Cooking With the French Chef: Chop Dinner In Half an Hour

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.

School has probably started for everyone, right? It started over a month ago for me, and my son is now into his senior year of high school, which includes going to a few classes at my old junior college. I’m at once excited, nostalgic, and a little melancholy.

Even though we’ve pretty much gotten our routine down (heh, not really), time is still at a premium. So when I saw that Julia had a chapter promising a chop dinner in thirty minutes, I had to try it. She’s got a few of these “Half an Hour” recipes, so we’ll go down this road a couple of times at least.

I’m always a little skeptical of thirty-minute recipes on cooking shows because the person presenting the recipe is going to be familiar with it and presumably doesn’t have to glance at their cheat sheet. The rest of us, on the other hand, probably don’t have that luxury, so thirty minutes may be more like forty-five minutes or an hour, at least the first time around.

Anyway, here’s the episode, which was the seventh of the fourth season and originally broadcast on January 15, 1966:

OK. Three recipes will be crafted in this go-round: Casserole a la Nivernaise, or Casserole of Pork or Veal with Carrots, Potatoes, and Artichoke Hearts, Consommé Madrilene, or Consommé with Fresh Tomatoes and Herbs, and Petits Pots de Créme au Chocolat, or Chocolate Cream Custards.

Lots going on here, but is it doable in thirty minutes? OK, Julia, challenge accepted. I think.

First things first, though. Ingredients, represent!

And just for curiosity’s sake, we’re going to time this to see how close to thirty minutes I get. Although, to be sure, Julia wasn’t taking photos of every step in her cooking process.

As it turned out, though, I didn’t take a lot of photos, either, because I was more interested in trying to hit that thirty-minute mark, but there are still enough to get the general idea across. And of course I had to set my timer just to see how long it really did take, but we’ll get to that.

First thing was to brown the pork chops and prep the veggies for the casserole, which didn’t go too badly. The chops looked pretty delectable, actually.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I had to make a few adjustments. Julia’s recipe called for four each of carrots and potatoes, but I bought three of each because there are only three people at my house. Since I couldn’t find the frozen artichoke hearts Julia called for I got canned ones instead, I forgot to buy vine-ripened tomatoes for the consommé so I had to use cherry ones, and I also forgot to buy Jamaican rum for the pots de créme, so I gave mine a shot of brandy. My chocolate was so dark it was kinda moot, anyway.

No biggie, though. We all know Julia was good with improvisation.

Next up for the casserole was to boil the veggies for a few minutes to cut down on cooking time, then after draining them they got coated with the oil and the pork chops were added back in. After dotting the whole thing with butter, shallots, garlic, parsley and some herbes de Provence, it all simmered for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, the consommé was supposed to simmer in its little saucepan. Theoretically, the tomatoes were to be boiled in the consommé, peeled, the insides turned into pulp, and it all should be added back in, with a shot of port to cover up the fact that the consommé was canned.

While that’s not too hard in theory, peeling cherry tomatoes is a pain in the neck, not to mention the skin is thicker than that of a regular tomato, so it doesn’t cook down in the same way. I figured I could get by with mashing the tomatoes with a fork and just adding them back in. Maybe it would all work out.

Heh. Nope. The soup looked the same twenty minutes later. I added some parsley and called it a sorta-fail.

And what of the pots de créme? Those were actually pretty easy. Two-thirds of a cup of chocolate chips with heavy cream added to the cup-and-a-half level, then melted in a saucepan, after which I added two egg yolks, one whole egg, two tablespoons of sugar and a shot of the brandy. (Incidentally, my egg separator used to be sold at Crate and Barrel but can now be found on Amazon. It’s an absolute lifesaver.)

This wonderfully rich mixture then went into ramekins in a baking dish with boiling water and baked on the lower level of the oven for twenty minutes. And yes, the water is a little cloudy because some of the mixture dripped into the dish when I was filling the ramekins.

So yeah, once dessert was baked, dinner was finally done.

I don’t think I was enthused as much as relieved.

It looked pretty, though. The soup was fine. The potatoes were fantastic. The pork was slightly dry, but we ended up using the consommé as a sauce. In all, it was OK but nothing to write home about. We had a ton of veggies left over, which ended up being really good with sausages the next day, but I’m not sure this is something I would make again.

The pots de créme, on the other hand…

Oh, these were decadent. Heady, velvety, and just enough. I used to order pot de créme at the erstwhile Johnny Caribe Restaurant in my hometown of Auburn, so it’s nice to know how to make them at home.

And after all that, did this meal take thirty minutes? Heck, no. Try just under two hours.

Granted, it probably goes faster once the familiarity is there, but I honestly don’t think an experienced cook would be able to make this meal in thirty minutes, either. There’s too much that has to happen simultaneously and not enough pockets of free time to piggyback the recipes.

Julia gives lots of do-ahead hints, though, and I have an inkling spreading the work out is the trick to hitting the thirty-minute mark, although it feels like cheating a little bit.

Another post is coming up tomorrow, and it’s the first of those paywalled posts. Hope you all can join, but if not, no biggy. Another post is coming up on Saturday, and I hope it’s going to be a fun one. Thanks for reading, all, and hope to see you soon…

---

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

~Purchases made via Amazon Affiliate links found on this site help support Taking Up Room at no extra cost to you.~

If you’re enjoying what you see on Taking Up Room, please subscribe to my Substack page, where you’ll find both free and paid subscriber-only reviews of mostly new and newish movies, documentaries, and shows. I publish every Wednesday and Saturday.