The French touch: a bottle of Banyuls and a fresh vanilla pod. Banyuls is one of the several fortified sweet wines that you find in southeastern France. The alcohol is high at 16.5 per cent, it costs fifteen to twenty dollars a bottle, and, like the cranberry, it has bright, zingy flavors. (The cook also found it to be a perfectly sound refreshment while finishing the turkey.) Vanilla is one of the fundamentals of the French palate, and not only in pastry; perhaps only the shallot is more pervasive.
Ingredients
1 lb. fresh cranberries½ cup sugar1 vanilla bean, wholeBlack pepper, to taste½ cup or more Banyuls wine
Directions
1. Wash cranberries and toss with sugar. Add to a saucepan.
2. Split vanilla bean lengthwise (try to split only the top half, leaving the bottom half intact), scrape out the seeds, and add them to the saucepan. Toss the pod in as well. (Retrieve it later and either put it to a second application or dry it out and keep it in a jar with sugar.)
3. Grind a generous amount of black pepper into the saucepan. Add wine, set heat to high, and bring to a boil. Stir once and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 10 minutes, uncovered, stir again, then add lid. Turn off heat. Check after 10 minutes, stir, taste (More sugar? A splash of wine? Black pepper?), and let cool.
Quince in Quince Nectar with Calvados
Like the cranberry, the quince, a relative of the apple and the pear, is an autumnal fruit with complex flavors that makes for a stunning sauce. You often can get quince where apples and pears are grown, and from Locust Grove Orchards, at the Union Square Greenmarket (which should have some on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving). An ancient fruit, quince is unrewarding until cooked and sweetened—the Greeks preserved it in honey—and is so high in pectin that it was probably the basis of early jam-making. (Spanish membrillo, traditionally served with a mild Spanish cheese, is jellified quince.) The fruit is tough, though: cutting it into bite-size pieces might be easier with a saw, and coring one is a little unnerving, requiring such an exertion to extract the pit with your knife that, at the moment of success, the knife is liable to shoot off dangerously (and take, on at least one occasion, a piece of the bearer’s hand with it). But I love the result.
I developed the following recipe in Lyon when I was trying to come up with a novel-seeming sauce for canard au cidre—duck in cider sauce—and then found the fruit so delicious that I couldn’t stop eating it.
Ingredients
8 medium quinces2 vanilla beans2 cinnamon sticks1 cup coconut sugar, such as Big Tree Farms, from Indonesia (or substitute brown sugar)1 cloveGrated fresh nutmeg, to taste (several swipes across a grater)½ cup strong cider (or a floral white wine)2 oz. calvados
Directions
1. Peel and core quince, and place peelings and seeds in a saucepan. Add 1 vanilla bean (split in half), 1 cinnamon stick, and water to cover. Simmer for at least 30 minutes and up to 1 hour. Strain the quince water, return to pan, and reduce slowly by half. Set aside.
2. Roughly cut the quince into chunks, put in a bowl, add coconut sugar, and toss to coat. Add remaining vanilla bean (split in half, with seeds scraped out), remaining cinnamon stick, clove, nutmeg, apple cider, calvados, and 6 oz. of the reduced quince water. (See note below for uses for the remaining quince water.) Let sit for at least 30 minutes.
3. Empty contents of the bowl into a pot. Set over medium heat and bring to a simmer. After 15 minutes, check the quince for tenderness with a sharp knife or a pastry needle. If not ready, keep checking every 10 minutes. In my experience, it may take a little time or a long time—it depends on the fruit—but you don’t want it to cook to mushiness. When done, remove fruit from pot, place in a bowl, and set aside.
Dining and Cooking