Escargots

Many times when Americans write about their dining experiences in France, they say that they have enjoyed eating escargot, in the singular. That makes me laugh. Who could eat just one? What you are served in France and in French is plural — des escargots. Sometimes six, sometimes a dozen.

Why did the escargot become a prized food item in France? One theory I've read is that people in Burgundy started eating snails because of the old Catholic tradition of meatless Fridays. Living far from the ocean, the Burgundians resorted to eating a cold-blooded land animal rather than fish, which were scarce. The main point was that you weren't supposed to eat the flesh of warm-blooded animals on Friday. Snails were also a meat that Catholics could eat during Lent.

I found this escargot in the garden the other day. Snails are
plentiful this year. I assume it's because of our damp weather.

Somebody must have liked the taste of snails, because they caught on. Of course, most of what you taste when you eat escargots is what is called "snail butter" — beurre d'escargots. It's the very garlicky butter with lots of chopped parsley that snails are normally cooked in and served with.

The varieties of snails commonly consumed in France, out of the hundreds that exist, are called l'escargot de Bourgogne (or le Bourgogne —  the Burgundy snail) and le petit-gris (the small gray snail). It seems that the Burgundy snail was never particularly Burgundian, but lived over a much wider territory. It's also called the escargot des vignes — the vineyard snail.

Most of the snails consumed in France nowadays are imported from Eastern Europe, Turkey, or Indonesia. The French snail population was decimated by over-gathering, says the food writer Jean-Pierre Coffe in his 1989 book called Le Vrai Vivre, which I translate as Living the True Life. There were only about 150 snail farmers in France by the late '80s, Coffe says, producing about 100 tons a year, while the French were consuming about 10,000 tons of escargots annually.

The snail was very cooperative about posing for my pictures.
I really didn't have to use a fast shutter speed!

Snails gathered in the wild need to be purged before they are fit for human consumption, I understand. Why? It's because in nature snails eat plants that are toxic or even poisonous to human beings. Purging them means feeding them a controlled diet (or not feeding them at all) for a few days to allow the toxic plant matter to pass on through their systems. Then they are good to eat — though not everybody would agree with that assessment, I'm sure.

Monsieur Coffe also says that prehistoric peoples as well as the ancient Greeks and Romans ate snails, blowing the meatless Friday explanation out of the water. He says entire peoples have been saved from famine by the lowly escargot. Recipes for fried snails date back as far as the 4th century of our era, and for many centuries snails were a food eaten mainly by the rich, Monsieur Coffe adds. The tradition of eating snails with garlic butter goes back only to about 1840.

I couldn't tell you what variety of snail it is. (2016 note: it's called le petit-gris.)
It looks nice and plump, though, doesn't it?

The Larousse Gastronomique food encyclopedia says snail flesh actually contains little nourishment and is hard to digest. It does contain a lot of vitamin C, interestingly enough, and of course minerals including calcium and magnesium. The Larousse Gastronomique lists just six recipes for escargots.

Moroccan chicken with fennel

This is another tajine idea. In French it's called Tajine de poulet au fenouil. The ingredients are two big bulbs of fennel, four chicken thighs, four chicken legs, one whole lemon, a couple of garlic cloves, and some Moroccan spices or curry powder. Add some potatoes if you want, or serve the chicken and fennel with rice or couscous. It's an easy recipe.

Ingredients for Moroccan chicken with fennel

If you have full leg sections of chicken as I did, cut the thighs and legs apart to make them easier to cook. I used four leg sections, but you could easily use six. Salt and pepper the chicken before cooking it.

Chicken legs and thighs, salted and peppered

Wash the fennel bulbs, discard the blemished outer layers, and cut the bulbs into quarters. Cut the lemon into four or five slices and remove the pits.

Fennel and lemon ready for cooking

Sauté the chicken pieces in a little olive or other vegetable oil. When they are starting to brown, add a good pinch of fennel seeds if you have some, a good pinch of hot paprika, and three tablespoons of curry powder (or your own mix of spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cayenne pepper, and others).

Chicken pieces browning with spices

Stir the chicken around with the spices and then add the fennel pieces and lemon slices to the pot. Throw in a couple of bay leaves and a couple of whole garlic cloves in their husk. Add not quite enough water to cover the ingredients — you can always add more water later if you think it needs it.

Chicken, fennel, lemon, and spices in the pot with some water

I decided to add some little red potatoes to the tajine because I had some in the cellar downstairs. Steamed potatoes are good with a curried sauce.

Add potatoes to the pot, or leave them out and eat
the chicken and fennel with steamed rice or couscous.

Cover the pot and let the chicken, fennel, and potatoes simmer on low heat for about 45 minutes or longer. Test the fennel and potatoes for doneness by poking them with a skewer or knife. If the chicken falls apart a little, that's okay.

Moroccan chicken with fennel ready for the table

For mine, the chicken was falling off the bone and the fennel was tender. The potatoes were completely cooked. I thought there was too much sauce, so I poured it off into another pot and boiled it down until it reduced and thickened a little. Then I poured it back over the dish, which I had kept warm in the oven. Taste it for salt, of course.

I thought the cooked lemon slices were good to eat, skin and all. Walt thought they were a little bitter.

Another ingredient you can add toward the end of the cooking is a dozen or so big green olives. Give the olives about 15 minutes to poach in the sauce before you eat them. They will add saltiness, so be careful with the salt shaker if you add olives.

Rillettes — potted meat

Another traditional Loire Valley food product is called rillettes, or potted meat. The English term "potted" is kind of unfortunate, don't you think? We Anglo-Americans have a way of making good food sound unappetizing without meaning to, I guess. I think it's because we are so squeamish about food in general.

The French word rillettes sounds a lot better. Pronounce it [ree-YET]. If you want an American equivalent, think Deviled Ham. But that product is so full of spices and chemicals that you'd never even know it is made with meat! Again, it's "deviled" — that can't be good, can it? It's evil.

I got these rillettes from a vendor at the market in Saint-Aignan.
His shop is in Angé, a village about 5 miles west on the Cher river.

Rillettes are usually made from pork here in the Loire, but you can also buy or make rillettes of duck, goose, rabbit, or chicken. I bought some rillettes de porc to serve to our friends from California last weekend, because I was trying to serve mostly local foods.

According to the web site of a major producer of this kind of potted pork, rillettes were first made in the Touraine. But the best known rillettes today are made in Le Mans, the city famous for car races that is an hour or two north of Tours in the area called the Sarthe.

On the back of the container, some pigs are having a pro-rillettes
demonstration. "Up with rillettes", their sign says. "Oh, to be
made into rillettes by traditional and artisanal methods," says the pig.

In fact, there is a local rivalry, and some people enjoy the debate over the relative merits of rillettes du Mans and rillettes de Tours. Our neighbor Bernard says he and his hunting buddies have such a debate every year, since they hunt in the forests and fields between the two cities and the hunters come together from the two areas. They bring rillettes for their mid-day picnic (and bread and wine too, I'm sure).

Bernard says that the Tours-style rillettes are meatier, less fatty, and not cooked quite as long. He prefers that texture, in which the chunks of meat are left more nearly intact.

The best way to understand what rillettes are like, if you've never had them, is to realize that American-style tuna salad is called, in French, rillettes de thon. The tuna in tuna salad, like the pork or other meat in rillettes, is cooked until it starts to fall apart. It's shredded.

Here are the ingredients in the locally made rillettes:
lean and fat of pork; seasonings.

Then it's put up in fat — mayonnaise in the case of tuna (mayonnaise is an emulsion of vegetable oil and eggs or egg yolks), and pork, duck, or goose fat in the case of potted meat. Rillettes, like tuna salad, are easy to eat because they are spreadable, and they're good eaten on bread or toast or in sandwiches.

In the old days, before modern refrigeration, rillettes were made in the fall when hogs were slaughtered on the farm. Smoking the meat was one way of preserving the meat so that it would last over the winter. Making sausages, which could also be smoked, was another method of preserving the meat. Another was to pack it in salt. And another, in France, was making rillettes, which were packed in crocks and covered with a layer of fat that protected the meat from air and mold.

I bought these duck rillettes at the supermarket.
They aren't local, but they are good. They're 70% duck.

Making rillettes requires long, slow cooking the pork or other meat in fat and liquid. Six hours or more of cooking is not too much. Here's a well-known chef's recipe that I found on the web and a link to the French site:

Jacques Thorel's recipe for rillettes

• 4½ lbs. of pork breast
• 4½ lbs. of lean raw ham
• 1¼ lbs. of lard
• 2 cups of water
• 1 cup of white wine
• 1 Tbs. salt
• 1 Tbs. black pepper

1. Cut all the pork into 1-inch cubes.
2. In a thick-bottomed pot, bring the water to a boil. Add the lard and the cubed pork.
3. Cover the pot and put in in a water bath in a 220ºF oven for six hours. Stir the pot frequently with a wooden spatula.
4. When the meat starts to fall apart, it's done. Pour on the white wine and let the meat cook for another hour.
5. Take the pot out of the oven and stir and shred the meat.
6. Put the meat into ramekins or jars while it is still hot. Store in the refrigerator.

Here's what rillettes look like in the container.

If you are in the U.S., you need to find fresh pork that has a sufficient quantity of fat to make good rillettes. I remember when I needed pork fat to make sausages in San Francisco. I had a hard time finding any. Finally, at Tower Market, I talked to one of the butchers. He brought out a big pan of fat that had been trimmed off the meat they were selling. I said that was exactly what I needed. He gave it to me free and wouldn't let me pay him when I tried. For him, it was something to discard. Ah là là !

The "industrially made" rillettes have a longer list of ingredients:
duck (70%) including lean meat, fat, and connective tissue*;
pork, including lean meat, fat, and connective tissue*;
sea salt, salt, pepper, and E250 (a preservative).

How do you eat rillettes? Cold, spread on bread or toast. Or in a sandwich. The traditional accompaniment is the little sour gherkins called cornichons in French. Any sour or even dill pickle, or pickled onions, would also be good.
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* I assume that "connective tissue," aka "conjunctive tissue" (conjonctif de canard, conjonctif de porc) is listed as an ingredient because of European regulations. The local rillettes surely contain it too, even if it is not listed. Again, it's not very appetizing, but here's a definition I found on the web: the tissue found in nearly all parts of most animals. It yields gelatin on boiling, and consists of variously arranged fibers which are imbedded protoplasmic cells, or corpuscles; - called also cellular tissue and connective tissue. Adipose or fatty tissue is one of its many forms, and cartilage and bone are sometimes included by the phrase.

Salad with duck and potatoes

When Peter Hertzmann came to visit a few weeks ago, he arrived from Le Périgord (aka La Dordogne) with several duck carcasses for stock making, a big bloc of foie gras de canard, three magrets (duck breasts), and several large tins containing duck fat, confit of duck legs, and confit of various gizzards, hearts, and other abats (giblets). Oh, and some duck rillettes packed sous vide (vacuum-packed, shrink-wrapped) too. Peter had spent a week working in a restaurant down there.

While he was here, we polished off the magrets and most of the foie gras. We made stock with one of the carcasses. Last week I opened a tin of confit de canard, which are the leg & thigh sections of a duck cooked slowly in duck fat (completely submerged in it) until the duck has rendered all its fat and gone all tender and tasty. Here's an earlier posting about making confit de canard.

Strips of duck skin for cracklings, shredded duck meat, and
sun-dried tomatoes for a salad, along with a good quantity
of rendered, clarified duck fat for future uses

You can cook the duck giblets, turkey or chicken giblets or legs, or even pork the same way. When you cook duck or other meats slowly in fat that way, the meat isn't seared on the surface and the fat inside the meat and under the skin just melts away. That's the theory, anyway. I know a lot of people are fat-averse, but I'm not. When you take the confit of meat or giblets out of the duck fat and drain everything on a rack or paper towels, you have a fairly lean result anyway.

A lot of people who are averse to eating duck or other meat fat have no problem eating high-fat potato chips or cookies that are almost pure margarine or butter. It's a psychological thing.

Confit of chicken gizzards and some shredded duck leg meat

This past week, we were invited to lunch by our summertime neighbors whose main residence is in Blois. Maryvonne served a salad with duck gizzards — gésiers de canard — as a starter course. (The main course was venison.)

A year or so ago, Walt and I had bought some fresh gizzards at the supermarket and tried to make a similar salad, which is one we have eaten often in cafés and restaurants and really enjoy. But I didn't know how to cook the gizzards. I just sautéed them in a pan, and they came out tough and rubbery.

Lettuce in vinaigrette and a bowl of boiled, peeled new red potatoes

I realized at that point that I needed either to cook the gizzards in duck fat until they turned into confit (a long process) or just buy gésiers confits to start with. When I went to the Intermarché supermarket on Thursday, I looked around to see what might be available in the way of gésiers. In the meat counter, near the chickens, guinea fowl, and ducks, I found packages of gésiers de canard and gésiers de poulet already cooked in duck fat and packaged sous vide.

Sun-dried tomatoes and duck-skin cracklings

I bought some, thinking that at home I had lettuce and little red new potatoes that I could use to make a nice salad. Then I remembered that I also had a leftover piece of confit de canard in the refrigerator.

On Friday morning I got out the cooked duck leg and warmed it up in some duck fat that I needed to clarify anyway. When the duck was warm, I took it out and peeled off the skin (I had also saved the skin from the last leg we ate, so I had a good amount). I realized that the duck meat, shredded by hand, would go well with the lettuce, gizzards, and boiled-potato salad I was making, and that I could cut the duck skin into strips and sauté them in duck fat until they crisped up and became what we call "cracklings." That would be a good flavor and texture to top the salad with.

The salad ready to eat

I boiled the potatoes in their skins and then peeled them after they were cooked. I dressed the lettuce with vinaigrette, which is the standard French salad dressing: for a good-sized salad, mix a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, 2 teaspoons of vinegard, and 2 tablespoons of oil. Add salt and pepper and stir well. You can use more or less vinegar, depending on how tart you like the dressing, or more of less oil, to taste. Use any vinegar you want (red wine, white wine, cider, tarragon), and any oil (olive, soybean, sunflower, etc.).

Salad makings on the table

The other thing I put out to have with the salad was some sun-dried tomatoes that I rehydrated in boiling water and then covered in a mixture of olive and sunflower oil. Fresh tomatoes would be even better, but they aren't in season.

This kind of salad, which is almost more meat than greens, is a very common one in French cafés and restaurants at lunchtime. It makes a balanced meal, I think, unless of course you are a vegetarian.

Hertzmann in the kitchen

So Peter Hertzmann and I were both bothered by the oysters we ate at the Cheval Blanc. Oysters contaminated with Vibrio bacteria look, smell, and taste perfectly good. You just never know. It's the same with salad greens, cheeses, pâtés, and many other foods. Hamburgers. Chicken. Oh well. Such is life. Eating only well-done foods is kind of boring.

Peter Hertzmann cooking in our kitchen at La Renaudière

Do take a look at Peter's A la carte web site. It's a veritable compendium of French food history, esoterica, cooking techniques, and recipes. His latest entry is about fromage de tête, or head cheese. You won't find that on many web sites.

Last Sunday, Peter cooked chicken breasts with a sauce Robert for lunch, accompanied by green beans cooked with a little diced tomato, onion, and garlic. He started the chicken in a pan on top of the stove and after it had browned on one side he finished the cooking in a hot oven for five or six minutes.

Blancs de poulet, sauce Robert

Sauce Robert is a classic French preparation made with onions, reduced stock, white wine, vinegar, and mustard. It's perfect with viandes blanches, white meats. Here is Peter's article on sauce Robert.

Cooking green beans — in this case flat green beans, which looked so good at the supermarket I had to buy them — with tomato and onion is one of my favorite ways to do them. The recipe I use calls them haricots verts à l'italienne — Italian style.

Green beans with tomatoes, onion, and garlic, ready to be cooked

At the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan, I had found some crosnes, which Walt had been wanting to try for a while. Peter found some nice Brussels sprouts. Then we bought some of Mme Doudouille's good saucisses aveyronnaises -- pork sausages from the area called l'Aveyron in south-central France. That was dinner.

Crosnes, choux de Bruxelles, et saucisses aveyronnaises

Peter shredded the sprouts before cooking them in a pan with butter. He did the shredding with a knife, not a mandolin or food processor, and it was a time-consuming process but the result was very good.

Look at Betty Carlson's La France Profonde blog for more information about Aveyron and its main town, Rodez.

Peter and Walt at their laptops on a stay-at-home Sunday

Beans for lunch, crosnes for dinner

Yesterday, Saturday, was a full day. We started it in the morning, between rain showers, with a trip to the farmers' market in Saint-Aignan. We had three meals in the planning: Saturday lunch, and then lunch and dinner on Sunday. I've always said that life in France is essentially planning your next good meal. Whatever else you do is just filler.

Peter Hertzmann is visiting for the weekend. He's the cook, and the food is excellent. Have a look at his web site, which is called A La Carte.

Crosnes. They look a little like worms, don't you think?

At the market we found an heirloom vegetable that Walt and I have been wanting to try. These little corkscrew-shaped roots are called crosnes in France, and Japanese or Chinese artichokes in English. The French name apparently comes from the name of the town in France where they were first cultivated, Crosne, which is near Orly, just south of Paris.

The woman who was selling them said we should trim off the little rootlets and then wash the crosnes well to remove any sand. Then rub them in a towel with some coarse salt to remove some of the skin, which on these looks to be pretty thin anyway. To cook the crosnes, you poach them in simmering water or broth for 10 or 12 minutes. Then you sauté them lightly with a little butter and parsley, adding some cream if you want. Un peu de crème ne gâche jamais le plat, the woman at the market said. She said to serve them with grilled meat — pork chops or veal cutlets, for example.

Big flat green beans that Peter will cook with tomatoes and onions

What else did we buy at the market? Some mushrooms from the mushroom lady, some chicken breasts and eggs from one of the poultry vendors, some sausages from Mme Doudouille, and some Brussels sprouts from one of the vegetable stands.

Yesterday Peter cooked a mushroom and cheese omelet for lunch. Today we'll have chicken breasts and green beans (from the supermarket) for lunch, and then sausages with crosnes and Brussels sprouts for supper. (Some of you are interested in this level of detail about food, I believe.)

A bakery in the town of Levroux

After lunch yesterday, Peter and I drove over to Valençay to see the château there. It's about 25 km from Saint-Aignan. Peter was especially interested in seeing the kitchens there, which were once managed by the famous chef named Carême. Unfortunately, the château de Valençay was closed for the winter. It re-opens on March 25.

We then took a drive south to the town of Levroux, where we walked around and took some pictures of the early Gothic church there. More of that in future posts. We drove on through the country, and even though the fields are very green, the weather was dreary.

L'eglise Saint-Sylvain à Levroux, près de Châteauroux

Last night we had dinner in the restaurant at the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc in the town of Bléré, near Chenonceaux. It's a Michelin one-star restaurant and was not disappointing. We ate fish and drank local white wine. More about that later too.

Weekend of restaurants and food

We have a visitor from California this weekend. His name is Peter Hertzmann, and he's an expert cook and a grand amateur (enthusiast, lover) of French cuisine. Here's a link to Peter's web site, which is a treasure trove of recipes, food ideas, and cooking techniques.

Ironically, since he arrived, instead of cooking we have been out to restaurants for two meals so far. The first was kind of a bust. We wanted to go to a restaurant in Saint-Aignan called Le Crêpiot Thursday night after Peter came in on the 7:30 train. But the Crêpiot is closed until March 14. The owners are taking a vacation.

Cycling on a damp February morning at La Renaudière

The idea was to eat something simple — what they call une grillade in French — a steak or some other grilled cut of meat, with a salad or French fries or both, for example. We ended up at a place called La Taille Rouge in the village of Couddes, 6 or 8 miles north of Saint-Aignan. Walt and I had driven by the place innumerable times and always thought we would stop for a meal. It's on the main road linking Saint-Aignan to Blois. It advertises itself as a grill — a place that would serve grillades.

When we got there, the place was totally empty. There was a big fire burning in the fireplace (even though it was not cold outside) and it must have been in our honor, since we turned out to be the only customers for the entire evening. The food -- a mixed salad as an entrée, then a piece of onglet (hanger or skirt steak in English) for Peter and me and a bavette (flank steak) for Walt — was acceptable (correct in French) but not outstanding.

Walt's flank steak was cooked on a grill in the fireplace. The skirt steaks were not grilled but pan-fried. I thought the home-style potatoes served with the meat were good, and we drank a bottle of Chinon red from Cravant-les-Côteaux. It was a quiet evening, and it is always a little sad and disconcerting to have a big restaurant all to yourself on a winter evening.

Yesterday we went to the restaurant I call "the truck stop" for lunch. It's official name is Le Grill des Nouettes and it's located next to the cemetery on the main street in the town of Noyers-sur-Cher, right across the river from Saint-Aignan. I've eaten at the truck stop half a dozen times and have always enjoyed the food. Yesterday the place really lived up to its name.

La Renaudière sunset, 22 February 2007

One friend from California said the Grill des Nouettes reminded her more of a midwestern church supper hall than a truck stop on the day we had lunch there, and she was right about the atmosphere that day. Yesterday, however, the place was packed with truck drivers and the big gravel parking lot out front was occupied by half a dozen big-rigs, plenty of little white vans (the kind used by local contractors and vineyard workers), and a dozen or so cars. Inside the restaurant there were a couple of dozen tables taken by groups of working men. And there were maybe half a dozen women diners in all.

When we walked in, the woman who runs the place called us into the bar next to the dining room and asked us if we all three wanted the daily special. We did. She had us pay up front, and asked if we would want coffee after lunch. We said we would. We paid our 36.30 € (about $15 per person) and she gave us a little red laminated card that was a token good for a cup of coffee. She said to show the server our receipt as proof that we had paid for the lunch special.

The Grill des Nouettes features an all-you-can-eat salad or hors-d'œuvre bar (un buffet) and the lunch special includes that plus a main dish (either meat or fish) and then cheese and dessert. Unlimited wine is also included in the price.

The owner seated us and told us to go serve ourselves at the salad bar. There we found vegetable salads (leeks in vinaigrette, for example, along with sliced boiled potatoes, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, beets, and grated carrots) and pâtés, rillettes and rillons, along with pickled herring, boiled eggs, and a big bowl of mayonnaise. There were sliced sausages and even big chunks of black pudding (blood sausage or boudin noir). It was easy to fill up a plate with nice little appetizers. It's all pretty rustic, but, well... appetizing.

Neighbor Jean-Michel walking
one of his grandchildren along our road

The main courses proposed yesterday were fillets of white fish in a cream sauce or pork ribs in a red sauce. We all three had the pork ribs, which were served with a mix of vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. The vegetables were sadly overcooked, and downright mushy, but the pork was good and the sauce was tasty. At the truck stop, red wine is served out of the jug or barrel in a quart-size glass carafe. It's a local "vintage" I'm sure, and it's drinkable.

The plate of cheeses that the waiter brought to the table when we finished our main course included a big piece of blue (probably bleu d'Auvergne), a chunk of what might have been coulommiers, and another that was probably Port-Salut, plus a log of goat cheese. Something for everybody, in other words. I noticed that the cheese platters were left sitting up by the salad bar at that point. The waiter didn't leave ours on our table very long, but we could always go up to the salad bar and get more if we wanted it.

For dessert, Peter and I asked for fresh fruit, and the waiter brought us a big bowl of bananas, oranges, tangerines, pears, and apples. He left it on the table. I noticed guys leaving the restaurant with a piece of fruit in hand — an afternoon snack, I guess. Walt had a choux à la crème for dessert. That sounds like cabbage, but it's actually a cream puff filled with whipped cream. He said it was good — not sickly sweet, and very tasty.

That was it. Coffee, of course. I still think the truck stop is a good place to have lunch. Great atmosphere.

Last night Peter cooked. He had brought us two nice duck breast fillets from the Dordogne when he came, and he cooked those by searing them in a pan on the stove and then putting them in a hot oven for five or six minutes. He then took them out of the oven and let them rest, covered with foil and and a kitchen towel, so that they heat would spread through the meat and finish the cooking evenly. The duck was pink and cooked through but not overcooked or dry.

Typical tile floors in our French house

While the duck breasts rested, Peter made a cream sauce with crème fraîche, a reduced duck stock (which he had made during the afternoon using a duck carcass, a chicken carcass, onions, leeks, carrots, herbs, and black peppercorns), and as a seasoning some chopped green peppercorns that we had in the refrigerator.

He also made a sauté or stir fry of vegetables: sliced onions and julienned carrots, red bell peppers, and zucchini. The vegetables were cooked quickly on high heat so that they caramelized a little in the pan but stayed slightly crunchy and crispy. Delicious. Nothing like the mushy truck stop veggies.

So up to now, the best meal we've had since Peter got here is the one he cooked in our kitchen last night. I don't think our knives are up to his standards, and our pots and pans are just adequate, but he didn't let any of that stop him from producing an excellent meal. Walt took some pictures and will be posting them on his blog, I'm sure.

Tonight we have reserved a table for dinner at a Michelin one-star restaurant called Le Cheval Blanc, which is in the town of Bléré. That's just on the other side of Chenonceaux, about 18 miles from Saint-Aignan on the Cher river. More on that experience tomorrow or Monday.

Spice blends

When I'm feeling like a purist, I don't like the idea of using packaged mixes of spices in my cooking. In reality, however, I use them, and I think most of us do.

It's better to use the individual spices and herbs you like, so that you can control the amounts. That's a good rule, but it is more honored in the breach than the observance, as they say.

The famous Emeril of New Orleans and TV Food Network fame uses his own spice blend in a lot of his recipes. I once heard Julia Child say that Emeril was a good cook, but that he needed to let go of the spice blend and do real cooking.

Tony Bourdain is outrageously disdainful, as usual, of Emeril's spice mix: "...for the record, his spice blend, 'Essence of Emeril' is labeled with total accuracy," Bourdain says. "I can rub it onto any meat, and the result tastes just like Emeril has sweated all over it. Horrific."

Moving on... What is "poultry seasoning" anyway? I'm sure most of us don't know. Do you ever use it? And what is in Old Bay seasoning? Let's not forget chili powder. The container of Schilling/McCormack chili powder I have contains standard ingredients including chili peppers, cumin, oregano, salt, and garlic, and then for that certain je ne sais quoi a dose of silicon dioxide ("added to make free flowing," it says). Yum.

And then there are the liquid blends: Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauces including my favorite Wilber's sauce from North Carolina. So many of those contain too much sugar or corn syrup for my taste.

A favorite North African spice blend is called harissa. It's a spicy-hot vegetable paste made with:

• beets
• carrots
• chili peppers
• water
• vegetable oil
• salt
• modifed sweetcorn starch
• coriander
• caraway
• citric acid
• garlic

Harissa is an indispensable ingredient and table condiment for North African couscous and many other dishes. The harissa I have is in a tube like toothpaste, looks like tomato paste when you squeeze it out, and is a product of France. Couscous, by the way, has now replaced steak-frites — steak with French fries — as France's favorite dish, just as salsa has replaced ketchup as American's favorite condiment.

Like anything else, pre-mixed spices aren't all bad. The one I used to flavor the chicken breast pictured on my previous post is called Muzzy's Magic Texas Heat Seasoning. (Actually, the names of some of the blends might be one reason why I feel so funny about using them! Muzzy? Magic? Texas? Heat? Oh well.)

Muzzy's "Texas" mix (here's the web site) contains:

• salt
• black pepper
• cayenne peppers
• garlic
• thyme
• basil
• celery
• bay leaves
  

The labels specifies: Contains No Preservatives. I guess that's good, except that salt is one of the most ancient preservatives we use! All the ingredients, in fact, are ones that I put in food, indivudually, all the time.

Wilber's eastern N.C. barbecue sauce lists these ingredients:

• vinegar
• water
• black pepper
• red pepper
• salt
• spices

They don't say what spices (trade secret?) but the label proclaims: Cholesterol Free. My jars are ones I bought a few years ago. Walt said the new Wilber's label probably says: Low Carb. There is also no sugar or ketchup in Wilber's sauce. That's what I like about it.

American cooks aren't the only ones who use pre-mixed spices. In France, the best known such mix is probably something called Quatre Épices — Four Spices — which according to at least one web site usually contains five:

• pepper
• nutmeg
• cloves
• cinnamon
• ginger

Instead of Quatre Épices, I'd rather use (and often do use) what is called here Piment de la Jamaïque — Jamaican Pepper — which in English is called allspice. It's not a blend but rather the berries of a plant that you can use like black pepper, either whole as peppercorns or ground into a powder. I like the flavor of allspice and usually use a mixture of allspice berries and black peppercorns whenever a recipe calls for black peppercorns and cloves (as so many French stews, soups, broths, and sauces do).

Other widely used spice mixtures are curry powder, which I guess is a British attempt to reproduce the spicing used in Indian cooking, and the blend called ras-el-hanout (rah-zel-ah-NOOT) used in Moroccan cooking.

The first package of ras-el-hanout that I bought in Paris contained just six spices:

• cumin (cumin oriental is specified)
• turmeric (curcuma in French)
• ginger
• nutmeg
• coriander
• cardamom

I did some reading on the web and in books and found out that some ras-el-hanout mixtures include as many as 27 spices! I haven't found one that complex. Another package that I bought spells the name with a Z (raz-el-hanout) and contains:

• coriander
• turmeric
• cumin
• pepper
• caraway (carvi in French)
• sweet peppers (piment doux)
• fennel
• fenugreek

So it's pretty different. I guess using those lists you can make up your own ras-el-hanout powder if you want to. It's a good seasoning for Moroccan dishes like couscous and tagines.

I have a couple of cans of curry powder that Walt brought back from London when he went there in 2005 on his way to New York. I know that different curry powder blends vary a lot. Here's what's in a can of Bolst's Hot Curry Powder (product of India, it says):

• coriander
• turmeric
• chillies
• mustard
• ginger
• cumin seeds
• fenugreek

I think one of the big differences between curry powder and ras-el-hanout is the presence of mustard in the curry powder.

Another curry powder I have, Cap Burung Nuri Parrot Brand Meat Curry Powder has many of the same ingredients, but a pretty different list overall:

• chili
• coriander
• cumin
• fennel
• black pepper
• cinnamon stick
• turmeric
• cloves
• cardamom
• fenugreek seed
• star anise
• curry leaves
• bay leaves

Just to contradict what I said earlier, it contains no mustard. But then it is a product of Malaysia, not India or the U.K. The label also specifies: 100% Natural Spices, No Preservatives, No Colouring, No MSG.

The only thing to do with these spice blends is to read the ingredients to see if they sound appetizing (and natural) and then try them to see what the flavor actually is. They are hard to avoid, especially for "exotic" dishes that you don't cook every day.

I would never use a spice blend in a classic French dish like Bœuf Bourguignon, Blanquette de Veau, or Coq au Vin, of course. But for a roasted chicken breast, sprinkling on a good spice mixture can produce delicious results.

By the way, I have been known to add a squirt of ketchup to a Bœuf Bourguignon or Coq au Vin when I don't have any tomato paste handy. The ketchup mainly adds color to the sauce and you don't put in enough so that the taste is noticeable. I saw Jacques Pépin do it on TV!

Duck with Orange Sauce

Canard à l'orange

A bag of blood oranges and a canette, or female duckling

Ever since New Year's Eve — or mid-December, really, when we were invited by a friend who said she was going to be making duck with orange sauce for our NYE dinner — this classic French dish has been on my mind.

Last week one of the French supermarket chains, E. Leclerc, advertised ducks (canettes, or young hens) for sale at a good price. I drove down to Loches, which everybody knows isn't at all far from Saint-Aignan (wink, wink), to buy one, since we don't have a Leclerc store in town.

Peeling the blood oranges, which were pretty small
as oranges go

I did some Google searching for recipes and looked in the standard cookbooks before deciding exactly how I was going to cook the duck and make the orange sauce. One recipe that I looked at said the best oranges to use would be oranges sanguines — blood oranges — because their juice has a peppery flavor. (I'm not giving a link to a recipe here because I didn't end up following any single one. I kind of made up my own.)

Peel, slice, and seed 6 or 8 oranges, depending on size,
and then juice a couple more for the sauce

I went to Intermarché and discovered that they were selling one-kilo bags of blood oranges for €2.50. I also needed to buy some cognac and an orange-flavored liqueur for the dish; I bought a bottle of Triple Sec. A lot of recipes called for Cointreau or Grand Marnier, which were much more expensive.

A lot of recipes also called for cooking the duck whole by first browning it on all sides in a big pot and then adding some water and chopped vegetables (carrots, onions) and letting it braise, covered, for 45 minutes. Or for roasting the whole duck in the oven.

Cut up the duck the way you would cut up a chicken.
In this case I took the breasts off the bone.

I decided I'd rather cut the duck up before cooking it. That way it would cook a little faster, it be easier to serve, and I would be able to cook the carcass and trimmings separately to make broth and skim off the duck fat for future cooking and seasoning uses. After I cut the duck up, I trimmed the pieces carefully to reduce the amount of skin and fat left on them. I didn't want too much fat in the orange sauce.

Then I cooked the duck pieces skin-side down in a hot pan to brown them well and to render out the layer of fat that lies under the skin. When I turned them over, I added a big carrot (cut up) and some whole peeled shallots and garlic cloves to the pan along with a bouquet garni and a cup of liquid. Salt and pepper as needed, of course.

Walt had gone out to the garden and gathered some herbs — sage, bay leave, thyme, and parsley — for the braising liquid. We had a leek in the fridge so we rolled and tied up the bouquet garni in a piece of the green leek top.

Herbs from the garden, trimmed duck pieces, oranges, and liqueurs

The recipe called for water. But I had about ¾ cup of very gelatinous, very dark-brown duck stock in the fridge. I had collected it when I cooked previous ducks and had been using it up gradually to flavor soups and sauces. It was like gelatin. What the heck, I thought, I'll use the duck broth instead of water. Then the cover went on the pan and the duck and veggies braised slowly in the liquid for about 45 minutes.

The duck pieces in mid-braising, with
carrots, shallots, garlic, and herbs

While the duck was cooking, Walt and I were busy peeling and cutting up the oranges. Then we sliced them in a bowl so that we could collect any juice they released. It's easy to see and remove the seeds from the slices. We didn't get a lot of juice from the slicing process, so Walt juiced a couple of extra oranges, for good measure.

Duck pieces removed from the braising liquid

After the duck had braised for 45 minutes and seemed done, I added, according to different recipes, about ¼ cup orange liqueur (Triple Sec, in my version) and a couple of tablespoons of cognac to the pan and removed it from the heat. It needed to rest for 10 minutes like that.

I decided to brown the cooked duck pieces in the oven when I took them out of the braising liquid, so after the 10-minute waiting period I removed them to a rack in a roasting pan. That pan went into a hot oven while I turned the heat back on under the braising liquid, added about ½ cup of orange juice to it, and started letting it simmer to reduce just a little. I also added about ¼ cup of vinegar, which I had seen used in several recipes. The sauce needs to be tart and sweet at the same time.

Duck pieces and orange slices

I tasted the sauce and decided to add a little more orange liqueur and cognac. Couldn't hurt, you know... When the sauce was starting to reduce and the duck pieces in the oven were browning nicely, I thickened the sauce by dissolving a heaping teaspoon of potato starch (you could use cornstarch) in ¼ cup of cold water and then slowly stirring that slurry into the bubbling sauce. It thickened just slightly.

While the sauce continued cooking on low, I melted some butter in a skillet and slid in all the orange slices so that they would warm through. Voilà! Everything was done.

Spoon some of the orange sauce
over the duck pieces and orange slices

To serve the duck, I put the pieces in a big shallow bowl and put the warm orange slices all around them. Then I spooned on some of the sauce. The rest of the sauce was served at the table.

À table !

What do you eat with duck à l'orange? The recipes I looked at suggested sautéed potatoes. We made French fries, because the fryer had fresh oil in it and we had frozen French fries on hand. That was a lot easier than peeling, cutting up, and sautéing fresh potatoes, and just as good.

The makings for duck with orange sauce

I had never made canard à l'orange before, and I think the only time I had ever eaten duck with orange sauce was about a year ago. Our friends Susan and Ray were here visiting, and we had our final lunch together at a Logis de France restaurant called the Agnès Sorel, which is in the village of Genillé, near Loches. The lunch special that day was canard à l'orange. It was good. Not exactly like mine, but not that different either.

Endives aux lardons

We haven't cooked and eaten many Belgian endives this year, even though winter is the season for them. I bought some at Intermarché last weekend and remembered that I had them in the refrigerator day before yesterday. We needed something for lunch.


To prepare endives for cooking, rinse them off and remove any outer leaves that are wilted or damaged. They say you shouldn't let endives soak in water because it will make them bitter, so just rinse them quickly. They are always clean inside, in my experience.

You can cook the endives whole or you can split them in half lengthwise, as I decided to do this time. Then put some olive oil or butter in a big pan and put the endives in. Put them face down if you cut them. Let them cook in the oil or butter long enough to start taking on some color. They will turn a kind of golden brown.

Turn them and brown them on all around if you want. The golden brown color is caramelization and will give the endives good flavor.

I cooked four fat endives. I could have fit eight in the pan if I hadn't cut them in half. They cook a little faster cut than whole.

Add a couple of whole garlic cloves to the pan if you want. Or, separately, lightly sauté an onion and scatter the pieces over the top of the browning endives endives.

Then pour into the pan about half a cup of white wine and the juice of one lemon. The wine is optional; the lemon juice is not. You could use vinegar in the place of lemon juice. And add salt and pepper to taste.

Belgian endives braised with lemon juice, onion, and lardons

For the endives as pictured, I decided to add some sautéed lardons to the pan for flavor. We were planning to eat this as a main dish, not as a side to go with any other meat.

Let the endives simmer for 45 to 60 minutes. Test them with a skewer to see if they are done. They should be well cooked for best texture and flavor.

Here's another idea for cooking endives as a side dish with fish fillets.

Fried chicken

« Pièces de poulet panées et frites »There's a lot of virtual ink being spilled on the subject of fried chicken these days. The term I've used as a subtitle, by the way, is what the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain calls its principal product in France. There are a few KFC restaurants in the Paris area, but none within a hundred miles of Saint-Aignan.

Poulet frit comme on en fait à Saint-Aignan

Last week there was a New York Times article about Korean fried chicken (you may need to log in to read it) that said Korean joints making fried chicken are springing up all around New York. It's giving a whole new meaning to the TLA (three-letter acronym) that is KFC. The Times says:

"For crunch, American-style fried chicken relies on a thick, well-seasoned crust, often made even thicker by soaking the chicken pieces beforehand in buttermilk. When that crust is nubbly and evenly browned, and the chicken meat is cooked through, the chicken is sublime. But too often, the flesh is still raw when the crust is cooked, or the skin never cooks all the way through, leaving a flabby layer of skin between the meat and the crust.

"Korean-style fried chicken is radically different, reflecting an Asian frying technique that renders out the fat in the skin, transforming it into a thin, crackly and almost transparent crust. (Chinese cooks call this “paper fried chicken.”) The chicken is unseasoned, barely dredged in very fine flour and then dipped into a thin batter before going into the fryer. The oil temperature is a relatively low 350 degrees, and the chicken is cooked in two separate stages."

The Times also gives a link to a blog written by an American Southerner who lives in Korea. It looks pretty entertaining and I've bookmarked it for future reading. My link sends you to his posting about Korean fried chicken. This blogger is into something I'm also into, as you know: it has been called "food porn." Here's a link to his Zen Kimchi home page.

I wonder if they eat baked sweet potatoes
with their fried chicken in Korea.

Then yesterday I looked in on a blog that I enjoy and that is written by a guy named Scott who lives in Durham, North Carolina, where I went to college. He's into food porn too and he has some good food ideas. He's also talking about fried chicken, citing the same NYT article, on his blog, Needs More Garlic.

Coincidentally, about 10 days ago I decided to make fried chicken. I wanted something American, and something I hadn't made or eaten in a long time. Southern fried chicken fit the bill. We used to eat it often for Sunday dinner when I was growing up in North Carolina.

Fried chicken pieces waiting in the oven

I've never been one to enjoy or eat often in fried chicken restaurants in the U.S., however. KFC, Popeye's, and Church's always left me cold. Too salty, too greasy. In fact, for years I was horrified by the whole idea of breaded, deep-fried chicken. They didn't eat such things in France, so I wouldn't eat them either. Give me a good, plain oven-roasted chicken any day.

Fried chicken is still not a French menu item, even though a lot of people nowadays have tasted fried chicken or chicken nuggets in fast-food restaurants.

On s'en lèche les doigts !

Actually, what inspired me to want to try to make fried chicken, I just remembered, was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle's food section on January 17 saying that fried chicken is the new "in" food in a bunch of Bay Area restaurants.

I read the SF Chron article and printed out the various recipes, or methods, for making fried chicken, which went from the extremely simple to the fairly complicated.

Then I got out five or six Southern cookbooks, as well as the Joy of Cooking, and read everything they had to say about Southern fried chicken. Cooking Across the South, Southern Food, Classical Southern Cooking, The Georgia Sampler Cookbook, The American Regional Cookbook, The Dictionary of American Food and Drink — those are the titles of some of the books that have ended up on my shelves over the past 30 years.

I decided that one of the keys to good Southern fried chicken was buttermilk. Problem is, it's almost impossible to get buttermilk in France. It's called babeurre, and it's definitely a specialty product. What is buttermilk? It's the liquid left over when you churn milk into butter, isn't it?

Chicken in a yogurt marinade

The big French dictionary says that babeurre is a technical or regional term meaning: Liquide blanc, appelé parfois lait de beurre, qui reste du lait après le barattage de la crème dans la préparation du beurre. Lait de beurre — buttermilk — is not something you normally find at the supermarket in France. Barattage, by the way, is "churning".

When you marinate pieces of chicken in buttermilk, the acid in the buttermilk tenderizes the meat. And if you add spices or herbs to the marinade, the chicken takes on the good flavors. That's the theory.

A black-and-white picture of the prep for my fried chicken

I think you can replace buttermilk with sour milk, and you can make milk sour very quickly by putting a little vinegar in fresh milk. That might be fine for other foods that you want to put buttermilk in — Southern U.S. biscuits, cornbread, hushpuppies, or Irish soda bread, for example — but for marinating chicken overnight I wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do. You know what sour milk tastes and smells like, right? What if I ended up having to throw out all my chicken after the overnight marinade?

I decided plain yogurt might be the best solution. So I mixed two containers of plain, low-fat yogurt, about half a cup of crème fraîche, and enough skim milk to make a fairly thick marinating medium, which I seasoned with a pinch each of hot paprika, black pepper, cumin, and dried thyme. I didn't want to overdo the seasonings, but I wanted at least a hint of their flavor in the final product.

To go with the fried chicken, a bowl of home-made coleslaw

I had bought two chickens, and we decided to save the breasts for another recipe, so I ended up marinating four thighs, four drumsticks, and four wings in my yogurt mixture, overnight.

The next day I mixed up a couple of cups of flour with some salt, pepper, and a pinch of curry powder in a big shallow bowl. I lifted each piece of chicken out of the yogurt marinade (using tongs), let it drip for a few seconds so that the excess liquid would drip off, and then rolled it in the seasoned flour. I let the floured chicken pieces rest for 10 minutes on a rack before I cooked them, so that the flour would absorb as much yogurt as it could.

On the table: coleslaw, mashed sweet potato,
and yogurt fried chicken

The last step was dropping a batch of four floured chicken pieces, one at a time, into a fryer containing hot canola oil about three inches deep. I used an electric fryer and set the temperature at 170ºC (340ºF).

As soon as the chicken was browned, I took it out, put it on a rack in a pan, and put the pan in the oven at about 250ºF (130ºC). The first batch of four chicken pieces was ready to eat when the second batch came out of the fryer and went into the oven. In the oven, the pieces had time to drip, so they were less greasy, and time to finish cooking all the way through. They stayed crispy.

Dans l'assiette

Next time I'll have to try the Korean method — less breading, double-frying. And maybe some pickled radish instead of coleslaw.

Meanwhile, this weekend's project is canard à l'orange — duck with orange sauce. Wish me luck. Later...