Stuffed Flounder Day

It's Stuffed Flounder Day. The typical flounder stuffing is crabmeat and other seafood, plus bread crumbs and herbs. Stuffed flounder was once a mainstay in New Orleans casual seafood restaurants, especially those at West End Park. The most famous was the house specialty of Bruning's, where they used flounders so large that the fishermen referred to them as "doormats."The idea of stuffed fish sounds appealing. It conjures up the image of a nice, moist, buttery fillet of fish, bursting at the seams with a filling of crabmeat or something similar. But the reality is usually quite different. Most cooks use too much bread crumbs, making the fish unpleasantly dry. The problem is often patched up with a sauce, but that has a way of turning the bready stuffing into an unpalatable mass.All that said, it is possible to make a good stuffed flounder. Start with a fish wide enough to accommodate a stuffing without falling apart. Most restaurants that do this put the stuffing right on top, but a better way is to remove the bones in the middle and slip the stuffing in. Best of all is to make the stuffing from crabmeat, small shrimp or crawfish, green onions, all folded into a bechamel. Bake the fish till done and then you're eating.

Lazone Randolph, the longtime executive chef Brennan's on Royal Street, was born today in 1946. He began working in Brennan's kitchen when he was seventeen. Like most chefs back then, he started at the bottom of the kitchen and worked his way up, learning his craft on the job. He shared a kitchen with Chef Paul Blange, the man who created most of Brennan's original menu. Lazone is a stickler for consistency, and that always showed in the cooking. His turtle soup knew no peer.

If you can't get a whole flounder in a restaurant, don't order it at all.

Morbier, (French), n.--A cheese made from unpasteurized cow's milk in the small town of the same name in eastern France, not far from the Swiss border. It is notable for having a thin layer of vegetable ash running horizontally through the small wheels in which is it made. The tradition is that the curds made with the milk gotten in the evening was separated by the ash from the curds made with the next morning's milk. It's unlikely that any Morbier is still made that way, but the layer of ash remains. It has a rather strong aroma and a slight bitterness, which some like and some don't. The French say that since it has to be aged sixty days to be allowed into the United States, the Morbier we get is past its prime and hence too strong. It's a great cheese to eat with a pastis or absinthe.

Redfish Lake is in the mountains northeast of Boise, Idaho, 141 miles away on a beautiful, forested, winding road. It's in the Sawtooth National Forest, a major snow-skiing area. They're saying the snow is fantastic there this year. Redfish Lake is about five miles long and half a mile wide in most spots, and collects snowmelt before letting it go into the Salmon River. The entire area is among the most scenic parts of the country in any time of year. And the fishing is superb. Redfish Lake is named for the sockeye salmon that spawn there.

On this day in 1478, George, the Duke of Clarence and brother of Edward IV, was executed by drowning in a barrel of wine. (Malmsey Madeira, to be exact.) The scene is immortalized in Shakespeare's Richard III.

In 1930, a cow named Nelly Jay (or Elm Farms Ollie--she seems to have had two names) was taken up in an airplane flying over Missouri. The Guernsey was milked at altitude, and the milk was packed into quart-size paper cartons and delivered by parachute to St. Louis. She was the first cow ever to fly.

In 1745, Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born on this date. He invented the electric battery. The volt, a unit of electrical force, was named for him. The one place where the battery has not made significant inroads is the kitchen. I've been universally disappointed by all battery-operated kitchen appliances. You go to use them for the first time in a year (because they tend not to be essential tools), and the batteries are always dead. Since every kitchen has electric outlets, why should anything in it be battery-powered?

Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel, was born today in 1871 in England. He was working on a new alloy for use in gun barrels when he combined steel with chromium and nickel. That creates an outer layer of metal oxides that retard tarnishing. Brearley recognized that the new metal would be perfect for forks, knives, and spoons. All other metals in use had to be well-dried after washing or they'd start getting dull or even rusty. Stainless changed the way cutlery was made, and dominates the table now.

Today is the feast day of Fra Angelico, a Benedictine monk whose painting and illuminated manuscripts in the 1400s are still among the great sights in the Vatican and Florence. Another Benedictine of the same name lives in the Piedmont region of Italy in the 1700s. Frangelico, a hazelnut liqueur in a bottle shaped like a monk (complete with a rope belt) is named for him.

It's the birthday (1941) of Irma Thomas. Nobody can touch her when it comes to singing New Orleans-style R&B. She also had the good taste (and good luck) to record many songs written by Allan Toussaint when nobody knew who he was. Irma's best food lyric is the song "You Can Have My Husband, But Please Don't Mess With My Man":My husband only feeds me red beans and rice
But my man gives me steak. Ain't that nice?

Singer Juice Newton warbled her first notes today in 1952. She has a rare drink-and-food name--or would if were her real one (which is Judy Cohen). . . Political writer Peter Fryer entered the Big Skillet today in 1927.

"The fact is I simply adore fish,
But I don't know a perch from a pike;
And I can't tell a cray from a crawfish
They look and they taste so alike."--William Cole.

"It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below."--Wallace Stegner, American writer, born today in 1909.