Almost every year towards the end of summer I find myself piling plums into jars, covering them with eau de vie (clear brandy), adding some sugar and sealing them up to be ready in time for the holidays. The jars need to rest for at least two months. When you open them, the flavor of the fruit has infused the alcohol, creating a heady, heavenly concoction that may be served after dinner in pretty little glasses, as you’d serve a digestif, for example Cognac.
Prunes à l’eau de vie / Plums in brandy
The recipe is laughably simple and can be made with any type of plums, although the smaller varieties work best. And if eau de vie is hard to find where you live, a flavorless vodka may be substituted with excellent results. You rinse the plums, prick them with a toothpick, place them in jars with hermetic seals (no need to sterilize), add the alcohol plus a few spoonfuls of sugar, and that’s it. After sealing the jars, you shake them to help the sugar dissolve, repeating this a few times a day for a day or two. Then you put them away in a cool, dark place, like a cupboard, to let them mature.
This year I used two types of plums — small, sweet yellow mirabelle plums, which are grown across France, particularly in Alsace-Lorraine in the northeast, and small blue plums, known here as quetsches, which are a bit more tart. In the past I have also used greengage plums (Reine-Claude), but they tend to be larger, which is a consideration as you want to be able to fit a plum or two into each little glass.
Preserving fruit in alcohol has a long tradition in France. The alcohol of choice is eau de vie, which is distilled from fruit. I generally use a variety sold as ‘Alcool pour Fruits’ that is 35% alsohol by volume, which is the minimum you need for this recipe. But I’ve also used vodka or regular brandy on occasion, or you could try matching the alcohol to the fruit, for example preserving plums using slivovitz, the clear plum brandy from eastern Europe.
My favorite homemade varieties are with plums and, in June, with cherries, both of which are also available in shops. Another type, which is less commonly seen now than when I first arrived in France five decades ago, is the amusingly named confiture de vieux-garçons (jam for old bachelors), in which the fruits are piled into a very large jar and doused in alcohol as they come into season. So you could have, for example, successive layers of cherries, apricots, peaches, plums and grapes. (I have never done this.)
France also specializes in fruit-flavored eau de vie, but this is impossible to make at home unless you have a license and a still. Popular varieties include Framboise (raspberry) and Mirabelle, as well as Poire Williams (pear), which is sometimes sold with a whole pear in the bottle. This absolutely mystified me when I first got here. How do they fit the full-grown pear into the thin-necked bottle? Well, it turns out they don’t. What they do is to insert a blossoming pear branch into an empty bottle and let the pear grow to maturity inside it. Once the pear is ready, they cut the branch and add the alcohol.
When I still had my farmhouse in Burgundy, I had many hilarious evenings with friends when dinner ended with cherries or plums à l’eau de vie. It was all the more fun because our garden had fruit trees, so I was able to pick the cherries and plums myself before having my way with them in the kitchen. You can use jars of any size for this recipe — a couple of large ones to keep at home, and smaller ones to give away. They make great Christmas presents.
Happy cooking.
Sometimes a new recipe just pops into my head. This happened the other day with this zucchini-red onion tart. Often it’s a visual thing. I open the fridge, spot an ingredient or two and think, Oh! That could be good. As you may know, it’s been incredibly hot in Paris this summer — too hot to spend much time in the kitchen. So I had a store-bought pie shell in the fridge, plus eggs, cream, milk and cheese, and fresh thyme growing outside my veranda.
When I go into the kitchen at lunchtime, I don’t always know what I’m going to make. The other day it turned out to be egg salad with radish and onion, a dish I picked up long ago while posted in the former USSR. I had the ingredients on hand (including fresh herbs), it was broiling hot in Paris and I didn’t want to spend a long time cooking. As I’d boiled a couple of eggs the day before, the salad was ready in less than 10 minutes.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that this is my first post in a while. The reason is that I’ve been busy on other fronts, notably helping to produce a special 50th anniversary issue of 
When spring comes to Paris, I tend to feel like spending less time in the kitchen – which is a good reason to make roast chicken thighs with thyme. It’s a supremely French dish and supremely easy. The chicken is coated with olive oil and sprinkled with thyme leaves. While it’s roasting, you can make the side dishes of your choice – or go read a book or look out the window at the budding leaves. Within a short while, your dinner will be ready.
In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying the annual rites of spring, repotting the strawberries on my balcony and going down to the quais along the Seine to buy a new cherry tomato plant. There are pansies, nasturtiums and campanula in bloom along the veranda rail and narcissus inside, and a I set a pot of muscari (grape hyacinth) in the bathroom. It’s all very lovely.
I first tasted this earthy wild mushroom spread at the home of my friend Vera, who lives across the street from me in Paris but is originally from Czech Republic. She served it on toast during cocktail hour and it knocked me out of my socks. The mushrooms – porcini, or cèpes in French – had been gathered by her nephew in a Czech forest and dried before being turned over to Vera. She brought them home, worked her magic and a recipe was born.
I learned to make this wild mushroom spread about a year ago when Vera, upon returning from a visit to Czech Republic, kindly gave me a bag of dried porcini gathered by her nephew (at right, with a couple of prize specimens). When I asked her what to do with them, she gave me the recipe, which I immediately tried. Judging by the response, it was a success.
The mushrooms Vera brings back hail from a forest outside the hamlet of Resek in the Krkonoše Mountains on the border between Czech Republic and Poland. The nephew’s family has a shed with drying racks ready to receive the mushrooms, which are first sliced (as shown at left). There’s a lot of competition for these mushrooms, which only sprout when the weather is right. Drying allows the family to enjoy them year round.
Fend off the last (hopefully) of this winter’s chill with a bowl of elegant, creamy vegetable soup, which is not just comforting and supremely French but remarkably easy to make. All you need is a leek, a potato, a carrot, dried tarragon and some heavy cream, as well as salt and freshly ground black pepper (de rigueur). Add some fresh herbs for garnish — chervil, as shown in the photo, or dill, cilantro, whatever — et voilà. Soup’s on.
You can vary the flavor and look of the soup through your choice of fresh herbs for garnish. I love feathery chervil (cerfeuil), and happened to have some on hand, so that’s what I used (at right). But chervil is far harder to find than dill, which would otherwise be my top choice, or cilantro, basil or tarragon. Chives are another possibility. Or use your imagination.
Clams cooked in white wine with garlic, shallots, olive oil and butter — and sprinkled with parsley and black pepper — make an elegant but simple dish that’s served in winter and spring in France. This is because clams are harvested over here from autumn to late spring. Elsewhere, it’s a different story, as you may know if you’ve ever been on a summer clambake. In New England, people may go clamming all year round.
In France, clams come in many varieties, and even the nomenclature is confusing. Palourdes, for example, is a vernacular word that covers several clam types. Praires, which I used in this recipe, are also known as palourdes sauvages (wild clams). Shown at right, they tend to be about 1-1/2 inch (4 cm) wide. Then there are coques, aka cockles, which are like mini-clams and are often used over here for pasta alle vongole. And finally there are what the French also call clams — a bigger, far less delicate variety.
This is the omelet ‘to die for’ made famous when Emily’s boyfriend Gabriel cooked one up for her in the first season of Emily in Paris. A French classic, it uses a mixture of fresh herbs — parsley, chives, tarragon and chervil — that are collectively known as fines herbes. Unlike most omelets, where the filling ingredients are placed on top of the omelet as it sets, this recipe incorporates the herbs directly into the eggs.
I find that the fresh tarragon (estragon) adds a particularly delightful tang. Tarragon may be grown on your windowsill or balcony, assuring a constant supply (except in winter — the snow in Paris this week had its way with my tarragon, but it will resprout in the spring). Estragon, by the way, was the name chosen by Samuel Beckett for one of the two main characters in Waiting for Godot. Who know why? Estragon, nicknamed Gogo, and his friend Didi spend their time on stage waiting for … well … God.
Parsley needs no explanation, other than to say that the French prefer the flat-leaf variety, which I encountered only after moving here. In the States, we only used curly parsley.
As for the chives, the most delicate member of the onion family, they will give zest to your omelet. But not to overdo it, with any of these herbs.
P.S. Here’s a reminder for readers of this site. I’ve written a recipe booklet to go with my recently published novel, 
Get your holidays off to a delectable start this year with bouchées à la reine — literally, mouthfuls for the queen. This supremely French savory starter consists of pastry shells with an elegant filling, for example sea scallops or mushrooms in a creamy sauce. The shells are made using puff pastry, while the sauce is a Béchamel with a dash of white wine. Preparation is a bit of a production, but it’s fun. Then sit back and prepare for applause.
But culinary fashions evolve and these days bouchées are seen less often, so I decided to try my hand at home. Making the shells is like playing with Play-Doh. You cut out large rounds of pastry, rings of the same size and smaller rounds for the caps. You top the large rounds with the rings and set the small rounds beside them, coat everything with an egg wash and pop them into the oven. You then make the filling and assemble the pastries.
I’ve never found bouchées a la reine to be of a particularly aphrodisiac nature, but who knows? Maybe with enough Champagne… Today’s recipe includes the sea scallop and the mushroom versions. You can make one or the other, or both.
Instead of sending a selfie, Martha provided this view of, as she put it, ‘the far-flung reaches of The Rites of Man‘, with the Shanghai skyline in the background. I’m pretty excited about that! She had pre-ordered the book, so it arrived on publication day, which was Wednesday. She wrote to me on Thursday: ‘Hello hello from Shanghai — just to say your book arrived on my Kindle yesterday as promised and have inhaled it — thank you for a marvelous read.’ I’m even more excited about that!
