Diced onions going gold and translucent in butter
I learned to cook in England, but the methods I learned were French.
I was a vegetarian at the time. I had several vegetarian cookbooks by Martha Rose Schulman (whom I consider greatly underappreciated.) Though I didn't know it at the time, her early cooking was greatly inspired by Beck, Bertholle, and Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
So I made lots of roux-thickened soups, vivid with greens and white beans I'd soaked and cooked the night before. Tomato and potato soup. Open-faced vegetable tarts with crumbly wholemeal pastry. You get the idea.
My vegetables were always browned in butter, because butter was cheap and olive oil expensive: this was England, subsidizing their dairy farmers, creator of the "surplus butter mountain" of the 1980s.
So diced onions going gold and translucent in butter - the smell takes me back to early adulthood, and English kitchens.
I only just realized this morning that that's a French thing, that while I learned to cook in English kitchens, what techniques I know are French. Funny old world.
I was a vegetarian at the time. I had several vegetarian cookbooks by Martha Rose Schulman (whom I consider greatly underappreciated.) Though I didn't know it at the time, her early cooking was greatly inspired by Beck, Bertholle, and Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
So I made lots of roux-thickened soups, vivid with greens and white beans I'd soaked and cooked the night before. Tomato and potato soup. Open-faced vegetable tarts with crumbly wholemeal pastry. You get the idea.
My vegetables were always browned in butter, because butter was cheap and olive oil expensive: this was England, subsidizing their dairy farmers, creator of the "surplus butter mountain" of the 1980s.
So diced onions going gold and translucent in butter - the smell takes me back to early adulthood, and English kitchens.
I only just realized this morning that that's a French thing, that while I learned to cook in English kitchens, what techniques I know are French. Funny old world.