Baby’s First Quiche

My maternal grandmother, as a child of the late forties/early fifties, is no stranger to convenience foods. Nonetheless, there are certain dishes about which she remains resolutely old-fashioned.

“You know,” she confided to my mother and me over Christmas, “my neighbor just told me she made her first homemade pie. Her first!” After we had expressed the appropriate surprise and dismay, she continued, “And then she told me, ‘Well, I made the filling and then just popped it into a crust I bought at the store!’ If she thinks that was homemade, well, what was she doing before?”

I’ve often heard it said that refrigerated pie crusts are a fine substitute for the homemade sort, even by people who presumably have more cooking experience than my grandmother’s unfortunate neighbor. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that those people are full of beans. There are quite a number of foods that I will grant are the same, or even better, when purchased rather than made at home. Under no circumstance is pie crust one of them.*

And yet it was pie crust that I found myself craving yesterday, specifically pie crust paired with a buttery egg mixture and, ideally, some spinach and/or bacon. Which was when I turned to my new friend Ginette.

Slight digression re: how Ginette and I made each other’s acquaintance: long ago, when my father was a child escaping a rather unpleasant conflict in his native land, his mother shipped him and his siblings out to stay with her college friends, who happened to live in the French countryside. This was not an ideal circumstance for anyone, of course, especially my (paternal) grandmother, who may or may not have been imprisoned as a result, depending on whom you ask. Nonetheless, it beat, say, being forced to stay in a hidden annex, especially because it gave my father a chance to acquire what would become a lifelong love affair with the cuisine of his tantes. Flash forward to the present day: he has passed that affection along to me, and I, in turn, have acquired what is said to be the Joy of Cooking of the French home kitchen, my new amie Ginette’s Je Sais Cuisiner (“I Know How To Cook“).

The thing about IKHTC is that the vast majority of the recipes run to less than three paragraphs, even the ones involving organ meats. For this reason, I’ve been suspicious of the amount of flavor each recipe could truly have. However, I did just finish Julia Child’s memoir re: France, which gave me faith that there might be something to these recipes after all. So I decided to tackle both her basic pie crust and her recipe for quiche Lorraine. As a control, and so I would have a choice of quiches over the next couple of weeks, I also made myfavoritefoodblogever Smitten Kitchen’s spinach quiche, using the same crust recipe.

The results? My doubts were put to rest. Making this pie crust is as much of a pain, sans food processor (mine is missing a part), as any other, but no more so, and it tastes fine – good buttery flavor, nice flaky texture from the canola oil. In an effort to test the recipe’s worth, I restrained myself from adding cheese to the bacon quiche, and it totally didn’t need it. The Internets told me I could swap sour cream for the creme fraiche to no ill effect, which I did for economics purposes, and for once the masses were right. Tastes great. Very easy. You totally don’t need more than a paragraph for this recipe. It rose to a positively inspiring height in the oven.

And as for the Florentine? Delicious also. Pretty sure both grandmothers are proud of me right now.

See? Really nice.

A few notes on the following recipe, and on IKHTC in general: I hate to say this, but it does help if you already know how to cook a little. I happen to know how to combine butter and flour for a pie crust, and she doesn’t really elaborate or provide any illustrations. That having been said, if you have ever made your own meals before, or if you have access to the vast hive mind that is the World Wide Web, you should be okay.

*I find store-bought pie crusts to have off flavors that are often unidentifiable and can only be attributed to chemicals, preservatives, and lack of freshness. This applies to store-bought pies as well, and indeed, if given a piece of store-bought pie I usually eat the filling out of it and try to discreetly dispose of the rest.

Quiche Lorraine

from Ginette Mathiot’s I Know How To Cook

• 1 recipe basic pie dough (recipe follows)
• flour for dusting
• 3-4 pieces bacon, fried and crumbled
• 4 eggs
• Generous 2 cups creme fraiche, or 1 cup milk + 1 cup creme fraiche (or 1 cup sour cream + 1 cup milk)
• Salt and pepper (I accidentally left this out until it was already in the crust. Still good)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roll the dough out on a surface dusted with flour and line a solid-based 9-inch tart pan. Sprinkle the bacon over the base. Beat the eggs in a bowl, add the creme fraiche, or creme fraiche and milk, and season with salt and pepper. (Note: you will be pleasantly surprised at how satisfyingly thick and smooth this gets.) Pour the mixture into the pastry shell. Bake for 40 minutes, or until set.

Basic Pie Dough (Pate Brisee)

from Ginette Mathiot’s IKHTC

Believe you me, if I had a functioning food processor (working on it) I would be making pie-related recipes once a week. And this is one of the recipes I would use.

• Generous 2 cups flour, plus extra for dusting
• 1 tbsp flavorless oil, such as sunflower or canola
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 c (1 stick) butter, chilled and diced (note: I made one crust with salted butter and one with unsalted. Both were fine. I think salted is okay if you’re familiar with the brand of butter and can reasonably guess how much salt a stick will have.)
• 1-2 tbsp ice cold water (I used a lot more than that. Just add water until it coheres)

Put the flour into a bowl. Make a well in the middle and add the oil, salt and butter. Rub the butter into the flour. (If you don’t know how to do this, SK, of course, has a nice tutorial. You can use an implement like she does, a fork or a knife, or your fingers. Not recommended: a whisk, which essentially becomes a cage filled with butter.) Moisten with the water to form the dough. Briefly knead the dough by hand; the more quickly this is done, the better (read: flakier) this pastry will be. Cover the dough with plastic wrap or tinfoil and let rest in the refrigerator for between 30 minutes and 24 hours. Bring to room temperature before rolling out. (I did not. It was still good. But I suspect it would have a better texture still if you did.) On a lightly floured surface, roll it out to a circle 1/8 inch thick and use to line a tart pan. The dough may also be used to line small round or boat-shaped pans (barquettes).

Spinach Quiche

From Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Bon Appetit, October 1991

• 1 recipe Basic Pie Dough (see above)
• 1 3-ounce package cream cheese, room temperature
• 1/3 cup half and half
• 3 eggs
• 1 10-ounce package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
• 1/2 cup grated cheddar
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan (I used Asiago, because that’s what I had)
• 4 to 6 green onions, sliced (I left these out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Preheat oven to 425°F. Beat cream cheese in medium bowl until smooth. Gradually beat in half and half and eggs. Mix in remaining ingredients. Pour mixture into prepared crust. Bake until crust is golden brown and filling is set, about 25 minutes. Cool 10 minutes before serving.

- Hillary