23It was a strange
and excellent
exercise to cook
the dishes of a
long-ago iconic
restaurant.- Dump butter-flour mixture into a medium
stainless bowl, make a well in the center and
pour ice-cold water into the well. - Using a flexible plastic dough scraper
instead of your warm hands, bring the dough
together by folding and pressing. Be firm and
brisk and get the dough past its shaggy stage
into a neat disc, trying to avoid using your
hands or too much kneading. Refrigerate the
dough for 30 minutes. Heat the oven to 375. - Cut the onions in half, and peel. Slice
the halves with the ribs (root end to sprout
end direction), not against, to create
julienne slices rather than half moons. - In a wide sauté pan over low-medium
heat, melt the bacon fat and slowly sweat
the onions until they are caramelized.
Take all the minutes you need — 25 or so —
to let them soften to translucent, then to
let the water they release start to evaporate,
then to allow the sugars they contain
to start to brown in the pan, so that you
end up with soft, sweet and evenly
browned onions. This is achieved by a slow
caramelization. Set onions aside to cool. - Roll tart dough out to a ¼-inch-thick round,
and drape over a round 10-inch fluted
false-bottom tart pan. Lay dough into the pan,
gently pressing into the bottom, and roll the
pin across the pan to cut off the excess dough.
Use your fingers to press the edges into the
flutes, accentuating the shape of the dough
edge. Dock the bottom of the dough with the
tines of a fork, weight the pastry with beans
or weight and blind-bake for 25 minutes. - In a bowl, beat the egg with the cream.
Stir in the caramelized onions; season with
pepper and nutmeg and salt to taste.
Stir well, and make sure the onions are all
evenly coated with the custard. - Remove tart shell from oven, and slip it onto
a baking sheet. Remove weights, fill with the
onion-custard mixture and distribute it evenly.
Return tart to oven on the sheet, and bake for
25 minutes, or until custard has set, the tops of
the onions start to achieve a deeper brown and
the dough is dark golden brown at the edges. - Remove from the ring, and allow to
cool just a few minutes on the rack, so that
the piping hot tart shell can kind of tighten
up enough to be sliced with a sharp chef’s
knife. (In the first few minutes straight
out of the oven, the dough is kind of soft from
the heat, possibly giving you the false
impression that you have a soggy tart. Let it
sit on the rack just to shake off this initial
soft stage and to recrisp and refirm, which it
will.) Cut into wedges, and serve while hot.
Yield: 6 servings.Adapted From ‘‘Th e Lutèce Cookbook,’’
by André Soltner and Seymour Britchky.Onion Tart
Time: 1 hour 40 minutes2 cups/260 grams AP fl our
Pinch kosher salt
½ cup/115 grams unsalted butter (1 stick),
cut into thumbnail cubes
½ cup/120 milliliters ice-cold water
1 pound yellow onions
2 tablespoons rendered bacon fat or lard
1 large egg
½ cup/120 milliliters heavy cream
Freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg- Blend flour and salt in the bowl of a food
processor. Scatter butter over flour, return
lid and pulse 12 pulses to cut butter into flour
to a coarse meal consistency.
from him that I and so many of my peers
learned essential French dishes — the
feather-light pike quenelles in sauce
homard, the French-style omelet and the
framboise souff lé. And it was from Solt-
ner that we learned to show up for work:
he spent 33 years at the stoves of Lutèce,
living in his apartment above ‘‘the shop,’’
notably missing only four days of work.
Perhaps most important, from Soltner we
saw how to remain true to yourself and to
your roots in your cooking: The famous
onion tart he served at his restaurant was
Alsatian, just like him.
Lutèce had already been closed for
26 years by the day of our lunch; hardly
anyone on my staff knew who he was. But
when I sent the email blast announcing
his guest-chef appearance, the lunch sold
out immediately. People fl ew in from all
across the country, and the dining room
was filled with industry pros: chefs,
restaurateurs, sommeliers, cookbook
editors, publishers and food writers. The
reverence for him in the room was palpa-
ble. Great whistling and clapping erupt-
ed frequently throughout the afternoon,
even before we poured the high-octane
pear-and-plum eaux de vie!
With Soltner cooking alongside us in
the days leading up to the lunch, we made
the pike quenelles in sauce homard and the
framboise souff lés and, of course, the onion
tarts. We were steeped in his cooking and
his thinking, and it was an excellent exer-
cise to prepare the dishes of a long-ago
iconic restaurant, and to see whether they
stood the test of time without becoming
museum pieces. Every one, especially the
onion tart, was still pitch perfect.
Soltner brought New Yorkers the onion
tart of his childhood in the Alsace. His
mother would take him by bus from their
small village to the nearby city of Mulhouse
for her shopping. In the windows of the
little bistros, there would be signs: tarte à
l’oignon prête à quatre heures. So at 4 o’clock,
fi nished with their errands, his mother
would take them for the tart, and she would
have a glass of wine, letting young André
have a sip, too. The onion tart has since
had its modernist interpretations and its
haute renditions, but the one he served
at Lutèce all those decades was distinctly
straightforward; he used a recipe from his
aunt. And that is the one here.
His tart dough comes together quick-
ly and easily; it is sturdy enough for the
job while remaining tender enough to
the tongue. The original recipe assumes
you have some skills and experience of
your own in a kitchen, but I added a
few precautionary and possibly over-
weaning instructions to the protocol
just in case.
All tarts that are fi lled raw and then
baked run the risk of having undercooked
bottoms or overdone contents. Like the
struggle to properly cook the leg and
breast of a whole turkey, this is the kind
of problem that arises when you need two
diff erent cooking temperatures and dura-
tions in the same dish. It’s now standard
to blind-bake the shell before you fi ll it,
and I’ve added the step. I like recipes to
be written the same way you would give
driving directions to your house to people
whom you really want to arrive.
As thrilled as we were to have Soltner
with us and to host a room packed with
his fans that day, it turns out he was as
delighted to be with us. He had cooked
for presidents and heads of state, but in
his entire restaurant career he had never
worked in a kitchen with women. At the
lunch, he stood up on an overturned
milk crate and addressed the room: ‘‘You
know, Gabrielle, it just wasn’t a thing in
my time.’’ He shrugged not apologetically
but more undeniably matter-of-fact and
said: ‘‘We didn’t have women in the bri-
gade, and so I never had that experience,
and I’m so happy to have had it now.’’ I
just hope that when I’m 87, this onion tart
will still be here, and that I’ll be limber
enough to have a new experience, and
spry enough to get up on a milk crate to
thank somebody for it.