Ham hock? Pork shank?

I've been reading about shanks and hocks. They're the same thing, I gather. The term "hock" is applied mostly to pork shanks, and the full term is "ham hock." In French, that's either jarret de porc (shank) or jambonneau (hock).

The term shank applied to jarrets or jambonneaux seems to be more American than British. What we call veal "shank" in the U.S. might be called "shin" or "knuckle" of veal in Great Britain. I can't affirm that as truth or fact, but that's what I see in the Collins-Robert dictionary. It also translates jambonneau, which I'd call "ham hock," as "knuckle of  ham." Never mind that it's more accurately the ankle of the animal than an actual knuckle.

You might not recognize this as a way to cook and serve a ham hock.

Usually, what we call a "hock" is cured meat, as is the corresponding jambonneau in France. It can be smoked or salt-cured, and in France the cured hock is often boned out and reshaped into a familiar form. You see them in charcuteries covered in bread crumbs and ready to be sliced and served (here's a photo). In fact, there are hundreds of photos of ham hocks here.

The hock is the shank or lower end of the ham or pork shoulder — in other words, it can come from either the front or back leg of the hog. The term "hock," by the way derives from the old English word for "heel," according to the dictionary I looked at.

Poach the fresh ham hock with aromatic vegetables and spices.

At any rate, I bought a jarret de porc a few days ago and cooked it. It was a fresh, uncured cut. It seemed like the best way to cook it would be by poaching or simmering it with onions, garlic, carrots, and celery, with salt, black pepper, and some allspice berries. I also threw a couple of dried hot red chili peppers into the broth.

Leftovers

The shank or jarret, as I'm sure you know, is not an inherently tender morsel. It's not really fatty, even though it's covered with a layer of fat and skin that can be left on or removed before cooking. All that skin (called "rind" as in fried pork rinds) and fat, along with the bone and connective tissue holding the piece all together, produced a lot of gelatin and collagen when poached or simmered. The fresh hock needs long, slow simmering or braising. You end up with a lot of rich stock to use in making soups and sauces.

After the pork shank had cooked for a couple of hours in barely simmering water, I took it out and let it cool to the point where I could handle it without burning myself. I first cut off the layer of rind and fat. Then I pulled all the meat off the bones and trimmed away the cartilage and tendons (the dog is having a feast of all that as a supplement to her daily ration of kibble).

It's not the most beautiful piece of pork cooked this way, but it's delicious and inexpensive.

I left the meat in fairly large pieces and put it in a baking dish with some big chunks of  winter vegetables: Jerusalem artichokes (AKA "sunchokes" or topinambours), rutabagas, carrots, and parsnips. You could add potatoes or sweet potatoes. I put a little bit of the ham hock broth in the bottom of the pan to provide some steam to cook the vegetables and further tenderize the meat.

Then I brushed the meat with some barbecue sauce I had made using sweet and hot red chili sauces from China along with some soy sauce (dark and light), ginger, rice vinegar, and garlic. Any good barbecue sauce you like would work, or none at all — you could just brush the meat and vegetables with olive oil.

"Barbecued" poached pork shank with roasted root vegetables

Put the pan back in the oven at a medium temperature and let it cook until the vegetables are tender and have started to brown. Baste it all with the broth and sauce in the bottom of the pan. Serve it just like that.

Weather reports and reflections

Parts of France are under hurricane warnings this morning. They're not the parts you might think of, but they will be experiencing damaging winds and high surf later today, because of a tropical cyclone. One place is Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean off Madagascar. I have an old friend who lives there, and I'm sending positive thoughts. L'île de la Réunion is a French département, just as the Hawaiian Islands are a U.S. state.

As you'll see from looking at the photos in this post, the weather here in Saint-Aignan

is damp, but it's less extreme than in many other places around the world.

Another nearby island that will be affected by the same cyclone is Mauritius, and one of our commenting friends (I mean yours and mine) is originally from there. She calls herself Beaver here on the blog, because she lives in Canada, but she has family members who still live on l'île Maurice, I believe. Maurice or Mauritius is not French — it's an independent country, but people there speak French as well as Creole and English. Let's send them positive thoughts too. It looks like a bad storm will be rolling through.

There's also a tropical storm affecting New Caledonia, in the South Pacific. That's part of France too. I've heard less about that one so far.

Meanwhile, here in Saint-Aignan, the wet, wet, wet month of December is over, and it turned out not to be the wettest December we've had in ten years. We got four inches (100 mm) of precipitation in December 2012, and it was all rain — no snow. But Walt looked back at our records and found out that December 2011 was even wetter, with six inches of rain! How soon we forget.

And Walt just told me that the temperature in his home town is –16ºC this morning — that's +3ºF. I repeat, 3º. At least we don't have to deal with that. I just looked, and I see that the temperature in Canada where Beaver lives is –7ºF right now. That's near –22ºC. Let's send her positive thoughts too.

We're spoiled here as far as cold weather goes. Or windy weather. We don't get much. Of course, we don't get much hot weather either. But here in Saint-Aignan we get more hot weather in summertime than we ever did in San Francisco, where the temperature varies from lows around 40ºF all the way up to highs in the low 70s most of the time, and in all seasons. Or what passes for seasons out there.

Once when we lived there, there was an article reporting that the city of San Francisco had just experienced one of the longest "heat waves" in it's history. The temperature had been above 70ºF for six days in a row. It was probably in July. I know I scanned and saved that article, but I wouldn't know how to find it now. It's somewhere on a disc or on my computer.

Here, right now, it's mild and wet. The ground is extremely muddy — squishy. The soil where we live is a mixture of clay and limestone, and it is famously imperméable. When it rains the way it has been raining, there's a lot of runoff. Down the hill, the river is overflowing (but not really flooding). The pond out back is also overflowing. We're not in any danger, if you except the danger of slipping and falling on the slippery clay when we go out for walks with Callie.

Population growth

The news this morning is that the French population is growing much faster than in any other European country. France has added a million and a half inhabitants over the past four years, the news report says. To me, that's not necessarily a good thing, but the authorities in France announce population growth with pride.

It's always been like this — or at least since the early 1970s, when I started spending time in France. While many people around the globe warn that our planet can't support such huge populations, France encourages large families by giving them government subsidies of various kinds. Couples are rewarded for having more children.

Life in the country has become more attractive and more comfortable.

Back in the 1970s, the French population was growing slowly. The country was impoverished by war in the 1940s, inflation and political instability in the 1950s, and then the oil crises of the early 1970s. Since the 1980s, the situation has reversed itself. I'm not sure people are having larger families, but I know that more young couples are deciding to have children. Some see that as a sign of confidence in the future of the country.

A new day dawning?

The French make up a very small percentage of the world population. Compared to the U.S., Brazil, China, and even Russia, France is not a large country. The population is now approaching 65 million — on a territory that's just slightly smaller than the state of Texas (pop. 26 million). French people are proud to see their numbers growing. At least that's the way the media and the authorities see it. If France declines, so does the French language and French civilization.

The hours of daylight are short here in winter, but when the sun comes out and

temperatures are mild, out in the country is a pretty nice place to be.

In France, the population is growing especially in Brittany and in the south, near the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. People want to live in warmer climates, and near the coasts. The northeastern part of the country is not growing as much. Paris continues to attract new residents, but the areas that are really growing are the villages and small towns that are fairly close to large cities.

The conveniences of modern life without the traffic and noise...

I put Saint-Aignan in that category. We are not very far from Blois or from Tours, where there are employment opportunities. Now there's an autoroute (a toll road) that you can take to get to Tours in 30 minutes or less, for example, without traffic jams for now. There are local trains that are in the process of becoming commuter lines, like the ones from Saint-Aignan to Tours.

Mobility is the issue — a jet flies over Saint-Aignan.

In the country, people can afford larger houses and they can have yards and gardens. A lot of new houses are being built, and a lot of older houses are up for sale as the older population dies off. For generations, rural areas in France steadily lost population to the cities. Now that nearly everybody can have a car, a telephone, a satellite television, and a high-speed internet connection, the sense of isolation in the countryside has diminished, and the old trend has been reversed.

Bonne Année

Happy New Year to all. 2013 is already eight hours old here in France. I have to admit that I slept through all the festivities (if there were any around Saint-Aignan). There must have been some, and I did vaguely hear fireworks as I was falling asleep just before 11 p.m., but I wasn't to be disturbed.

Winter 2012 at La Renaudière, outside Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher in the Loire Valley

We were lucky to have some nice weather over the last few days of 2012 (though it is raining again now). We've been having a very mild winter. In French they say: « Noël au balcon, Pâques aux tisons. » That means, if it's warm enough to spend Christmas day on the balcony, then you can be sure you'll be sitting around the fire at Easter because the weather will be cold (tisons are "dying embers"). That's something to look forward to in 2013. Ha ha ha

Catkins

As you can see, the catkins are already hanging on the hazelnut trees in our back yard. They're called "catkins" because they look like kittens' tails. The word derives from an old Dutch word, katteken, which meant kitten, and in French the name is also chaton, which also means kitten.

A sunny December morning in the living room

Christmas ornaments will go back into their boxes today. The tree too — it'll be a year before we see all that again. Those big towers of old music CDs will soon be packed up in boxes too — and maybe for good, since I copied all the songs to hard disk over the past month.

A December sunset to bid 2012 adieu

That last photo is a little misleading, since 2012 was actually a wet and gray year overall. But it's over, and it tried to make amends before going. Now on to 2013. We'll see what that brings. Happy 2013 to all.