Fritz Blank: What a delicious journey

The old laundry paddle is retired, wedged beside the blackboard in our kitchen, a totem now.

Its handle is sawed off to utensil-height, a hole drilled in it for hanging, its blade worn smooth as river stone.

Fritz Blank, who once used it to stir his grand copper pots, bequeathed it to me - autographed, for good measure - as he was packing up his haute French classic Deux Cheminees at 12th and Locust, getting ready to decamp with his cat Bobo to Thailand.

That was seven years ago. And it hasn't stirred since: It seemed unseemly to dunk the thing - so accustomed to the likes of truffled sauce Perigord - in our more prosaic chicken paprikash, fish stews, and Frog-Commissary vegetarian chili.

It had blended into the woodwork by last week when news came that Blank had died in his faraway new home, coconut trees swaying outside the door, mountains smoky in the distance: He'd been struggling with Alzheimer's, forgetting, he reported on a rare visit to Philadelphia a few years ago, how to find his way to Broad and Market.

What a cruel fate for such a quick wit, for a mind so wide-ranging and restless and hungry. He could be hard to track on occasion, discoursing on the persona of the caraway seed one moment, the next on the sorry state of Viennese cookery, the next on the African-inspired kinship of Philadelphia's spicy pepper-pot soups to the creole gumbos of New Orleans.

But it was a caffeinated joyride, nonetheless, jaw-dropping in its erudition. He was a showy polymath, a Renaissance man - an earring in his right ear - in the whirl of Philadelphia's Restaurant Renaissance, and for my journalistic purposes, a ready source and bottomless fount of culinary history.

His library, since donated to the University of Pennsylvania, was a vast store of 15,000 volumes adjoining his living quarters one level up from the chandeliered dining rooms where he'd nightly preside over a menu of velvety crab soup (with a shot of Scotch), veal sweetbreads, and a raspberry-vinegar-marinated rack of lamb.

I have his recipes still, some garnished with his hand-sketched jolly-chef cartoon and printed under the black-and-white logo of Deux Cheminees' brick Furness mansion (circa 1914), which once housed the Princeton Club. There's an all-American figgy pudding, and old Philadelphia rum-and-lime Fish House Punch, a kielbasa-studded Soupe au Choucroute à la Tchecoslovaquie (Sauerkraut Soup), and the sort of invention Blank specialized in - boneless shad fillets with a bacon butter sauce, a Philadelphia stalwart burnished with a Frenchified sauce.

He was a French-cooking chef, of course, given to flat, squat cook's caps. But that came later in life. He was a dairy scientist first, a microbiologist at age 32 who had a hand in cracking the mystery of Legionnaire's disease. He loved to ham it up in Harrisburg at the state Farm Show's annual dairy milking contest.

But he was no less a serious scholar, regularly invited to give papers in London (one on America's pioneering "Cereal Kings") at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery.

He was a devotee of the dishes of Eastern Europe, and of his Pennsylvania German forebears, schooling externs in his basement kitchens on the nuances of ("It needs to glisten!") vinegary ("Use lower-acid rice vinegar!") German potato salad; hot-sweet mustards made to the specs of his hero, the Hungarian master Louis Szathmary; even the proper technique for cooking the Munich frankfurter: "Never plunge it into boiling water!"

"Fritz," it turns out, wasn't Blank's given name. He was born Frederick Carl Blank Jr., and nicknamed Fritz by his grandmother, after a false start as "Binky." (That tale and far more colorful ones are the stuff of an affectionate biography, Chef Fritz and His City, by Samuel Young.)

The grandmother, Blank's beloved Oma, was his first tutor, showing him the ropes of German cookery, and the secrets of a turtle soup that years later he would call the toast of the saloons of his hometown Pennsauken - or "East Philadelphia," he'd say.

Rural Jersey stayed in his blood: He'd drag guests to volunteer fire department fund-raisers of fried muskrat in the marshlands, then feed leftovers - leathery, gamy things - to the likes of Penn professor Paul Rozin, who studied the psychology of eating.

As generous as he was, Blank could be cranky and disapproving of his fellow chefs. But he was a charter member in good standing of a charmed circle, the post-Julia Child class of Georges Perrier, Jean-Marie Lacroix, and Susanna Foo, who presided with distinction over the second wave of the city's culinary awakening spanning the '80s.

The wheel was turning once again as Blank ended his nearly 30-year run in 2007, the popularity of French fine dining in steep descent.

But today, as tastes change yet again, French flavors can be spotted creeping back onto menus from Rittenhouse Square to Queen Village to East Passyunk.

In homage to that uptick, and as a toast to chef Fritz, I'm resolving to give another try to the recipe he gave me long ago - a cool-weather blanquette of pork, a stew of carrots, onions, and mushrooms finished with a bit of cream.

And, yes, I'll plan to stir it with that sidelined laundry paddle.

See what sort of magic is left in the wand.

Makes 6 servingsEndTextStartText

3 pounds pork, trimmed of fat and cut into 1 1/2-inch chunks

1 cup flour, seasoned with salt and pepper

2 tablespoons lard or shortening

2 cups chopped onions

1 cup carrots, in 1/2-inch pieces

1/2 cup celery, tender inner stalks and leaves, in 1/2-inch pieces

1 tablespoon chopped garlic

1/2 cup chopped parsley

1 1/4 cups rich chicken stock

1 1/4 cups white wine

1 bouquet garni (see note below)

1 1/4 cups heavy cream

1/4 lemon

Salt and pepperEndTextStartText

1. Dredge pork cubes (boneless shoulders or loin ends work well) with seasoned flour and shake off excess.

2. In a heavy kettle or thick-bottomed stock pot, melt shortening over medium-high heat. Saute pork until lightly browned on all sides. Add vegetables, garlic, and chopped parsley and toss with meat. Add chicken stock, white wine, and bouquet garni. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a lively simmer. Cook partly covered, stirring occasionally, until meat is tender, about 1 1/2 hours. Remove bouquet garni.

3. Add cold heavy cream and, uncovered, bring back to a boil, then remove from heat. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and a sprinkling of lemon juice.

Note: To assemble bouquet garni, make a nest of 10 or 12 sprigs of parsley in the palm of your hand. Lay in it: a few sprigs thyme, 5 bay leaves, 4 black peppercorns, 4 bruised juniper berries, and 3 cracked allspice berries. Make a fist, bunching it into a ball. Wrap it like a yarn ball with common string, or tie up in cheesecloth. In place of juniper berries, you can add 2 tablespoons gin to the stock and wine.

Per serving: 562 calories; 62 grams protein; 19 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams sugar; 21 grams fat; 200 milligrams cholesterol; 324 milligrams sodium; 2 grams dietary fiber.