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Blogs / On the Table / January 2010 / Take your sweet tooth out to dinner at Les Madeleines

Take your sweet tooth out to dinner at Les Madeleines

I remember the early days of fusion, when I might be faced with an incoherent meal that began with, say, sushi and a stuffed chile and went on to some kind of fruit-sauced fish. Invention was everything and restaurant meals often seemed like some kind of surreal Terry Gilliam-directed montage.

But context is everything, even in cooking. A meal should be a progression of complementary flavors, easy to achieve if you pay attention to the cultural origins of the dishes.  Pastry chef Romina Rasmussen, owner of Les Madeleines,  has expanded her syllabus accordingly —besides learning to make fantastic pastries like kanafeh, croissants and Reine de Saba, students in her upcoming cooking classes will now enjoy dinner, too—a meal to match the sweets they make.

Like, on Saturday, January 23, a Moroccan dinner menu of pomegranate and pistachio-crusted lamb and chicken and dried fruit tagine goes with a lesson in making kanafeh almond pudding and gazelle horns,  cookies filled with almond paste which Romina uses as a crust for sesame cheesecake. Okay, yum.

On February 13, learn to make chocolate mousse, chocolate truffles and the Reine de Saba chocolate Amaretto cake and enjoy them after a dinner of salad and steak frites.

The menu—I mean, course schedule—goes on to cover Asian, breakfast and other full meal deals. Sign up online.