Dill sauce according to a 19th century recipe
A Michelin-starred restaurant in the centre of Prague
The tasting menu presents a seasonal ingredients from select farmers, gatherers and hunters. We place a lot of energy into finding them, and cook to emphasise the individuality of each ingredient.
Our dishes are rooted in traditional cuisine, finding inspiration in the cycles of nature, and the relationships between the ingredients we select. When we prepare game, careful attention is payed to the environment in which the animal lives, what it eats, and how the seasons influence its flavour.
Our sommeliers contemplate and experiment with wine and non-alcoholic food pairings, mixing fruit, vegetables, herbs and nuts into their drinks.
Oldřich Sahajdák, the chef of La Degustation, came across Marie B. Svobodová when Café Savoy was opening. Together with Tomáš Karpíšek, the founder of Ambiente, they were flipping through old cookbooks to create a "First Republic" café menu. "Among all those cookbooks was Marie, or Maruška, but we didn't even look in it at the time. But when we started planning the concept of La Degu in 2006 and digging through centuries-old recipes, it was the first book we picked up. We never opened another one. It had exactly what we needed - traditional dishes that we could give a modern face to," says Oldřich Sahajdák.
Can you remember the first thing you cooked, according to Marie Svobodová?
It was a grand broth and we still make it today. Wherever a recipe says "pour water over", we use this broth. It's made during the day and should be made for at least 12, preferably 24 hours. It's a simple equation - for 1 kg of meat, 2 kg of vegetables and 3 litres of water.
More than half the book is devoted to processing, storage, preservation and dining techniques. Not enough recipes?
On the contrary. This means much more to us than the recipes themselves. They are often misleading, and I myself don't like to be asked to describe in detail how to cook anything. Marie Svobodová writes exactly as I imagine it. Grammars play no part, and to be able to take a recipe you need to be an experienced cook. That's how we do it with everything. When we plan a dish, we get a cookbook, write out the ingredients, then lay them out on the table and cook. How much garlic and in what form is up to our imagination. It simply has to taste the way it should.
Did you find something in the cookbook that you had cooked in a completely different way before?
I can think of béchamel, tomato and dill sauce. The way they teach you béchamel in school is that you make a roux and then pour in milk, cream and broth. You boil that, and you're done. But in this cookbook, it's three broths. Ham, poultry, and then there's white sauce, which is a soup made from all kinds of poultry - quail, pigeon, pheasant, chicken, and fowl. The whole thing is cooked for twelve hours with boiled cream. I wouldn't have thought of this before, but it's standard procedure for us nowadays. As is the delicious tomato sauce that is made by combining fresh tomato juice, onion broth and tomato stem broth. When you add the meat stock, you get a sauce that lacks nothing.
And dill sauce?
This is made from dill and vinegar broth and the aforementioned white sauce. Twenty litres are thickened with two tablespoons of plain flour, drizzled with dill oil and finished with freshly chopped dill, which we freeze with liquid nitrogen.
How about baking in a napkin?
That wasn't so new to us. But we did try cooking a meat pate like this once. We sealed the liver in a napkin, threw it in a baking dish according to the recipe, and poured hot lard over it, which cooked the pate. It stayed beautifully pink and tender because the lard wouldn't soak in. It keeps the juices in and therefore the flavour.
Did you also come across any recipes in the cookbook that didn't work?
It's quite common for things to go wrong. For example, the beetroot salad, which according to this cookbook is covered in stock and sprinkled with lots of herbs and salt, was not good at all. But thanks to Maruška, we figured out how to use sea salt. It always works, especially in baking. Whether you're preparing vegetables or meat, just sprinkle it with salt and herbs, and that's it. Roast a whole chicken this way at 140 degrees in about an hour, and you're guaranteed to be salted and juicy.
The cookbook is written in a language all its own. Do you understand everything?
Sometimes we don't know what's going on. We still say "slice it up" and "let it go" as a joke when we're not sure about something. The language of the cookbook is lost on us, as are some of the ingredients it works with, like beaver and turtle meat. Often in the book you will find two versions of the same recipe - one for the manor and one for the home, ordinary kitchen. We want to cook for the manor.
A lot of recipes also have the French name in brackets.
French is the language of gastronomy, and in the old menus the Czech names were written in brackets. In the gastronomic world, French is still superior to Czech today. That is why our restaurant has a French name, which translates to Degustation of Czech Bohemia. That's also why I don't say big broth, but grand broth.
So can the cuisine at La Degustation be described as Czech?
This cookbook was written in 1894, when Czechoslovakia didn't even exist. Many of our dishes are more representative of Austro-Hungarian cuisine. That's why I always say that La Degustation focuses on Central European cuisine and cooks it with local ingredients and local recipes. "Czech" for us means that we push Czech flavours that we know from our childhood into every dish. It's a kind of childhood cuisine according to grandpa.
Why Grandpa's?
Why Grandma's? For example, my grandfather cooked almost more than my grandmother.
Mrs. Svobodová also describes a kitchen calendar. Can you use it to create a fall menu?
Yes and no. We have to and want to base it on what's available. The fallow deer hunt is coming up soon and the fishery is coming up, so we'll be getting grass carp and candies in the kitchen. But if this cookbook told us anything important, it wasn't a guide to when, but rather how to combine foods. The key is what occurs naturally next to each other, what goes together. You feed the pig bread and potatoes, so coat the pork with bread crumbs, fry the schnitzel and serve mashed potatoes with it. Rabbit likes spinach, our guests like rabbit on spinach. In the time we've been open, we've developed a long list of ingredients that go together and never fail. Like danishes, cranberries and nettles.
The cookbook also talks about leftovers and how to use them. Can these tricks and tips be applied in a restaurant setting?
I have to admit, we haven't studied this chapter much yet. For us, it's simply "economically and environmentally". In practice, this means that we try to make the perfect meal even with so-called second-class ingredients. For example, almost nobody wants to buy tripe at Amaso, but in our kitchen we use it to make a beautiful old dish - pajšl. The skins, which simmer for a long time in a creamy mushroom sauce, are also perfect. If you close your eyes, the food must taste delicious. And it doesn't matter if it's tripe, skins, sirloin or truffles.
What's on your menu now, according to Marie?
We cook her way practically all the time. A week ago, it was veal tripe in béchamel, and now we're stocking up on plum jam for the winter. But I have to say that we use about 15% of the cookbook, because there is so much in there that we can't manage it all. We always have a Marie period where we go crazy and try new things. Then we don't look at it again for six months. It's like our bible that's there when we don't know what to do.
A bible to Czech housewives in 1894. Marie B. Svobodová summarised in it, at her own expense, the entire basis of the art of cooking - from nutrition through commodities, technology and procedures to dining, menu preparation and specific recipes. The informative part has almost 400 pages, the practical part ends with page 929. The book speaks in a language full of bourgeois flavours and references to French and Central European gastronomy - and that's what La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise has opted for.
