The Frog Commissary Cookbook: Hundreds of Unique Recipes and Home Entertaining Ideas from America's Most Innovative Restaurant Group

632 Pages·2013·10.75 MB·English

by  Steven Poses

A MAIN STREET BOOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
MAIN STREET BOOKS, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of a building with a tree are trademarks
of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Poses, Steven
The frog commissary cookbook.
1. Cookery. I. Roller, Rebecca. II. Title.
TX715.P863 1985 641.5
eISBN: 978-0-307-82644-2
Copyright © 1985 by The Commissary Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Dedication
HORS D’OEUVRES
APPETIZERS
SOUPS
SALADS
SALAD DRESSINGS AND SAUCES
SEAFOOD ENTRÉES
POULTRY ENTRÉES
MEAT ENTRÉES
PASTA ENTRÉES
PIZZAS AND SANDWICHES
BREAKFAST ENTRÉES
VEGETABLES AND SIDE DISHES
BREADS AND MUFFINS
DESSERTS
Introduction
The Frog/Commissary Cookbook is a useful compilation of flavorful and
often unusual recipes. The recipes are at once sophisticated, highly
accessible, and generally easy to follow. The cookbook is a result of the
efforts of scores of exciting cooks who have worked in a family of unique
restaurants in what has become one of America’s most interesting
restaurant cities—Philadelphia. In addition to the recipes, the cookbook
attempts to communicate an attitude about food, the service of food, the
operation of those restaurants, and in its own way, it tells a story about
an era in contemporary American culture. It is not like any other
cookbook that you own.
I had not always wanted to cook and run restaurants. I grew up in
Yonkers, New York in a fairly prosperous and sheltered setting. I came to
Philadelphia in 1964 as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania
with a strong desire to be an architect. Fairly early in my undergraduate
training I encountered difficulty in a freehand drawing class and
concluded that I was not cut out to be an architect. In the very socially
conscious period of the mid-sixties, I concluded that my interests lay
more in people and the cities they inhabited than in buildings per se, so
a change in career direction made some sense.
A key book for me at that time was Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of
Great American Cities. Jacobs wrote about the role neighborhood candy
stores played in defining a community. It was often the neighborhood
candy store that provided people with a way to define and connect with
their neighborhood. The candy store was symbolic of numerous small
elements that helped break down the anonymity of cities. I graduated
from Penn with a sociology degree and a strong interest in contributing
to the kind of positive urban life that Jacobs presented.
During my college years, I developed an interest in cooking. My
mother was a very good cook, and at an early age I came to appreciate
good food and the pleasure that can result from serving it. Without my
mother’s cooking in college, I had both the need and opportunity to
learn how to cook. A summer’s long trip provided extraordinary
exposure to the wonderful food of France, Spain, and Italy and whetted
my appetite to be able to produce such food. I subscribed to the then
new Time-Life Series of International Cookbooks and began
experimenting.
My love of cooking and a vision of contributing to urban life was
coming together as an idea for a restaurant that could serve the same
role as Jane Jacobs’s neighborhood candy store. It would be the sort of
restaurant where people would come together over good food and wine
and discuss the great issues of the day. The restaurant would provide a
sense of place for people. I would do the cooking.
I knew that I needed experience before I could open a restaurant, so
after a brief stint in the Peace Corps and peace movement, I answered a
newspaper advertisement for a busboy. I was offered the job if I agreed
to cut off my beard. I did. For the next six months, I was the busboy and
glass polisher at La Panetière, then Philadelphia’s most elegant French
restaurant.
I really wanted to cook. A position opened up in La Panetière’s
kitchen. I peeled carrots and potatoes, cleaned mussels, pulled feathers
out of pheasants, shaped turnips, chopped parsley, and eventually got to
sauté vegetables on the cooking line. I was now doing some serious
cooking. I invested in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I
kept it by my bed and it became my bible.
Much of what I had been cooking, both at La Panetière and at home
on my one night off, was very conventional with familiar Western
flavors and ingredients. Though my parents’ parents were Eastern
European Jews, my real culinary heritage was a curiously neutral result
of growing up suburban in the postwar assimilationist era of the fifties
and sixties. La Panetière’s approach to cooking was classic French. The
experimentation of Bocuse, Gérard, and the brothers Troisgros that
would soon explode as Nouvelle Cuisine and open French cooking to
broader influences, was taking place in the isolation of their French
kitchens.
The Vietnam War was going on and there were a number of young
men from Thailand working in La Panetière’s kitchen. The exposure to
the exotic tastes of Thailand while sharing the staff dinners that they
prepared was a revelation: sweet and fiery, red, green, blue and orange
curries; pickled vegetables and preserved radish; lemongrass and fish
sauce. The Thais with whom I worked and slurped noodles introduced
me to the Orient … and a particularly exotic corner of it, at that.
Only in America and only at that time could a Jewish kid from
Yonkers, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, be
working and learning how to cook in a French restaurant alongside a
substantial contingent of Thais. And my lack of a strong culinary
tradition created an openness to a vast world of ingredients, tastes,
textures, and methods of cooking. The Frog/Commissary Cookbook is very
much a result of this new heritage, whose origin was in the kitchen of La
Panetière. Its recipes and spirit continued to be influenced by a long list
of young cooks whose parents were Italian, Irish, German, Japanese,
Chinese, Vietnamese, or Iranian. We have all worked together, sharing
culinary traditions in evolving a rich, new, and curiously friendly
multicultured cuisine. We never sought originality for its own sake nor
were we ever limited by adherence to tradition. Our simple guiding
principle was “Does it taste good?” The recipes evolved this way and
have been refined in the crucible of the highly competitive, very
sophisticated, and greatly appreciative restaurant market of Philadelphia
over the past twelve years.
Anne Clark was our test chef when the commitment to go ahead with
a cookbook was made. In my strongest early recollection of Anne, she sat
at table 25 at Frog with one of her twin sons and curled chocolate to
garnish a peanut butter pie she had baked for us at her home. Anne was
one of a corps of home bakers who prepared desserts for Frog in the
early days. Anne loved to bake.
As Frog got busier and Anne’s twins got older, she came to work in
our kitchen as a baker. When The Commissary opened, she was head
baker. It was she who developed the tradition of great desserts in all our
restaurants. Anne developed our Carrot Cake, Strawberry Heart Tart,
Chocolate Mousse Cake, and numerous other now classic desserts.
Today, The Commissary employs ten bakers to keep up with the
demand.
One night over dinner in Chinatown, Anne asked if there might be a
role for her outside of the bakery. While she loved to bake, she also
loved to cook. The Commissary had been running a series of loosely
organized but successful cooking classes that I thought could stand some
order and expansion. In addition, because the kitchen staff was
constantly experimenting with new dishes, I was worried about quality
control. I offered Anne the position of our first testing chef. She went on
to become the general manager of The Commissary.
From the outset we made serious commitment to the testing process
for the cookbook. We knew that all dishes selected for the cookbook
were good because we had served all of them in the restaurants.
Translating those dishes into recipes that work for you in your kitchen
was very much another matter. Simply reducing the size of a recipe
designed to produce fifty portions by dividing rarely works. Even when a
dish we were using was recorded in a restaurant-size recipe, we began
from the beginning in constructing the recipe in a way that we knew it
would work for you in your home.
It was Anne who brought discipline to our recipe-development
program. Before she came to work for us she had worked in the test
kitchen of Farm Journal. At The Commissary she was always
admonishing staff in the warmest and gentlest way to measure, measure,
measure. Anne understood that if you’re just producing a dish once you
can work by feel—a little of this, a pinch of that. But a restaurant must
constantly reproduce a dish over and over again. Each time a customer
has it, it should taste the same. For Anne, the challenge of getting a
recipe down was the challenge of capturing creativity. For this you had
to measure. You never resented Anne. For her, you wanted to measure.
Along with discipline Anne brought tremendous skill and an unerring
sense of taste to the cookbook project. She tested many recipes herself
and worked closely with testing chefs Roxanna Petzold and Prilla
Rohrer. A small apartment up the street from The Commissary served as
our test kitchen. We chose an apartment because we wanted to develop
the recipes for the book on the kind of equipment you would be using
and not commercial equipment. Customer satisfaction has always driven
the restaurants and we had no less a concern for it with the cookbook.
The testing chefs often started with someone’s vague outline of a dish.
It may have been a mere recollection of something we served over a
busy week years ago that was remembered as extra special. Anne coaxed
and nursed these recollections through the testing process to what we
present here. Each day she recruited a small crew of tasters from the
restaurant’s staff to judge the results of the day’s efforts. When we were
having a particular problem with a recipe, she would retest it over
dinner with her husband and kids, and often again late into the night
until she was satisfied. I shudder to think of the sleepless nights Anne
will have should one instruction here be unclear, one ingredient left out,
one measurement incorrect. We’ve tried very hard to prevent any of this
from happening.
Becky Roller wrote most of the copy and illustrated the book. Becky
was the cashier at The Commissary on May 5, 1977—the day that it
opened. She had just graduated from Smith College with a major in art
history. She loved food and The Commissary looked like an exciting
place to spend a little time while she figured out what she really wanted
to do. She had been cashiering for about a year when she quit to go to
Europe for an extended wining and dining holiday. I vividly remember
the day she walked back into The Commissary. She had come in for
breakfast and was bursting with excitement about the glorious meals she
had eaten and wines she had drunk. I had been thinking that I might
need an administrative assistant of sorts, I liked Becky’s enthusiasm and
she still had no career plans. I offered her a loosely defined job then and
there and happily she accepted it.
One of Becky’s early projects was to put together a newsletter. We had
two restaurants at that point and there was always something going on
to report about: food festivals, cooking classes, new menus and recipes,
future plans. A regular newsletter seemed like a good idea and Becky
was a natural. She had studied calligraphy at Smith and had done
beautifully illustrated recipes as a class project. (Her rendition of our
carrot cake recipe hangs framed in my kitchen at home.) Next Becky
undertook to produce what has become an annual Commissary calendar.
The calendar and the newsletter laid the graphic basis of the book.
Becky worked with Anne and our testing chefs and translated their
scratchings into the recipes contained here and tested quite a few
herself. She also wrote all of the recipe introductions, gathered the
collective expertise of staff members for the boxes, tips, and hints, and
then did the illustrations.
At this point the basic purpose of the Introduction has been served. You
have a good feel for what this cookbook is about, who the key characters
are, and how the food evolved. If you just cannot wait to get into the
kitchen and start cooking, proceed to the recipes on this page and begin.
Have fun. There is, however, a story attached to the book having to do