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.