Ratatouille: A Dish You Can Pronounce Because of the Movie

Ratatouille is one of my absolute favorite dishes. Despite being an unrepentant meat eater, I am a sucker for a good vegetarian dish (on very rare occasions will I entertain eating a vegan dish). A soft, luxurious vegetable stew of French origin, ratatouille evokes imaginary memories of life as a peasant in the countryside of Provence. Like many others, I had never heard of ratatouille until the film of the same name came out (didn't help that I was 12 at the time). Ironically it is also my favorite Disney-Pixar film (eat your heart out Toy Story).

So I wanted to take a few precious minutes of your life (and mine) to talk about ratatouille: the movie, and the dish.

The Movie

For someone who loves to cook, and someone unabashedly in love with French culture, it is little surprise that I enjoy the movie so much. It is an inspiring story of an anthropomorphic rat who learns to control a gangly French ginger in order to achieve his dream of becoming a chef, all set in the ultra romantic city of Paris. I'm going to assume that anyone reading this has already seen the movie (it's been 13 years, spoiler alerts are over). If you have yet to see the movie, go watch it. Like right now. If you're reading this at work, take the day off and go watch the movie. If you're reading this on the toilet, finish up and go watch it (don't forget to wash your hands).

The film has everything necessary for success. Heartwarming friendship, light romance, adorable animals, a villain (or two technically), and a message of encouragement for the amateur chef. Remy, the lovable cooking rat and protagonist (not sure why I'm bothering to clarify that, you've seen the movie) is obsessed with the book Tout le Monde peut Cuisiner, Anyone Can Cook. Written by the dead chef, Auguste Gusteau, the father of young Linguini, the book touts (pun intended) the concept that anyone can learn how to cook. Gusteau reminds me of a much fatter Jacques Pepin, one of my cooking idols. Pepin is a grandfatherly French chef whose cooking videos and shows have helped improve my kitchen techniques (his pronunciation of onion as "onyo" is comical) without devolving into the intense complexity of his former colleague, Julia Child.

The movie's climax comes when the infamous food critic, Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole, aka Lawrence of Arabia), visits the restaurant. The gaunt and death-like Ego is a force to be reckoned with, yet his cuisine-critical fury is appeased when he is presented with a dish of ratatouille (technically confit byaldi but we'll get to that), or as Emile calls it, rat patootie. Sending him back to his days as a youth in France eating his mother's cooking, the dish grows his shrunken heart á la the Grinch. He writes a glowing review of the restaurant and the chef and the restaurant is closed down because it's being operated by literal sewer rats. The end. Nah, they open a new successful restaurant and live happily ever after.

The Dish

I first cooked ratatouille using a recipe from The New Basics Cookbook (one that I highly recommend for my fellow amateurs). Having just watched the movie, I was struck with inspiration and decided to cook classic ratatouille. I bought a handful of various vegetables and got to it. The end result was brilliant (well, okay at least). A velvety stew of veggies with enough savory flavor to appease my carnivorous habits. Combining eggplant, onion, zucchini, summer squash, and tomatoes, the dish is relatively easy to whip up and a surefire way to improve your prepping skills.

Going on to cook the dish more often, I began experimenting with various riffs to spice it up. One such change was going more Provencal and utilizing pesto and anchovies for a more Mediterranean flavor (highly recommend). I recently attempted Julia Child's recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking to great success. Probably the easiest dish in the book, I recommend giving it a go if you're interested in trying to make ratatouille for the first time.

Ultimately I realized I needed to attempt the highest level of ratatouille skill: confit byaldi. 

In an effort to impress a girl I was dating at the time (curse my penchant for dating vegetarians), I strove to achieve creating the inexplicably difficult dish. Originally dreamed up by Chef Michel Guérard, the version of the dish served in the movie to Anton Ego was birthed from the mind of chef extraordinaire, Thomas Keller. The creators of the movie even spent time in Keller's famous restaurant, The French Laundry, to nail down the appropriate cuisine setting. Thomas Keller's recipes are difficult. Like annoyingly difficult, especially for someone with no formal kitchen training. Arguably difficult just for the sake of being difficult.

Regular ratatouille calls for the cubing of your vegetables, sauteing them individually, then combing them all in a tian to cook and meld their flavors together. A decent amount of prep, but overall a fairly simple dish. Confit byaldi instead calls for all of the vegetables to be cut down to wafer-thin slices, then shingled over a roasted red pepper sauce (pipérade if we're using the technical jargon). Sounds easy, is actually a hellish endeavor. Slicing vegetables ultra thin in a mandolin (not the instrument) or via knife into equally sized pieces is no easy task, then arraying them into a delicious rainbow by hand is equally difficult. Making confit byaldi requires serious dedication. The amount of prep that goes into the dish is tedious. But the result is so worth it. Ratatouille is delicious, but confit byaldi is ambrosia. There are so many flavors that come out in the dish; garlicky, oniony, roasty, herbal. It's a vegetarian fantasy.

Whether you are cooking to copy the food of your favorite Pixar flick, trying to impress a vegetarian date, or simply want to bask in the genius of French cuisine, I cannot recommend ratatouille enough. Go make a batch of it and eat it while watching the movie, you will thank me.