The Envelope, Please: Cooking En Papillote
By AMANDA HESSER
Published: May 19, 1999
THE cooking method known as en papillote -- for the parchment paper that encloses the food in an envelope -- has held its own through any number of culinary fashions. It was especially favored in the days when haute cuisine was more ceremonious, allowing the server to open the package at the table in a show of erupting aromatic steam. It was ideal during the height of the healthy eating movement, because the method requires little or no additional fat.
Now, it still maintains its place, mostly in restaurants, thanks to what is perhaps a purer, more esthetic reason: a dish cooked in this way is intensely yet harmoniously flavored. Done well, it can present itself in unparalleled and unadorned beauty.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef at Jean Georges, uses the technique. As do Jean-Louis Palladin, the chef at Palladin, and Eberhard Muller, at Lutece.
Although restaurants know how much panache en papillote brings to a dish, there is an additional beauty, one appreciated by too few home cooks: it is fast and uncomplicated in its execution, once you get the knack and understand the principles that underlie the method.
When food is sealed in paper, it cooks in its own juices. It is a more flavorful approach than ordinary steaming and less restrictive than cooking in a hermetically sealed pot. There is no water beneath and no lid above. Ingredients cook quickly because they are surrounded by moist heat. As the package is heated, the air inside expands, and the flavors of the ingredients are swept into it, swirling and mingling, with no escape. The ingredients are, in a sense, cooked with flavored air and form a sauce purely of their own essence.
Today, when efficiency is often valued over ceremony, the traditional parchment (which requires some technique and time to cut into the shaped envelope that most dishes require) is replaced by simple crimped aluminum foil, with no loss of flavor.
At Palladin, Mr. Palladin prepares vegetables in a foil package. When it arrives at the table, it is not particularly attractive, looking more like a TV dinner. It is rumpled on the edges and lies on a bed of hot rock salt to keep it warm. The waiter just slashes open the package and leaves you to fend for yourself. Inside the banks of foil is a tangle of ramps, turnips, asparagus, baby pattypan squash and tiny mushrooms called mousserons. What you cannot see, you smell -- grass and onions and a heady truffle broth.
But like many other chefs perpetually in search of an idiosyncratic touch, Mr. Palladin embellishes on the simple method by first simmering each vegetable individually. Then he brings them to the foil. On the aluminum, he lays a lettuce leaf as insurance against scorching, combines the vegetables and broth and bakes the combination to create a superbly harmonious dish.
Mr. Vongerichten, staying closer to the basic technique, makes a similar but simpler dish. He brushes a piece of foil with olive oil, and then assembles a pyramid of spring vegetables -- pea shoots and then morels and blanched fiddleheads -- and a neat square of black bass. Over it he lays asparagus and ramps, and seasons the stack with salt, enriched chicken stock and vin jaune, a sherrylike wine. He folds it up firmly but roughly. As for parchment, he said, ''I don't have the patience for that.''
His own take on the technique is to do it on the stove top rather than in the oven. He heats a saute pan brushed with oil, and then lays the foil package directly on top. It inflates like a balloon, and when it looks as if it is about to burst, he begins counting four minutes. The package, like a manhole, spews steam from its corners; it ultimately becomes so inflated that just a Band-Aid size strip is in contact with the pan. Mr. Vongerichten calls it ''Jiffy Pop for black bass.''
Cooking en papillote is almost always associated with fish and vegetables. They are delicate, aromatic ingredients, and they cook quickly. But the association is too limiting. Cooking en papillote is a sophisticated way of preparing all kinds of foods. Meats like lamb and chicken also benefit from cooking in paper or foil. It just must be done more slowly.
At Rosa Mexicano, for instance, there is a dish called mixiote de cordero, which is lamb in parchment. It is a traditional Mexican preparation from Tlaxcala, near Mexico City. There, meats are wrapped in the skin of young maguey leaves and steamed, usually for several hours. At the restaurant, Ruperto Cantor, the chef, uses parchment paper rather than the leaves to cook lamb shanks rubbed with pasilla, guajillo and ancho chilies and garlic. The same may be done with chicken or rabbit, he said.
Strangely, pasta, one of the most time-sensitive dishes, can be made with parchment. The pasta is not cooked in the paper but finished in it, blending all of the flavors in the sealed package just before serving.
Margherita Aloi, the chef at Le Madri, prepares a spaghetti dish in her own atypical way. She cooks the spaghetti until it has just a thin, firm core, and then swirls it with a simple tomato puree and tiny meatballs made with veal, ricotta cheese and lemon zest. She wets a piece of parchment, lines a terra-cotta dish with it and fills it with the pasta. Then she seals the paper, ''like a seed package,'' she said, gathering the open ends and folding them down like a brown paper bag, and she places the dish in a cool corner of a wood-fired oven. The terra cotta, she said, keeps the heat even, so the bottom doesn't scorch. When the paper browns, it is ready. When it is finally unfolded, steam billows forth. The tomatoes and meatballs glisten, and the pasta is perfectly al dente.
Bondi Ristorante also serves pasta ''in cartoccio,'' Italian for ''in a bag,'' but with shellfish rather than meatballs.