“It’s not about the ingredientsit’s about what I do to them,” a famous San Francisco chef told me. I wasn’t surprised, then, when I ate at the chef’s restaurant and sampled a large variety of overwrought, gorgeous-looking dishes without much depth of flavor.
Many chefs love to create dishes that involve extensive manipulation — sauces made with long reductions and repeated strainings or through the addition of chemicals, meats that are pounded, stuffed, rolled and wrapped in caul fat, vegetables which are trimmed into perfectly even shapes that do not occur in nature.
Others like to spend more of their time in looking for the best ingredient and then doing as little as possible to it. That you like one approach more than the other is probably a matter of temperament. Are you a forager or a cook by nature?
Of course, most of us are a combination of both. In the summer, we would prefer to shop more and cook less, and in colder months, the opposite is probably true.
My wife and I created this simple dish last month when we were in France. We found some sweet, perfectly ripe black figs from Provence at the farmers market near our house. We talked about doing something complicated with them — a fig jam or a tart with poached figs — but we decided on simply drizzling them with orange-flower honey and garnishing them with mascarpone and a little cracked pepper.
This dish cries out for a dessert wine to accompany it, a late harvest Riesling or a Beaumes de Venise.
