Pacing…
Cold cold heart
Heart of stone.
Beats alone.
Pairing…
Cold cold feet
Feet of clay.
Walk away.
Kicking the bucket list
Nothing like surviving strangulation in your swimtrunks to make you lust for life.
For you and me, that might mean ordering a dangerously rare steak and staying out
late on a weeknight. As always, with Hannibal, it’s an order of magnitude higher: he kicks back by kidnapping and roasting a comedian, doping a friend-with-benefits and having a
party for everyone who thinks they know him.
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| Quick sketches to send to Heads of Departments as the script changes keep on coming |
Alana, straight and narrow
First of all, I just have to say it: Alana drives me mad.
Thoughtful and sensitive, how can the girl be so wrong, wrong, wrong about so
many things? She’s our darling daring Little Red Riding Hood in the woods having a
picnic with the monster who ate her granny.
Back in Season One, when I gave Carolyn Dhavernas a
cook’s tutorial for her first kitchen scene – chopping carrots with Hannibal -- she showed excellent knife skills. But, in character while doing the scene,
she was so reckless with the knife I was on edge the whole time. Blithely
drinking a little too much in that first scene with Hannibal, Alana was charmingly guileless, headstrong and a
little drunk on Hannibal’s cellar-brewed People Beer. I didn't realize it back then but Carolyn had her character
totally nailed. It was a real foreshadowing of this episode’s seduction scene
when Alana drinks a little too much of Hannibal’s poisoned wine and as a result,
she misses entire chunks of the evening. Like when he slips out of bed to get the fixin’s for a midnight snack -- roast thigh.
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| Eddie's thigh baked in clay with marrow and tiny Lady Apples on the side |
Surprise, it’s Eddy’s thigh
Up til now, the script had called for Alana having lasagna
with Hannibal. I got my first clue there would be a thigh roasting when I heard my phone
chirping just after midnight as I’m on my way home. It’s Bryan Fuller asking
cheerfully, “Hi Everyone! We would like to so a Braised Roast of Eddie Izzard’s
thigh. This shoots Friday (tomorrow). Any interesting tidbits about history of
roast…or anecdote…? What can we do with a whole joint – bone and all…”
Jose Andres, our food consultant in DC, replies with a
suggestion of cooking the roast in clay so Hannibal can lecture Gideon about
man being made of clay and returning to clay. It’s 1 o’clock in the morning.
This is a wonderful idea! I email Bryan and Jose my thoughts
on how it would be done for camera: Hannibal rubbing herbs into a thigh-sized
cut of meat, rolling, barding and wrapping it in lotus leaf, then covering it
in thin sheets of clay using a wire garrotte he just happens to have in his
batterie de cuisine (stored next to the mace).
It’s 2:30 am. I need to know how
it will play in the script because to be ready for Friday’s shoot, I
have to order the special “people-sized cuts” from the butcher in the morning
before he cuts all the pork sides out into normal roasts and chops.
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| Roman cauliflower studded with purple cauliflower to go with the Clay-roast Thigh |
Late to bed early to rise – back to the market to get those thighs…
Bryan promises to send me script revisions by 5 or 6am. Good
because the butchers bring out the big knives around 6am and by 9 it’s too late
to get special cuts. It’s almost 4am now so I sign off by telling Bryan I am
going to dream of Beggar’s Chicken – an old Chinese peasant dish where you go
outside and dig up wet clay from your yard to slather around a chicken which you
have wrapped in lotus leaves.
While I sleep, I decide that I will use two
double pork loins invisibly sewn together and trimmed to approximate the muscle size of
Izzard’s thigh, boned. I figure I
will need 4 roasts per page of dialogue to cover the number of takes. In the
morning, I read the new pages in time to see I need 6 to 8 roasts. Ettie and
Victoria (my assistants) and I spend the next 16 hours stitching loins
together, rolling sheets of clay, pinching clay into vine leaves and roasting eight
complete thighs, each wrapped tightly in its own clay coffin. One bursts in the oven, so I have seven camera-ready beauties by 4am - just enough time to grab a nap before I drive to set in time for the scene.
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| Video Village where producers and directors cluster around monitors to watch the scenes as they are being shot. Everyone has wandered off momentarily because we are frantically injecting water into the roast with a syringe so it will run with juice when Mads slices it on camera. Why frantically? The clay keeps plugging up the needle. |
The kitchen scenes of Hannibal preparing the roast are TBS (to be scheduled). They don't get on the schedule til just before our second hiatus. Worry about matching those thighs later! There's a party scene going on....
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| In the foreground, a tray of Heart Tartare in Filo Flowers waits to go to set |
Enough of thighs and sighs-- on to the party for a feeding friendy!
While the thighs have been roasting, the script for the
party scene has changed from a sit-down dinner to a cocktail party. From a food
stylist’s point of view, a cocktail party scene is the best. You get to do
several extravagant pieces-montees for the central table and pretty decorated
trays of hors d’oeuvres for the waiters to carry around the room, each morsel a
jewel presented to the guests. Not like a sit-down dinner with crazy resets and keeping track of what each
guest has on his plate for the dozen-plus takes of a dinner scene.
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| Roulade of beef stuffed with sushi rice and chive flowers |
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| JellyTimbits stuffed with Foie Gras and Timbit slices topped with Headcheese |
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| Squab drumsticks on Fresh Figs and Fig Newtons - claws bursting up from the underworld ( Fig Newtons = Cookie Hell) flailing heavenward, grasping for (your) lifeblood |
For a
cocktail party scene, you have the much easier task of resetting the waiter’s trays
which gives you lots of time to chuckle about the extras who have greedily gobbled several hors d’oeuvres on the first take then are condemned to eat the same
amount again and again for every take.
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| Boar's head with Sausage collar and Veggie Wig-hat. Couldn't get the eyes to close. Worst. Side eye. Ever. |
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| Crayfish and octopus Ultimate Fighting with trout and squid |
On location in a rambling home in outer Etobicoke, the scene shoots for about 10 hours. The
party is swellegant yet scary as befits our Fancy Cannibal. Hannibal is of course one
step ahead of everyone – just when they are all beginning to suspect he is The
Ripper, he throws them a bone of a non-human kind.
Toss a bone to your friends, throw a party!
Recipes for your own "at Home" with Hannibal cocktail hour |
| Trays waiting to go to set |
Heart Tartare Tarts
You can substitute chopped beef tenderloin for the heart in this recipe if you prefer - or go pescatarian and substitute chopped raw salmon (sushi grade, of course).
For heart tartare:
1/2 lb. veal heart, finely chopped
1 tsp olive oil
1 raw egg yolk (optional)
1 tsp capers
1 tsp chopped cornichon pickles
1 tsp red onions, finely chopped
1 tsp chopped cornichon pickles
1 tsp red onions, finely chopped
salt, pepper to taste
For tart shells:
6 sheets filo dough (approx 12” x 18”)
½ cup melted butter
To make tartare:
1. Remove all silverskin, veins and connective tendons (the Chordae Tendineae - also called Heart Strings. Think about cow love and honour the beast)
2. Combine chopped heart, oil, yolk, cornichons, onions, capers, salt and pepper. Refrigerate until just before serving.
2. Combine chopped heart, oil, yolk, cornichons, onions, capers, salt and pepper. Refrigerate until just before serving.
To make pastry shells:
1. Brush 1 sheet of filo dough with butter and place two
more sheets directly on top. Brush the top with butter and layer on two more
sheets. Butter the top layer and add remaining 2 sheets. Press lightly to stick
layers together. Cut the stacked filo into 12 squares 3” x 3”, reserving
offcuts for shards. Press squares into the rounds of a buttered mini muffing
tin allowing corners of pastry to extend up from sides of the rounds. Bake at
375 until lightly browned.
2. Set aside to cool. Fill each shell with 1 - 2 tsp heart
tartare just before serving.
To make decorative shards:
1. Cut pastry
scraps into long triangular shards and place on buttered cookie sheet. Bake at
375 until golden brown. Set aside to cool. Spear into filled tart shells just
before serving.
makes 12
Wagyu Beef Roulades
Rolling these is very easy if you use a bamboo mat such as
is used for making Japanese maki sushi rolls. Otherwise, you could use a linen
towel – as in the torchon method for making foie gras.
1 1/2-lb piece of wagyu beef sirloin, or beef tenderloin if you don't have the $300 for Wagyu
1 cup short grain rice for sushi
4 tsp seasoned rice wine vinegar**
1/4 cup Korean BBQ sauce*
(optional)
Chinese chives, blanched
12 pc parchment paper about 5" x 5"
12 pc parchment paper about 5" x 5"
1. Place beef into freezer for 45 minutes to firm up the
meat so it can be sliced thinly.
2. Cook rice according to directions, cool and mix in rice
wine vinegar.
3. Remove beef from freezer. It should semi frozen. Cut
across grain into 1/8-inch slices. Gently shape and pound slices into squares 4 inches x 4 inches on the pieces of parchment paper.
4. Turn a square of beef onto sushi mat, paper side up. Peel off and discard paper. Spread a thin layer of
rice on beef and roll up tightly. Tie circumference of roll in three places
with a Chinese chive or butcher’s string. Brush with Korean BBQ sauce. Repeat
with remaining beef and rice.
5. Grill lightly just to sear beef. Cut each roll in half
for hors d’oeuvre size.
* ¼ cup soy sauce, 1 T brown sugar, 2 tsp chili hot sauce, ¼
tsp crushed garlic
**1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar, 1 tsp sugar, ¼ tsp salt
Makes 12 roulades or 24 pieces
Prosciutto Roses on Watermelon
For multicoloured options, use cantaloup or honeydew melon as well as watermelon.
12 one-inch cubes watermelon, no rind
12 thin slices
prosciutto
1. Form a rose from each slice of prosciutto: shape one end
of slice into a small bud-like cone then loosely wind the remaining strip
around it. Refrigerate for 20 minutes to firm the prosciutto then skewer each
rose with a decorative toothpick and stick one onto each cube of watermelon.
Makes 12
