The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia says that en crapaudine is a way to prepare a small chicken or, especially, a pigeon. I've never cooked a pigeon, but I've eaten "squab" in restaurants. Anyway, Walt and I prepared and cooked a poulet en crapaudine a few days ago. He cooked it over indirect heat on the barbecue grill. The French word crapaud, which crapaudine is derived from, means "toad" — the chicken or pigeon ends up looking a little like an overgrown toad or frog.
In America, you might call this a "butterflied" chicken or even a "flattened" chicken. It's a very easy to do. I use kitchen scissors and cut up one side of the backbone of a whole chicken (starting next to "the pope's nose") and then cut it up the other side to complete remove the backbone (make stock with it). Use a big sharp knife to make a small cut in the hard part of the breast bone of the bird. That will make it lie flat.
Another thing you can do to make it easier to put the flattened chicken on the barbecue grill and then turn it over during cooking is run a long skewer through the thighs and legs, across the width of the bird, to hold it together. Sorry, no photo of that. We seasoned the chicken well on both sides with a spice blend we made ourselves, along with some garlic powder and onion powder. Spice blend recipe below...
While the chicken was cooking on the grill, I made a side dish of glazed carrots for us to have with it. Walt had bought a nice bunch of baby carrots — true baby carrots, not the ones that are the ground-down cores of big carrots — at the open-air market the day before. I didn't peel them but just scrubbed and washed them to get them ready. Then I cooked them in a steamer pot.
When the carrots were cooked — les carottes sont cuites is a French expression meaning something like "the time has come" or "we're good to go" — I melted some butter in a pan, put in a tablespoon of "raw" sugar (cassonade) and some salt and pepper, and then I glazed the cooked carrots in that mixture. Add a spoonful or two of water to dissolve the sugar (or use honey) and when the water has all evaporated, les carottes sont... glacées. Sprinkle on some fresh chives.
Here's the cooked poulet en crapaudine, which we had seasoned with this Arabic spice blend of powdered spices before cooking. I found the recipe on the internet years ago, and for us now it's a standard blend. Here's a link, and here's another to make a larger quantity of the spice blend.
Arabic (Lebanese) Spice Blend
All the spices are in powdered form.
2 tablespoons each : black pepper – paprika – cumin
1 tablespoon each : coriander seed – cloves (girofle)
1 teaspoon each : nutmeg – cinnamon
½ teaspoon : cardamom
I'm certainly going to make some of this Arabic Seven-Spice Blend. It sounds very versatile and useful...
ReplyDeleteI know it's a slightly different word, but I was just reading a novel set in Napoleonic times and an English officer refers to the French soldiers as "Johnny Crapauds". Could there be any connection between this and "crapaudine"?
I think the disparaging appellation Johnny Crapaud is similar to people calling French people "frogs" — frogs, toads... not much difference.
DeleteJust noticed there seem to be eight spices in this blend...
ReplyDeleteYou are right. I hadn't noticed. I'm going to change the post.
DeleteBoth the recipes I linked to say 7, but they are wrong. The spice blend is good on pork and other meats too. You can vary the amounts if there is one spice that you like or don't like more than others. One thing I read said that maybe paprika shouldn't be in the mix.
DeleteDelicious looking dinner! I’ve sent myself the spice recipes, thanks.
ReplyDeletealso called spatch cocked (is that one word or 2? haha)
ReplyDeleteThe word crapaudine has several completely different aceptations but all refering to the shape of a toad. See crapaudine at CNRTL in French.
ReplyDeleteAcceptations and referring! Sorry.
DeleteFrom the LG: CRAPAUDINE (EN) Manière d'accommoder un petit poulet, un poussin ou, surtout, un pigeon. La volaille, fendue, aplatie (« comme un crapaud »), panée et grillée, reste savoureuse, car les sucs sont concentré
DeleteYes, it is one of the acceptations, but it could also be a socket ( in a door) and a grid to prevent debris going into an exhaust water pipe, etc.
DeleteI read a few entries in the CNRTL dictionary every day, and I had read that one. But I wasn't really writing a post about the term crapaudine and all its meanings.
DeleteWell this looks delicious. I never would have guessed that the produce vendors grind big carrots down to "baby" ones. I love glazed carrots.
ReplyDeleteI too love glazed carrots..
DeleteI put carrots in mine. But then I put carrots in nearly everything.
DeleteOoh, the glazed carrots that way, look especially nice (the chicken, of course, looks so tasty).
ReplyDeleteAbout biscuits, from yesterday's topic... you mentioned thinking of them as an especially southern thing. I think the breakfast use of them, with gravy, is a pretty southern thing (though it's pretty normal here in Missouri, and I don't think of Missouri as southern). I never in my life, growing up in New Jersey, had biscuits and gravy. My parents were from New England, and I don't think it's a thing in either area. We had biscuits with nice dinners, like when we had turkey or a roast or something. Having bread with dinner was not a practice in our house, except for biscuits with something like a special holiday meal.
I think that not having bread with dinner was the case in a lot of American families. We had breakfast breads like biscuits or toast, we had sandwiches on bread, and we had cornbread and hushpuppies. I'm not sure I ever had biscuits and gravy either. I think I had them once in California, in a restaurant up in the mountains. My mother often made cheese biscuits for breakfast.
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