Cooking With the French Chef: Brains, Aspic, and Other Gross Stuff

Welcome back to Cooking With the French Chef, in which I review episodes of Julia Child’s original show, cook out of the new edition of the French Chef Cookbook and share the results with you. Past posts can be found here.

We all like to wax lyrical about Julia Child, but there are some recipes of hers I can’t stand and will not be attempting; namely, those featuring organ meats. I warned you all that we might talk about them at the beginning of this series, and today is the day. I would have left them out, but in the interest of journalistic integrity thought it best to at least peek at them a little, not to mention there’s always something to learn.

Vegetarians and anyone who’s squeamish may want to take evasive action. I won’t be offended, I promise. In fact, you have my sympathies.

So yeah, now that you all have been warned, it’s time to get the ickiness out of the way, at least I hope so, and we’re going to start with the ickiest of all: Brains. Feel free to make zombie noises.

Oh, and this episode, which was originally broadcast on June 15, 1966, also looks at sweetbreads, which I’ve heard are pretty tasty, but I’m not going to break my No Organ Meat streak to find out. Anywhoo…

Brains have definitely fallen out of favor for a lot of people, plus they’re not the healthiest choice. In Julia’s day, however, they were still accepted and commonly featured in cookbooks. I started groaning about two minutes into this episode, because while Julia is laying the brains she’s been soaking on a baking sheet, she describes both them and sweetbreads as having “a lovely, delicate taste.”

I’ll take Julia’s word for it that sweebreads taste good, but not brains. It’s just wrong. So, so wrong. Despite every wrinkle on these things being clearly visible, with some of them even still having the brain stems attached, Julia handles them as casually as if she’s deveining shrimp. The sweetbreads aren’t so bad because they look like chicken thighs once they’re prepped, but they’re still pretty gross.

I don’t remember a single one of the recipes from this episode and I don’t care. This is one of those times when it’s a mercy the show was in black and white, because that way cooking brains can’t get any more disgusting. Gray matter is still gray matter.

Journalistic integrity, journalistic integrity, journalistic integrity…

Tongues, however, are obviously not gray, and that’s what’s next on the docket. This episode was originally broadcast on August 17, 1966. Buckle up, kids…

Things start out pretty nicely here, amazingly enough. Julia tells a story of going shopping at a grocery store and calling a tongue in the butcher’s case, “you ugly old thing,” before taking it home and fixing it for a dinner party, where it was loved and devoured.

She shows us trimmed and untrimmed tongues. She shows us a tongue with a blemish, pronouncing the blemish to be no big deal. She talks about scrubbing the tongue with a vegetable brush and then soaking the tongue in water for two hours before boiling it for another two hours. Braised tongue is perfectly delicious because tongue doesn’t have much of a flavor. Or so Julia says.

It’s all pretty easy to take until she peels the ugly old thing and slices it like a tri-tip. She even uses tongue stock for her braising liquid. Yeah. Tongue stock. Eeeeewwww. My son was more grossed out than I was during this episode. Me, I sort of tolerate tongue the way they serve it at Basque restaurants, but they like to marinate it and slice it really thin so it’s more like deli meat. It’s still tongue, though.

Okeydokey, on to chicken livers (Oh, goody). This episode was first broadcast on April 20, 1963. Enjoy…

Fried liver. Sauteed liver. Liver timbales. Julia runs chicken livers through a blender, then through a sieve. We see livers close up in all their yucky glory. Molded into gourmet shapes suitable for dinner parties.

Ugh. Sorry. I can’t do it. Liver is still gross. Both of my Midwestern grandmas, rest their souls, loved liver and onions. I can’t share that love, although it’s not for lack of trying. To each their own, but I refuse to cook or serve liver in my house. If anyone wants liver, they can go to Brookfields. I’ll join them and order the chicken enchiladas.

No showcase of gross recipes would be complete without at least one peek at the strange jiggliness of aspics, so here we go with an episode that first aired on May 18, 1963. Have fun…

Aspics, as we all know, are a savory Jello that’s an odd mix of art and culinary weirdness. This is one time I wish the episode was in color because we get to see Julia cut up bits of vegetables that are ordinarily tossed, like the green parts of leeks or onion skin, into nifty shapes so she can fashion designs in her aspic, which she swears is easy to make.

Seeing as I’ve watched Julie and Julia more times than I can count, I’m going to take that on faith. To be fair, though, Julia doesn’t boil any calves’ feet for this aspic–she just uses stock, water, plain powdered gelatin and canned consumme. Oeufs en gelee and cold roast duck with cherries are the star recipes in this episode, so for any aspic newbie this is probably a pretty non-threatening way to start.

It’s funny that aspic was a pretty prominent part of Julia’s repertoire as a cook, because she always said to never put anything inedible on a plate. Yes, aspics are edible, but why anyone would want to consume them is a whole other matter.

It could have been worse, though. Julia could have made pressed chicken like they did in 1916.

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All right, is anyone hungry after all that? Was anyone eating while reading this? Leave any and all thoughts on that, plus organ meats in the comments below. I’m gonna go look at something pretty and maybe have a York peppermint patty. I don’t know why, but it sounds really good right now.

We’ll make up for this month’s lack of cooking in July with probably the least threatening dish I could possibly make. Well, it’s more of a first course, anyway, but we’ll talk about that next month. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you on Friday for the Seventh Broadway Bound Blogathon…

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The French Chef Cookbook, The French Chef, Volume One (DVD) and The French Chef, Volume 2 (DVD) are available to own from Amazon.

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