming a tiny bit impressed, and once the flame had extinguished, just said "flambé ! ". Which made us burst out laughing, in big relief, to see him making jokes and not being flambé himself.                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Unless you have the latest professional, at least 5 m high ventilation equipment in your kitchen, while it might indeed impress your guests, still ... I don't recommend to try this at home ! Or use just very little Cognac in the pan and more for the digestif...

I found an interesting anecdote on Wikipedia about the "invention" of this technique :

"Although the practice of igniting food for show can be traced to the Moors in the 14th century, modern flambéing was discovered in Monte Carlo in 1895, when Henri Carpentier, a waiter, accidentally set fire to a pan of crêpes he was preparing for the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom. He discovered that burning the sauce affected its flavor in a way that he could not have anticipated."

And then there is the last sentence of the Wikipedia article : "For safety reasons, it is recommended that alcohol never be added to a pan on a burner". That's obviously for amateur home cooks only...