Guinea fowl leftovers

We had more of the pintade for lunch yesterday. Here's what it looked like (according to my telepone's camera). I'm not sure about the colors, even though I've adjusted them in Photoshop. We were certainly happy with the bird itself, however. It was better yesterday than it was on Christmas Day. I made a cream gravy for it, but I'm not posting a photo of the bird with the gravy.

I was just reading about pintades on Widipédia. France is apparently Europe's biggest producer of Guineafowl (as Wikipedia spells the word). It might be the world's biggest commercial producer of pintades. I was interested to see that there's no mention of the food qualities of pintades in French Wikipédia. But here's is a paragraph on English-language Wikipedia about the characteristics of Guineafowl meat that reads:

Guineafowl meat is moist, firmer and leaner than chicken meat and has a slight gamey flavour. It has marginally more protein than chicken or turkey, roughly half the fat of chicken and slightly less food energy per gram. Their eggs are substantially richer than those of chickens.

Un chapon de pintade pour Noël

Here's what our Christmas bird looks like this year. We got it from the poultry vendor who sets up at the Saturday morning outdoor market in Saint-Aignan. It's a chapon de pintade (aka une pintade chaponnée). Pintade is French for "Guinea fowl." It's not that different from chicken as far as the meat is concerned, but it's something special to have for Christmas.

A picture of the oven-ready bird taken using my phone's standard photo mode

A picture of the same bird taking using my phone's food photo mode

Bon Noël 2024 à toutes et à tous

Blanquette de porc

We'll be going into high gear in the kitchen over the next week or so. Saturday will be Walt's birthday, and for that we always cook a French steak au poivre. Then three days later, on Christmas Eve, we'll make a cheese fondue (une fondue savoyarde) for our mid-day meal. On Christmas Day, we'll roast a guinea fowl (une pintade) that has been fattened, maing it into a capon (un chapon) with all the trimmings. More about those as all that unfolds.

Three views of the pork shoulder roast that I bought at Intermarché a few days ago

Meanwhile, for today and Friday, I'm going to make a blanquette de porc. Thats pork shoulder simmered until well-done with carrots, bay leaves, garlic, leeks, and white wine. I'm going to base it on my favorite recipe for blanquette de veau, cooking it a little longer because porc is naturally a little drier and tougher than veal. More about that tomorrow. Above are photos of the pork shoulder roast (un rôti d'épaule de porc) that I bought a few days ago. The pork had been de-boned, rolled, and tied (désossé, roulé, et ficelé by the butcher). I'll post a recipe and some photos of the cooking process tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I was looking through some old blog posts of mine and saw that I once pointed out that blanquette seems often to be something we make in December. This year is no exception. I also came upon the photo above of the church and château in Saint-Aignan, which I took exactly seven years ago today.

The Christmas capon feast

I think we are in a rut, but it's a happy rut. We seem to have pretty much the exact same Christmas dinner every year. I guess everybody does. Oh, sometimes it's a turkey, sometimes it's a chicken capon, and sometimes it's a Guinea hen — or a Guinea fowl capon, as it was yesterday. Then it's cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, winter squash puree, and a stuffing or dressing of some kind. I also think our table was really overloaded yesterday. Here it is:

In the background, on the cake stand, you can see the applesauce cake Walt made yesterday morning, with pecans.

Here's how the chapon de pintade — a Guinea fowl capon, which is a specially fattened bird. I didn't oil or butter the skin at all; it had enough fat under it to keep the meat moist. I didn't stuff the bird except for putting a shallot, a garlic clove, and a cut-up celery stalk inside.

This is the cranberry sauce Walt makes with dried cranberries and orange peel — it's sweet and tart at the same time.

 This is a dressing, which is a stuffing that is cooked separately from the bird rather than inside it. It's made with sausage meat, duck liver plus the liver of the capon, cubes of bread, shallot, onion, garlic, pecans, and dried cranberries "rehydrated" in cognac. It's a kind of terrine that's served warm...

And last but not least — we both love them —Brussels sprouts trimmed and then steamed, cut in half, and sautéed in butter with a little bit of flour sprinkled on them to give them a crunchy crust. Pan-roasted, I guess you could call them.

Joyeuse fondue et bonne pintade

Our regularly scheduled programming is being interrupted by the holiday. It's Christmas where I am, and it might be Noël where you are when you read this. I hope you will have or are having a merry one, despite lockdowns, confinements, Brexit, pandemics, and presidential pardons. Stay well and stay safe. Maybe we'll all be vaccinated by next summer and things will get better.

Meanwhile, life goes on at the domestic and kitchen levels. Yesterday we made our Christmas Eve fondue savoyarde and a big green salad with garlicky vinaigrette. Here are the cheses that went into a pot of simmering white wine to melt into fondue. Maybe Walt will post a picture of the finished fondue. This year's was one of the best in recent memory, in part because of the cheeses we used.

Starting on the left in the picture above the cheeses were Comté, Beaufort (upper right), and Abondance (lower right). All are what we Americans call "Swiss" cheeses but these are French, and all are AOP (the European label of quality) so are guaranteed to be authentic and made according to strict, time-tested criteria and standards having to do with where the milk comes from, from what breeds of cattle, and how long the cheeses are aged.

• Comté cheese is made in the 4,600 sq. mile Franche-Comté region in eastern France, which shares a long border with Switzerland. Annual production is more than 60,000 tons, more than for any other French cheese.


• Abondance cheese is made in a 1,350 sq. mile area centered on the Haute-Savoie département in the Alps, a part of France that's east and south of the Swiss city of Geneva. Annual production of Abondance cheese is smaller, coming to about 3,000 tons.


• Beaufort cheese is made in a 1,550 sq. mile area in the Savoie département, in the Alps just south of the Haute-Savoie. Annual production is just over 5,000 tons.

The other ingredients in this kind of fondue are white wine, garlic, kirschwasser (cherry brandy), and corn or potato starch as a thickener, seasoned with black pepper and grated nutmeg. We eat it with cubed French bread and fresh apple also cut into cubes. Our version is 500 grams (just over a pound) of cheese, once cup of white wine, and small amounts of the other ingredients. We put in about 150 grams each of Abondance and Beaufort, along with 200 grams of Comté.

This morning Walt is making an applesauce cake for our Christmas and weekend dessert enjoyment. And we'll be putting this guinea-fowl capon (the chapon de pintade above) on the rotisserie in the oven around 10 a.m.for 2 to 2½ hours. We'll have it with giblet gravy, bread stuffing, cranberry sauce, steamed Brussels sprouts, and pureed pumpkin as our Christmas dinner at noontime.

Je retourne à Paris

I am so enjoying looking at and re-processing photos I took in Paris in March and April 2006 that I can't stop now. That's why I say I'm returning to Paris — it's virtual. The first photo below shows a train like the ones that run on the line that passes through the Saint-Aignan area, taking passengers from Tours all the way to Lyon. We took one like this but changed in the nearby town of Vierzon to get to to catch a train on the north-south line that goes to Paris...

In my recent post about the studio apartment we rented for a week in Paris in 2006, I mentioned the advantages of staying in an apartment. One is that you can go to a boulangerie and bring back baguettes and croissants for breakfast in your own place. Here's a boulangerie that was just a few steps up the rue du Vertbois, where we were staying.

There were half a dozen restaurants within easy walking distance too. We didn't eat in many or any of them, though, because were spending time walking through other parts of the city, meeting up at lunchtime and dinnertime with our friend from California who happened to be in town too. I just saw on the internet that Le Clos du Vert Bois has gone out of business....

The restaurant called Chez l'ami Louis (below) is a very famous one, but we didn't eat there either. It seemed too expensive. Web sites that review restaurants say its prices are $$$$ (or €€€€) — too rich for my blood. I remember a TV news report about Brad Pitt and some of his movie star friends — maybe George Clooney — having dinner there a few years ago. I've also seen it called le dernier vrai bistrot à Paris. Maybe it would be worth trying it one day.

Our studio apartment was just around the corner from the triumphal arch below that's called La Porte Saint-Martin. It's located at the intersection of the rue Saint-Martin and one of the so-called grands boulevards where there are many restaurants, cafés, and theaters. Louis XIV had it thrown up there a few centuries ago.

I'll be headed to the special holiday market in Saint-Aignan this morning to pick up a chapon de pintade (guinea fowl capon) that we've ordered for our Christmas dinner on Friday. I'm hoping it doesn't start raining, but rain is what the forecast for today shows. Yuck.

Summertime foods — pasta and "pterodactyl"

Grilling season. A spur of the moment idea: pintade. "Pterodactyl" as American friends called it years ago when they visited and we bought a pintade at the market. It's a guinea hen. Walt got it from the poultry vendor in the market last Saturday. It weighed nearly 2 kilos (just over 4 lbs.) and sold for 6.50€ per kilo — about $3.50/lb.

I wasn't sure I'd be able to cut it up the way I would cut up a chicken, but it turned out to be pretty easy. The plan, given our current afternoon temperatures in the 35ºC range (that's 95ºF), was to cook it on the barbecue grill on the front deck.

We cooked just one leg and thigh and one half of the breast. The other meaty pieces went into the freezer for later. And with the back, neck, and giblets I made broth (despite the hot weather). It was morning and all the windows were open anyway. By noon it would have been to hot in the house...

This is the liver. I poached it briefly in the broth I was making. It was a tender morsel to enjoy with the grilled guinea fowl pieces, and with a pasta salad on the side.

I made the salad with leftover cooked pasta and steamed cauliflower from lunch a few days ago, plus some chickpeas, green beans, and a lot of fresh basil leaves and tomato.

P.S. Sorry I neglected to take any photos of the grilled guinea fowl pieces. Next time...

Cranberry-Walnut Chicken Salad

I don't think I've ever been served chicken salad in France. At least, not a chicken salad the way we make it in America. I wonder if it is a staple in the U.K. or Australia the way it is in the U.S. This one has cranberries and walnuts in it, along with chopped celery, shallot, and parsley. Here's a recipe that just slightly different from this one.

The first thing you need when you want to make this kind of chicken salad is some chopped up chicken. We had cooked a chicken on our kitchen stove's rotisserie (tourne-broche) in the oven. Having the rotisserie is a feature I really like and use regularly. Sorry I didn't take a picture of the cooked chicken before I removed the skin and then took the meat off the bones and diced it up.

Then you need some flavor ingredients: shallot, celery, and parsley, in this case. One nice French shallot (échalote) is plenty for the meat of half a three-pound roasted chicken. Chop the vegetables as finely as you like. You can substitute onion for the shallot, of course. Red onion would be very good.

This particular recipe includes dried cranberries, roughly chopped. It's nice to be able to find these dried cranberries in the supermarkets. Cranberries are not French but North American. They're good in salads and cakes, and Walt has discovered that he can make good cranberry sauce with them for the holiday turkey (dinde) or guinea fowl (pintade). I think you could substitute raisins or diced apple for them in this salad.

And then walnuts, toasted before being chopped. Walt shelled these and then toasted them on a tray in our little countertop oven. Our American friends down the road have a big walnut tree and often have such big crops that they share them widely, including with us. And our English friends over on the other side of the river also have a big walnut tree, and they generously share them too. We don't lack for walnuts. (The salad would be good with pecans done the same way.)

Of course, you also need a dressing for all these ingredients. I use a combination of mayonnaise — I like the Maille mayonnaise fine from the supermarket if I don't make my own — and some plain yogurt, or a combination of yogurt and crème fraîche, to thin the mayo a little — two parts mayo and one part yogurt. Then it's easy to toss the salad in it. Salt and pepper of course. Serve as a sandwich filling or as a salad over a bed of lettuce, with fresh tomatoes.

Pintades, lapins, et magrets de canards

According to the 2007 Grand Larousse Gastronomique, France produces more Guinea fowl (pintades) than any other country in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if the French consume more pintades than any other people. The same is probably true of rabbit, and the GLG says France is the world's second biggest rabbit producer, after China. The GLG notes too, in its article about poultry, that duck production in France, especially in the southwest region, has been increasing for years, mostly because of the demand for foies gras (fattened ducks' livers) and magrets (duck breast filets).

This is a pintade, or Guinea fowl.

Again according to the GLG, the a magret is the pectoral muscle (le muscle de la poitine) of a duck that has been fattened by force-feeding. The fattened duck is called un canard gras. In that sense, the magret is a by-product of the foie gras industry. The duck breast meat has the skin and the layer of fat that lies under it still attached. For generations, the duck breast was made into confit (slow-roasted in fat) along with duck legs, thighs, and wings.

This is a three-pack of magrets de canards that I bought at the supermarket. The total weight of the duck is about 2½ lbs. The total price was 15.46 euros, or just over $17 U.S.

I remember doing exactly that myself 20 years ago, when I was making confit with frozen whole ducks that I could buy in San Francisco. I'm not sure that I had ever cooked or eaten a duck breast pan-fried or oven roasted when I lived in Paris in the 1970s and early 1980s. I don't remember them being served that way in restaurants back then. The only duck I remember eating was Peking duck or canard lacqué in Asian restaurants in Paris, and I remember how good that was.

These duck breast filets come from the Périgord in the French southwest, which, like the Touraine, Berry, Anjou, Poitou, Perche, and Orléanais, all around Saint-Aignan, was an old province that was given a new name at the time of the French Revolution. The modern name of the Périgord is La Dordogne, and you might be more familiar with that name. La Dordogne is a département (a county, more or less) in modern France. Some old provinces were small enough so that now they are just one county, but other, more extensive old provinces are divided up into several counties nowadays.

The GLG says that it was restaurant chefs in the Landes (southwestern France, bordering on Spain and the Atlantic Ocean) who revived local tradtions by starting to grill duck magrets, skin-and-fat side down first so that the melted duck fat would "nourish" the lean breast meat when the filet was turned over to finish cooking, and serving the magrets rare (saignants) or medium-rare (rosés), with crispy skin. The best duck magret for this kind of cooking comes from ducks that have been slaughtered no more than 48 hours earlier.

Finally, a couple of days ago I opened Wikipedia, both French and English,  to look up magret. There's no such entry in the English-language Wikipedia. In the French-language Wikipédia, I read that magret de canard can be air-cured (dried) or smoked and then cut into thin slices and served like air-cured ham. But most often, the magret is grilled or pan-fried the way the GLG describes doing it. Sometimes the little tenderloin muscle attached to the duck breast (as on a chicken breast) is sold and cooked separately, in a sauce. It's the tenderest and leanest part of the breast filet.

Finally, the French Wikipédia article enlightened me as to when grilled, rare duck magret became a standard preparation and popular menu item in France. It was a chef named André Daguin, whose restaurant was in the town of Auch in Gascony (southwestern France). He started cooking and serving grilled magrets in the late 1950s and became famous for it. He recommended that the name of the duck filet should be maigret [may-'gray], based on the French word maigre, meaning lean. The new name didn't catch on, however, and the old Gascony dialectal form of the word, magret [mah-'gray], is still used all around France today.

Bonne année 2019

It's almost midnight on the U.S. East Coast — approaching six a.m. in France. So it's 2019 here. 2018 went by in a flash, but it couldn't go fast enough for me. Let's hope for a better year this time around.

And I can't believe my black-eyed peas have been in the slow cooker for nearly nine hours and they aren't done yet! I guess I should have started them in boiling broth. It must have taken hours — I was sleeping — for the cooker to come up to temperature.

I've taken the black-eyes (called haricots cornille here in France) out of the slow cooker and put them in a big pot on higher heat to finish. Of course we won't eat them for another seven or eight hours, so it shouldn't be a problem. The ones we get here come from Portugal, but the package doesn't say where they were grown. Maybe in the U.S. Black-eyed peas are a variety of what are called "cowpeas" and they came originally from Africa.

Yesterday I spread a kilogram of haricots cornille out on a baking sheet in one layer so I could pick through them and eliminate the broken or shriveled ones, not to mention any extraneous matter I might have found (none this time). Then you just cook them in water or broth (a combination of pintade broth and potée broth for me this year).

U.S. Southerners (I'm from North Carolina) eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day out of superstition. Eating them on January 1 is supposed to bring you good luck for the new year. We'll have ours with Toulouse sausage, smoked pork belly (poitrine de porc fumée), and confit de canard (slow-cooked duck, in this case leg-thigh pieces and gizzards). I guess I'll make another salade de scarole, plain this time, to round out the meal. Or maybe I'll take some garden-grown collard greens out of the freezer.

All the best to you all in 2019.

Un pintadeau, et une farce aux foies de canard

The bird we cooked and ate this Christmas was what is commonly known as a chapon de pintade — a Guinea-fowl capon. You probably know what a capon is. It's a male bird, usually a chicken, that has been fattened to produce tasty, tender meat. The capon has also been surgically castrated, but let's not think about that. As far as I know, capons are not force-fed (gavé).

People call these capons chapons de pintade, so I guess pintade is the generic term for this species of poultry, but it is also the name for a Guinea hen, the female of the family. This kind of capon should, I think, be called a chapon de « pintadeau », which is the Guinea cock. Oh well. The fact is, the pintade and pintadeau, African in origin, are a delicious volaille (fowl) that has been appreciated in Europe since Roman times. This one weighed 2.6 kg, or 5¾ lbs.

We bought the Guinea-fowl capon from our local poultry vendor (volailler), who sells them and all sorts of prepared poultry and poultry products (including rabbits) at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan and at the Friday market in Montrichard. The processing facility is located in Pouillé, a village just 5 miles from our house. We've been buying poultry from these people (named Clément) for 15 years now.

I noticed at Saturday's market that, according to a sign on the wall of the vendor's market stall, the poultry they sell comes from an abattoir in the village of Ouchamps, just 15 miles north of here, near Blois, and are birds raised on nearby farms. I've driven up there to buy local volailles, but I didn't know that our market vendor bought from the same place. We slow-cooked the pintadeau on the rotisserie (tourne-broche) in our oven, after "stuffing" it with bay leaves, garlic cloves, allspice berries, black peppercorns, red pepper flakes, and coarse salt.

I also made "dressing," which is what I call stuffing that you don't cook inside the bird but in a separate pan. For the dressing, I had sausage meat, duck liver plus the liver of the pintadeau, cubes of my home-made pain de mie, shallot, onion, garlic celery (céleri-branches), pecans from North Carolina, and dried cranberries "rehydrated" in Armagnac. I might have forgotten an ingredient or two... Tasha was attracted by the aroma of the cooked sausage and liver, as you can see below.

We had steamed and then lightly sauteed Brussels sprouts and a purée of potimarron (winter squash) from the 2018 vegetable garden as side dishes with our chapon de pintade, and of course the dressing. We opened a bottle of 2015 Régnié red, which we bought on our quick trip to Beaujolais last March, to wash it all down with.

Tian de courge, et pintade au tourne-broche

On Saturday, Walt went to the open-air market in "downtown" Saint-Aignan and bought a pintade — a guinea hen — for our Sunday dinner. Yesterday we roasted it in the oven using the stove's rotisserie feature. As a side dish (or maybe it was the main dish) he made a recipe from Richard Olney's Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook — a Tian de courge, or winter squash gratin. The recipe is below.

A tian is a Provençal gratin dish, and I thought this one was amazingly good. It's made with pureed winter squash — ours was a potimarron that grew in our garden, but butternut or even pumpkin pulp would be good — and with leeks cooked in olive oil, eggs, cream, parmesan cheese, and a grating of nutmeg. The leeks especially, but also the parmesan and nutmeg, add a lot of flavor and make the squash puree really delicious. The topping is grated parmesan and panko (Japanese breadcrumbs).

Walt modified the recipe slightly, because he started by roasting the squash in the oven and then mashing and whipping the squash pulp into a smooth puree, instead of cutting the raw squash into chunks and cooking them down in a pan with the leeks. You can do it either way. We had some julienned and steamed collard greens as a garnish.

The pintade came out really good too. I put sage (we have a plant out back), parsley (growing in pots on the terrace), a dried cayenne pepper, some allspice berries and black peppercorns, a shallot, and two garlic cloves in the cavity. The bird cooked on the spit, turning over a pan of water so that it steamed and roasted at the same time, keeping the meat moist. We ate half of it...

Turkey... façon coq au vin (2)

First, there are two things I want to say about coq au vin. Most of the time if you order it in a restaurant in France, it will be a standard chicken that you are served cooked in red wine. A chicken doesn't need such long slow cooking. Also, coq au vin is a kind of fricassée and can be made with either red wine or white wine. I've made the white wine version before, and I've made it with a guinea fowl (une pintade) instead of with chicken. Look through these old posts from my blog to see examples of poultry stewed in wine.

Since I don't know if you can get a turkey as small as the one I had, I'll say you can always use a big chicken. The first thing you have to do is cut it up into serving pieces — thighs, drumsticks, wings, and breast meat (or buy pre-cut parts). You can cut the white breast meat into either two or four pieces. Here are a couple of photos of the turkey pieces after they marinated in the red wine and aromatics.

Make some broth with the back and the wing tips while the fowl in in its marinade, because the cooking liquid should be a combination of wine and broth. And don't throw out the onions, garlic, herbs, and carrots when you take the pieces of turkey out of the marinade. You'll cook them in the stew. (Actually, marinating the poultry is optional. Skip it if you don't have time.)

Another important flavor ingredient in coq au vin is what is called poitrine fumée — smoked pork belly, bacon, or "side meat" in the U.S. — in the form of lardons (sliced or diced). I cut up a slab of smoked pork because I wanted big pieces in the stew. If you can get slab bacon, you can do this, or you can use thick-sliced American bacon.

I put in a good amount of pork partly because the turkey I was cooking was smaller than the one called for by the recipe I was following. I wanted enough meat for the amount of wine I was putting in (a whole bottle, which is three-fourths of a liter). The first step in the cooking is to brown the pork in a pan or pot. Then you can take the smoked pork out of the pan and brown the poultry in the pork (bacon) fat.

Part 1 — Part 3