Anyone can use fruit to make a sweet dish: apple brown betty, strawberry parfait, cherry pie. Peach pie. Blueberry pie. Lemon meringue pie. Key lime pie. You get the idea.
But it takes more fortitude to use fruit to make savory foods, more willingness to think outside the peel. And that makes the results all the more special.
Examples abound. If you think about it, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a more or less savory use of fruit in a meal. For that matter, spaghetti and meatballs uses a fruit _ tomatoes _ to make a savory sauce.
I decided to explore the savory side of fruit with four dishes. Not one of them used jelly or tomato sauce, which would be easy. No, instead I made duck a l'Orange.
Duck a l'Orange takes significant time and effort. If you feel that you'll never put that much labor into a single meal, don't worry _ the other three dishes are easier. Much easier.
Seriously, one is just a grilled cheese sandwich with slices of pear and roast beef. It's so easy, it's almost not worth talking about (until you try it, and then you'll be talking about it for weeks).
But first, the duck a l'Orange.
Duck a l'Orange is the most classic of all classic fruit-based savory dishes; it has been around since at least the 1500s, and some scholars think it goes back before that. According to Saveur magazine, when French cooking changed radically in the 17th century from medieval tastes to the style we know today, one of the very few dishes that survived the transition was duck a l'Orange.
It's just that good.
There are hundreds or thousands of recipes for duck a l'Orange on the internet, and many of them use such abominations as marmalade or orange juice. Please. It was the use of such insipid sweetenings that made the entire world suddenly tired of the dish in the 1980s.
I went old school. I used the recipe by Julia Child, who, after all, was almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing it in America. She makes her own duck stock, so I made my own. She makes a gastrique, so I made gastrique (it's a sweet and sour sauce, which you here mix with the duck stock and blanched orange peels). She sliced four oranges' worth of supremes _ peeled, individual orange sections _ so I sliced four oranges' worth of supremes.
It took a few hours and a fair amount of labor, but the results were exceptional. Supreme, even. Though it is poultry, duck has a hearty flavor to almost rival red meat. This makes it a perfect foil for the exceptionally complex sauce from the meaty stock, the bracing oranges, the faint tang of the gastrique, the reduced sweet madeira wine (or port) and the tempered bitter orange taste of the zest.
C'est magnifique!
Obviously, the grilled cheese sandwich with roast beef and pear cannot compare to a perfectly prepared duck a l'Orange, but it comes a lot closer than you might think possible. One bite, and it could become your favorite sandwich ever.
The secret is the cheese. The recipe calls for blue cheese, which of course makes the ultimate combination with roast beef. And the cheese is mixed with a bit of mayonnaise, to make it even richer and creamier.
The sliced pear adds an unexpected brightness to the sandwich, counterbalancing the heavy notes of the beef and blue cheese. In its own way, the sandwich is quietly impressive.
I next made a Chilled Avocado and Yogurt Soup with Melon, which is almost as easy to make as the sandwich. You can think of it as a soup in two parts, the chilled avocado and yogurt part, and the melon part.
The chilled avocado and yogurt part is a tangy and creamy soup with a gorgeous mint-green color and a rich-but-perky flavor to match. The two main ingredients are thinned with vegetable stock, and all it takes is a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice to make the soup wonderfully light and lively.
Then comes the melon part. Add a few cantaloupe melon balls as a sweet and juicy counterpoint, and the flavor _ which is already great to begin with _ becomes exponentially better. It's a scientific fact; you can try it yourself.
Finally, I made a savory tart with figs, blue cheese, honey (well, it's a mostly savory tart), balsamic vinegar and rosemary.
Figs, blue cheese and honey make one of those all-time classic combinations; it may not be as well-known as some, but it is no less magical. Put them on top of a puff pastry tart, and nothing could be better, right?
Well, yes, unless you think to brush the figs with rosemary-flavored olive oil and then sprinkle the tart with reduced balsamic vinegar. That takes the tart into the stratosphere.
It's as good as a fruit pie.
