Ho ho ho

Christmas morning. Windy and rainy outside. I'll get my walk with the dog anyway; she doesn't really care unless rain is absolutely pouring down. They say it will be rainy and blustery outside all day. But it's not cold.

Un coq de la race « géline de Touraine »

A géline de Touraine rooster

Thanks to www.gelinedetouraine.fr for use of the photo

We haven't cooked Christmas dinner yet, so I can't show pictures of that. I'll just show you the main ingredients. The "undressed" géline (if you know what I mean) weighed about 2 kg, which is 4½ lbs., and cost 30 euros. That would be 6.67 euros, or nearly $9 U.S., per pound.

You pay for the undressed bird — head, feet, feathers, and all — and then the butcher "dresses" it (il prépare la volaille), so what you get weighs less. This one weighs just under 3¾ lbs. as pictured. I haven't yet looked inside to see if we got any giblets (abats in French).

The chestnuts for the stuffing, and the bird we will stuff them into

Chestnuts are complicated in French, linguistically. They're called châtaignes [shah-TEH-nyuh], botanically, and the tree is the châtaignier [shah-teh-NYAY]. There's another tree called a maronnier [mah-ruh-NYAY] that we call a horse chestnut or buckeye tree, and its fruit is the marron [mah-RÕ] — with the French R and the nasal O vowel — which is not edible for humans.

But in cooking terms, châtaignes are commonly called marrons, so you get sweet treats like crème de marrons and marrons glacés, which are really châtaignes. The tin labeled « Marrons Entiers » actually and technically contains châtaignes. Got that? I'm not sure I have. As CHM says, the simplicity of the French language is stunning to behold.

Here's the stuffing recipe I'm going to (more or less) follow:

200 g de lardons fumés
1 oignon
2 gousses d'ail
une poignée de chapelure
deux brins de feuilles de sauge
sel et poivre
une pincée de clou de girofle moulu
une pincée de noix muscade
10 ou 12 petits champignons de Paris
le foie de la volaille
1 bocal (ou boîte) de châtaignes (500 g)
150 cl de crème fraîche
2 œufs

Got that?

Notre géline de Noël

Here comes our 10th Christmas in Saint-Aignan. One year, we poached and roasted a duck for our Christmas dinner. Another year it was a farm-raised turkey that we got from a butcher shop in town, and it was the best turkey ever. Another year we poached and roasted a goose. And so on.

This year, we've order a special Touraine chicken called a « géline » or a « Dame Noire ». It's an old breed of black-feathered chickens that nearly died out after World War II but was successfully revived. Here's a translation/adaptation of the history of the bird called the géline de Touraine that I found on a web site:

The term géline comes from gallina, which means "hen" in Latin.

In the 15th century, there was a feudal tax called the gélinase or gélinage, known also as the "géline custom." According to a 1461 document written by Baudet Berthelot, advisor to the king, the custom (or duty) that a landowner had to pay was 15 coins for a goose, 10 for a capon, and 8 for a géline or hen.

The géline de Touraine is the only breed of chicken known officially as a géline.

Books published in the second half of the 19th century describe the bird that was the ancestor of today's géline. Back then, it was called simply the "old black hen of Touraine" or, in everyday language, "la noire de Touraine" or "the local hen."

By the 1870s, the area in which the black chicken of Touraine was raised had expanded to include all of the southern part of the provine and a part of the Berry province to the east.

The géline made the markets of local towns like Sainte-Maure, Loches, and Montbazon famous. At Loches, more than 60,000 of the birds and many more of their eggs were sold annually.

In the early 1900s, French farmers starting raising chickens imported from other countries. Some local people weren't pleased about that, and one of them was a professor of agriculture in Tours named Jean-Baptiste Martin. In the early years of the century, he spoke out. Faced with the extinction of the local breed of chicken through hybridization with imported birds, professor Martin decided to "baptize" the local black chicken, giving it a recognizable name.

In a 1909 publication, he wrote: "We are in possession of a breed of chicken of great merit which has nearly been forgotten. Let's save it. Let's build a dike to protect it from the flood of foreign breeds that are being imported, which are not up to the same standard and are perturbing our barnyards. Farmers, breeders, chicken-lovers, let's work together and start the Touraine poultry-breeders club."

Before taking this initiative, Martin realized that the local hen really did need a name. He chose géline, and the name is still used and well known 100 years later.

The Touraine poultry-breeders club was founded the 12th of August 1909 at the big agricultural fair in the town of Bourgueil. Its bylaws were officially approved after the club's first general assembly was held in Tours on the 23rd of October that same year. The assembly established the criteria that define standards for the géline de Touraine breed.

So the géline de Touraine was really born on that day in 1909, even though the standards were not recognized nationally until 1913. The club's main focus was the géline, but over the years it also defined standards for the Touraine goose, the Touraine pigeon (now extinct), the Touraine gray rabbit (not yet certified) and finally for the Touraine black turkey (also now extinct).

In January 1917 the club held its first exposition, to show off specimens of the géline de Touraine. More than 280 gélines were put on display at a location in Tours.

Between 1945 and 1970, the géline went into decline. Local farmers started raising breeds of chickens developed in the Anglo-Saxon world and by industrial-scale breeders elsewhere in France. In 1977, French national authorities declared that the géline de Touraine breed was officially extinct.

In the 1980s, things began to change. In 1987, Mr. Maurice Brault, president of the local breeders association, found a flock of chickens that he determined were gélines de Touraine in the southern part of the province. He collected six dozen eggs and successfully hatched some of them. A couple of years later, working in Loches, he had 200 chicks. He gave some to a breeder in Genillé, who raised them successfully.

In 1988, an organization called La Confrérie (Brotherhood) des Chevaliers (Knights) de la Géline de Touraine was created. Its motto is: "Géline de Touraine am I, and proud to be from Loches."

That's the story. Today our itinerant butcher will bring us our Christmas géline. I could have driven to his shop over in nearby Thésée to pick it up, but he said he would be out making deliveries anyway and would stop by.

We cooked a géline just once before, and I blogged about it here in April 2011. This time, we're going to have chestnut stuffing, winter squash, and green beans with the roasted bird.

Apéros with neighbors

We had neighbors over for pre-dinner drinks and finger-foods last night. The French tradition of apéritifs (also called apéros in informal language) makes for a nice way to have people in without a lot of fuss and bother. D. and A. live two houses down the road from us in an old farmhouse that they have spent the last 33 years fixing up. They're both 66 years old.

They'd never been inside our house before — not even before we came to live here. We've been to their place only once. In other words, we've lived close to each other for 10 years now but we've never socialized. D. and A. don't live here full-time. They come from the Paris region, where they have an apartment about 15 miles northwest of the city.

Walt made a batch of corn muffins for us to have with our glass of wine.

The muffins have grated ewe's milk cheese (fromage de brebis) in the batter.

D. worked most of his life as a boulanger in a wholesale bread bakery in the town where they have their apartment. A. worked for more than 20 years, she told me, in the offices of the Galeries Lafayette, the big department store in Paris. I asked them how they ended up in Saint-Aignan, and they said one of D.'s co-workers (who was a pâtissier or pastry cook) told them about the house, which was owned by an aunt of his who had just died. They bought it. They no other connections to the Saint-Aignan area back then.

They said that when they first saw their house back in the late 1970s, there were nine people living in it — in a single room. The floor was terre battue (that's packed-down dirt). In the country in Touraine, the people and whatever farm animals they kept often lived together in a single building — the cows or goats on one end, and the people on the other, in a single room with a big fireplace that provided heat and served as the kitchen.

Touraine in winter (in a photo taken seven years ago on this date)

D. and A. said they have never flown on an airplane. Well, he said he was on a plane once, many years ago, when he was doing his military service.  They spend most of the year down here now, since she retired from her job, but they keep their apartment in the Paris region and spend part of the winter there. They said if we ever want to go spend a weekend up there when they are down here, they'd be happy to give us the keys. And there's a garage for the car. They said they'd be glad to keep Callie for us.

Steak au poivre, sauce au cognac

Steak au poivre has been Walt's birthday dinner since 1981. I wasn't there for the very first one. He was  traveling around the south of France with some friends in December that year. In Antibes, on the Mediterranean coast, he had a steak au poivre in a restaurant on his birthday and thought it was really delicious. Memorable.

Steak au poivre garni de pommes frites

A year later we were both living in Washington DC when his birthday rolled around again. I told him I'd cook dinner. He told me about the steak au poivre in Antibes. I told him that I knew how to cook that — no problem. That was what we had for his 1982 birthday dinner. And we've made steak au poivre on December 21 every year since then.

A dry rub of crushed black pepper

In most years we've made the pepper steak with a cream sauce, which was my recipe in the 1970s. Then in the '90s we watched a Jacques Pépin (a well-known French cook and TV host who has lived in America for decades) and Julia Child (the American woman who introduced French cooking methods to America in the 1960s) cooking show in which Pépin makes his version of steak au poivre not with a cream sauce but with a sauce finished with butter. That's what we made this year (last year we made the cream sauce style — both are good).

We got a big, fairly thick piece of boneless entrecôte from the drive-up butcher this week — that's the cut known in different parts of the U.S. as rib-eye, New York strip, Delmonico, or club steak. To make French pepper steak, the first thing you do is crush some peppercorns using a mortar and pestle to make what is called a mignonnette de poivre. Then you rub the coarsely ground pepper all over the steak and let it sit for a couple of hours.

Sear the peppered steak on both sides in a heavy pan over high heat

When you're ready, you just sear the steak in butter over high heat in a thick-bottomed frying pan. Then take it out and cover it with foil and a kitchen towel, or put it in a warming oven, and let it rest for 10 or 15 minutes while you make the sauce.

Dice up a shallot and toss it into the pan that the steak cooked in. Let it fry for a minute or two, and then pour a good glug of cognac (or whiskey) into the pan. You can flame it, but it's not absolutely necessary. You can also use white wine instead of cognac to make the sauce (but it won't be as good, IMHO). Let the alcohol or wine reduce a little over high heat, and then add a quarter cup of dark beef stock. Let that too reduce a little and then put in either cream or some butter cut into small pieces to melt and give the sauce a nice gloss.

Put the steak back in the pan for a minute or two and spoon some of the sauce over it. It's ready.