Tourner les légumes

Tourner les légumes belongs to the classical French kitchen, where the cutting of vegetables into regular, formal shapes was taught as part of the brigade's basic training and codified in the writing of Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire. Jacques Pépin — Complete Techniques carries the method forward as a hand skill to be learned by repetition, with the small paring knife and the vegetable held in the left hand. The tradition rests on a plain principle: pieces of identical shape and size cook at the same rate and sit evenly on the plate.

The technique shapes a vegetable with a small paring knife into a barrel or ovoid form of about five to six centimetres in length, with seven faces and blunt rounded ends, the faces cut by a curved stroke of the blade drawn towards the thumb. It is applied to firm roots and tubers such as the potato (Solanum tuberosum), the carrot (Daucus carota), the turnip (Brassica rapa) and the courgette (Cucurbita pepo), and to the mushroom cap in a different, spiralled form. The classical garnishes that depend on it include pommes château, pommes anglaises, carottes glacées and navets glacés, each named for the shape and the cooking given to it. The trimmings are not wasted but go to the stockpot, the purée or the staff meal.

Turned vegetables accompany roast and sautéed meats, poultry and fish, and are served with sauces such as a sauce bordelaise or a beurre blanc, which they carry without breaking. They are glazed in butter, stock and a little sugar, or boiled in salted water and finished in butter, and are drunk with the wine suited to the principal dish, a red Bordeaux with a roast of lamb or a white Burgundy with a poached fish. The structural reason is that a uniformly shaped vegetable keeps an even texture from edge to centre, so each mouthful offers the same tenderness against the meat.