[Sca-cooks] semi-topical: Good Friday dinner?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Laura C. Minnick:
>At 10:25 PM 3/25/2005, you wrote:
>
>>Beer is allowed during Lent, right????
>>
>>Beer, Tuna Sandwich, and a bag of Chile Limon chips....
>
>What do you put in your tuna? Mayo is off-list, you know... (hacks 
>me off too- so much of the 'making-fish-edible' techniques I know 
>involved mayo in some form or another...)

The undisputed king of tuna sandwiches involves no mayo at all! It's 
a pan bagnat, or bathed loaf, a Nicoise/Provencale thing. It's 
basically a Salade Nicoise hoagie.

You split a loaf of French bread, and rub it inside and out with a 
cut garlic clove, which kind of disintegrates as you rub it on the 
bread. Brush the inside with EV olive oil, then lay in lettuce or 
other greens, sliced hard-boiled eggs, tuna (yuppies eat this with 
grilled tuna, but the traditional standard is dark tuna canned in 
olive oil, and it's just fine with the wimpy solid white stuff, too). 
Add slices of green Bell pepper, cucumber, tomato, anchovy fillets, 
pitted Nicoise olives (Moroccan oil-cured are good, too, and much 
easier to pit quickly), and maybe a ring or three of thinly-sliced 
onion.

You then wrap your sandwich up tight in plastic wrap or parchment 
paper, and place a weight on it for an hour or so. Ideally, you've 
balanced things so that the various juices mix together and soak into 
the bread, which softens up without becoming so soggy it falls apart.

I once made a pair of these for Joseph Baum and Michael Whiteman, who 
were partners in owning the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center in New 
York, and Whiteman was married to the executive chef at Gracie 
Mansion. Mine was a fancified version with sliced, grilled tuna, 
rouille sauce (a sort of garlicky, red-peppery mayonnaise stuff), and 
Baum and Whiteman were there to discuss buying the establishment I 
worked at, and having it run by the current management and staff. 
They had just decided this was perhaps the best sandwich either of 
them had ever had, saying they definitely wanted it as a menu item, 
when suddenly Whiteman dropped a huge clump of his on his necktie... 
;-)

They decided it was too difficult to eat, after all.

Probably pretty similar to one of the Roman sala cattabia recipes...

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04