Monet's Palate - A Gastronomic View From the Gardens of Giverny

-We are about to embark on a culinary tour of Claude Monet's beloved Normandy, a region of France just North of Paris, along the Seine River.

This region inspired Monet's passion for art and his passion for fine cuisine.

Both of Monet's palates met at his home in Giverny, surrounded by his beautiful gardens.

Join us as we explore the cuisine Monet loved and adored.

-Because we have a painting, a master work that includes the wonderful willow trees and the flowers on the water and the bridge, I was immediately attracted.

I wanted to go when I was there and see that scene with my own eyes.

Then I wanted to get on the bridge and have my picture taken, which I did, with Francoise Gilot and my friend Charlie Rose.

So my big memory is seeing the real thing that's in my picture.

That's, I think, the standout.

Of course, it was fun to sit in his chair and go in his dining room and his kitchen, imagine what it'd be like to have lunch or dinner with him, which would -- which is a fabulous idea.

I was born too late.

Damn.

-With somebody who has the subtlety of the colors in mind and the textures that are on the plate and the dishes, the food is put on the dishes that are on the table holding the flowers.

And it becomes, really, a special experience.

-Food was such an important aspect of their lives and not just once or twice a day but, you know, three or four times a day, with considerate elaboration.

And -- And they ate a lot.

I mean, you know, a three-, four-course meal was not at all unusual in those days.

You know, Monet is supposed to have had, I mean, a regular habit, even though he was working like a complete workaholic.

You know, he would -- Nothing would take on his lunch habit.

You know, he would have to take an hour off wherever he would be in the world and -- and, you know, go at some length to, you know, consume his elaborate lunch and end up with his -- Apparently, he would never finish lunch without having had quite some wine and -- and a prune, which is a plum spirit, white spirit, you know, which is quite powerful.

And that was every day at lunch, not to mention, after that, dinner.

So you just wonder, you know, how you go back to work and, you know, focus on -- You know, that may have something to do with Impressionism in some ways, you know, just the effect of the plum.

-This is Monet's dining room, a very special place with the most beautiful colors of two tones of yellow.

Monet chose the tones of yellow for his dining pleasure, as well as he chose the same tones of yellow to use in his plates and his dishes.

There were many, many, many occasions where the family would get together for holidays.

It was a wonderful time in the life of Monet, the Easters and the Christmases.

And there was one special drink that Monet would adore for Christmastime, and that was the Veuve Clicquot champagne.

It was quite unusual that Monet also liked to decant his own champagne.

You kind of lose all those bubbles when you're doing that.

In Monet's time, he invited people like Renoir and Caillebotte.

More than likely, the men who were the Impressionist painters of his time came here to have a dinner with him.

Or if not a dinner in the dining room, there would be a wonderful picnic in the gardens where he'd bring an opera star from Paris.

The opera star would entertain at a piano brought into the gardens at the same time.

The only painter who didn't come to Giverny to sup with him was Manet, who died the day that Monet moved in here in Giverny in 1883.

And they all had to go back to Paris to a funeral.

The room is exactly as it was in Monet's time.

You see about you the Japanese woodcut prints.

These were very special to Monet and friends.

They were special to Impressionists because they saw a new theme in these woodcuts, and they became an important art form for the art community.

And eventually, Monet had them kept, and the others, had them kept in Paris shops for them.

-It gave a sense of place at the table, that when you ate at his table, you were eating the food from his garden and his stream.

-Everything in this room is exactly as it was when Monet lived here.

In fact, it's exactly as it was in 1946, when his -- the last descendant who lived in the house, his stepdaughter Blanche, died.

When she died, the house closed forever.

And with it, all the cooking that Marguerite did in this kitchen.

Marguerite was alive when Monet's museum opened in 1980, but she wouldn't come back.

She decided that she wouldn't come back if the Monet family weren't here.

It would be too painful for her.

So she sent her son in 1982 to see the house where she was a little servant girl.

Can you imagine all the cooking that was done for this huge family here at Monet's house?

There's a little farmyard outside where Monet -- where they have all the eggs and all the chickens -- from the chickens and the roosters and the hens and the turkeys.

But the turkeys never were at Giverny originally.

That was where he painted -- The wonderful turkeys was in another region.

But that's all representative of Monet's palate here at Giverny.

For his day, it was an advanced kitchen.

This room was built on.

You see, he had a house which was not a whole house.

It was a farm house in the early days.

And when Monet came to Giverny in 1883, he rented this place.

He didn't buy it outright.

By the time 1909 came, 1910, he was more affluent with his art.

So what he did is he purchased the house, and then he made a restoration.

He added on part of the dining room.

He added on this whole kitchen, some house -- part of the house beyond, and then some space up above.

And many of the kids who were living in this household were living in the attic.

They had rooms there.

It was spread out.

But there were the comings and goings of so many young people.

There were six children that belonged to him through a second marriage, and he was a good father.

He really was part of their lives.

And then he had his two sons who were the children of his first marriage.

His wife died, and he then married Madame Hosched.

-I think indeed there is a link between Monet's palate, the food that he ate, and the pictures that he painted, if only just in the colors, because Monet, particularly when he was painting near the sea, the colors are subdued.

They're subtle.

They're grays.

There are lots of whites on the rocks.

He's fascinated by shades of -- of gray, of cream colors.

There you go right into the food.

If you look at the fish, the fish that you see in the markets, all of those scales, all of those -- the white belly and the gray and the blackish back on the fish you see reflected not in the shapes necessarily, but certainly in the colors.

-Let's not forget that we are on the sea, the state of Normandy.

And there's Honfleur and the wonderful seaports.

Wonderful, marvelous lobsters and wonderful fish and marvelous oysters.

Absolutely divine.

-If it's right, will be Claude Monet scallops.

But if not, will be Roger Verge.

[ Speaking French ] Some thyme.

[ Speaks French ] Crema.

Lucky Normandy.

We have a shallots, white wine, thyme, and the scallops.

Okay, we add the...

The cream is thicker than the one in Normandy.

Okay.

Merci.

And we are going to blend it with champagne.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's for you.

-Thank you.

-Okay.

Just a little bit more of salt.

-Yeah.

[ Speaks French ] -It's a Claude Monet scallop.

Sea scallop.

Enjoy it.

-He really did not take any shortcuts, went out of his way to produce the most elaborate and most wonderful, exquisite meals.

And I think you can draw a parallel with art at that level in that there is definitely the same kind of sensibility there, you know, sort of looking for the ultimate refinement, but also this kind of almost insatiable gourmands, you know, the desire to fulfill one's needs, one's desires to the extreme.

And I think you sense that very much in his painting.

-I wanted to cook for you a dish that's typical of Normandy, which is moules marinires -- sailor's mussels.

And it's quite simply mussels, a bit of chopped shallot, which I'm going to put into the pan, white wine.

It's all of these things.

A kind of white wine or whatever it is to taste.

You need, oh, I would think about a cup, a cup and a half of white wine.

And I'm going to boil those two up together to concentrate the wine a bit so that we get a more mellow flavor.

Now, this is starting to fizzle.

I want it to boil down a little bit.

The reason I think it's important to have little mussels, they have much more taste.

Like a lot of small things, the flavor is much more intensive, and you often see mussels that are too big.

They're good for stuffing, but not for serving in their shells, which is what we're going to do.

So I'm going to tip them into here.

Lid on.

The only other ingredients in classic moules marinires, you can have them absolutely plain, bit of parsley for color and for flavor.

And salt and pepper, but we'll do that in a minute.

Another thing that everybody loves to put in is real Normandy cream.

And I've got some cream from Normandy.

Crme frache, that lovely, thick, rich cream that has a very slightly cheesy, slightly tart flavor.

And you can see this is sort of three versions.

This is the French.

And just looking at it, it's wonderfully rich in consistency.

The butterfat goes up as high as 60% on crme frache.

And, of course, it tastes wonderful.

It's slightly sweet.

Mmm.

Absolutely lovely.

Lovely.

I can see the steam escaping.

Yes.

Great.

They boiled up to the top, and there they are all open and ready to go.

And so, all I do is just add the parsley.

Generous amounts of parsley, lots of pepper.

And then I'm going to taste to see if they need any salt.

But, of course, they've kind of produced lots of their own salt with the saltwater.

Now dig down.

Those don't need salt for me, but I, of course, am going to add some cream to soften the flavor a bit.

And, of course, I'm going to use the French cream.

Just stirring it in and just mixing it, melt in a minute.

And you can see that's melting very rapidly.

So that's done already.

Couldn't be quicker.

And I'll spoon out a portion.

Pile them up.

Now, these colors, to me, are very much the North Sea, the clouds, those pictures of everybody, even in the summer, in all of those clothes because of the chilly winds.

Monet's paintings of that coast -- black and gray, misty.

And give everybody a bit of the juice.

Best part.

Stop them cooking.

They're done.

Now, putting them on their plate.

Then to eat them -- this was always our children's favorite thing -- you need -- you take one shell, and you pick up another one, and you just pop out the mussel, and off you go.

And it's so good.

It's delicious.

And it's fun, too.

-We often in the world think that French cannot cook without butter.

But if the rest of the world had Normandy on their -- on their map, I think they will also be cooking with butter.

And I think our -- the quality of the regional ingredient there in Normandy are very unique.

And it influenced our cooking, in a way.

And, of course, maybe a crme frache from Vermont is -- or a crme frache from Charente-Poitou in France or many other place, it's a good crme frache, but a crme frache from Normandy has this richness and flavor due to the grazing and due to the feed of the cows, and it make the taste very special.

And it's very much many ingredients like that where it has a particularity.

When you use Normandy crme frache into a preparation, it gives that richness, butteriness, but also a little bit of the acidity you want in a crme frache.

-Normandy -- It was absolutely no accident that the Vikings invaded Normandy.

Normandy was an extraordinarily wealthy province and remained so.

All along the Normandy coast and well inland in Normandy, William of Normandy, William the Conqueror, they were all Viking, and you can still clearly see the physiognomy, and you can see the love of the same plain, simple food -- lots of pork, lots of cream, sausages, chicken, Calvados made from the cider, a good, strong nip of something to keep you going.

Great for cooking.

Flames in a minute.

Up everything goes.

-I think it's true for both Monet and Pissarro.

They spent relatively little time in Paris.

Well, Pissarro spent quite a bit of time at the end of his life.

But it seems to me that they spent as little time as was necessary for them to just get their footing in the art world.

And then they would go off and do their work wherever they were attracted to.

-Monet first came to the Savoy, or came to London, in 1898.

So he was probably familiar with the Savoy.

And he came to stay in 1899 for the first time.

He stayed on the sixth floor, which, in those days, was the highest guest floor in the building.

and he stayed on the Southwest corner with a fantastic view over the river.

And he started his series of paintings of the two bridges, or looking up and downstream towards Charing Cross or Waterloo Bridge.

And he came back in 1900, in the spring of 1900, and he wanted the same room, but he couldn't have them because they'd been rented to somebody else.

So he had to take rooms on the fifth floor.

He took the same relative rooms.

They were directly underneath the ones he'd had in 1899.

And he returned for the last time in 1901.

I'm not sure which rooms he had.

Probably if he could get the sixth floor, he had the sixth floor at that time.

And he just worked on these series of paintings.

He brought the same canvases back with him on all three occasions, and he painted.

Throughout the day, he'd just change as the light changed.

He would change canvas.

And he painted a huge number of canvases.

I mean, I think it ran into hundreds.

But at the end, he took them back to France with him, and he worked on them a bit at home in between visits and afterwards.

But he destroyed quite a lot of them, and there's only about 36 or 37 that actually survive from those three visits.

The Savoy Grill was one of the restaurants that was opened.

There was -- There were about three restaurants opened, but all the restaurants were actually on the river side when Monet was here.

And they served mainly French cuisine because, of course, our first main chef had been Escoffier.

And he very much influenced the kind of cuisine that was served in the restaurants.

And we employed a lot of French chefs after Escoffier.

So although Monet came just after Escoffier had left and he wouldn't have actually eaten his food, he was very fond of eating in the Savoy Grill.

Apparently, he was very fond of Yorkshire pudding, which isn't very French.

-One of the great appeals of going to London was, you know, the high -- high cuisine, the great food.

And the Savoy was one of the most renowned places there.

But it's -- it's funny, when you look through 19th-century newspapers to find the great point of attraction, as far as gastronomy was concerned, even in Paris was English cuisine.

The only way to relate to this today is to think about Yorkshire pudding, for instance, or, you know, the traditional country cuisine in Britain has remained -- has retained some of this -- some of this very sophisticated kind of tradition.

-Today, I'd like to show you Monet's Yorkshire pudding.

Of course, it wasn't an invention for Monet.

It was an invention from the Yorkshire Dales, you know, when meat was short on supply and they had to bulk up the portions with some starch.

And that's where it originated, really.

Right, the ingredients for our Yorkshire puddings are very, very simple, like most good things.

You've got some flour.

Eggs, milk, and some salt and some pepper.

Now, it is very, very important that you have nonstick molds, something which is, perhaps, covered in sort of Teflon or something like that.

Into those molds, pour a little bit of oil.

Vegetable oil, not the expensive olive oil, as this would distort the taste and the flavor of the Yorkshire pudding.

As you can imagine, in the 18th century, the Brits had no olive oil in Britain, of course.

First of all, you add a little bit of salt and pepper before you add anything else.

It helps to bring out the flavor.

Then we add the eggs.

Let me crack a couple.

They are medium-sized eggs.

And you stir them in gradually.

There you go.

Now, you work that to a smooth batter.

Okay, once your batter is smooth, which it is now, we add the milk.

Again, carefully measured.

And we just do it nice and gentle.

The first lot slowly, just to thin down the mix a little.

And once you achieve that, you can add a little bit more quicker.

There we go.

And there we are ready.

One of the most important things is that your molds are very hot and that the oil is very hot.

So when the batter hits the molds and the oils, it starts cooking straightaway, sizzling.

There we go.

See?

Then you fill up the molds about half.

Yeah, yeah, you can see how the bubbles come up.

And this is quite important.

Now they go back into the oven.

Now you can see they're lovely.

As I said, the center is slightly soft, and the outside is nicely colored.

It's nicely colored and very crispy.

Of course, when Monet then came to eat his Yorkshire pudding, what would he eat it with?

It would be with Scottish beef.

I cut one nice slice.

I take one out right of the middle to get a medium-rare.

There we are.

You see?

Now, this beef is like butter.

You could eat this beef with a fork.

So there would be a little Yorkshire pudding.

And then, of course, what mustn't be missed in England is some roast potatoes, which go on there.

And then a few vegetables.

And this is very traditional English food, of course.

The English call it two vegetable and potatoes.

There we are.

And a little bit of the gravy.

Not sauce, I have to point out, but gravy.

And the gravy is, of course, very important, not just for the meat and the potatoes, but the gravy is there to soak up -- to be soaked up with the Yorkshire pudding.

And there we are.

This is now our traditional English roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, vegetables, and potatoes.

And I would imagine Monet would have just loved it.

-In Normandy, to what we have, not only do we have good cream, we have wonderful cheese, like Livarot.

Wonderful cheese.

We have Tripes la mode de Caen.

Great, great, great, great lamb, too.

Southdown Lamb, Preseli.

Near Mont Saint-Michel.

It's a great place.

-So Normandy can be done or breast of duck, tripe.

That's another dish of Normandy which is done heavily.

-As we often do, also, sometimes, Dover sole Normande, which has, also, a little bit of apple inside.

We make the sauce with, also, fresh apple juice and a little bit of Calvados.

And we -- It's often mussel, also moules Normande.

I love mussel dish.

-There's Pont-l'Evque.

There's Camembert, two kinds of Camembert, sort of a regular Camembert and then a raw-milk Camembert.

And then there's Livarot.

Livarot is a very special cheese that has a very special pungency.

Some people like it, and some people don't.

-Certainly seafood stands out and all of the beautiful vegetables.

I think of turnips and peas and watercress.

And I think of, you know, chickens and ducks and geese and fish from the streams and crayfish and... butter, really good butter.

-The dish that I'm going to make today is called quasi de veau aux pommes.

In a pan, I will put a little bit graisse Normande, or melted fat, and a touch of butter.

And the veal will be added.

I cook the veal very slowly on both sides.

Now I'm going to check the browning.

I'm going to let it cook a little bit more on that side.

So I try to cook it once about five -- four to five minutes on each side with a light browning, as it is now.

But I want it just a little bit more.

You can see it's starting to cook on the side there.

And I keep it just a little medium.

Not well done all the way.

Veal can be eaten a little bit medium.

The thing going to be served with the veal and apple, will be on the top of, a little sauted potatoes.

Overlap together to make a base, like a little pie or crust, if you would like, too.

About three layers, approximately to make a nice little rosette style.

We'll add the apples into the pan, and they will cook slightly on both sides.

I just burn them just slightly on the top.

And what do we have to do is to finish the sauce slowly.

Into the same pan as we had the veal and apples, I'm going to put shallots.

About a tablespoon of shallots.

In Normandy cooking, we use a lot of shallots, leeks, and cider, or Calvados.

Some diced leek is added to it.

A little bit of the green and white.

Actually, the green is fine.

It's used quite a bit.

A lot of people don't like to use them, but it's good.

And just sweat it up a little bit.

But not too brown.

Not browning the shallots excessively.

And the next thing I'm going to put is Calvados.

Sometimes cider will be used to deglaze, too.

Of the fire, I put the Calvados in a pan.

Right now.

All right?

And that will quickly evaporate.

We get the taste of the apple-flavor brandy.

And the apples were cooked in the pan, so the flavor is right there.

The next thing I'm going to add is just a touch of veal glaze.

Or veal stock.

We use veal stock.

Into the pan.

And now, at the last minute, the crme frache is added.

And crme frache is kind of ironic because it is a kind of a sour culture cream.

So, actually, it's not really fresh.

So I have the veal here sliced, and I'm going to put the little potato base on the top.

Plate the apples right on... ...so you look like a little pie.

All right.

Then the carrots.

And the sauce will go right over the veal.

And a touch around.

And a julienne of leeks... ...on top of the veal.

And the last thing -- a touch of Calvados over the apples and potato galette.

And this is the dish.

-When you look at the local ingredients, they reflect a mild climate, an awful lot of rain.

They reflect lush grass.

They reflect gentle colors, gentle nuance.

Oh, apples in the valleys.

The little crabapples for making cider that now, more and more, they're making varietal cider, and they're pressing different vintages of cider.

-There is Calvados, which is a product of cider, hard cider, and, like, a cognac and also cider, cork cider, done all over Normandy.

We don't have any wine because of the region being quite rainy and cooler than other part of France.

So there is no wine in that region.

-The Vikings invaded Normandy and drank the local spirit, which, at that time, was not referred to as Calvados.

But with apples being much more prominent in Normandy than grapes, then they made a distilled spirit from the apples.

-The process here, we start out with apples.

They are mashed together to sort of form a brew of apples.

The result of that is known as cidre, or, in English, cider, which is quite simply a fermented beverage made from apples.

-By law, Calvados has to be aged at least two years in French oak barrels.

As we see with this vintage-dated Calvados, it's 22 years in oak.

It's not uncommon to see Calvados' four and five decades old.

-The [speaks French] it's a very specific moment in a meal where you want to take a break from going, also, often from savory fish, savory -- to meat savory and having a pose to rest your stomach, especially in a big meal, in a big celebratory meal where you want to rest your stomach and be prepared for the meat.

But, to me, the best [speaks French] is to be in Normandy under an apple tree.

This Calvados is superb.

[ Sniffs ] Very, very nice.

-There are two ciders that I know of, which one is the brew, and one is the dew.

And one is a sweet, and one is a non-sweetened cider.

And then, of course, the very strong Calvados, which is taken for digestion of a meal, after a meal usually.

And there's the tarts made of apples which the region is very famous for.

And wonderful fishes and wonderful sauces.

-[ Speaking French ] -As typical from Normandy, there's a supreme of turbot with some vegetables.

You put some carrots, carrot bed, some leeks.

Put it thinly.

-Cream.

-Some cream, fresh cream.

-[ Speaks French ] -Some salt and pepper.

-[ Speaks French ] -And then the turbot fillets.

-[ Speaks French ] -You've got salt and pepper again.

-[ Speaks French ] -Some butter -- you -- you cooked before.

-[ Speaks French ] -Some hollandaise sauce.

It's typical from here, from the restaurant La Bonne Marmite.

And then in the oven.

-[ Speaks French ] [ Speaks French ] -160 grads.

-[ Speaks French ] -Twelve minutes.

Well, the turbot is ready.

It's very hot, as well.

You take it carefully, and you put it into your dish.

And you put a small potatoes crepe with it.

With a small garniture.

It's ornate.

-People ask, "Why do you and everybody else in the world enjoy and appreciate and cherish Impressionist art?"

It's very obvious to me that there's a universal appeal to the wonderful sensibilities of Impressionist painting.

First of all, the subject matter.

Regular people out enjoying nature or looking at nature or... behaving in natural ways.

We're not talking about biblical subjects or, you know, great mythological, heroic moments.

We're talking about regular activities and regular places just as they ordinarily appear.

That's a hallmark of the painting of the late 19th-century Impressionism.

So the subject matter of the pictures is at once sympathetic with huge percentage of the population today and then.

But the rich, wonderful use of colors that dance in the sunlight or off the -- off the surface of water or in the trees or on haystacks or wheat fields or flowers on a lily pond.

Claude Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Manet.

Color is such a wonderful ingredient, such a rich, textural thing in Impressionism painting -- Impressionist painting that it certainly reverberates with people that look at the pictures.

-Recording the changes of weather, catching the particular effect, I mean, you read this throughout their correspondence.

You know, when the right effect, the right light effect is there, off they go, they run, and it's very important.

It's, like, you know, they have to catch it before it's gone.

So you can imagine sometimes, you know, these four-course meals with elaborate cream dishes.

And then off comes the right effect, the particular light that Monet was looking for.

And you can imagine, at that point, there was an immediate need to just rush out and go and pick it up, so... -Cooking, it's linked to the artistic world, as well.

And we do live like artists sometimes.

I will say a painter like Monet or a great artist has certainly more tranquility in his life to create.

He has more time to go back over his thought and to really -- Sometime it could be finished in an hour.

Sometime it could be finished in a week.

For us, I think it's much more ephemeral and very spontaneous.

And we don't have -- We have a lot of time to think about it, but we don't have much time to execute.

So it's in a very different way.

We -- The adrenaline we get to achieve our art is much stronger, maybe, than a painter.

But at the end, I think we definitely receive the same pleasure.

-Seems Monet saw a certain light at Giverny that he was very interested in.

They said he saw it on the train.

You know, many of the Impressionist artists lived in the region.

They were here to -- to paint.

And it was -- He, the man of Impressionism, he was the father of it.

And he brought all these people to come and visit him at Giverny.

There were people coming to buy houses.

There were people coming to rent houses.

There were people staying at the Hotel Baudy up the road.

Hotel Baudy was the only hotel in town.

And when Americans in the main came from everywhere to be at the hotel, Mrs. Baudy would have an overrun and take them into her home.

Sometimes he'd go to the Hotel Baudy and have a dinner, and at the end, when he'd have a dinner with them, they'd speak nothing -- nothing about art.

It was only about food.

Food was very important to him.

He was quite a lover of eating and of foods.

-Hello.

I'm Michel Richard.

Welcome to my kitchen.

I'm from -- Not from Normandy.

I'm from Brittany, very close to Normandy.

And my mother spent a lot of time in Normandy.

And I learned to cook from my mom.

My mother used to cook with a lot of cream and butter.

I think that were the result of my -- the oversize of my belly.

She used to make chicken Valle D'Auge.

Valle D'Auge is a place where we have a lot of apples.

And in Normandy, they use a lot of apple.

They use a lot of Calvados.

That makes the men happy.

A lot of apple and a lot of apple juice.

And today, I'm going to show you in my kitchen at Citronelle in Washington, D.C., I want to show you how to make a duck with apple.

For that, the recipe's almost ready.

You need a beautiful duck.

Different than Normandy because Normandy just strangles the duck.

It's full of blood.

And that makes the duck very, very tender and very, very bloody.

But we don't do that here because you're going to feel like you are Dracula.

Okay.

Yeah, we just saut the duck leg.

Nice and plump.

I'm going to remove the fat.

I want add fresh butter.

I remove the fat because the fat is burned, and that will give a bad flavor to the sauce.

Fresh butter, again.

Put it back.

Put back that.

I want to add the mushroom.

We'll add the mushroom.

I want to flamb the duck with the Calvados now.

Isn't that fun?

Be careful, or you'll have to call the fire department.

We used to flamb in the old days because we didn't have any refrigeration.

It was a way to kill all the germs.

But we did realize that gave a very nice taste to the food, too, so we keep on doing it.

There is no more germ in my food.

Okay, now we add -- we add the shallots.

I want to add the cider, apple cider.

We have some stocks here.

We use chicken stock.

This is a veal stock.

If you don't have veal stock, you can buy chicken stock in the market.

The one you find in a can, they are wonderful, too.

The bottom is hot enough.

I'm going to caramelize the duck steak, if you want, the duck breast a few minutes.

Going to give you an extra flavor.

And I'm going to finish to cook it in a very low-heat oven.

This is where the meat will be warm and will not shrink.

This is fine.

Here a nice color.

Beautiful color.

I'm going to transfer.

In the oven.

Here.

Okay, here we have the legs.

They are cooked.

I'm going to transfer the leg into container here.

And I put them here under the salamander to re-create a nice crust to my legs.

So good.

Okay, you have to wait a few minutes.

You have to reduce the sauce halfway down.

After that, we will add the cream, the salt, the pepper.

You want more?

Eh, we're in Normandy.

Let's go.

I put more.

Vive le Normandy.

I have to mix.

At the end, you just add a little bit of that.

Give some extra flavors.

See, the legs are very nice.

When you finish the sauce, stick them under the broiler, and then we have a nice, crispy, nice color.

Then you... Then you do nice decoration, nice presentation.

And you add the sauce.

You could do, and I do sometimes in my restaurant, I put some sauce over the fish, over the meat or whatever, and I give some sauce on the side in a little boat.

Voil.

Enjoy the flavor of Normandy.

Mmm, it smells so good.

Let me have a little piece here.

Nice.

Hmm.

-If you go to a lovely little restaurant here in the region, you will have a wonderful appetizer, and you'll have a wonderful -- perhaps a salmon with a special Normande sauce or another fish, a white fish, a turbot with a Normande sauce.

And a salad, and the cheeses are very special.

Or an apple tart, which is a wonderful finish.

And, of course, it's a finish to the meal.

-Normandy apple pie is the dessert, and every Normandy baker makes their own, and they're all slightly different.

Some are caramel, some might have a crispy topping.

The one I like best, actually, is made usually not with apples, but with pears.

And it's a nice, sweet pie pastry crust.

And then it has an almond frangipane filling and then thinly-sliced pears almost in a petal, flower pattern embedded down in the frangipane.

And you'll see that often in the Normandy bakers.

Just the local baker made wonderful croissants, some of the best I've ever come across.

And he would make brioche.

It was always a Sunday treat, that.

And it was a little village.

I mean, 200 people, something like that.

And at Christmas, every pensioner was given by the village a big brioche, and it would have that nice hat on the top, you know, that when you try to make them, they always fall off, because the dough gets soft, and the hat falls sideways.

And the test of a good baker in Normandy is having the little lady sitting with her skirt like this, which is the brioche skirt, and then her little round bun top on the top and lovely and brown.

-I'm Remy Funfrock, pastry chef at Cafe Boulud.

And today I'm going to do a pear Napoleon with a Calvados cream and caramel ice cream.

I put some butter in the pan.

And brown sugar.

And I dissolve -- dissolve the sugar.

And add the pear right away.

And caramelize the pear.

Just rub the pear with the caramel and butter.

I use brown sugar.

It's a wonderful flavor with the butter.

Reminds me of butter I used to use in France from Normandy.

When the pear get like that, caramelized, I flamb with Calvados.

And I keep the caramelization to do the sauce later.

Layers of puff pastry, caramelized puff pastry.

Add the pear.

Now I'm going to pipe some Calvados cream, some pastry cream flavored with Calvados.

Another layer of puff pastry.

I'm going to top the mille-feuille with caramel ice cream.

Some sauce around.

I know Claude Monet was a fan gourmet, so I think pear, Calvados, caramel ice cream, puff pastry, I think, is a nice combination of flavors.

And I think he would -- I think he would love it.

-We have irises and roses and peonies and poppies, and it's a galaxy of color.

It's Monet's palette.

-I think a little -- a toast to Claude.

-Claude Monet's Claude Monet, and that's a hell of a painter.

Boy.

Wonderful.