Une cuisse de sanglier

You might not know what that means. Cuisse means "thigh", and a sanglier is a "wild boar". On dictionary.com I see this definition: "a wild Old World swine, Sus scrofa, from which most of the domestic hogs are believed to be derived". American friends who live a few miles upriver from us sent an e-mail Friday evening and said they had a special gift for us. Could they stop by on Saturday morning? Yes, of course. The gift was the raw, fresh leg of a boar weighing 4.8 kilos — just over 10 lbs. They have a neighbor who hunts and who shares the game he kills... let's say, "harvests".

There are a lot of wild boars in the Saint-Aignan area, and according to reports there are plenty of them that live in the vineyard or surrounding woods out behind our house. I've never seen one out there, but I have seen them up near the Château de Chambord, and even in the woods just across the Cher river in a forested area that's less than three miles from our house. Most of the time you only see them after dark, but one morning I was driving over to Romorantin, 15 miles east, and I saw a herd of them, 25 or 30 strong, cross the road in single file not far ahead of me. I slowed down and watched them climb up an embankment and disappear into the woods.

On Saturday I looked for information about cooking sanglier. The Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia says that les jeunes sangliers ont une chair délicate — the meat of a young boar is a delicacy... I hope it's true. I cooked half of the boar's leg we were given yesterday. We decided we wanted it well done — it's a variety of pork, after all. Then I found a French recipe on the 'net for what is called effiloché de gigot de sanglier. Just now, I found an English-language blog post on the same subjectpublished by a man who calls himself Chef Dennis.

So yesterday I cooked about half of the gigot / cuisse de sanglier in the slow cooker for 8 or 9 hours, with a carrot, a stalk of celery, a large shallot, and five or six garlic cloves. I put in some vinegar and spices and herbs to give the meat good flavor. I just tasted it and it is good. But it needs a sauce, so I'm going to do something new (for me) and make a batch of western North Carolina barbecue sauce to have with the pulled meat. Normally I use eastern NC sauce, which has no tomato or sugar in it, just vinegar and spices including hot red pepper and ground black pepper. Here's the recipe for the NC sauce that has tomato in it. You might enjoy watching this short YouTube video featuring a cook who shows how to make the sauce and has a western NC accent. Here's a link to part 2 of this post.