July 21, 2006
MarkBernstein.org
 

Sauce Robert

Michael Ruhlman revisits a revelatory moment in cooking -- his first encounter with Michael Pardus' Sauce Robert.

It didn’t taste brown anymore, it taste light and clean and delicious, smooth on the palate, bright from the wine and mustard, sweet from the mirepoix used along the way and now the minced onion. That something could go from drab brown to deeply delicious in a few moments was the first part of the revelation; the second was confronting the fact of my own deep ignorance. That was the moment I realized how little I knew about food and cooking and how vast this new country that I’d just set out to explore was going to be.

Ruhlman's veal stock really is worth the effort.