Saucisses à la languedocienne

This weekend I cooked and posted about topinambours (Jerusalem artichokes) à la boulangère. They were good, and we finished them yesterday at lunchtime. Gratins are often good reheated, like other casserole dishes. With the Jerusalem artichokes, we had sausages in a tomato/caper sauce called saucisses à la languedocienne. The Languedoc is an ancient province in southern France, bordered by Provence, the Perigord, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Pyrenees mountains.

This is a recipe I stumbled upon when doing research in the Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia. I was looking up information about saucisses de Toulouse, because I had bought some of those at a local supermarket, Intermarché, a few days earlier. Saucisses de Toulouse are about the plainest sausages you can buy, and that's what makes them good.

 They're also called saucisses au couteau because they are, at least traditionally, made with pork (shoulder and lean breast) that has been chopped with a knife, not run through a grinder. The meat used for Toulouse sausages is simply seasoned with salt and pepper. Saucisses de Toulouse are good served with beans, as in cassoulet (a Toulouse and Castelnaudary specialty). They're good baked in the oven, fried in a pan on top of the stove, grilled, or poached in water or wine.

 They come in two forms: saucisses portion (classic sausages, which is what I had this time), or saucisse brasse — a long section of bulk sausage that is often presented wound into a spiral, sometimes called en escargot (snail-style — no, there's no snail meat in it!). That's what's pictured here. The escargot-shaped sausage can be held together for cooking by running two long skewers through it, perpendicular to each other in a cross shape.

 
The recipe I happened upon in the Larousse Gastronomique calls for pan-frying the Toulouse sausage in goose fat (butter, oil, bacon fat work fine too) for 15 to 20 minutes, covered, along with some diced garlic and some herbs (thyme, bay leaf...). Turn the sausage(s) once during the cooking time and make sure the meat is completely cooked through. Then take the sausage out and reserve it in a dish in a warming oven.

Degrease and then deglaze the frying pan with a couple of tablespoons of vinegar, which should evaporate almost completely. (Use wine if you don't like vinegar, I say.) Pour a cup or so of vegetable or chicken broth and half a cup of puréed tomato into the pan. Spoon in two or three tablespoons of whole capers (from a jar, packed in vinegar or brine) and let the sauce reduce until it's as thick as you want it to be.

Spoon some the sauce over the reserved sausage, serving the rest separately. Serve hot. This tomato-caper sauce is also really good served with pommes de terre or topinambours boulangère, and it would be good with frites, sautéed potatoes, or purée de pommes de terre. Also rice, polenta, or pasta.

Here's the recipe for the sausages from the Larousse Gastronomique (it's in both the 2007 electronic version of the book and in the 1967 printed edition). It calls for a long piece of saucisse roulée en escargot (2.2 lbs.).

Saucisse à la languedocienne

Rouler en spirale 1 kg de saucisse de Toulouse et la piquer avec 2 brochettes croisées pour qu'elle garde cette forme.

Chauffer dans une sauteuse 3 cuillerées à soupe de graisse d'oie et y mettre la saucisse. Ajouter 4 gousses d'ail émincées et 1 bouquet garni. Cuire 18 min à couvert ; retourner la saucisse à mi-cuisson. L'égoutter, la débrocher, la dresser dans un plat rond et la tenir au chaud.

Dégraisser puis déglacer la sauteuse avec 2 cuillerées à soupe de vinaigre, puis mouiller de 30 cl de bouillon et de 10 cl de purée de tomate ; faire réduire. Ajouter 3 cuillerées à soupe de câpres au vinaigre et 1 cuillerée à soupe de persil ciselé. Mélanger et napper la saucisse de cette sauce.

Pourquoi « boulangère » ? « Jérusalem » ? « artichaut » ?

Walt came back from the supermarket a couple of days ago with a bag of beautiful topinambours — Jerusalem artichokes. What are they? Well, they are the roots of a North American sunflower plant. The scientific hame is Helianthus tuberosus. It's often called a sunchoke, and the root is a tuber that, cooked, tastes like an artichoke heart to some people. The tuber looks sort of like a ginger root.

Why is it named "Jerusalem"? Well, that might be a corruption of an Italian word for sunflowers, which is girasole ("turns with the sun" — tournesol in French). Blame English speakers for the misunderstanding. Another theory is that the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic to settle in the New World believed that their colony would be seen as a "New Jurasalem" and somehow the name came to be applied to this new kind of sunflower they had found. Native Americans knew it was a good food.

Anyway, I decided to cook them à la boulangère. Potatoes and even roasts like mutton used to be, and still can be, cooked that way. These are dishes that were cooked in bakers' ovens in France in the days before people had ovens in their home kitchens. In the morning or afternoon, when the day's bread had been baked, the oven was still hot. People — whether it was the baker's wife (la boulangère) or neighbors and customers — could take their prepared roasts and vegetables and have them cooked in the hot bread oven.



Here are the topinambours completely cooked. Below, they have just gone into the oven.

I found a French recipe on the internet after I had the idea to cook the Jerusalem artichokes this way. I've made pommes de terre à la boulangère numerous times over the years, but I had never tried it with topinambours. The author of the recipe I found uses the term « boulangère » as a noun, which was new to me. But why not?

The first thing to do is peel the topinambours (or potatoes, or a combination of the two) and cut them into thick slices. Optionally, slice up an onion and a garlic clove or two as well. Then sauté all the vegetables in a big flying pan to start them cooking and brown them lightly. Use butter, cooking oil, bacon fat, or duck fat as the cooking medium.

When the vegetables are starting to brown and tenderize, dump them into a baking dish and spread them into an even layer. Add a bay leaf and some sprigs of thyme or other herbs. Then pour enough hot broth (chicken, vegetable, etc. — your choice) to not quite cover the layer of "sweated" vegetables. (The boulangère is like a gratin dauphinois made with broth instead of milk.)

Put the pan, uncovered, in a hot oven and wait 30 minutes or so for most of the liquid to evaporate and for the slices of topinambour or potato to brown as much as you want them to. It's pretty simple. Salt and pepper the boulangère after the broth has evaporated because you don't want it over-seasoned.

Le hameau en trois photos

My title says "the hamlet in three photos" — but this is actually only about half of the hamlet, which is made up of nine houses. There are four houses in the first image. You can see what wintertime looks like here this year. Our house is the one that the road appears to be heading toward. You're seeing the back of the house, which over looks the yard.

I took these photos three or four days ago on a very warm (for mid-January) afternoon. I moan about everything being gray and sad-looking in the Loire Valley winter, but you can see it's not really true. It's browner than it is gray, at least when there's no fog. And there are reds and greens and blues too, though muted. It's pretty here, even in the dead of winter.

I was on my way home after a walk with Tasha in the vineyard. I take an afternoon walk with the dog every other day. I also take a morning walk with her every other morning. Walt does the same, but on opposite days. When the weather is good, I walk farther than on very cold or very wet days. But rain doesn't stop me, or Walt either, from going out for a daily walk.

Obviously, going out for a walk every day helps keep cabin fever at bay, or at least reduces its intensity. Photography, tennis or films on TV, cooking, trying to organize things on my computers... those are wintertime activities. It's important to have a project and to feel like you've accomplished something despite the dark, short days and less than ideal weather.

Winter greenery

We haven't yet had a flake of snow this winter. It's been coldish on some recent days, but we've had very few days with frosty mornings — yesterday was the rare exception. However, this morning it's 6ºC (at least 10ºF) warmer than it was yesterday morning at the same time.

The other day (Tuesday, Jan. 15), when I took these pictures of the vegetable garden, it was downright warm outside, considering we're in mid-January. It felt more like early April. Today, I thought I'd do a report on how my winter greens are growing.

First, let me say that the collard greens were a disaster again this year. Maybe I planted them too late (end of September). They were immediately attacked by pests that ate all the leaves. So no pictures of those — I wonder if I'll ever be able to harvest beautiful collard plants like the ones I harvested in February 2015.  Today I'll focus on the kale instead.

By mid-October, the kale plants — called lacinato, dinosaur, or black Tuscan kale — had already grown pretty tall. Look at this post from back then. Pests, probably snails and slugs mostly, chewed all the leaves off the collard seedlings, but the kale was too tough for them. I had hoped for some cold weather to kill caterpillars and make the gastropods go into hibernation, but no luck with that.

The Swiss chard, also attacked by pests, hasn't fared very well either. But I'm optimistic that the plants will bounce back and grow tall and bushy as the days get longer. A year or two ago, I had some really beautiful chard plants in March and April.

One other green plant, while not one you can eat but you can enjoy cooking with, is bay laurel. I dug up a volunteer plant last summer and planted it in a pot. I meant to get it planted in the ground by November, but rainy weather prevented me from doing it. It's doing fine in its pot, which I set out on the tarps in the garden plot to help keep the tarps from blowing away. If we have a really hard freeze, I can always bring it into the greenhouse.