The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion

by Patrick O'Connell

Overview

110 sparklingly original recipes from the world-renowned self-taught chef and founder of the three-star Michelin restaurant The Inn at Little Washington
 
Patrick O’Connell, a self-taught chef who read cookbooks to learn how to cook, began his culinary career with a catering business in an old farmhouse, cooking on a wood stove with an electric frying pan purchased for $1.49 at a garage sale. To O’Connell’s surprise, the pan was able for boil, sauté, and deep fry for parties of up to 300 guests, which sharpened his awareness of how much could be done with very little.  In 1978, his catering business evolved into a country restaurant and Inn, operating out of a defunct garage in a small Virginia town affectionately referred to as “Little” Washington. Now a multiple James Beard Award–winning and Michelin star restaurant, The Inn at Little Washington was America’s first five-star Inn.
 
In The Little Inn at Washington Cookbook, O’Connell assembles elegant, simple, and straightforward recipes that elevate everyday ingredients. With helpful, detailed instructions, O’Connell teaches you how to make over one hundred dishes, from Fresh Tuna Tartare on Tuna Carpaccio with Wasabi Mayonnaise and Miniature Caramelized Onion Tartlets to Rockfish Roasted with White Wine, Tomatoes, and Black Olives on Toasted Couscous and Steamed Lobster with Grapefruit Butter Sauce. He also includes delicious desserts, such as Rosemary Crème Brulé and Double-Pumpkin Roulade, and savory sides, like Creamy Garlic Polenta and My Grandmother’s Baked Beans.
 
With over three hundred stunning, mouthwatering photographs and thoughtful reflections from O’Connell, The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook is a fresh and glorious resource and a romantic culinary journey through the Virginia countryside.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679644965
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/02/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A native of Washington D.C., Patrick O'Connell began his culinary career at the age of fifteen, working in a neighborhood restaurant after school. As a drama student at Catholic University of America, he financed his education working as a waiter. In 1972, together with Reinhardt Lynch, O'Connell began a catering enterprise in the Shenandoah Valley that eventually evolved into The Inn at Little Washington.

A member of the prestigious Paris-based Relais and Chateau Association, The Inn received the first perfect score in the history of the Zagat rating system. The James Beard Awards named Patrick O'Connell Best Chef of the Mid-Atlantic region in 1993 and selected The Inn at Little Washington as Restaurant of the Year. O'Connell was one of the original inductees into "Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America." He lives in Washington, Virginia.

Tim Turner is a preeminent food photographer. His previous books include Charlie Trotter's and Vegetables also by Charlie Trotter. His photographs have appeared in Food and Wine, Bon Appetit and Ladies' Home Journal, among other publications, as well as numerous advertisements.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
 
Probably the best and the worst thing that ever happened to me was that I got a job in a restaurant at the impressionable age of fifteen.
 
The addiction was immediate. Once I discovered the pace and intensity of this delicious business, I was hooked. I found restaurant people to be fascinating characters. Whoever was writing this script had an outrageous sense of humor, and I wanted a part in the production.
 
I was supposed to have become an actor but soon found the living theater of the restaurant world more compelling than the stage and discovered that working with food gave me a much-needed grounding and connection with the real world, which contributed to my remaining somewhat sane. Running a restaurant allows me to be the producer, director, set designer, and lead player in a wonderfully fractured nightly performance in which the world of complete illusion in the dining room is brilliantly juxtaposed with the blood-and-guts reality of the kitchen. The fact that no scene can ever be captured or exactly replicated adds a certain spice to the intensity of the moment.
 
This book is a distillation of my thirty years in the kitchen. Many of the recipes I have included are like old friends who have been brought from distant places for a culinary version of This Is Your Life. Each one has a story to tell and relates to the others. Collectively, they define a style and taste that are uniquely American, though full of influences from other countries.
 
This is not a typical chef’s cookbook of esoteric, egomaniacal, and impossibly complicated formulas that only a wizard with a staff of eighty would attempt to produce. The recipes assembled here make up a practiced, finely honed repertoire of elegantly simple and straightforward dishes that are continually evolving. Everyday ingredients are elevated to new heights through surprising combinations and seductive presentations.
 
As a self-taught chef, I have learned my most valuable lessons through making mistakes. I hope this book will keep you from making similar ones. You should be encouraged to know that I taught myself to cook by reading cookbooks and through years of trial and error. I was recently quoted in the book Becoming a Chef as saying that cooking “can’t be taught, it has to be caught” — rather like a fever, which then takes on a momentum of its own. This book is intended to help you catch it — to become consumed with the passion.
 
In addition to some of my favorite recipes, I want to share some of the less tangible secrets of creating a memorable event centered around a meal. Great food is simply one component of a magical dining experience.
 
In planning a menu, I always aim for an element of novelty. A guest expects the food to be delicious and perfectly executed but also craves the unexpected surprise—something to remember and talk about. Often it’s the tiniest details that leave the most indelible memories. They represent the thoughtfulness that goes into making an occasion special and are often personal touches that cost little or nothing.
 
For example, hand-writing individual menus on interesting little cards that include the date lets the guests know what they’re eating and gives them an inexpensive souvenir of your party. Enhancing the moment by emphasizing the season in both your choice of food and its presentation strengthens the memory-making potential of a dinner party. Try to make each meal a celebration of the moment: look for ingredients that symbolize the time of year and try to do something out of the ordinary with them.
 
My suggestion for the home cook has always been to build confidence and a repertoire by mastering one well-conceived three-course meal, re-creating the same three dishes over and over, perhaps one night a week for six or eight weeks, until you’ve made every mistake possible and learned something from each one. By then, your menu will feel like a part of you, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can accomplish the preparation. At that point, you’ll be ready to invite guests, who more than likely will be astonished at what an accomplished cook you are, even though secretly you may not be able to cook anything but those three dishes. You’ll then have the confidence to proceed and live up to your newfound reputation as a wonderful cook.
 
Like a good wardrobe, many of the components in my recipes are interchangeable. I invite you to rearrange them as you like. At The Inn at Little Washington we sometimes joke about “spinning the dial” in choosing the accompaniments to the dishes on the menu. One day the tangle of tart greens may be served with the rabbit sausage and the next day with the venison. An unusual sauce may complement five or six different foods. Mixing and matching is part of the fun. I’ve provided suggestions for substitutions with the recipes, as well as alternative ways of using various components interchangeably. Flexibility is essential to creative cooking.
 
In planning a party or an event, I visualize it in advance, as if I’m watching the preview of a film. I pretend I’m the guest and walk myself through it scene by scene, from the entrance, to the table, through dessert and departure, looking for areas of potential discomfort, glitches, or rough edges. This exercise can be done in minutes and will always bring to your attention details that you forgot to take into consideration. While on your walk-through you’ll probably come up with great ideas for special touches.
 
It’s reassuring to have a little rehearsal of the meal a few days in advance to ensure that everything works and to analyze how the food makes you feel. As a result, you may decide to add or delete a course or to increase or decrease a portion size.
 
The best way to minimize stress while entertaining is to be thoroughly organized. Knowing exactly what china and serving utensils will be needed for each dish is important. If you make this a habit while cooking for yourself or preparing simple family meals, it will eventually become automatic. A blackboard in the kitchen is useful for listing your menu, garnishes, and side dishes to ensure that nothing is forgotten in the tense final moments of bringing everything together. Most of us can remember at least one occasion when we discovered that a course we’d spent hours preparing was left unserved in the kitchen.
 
To improve your cooking, it is essential that you receive helpful criticism. Find someone whose opinion you value and ask him or her to be brutally honest in critiquing your work. Don’t rely on your guests or friends because they’ll invariably tell you everything you cook is wonderful. Compare your creations with similar dishes in fine restaurants. Begin developing reference points of taste. While traveling, seek out and analyze the great dishes of the regions you’re visiting and try them at home. Compare the results and keep practicing until your version is even better than the original. Each time you prepare a dish, ask yourself, “How can I make it better and do it faster next time?” Fantasize about how you would like your food to look and taste and, amazingly, in time, little by little, your fantasy will become a reality.
 
But be careful. All your dreams could come true, and one day you might wake up owning a restaurant.
 

What People are Saying About This

Larry King

One of the best and most romantic restaurants in the world is finally in print.

Mike Nichols

There are few places in the world where I would rather eat than The Inn at Little Washington.

Willard Scott

What a treasure this book is! Not only fastastic recipes, but a beautiful picture of our beloved Virginia countryside.

Craig Claiborne

Patrick O'Connell is one of the greatest American chefs. This beautiful book is an excellent reflection of the food he prepares and serves at The Inn at Little Washington.

David Brinkley

If there is a finer restaurant in the United States, I have not found it.

Daniel Boulud

Patrick O'Connell's style of cooking truly captures the harmony between the rich bounty of rural Virginia and the stylish elegance of The Inn at Little Washington. With this beautiful book, O'Connell raises his artistry to new heights.

Alice Waters

This book will transport you to the utterly extraordinary Inn at Little Washington, where the food depends upon local farmers and ranchers, whose glorious produce shines through these enchanging recipes.

Recipe

A Recipe from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook

My Grandmother's Rhubarb Pizza with Ginger Ice Cream

Serves 6

Although my grandmother did have a rhubarb patch, she wasn't into making pizzas. But if she had been, they probably would have tasted something like these. (A chef has to take a little poetic license once in a while to keep his clients intrigued.)

In the restaurant, we use a flaky croissant dough for the crust, and you may too. But here we're calling for purchased puff pastry. The pizzas may be completely assembled well in advance and baked just before serving.

1 package puff pastry
8 thick stalks red rhubarb
1 quart water
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup Raspberry Puree (recipe follows)
Nonstick cooking spray
1/4 cup sugar (combined with 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon)

Ginger Ice Cream

[Optional garnishes: sliced strawberries, dried cherries, toasted green pistachios, and grated white chocolate]

On a floured board, roll the pastry out 1/8 inch thick. Lay a bowl about 5 inches in diameter upside down on the dough and cut out 6 circles with a sharp paring knife. Place the pastry rounds between sheets of waxed paper and refrigerate.

Wash the rhubarb and trim off any leaves, cutting off any brown or bruised spots. Using a very sharp knife, slice 6 stalks on the bias about 1/8 inch thick. Roughly chop the remaining 2 stalks and keep separate.

In a 4-quart saucepan, combine the water, sugar, and Raspberry Puree over medium heat. Bring just to a boil.

Place the rhubarb slices in a stainless steel bowl and carefully pour the hot liquid over them just to cover, leaving about 2 cups liquid in the pan.

Add the chopped rhubarb to the liquid left in the pan and simmer until very soft. Remove from the heat. Strain, reserving the liquid, and puree the rhubarb in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Return the liquid to the stove and simmer until reduced to a syrupy consistency.

To Assemble:

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Remove the pizza rounds from the refrigerator. Spray several baking sheets with nonstick spray and lay the rounds on them. Spread about 1 tablespoon of the rhubarb puree evenly over each round. Lift the rhubarb slices out of their liquid and arrange on top of the puree in concentric circles.

Bake in the lower half of the oven for 6 to 8 minutes, or until the pastry is crisp and golden brown. Remove from oven and brush with the rhubarb syrup.

To Serve:

Sprinkle each of 6 serving plates lightly with cinnamon sugar in a ribbon-like pattern.

Place a warm, glazed pizza on each plate and top with a small scoop of Ginger Ice Cream.

[Editor's note: At the restaurant, Patrick O'Connell often serves the pizzas plain. If you'd like to decorate them the way he did at the class, decorate with sliced strawberries, dried cherries, toasted pistachios, and then sprinkle grated white chocolate over the pizzas when they are (ot out of the oven—it will melt like cheese.]

Raspberry Puree

Makes 1 cup

3 pints fresh raspberries

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 to 4 tablespoons sugar

Puree the berries in a food processor. Strain through a fine strainer to remove all the seeds, pressing hard on the solids with a rubber spatula to extract all the liquid.

Add the lemon juice and mix well.

Add the sugar 1 tablespoon at a time, tasting after each addition, until the desired sweetness is obtained.

Note: You may substitute frozen raspberries, but reduce the sugar by one-half.

_{Excerpted from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook, copyright © 1996 by Patrick O'Connell. Published by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.}

Editorial Reviews

A Cooking Class with Patrick O'Connell

After watching Patrick O'Connell regale the audience at New York cooking school De Gustibus at Macy's with hilarious stories from his childhood and from his two decades running The Inn at Little Washington with partner Reinhardt Lynch, no one was surprised when he revealed that he grew up wanting to become an actor.

Great Pee-Wee Herman imitation notwithstanding, it's lucky for lovers of great food everywhere that his drama career was sidetracked by the catering business he started in the Shenandoah Valley, which eventually evolved into the sublime establishment known to its many devotees simply as The Inn. But even more entertaining than O'Connell's anecdotes to the audience of gourmands at De Gustibus were the fabulous dishes he demonstrated from his new book, The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook.

About Patrick O'Connell and The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook

Anyone who's tasted O'Connell's complex, impeccably fresh cooking will find it hard to believe he wasn't formally trained. "I learned to cook from books," he said. Now he's written his own. The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook is one of the most beautiful cookbooks to be released in recent years—it was nominated this year for a James Beard Award for Best Food Photography. Stunning images not only of the finished dishes but also of the Shenandoah countryside and of the fruits and vegetables from the Inn's gardens and nearby farms grace every page.

It's a pleasure to browse through, but cooking from it is even more satisfying. Though there are plenty of simple recipes, many of the dishes are challenging for the home cook; O'Connell's food is refined, with many layers of flavors, and the dishes are always beautifully garnished and presented. O'Connell deliberately wrote the book this way: "I think too many chefs' cookbooks are oversimplified," he said. "It's disappointing when you eat at a wonderful restaurant and you want to replicate a dish you loved exactly. It's impossible to do if it's been simplified too far in a book." So he's taken a different approach for the home cook. Each recipe is broken down into sections, or segments, so that you can do as much or as little as you want. "If you don't want to do the garnish, you can skip it," O'Connell said, "or do just one sauce instead of two. It's really very approachable...even for the novice cook."

About the Menu

O'Connell began the demonstration with a simple but delicious recipe for spiced pecans, which were used to garnish the cheese-course salads that followed the entrée. They were crisp and addictive, seasoned with cumin, brown sugar, and a hint of cayenne. "If they're too spicy for you," he said, "just cut down on the cayenne. It's a matter of taste. There's never any right or wrong about taste." The Miniature Caramelized Onion Tartlets were made with a heavenly croissant dough and filled with savory custard and caramelized onions cooked down nearly to jam. We drank a dry and refreshing sparkling wine, the Domaine Carneros Brut from the French producer Taittinger's vineyard in the Napa Valley, as we nibbled on the pecans and the tartlets. A lovely herbal Sauvignon Blanc from Napa's Cakebread Cellars was poured with the entrée, an elegant grilled poussin served over a lacy potato galette, accompanied by thin green beans dressed simply with nutty browned butter. Marinated in vinegar steeped with blackberries, the flesh of the little chickens had turned a gorgeous purply blue and was full of succulent flavor.

The poussin was followed by what O'Connell called the cheese course: the Miniature "Croque Monsieur" on Field Greens. It turned out to be an incredible dish—a small wedge of Brie that had been wrapped in filo dough and sautéed until crisp on the outside and deliciously runny within, contrasting perfectly with the cool, lightly dressed fresh greens. The spicy pecans were sprinkled atop. The dessert took the prize for the most visually arresting dish of the evening: the Rhubarb Pizza consisted of a round of flaky, sweet dough topped with sauce (rhubarb/raspberry puree in place of tomato) and thin strips of rhubarb, decorated with thin slices of strawberry to mock pepperoni, dried cherries instead of black olives, and toasted pistachios for green olives. O'Connell suggests bringing the pizza to the table hot, and offering guests a sprinkle of "Parmesan" (really grated white chocolate) as the final touch. Then he slices up the pizza in wedges, just like the real thing, and serves it with a lovely ginger ice cream.

Tips from Patrick O'Connell

• An elegant idea for serving soup from The Inn at Little Washington: a demitasse espresso cup. "We offer a demitasse of soup to begin every meal at the restaurant. It's a wonderful way to get just a taste but to not take the place of a more complex appetizer," O'Connell explained. "I love the idea, and I always like to pass it along to others. It works well for cocktail parties, also: Bring out a tray with little demitasse cups and saucers with a beautiful seasonal soup—hot, cold, whatever. People can sip it and put it down. It's just the right amount."

• A small bird like a poussin, quail, or game hen is particularly elegant when it's completely deboned first: "You can serve it with a knife and a fork and cut right through it-- people are so delightfully surprised," O'Connell said. Poultry shears and a small sharp knife are the best tools for this delicate job. Lay the bird breast side down and first snip off the wing tips at the second joint. Then use the shears to cut along both sides of the backbone to remove it completely. Flip the bird over, and with the knife, make a small incision along the center of the breastbone, and then remove the breastbone with your fingers. Remove the rib bones from the breast meat by gently running the knife point under the bones. Do the same thing with the thigh bone, keeping the knife point against the bone. You can leave the very last bone in the leg in place. "Your butcher can do this for you too," O'Connell said. The deboned birds lay completely flat, so they cook very quickly and burn easily. O'Connell advises "par-grilling:" grilling briefly to crisp the skin, then finishing in the oven.

• Don't forget to take the time to appreciate the pleasures of working with food. "Food is therapeutic," O'Connell said. "All you have to do when you're having a bad day is touch food—grab some dough, or take the advice of a ladies' magazine that once said what to do if you're feeling suicidal: bake cookies. When you finish, you will be reconnected, you will feel like a productive human being. You will have basically performed a miracle—that's what the joy of it is."

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