Shockingly, I can find no evidence that FYCE has ever done a quiche recipe. They are very simple and tasty, but they acquired a bad rap in the 70s, when they became quite common among a certain stereotyped group. The B-52s made a song out of it (involving a dog named Quiche Lorraine) because it was so absurd and the B-52s were not likely to be huge fans of the dish as it had become a common derogatory descriptive. The bad odor still clings. Quiche is pretty much a frittata with a crust, which you will find hard to avoid on brunch menus nowadays.
FYI, Quiche Lorraine is not named after a person but a region in northeastern France. It’s now most famous, if at all, as the scene of some of the worst battles of WWI. Verdun and Metz are in Lorraine. It’s also a little bit of a “rust belt”: in the 1800s it was a coal and iron center, but most of that has closed down.
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1 frozen pie crust, thawed
8 slices of bacon.
1 medium onion, diced
1 1/2 cups half and half. I’m like Goldilocks: 1 1/2 cups cream is too rich; 1 1/2 cups milk is too milky, half-and-half is just right.
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 half cups shredded Swiss cheese. Or 3/4 cups each Swiss and Gruyére. Or 1 1/2 cups shredded Gruyére. Use more if you want and can fit it into the pie dish.
Some salt and pepper
Fry up that bacon so it’s nice and crisp. Put it aside on a plate with paper towels so it dries and cools a little. If you want, fry the diced onion in the bacon grease, you might need to add a little butter, but you can also not do this and use the onions as is.
Crumble the bacon into Bac-O-Bits. When the onions are browned put them in a bowl, if you’ve fried them.
Heat an oven to 350 or 375 degrees, I set mine to 350 but you might need to go up to 400 if you don’t have the Atomic Particle Accelerator model that I do.
In a bowl, crack open the eggs, whisk them a little, then add the half-and-half and the cheese and whisk some more.
Put the pie pastry in a 9″ glass pie dish. Make a festive little border by pinching a little along the edge, so it doesn’t just flop over the sides. Make a little serpentine design.
Add the bacon to the pastry. Add the onions, fried or not. Add the egg/half-and-half/cheese mixture. That, my friends, is it. No need to combine because through some kind of culinary wizardry the onions and bacon will rise up like Lazarus, but often you will see recipes that call for mixing everything together, which also works quite well. If you’re using bacon you can put some of it on top. This is a very malleable recipe. Put this in the oven for 40 to 50 minutes. The top will be golden but not crispy. Do the toothpick test in the center to make sure it’s not a gooey mess. It needs to hold together, like a chilled custard. Let it sit out for a few minutes so it cools a bit and firms up even more, then slice and serve.
Et voilà. Why did the B-52s find this easy, inoffensive egg dish so funny? Because, as the stereotype went, you would be a white woman serving this with a simple salad of romaine and spinach leaves, along with copious amounts of Chardonnay, to your fellow white single friends, and you would compare notes on which fern bar had the best “Ladies Night” and attracted the most eligible bachelors. Believe me, there was a whole mythology around this. The closest contemporary parallel I can come up with is when the avocado on toast craze hit and some jaded souls, like me, would raise an eyebrow when trapped in a conversation about this really cool spot not actually like, in Williamsburg, maybe like East Williamsburg? Or Bushwick? What-EVER, it’s only $7 but you have to get there super early because the lines are in-sane and they sometimes run out?
If you want to leave out the bacon just add more cheese. For spinach, I chop up the leaves as small as I can, a good amount, put 2/3 in with the eggs with or without the bacon, and put the rest on the top. You might have to cut down on the cheese content a little to leave enough room in the pie dish. You have to watch this, though, because you don’t want the spinach on top to burn. The filling should keep it moist enough that it won’t. Really, there’s a lot of stuff you can do. Tomatoes! Mushrooms! I once improvised a ground beef version and it came out really well but I might as well have made a casserole.
The great thing about quiche is that it can be served at any time of day, and be eaten hot or cold. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to run to meet up with my friends at The Brass Monkey. Last time I was there there was a guy who looked just like Lief Garrett and I’m not going to let him get away twice!
Is that the “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” bit? I vaguely remember that, and despite me being very… unwoke? at the time, found it a bit much (although, I also felt it wasn’t entirely as serious as many of the fans took it to be?)
I’ve definitely heard that saying before. TV? A movie? My mom? IDK.
It’s the title of an actual book someone wrote.
yeah, like @sedevilc said, it was a book, published in the 80s? maybe late 70s?, and was supposed to be humorous, and all about what behaviors are/are not acceptable for men.
I’ve never heard of “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” but I don’t doubt it exists. There’s also a deep flaw in my hastily written recipe. The quiche has the crust; a frittata does not (as far as I know.)
Yup, I saw that and fixed it:)
Many thanks!
I’ve got your back.
It’s a book. I think it was one of those deeply unfunny humor books that used to hit the best seller lists like Sniglets.
Looking it up, it’s one of those horribly dated supposedly tongue in cheek humor books that is really pushing the point of view it is supposedly mocking.
It’s padded with lists and quizzes and printed in a large font to stretch a Parade Magazine two paragraph humor piece into something passing as a book.
The author contributed to SNL, the NY Times and cowrote a allegedly light hearted book with Bill O’Reilly. Sounds like a classic example of 80s-90s Mitch Albom-esque establishmentarian nagging “humor.”
Quiche Lorraine also makes for excellent day-after hangover food, trust me on this. Just FYI.
OK, fess up. A person who makes fancy french sauces from scratch uses frozen pie crust? I call shenanigans.
It’s true. I have these very strange culinary defects, which I have described. I can’t make a pizza to save my life, but I can make flat-bread pizza using stuff like Pillsbury pizza dough that turns out really well. I can’t roast a chicken, but I’ve made tons of roasts and turkeys. I’ve tried to make fudge several times and it always ends in failure. I have no idea why. But give me a few supermarket eggs and there’s nothing I can’t do. I have this weird thing about meat, too. You shouldn’t let me within 100 feet of a barbecue grill but give me access to an oven or stovetop or even a countertop grill I can work wonders.
@Sedevilc I make my sauces from scratch and use store bought crusts too. They’re just one of those things that seem like more work than it’s worth when Pillsbury makes a perfectly acceptable one.
@Hannibal I freely admit to being a complete pie crust snob. First, you get some leaf fat from the farm, render it into lard…
What is funny is I will render lard to make pie crust or spend all day making sourdough bread, but something crying out for sauce gets a pat of butter and some penzey’s mural of flavor. and done.
@Sedevilc I have no doubt your pie crusts are far better than Pillsbury. I’ve toyed with the idea of making crust from scratch. I wouldn’t use a box cake mix but somehow I’ve convinced myself it’s okay to cheat when it’s pie.
I adore quiche. The carnivore will not eat eggs in any form unless they are hidden in cookies or cakes. It has been years since I had a quiche, and your recipe is just perfect!
So when I unsteadily come and visit you and ascend your smooth and stable concrete porch what exactly will we eat? Have you tried to cook out of the Larousse yet? I’d be fascinated to visit your local markets and farms though.
@MatthewCrawley
You and Ellie will eat every cream sauce her heart desires. As long as I have a cocktail I will be fine.
@elliecoo have you considered making mini frittatas in muffin tins? I like to do those and then reheat them throughout the week for breakfast. You probably could do mini-quiches somehow, although you may need to reheat in an oven/toaster oven and not a microwave so the crust doesn’t turn to mush.
You know, I’m not a huge quiche/frittata fan (I’m a bit picky about eggs), but I found that I way prefer mini ones. I’ve made some cheesy frittatas in a muffin tin that I really enjoyed.
@brightersideoflife, very good idea – I never thought of doing that.
It’s an awesome song, tho.
This reminds me that I don’t think FYCE has ever had a lobster roll recipe. They’re really simple, if you don’t steam your own live lobsters. I’ve seen this done a few times. It’s very unsettling, because it sounds like the poor lobster is screaming, but that’s actually the air being released between the flesh and the shell.
I love quiche, it’s easy and a great way to use up leftovers.
Like SO many recipes it sounds somewhat fancy but that is essentially what it is, I think, a way to use up leftovers. Lots of Europeans used to be kind of subsistence farmers, and they did not waste food. I don’t cook a lot with truffles, delicious though they are, because they’re so expensive. So where did all these truffle recipes come from? Well, if you lived in the woods and they were right there…
Didn’t those escape to the chateau people try to grow truffles? what happened with that project?
I’ve never seen “Escape to the Chateau.” It would only invite envy-anger. For that matter, I don’t know much about truffles. I suppose they could be planted but I thought they just grew wild around trees.
You give me a fork and I will eat that entire quiche.
@matthewcrawley my parents always hated quiche when I was younger, but it’s because in the 1970s and 80s the folks who made quiche around them used things like canned asparagus and canned mushrooms in the quiche, so it wasn’t nearly as tasty as well… damn near any other breakfast item. Also good luck finding gruyere, you were stuck with the shredded swiss cheese in a bag.