Authentic-ish French

Meuniere means "in the manner of the miller's wife", and what the miller's wife did was dust the fish in flour and cook it in a great deal of butter until the butter browned. The browned butter is the sauce. There is no other sauce.

I drafted a version with 25g of butter instead of 120g and it came out at 229 kcal against 409. The numbers are real. What I made was a nice piece of fish with lemon and parsley on it, cooked in a little butter, and that is a perfectly good dinner with nothing whatever to do with sole meuniere.

There is a second problem and I will own it. Neither nutrition database I use carries sole, so my draft was costed against sea bass. For most dishes a stand-in like that is fine and the appendix says so. For a dish that is named after the fish and has four ingredients, costing it against a different fish and then calling it lightened is not a thing I am prepared to print.

Buy a sole, buy good butter, use all of it, and eat it twice a year.

Rillettes are pork cooked slowly in fat until it collapses, shredded, packed into a jar, and then sealed under a layer of more fat.

It is potted fat. That is not me being unkind about it, that is the definition and the preservation method at the same time: the fat cap is what keeps the air out and lets it sit in a cellar for months.

I made a lean version with shoulder and stock. It set into a jellied pulled pork, and jellied pulled pork on toast with cornichons is genuinely good. It also has no fat cap, which means it keeps for 3 days rather than 3 months, and it spreads like meat rather than like butter, which is the entire textural point of the thing.

Make the real ones, put them in a small jar, and remember that nobody eats a whole jar of rillettes in one sitting except on purpose.

A snail is 90 kcal per 100g and tastes of very little. What you are eating is garlic butter, delivered in a small edible cup.

I mean that literally. The traditional recipe is snails, butter, garlic, parsley and shallot, and the butter is about 85% of the calories on the plate. Take it out and you have poached snails with herbs on them, which is not a dish anybody has ever wanted.

There is also a data problem worth admitting: neither database carries snails at all, so any figure I printed would be a stand-in for the least important ingredient in the dish while the important one is straightforwardly butter.

Six escargots is about 320 kcal. Have six, once a year, in a restaurant that has the right little dish for them, and enjoy every one.

The swap kit in chapter 2 has an entry about trading yolks for whole eggs, and that entry ends with a line saying do not try this in a creme brulee.

So I tried it in a creme brulee.

Creme brulee is egg yolk and double cream, baked barely, with a sheet of burnt sugar on top. The yolk is not a binder here, it is the texture. Fat and lecithin are what make it set into something that holds a spoon and then dissolves, and every version I made with whole eggs, semi-skimmed milk or evaporated milk set firmer and grainier and tasted of milk rather than of cream.

The evaporated milk one was closest, and it was still a baked custard rather than a creme brulee. There is a real difference between those two things and the difference is the entire reason anybody orders one.

Make it properly, in small dishes, and share it.

A madeleine is flour, sugar, egg and butter in roughly equal weights, baked in a shell mould, eaten within about 20 minutes of coming out of the oven.

There is nothing in it to remove. Take out the butter and you have a plain sponge in an attractive shape. I got a version down to 77 kcal a madeleine against 122, and what I had was a small light cake with none of the crisp brown edge, which is the thing that makes people eat four of them.

Also, and this is the part that decided it: a madeleine is already 122 kcal. It is one of the few things in this series where the traditional portion is genuinely small, and saving 45 kcal on something you eat two of is not a recipe. It is fiddling.

Make them properly. Eat them warm. That is the whole point of them.