Le pounti auvergnat

Changing regions and focus, from Normandy to Auvergne and from drink to food. You won't believe this, but I harvested some more Swiss chard this week. It was the last of it. After I cut down three of the plants, they re-sprouted a profusion of tender green leaves. I dug those three up a few days ago and picked off the new growth.

One idea I had for using those tender leaves was to make a savory cake called a pounti, which is an Auvergne specialty. I also see it called simply a gâteau de blettes (a chard cake) on some recipe sites on the web.

We first learned about and tasted pounti cake when we spent a view days in the Cantal (Auvergne) 10 years ago. I posted about it, including a recipe, back then.

The flavor ingredients are prunes, cheese, onions, and ham or other meat. Making pounti is a way to use up leftover meat like cooked pork or poultry. It's more a concept than a strict recipe, as are so many regional French dishes.

As usual, there are now a lot of recipes for pounti cakes on the internet, including quite a few in English. First you make a cake batter with flour, eggs, oil, and warm milk. Then you mix in grated cheese, sliced chard leaves, and pitted prunes. Walt says we should make a pounti-style cake with diced smoked chicken and dried cranberries, and that sounds like a good idea to me.

In this pounti, I used Emmental cheese and smoked pork lardons. If I'd had any Cantal cheese on hand, I would have used that, and I almost decided to make it with goat cheese. That will be for another day. You can also substitute fresh spinach leaves, tender kale leaves, or even lettuce for the chard.