Around My French Table (79 page)

Usually street-corner crepes are made with the simplest ingredients, but when you're making crepes at home, there's no reason not to make them with a little extra butter and a spoonful of dark rum, so that even if all you do is sprinkle them with sugar, you've got crepes with a lot of flavor.

If you'd like to do more than sugar the crepes, you can fold them into triangles, fill them with lemon curd (delicious but optional), and drizzle over a sauce with all the flavors of the original Suzette. The sauce comes from Pierre Hermé, and while it's simpler than the classic, it's no less seductive.

BE PREPARED:
Crepe batter is very quick to make, but it absolutely must rest in the refrigerator before you use it—it needs the rest and chill to become perfectly blended and to thicken. Two hours is the minimum; 12 hours or more is ideal.

TO MAKE THE CREPES:
If you'd like, put the sugar and zests into a bowl and rub the ingredients together with your fingertips until the sugar is moist and very fragrant. (This is a great technique for getting all of the flavor from the zests' volatile oils into the sugar.) Rubbed or not, put the sugar and zests in a blender or food processor. Add the salt, eggs, milk, rum or vanilla, and Grand Marnier, if you're using it, and whir to blend. Pour in the butter and whir until the mixture is well blended. Add the flour and pulse the machine to incorporate it. Make certain the flour is blended, but don't mix the batter too much. Pour the batter into a pitcher or a large measuring cup with a spout, cover, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
(The batter can be refrigerated for up to 1 day.)

When you're ready to make the crepes, sprinkle a dinner plate with sugar, and keep the sugar bowl close by. Check the batter: it should be just a bit thicker than heavy cream. If it seems a little too thick—it should pour easily—thin it with milk, stirring it in a drop at a time.

To make the crepes, you'll need a seasoned or nonstick 7½-inch-diameter crepe pan or a similar-sized skillet. Rub the pan with a lightly oiled crumpled paper towel and put the pan over medium heat. When it's hot, lift it from the heat and pour in 2 to 3 tablespoons of batter; as soon as the batter is in the pan, swirl the pan to spread the batter in a thin, even layer. If you're new at this, the easiest thing is to pour in more batter than you need, quickly swirl the pan, and then pour the excess batter back into the pitcher. Return the pan to the heat—use a small spatula to cut off the tail that formed if you poured back the batter—and cook until the top of the crepe is set. Run the spatula—an offset icing spatula is great for crepe making—around the edges of the crepe and take a look at the underside: if it's browned, flip it over, a job best done with your fingers. Cook until the underside is speckled with brown spots (it will never be as brown or as pretty as the first side). Transfer the crepe to the sugared plate, sprinkle it lightly with sugar, and continue with the rest of the batter. The crepes can be used now or held for later (see Storing).

TO MAKE THE SAUCE:
If you have an immersion blender, this is a good job for it; if not, use a whisk. Melt the honey in a microwave oven or in a saucepan over low heat. Cool the honey for 5 minutes, then add the orange and lemon juices. Blend or whisk in the butter, adding it a tablespoon at a time. You'll have a smooth, slightly thickened sauce.
(The sauce can be refrigerated overnight; reheat before serving.)

If you want to fill the crepes, spoon some lemon curd onto the upper-right-hand quarter of each crepe, fold the crepe up from the bottom, so you cover the filling, and finish by folding the left half of the crepe over the right, forming a triangle. If you're not filling the crepes, fold them in quarters. Arrange the crepes on plates, drizzle the sauce over them, and serve immediately.

MAKES ABOUT 10 CREPES

SERVING
Although you can certainly eat crepes out of hand and imagine yourself on the streets of Paris, I serve these as a plated dessert because I'm crazy about the impossible-to-eat-on-the-run sauce. Whether filled with lemon curd or just sprinkled with sugar, the crepes should be folded into triangles and drizzled with the sauce.

STORING
You can make the crepe batter and sauce a day ahead and keep them covered in the refrigerator; reheat the sauce gently before using. You can even make the crepes ahead. Let cool, then wrap them airtight and keep them in the refrigerator for up to 1 day or in the freezer for up to 2 months; if you want to freeze the crepes, stack them, putting a piece of wax paper between each crepe, and then wrap them airtight. Thaw, still wrapped, in the refrigerator. To reheat the crepes, wrap them in aluminum foil—it's best to make 2 packets—and put them in a 350-degree-F oven for about 5 minutes.

BONNE IDÉE
Gâteau de Crepes
Instead of wrapping your crepes around a filling, you can stack the crepes, layering them with some filling, and make a cake that's unfailingly impressive. Traditionally a crepe cake is made with about 20 crepes (so you'll need to double the crepe recipe) and layered with vanilla pastry cream (
[>]
). You can use chocolate pastry cream (
[>]
) or the same lemon curd (
[>]
) used for the Suzette-type crepes, or you can alternate layers of pastry cream and curd or use pastry cream or curd on half the crepes and jam on the others. You can layer the crepes with bittersweet ganache (
[>]
) or ganache and Nutella. Whatever you do, you should assemble the
gâteau
in advance so that you can give it at least 4 hours in the refrigerator before serving. To finish the cake in style, sprinkle the top of the (cold)
gâteau
with an even coating of brown sugar and use a blowtorch to caramelize the sugar. Wait for the sugar to cool before you bring the cake out to applause. If you don't have a torch, just dust the top of the
gâteau
with confectioners' sugar.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERESTIMATE
the French love of Nutella, the chocolate and hazelnut spread invented in Italy about seventy years ago and eaten with gusto all over most of Europe. If you think about how attached we Americans are to peanut butter, you'll have an idea of how much the French love Nutella. It's a perennial at crepe stands all over the country, sometimes along with bananas. Spread on a slice of bread, it's often the after-school snack of choice (see box).

And just as American chefs have been known to use peanut butter to create grown-up desserts that recapture the pleasures of childhood, so French chefs are always finding surprising ways to make Nutella chic. Here's Pierre Hermé's reading of the after-school treat
pain au chocolat:
the bread is brioche (or challah), the chocolate is Nutella, and the surprise is orange marmalade.

For another sophisticated use of Nutella, look at the ganache tart with a hidden layer of the chocolate and hazelnut spread (see Bonne Idée,
[>]
).

Preheat the broiler. Line a baking sheet (or the broiler pan) with aluminum foil.

Put the Nutella in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water and heat, stirring frequently, just until it is softened and warm.

Brush one side of each slice of bread with melted butter, and put the bread, buttered side up, on the baking sheet. Run the bread under the broiler; pull it out when the slices are golden. Spread the marmalade over the hot bread and then, using the tines of a fork, generously drizzle each tartine with some warm Nutella. Top with a few grains of fleur de sel and some chopped hazelnuts.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
Although it's a play on an after-school snack, this tartine is also made for a strong espresso.

STORING
No leftovers except the crumbs.

T
HE TEXTURE OF THIS LIGHT
, thin, crisp, flavorful, and very buttery waffle is remarkable and puzzling—you've got to wonder how anything with so much butter can be so light. The lightness comes not from leavening, but from beaten egg whites, and the crispness from butter.

I can remember when we first tasted this waffle. Michael had ordered it for dessert at Ghislaine Arabian's restaurant in Paris, and after he'd taken the first bite, you could see that he wanted to proclaim its goodness but that he didn't want the exclamation to get in the way of his enjoying the waffle while it was warm and the accompanying ice cream was cold.

When Ghislaine sent me the recipe, I was sure there was a mistake, because when you fold the ingredients into the whipped egg whites, there's so much more liquid than whites that the first thing that comes to mind is "floating islands." And the batter's thin, closer to a crepe batter than the usual waffle mixture. But I should never have doubted a star chef who, although she made her name in Paris, comes from Belgium, the land of waffles.

At the restaurant, Ghislaine served her waffle dusted with confectioners' sugar and accompanied by ice cream. But the waffle can also have a little whipped cream and some chocolate sauce. Or it can be served in the style of the Parisian chef Christian Constant, who cuts his waffles in half, tops each half with whipped cream, and sends out the plate with a little pitcher of caramel sauce.

Preheat a waffle iron. A Belgian waffle iron, one that has deep-pocketed grids, will live up to the treat's origins, but any waffle iron will produce good crispy waffles from this recipe. Just keep in mind that there isn't a standard capacity for irons, so depending on your iron, you might get a bigger or smaller waffle.

Put the butter and milk in a bowl and whisk together. Whisk in the flour until the mixture is fairly smooth—don't worry about a few small lumps—then whisk in the sugar, salt, and vanilla.