France and the Alps · Volume 12, Choucroute, Bière de Garde and the Double Border
Quiche Lorraine
Lorraine
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- 10 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The Syndicat National de Défense et de Promotion de l'Authentique Quiche Lorraine actively campaigns against cheese in the filling, tracing the dish to a first written mention on 1 March 1586 under Duke Charles III, when it was bread-dough scraps topped with an egg-and-cream mixture, the migaine, itself originally just eggs and cream, sometimes butter. Smoked lardons were only added from the nineteenth century, tied to rural Lorraine's own meat-preservation practice. The syndicate's own precise modern quantities could not be retrieved for this chapter; the recipe below follows the widely corroborated no-cheese structure.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 1 hour, plus resting.
Ingredients
- 250 g plain flour
- 125 g cold butter, cubed
- 2 to 3 tbsp, added gradually a little cold water
- 200 g smoked lardons
- 3 eggs
- 300 ml crème fraîche or a mix of cream and milk
- to taste freshly grated nutmeg, salt, pepper
Method
- Rub the butter into the flour to breadcrumbs, add just enough cold water to bring it together, rest at least 30 minutes.
- Line a tart tin with the pastry, chill, blind bake if the base is thin.
- Fry the lardons gently until just coloured, no need to render them fully, drain.
- Whisk the eggs into the cream, season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
- Scatter the lardons over the pastry base, pour over the migaine.
- Bake around 190°C, 25 to 30 minutes, until just set with a slight wobble at the centre.
What a modern chef changes
The migaine treated as a true custard, and the lardons given real smoke.
Rung 5, applied by analogy.
Method
- Do not add cheese. The syndicate's own defence of the dish is worth honouring: the migaine's silkiness is the point, and cheese muddies rather than improves it.
- Smoke your own lardons from a piece of pork belly on a Big Green Egg, cut into batons after smoking, for a depth of flavour well beyond a supermarket smoked-bacon lardon.
- Bake low and slow, around 150 to 160°C for closer to 40 minutes, watching for the gentlest possible set, since a custard baked hot and fast weeps and turns grainy, the single most common domestic failure with this dish.