Cornbread for stuffing (or "dressing")

The first step in making cornbread stuffing, as a stuffing or side dish for a roasted bird or pork roast, is to make cornbread. In the U.S. of course, you can buy ready-made mixes or bags of cubed cornbread, so you don't need to bother. But your own bread is always better. It's simple.

This recipe is in U.S. cups, and a cup is 8 fluid ounces. A set of measuring cups is a handy tool to have.

Cornbread for stuffing

1 cup fine cornmeal
¾ cup quick-cooking polenta
2 or 3 Tbsp. plain flour (optional)
1½ tsp. baking soda or powder
1 cup plain yogurt (or buttermilk)
½ cup milk (or more for consistency)
1 egg, beaten

Mix all ingredients together to make a fairly stiff dough. Add more milk to thin if you want. Pour (or spread) the dough into a generously oiled and heated baking dish. Bake at 425ºF (220ºC) for 25 to 30 minutes.until brown.

Let the dense cornbread this recipe produces cool and dry for 24 hours and then cut it into small cubes — say half an inch or 2 cm. For extra flavor, spead the cubes out on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven for a few minutes before mixing them with the other stuffing ingredients.

The range of ingredients you can use in the stuffing is, well, endless. Sauteed mushrooms and onions; bell peppers; cooked sausage meat, pork lardons, or poultry; cranberries or raisins; pecans, walnuts, or pistachio nut; herbs. I posted a list of ingredient ideas yesterday.

After you've tossed the cubed cornbread (or white bread, which works just as well but gives a different taste and texture), moisten the stuffing with hot broth or water. Add in a few tablespoons of melted butter or duck fat, for example, or some olive or other oil. Finally, stir in two beaten eggs to bind everything together.

My stuffing had enough liquid in it so that you could see it just below the surface of the bread cubes. That was okay — it all boiled away as it baked in a hot oven for 30 to 45 minutes, until browned. To serve the stuffing or dressing, you can spoon it out of the dish, or you can try to slice it. It's easier to slice once it has completely cooled down.

Dressing for the bird

So here I am up at 6 a.m. on Christmas morning making "dressing" — that's what I call stuffing when it is not stuffed into the bird. I'm probably insane on some important level, but there you go.

This year we'll again have a cornbread dressing, cooked in a casserole dish separately from the Guinea fowl capon we are planning to spit-roast in a couple of hours. Both the bird and the dish of dressing won't fit into our oven at the same time, so we have to juggle.

Yesterday I made a list of ingredients for my dressing, so I wouldn't forget anything this morning. Giblets, sausage, mushrooms, bell peppers, cranberries, sage, pistachios, thyme, onion, garlic... 

I also started preparations by doing what I could do ahead. Shell out a bowl full of pistachios, for example. Peel, chop, and sauté some onions. Wash, slice, and cook some mushrooms.

Actually, I made the cornbread base for the dressing on Friday. Yesterday all I had to do to it was cut it up into little cubes.

Then I'll toss it with the other ingredients — those mentioned just above plus some cooked sausage meat, the cooked Guinea fowl liver, some dried cranberries that Walt re-hydrated yesterday, some sliced bell peppers from the freezer, and so on.

I'll try to get this organized into a recipe later today or tomorrow — including a recipe for the cornbread. At this point, it's pretty free-form. Moistened with broth and duck fat, bound together by a couple of beaten eggs, it will all become a savory (corn)bread pudding.

Merry Christmas to all. Et bon Noël.

Fondue day

And capon day as well. I have to go to the open-air market in "downtown" Saint-Aignan this morning to pick up and pay for the Guinea fowl (chapon de pintade) that Walt ordered last Saturday for our Christmas dinner. We'll cook it tomorrow on the rotisserie (tourne-broche) in our oven. We don't know how much it will weigh, but I'm guessing about five pounds (2 kilos).

Of course it's raining outside. Figures, right? Oh well, the only thing I have to do outside today is the run to the market. After that, we'll be making today's lunch, a cheese fondue, which is called fondue savoyarde in France. The Savoie is an old province high in the French Alps, on the Swiss and Italian borders. So you use Alpine or so-called "Swiss cheese" in a fondue. The ones we'll use are pictured below, and they are all French. They all came from the supermarket. Each carries its own special "quality badge" — IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée), AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée), or Label Rouge.

I guess I should have kept the cheeses in the same position for the two photos, but I neglected to do so. So below you have Comté on the left, French Gruyère in the middle, and Emmental on the right. All are made with raw, unpasteurized milk, which is supposed to mean that they have the best possible flavor. Don't expect to find anything labeled as "Swiss cheese" in France. Oh, you can get cheese made in Switzerland, but it will probably be labeled as either Gruyère or Emmental, not with some generic name. Dairies in both France and Switzerland have the right to use those names for their cheeses.

My recipe for fondue savoyard is one that was given to me more than 40 years ago by a friend who had lived in eastern France, in the province called Franche-Comté, which is where both Comté and French Gruyère cheese is made. It's just north of Savoie. The recipe calls for using at least two different cheeses in the fondue mix, and I often use three. Here's the recipe. I guess I should really call it « fondue franc-comtoise » because that's where my friend lived all those years ago.

Fondue savoyarde

• 200 grams of cheese per person

• 1 liter of white wine for 2 kilos of cheese

(use a mix of 2 or 3 Alpine cheeses)
• small amounts of garlic, cornstarch, kirsch, black pepper, and nutmeg

Prepare the sauce pan or fondue pot by rubbing it with 2 cloves of garlic. Set the pot containing white wine on a very hot flame or burner on the stove. Gradually add grated cheese while stirring the mixture in a figure-eight pattern.

When the cheese has all melted, add half a teaspoon of cornstarch mixed into a little kirsch (or other clear brandy). Grate in some nutmeg and grind in some black pepper. Then set the fondue pot on its stand, over a flame, at the table. Serve the fondue with cubes of French bread and chunks of fresh apple.

The proportions are kind of complicated, but Walt has made a spreadsheet giving specific amounts of cheese and wine adapted to serving different numbers of people who will be partaking of the fondue. To serve four, for example, you'd want about 2 lbs. (800 to 900 grams) of cheese and about 500 ml (2 cups) of dry white wine.

P.S. A few years ago we bought an inexpensive electric fondue pot, and it is great. The fondue stays evenly hot and smooth during the meal, and there's no burned spot on the bottom of the pot like what you get with "sterno" (alcool à brûler).

Tout un fromage

Ou plusieurs, en l'occurrence. What would a holiday meal in France be without cheese? Here's a page out of a different supermarket's Christmas advertising flyer. It's from SuperU in Saint-Aignan, where I went shopping yesterday. By the way, tomorrow we will be enjoying a lunch of what has become our "traditional" Christmas Eve cheese fondue. The three cheeses we'll be using — Comté, Gruyère, and Emmenthal — are made from unpasteurized milk.

Above,clockwise from the top left, you have these cheeses, all made with raw (unpasteurized) milk — lait cru. For the prices, divide the one listed by 2 to see approximately what the cheese sells for by the pound in U.S. dollars.

• Roquefort, a cave-aged cheese made with ewe's milk in southern France
• Beaufort, an Alpine cow's milk cheese
• Chevrot, made from goat's milk in three styles (plain, ash-coated, or low-salt)
• Cœur de Neufchâtel, a heart-shaped cheese made in upper Normandy from cow's milk
• Saint-Nectaire, a soft cow's milk cheese from the Massif Central (Auvergne)

The AOP designation on some of the labels means Appellation d'Origine Protégée, which replaces the older AOC label. It is a guarantee that the cheese is produced according to traditional methods in the place named on the label — the genuine article, and not just a knock-off. Cheddar cheese, for example, can be produced anywhere in the world and still be called Cheddar, even though Cheddar is a place in England and "real" Cheddar comes from there.

And here are a few more, all but one made from cow's milk, including a couple of cheeses made from pasteurized milk:

• Comté, from eastern France and one of the country's most popular Swiss-style cow's milk cheeses
• Laguiole, an aged cow's milk cheese from the southern part of the Auvergne
• Etorki, a cheese made in Basque country from pasteurized ewe's milk
• Brie, sold under the brand name Le Roitelet, made from pasteurized cow's milk
• Morbier, a medium-soft cow's milk cheese from eastern France

The full French meal always includes a cheese course with a selection of cheeses, bread, and sometimes green salad. It comes after the main course and before dessert and coffee. Hundreds of different cheeses are produced by farmers and in dairies all around France.

In each case, the cheese labels above tell you what percentage of milk fat (MG or matière grasse) the cheese contains, as sold. That's a new labeling convention. In the past, French cheese labels specified the amount of milk fat that would remain in a specific cheese if it was completely dried out and all the water was gone. That meant that a Camembert, for example, was described as having 45% MG instead of the 25% the cheese really contains when you eat it. For comparison, French butter contains 82% fat, the rest being milk solids and water.