I was having my déjeuner quickly one day before the meal service was to start in the main dining room. As was my habit, and since as a friend of the chef I was considered to be on a slightly different level than the fulltime cooks in the kitchen, whenever I worked at Le Château d’Amondans I ate my meals with the chef and his family in their private dining room. As usual, the chef, Frédéric Médigue came running in as if he was late and carrying his usual armful of lunchtime mail.

The small, yellow La Poste truck arrived every day, except Sunday, just before noon; as you would expect, there was a bundle of daily mail directed to the restaurant and hotel. There was always plenty of bills and advertisements. Occasionally, there was a personal letter; a couple of times a month, a cooking magazine would arrive. Since the mail was never for me, I had no interest in it except for the cooking magazines.

One day, as I was waiting for my repas to be served, and Frédéric and Pascale, his wife, both talked away on separate wireless phones, I kept myself occupied by thumbing through one of the cooking magazines. It was a magazine designed for professionals; there was a ton of advertisements for equipment and supplies with the occasional article thrown in. One short feature caught my eye. It was a biographical sketch of a chef not familiar to me. There was a paragraph or two about him and his restaurant. There were also two pictures of him with this rather fancy preparation. In one he was pretending to assemble the dish and in the other he was holding up the plate and posing with a wall-to-wall smile. I looked at the dish and recognized it immediately: émietté d’esquinade à l’huile de curry.

I held on to the magazine, my finger marking the page, like a cat that just caught his first mouse. I waited eagerly for Frédéric to finish his call and immediately placed the magazine, open to “that” page, in front of him. “He stole your recipe!” I cried out. Frédéric calmly looked down at the offending page and laughingly said, “No. We both stole the recipe from Mr. Outhier.”

(Louis Outhier is a retired chef from the south of France. He, along with Paul Bocuse, Jean Troisgros, and other chefs of that ilk, were students of Fernand Point. Starting in 1954, Outhier was the proprietor and executive chef at Restaurant L’Oasis. The restaurant was located in a renovated villa in the village of La Napoule near Cannes. It received its third Michelin star in 1969. André Gayot, in his article Of Stars and Tripes: The True Story of Nouvelle Cuisine, writes, “Outhier, who had worked at L’Oriental in Bangkok, was the one who introduced the Asian accent with spices and herbs [to nouvelle cuisine]. He knew how to use them: in minute quantities with subtle touches only.” In 1988, Outhier stepped away from the stove and worked for a while as a consulting chef. Mr. Outhier remains one of Frédéric’s mentors and when the Château was a school as well as a restaurant, he would spend a couple of weeks each year working with the students.)

I first encountered émietté d’esquinade à l’huile de curry on my first visit to Le Château d’Amondans in June, 1999. On that visit I was a combination student and tourist. Chef Médigue demonstrated the preparation of the dish during one of our classes, and we ate it as our entrée for the lunch that followed. I returned the next May for a five-week long stage, and this entrée was still on the menu. On that visit I spent mornings, afternoons, and evenings, six days each week, working in the Château’s kitchen, providing me numerous occasions to pick the meat from totes full of still-hot, cooked crabs for the dish. Although I picked a lot of crab, I never had the opportunity to work on the rest of the dish’s preparation. Because of the poor quality of mandolin they were using, the other cooks all seemed to struggle with the preparation of the fresh potato chips that were part of the dish. When I returned to Le Château d’Amondans to work the following year, the dish was no longer on the menu.

I should probably make one correction to the previous paragraph. We never actually prepared émietté d’esquinade à l’huile de curry at Le Château d’Amondans. We were actually preparing émietté de tourteau à l’huile de curry. Esquinade is a smallish variety, 500 to 900 grams (1/2 to 1 pound), of crab found in the Mediterranean Sea along the south of France. What was available in Amondans, far away from the Mediterranean, was the more generic tourteau. This word along with crabe is what you commonly find on menus throughout France. The tourteaux we were cleaning weighed in at greater than a kilo (21/4 pounds). For my preparation in this article, I used one of the Dungeness crabs common to my part of the world.

Most of the preparation of émietté de crabe à l’huile de curry is completed long before serving time. And although the dish is fairly complicated, it is not particularly difficult to complete if you set aside sufficient time for the mise en place and have all the necessary equipment at your disposal. As described read below, it is possible to break the mise en place into seven distinct steps. The first one, l’huile de curry, needs to start the night before you plan to serve the dish. The remaining steps can be completed a few hours before serving, although the crab could be cooked and cleaned a day ahead if that fits your schedule better. The quantities in the following recipe are sufficient for 4 servings.

l’huile de curry  

le crabe  

Note: although fresh crab is best in this dish, canned crab can be substituted. Be sure to choose a brand where the meat is flavorful and not shredded too fine.

les chips  

la mayonnaise  

Note: if you wish, you can make the mayonnaise using an egg yolk instead of the white in the traditional manner with a whisk. With either method, more mayonnaise than is needed by the recipe will be produced.

la purée d’avocat  

le poireau  

les ciboulettes  

Note: choose chives that are bright green but dry inside.

assemblage et service