Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Elin Hilderbrand

Quote by Elin Hilderbrand

“Joe was making the mustard in a twelve-quart stockpot. Adrienne watched him for a minute, in awe of the sheer volume of ingredients: a pound of dry mustard, five cups of vinegar, eight cups of sugar, a whole pound of butter, and a dozen eggs. Joe added sixteen grinds of white pepper from a pepper mill that was longer than his arm.”

Quote by Elin Hilderbrand

Book:The Blue Bistro
Create image

Work

The Blue Bistro

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Elin Hilderbrand
Elin Hilderbrand

Elin Hilderbrand is an American author known for her heartwarming family novels. Her works are typically set in Massachusetts and tell stories about love, family, and friendship. more

You May Also Like

“Every once in a while at a restaurant, the dish you order looks so good, you don't even know where to begin tackling it. Such are HOME/MADE's scrambles. There are four simple options- my favorite is the smoked salmon, goat cheese, and dill- along with the occasional special or seasonal flavor, and they're served with soft, savory home fries and slabs of grilled walnut bread. Let's break it down: The scramble: Monica, who doesn't even like eggs, created these sublime scrambles with a specific and studied technique. "We whisk the hell out of them," she says, ticking off her methodology on her fingers. "We use cream, not milk. And we keep turning them and turning them until they're fluffy and in one piece, not broken into bits of egg." The toast: While the rave-worthiness of toast usually boils down to the quality of the bread, HOME/MADE takes it a step further. "The flame char is my happiness," the chef explains of her preference for grilling bread instead of toasting it, as 99 percent of restaurants do. That it's walnut bread from Balthazar, one of the city's best French bakeries, doesn't hurt. The home fries, or roasted potatoes as Monica insists on calling them, abiding by chefs' definitions of home fries (small fried chunks of potatoes) versus hash browns (shredded potatoes fried greasy on the griddle) versus roasted potatoes (roasted in the oven instead of fried on the stove top): "My potatoes I've been making for a hundred years," she says with a smile (really, it's been about twenty). The recipe came when she was roasting potatoes early on in her career and thought they were too bland. She didn't want to just keep adding salt so instead she reached for the mustard, which her mom always used on fries. "It just was everything," she says of the tangy, vinegary flavor the French condiment lent to her spuds. Along with the new potatoes, mustard, and herbs de Provence, she uses whole jacket garlic cloves in the roasting pan. It's a simple recipe that's also "a Zen exercise," as the potatoes have to be continuously turned every fifteen minutes to get them hard and crispy on the outside and soft and billowy on the inside.”

BreakfastPotatoesBrooklynSeasoningsFriesMustardScrambled EggsToast
Book:Brooklyn in Love: A Delicious Memoir of Food, Family, and Finding Yourself
Create image

“We confit the leg and serve that with roasted fig and butternut chips, whatever, that's a different prep. But the breast we sear off, right, and the potatoes we slice thick and roast with a little thyme. Crisp up the duck skin, let the fat render, and a minute or two before you take it off the flame to rest, you brush the meat side with some mustard thinned with a little olive oil. You let the breast rest on the potatoes, mustard side down, for maybe two minutes before serving. The juices mingle with the mustard and the thyme and the olive oil on the potatoes, and boom- dish has a sauce by the time you serve it. It's a self-saucing dish.”

DuckMustardSaucesThymeDish
Book:Bread and Butter
Create image