Tarte d'Alsace

Eastside Road, March 21, 2010—

ANOTHER CHEMISTRY SET tonight, but one we like: "Tarte d'Alsace," flat bread with ham, onions, and gruyère. It's from Trader Joe. In it,

wheat flour, water, sunflower oil, salt, crème fraîche, ham, onions, gruyère.

That sounds innocent enough, but parenthesized within those eight ingredients we find these:

(cultured pasteurized cream, citric acid, sodium ascorbate, salt, sugar, sodium phosphates, smoke flavoring, sodium erythrobate, sodium nitrate, canola oil, caramel color, enzymes)

But still, we've bought and cooked these things before, and they seemed the perfect inexpensive and easy thing to serve to a party of ten or twelve guests, some of whom we'd never met before, who were arriving on a Sunday evening to read through a couple of Gertrude Stein plays. (What Happened a Play, Ladies Voices.)
It was a stretch of a day, watching a mock trial for the fifth time in 48 hours, then driving home 110 miles to our party. Dinner had to be easy. Richard brought the salad — tasty — and we supplied these Alsatian tartes, six of them, bought at Trader Joe's. They worked fine.

Alsace white, "Now & Zen", 2007 (details here)