Monday June 23
If you ask him nicely, and in advance, Stefan will whomp up a dinner just for you and your party in the formal dining room at Springbank House. So we made sure to ask him nicely, and he and Andrea obliged with a personalized four-course dinner that was unforgettable.
It opened with wild boar sausages on pineapple and melon chutney, floating on a cloud of julienned kohlrabi à la crème, and sprinkled with parsley and scallion. These were not the spicy, cured boar sausages you find in Italy, but ground and lightly seasoned loin meat, much more subtle.
Next came an inspiration, as if a Thai soup had been re-imagined in a New England kitchen: cream of corn soup with sautéed shrimp and fennel, tender and sweet, laced with a whiff of white truffle oil.We brought the wines for the meal, as Springbank House doesn't have a liquor license. So the first courses went with a Legends unoaked chardonnay (which Barbara said tasted of bananas, but Holt said tasted like honeydew melon, which is fortunate, as Holt doesn't like bananas).
Andrea then opened and decanted our our Vieux Mas des Papes Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2003, to accompany something we'd never experienced before: creppuette of lamb, pairs of perfect frenched chops topped with shiitake mushroom slices and spinach, each one wrapped in caul fat, so that all the flavors had melded as they roasted. This was flanked by sautéed asparagus spears and "Parisienne" potatoes, tiny perfectly-roasted spheres rolled in poppy seeds.
Finally, dessert was a fan of sliced Ontario plums, topped with nutmeg-dusted Muscat sabayon, and scattered with local raspberries. Andrea and Stefan kindly joined us in a wine-tasting (or finishing) at the end, and we continued our discussion of local foods, customs, and oddities of the human race until well into one of our most enjoyable evenings ever.
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