Hello, everyone.

Cheryl walked past a table Thursday night and heard someone remark:
"I'm in a French restaurant, and I'm seeing wasabi and yuzu and tamarind on the menu."
She sighed, and refrained from butting in and saying: "Do you think the great chefs of France limit themselves to the ingredients that are indigenous to 19th century France."

Instead, she walked into the kitchen and groused aloud to her husband about American preconceptions about what French food is or should be.

"We've always used wasabi," Chef Paul commiserated. "Tamarind is not something we use a lot of, but it's something I've always liked. If you go to a restaurant in France, especially one that's renowned for being good, they frequently use ingredients from other parts of the world. The technique is still basically French. Wait till you see the pheasant."

When this argument comes up - when an American complains that something we are doing is not French enough - Cheryl always thinks of the orangeries throughout Paris and the French countryside. She was surprised the first time she visited France at how thoroughly oranges and lemons and grapefruits are a part of French culture - every menu in every restaurant featured citrus, even though the fruits are not native to the climate and have to be imported or grown in special greenhouses, some of which date back to the 17th century.

How could this be other than through the enthusiastic acceptance by the French of the best the world has to offer?
Fortunes were made in the spice trade in Asia, Africa and the Americas and European food became laced with nutmeg, mace, ginger, black pepper and cinnamon. Today, noone accuses the French of impurity of culture for putting cinnamon in their créme brûlée or pepper in their stock or chocolate in their mousse. For centuries, French colonization has brought French cooking techniques to vastly different cultures and brought new cuisines and produce back to France. Traces of Polynesia, Vietnam, Laos, West Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Cameroon, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, India, Cambodia, China, Louisiana, Canada, the Caribbean, the West Indies and South America appear in modern French cooking, with even older references to Jerusalem and Byzantium lingering in the "classic"
French dishes.

At Fleur de Lys, chef de cuisine and owner Hubert Keller replaces the usual chervil in a standard French lentil salad with minced fresh cilantro, uses a bit of soy sauce instead of salt and fresh fava beans for contrast and fennel instead of onion.

Eric Ripert, executive chef of Le Bernadin in New York City, is a native of Andorra, the tiny country between France and Spain. He learned his craft at La Tour d'Argent and Robuchon in Paris. He told Carole Kotkin of TravelLady Magazine: "I am a French chef, but I am also a New Yorker and I am greatly influenced by the different cultures that surround me - South American, Chinese, Italian, and American. Rather than bending ingredients to fit one of the world's most rigidly codified cuisines, the modern French-American restaurant creates or adapts dishes in order to utilize an ever-growing availability of high-quality produce."

"Before Nouvelle Cuisine, if I wanted to make a Hollandaise sauce with coriander, the chef would lose his mind," Ripert said. "Today we have this freedom." Modern French cuisine has become light, creative and sophisticated, with roots in both classical and robustly regional French cooking. "While 10 years ago most fish sauces were based on cream or butter, today they're lighter, built on wine, olive oil or a vinaigrette," Ripert says. "But we still offer some with cream. You need a variety so everyone is happy."

One the greatest principles of the French culinary legend Escoffier is "faites simple" (keep it simple). The greatest concoctions are often the simplest, in which none of the few ingredients overpower the others but combine into one dish sublimely elegant in its simplicity.

So French cuisine, rather than being a static monument imported to the United States and frozen in time, is a living, growing organism.
It respects technique and a simplicity and balance in flavors, but is not shackled by tradition, anymore than American cuisine is.

So back to that tantalizing hint about Paul's pheasant. He's come up with a new recipe in which he's searing the birds, then poaching them with keffir lime and lemongrass-infused pheasant stock. The liquid produced during the slow cooking process becomes part of the delicate sauce, enhanced with port-reduced with keffir lime leaves.

If one incredible bird is not enough, he's also making partridges with mushrooms (including morels, chanterelles and maitakes), green grapes and Amontillado sherry.

As we ponder these multi-national recipes, we are experiencing the calm before the storm to a rather ridiculous degree. We are girded and ready for summer, and yet, summer is not quite ready for Saratoga.

Paul and Cheryl have had a little free time to sit around and entertain each other and fret about how to keep the summer staff busy until the summer crowds actually arrive. The other day it was hot, so Cheryl handed the chef a pair of scissors and asked if he would take her to the driveway and rid her of six to eight inches of hair.
Cheryl didn't really care how it came out, but apparently the chef is pretty handy with sharp implements. His ministrations have apparently made a marked improvement in Cheryl's appearance and many women who know he did it are now reconsidering Paul's potential.

Cheryl slipped away for a couple of hours Wednesday and made a studio recording of classic jazz cover tunes with jazz pianist Cole Broderick. (Actually, we laid down 13 tracks in about 90 minutes, most of them in a single take.) We're hoping to have a CD available for customers before haute saison (as soon as we clear the publishing rights on all the songs and devise an album cover.

Most of these stolen minutes of leisure and whimsy are due to the continuing loyalty of our staff, some of whom have been with us for nigh onto a dozen years, as well as the return of some of the ghosts of Chez Sophie past, employees who worked with us season after season, left for other ventures, and this spring, converged upon us en masse to recapture some of the Chez Sophie magic.

Loyal Chez Sophie fans will recognize Dominique Bourgeault, the brusque, rotund Frenchman who left us when we moved to the new location because the dining room has a couple of stairs between the kitchen and the lower dining room. He had his knees operated on and is back, moving exceptionally well for someone sporting surgical scars. Scott Maxwell, the tall, handsome young man who worked with us at the diner and managed the night staff when we opened in Saratoga has returned from an extended trip to Australia. Lisa Schenkelberg, whose blue eyes are nearly bigger than her pixie face, has returned for a summer vacation after several years in San Francisco, where she has been restoring art. Carol McCaffrey, the tiny and eminently efficient Irish woman, is back for the summer, foregoing the steady company of the Rhode Island-based husband she left Chez Sophie for so she can spend a few months with her children and their children. Todd Carangelo, the slim, attentive teacher has come back to us. Katherine Helgerson, the gorgeous, smart, understated blond, is back from last summer. And there are others who will probably be offended that we didn't mention them.

For those of you who have been frequenting us during the last year, we have retained Jay Christensen, the loyal Danish skiier who has worked with us on and off since we opened in the diner in 1995; Erica Miller, the sprightly blond who rose from ostensible baby server to night captain in the space of less than a year due to determined and competent hard work and a facility for understanding technical stuff that surpasses most of us; Mitch Rowen, our head bartender, who does all the liquor ordering and scheduling and invented our new cocktail menu; Sarah Zukowski, the lithe, tan landscaper with the dark braid and Heidi Graham, the solid morning server who makes sure your eggs arrive quickly, accompanied with a smile. We also have a small crop of fresh young faces, all of them chosen carefully from a huge pool of applicants. The long and the short of it is, we have a huge staff preparing for summer, and they don't need much training, so we'd love it if you all came to visit us in the next few weeks. We know the locals tend to stay away once the track madness begins, but that won't be for weeks and we need to keep these talented people busy.

Normally our Pink Plate Special goes on summer vacation at the beginning of July, but we've decided to extend it for a couple of weeks because we have some wonderful ideas for Pink Plates that we want to share before Bastille Day. So the Pink Plate we announce next Friday will be the last one of the season.

The penultimate selection this coming week is another cross-cultural hoot. Paul is calling it "sandwich clin d'oeuil Egyptien au porc."
His father, Joseph, who inspired the dish, would call it an "Egyptian eye-wink sandwich." (Joseph, by the way, can barely boil water, but always manages to feed himself something tasty when there are no chefs around to correct him.)

"This is something my father makes where he takes a piece of bread and cuts an eye-shaped whole through the middle of it and winks through it. Then he fries it in butter and drops an egg through it."

Paul will replace the bread with a slab of pork, dredged in breadcrumbs, cut a whole in the center and fry an egg in it. The sauce will be made with Dijon mustard and it will be served with truffled home fries and asparagus. (Souschef Mark Graham just called this dish a "black-eyed Susan.")

The Pink Plate is a weekly prix fixe special we offer on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. For $30 per person, you get your choice of soup or salad, the featured entree, two selections from our cheese board or one of a couple of featured desserts and coffee, tea or espresso.

We should have expounded a little more in last week's newsletter on the farm-raised fish versus wild fish issue. Our glancing reference to farm-raised sturgeon last week prompted several emails warning us against using farm-raised fish. Of course, Chef Paul is well aware that not all farm-raised fish are worth eating. He refuses to buy anything but wild salmon because farm-raised salmon don't taste as good (because they are fed with pellet food), don't look as good (even though they are fed artificial coloring to make them pink) and aren't as good for you. (they are not as high in Omega-3 fatty acids as salmon that have foraged naturally, and often they are treated with antibiotics to compensate for the stress that being farmed in close quarters causes to them.) The open-net pens and cages used by many salmon and tuna farmers in offshore coastal areas or freshwater lakes have been blamed for pollution, because fish and waste can escape into the wild.

Because of these factors, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program tags farm-raised salmon "Avoid" because their ocean pens pollute the water with disease-carrying feces. Shrimp and prawns get the "Proceed with Caution" yellow light if they were netted in U.S.
waters, because American fisherman use devices on their nets that allow endangered sea turtles to escape, but not enough research has been done to determine how many other animals still die. Farmed shrimp or those caught internationally are red-flagged, because shrimp farming destroys mangrove trees where wild fish eat and breed and fishermen from other countries don’t all promise that sea turtles can escape from their shrimp nets. Wild Caspian sturgeon, the traditional source of caviar, stays in the "Avoid" category because it is overfished.

However, U.S. farm-raised sturgeon and the caviar they produce are deemed a "Best Choice" by both the Seafood Watch Program and Environmental Defense. That is because recirculating systems enclose fish in tanks, where water is treated and reused through the system.
Several entrepreneurs are experimenting with more sustainable closed aquaculture systems and other methods that integrate fish-farming with a diverse system of crops and livestock.
Wild Alaskan salmon are also rated a "Best Choice," because the industry that hauls them in is well-regulated, and because the fish reproduce quickly.

If Cheryl ever wondered if anyone reads her emails, she got the answer this week. We dropped a note deep down in the copy about missing a year-old letter from the archives last week and got prompt emails of the missing missive from 12 customers within six hours. In the next week, she counted more than 200 copies of the missing newsletter and is still trying to write thank you notes to everyone.
Amazing. During her 20 years as a newspaper reporter she never had such a strong feeling that people were actually reading her stuff.
Thank you all.

Our Sunday Jazz brunch this week with pianist Cole Broderick will feature andouille-stuffed pork loin chop with whisky-braised applesauce and mashed sweet potatoes ($15); torchio pasta with white clam sauce ($13); Chimay Ale-battered catfish with fried green plaintains ($14); and bananas Foster stuffed pancake with your choice of bacon or sausage ($13). Appetizer specials include steamed Rhode Island Littleneck clams ($12); a salad of Sunset Hill Farm greens tossed in a red wine vinaigrette ($7); crabcake with caper mayonnaise ($14) and soup of the day ($8).

The brunch specials run from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The complete menu,
offered from 7 to 2 p.m., includes a Continental assortment of
muffins, pastries, fruit, yogurt, frittata etcetera for $9;
omelettes ($9 to $11); pancakes du jour ($9); the All in One, which includes 2 eggs any style, homefries, toast and sausage or bacon ($10); waffles with sweet cream butter and local maple syrup ($10); and Irish steel- cut oatmeal ($8).
Jazz pianist Cole Broderick plays from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Live Piano Jazz
Jazz pianist Cole Broderick plays the baby grand Tuesday through Friday night, and during Sunday brunch from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
(barring special events that preclude live music.)
Cost: No cover charge

Tasting menus
Chef's Choice seven-course tasting menu available each night. The
menus are designed based on the best and most creative dishes Chef Paul K. Parker is serving each evening. We will pair wines for you at an additional charge or you can order from our extensive wine list.
Cost: $75 per person for seven courses, plus tax and tip. Everyone at the table must partake in the tasting menu.
If you're feeling less impromptu, you can call ahead to arrange a
special tasting menu with the number of courses and wine pairings
designed to suit your capacity, dietary restrictions and budget.
Tasting menus arranged in advance will be printed on commemorative
vellum scrolls personalized with the name of the host or the reason
for the event.
Cost: $50 to $200, depending on the number of courses and the wines
selected; available for two to 75 guests. Call Cheryl to make
arrangements 518.583.3538

The Pink Plate Special
offered Monday, July 2, Tuesday, July 3, Wednesday, July 4 and Thursday, July 5.

$30 per person
includes your choice of soup or salad, a special entree, selected
desserts or a cheese course and coffee, tea or espresso.

This week's special entree:
"clin d'oeuil Egyptien" au porc
(pork, dredged in breadcrumbs, with an egg fried in the center, with a sauce of Dijon mustard, truffled home fries and asparagus)

Notes on Nico and Léo:
Warm weather has had an enlivening effect on four-year-old Nico, who was already about as lively as any human can be. He can run and play all day long, swim in his kiddie pool, drive the neighbor children to distraction when they get home from school and still have plenty of energy left over to bounce off the walls all night. Cheryl was trying to write the newsletter Thursday while Nico slapped, bounced, jiggled, grunted and shrieked his way around the living room. His little sister was catching a fair percentage of his flying limbs, which meant she was doing some screaming too. Cheryl ordered Nico to get into the inflatable ball house, which she acquired a couple of weeks ago in hopes that she could tuck him into it when he get too crazy so he could blow off some steam. Unfortunately, it seems too small for his room-sized energy, even though it says "recommended for children ages 3 and over." By that guideline, Léo is too young for the toy, even though it seems just about perfect for her. She will not go near it, however, unless Nico is in there. Of course, if Nico gets in there, she gets crushed. Consequently, neither child uses it for much.
Hope, the children's nanny, explained that Nico has discovered how to permanently smash the brightly colored balls. Léo finds great joy in tossing them into the yard, where they hide in the grass and get demolished by the lawn tractor.

The Parker family
at Chez Sophie
518.583.3538