It’s not often that I run across something on my plate that I’ve never heard of. Maybe while traveling, yes, but certainly not on home turf, where the same basic ingredients get continually rehashed in restaurants across the city. So imagine my great surprise when a recent weekend afternoon found me in a smart local French establishment staring in disbelief at my menu, halfway suspecting a spelling mistake and defensively challenging the waiter: ‘what is that?’ ‘A socca, madam,’ he replied with infinite Gallic graciousness, ‘is a chickpea pancake from southern France. It is very good.’ I squinted at him for a moment before deciding that he was probably telling the truth, at least the part about it being good, because after all, he did have a French accent. ‘Okay,’ I conceded, ‘If you say it’s good I’ll have it.’

The socca that appeared on my plate was a thick circle about six inches in diameter, crusty and golden on the outside and studded with large succulent mussels. The pancake itself was nutty and moist with a subtle whisper of fennel, and it came crowned with a peppery tangle of frisee salad and a pungent drizzle of fresh basil pesto. And he hadn’t been lying – it was good. So good, in fact, that I raced to the internet as soon as we were home, itchy to fill in my socca gaps.

It turns out that my waiter had been correctly informed, and that the socca is indeed from southern France – Nice, to be exact, though a similar version is also made in Marseille. It is something like a very rustic crêpe which traditionally contains only chickpea flour, water, salt and olive oil, and can still be found in those places sold from mobile socca carts equipped with charcoal ovens. You buy it by the slice, and eat it out of paper cones sprinkled with pepper. How I’d never heard of it is still a mystery, considering my bursting French recipe collection, but there was no time to waste trying to figure that out – I had to try making it myself.

I suspected that the socca I had tasted at the restaurant was a far cry from traditional. Nevertheless, I had been so smitten by it that I decided to try to replicate something similar, and from this attempt comes my first entry for Tomatilla’s monthly Paper Chef competition (ingredients dates, honey, buttermilk and eggs), and which is being judged by the lovely and talented Julie of A Finger in Every Pie. I started with the idea of a thick, fennel-y seafood socca like I had tasted, and lightened it with eggs and buttermilk. The result was fantastic, very moist and chewy. I topped it with an improvised date-orange salad with red onion and arugula, and drizzled the whole thing with a reduction of honey, spices and chicken stock. The crowning glory, just to reaffirm my commitment to the competition ingredients in case anybody doubted it, was a homemade crème fraîche, soured with buttermilk. It was a very interesting combination of tastes, both sweet and salty, and made a tasty, albeit unusual, Sunday dinner.

So, socca, welcome to the family. Despite your newcomer status, I’m certain you’ll be making frequent and much-anticipated appearances at our table.

Seafood Socca with Date-Orange Salad, Spiced Honey Sauce and Crème Fraîche
Serves: 6

For the soccas:
2 cups chickpea flour (also called gram flour, or garbanzo flour)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
2 cups fresh or frozen mixed seafood (I bought a mix that included mussels, shrimp and calamari)

For the date-orange salad:
6-8 medjool dates, pitted and chopped
2 oranges, peeled, and segments cut into pieces
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
1 cup arugula (rocket) leaves
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar
salt and pepper

For the spiced honey sauce:
1 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1/3 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon hot chile powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon red-wine vinegar

For the creme fraiche:
1 cup heavy or double cream
2 tablespoons buttermilk

To make your own crème fraîche, you’ll have to start the night before. Add the buttermilk to the heavy cream and shake together in a clean jar. Close the jar, and leave out a room temperature overnight (and depending on how long it takes to set, up to 24 hours). When it has thickened, put in the refrigerator.

For the soccas, whisk the flour, salt and baking soda together in a bowl. Add the eggs, buttermilk and oil and whisk until smooth. Stir in the fennel and the seafood. Coat a 12-inch skillet (preferably a non-stick one) with oil so that it covers the bottom. Heat the pan in the oven at 450F until the oil is hot and bubbling, about 4 minutes (if using a cast iron skillet, it may take longer). Take the pan out of the oven, pour a large scoopful of batter in and swirl around so that it covers the entire bottom of the pan, rearranging the seafood so that they are evenly spaced. Cook in the oven for about 7-9 minutes, or until golden brown on top and firm throughout. Remove from oven, transfer to a plate, and repeat until the socca batter is used up.

For the salad, combine all the ingredients and add salt and pepper to taste. For the sauce, combine the stock, honey and spices in a pan and reduce over medium heat until the sauce has the consistency of heavy cream, about 10 minutes. Add the vinegar and set aside.

Place the soccas on plates and top with some salad, a drizzle of the honey sauce, and a dollop of cr&egrav
e;me fraîche. C’est tout!

Okay, it’s dessert time… and Norman, you sneaky devil, you have redeemed yourself.

When I saw cream cheese flan in his book, I knew I had to make it because once upon a time the most delicious flan I ever ate contained exactly this. I know that’s a hard thing for poor Norman to live up to, especially since memory often makes things better than they actually were, but by golly, he got it spot-on. It is perfect.

What I love about this dessert is that it’s the best of two worlds: cheesecake and flan. If you like either one, you’ll love this. If you like both, even better. It’s got creamy caramelized undertones from the condensed milk, a fragrant whisper of almond, and a texture like wet silk. The sauce was my creation, but I think its freshness and acidity complement the rich flan perfectly. It isn’t the lightest dessert in the world, but it has that magical ability to slide into the cracks in your stomach no matter how full you think you are.

Delicious.

Cream Cheese Flan with Fresh Strawberry-Passionfruit Coulis
Serves: 8

For flan:
1 cup sugar
seeds from 1 vanilla bean (or if you haven’t just won the lottery, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract)
5 large eggs
5 ounces cream cheese
One 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
One 12-ounce can evaporated milk
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/4 teaspoon almond extract

For sauce:
2 cups fresh strawberries, sliced
4 fresh passionfruit, halved
1/3 cup sugar, or to taste (I didn’t actually measure, I just added)
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 additional passionfruit, for garnish (optional)

For the flan, start by preheating the oven to 300F/125C. Melt the sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat and cook it until it turns into a smooth dark amber caramel. Quickly pour into the bottom of an 8-inch soufflé dish or other round mold (or several smaller molds).

Add all the ingredients for the flan to a blender and blend until smooth. Pour through a strainer into the caramel-lined mold. Set the mold into a larger baking pan and pour enough hot water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the mold. Cover the mold with foil. Bake until the flan has set, about 2 hours (less for individual molds) – a toothpick inserted into the center should come out clean. Let cool and refrigerate overnight.

For the coulis, combine all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth (this can also be done with a hand-blender, my best friend). Strain the mixture into a bowl, pressing on the solids to extract as much liquid as possible. Taste for sugar and add more if needed. Keep chilled.

When you are ready to serve, run a knife along the inside of the mold to loosen the flan. Pour about 1/2 inch of hot water into a large pan and set the mold inside for about 8-10 minutes, so that it will unmold more easily. Remove it from the water, place a platter over the top, and invert. Serve the flan drizzled with the fruit coulis, with some extra passionfruit pulp on top, if desired.

There is a wonderful story that accompanies this recipe in Norman’s New World Kitchen. Many years ago, a housekeeper in Venezuela named Juanita was gastronomically light-years ahead of her time. She was a gourmet in a country that didn’t yet know the meaning of that word, inventing dishes so complex and delicious they would rival today’s hautest cuisine. One of the dishes she invented was this, and one of the people she taught it to came to work at Norman’s restaurant. When I first spied this recipe in the book it lept off the page at me, begging – no, demanding – to be made. It seemed to represent everything I look for in food: hearty, rustic character, bold, intriguing flavors, and of course that element of the unexpected – in this case in the form of chocolate.  

And really, what could be more New World than chocolate? If you’re a fan of Mexican food, for example, you no doubt will have tried mole, and chances are that the mole you tried contained chocolate. It’s a fantastically complex sauce to make, often containing a dozen different varieties of chile, some of them indigenous to specific parts of Mexico, along with nuts, seeds, herbs, dried fruits, onions, garlic, chocolate and bread. Although by the standards of what we normally eat it seems avant-garde, in fact it probably links us back to some of the earliest dishes human civilization invented, as nearly everything that goes into it was indigenous to the New World.  

Mole for me remains one of the great culinary mysteries, however, as I’ve tasted absolutely delicious versions in restaurants but never been able to replicate an edible version myself at home. I’ve always blamed my failures on the authenticity of my ingredients or the lack of patience to toast, grind, simmer and strain all those components properly. Perhaps that was another reason this particular recipe appealed to me so much: it had the most obvious characteristic of mole, namely chocolate, but the preparation looked like a summer breeze in comparison. I also knew its description would turn heads at the dinner table – and let’s face it, when you’re slaving away for hours in the kitchen, you might as well be making something that turns heads!

But enough with the lead-in. It’s truth time. I followed this recipe to the letter. I browned, I caramelized, I braised and I simmered. I bought the best components I could get my hands on: dark, bitter Venezuelan chocolate, fresh Tahitian limes that I spent an hour squeezing… But honestly, I could barely eat the results. The duck was fine, delicious in fact – the braising method produced a succulent, tender, perfectly cooked leg that I would be happy to make again, and the long slow cooking of the onions and oranges produced a savory compote with a slight citrusy note that was incredibly tasty. But the chocolate sauce – really the component that ‘makes’ this dish – was awful, just all sourness and bitter, and it was so powerful that even a few cautious dribbles on the duck and onions threatened to spoil them too. Everyone at the table was polite and oohed and aahed, but when I asked if it was something worth making again there was a curious silence. Dear Norman, I’m sure you meant well with this recipe and I’m even more sure Juanita was an excellent cook, but maybe it will take a few more light years for our under-evolved tastebuds to catch up with her culinary genius.

Braised Duck Legs with Orange Chocolate Sauce
Serves: 4-6

For the duck:
2 oranges
8 duck legs (I used only 4 because they were quite large)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 Spanish onions, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, sliced
2 leeks, white part only, sliced
2 stalks celery, sliced
1/4 cup chopped fresh thyme
2 bay leaves, broken in half
5 cups rich chicken stock
salt and pepper

For the sauce:
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups fresh orange juice
1 1/2 cups fresh lime juice
5 oz extra-bitter chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon butter
dash of red wine vinegar, optional

Preheat the oven to 300F/125C. Grate the zest from the oranges and set aside. Peel the oranges and separate the segments, discarding any seeds.

With a sharp knife, score a crisscross pattern in the skin of the duck legs. Season with plenty of salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a large roasting pan over medium-high heat. When very hot, put the duck legs in (in batches if necessary), skin-side down, and let sear until brown (protect yourself from splatter!). Turn once and sear the other side as well, then remove to a plate and let drain on paper towels. Pour off the excess fat from the pan.

Spread about half the sliced onions in the roasting pan and place the duck legs on top, skin side up. Scatter the garlic, leeks, celery, orange segments, thyme and bay leaves over the legs, and cover with the remaining onions. Pour 4 cups of the chicken stock over everything, cover the pan with foil, and place in the oven for 1 hour. After an hour take the pan out and stir the onions around. Re-cover the pan and place in the oven for another approximately 1 1/2 hours, or until the duck is fork-tender. During this time, stir the onions every 20-30 minutes, and I recommend taking off the foil for the last 40 minutes of roasting so that the skin crisps up nicely.

While the duck cooks, make the sauce. Heat the reserved orange zest, sugar, orange juice and lime juice over medium-high until it boils. Turn down the heat slightly and let it simmer until the liquid is thick, amber-colored and coats the back of a spoon, about 40 minutes. Take it off the heat and whisk in the chocolate and the cream. Heat the remaining cup of chicken stock and gradually add it to the chocolate mixture, whisking constantly. Don’t let it get too thin – only add enough so that the mixture is smooth and glossy and coats the back of a spoon.

When the duck is cooked, remove the pan from the oven and set the legs aside on a plate. Put the pan over me
dium-high heat on the stove top and cook until the liquid in the pan reduces to a thick glaze on the onions. Taste and adjust for salt. Add the legs back to the pan and keep warm until ready to serve. Whisk the butter into the chocolate sauce and add a little vinegar if it seems too sweet. Serve the duck on a bed of the braised onions and drizzle with the chocolate sauce, with plenty of rice alongside.