Rillettes, with a caveat

I finished making the rillettes de lapin, the rabbit rillettes, that I posted about a couple of days ago. Rillettes are slow-cooked meats like pork, rabbit, or duck that is shredded and packed in pots or a terrine with a little rendered pork or duck fat to bind the shreds together.

A slice of cold rillettes de lapin — "potted rabbit"

Pressing the shredded meat into a loaf pan or other rectangular dish makes it possible to cut the rillettes into slices for serving. You have to let the rillettes cool down completely in the refrigerator before you can cut slices, the way you would cut slices of pâté. It would be good to weight the rillettes down with a brick or another dish to press them into a solid mass, but it's not absolutely necessary.

Rabbit rillettes, still warm, packed into a clear loaf pan

I feel like I need to issue one warning about making rillettes the way I have described. The process of preparing the meat for cooking calls for marinating it in coarse salt for 24 hours before cooking it. The idea is to then rinse the rabbit pieces under running water and cook them very slowly in, for example, duck or goose fat, along with the liquid released by the  rabbit pieces as they marinated. Then you pour some of the duck or goose fat and some of the cooked marinade over the shredded meat and stir it all together while it is still warm.

Rillettes pressed into a loaf pan for cooling...

Well, that marinade is very salty, especially if you've boiled it down and concentrated it. Use it sparingly — a little bit goes a long way. When you're making rillettes, pâtés, or other preparations that you plan to serve cold, you need to over-salt them slightly. At low temperatures, the food can taste bland unless you add plenty of salt. However, too much salt is never good. Better to taste as you go to make sure. At the point where you combine meat and marinade, everything is completely cooked, after all.

...and then slicing

You don't have to serve these rillettes cold, of course. They are basically lean meat. You can combine them with cooked onions or other vegetables — carrots, mushrooms, peas — and make a kind of shepherd's pie — un hachis parmentier in French — with them. You can serve them quickly sautéed with vegetables as a meat sauce for pasta. The rillettes can be chopped up a little more finely and go into a soup like minestrone or bean soup.

A serving of cold rillettes calls for
some cornichons or olives

I think I have to go start making lunch. Carrots, onions, mushrooms, shredded rabbit, bow-tie pasta...

J'ai vu le coucou

Jean-Claude Chantelat writes in his book Les Oiseaux de France (2003):

« On connaît son chant, si caractérisque au printemps, et ses mœurs particulières... Mais combien d'observateurs ont vu le coucou gris ? » — ["We know its call, so characteristic in springtime, and its unusual behaviors... But how many bird-watchers have actually seen a cuckoo bird?"]

Well, I have. We have a cuckoo in the area that likes to perch at the very top of the big Himalayan cedar in our yard and do its cuckooing call these spring mornings. And now that we have our loft and can get to the upper-story windows to look out, I can actually see the cuckoo. That's « le coucou » in French.

The cuckoo perched in the top of our tall cedar tree
(sorry I couldn't get a better picture)

If you've ever heard a cuckoo clock "chime" the hour, you know what the cuckoo sounds like. In fact, when we first moved here, a friend came from the western U.S. for a visit. The first morning she was here, she emerged from the guest bedroom at an early hour and requested that we turn off the cuckoo clock so that she might sleep a little later the next day. We told her that we didn't have a cuckoo clock, but an actual cuckoo bird, and there wasn't much we could do about the loud cuckooing.

Another book we have, The New Birdwatcher's Pocket Guide to Britain and Europe, calls the cuckoo bird a "familiar disembodied voice." The cuckooing in Europe starts in April, when the birds return from their winter territories in southeastern Africa. The cuckoos fly back down there in July or August. We only hear them cuckooing from April through June. If you don't want to be awakened by them early in the morning, don't come to Saint-Aignan in springtime.

Still another bird book on the shelf, the Collins New Generation Guide: Birds of Britain and Europe, says that the female cuckoo lays 25 eggs per season. That would be a lot of eggs in one nest, but no problem, of course. The cuckoo never builds one. She just lays each egg in the nest of other birds, after pushing out the eggs she finds there. The other birds hatch her egg and feed her little one until it fledges and then flies back to Africa.

Home-made Rillettes de lapin

Rillettes are shredded lean meat packed in pots with some fat and broth to bind the mixture together. They are normally eaten cold, either mounded or spread on toasted bread and accompanied by the sharp flavor of the sour French gherkins called cornichons — or with salty olives. In cafés in Paris and around France, you can usually also get a rillettes sandwich, which is a small portion of the potted meat spread on a split baguette.

Shredded rabbit meat after its slow cooking in duck fat

Rillettes are usually made with pork, and pork rillettes are a specialty of the Loire Valley and the areas just to the north. The most famous rillettes are probably the ones made in and named after the city of Le Mans. The pork rillettes made in Tours are nearly as well known, especially around Saint-Aignan, Blois, and the rest of the Loire Valley. There is a rivalry between Le Mans and Tours for rillettes bragging rights. Which city's are the best? The most authentic? The tastiest? All that.

Nice pieces of rabbit, which is a lean, white meat
and not gamy at all

According to the Robert dictionary of the French language, the term rillettes dates back in writing only to 1835, when the novelist Balzac, who lived and worked in the Loire Valley, used it in a published work. Of course the term or similar ones already existed in the spoken language, at least regionally. But Balzac officially made it a French word, and the rest is history. The Collins-Robert French-English dictionary gives one translation — the not-very-appetizing term "potted meat" — but also says French rillettes are also just called "rillettes" in English.

It's pronounced [ree-YET] in French, and maybe [ree-YETS] in English. It's a plural, and I don't think there's any such thing as a single rillette. Nowadays, rillettes are made of many different meats, including duck, goose, rabbit, or even chicken or turkey, or of fish, including tuna, salmon, or mackerel. For meat rillettes, the fat the meat is cooked in is usually lard when pork is involved, or goose or duck fat when other meats are used. The fat used in fish rillettes is either mayonnaise, softened butter, fromage frais (which is like smooth cottage cheese), or softened cream cheese.

The "marinade" is coarse salt, black pepper, dried thyme
and bay leaves, and minced garlic. Marinate for 24 hours.

For the past few days, I've been making rabbit rillettes. My batch is in the oven as I type this, warming up so that I can incorporate some of the duck fat that I cooked pieces of rabbit in yesterday and the day before. I'll also add some of the broth the rabbit produced as it cooked; it will be full of gelatin because the rabbit cooked on the bone. After I mix the shredded meat, fat, and broth together, it will go into the refrigerator to cool and set up.

There won't be any pork in my rabbit rillettes, though I think you could add some. And you could add some lard to the fat, but I'd rather just make rillettes with duck fat. Duck fat, by the way, can keep indefinitely in sealed jars in the refrigerator or a cold cellar. After you use it, you melt the rest and as it cools and solidifies the jars seal again and can go back into storage. Duck fat is a healthy fat, and the people who eat a lot of it down in southwestern France have low rates of coronary disease.

Rinse the marinated rabbit pieces and cook them slowly
for several hours in enough duck or goose fat to cover.
This makes rabbit confit — like duck confit.

But the most important thing about rillettes is that they are delicious. The meat itself is marinated in salt, pepper, and herbs before being cooked slowly in fat. The fat tenderizes the meat, and you let it cook at low temperature until it starts to fall apart. After it's cooked in fat, I like to take the pieces and put them on a rack in a low oven (say 200ºF/100ºC) and let them drip and dry. The outside of each piece of rabbit, duck, or pork, for example, will brown lightly. That adds flavor to the shredded meat.

After you take the meat out of the oven and let it cool, you have to shred it, leaving some nice chunks when you can. If you cook boneless pork, you can just mash it with a fork. If you use rabbit duck, or goose, you need to take the meat off the bones and make sure no little bones go into the mixture. It takes time, but it's not hard to do. When you mix the fat and broth into the shredded meat, you can also add either fresh or dried herbs for even more flavor.

The cooked rabbit pieces after they have dried
and browned slightly in a low oven, ready to shred

You can pack the finished rillettes into small pots — that's why the English term is "potted meat" (it's not because alcohol is involved!) — or you can pack them into a larger dish and then cut slices or even wedges. At the markets, you often see rillettes in large heavy bowls, and the charcutier or charcutière either spoons some out or cuts a wedge, weighs it, and wraps it in butcher's paper. Sometimes you get a slice. I'm going to pack my rillettes in a big dish, cut slices, wrap them, and put at least some of them in the freezer.

For these rabbit rillettes, I bought two rabbits that each weighed 1.5 kg, or over three pounds. So I cooked somewhere between six and seven pounds of rabbit. That's a lot. The rillettes will keep fine in the freezer for two or three months. They will be good spread on toast rounds and served with cornichons or olives when we are sitting out in the back yard with friends this summer, having a glass of rosé wine. They will also be good as an ingredient or side dish with a big salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

I realize that most of the people reading this blog won't have several quarts of duck fat in their fridge. I do, though — that's part of life in France. At least my life. I'd better get downstairs now and pack the rillettes into that big dish. It's a terrine, by the way...

Click this link for a follow-up post about rabbit rillettes, including a note about saltiness.

Lunches of duck and okra

High temperature records were broken in different parts of France yesterday. Some places had highs of 30ºC, which is 86ºF. Here in Saint-Aignan, our thermometer showed about 72ºF, but it reads low. It was a little cooler than the day before, but the temperature up in the loft still managed to hit 77.

Here's some food porn. This week has been busy, but we've been cooking anyway. Last year we bought a little electric grill to cook on, and we set it up on the front terrace this week, for the season.

A duck breast fillet cooking on the electric grill — it's good
to score the skin of the duck breast in a cross-hatch pattern
with a sharp knife to keep the filet from curling as it cooks.

The cooking you do on such a contraption can't really be called grilling, or at least not barbecuing, but it is handy and it keeps the heat out of the kitchen. What we grilled this week, among other things, was a nice duck breast. I had bought three of them as a package deal, and I'm using one to make duck breast prosciutto. That's a three-week process, and the meat is curing in the fridge right now.

A cold appetizer of thinly sliced duck breast meat

Meantime, we decided to grill one of the other two duck breast filets. I don't know if you eat duck, but if you do maybe you know that the breast meat is cooked rare, like good steak. It resembles beefsteak in color, texture, and taste. We ate a good portion of the duck breast we cooked while it was still hot, but there was some left over. A day or two later, that little piece cut into thin slices made a nice cold appetizer.

In Blois on Wednesday I found fresh okra (gombos in French) in an Asian grocery store in the old part of town. I had to buy some, because I find fresh okra so rarely. When we got home, I decided to cook it quickly to go with the grilled duck breast.

Cooking okra as a quick stir fry...

"Okra and tomatoes" is a classic combination (at least in the U.S. South) but it's not tomato season. I could have used frozen or tinned tomatoes, but I wanted something I could make more quickly. We were having a late lunch after our shopping trip in Blois and environs, and we were both starving. It doesn't take long to grill a duck breast.

...with a hot, sweet, and slightly vinegary chilli sauce

I sliced up the okra pods, stir-fried them in oil in a wok, and seasoned them with Sweet Chilli Sauce from a jar that we had in the refrigerator. To that I added about a teaspoon of a very hot habañero sauce and a tablespoon of distilled vinegar. It was brightly colored and very tasty. The chilli sauce was thickened slightly by the okra's natural juices (wink, wink).

In the fridge right now I have some big wide Italian flat green beans — called cocos plats in French — that I think I might cook the same way today.

Mower mission accomplished

We didn't have to go to Tours after all. We found a good mower right here in Saint-Aignan. Or, rather, in Noyers-sur-Cher, across the river. BricoMarché came through for us. They advertised a mower with a Honda engine and the right specs. It cuts a 53 cm swath, which is almost as wide as the largeur de coupe of the old mower (it was 56 cm).

Apple blossoms starting to break out...

The grass we have to keep cut is probably almost 20,000 sq. ft, or half an acre. That's 2,000 sq. meters. And it can grow pretty fast when conditions of heat and moisture are right. If you let it get out of control, you're in trouble. Walt is the lawn mower, or the lawn-mower operator.

...and some that are in full flower

The other important feature of the mower is self-propulsion (we need une tondeuse tractée). It's hard enough to follow the mower around, guiding and turning it at the edges of the grass plots and around obstacles, without having also to push it. Our yard is not really big enough to justify a riding mower (un tracteur is what everybody calls that). There are too many trees, garden plots, grape vines, bushes, and walkways so the grass is divided up into fairly small plots.

A neighbor's house and yard down in the river valley

I'm cooking a couple of pork shoulder roasts in the pressure cooker this morning. I flavored them with smoked paprika, hot paprika, salt, pepper, and some vinegar. They'll cook for 90 minutes to two hours. I'm also making rillettes de lapin confit today. I started the process yesterday by salting down the rabbit pieces and putting them in the refrigerator to more or less marinate. (I guess "marinate" comes from "marine" and words like that, so it's based on salting.)

Sunset over the vineyard

More about all that later. Our unnaturally warm weather continues, and no end to it is yet predicted. The last time we had such a warm, almost hot April was in 2007. That year, May turned chilly and cloudy, and the rest of the summer remained cloudy and rainy. The garden was pretty much a failure. So we'll see how 2011's weather evolves.

An urban excursion

We had a very successful day shopping yesterday. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. We drove up to Blois to price lawnmowers up there, but we also had a long list of other things we needed to buy. We try to group all these searches and purchases so that a single trip is as useful and productive as possible.

First on the shopping list was more paint for the stairwell and hallway. The painting project is ongoing. We knew what we wanted, which was more of the paint we used up in the loft last fall. And we remembered where we got that paint — at a big DIY store called BricoDépôt. There's one on the north side of Blois, out on the A10 autoroute.

This are the kinds of flowers that will be getting mowed down
once we find the right mower. Seems a shame, but...

Getting there was nerve-wracking. We're just not much on driving in cities any more, I guess. Blois is a very small city, but it has a dense network of small, narrow streets, a lot of one-ways, and the inevitable road works all around. We got lost. A couple of times we had to pull into driveways, turn around, and backtrack because we realized we had gone right past places we were trying to find.

The exterior roads around Blois are not much easier to navigate, especially on the north side. They're over-engineered and not really intuitive. In France, the people who design roads seem determined to make sure you can't get there — wherever you're going — by the most direct route. You have to go all around your elbow, which is most cases turns out to be around a big round-about — a carrefour giratoire, they call them — with gigantic trucks and small sports cars whizzing all around it.

Yesterday's sunset...

Anyway, I was talking about successes. And the weather was beautiful. Not only did we find the paint we needed — not the same brand, of course, that would be too easy — but we also found some wooden shelving units of the kind, style, and price that I'd been looking for over the past three or four years. And they actually fit inside the little Peugeot so I could get them home. I can finally scratch those off the shopping list.

...and a close-up taken through the linden tree out back

We also found an Asian grocery store that we'd been hearing about and trying to find for years and years. A friend had told us about it in 2005 or so, and we had looked for it before. Thanks go to Susan and Simon for mentioning the Asia Store in Poitiers. When I Googled that name, I found a place called Asia Store or Asia Foods or some such name in Blois. I got the address.

One more time, we rode all around in the little narrow streets of old Blois looking for it. I had printed a Google map showing one-way streets. Then there was the inevitable construction project blocking the very road we needed to take. That sent us off on a long detour. But we ended up finding the store, which was very small but well stocked with all kinds of exotic products and exotic peoples.

Parallel tracks that would be easier to navigate than
the narrow streets and traffic of Blois

I found fresh okra, which I and a very pleasant and talkative African woman picked over, choosing the nicest ones, as we exchanged cooking and gardening stories about okra/gombos. Walt found bags of frozen shrimp at good prices, and we had thought to put a cooler in the car so we could buy a couple of kilos of shrimp and get them home before they thawed. We also got a jar of peanut butter, another exotic find.

Oh, and lawn mowers... we stopped in three garden equipment stores on the way to Blois. The first one is right off the highway outside the town of Contres on the road to Blois. The man there was very helpful and informative. But he didn't have exactly the mower we had in mind. Farther north, in the shopping district that straddles the Blois "suburbs" of Vineul and Saint-Gervais, there was a similar store that had three brands of mowers, and one that matched our criteria.

The man showing us the mowers there, however, seemed kind of pushy to me. He tried every angle to sell us something — anything. I felt rushed. « Qu'est-ce qui vous fait hésiter ? Est-ce le prix ? », he said — what's making you hesitate? Is it the price? Is there some feature you want that this mower or than doesn't have? I'm sure he was trying to be helpful, but he asked too many questions, trying to pin us down.

Rush hour traffic around Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

The Toro mower he showed us cost about 150 € more than I wanted to spend, and that's what was making me hesitate, but I didn't really want to say so. I was looking for the exit, and we finally told him we'd come back after we'd looked around a little more. At the next garden shop, the clerk who tried to help us was basically incompetent, and the mowers there didn't fit the bill. So it was back to square one.

The upshot of all this is that we have to go out again today and shop at a couple of more places. I found that over-priced Toro mower on the web site of a big store called Castorama, over in Tours, for 100 € less than the smaller store's price. So it's off to Tours today (an hour's drive), after a stop at our local BricoMarché store to check out a Honda mower they have on sale this month. At least the weather is again supposed to be beautiful.

The busy season

A few springs ago, I planted oregano in the garden. Then the time came to till up the plot of soil it was growing in, so I dug it up and put it in a big plastic planter box.

Now it comes back every spring. Even the cold weather and snow we had last December didn't cause it to die back. In fact, it came back more beautiful than before. It's pretty to look at and good to eat too.

Oregano — Origan

We are having amazing weather this week. It's sunny and warm. The high temperature this afternoon is predicted to be 23ºC — that's the mid-70s F. A lot of trees are covered in flowers, and the grass is really growing again.

That grass is a problem because the lawn mower stopped working yesterday. The motor runs fine, but it's self-propulsion feature seems to have given up the ghost. The mower has given us a good eight seasons of service, so we've decided to replace it. We can't live without a good lawn mower, and we especially need one right now.

Sunset a couple of days ago

I'm also busy with the rotary tiller, preparing garden plots for planting in about a month's time. The ground is still a little wet and heavy, but tilling it up at least superficially will help it dry out faster.

Today we're off to Blois to do some heavy-duty shopping. More paint for the hallway and stairwell, the mower, some things from one of the Asian groceries up there in the big town, and maybe some new vinyl chairs for the back yard.

Chez nous

This is the busy season. It's hard to realize that we will be able to live outdoors as much as indoors for the next six months. We'll be able to throw open the doors and windows. And watch the garden grow.

Joël Robuchon's Clermontoise potatoes

The Auvergne, which is the mountainous center of France, cold and damp, is known for its potato dishes and big boiled dinners. One famous potato dish is called La Truffade — it's sliced potatoes sautéed with smoked lardons of pork bacon and then smothered in the young Cantal cheese called tomme fraîche. See my earlier post here for the recipe and some pictures.

A propos of all that, here's a recipe for another nourishing Auvergnat recipe for cooking potatoes and cheese. It's from the famous chef Joël Robuchon's book called Le Meilleur et le plus simple de la pomme de terre — "the best and simplest ways to cook potatoes" — which is a small paperback containing about 100 recipes. I don't know if Robuchon was born in the Auvergne, but if he wasn't he should have been.

Joël Robuchon's little book of potato recipes and ideas

Often, when I have a certain variety of potato in the cellar, just begging to be cooked, I thumb through Robuchon's little book. It has nearly as many pictures as recipes in it, so it's entertaining to look at and easy to use. You just wait for a recipe to catch your eye, or jog your memory of some great potato dish you might have eaten in a restaurant in Paris or the Auvergne, and then you verify that the recipe calls for the kind of potatoes you have on hand. Waxy, firm boiling potatoes, or mealy, dry bakers. Use waxy potatoes — red or gold ones — for this recipe.

Creamy, cheesy potatoes baked in the oven

Pommes de terre gratinées clermontoises is another gratin, which is a French specialty. When you live in a country that produces hundreds of cheeses, you end up finding many ways to use them in your cooking. What goes better with potatoes than melted cheese? And especially Cantal cheese, which resembles our Anglo-Saxon Cheddars but without the orange food coloring in it. Cantal melts more like cheddar than like Swiss-style cheeses. It's an "uncooked" cheese, like Cheddar — the milk is never heated up during the cheese-making process, and it melts into a molten, unstringy liquid.

The other ingredient in this recipe is cream. In France, that will be crème fraîche, which is a "fermented" version of our heavy cream. In other words, French cream is made from milk that is allowed to start to sour slightly, so that the cream is "cured" and tasty rather than fresh and bland. Why it's called crème fraîche is a little bit of a mystery, since it's not made from perfectly fresh milk. At any rate, heavy cream will work in the pommes clermontoises, but use crème fraîche if you can get it.

Pommes de terre gratinées clermontoises

This recipe from the city of Clermont-Ferrand is made
using the wonderful cheese that is called Cantal.
The Auvergne, like Normandy, has three excellent cheeses.
And in my opinion, along with those Norman cheeses,
the Cantal, Fourme d’Ambert, and Saint-Nectaire cheeses
of the Auvergne region are among the world’s finest.Makes 4 or 5 servings.

2 to 2½ lbs. boiling potatoes (1 kg)
4 Tbsp. butter (50 g)
1¼ cups heavy cream (300 ml)
5 oz. Cantal cheese (150 g)
nutmeg
salt and pepper

Select potatoes that are all about the same size.
Peel them and cook them whole in boiling, salted water
for 30 minutes.

Turn on the oven to 180ºC (350ºF). As soon as the potatoes
are cooked, drain them and then dry them out
slightly in the oven as it heats up.

Lay the potatoes out on a clean dish towel and,
using the back of a big fork, flatten them slightly
so that they resemble little cakes of soap.

Butter a baking dish and arrange the potatoes in it.
Season them with salt, freshly ground pepper,
and grated nutmeg.

Grate or crumble the cheese. Meanwhile, heat
the cream to the simmering point and pour it
over the potatoes. Sprinkle the cheese over all.
Set the pan in the hot oven and let it cook
and brown, for 5 minutes or longer.

Serve the potatoes hot out of the oven
as a side dish with roasted meat.

Boudin noir et pommes de terre clermontoises

In his preamble, I assume that Robuchon is talking about these three Normandy cheeses: Camembert, Pont-l'Evêque, and Livarot. I'm sorry he left out my favorite Normandy cheese, Neufchâtel. He also left out a very good Auvergne cheese, Le Bleu d'Auvergne. So, IMHO, there are at least four great cheeses in each region under discussion here.

Nonetheless, this is the kind of potato dish you can make using whatever cheese you have in the refrigerator or particularly love. The cheese has to be good, but it's the combination of reduced cream and melted cheese over potatoes that are already cooked that makes it so good. The cream needs to boil and thicken and reduce in the bottom of the baking dish to give the potatoes good flavor and texture.

Golden brown

Robuchon's recipe assumes that the potatoes are still hot when they go into the oven. That reduces the cooking time. If you use potatoes that have had time to cool down after being boiled, then you'll need to increase the cooking time so that the potatoes and cream have plenty of time to heat up, and so that the cheese melts and turns golden brown.

The church in Meusnes

What is there to say about Meusnes? How the name is pronounced? The two S'es are silent, as is the final E. What you have left is Meu’n’. The EU vowel is not the open vowel of jeune or peur — it's the tightly closed EU of peu, veux, and, for example, Meuse (the river). To say Meusnes authentically, you definitely have to pucker.

Another thing about Meusnes is of course the church. That's what these pictures show. I took them in early July of 2004, when CHM was visiting and we were out sightseeing a lot. We were taken by surprise by the beautiful Romanesque church in Meusnes, which is about 10 km/6 mi. east of Saint-Aignan on the road to Selles-sur-Cher. It's in the Loir-et-Cher département, but in an area that used to be considered part of the Berry province, not the Touraine or the Sologne.

At first, Meusnes seems a drab kind of town. It all seems to be strung out along the highway, and you get the impression that you'll never get through it all. The secret to towns like Meusnes, of course, is to get off the main road and explore the side streets.

If you turn north in central Meusnes, right in front of the school and the church, you head toward a bridge over the Cher River that will take you to Châtillon-sur-Cher. It's a pretty drive past a lot of old-style Touraine houses, and then through the wide, low, green river valley.

If you turn south at the same place, you see similar houses as go up onto the highlands at the southern edge of the river valley. And you start seeing vineyards and old farmhouses with signs advertising wine for sale to the public. You can try just stopping in at one. Often, you'll be offered a dégustation and then you can buy a few bottles. Or a bag-in-box.

The church in Meusnes was built in the early days of the 11th century, so the village has been in existence for a long time. Its population is about 1,000 nowadays. There are some new houses, but there's nothing you could call a subdivision or a development. The same man has been mayor of Meusnes since 1977, according to an article I read. He was the youngest mayor in France when he was first elected. Now he might be the oldest... but probably not.

How did the village survive? Well, it and the neighboring village of Couffy were centers for the quarrying and carving of flintstone for three centuries — the 17th, 18th, and 19th. Napoleon's armies were armed with muskets that fired shots thanks to flintstone from Meusnes.

It's not surprising, then that the wines produced in and around Meusnes are sometimes described as "flinty." Meusnes is at the extreme eastern end of the Touraine wine region, on the northwest corner of the Valençay wine appellation. The grapes, as elsewhere in Touraine, are Gamay and Sauvignon Blanc, along with Cabernet Franc and Côt/Malbec. The local cheese is — what else? — goat cheese in the round disk style of Selles-sur-Cher.

Two more things about Meusnes: it has a nice bread bakery and that great butcher shop that sells beef, pork, and other meats. Chiquet's place is also a delicatessen with salads and hams and sausages and terrines.

And finally, I read that the famous French tennis player and latter-day singer named Yannick Noah, who lives in New York City these days, used to spend his summer vacations in Meusnes. Yannick Noah is known for going barefoot most of the time, even on stage. Maybe he learned that in Meusnes.

Terrines, pâtés, and rillettes

One of the products on sale at the Charcuterie Chiquet in Meusnes — one that caught our eye — was a terrine de bœuf cuit — a kind of pâté made with beef. Actually, this isn't really a pâté, because it's made with lean meat. I guess it could be called a "jellied" beef dish, or beef in aspic.

Terrine in French is the name of the dish that pâtés and other preparations are cooked in. It's called a terrine because it's a baking dish that was originally made out of terre cuite or, in Italian (and English), terra cotta. A terrine is an earthenware dish, and it's often rectangular, or oval-shaped.

A slice of Bernard Chiquet's terrine de bœuf cuit — potted beef

By extension, the foods cooked in such dishes are themselves called terrines. You can make terrines with meat, poultry, liver, fish, or vegetables. Sometimes they will have eggs or gelatin in them, to bind together the other ingredients. Here's a vegetable terrine that Walt made and posted about some time back.

So what we call pâté can be made in a terrine or not. Pâté is by definition a mixture of chopped or pureed meat, fish, or liver, with spices and other flavoring ingredients — herbs, wine, onions, garlic, and so on.

The origin of the term pâté has to do with the fact that the meat mixture was traditionally cooked in a pastry crust, or "paste." Today, pâtés can be made that way, or as terrines, without a crust. The word pâté now has both meanings. Sometimes you see preparations called terrines de pâté. And sometimes you see terrines de [whatever] en croûte — in a crust — which brings the whole thing full circle.

One thing you always eat with terrines, pâtés, and rillettesare these little picked gherkins called cornichons.
They are sour and vinegary, not sweet.

A similar but different way of preparing meats in France is called rillettes. Rillettes are not pâtés — the method is preparing them is completely different. The meat for pâtés and terrines is chopped, ground, or pureed and then mixed with flavoring ingredients before it is cooked.

Rillettes, on the other hand, are lean meats — pork, rabbit, duck, goose, or even turkey or chicken — cooked with or in lard or poultry fat and then shredded and potted up. Sometimes people say they don't really want to know what went into the making of a pâté (or a sausage). With rillettes, you don't even have to ask the question: rillettes are lean meat all shredded up, and bound together with some fat.

In a way, the terrine de bœuf cuit is actually a kind of beef rillettes, judging from its texture. It looks like corned beef that has been set up with aspic (gelatin) and packed into a terrine.

In France, what we call tuna salad is now called rillettes de thon — tuna rillettes. The fat that binds together the shreds of cooked fish is mayonnaise — an emulsion of egg yolk and vegetable oil. Or it can be fromage frais or fromage blanc in France.

Rillettes de lapin, with shreds and chunks of cooked lean rabbit meat

I saw a chef on a French cooking show make rillettes de lapin the other day. All he did was "marinate" rabbit pieces in garlic, coarse salt, and black pepper overnight. Then he rinsed off the pieces, dried them, and cooked them at very low temperature for several hours in enough melted goose or duck fat to cover them well.

When the rabbit was completely cooked, he let the pieces cool enough so that he could handle them and he used his fingers to take all the meat off the bones. He put that meat in a bowl, added just enough melted goose fat to bind the meat together, and stirred it all up. He added some fresh herbs to the mixture and then put it in the refrigerator to cool. Voilà : rillettes de lapin. Serve them cold or cool, spread on toast. Or eat some alongside a nice green salad.

Here is a recipe for Rillettes de Touraine, made with lean and fat pork cooked in Vouvray wine. And here is a recipe and descriptions of Rillettes de lapin that I made a couple of years ago. I cooked the rabbit in white wine, not duck or goose fat.

A boudin noir, or "black pudding," served with
potatoes au gratin from Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne

Another interesting linguistic subject has to do with the French word boudin and the English word pudding...

Strange ‘cheeses’ from Meusnes

Thursday morning we had several errands to do. The first was a trip to the vet's to get some products and pills for Bertie and Callie. The second was to buy some wine. Since the vet's office is across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher, I told Walt that, for a change, we should go to the Domaine Michaud winery over there to have our wine jugs filled with Gamay and Cabernet red wines. I'd only been to Michaud's once before.

It turns out that there's a whole world over there — okay, just a village — that we hadn't discovered until recently. It's called Les Martinières, and it's a neighborhood — a hamlet, or hameau, sort of like the one we live in. It's five miles due east of our house, and it's very picturesque, with roads and streets winding among traditional-style local houses and buildings. Les Martinières is a wine village surrounded by vineyards, with three or four wineries in operation. It's a little off the beaten path. Monsieur Michaud's wine is excellent.

Bernard Chiquet prepares and sells "naturally good" hams and sausages in Meusnes, near Saint-Aignan.
Notice the address: "the street of sighs."

Across the Cher River from Les Martinières, via the bridge at Châtillon-sur-Cher, is the village of Meusnes. (I'm getting to the point.) It's a pretty drive that takes you over bridges across the Canal du Berry, the Cher River, the Fouzon River, and the wide, flat river valley. In Meusnes, there's a good bakery, a beautiful old church, and a fine butcher/delicatessen shop — une boucherie/charcuterie — that I first heard of about five years ago.

Standard French sausages: clockwise from the top — merguez (spicy lamb sausages);
saucisses de Toulouse (fresh pork, not ground but chopped with a knife);
boudins noirs (blood sausages, a.k.a. black pudding);
and saucisses fumées (smoked pork sausages).

I'd only been to Bernard Chiquet's shop once before, years ago. But I was curious to visit again, especially since good weather was predicted for a weekend, and it seemed this would be a good opportunity to do some barbecuing. What to cook on the grill? Sausages, that's what. The good, standard French sausages, de préférence.

Strange "cheeses" in a pork butcher's shop...

After I had picked out some sausages — some to cook, others to put in the freezer for cooking later — I noticed some unusual looking products on the top of the display counter. Were they cheeses? I was examining them with great puzzlement when Madame Chiquet finished weighing and wrapping the sausages I had selected.

The first one that caught my eye was something called « Le Palet-Côt », which looked for all the world like a local Selles-sur-Cher goat cheese. « Qu'est-ce que c'est ? », I asked.

...are not cheeses at all, but hard dry sausages.

« En fait, c'est du saucisson sec, Monsieur. » , Madame Chiquet told me. « Et vous savez ce que c'est que le côt, n'est-ce pas ? » Yes, I know the word Côt — it's the local name for the grape that elsewhere is called Malbec. She proceeded to show and describe to me all the different hard, dry sausages — salamis — that she and her husband make. Most looked like your standard saucissons secs.

A close-up of the Palet-Côt saucisson, a hard salami made with pork, beef, hazelnuts, and red wine

Another one, however, looked like a Valençay-style goat cheese — the truncated pyramid of a cheese that is coated with black wood ash. Only this "cheese" was called « Le Cananard », and the coating was a layer of coarsely crushed black peppercorns. The meat turns out to be a mixture of pork and duck — canard in French. I should have asked for more information about the made-up word « cananard ».

Saint-Aignan, Noyers, Châtillon, and Meusnes

These were too funny not to buy, and they are very good with a glass of wine at apéritif time. Hard sausage is something you often get served with apéritifs — pre-dinner drinks — in France, but not this kind.

Chicken cooked in red wine

I won't call this coq au vin because it wasn't made with a coq but with a poulet. It's the same thing, though, as far as other ingredients and the cooking methods go. I've seen recipes for so-called coq au vin that are made with a rooster, a capon, or just a young chicken.

No matter how many times you make it, it's just as good. One thing I like to do when I make a chicken this way is to marinate it overnight in red wine with aromatics: onion, garlic, carrots, celery, thyme, bay leaf, pepper, salt, and allspice berries. Use at least two-thirds of a bottle of good red wine (two cups) or — why not? — the whole bottle. Add some water to the marinade if necessary to cover all the ingredients.

Chicken fricasséed in red wine with aromatic
vegetables, lardons, and mushrooms

When you lift the chicken pieces out of the marinade, they have taken on a purple color. You can use a whole chicken, cut up, or you can use the chicken pieces and parts that you prefer. Legs and thighs are really good, for example, because they don't get as dry as the white meat might.

Chicken pieces after marinating in red wine overnight...

After you've taken the chicken pieces out of the red-wine marinade, dry them off with paper towels before you sauté them in vegetable oil or butter to stiffen the flesh and give the skin a light coloring. You only need to sauté the chicken for, say, five minutes. Don't crowd the pan. I used a whole chicken cut up into 10 pieces — 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, and the breast cut into 4 pieces — and I sautéed all that in two batches.

...and after a light sauté in a skillet

After sautéing the chicken pieces, strain the aromatic ingredients out of the red wine — keep the wine, of course — and sauté them lightly in the same pan you used for the chicken. And don't forget to add some smoked bacon or ham, cut into chunks. Those chunks of smoked pork are called lardons in French, and they are an ingredient in many stews and sautéed dishes. Here in France, you can buy them ready to cook. In the U.S., you will have to buy some slab bacon, or at least thick-sliced bacon, or a thick slice of smoked ham, and cut the lardons out of it yourself.

Sauté the vegetables and lardons in the same pan.

When the vegetables are starting to color lightly and the lardons are at least partially cooked, add a couple of tablespoons of flour to the pan. Stir that in well and let it cook for another minute or two. Now pour in the red wine that everything marinated in. Stir it around and the flour will thicken the liquid just slightly.

Lardons of smoked bacon

Put the pieces of chicken in a baking dish. Pour the thickened red wine, containing all the vegetables, herbs, and spices, along with the smoked pork, over all. Stir it around just a little to make sure everything is evenly distributed in the dish.

If it's a dish you can put on a burner, heat it up to the boiling point before setting it in the oven, covered. Otherwise, set the dish in a very hot oven and after five minutes turn the oven down to about 325ºF/160ºC and let it cook for at least an hour. I like to leave it in the oven for two hours or more at that low temperature, watching it and adding some water if needed to make sure there's always enough liquid in the dish, so that the chicken starts falling off the bone. That's a personal choice. Some might call it overcooked, but to me it's French-style — succulent and tender.

Here's the stewed chicken as it comes out of the oven.

While the chicken is cooking, wash, slice, and sauté some nice mushrooms. Gently stir them into the coq au vin about 10 minutes before serving it.

Maybe coq au vin, or chicken fricasséed in red wine is old hat, as they say, but it is always good. Serve it with rice, boiled potatoes, or pasta, accompanied or followed by a green vegetable or a green salad. Wine and bread. Some cheese. Dessert. Coffee. Satisfaction.