Blue Cayenne

This would be a delightful soup to serve on New Year’s Eve. 

It’s delicious. 

It’s beautiful.

The Roquefort cheese and butter mixture stirred into the soup at the list minute adds a subtle and unexpected flavor that should wow your guests on that special night.

It would definitely be a conversation starter.

After all, who expects to find  blue cheese in their soup, let alone a fine sheep milk blue from Southern France with, according to Smithsonian Magazine, a pedigree that dates back to at least 1411–the year when French King Charles VI of France officially gave the cheese the protection of the crown.

Here’s a bit of history. Charles VI was known as Charles The Beloved when he was young. He succeed to the throne at eleven. As he matured, however, things took a dark turn and “The Beloved” morphed into “The Mad” as Charles’ mental health deteriorated.  At times, he thought he was made of glass and would shatter if jostled. At other times, he ran wildly up and down the halls of his palace, a development that caused his aides to seal the palace doors. In battle, he attacked his own men. It was a difficult time for France and its troubled king during a particularly fraught period in French history as France struggled with England.

We’re figuring that the recognition of Roquefort cheese as a French treasure was done on one of Charles’ good days.

I first learned this recipe at the La Bonne Cuisine Cooking School then located just off Main Street in Seal Beach, California. Margaret, the proprietor, was a talented recipe developer. I fell in love with the tiny cooking school and attended many classes there. We learned everything from classical French dishes to regional Mexican ones.

Sadly, La Bonne Cuisine Cooking School is long closed and to my knowledge no similar cooking school operates locally. Fortunately, I still have a big notebook of Margaret’s recipes. Here is the original recipe handout from the school with all the scribbles of an eager cooking student (me!). It looks like I took that class in the summer of 1979–23 years ago. 

Wow! I HAVE been serving this soup for a long time. 

Here is Veloute de Roquefort as I prepared it in my kitchen. This soup deserves the best Roquefort cheese you can find. 

There is a surprise in every delicious bite of this unusual salad!

The big surprise here is a big schmear of softened goat cheese and cream cheese hiding under this pretty pile of greens and golden beets. 

More good news! There can be a real WOW factor with this salad; it lends itself to being very artfully arranged on a plate. 

I served this recently at a dinner party. My guests were curious when I served it. When I collected the plates, every  bit of the salads was eaten down to the last tiny microgreen. 

I’m listing the ingredients below, but not the quantities. This recipe is very flexible. I’ll leave the quantities up to you, the size of your party and your taste. 

It’s the season for gift giving. 

Here’s an idea: Gift a snacking cake.  Your gift will be as unique as it will be delicious.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in Chetna Masan’s great cookbook, The Cardamom Trail. You can find the book at your local bookstore or on Amazon here. The book’s target subject is baking both sweet and savory foods (many of them European classics) with spices ranging from cardamom to cloves to tamarind and fenugreek. These were the spices traded centuries ago along the ancient trade route often referred to as “The Cardamom Trail.”

The cookbook’s author, Chetna Masan, was a Great British Bake-Off contestant. She was born in India but currently lives (and bakes) in Great Britain. In the forward to her book, Makan explains that she often takes a classic European recipe and adds Indian spices like cardamom to mix things up. This, for example, is a delicious “take” on traditional carrot cake. 

The cardamom spice used in this recipe, if you are unfamiliar with it, is the world’s third most expensive spice–after saffron and vanilla. Indigenous to India, the spice was grown only in India until around 1900 when German immigrants exported it to Guatemala. (Guatemala is now the world’s major producer of the spice.)  Today, according to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, a significant percentage of the world’s crop is consumed in Arab countries (for Cardamom coffee) and by Nordic countries where the spice is used extensively in baking.

If you are really a fan of this spice (as I am), here is a link to an interesting 7-minute video about cardamom growers in India: Cardamom Production in India. The harvesting of the spice is difficult and crops are increasingly threatened by climate change. That means, of course, that the world’s third most expensive spice is likely to get a whole lot more expensive in coming years. 

Here is the recipe for Carrot and Banana Spiced Cake as I prepared it in my kitchen and a link to the original recipe on the author’s web page: Carrot and Banana Cake.