3), the ingredients are cooked separately-never in the same pan. “We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version, with small and perfect cubes,” Richard said, watching David and me. In an equally casual spirit, they are cut up in chunks: i.e., no fine dice. 2), a matter of eyeball judgment rather than weighing on a scale, since the onions are dense, tomatoes fairly weighty, zucchini less so, peppers hollow, and eggplants only marginally heavier than air.
The quantities are roughly equal (essential principle No. There they were, in leafy abundance: all five ingredients, in their end-of-summer ratatouille bounty.
He then counted them off, on his fingers: “Eggplant, red peppers, onions, tomatoes, and zucchini.” (Plus garlic, which somehow is never treated as a sixth ingredient, even though no ratatouille can be made without it.) I remembered Deshaies’s point several years later, when I found myself, on an early-autumn day, in the Alpine village of Lanslebourg, overlooking a river and a row of domestic gardens. “It is made with the five vegetables that every family can grow in its home garden,” he said-nothing exotic, nothing hard to find (essential principle No.
The executive chef, David Deshaies, was showing me how to prepare ratatouille. The kitchen was at Citronelle, the Washington, D.C., restaurant run by the great Michel Richard. That was before I learned three essential ratatouille principles, which were proffered-very casually-when I was helping out in a French kitchen, and which changed my approach irrevocably. I’ve always loved the idea of the dish but was never thrilled with what I made, and eventually I stopped trying. The word also evokes memories of disappointment. “Ratatouille”: the word evokes French vegetables, meatless health, sunshine, and a jolly Pixar film that, for about six months, my young twin sons watched, seated at the kitchen table, while waiting for their dinner.