Step by step to Mexico's classic custard … or Morocco's exotic cousin of chicken pot pie - excerpt from Sunset's Easy Basic for International Cooking - recipes

Sunset, Oct, 1984

Step by step to Mexico's classic custard . . . or Morocco's exotic cousin of chicken pot pie

Both sophisticated and inexperienced cooks will find lots to try in Sunset's newest cook book, Easy Basics for International Cooking (Lane Publishing Co., Menlo Park, Calif., 1984; $16.95). Results will be authentic to the seasoned traveler, yet they're easily achieved by the novice.

A companion to Sunset's Easy Basics for Good Cooking, this book crosses borders of five dozen countries and regions, exploring more than 375 recipes in 224 pages with 236 step-by-step color photographs. Woven through the pages is commentary that relates one cuisine to the next by pointing out similarities of technique and ingredients, making the foreign familiar and paving the way to success.

For example, Hungarian langos and American Navajo fry bread are made in almost the same way. Indonesian gado gado sauce becomes less intimidating when you know peanut butter is the base, and pastel de Montezuma is just the Mexican way to use leftover turkey or chicken in a casserole.

The editors of Sunset Books and Sunset Magazine selected dishes for this book to suit a wide range of tastes. Without sacrificing authenticity, they carefully streamlined procedures when testing the recipes to ensure excellent results with the fewest steps possible. You'll find most of the suggested ethnic ingredients in well-toocked supermarkets, but alternative everyday choices are also given.

The book is organized for easy meal planning, starting with appetizers and ending with desserts. Numerous short sections, scattered through the chapters, discuss barbecuing, how to get liquors to flame, how to freeze fruit ices, and other ideas that apply to several recipes.

Examples of the clarity of presentation found in this book are the two following recipes. Consider baked custard. It isn't international; it's universal. Almost every cuisine has a mixture of liquid baked with eggs to delicate firmness, from the lean and fragile Japanese chawan mushi to the rich French pots de cremes.

Flan . . . Mexico's caramel custard

The custard that Mexico has adopted as its own is flan. You also encounter variations of this caramel-crowned dessert in other former Spanish colonies, in Europe, and in the Middle East. If you've made flan before, you know that caramel is the secret to both the sauce and the ease of unmolding the custard. But if you haven't, the new book's photographs, as you see on the next two pages, are definitely more helpful than words alone.

Flan

1/3 cup sugar

6 eggs

6 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups whole milk Boiling water

Preheat oven to 350|. In a small nonstick frying pan over medium heat, melt the 1/3 cup sugar, shaking and tilting pan to mix sugar as it melts. Cook just until sugar is amber colored and completely melted. (If sugar turns darker or begins to bubble and foam, it's probably scorched. Start over with fresh sugar.) Immediately pour syrup, all at once, into a 1-quart straightsided baking dish, tilting to coat bottom and 1/2 inch up sides. Place dish in an 8- or 9-inch square baking pan; set aside.

In a bowl, beat eggs, the 6 tablespoons sugar, and vanilla until blended but not frothy. Add milk; stir well. Pour into caramel-coated dish. At once pour boiling water into baking pan to a depth of about 1 inch. Bake on center rack of oven for 40 minutes or until center of flan jiggles only slightly when dish is gently shaken.

Remove dish from water at once; cool for 15 minutes on a wire rack, then refrigerate (caramel liquefies as flan cools). If made ahead, cover with plastic wrap when cooled and refrigerate for up to 2 days.

To serve, run a knife between flan and dish. Cover dish with a rimmed serving plate; hold plate in place and quickly invert flan out onto plate. Caramel will flow over flan. Cut into wedges; spoon caramel over each serving. Makes 6 servings.

Bastilla . . . Morocco's poultry pie

Even though bastilla gets spelled lots of ways, it has a specific meaning in Morocco: poultry pie baked not in a crust, but in crackling sheets of fila. Pigeon is a traditional filling, but more readily available chicken is also used.

Fila is also a word that has many other spellings--filo and phyllo are two. These thin sheets of pastry are used in many cuisines in Mediterranean countries and the Middle East, making complex-looking dishes--such as the Moroccan pie pictured on page 114--very easy to make.

Bastilla

1 broiler-fryer chicken (3 to 3 1/2 1b.), rinsed and drained

2 medium-size onions, chopped

1 large can (49 1/2 oz.) or 6 cups regular-strength chicken broth

1 cup chopped parsley

1 cinnamon stick (about 3 in. long)

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon saffron threads

6 eggs

8 sheets fila

4 tablespoons (1/8 1b.) butter or margarine, melted

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2/3 cup finely chopped blanched almonds

Powdered sugar and ground cinnamon