Replies

Another great movie: “Under the Tuscan Sun” (2003) with Diane Lane. Relationships rather than food takes center stage. Food is more down stage :-)

“Tortilla Soup” has a Mexican flavor. This movie cast Raquel Welsh and Héctor Elizondo.

“Dinner Rush” (2000)cast Danny Aiello and Sandra Bernhard
The food perspective from a restaurant and chefs. A bit of gangster and comedy. Enjoyed and wouldn’t mind watching once again.

Babette’s Feast actually made it to dinner theater. The cast cooked the meal and then served. At the time, an article was written and shown online, then removed. Fortunately, via the Wayback Machine, was able to save it:
***************************************
“Babette’s Feast” A taste of Theater Oobleck’s
unique culinary tour de force

By LEAH A. ZELDESFood Editor of
In The Loop

Isak Dinesen did not provide the recipes for
the dishes named in ``Babette’s Feast,’’ her poignant tale of a French chef
forced to flee Paris to Norway in the late 19th century. The members of Theater
Oobleck, whose sold-out dinner-theater adaptation of the story is currently
playing at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, were therefore
forced to create their own.

The cast of the play prepares all of the
food, which they serve to the audience in the course of the
performance.

``I was very passionate in terms of the food
being classic French food,’’ says Teria Gartelos, who plays Babette, and was the
primary researcher of the menu, which includes the troupe’s own versions of
blinis Demidof, cailles en sarcophages and turtle soup.

There is no classic French recipe called
blinis Demidof. Blinis are pancakes. Prince Anatole Demidof was the husband of
Napoleon’s niece Princess Mathilde. The dishes named for him are made with
chicken.

However, the fuss made over the dish in
Dinesen’s story, Gartelos says, ``means there’s got to be something spectacular
— I figured if it’s something special and it’s got a Russian name, it must be
caviar.’’

Real fish eggs were too costly for this
production, where tickets were $17 or pay what you can. A cast member recalled a
meal in a Russian restaurant. ``He said he’d eaten a mock caviar made with
beets. That’s all I need to hear,’’ says Gartelos, who is partial to beets, and
developed a topping of gingered carrots and beets for the yeast-risen
pancakes.

Cailles en sarcophages was the most difficult
dish to develop, despite its straightforward name: ``quails in coffins.’’ The
company considered that quail was too expensive and troublesome for their
purposes.

``I researched quails and everything I could
about quails and puff pastry,’’ Gartelos says. ``(Someone) had an idea about
chicken and mushrooms. I found out that in classic French cooking quails are
almost always served with truffles.’’ So they went with chicken and
mushrooms.

``That recipe was like childbirth, pulling
that out. We tried poaching the chicken, baking the chicken — `how do we do
this?’’’ They experimented with different fillings, different sauces.

Meredith Neuman, another cast member, learned
to make puff pastry from scratch. ``I think sometimes it’s good to go into
things without knowing what you’re getting into,’’ she says. ``I didn’t know I
was supposed to be afraid of puff pastry.

``I basically have all day to do it. The
first thing I do is to make all three batches. The idea for the folding of it I
saw in a book on Russian pastry. I just played around with it.’’

A layer of phyllo dough wraps the filling
before it goes into the pastry coffin. ``It keeps the puff pastry from getting
soggy,’’ Neuman says. ``I refer to the phyllo as a shroud.’’

The pastry is shaped like a coffin, and the
plate garnished with a black-rice tombstone and vegetables like a cemetery
bouquet. ``The whole idea is that the plate should look funereal,’’ says
Gartelos. ``We wanted it to look like a crypt.’’

Cailles en
sarcophages

``Quails’’ in
coffins

Theater Oobleck’s version of Isak Dinesen’s
ironically named dish is chicken in homemade puff pastry. The group adapted the
pastry from Nick Malgieri’s ``How to Bake.’’ Nonpurists or short-of-time cooks
may prefer to substitute frozen puff-pastry sheets. The recipe should be started
one day ahead. (Recipe by Meredith Neuman, Teria Gartelos and Lisa Pawlik- with
help from David Isaacson, Kate O’Reilly, Danny Thompson and Max
Greenberg.)

Puff pastry:

15 ounces (3 3/4 sticks) unsalted
butter, chilled and cut in 1/2-inch cubes

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

3/4 cups ice water

Filling:

3 small chickens, cut up

Herbes de Provence

1 3/4 cups dry white wine

1/2 cup orange juice

7 teaspoons minced garlic

Truffle oil

1 1/2 onions, peeled

4 or 5 carrots, peeled and cut
lengthwise

2 ribs celery, cut
lengthwise

1 bay leaf

1 small bunch parsley

1/2 teaspoon whole
peppercorns

Salt to taste

2 pounds white button
mushrooms

1/2 cup butter

3 shallots, minced

1/4 cup sherry

1/4 cup flour

To form the sarcophages:

3 egg whites, lightly
beaten

1/2 package phyllo dough, thawed if
frozen

Prepare the pastry: In a large bowl, cut 6
tablespoons (3/4 stick) of the butter into the flour with a pastry blender until
the butter is more or less incorporated. Now coarsely cut the remaining butter
into the flour mixture, leaving many visible pieces of butter (about 1/4 inch in
diameter should be fine).

Dissolve the salt into the ice water. Slowly
drizzle the salted water into the flour mixture while tossing gently with a
fork. When all the water has been evenly distributed, there will remain many dry
crumbs. Don’t worry.

Empty the dough out onto a large piece of
plastic wrap. By folding up the four sides of the wrap and pressing, form a
rectangle of dough. Roll the dough out just a bit and fold the sides over the
middle, forming a piece one third the former size. Repeat, this time folding the
top and bottom to the middle. The butter and flour will not yet be working in
harmony, so you will probably have to use the plastic wrap to aid you in the
first few folds.

Puff pastry requires a somewhat Calvinist
submission of the will and a confidence that layers will appear. Roll the dough
out again and repeat the folding, lightly dusting with flour between every
layer. Discard the plastic wrap as soon as the dough holds together on its
own.

The dough will become progressively softer as
you work on it, with an almost springy texture. After 6 or 10 repetitions of the
folding and rolling, cut the dough into 18 equal pieces. Wrap each well in
plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.

Make the filling: Place the chicken legs and
thighs in one baking dish, the chicken breasts in another. Rub herbes de
Provence under the skin of these chicken parts. Combine 1 1/2 cups of the wine
with the orange juice, 4 teaspoons of the garlic and a liberal sprinkling of
truffle oil. Chop the onion half and add it. Pour over the chicken parts, cover
and refrigerate overnight.

Place the chicken wings, giblets (reserve the
liver for another use) and remaining parts of the chicken in a large stockpot,
cover with cold water and bring to a boil. Skim off the foam that rises to top.
When the liquid is relatively clear, add the carrots, celery, whole onion, bay
leaf, parsley, peppercorns and salt. Reduce the heat, cover and let simmer at
least 2 hours to make a hearty stock. Strain, discard the solids, and
refrigerate the stock.

The next day, preheat the oven to 350
degrees. Skim any fat off the stock and pour enough over the marinated chicken
to cover. Bake the chicken until it’s tender and the juices run clear, about 25
minutes for the breasts, a little longer for the legs and thighs.

Reserve the juices from one of the baking
dishes, skimming the fat off the top. Skin, bone and chill the
chicken.

In a large skillet, saute the mushrooms over
medium-high heat in 1/4 cup of the butter and the remaining wine with the
shallots and remaining garlic. Spoon out and reserve the mushrooms. Add to the
mushroom juices in the pan the chicken juices and sherry. Cook until reduced by
half.

In a medium saucepan, melt 1/4 cup butter
over low heat and sprinkle in the flour. Cook and stir until light brown. Add
the reduced juices and cook until very thick. (This should yield about 1 1/2
cups.) Combine the sauce with the chicken and mushrooms.

Assemble and bake: Cut the stack of phyllo
sheets in half and lay between two damp, clean towels. Lightly dust with flour
and roll each of the 18 pieces of dough to a diameter of 6 to 8 inches. Set
aside.Place about 1/2 cup of the chicken mixture into a half sheet of phyllo and
wrap like an egg roll into a neat, tight package. Place the phyllo-wrapped
chicken on the rolled dough, and brush the egg white around it.

Fold the bottom of the dough up onto the
phyllo to form the ``foot’’ of the coffin. Then fold up the sides and top of the
dough, pinching it together to make a cross shape on the top. Repeat for each
sarcophage. Cover and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Brush the
pastry with egg white and bake for 15 minutes, or till golden brown. 18
servings

Blinis Demidof a
l’Oobleck

Yeasted pancakes with gingered
carrots and beets

Theater Oobleck adapted the blini recipe from
Sheila Lukins’ ``All Around the World Cookbook.’’ The topping is their
own.

1 teaspoons active dry yeast

2 3/4 cups all-purpose
flour

3 1/4 cups warm milk

4 eggs, separated

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4-inch chunk fresh gingerroot,
grated

4 medium beets, tops
removed

6 to 7 teaspoons prepared
horseradish

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

2 tablespoons orange juice

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 cup grated carrots

Clarified butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Sour cream

In a large bowl, stir together the yeast, 1/2
cup of the flour and 2 cups of the milk. Cover and set aside in a warm place for
30 minutes. Let the remaining milk cool to lukewarm.

Beat the egg yolks and stir into the yeast
mixture with the remaining milk and flour and the 1/4 teaspoon salt.

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold
into the batter. Cover and let rest in a warm place to rise for 1
hour.

Cook the beets till tender in a large pot of
boiling, salted water. Peel, then grate or chop the beets and combine them with
the horseradish, vinegar, orange juice and sugar. Set aside the
refrigerator.

Meanwhile, in a large skillet over low heat,
saute the ginger and carrots in clarified butter till just warmed through.
Season with salt and pepper. Let cool.

Fold 3/4 cup of the cooled carrot mixture
into the blini batter.

Heat a nonstick skillet, brush lightly with
clarified butter and cook a few blini at a time. Make them 3 to 4 inches in
diameter. Cook for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes, then flip and cook the other side about 1
minute, until puffed and golden.

Serve warm, topped with sour cream and the
carrot-beet mixture. Makes about 40 blini, 10 to 15 servings.

Soupe a la tortue a la
Louisianne

Turtle soup

Teria Gartelos’ recipe is modeled after that
served at restaurants such as Brennan’s in New Orleans.

Stock:

3 pounds turtle meat (available from
specialty butchers such as Wild Game Inc.)

3 1/2 quarts water

2 bay leaves

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons salt

2 ribs celery

4 cloves garlic

1 onion

Coriander seed, peppercorns and dried
herbs (basil, marjoram, rosemary and thyme) to taste

Soup:

1 1/2 cups butter

2 cups chopped leeks, white part
only

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 cup tomato puree

1 cup sherry

1/2 cup worcestershire
sauce

3 eggs, hard boiled,
chopped

1/2 cup chopped parsley

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Prepare the stock: In a large stockpot, cover
the turtle with the water and bring to a boil. Skim the foam that rises to the
top until the liquid runs almost clear. Add the remaining stock ingredients,
reduce the heat, cover and simmer till you have a nice, hearty stock, at least 2
hours.

Strain and refrigerate the liquid. Remove the
turtle meat from the bones; cube and chill the meat. Discard the remaining
solids.

Make the soup: In a large pot, melt the
butter over low heat and add the leeks; cook slowly until the leeks are
transparent. Whisk in the flour until thick. Add the tomato and cook 5
minutes.

Skim any fat off the top of the turtle stock
and add 10 cups of it to the leek mixture, along with the sherry and
worcestershire. Cook 15 minutes. Add the turtle meat and the eggs and simmer 12
more minutes. Stir in the parsley and lemon juice and serve. 15
servings.

Theater Oobleck also makes a vegetarian
version without any cooking alcohol: substitute 2 pounds chopped button
mushrooms and 1 pound chopped portobella mushrooms for the turtle. Add a chopped
apple and pear to the stock, and substitute 1/2 cup cider vinegar for the
sherry.
******************************************
Some recommended on various “Best of” lists.
Bridesmaids (2011)
Chocolat (2000)
Diner (1982)
Dinner Rush (2000)
Eating Raul (1982)
Fatso (1980)
Frankie and Johnny (1991)
French Kiss (1995)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
In Her Shoes (2005)
Julie and Julia (2009)
Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
Moonstruck (1987)
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)
A Private Function (1984)
Sabrina (1954)(*my own addition*)
Soul Food (1997)
Simply Irresistible (1999)
The Help (2011)
Tortilla Soup (2001)
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Woman on Top (2000)

Bon Apetite.