France, La Brugue: Al's duck with fig jam, rosemary & garlic

For a second summer, I made my way across the French countryside, spellbound. From Cadenet in Provence to Marseilles, curving along the Mediterranean coast to Montpellier, up to Toulouse following the main trunk line, hopping off & on, changing trains, feeling the journey take a hold. At Gourdon, I stepped off onto the platform. It was 8 o'clock, a mild evening, blue sky & a warm breeze. Arrived in the Lot region, the train clicity-clacking off on its way to Paris, I stood there alone; I was warm, I was in France. Happiness.

Last summer I spent several weeks here with my mate Nico. He'd wanted to show me a France I'd never seen, & succeeded in doing so. I love France. Having places to go & people there to see, maybe stay with a while, it all helps, no matter where you are. This part of France though is a little more than that, it's become a home for Nic's clan, & by extension, it felt a little like home when I climbed off the train & found myself in familiar surroundings. With Al & Sal's place only 10kms away, I stood there exhilarating in standing there & I decided the walk would be a fine thing indeed. Shouldering my ruck sack I set off for La Brugue, out of town & into the French countryside. 

In this region of France, duck is a specialty. Last year 24aug'12 I blogged about foie gras, making the most of this region's considerable industry to become as learned as possible on the subject. This time, my taste bud settings were already switched to duck before the train arrived. Quite a long time before, actually. As it happens, Al has a couple of duck dishes that enjoy a significant following round those parts. Last time I was at La Brugue we had duck breast, pan seared & braised in a white bordeaux & damson sauce, which led to my 07sep'12 post. Needless to say, when the matter of what to have for dinner came up in conversation I took the opportunity to suggest, perhaps we eat duck, & Al cooks?? While I write notes & take photos?? It goes without saying really, Al was thrilled with the idea. 

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Before starting, a couple of things you'll need to prepare: 

for the chicken stock:

the frame & leftovers from last night's roast chicken

1/2 an onion, 1 or 2 garlic gloves, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf, a cpl glasses of white wine

then...

*in a saucepan, you cover the bones with wine & top up with water if need be, throw in all the rest

*you bring it to the boil, then lower to a good simmer, & leave it for 2 to 3 hours

*strain the bones etc out & discard, then continue to simmer until the volume is reduced by half

>this is what chicken stock means, & this chicken stock is good to go

for my compote (Sal's is also home made):

a quince, peeled & cored, 2 rhubarb sticks, a handful of strawbs, 3 or 4 plums, cut into pieces, figs

then...

*in a saucepan, the quince, in pieces, a cup of sugar

*add a vanilla pod, 2 or 3 cloves, a glass of white wine

*simmer gently for about an hour, the quince should be cooking nicely

*weigh out the fruit & add a little more sugar if necessary (I prefer a little tart)

*simmer on a medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring often, til it the fruit is cooked 

>ready when it starts to look jammy, what you've probably got there is jam

for the duck itself:
we were four & two large breasts were enough for us, the skin scored in crosshatch pattern,
several garlic cloves, just enough chicken fat skimmed from the stock to lubricate the pan
then...

*get a cast iron pan nice & hot, drop in the chicken fat, then the garlic, pinch of salt, toss it about
*break a few sprigs of rosemary into the pan & shake about with the garlic & salt
*lay the duck breast in the hot pan, skin side down, & let it brown, a few minutes, maybe about 5
*turn the breasts over, skin side up now, tossing the garlic in the pan about too

now you start to build the sauce...

*with the duck still in the pan, drop in a big spoon or two of the compote, move it about the pan & let the sugars begin to caramelise a little, though be careful not to let it burn

*a good slug of red wine at this stage, a glass at least, to deglaze the pan, & the same of chicken stock

*put a lid on the pan, tinfoil tightly covering if no lid, lower the flame & braise the duck breast for 6 or 7 minutes

*remove the breast, wrap the foil, leave to the side to rest, another 6 or 7 minutes, before carving

*in the mean time, turn your sauce up & reduce it by 2/3. The sauce should deepen beautifully in colour to a dark ruby red as the liquid reduces, leaving you with a nice thick slightly chunky sauce which you can either serve as is or strain & pass through a sieve to make it smooth.

A word on carving...

>The meat wants to rest somewhere round the same length of time it was cooked, so when it comes to resting times, I'd be resting this duck for about 10 minutes. 

>But it needs to stay warm during this time, so take it off the hot pan & onto something warm,

wrapping it in foil is one solution,

or placing it in a warm oven with the door slightly open, on on a shelf above the hobs...

>When carving the meat, sufficiently rested there will be no blood pool, & the colour should be a nice even pink, since the meat has had time to relax after the intensity of extreme heat, & the blood has eased its way back throughout the piece.

To serve...

We simply sliced the duck in fairly thin pieces, fanned them out in layers in a dish & poured the sauce over. We're in the country here, no need to pass the sauce; ours has all the chunks of garlic & pieces of fruit, sprigs of rosemary, & that's how I like it.

Sal organised a side dish of potatoes, dug from the garden outside I should add, steaming them then tossing them in pieces with butter, & a lettuce leaf salad. 

Catching the last of the sun, sitting down to enjoy another meal on the gravel patio just outside the kitchen door. 

France, Paris: blanquette de veau

I visited Brody Bennett, a friend from Mangawhai currently cooking at Antoine Westermann's specialty vegetable restaurant Mon Viel Ami, located in the heart of Paris on Ile St-Louis, one of the two natural islands in the Seine. I was only in Paris for two days proper, managing two lunches there & an evening for dinner...it wasn't enough.

With all the great dining experiences, there's an almost irresistable urge to retell history in a narrative of bite sized highlights...I'll resist (friends have taken me aside before now to explain how not everyone appreciates the detail). What a pleasure though, when you love food, to dine in the restaurant where friends work. Meeting the brigade, seeing the kitchen..you know you're in good hands, & it's cool. Mon Viel Ami's vegetable cookery was  another aspect of this experience that appealed very much, most significantly because this was the section I grew up in. My role as Entremetier at Petit Lyon in Wellington, the restaurant which changed life as I knew it, remains as the benchmark for every restaurant experience I have had since then. This was familiar territory.

Feeling pretty good, I sat in Mon Viel Ami about to order, visualising a vegetarian feast. I liked the way this menu was organised &, continuing to browse for the sheer pleasure of it, I came to 'Dish of the Day'. I had no idea what day it was at that moment & knowing wouldn't have made a scrap of difference, until I looked down the days & saw Thursday's dish. Suddenly, what day it was did matter; in an instant it had become a matter of great importance that today be Thursday. What I was looking at I'd not seen for the longest time: for on Thursday's at Mon Viel Ami the dish of the day was that same dish my mother would make for me on special occasions when I was a boy, a speciality, one of her best, & the dish I remember most fondly of all others for that reason. Time to order. I asked...it was Thursday.

We all have that dish, don't we? Elsewhere on this blog I've had other friends, chefs, tell the same story, that childhood dish which cuts through time, which brings back memories. Blanquette de veau is mine. The blanquette they served that day for lunch at Mon Viel Ami was outstanding. A basket of crusty bread on the side, to mop up the sauce, & a glass of vin blanc. Simple & understated, it was served in a plain casserole, just like the one my ma used when she would make blanquette de veau, now passed down in turn to me. This recipe is, in my mind, the quintessence of French cooking. Vegetables from the garden, a shoulder of veal, butter cream & eggs, slow cooked. So simple, yet so so delicious, & a joy to cook.

The recipe above is the same one my mother started with. I found this copy of the cookbook it comes from, by Margaret Fulton & published in 1968, which my mother used. The original copy now fallen to pieces, I have it tucked away, the pages are yellowed with age, stained from use, all us kids have thumbed through it, cooking any number of recipes under my mother's guidance. But this one I use still from time to time when nostalgia gets the better of me. The recipes are tried & tested, but like all recipes they are best used as a guide. Also, within this recipe, like all good recipes, there are lessons to be learned, the cook's magic, to reward those who persevere, as I hope you do.

Portugal: morcela con favas, Portuguese blood sausage with freshly picked broad beans & peas

In the kitchen at Monte Saraz, Rosa tells me how in December each year the families of her village come together to kill their pigs. Rosa takes care of the cooking & housekeeping here at Monte Saraz, a restored Roman army barracks now functioning as a pousada, a hotel of sorts, located just outside the small village of Monsaraz, Alentejo province, a short drive from the Spanish border. There's a sense of age & time, historic charm, resting on the place. A Roman arch still stands in the garden, an inscribed marble frames one of the doors, water is drawn from an ancient well...twisted gnarly olive trees & groves of lemon & clementine, bright red poppies & lavendar growing wild in the long grass...blue skies & a castle on the hill. Yeah, it's choice.

  

We are staying a week before Jason & Lucy's wedding, & guests are arriving from New Zealand & Australia, Canada, USA & the UK, all over the world, to join us here in the days leading up to the celebration. For my part, I've found Rosa in her the kitchen & here I will stay, learning Portuguese dishes & cooking for everyone. It's a real coming together, loads of people to help out peeling onions or chopping parsley, driving to the shop, opening bottles of Alentejo vino tinto, having a good time.

 

The black pig, Alentejano, which Rosa is referring to is famous in this region. In most villages here families raise their own animals, grazing them amongst the oak & cork trees which grow in the surrounding hills. Fattened on an abundance of acorns, they are slaughtered following the traditional method, away from the industrial abbatoirs & increasingly strict regulations; a modernising trend which is seeing such practices slowly disappear from rural village life all over Europe.

And it is a village affair. Taking place during the winter, around December, in time for the festive season, families come together. Helping each other, each person has a role, plays their part. It takes five men to tie the pig down & hold it in place, to stretch it out while its throat is cut & to collect the blood which at first spurts, then pulses, then bleeds draining into a waiting bucket. Someone stirs the blood to stop it coagulating, spices & seasoning are added, onions, chunks of meat from the neck & cheek, in some cases rice or oats, while alongside someone else is responsible for the  thorough cleaning of the pig's intestines, washing & rinsing them repeatedly until they are ready to be filled with the blood mixture & tied off. Then the morcela & chorizo are hung in the chimney to dry & cure in smoke.

Our morcela came from a butcher, Talho Luis & Edgar, in Lisbon (Rua de Graça, 170). In fact, for the three weeks we stayed in Portugal, the meat for all our cooking came from this one supplier. Although finding a butcher was on our to do list while we were in the city, this particular place we discovered purely by chance. At the time, if memory serves, we were actually looking for a bar; mainly we were drinking. Anyway, we spied the beaded metal curtains of the butcher shop, it was busy & they were right into it, proudly Portuguese, generous with their time & with plenty of advice on how best to prepare the dishes we mentioned. We talked for a long time about what was available & what we intended to cook. We hand picked our joints & they were inspected, set aside & hung for us until we were ready to return & collect. Each time we visited, we left loaded with pork loin & beef fillet, the famous secreto, & of course charcuterie.

Morcela con Favas
Ingredients:

2 morcela sausages

a handful of broad beans, a handful of fresh peas

fresh parsley & coriander, roughly chopped

 good squeeze of lemon juice & a healthy dollop of quality virgin olive oil

salt

Method:

*fill a saucepan with water & put it on the boil;

*shell the peas & (broad beans);

*blanch the peas & beans in boiling water for 30 seconds, then refresh them in iced water to stop the cooking process completely, drain & set aside in a bowl;

*put the water back on the boil, to be ready for the 2nd stage of boiling to follow.

*slice the morcela into pieces roughly 1/2 an inch thick;

*in a hot pan, saute the slices well, turning to form a grilled crust on both sides;

*cool the sausage sufficiently to allow the slices to be broken up into a salad bowl, the morcela should however still be warm.

*stage 2 veg: drop the favas (broad beans) into the boiling water for 30 seconds, add the peas for another 30 seconds, strain through a sieve & shake the sieve free of water

(the beans are larger, right? -so they take a little longer to cook, though 1 minute is ample)

*add to the morcela in the bowl

*throw over a handful of your chopped herb, squeeze a lemon over the top, a good dash of olive oil & a sprinkling of salt crystals

*toss the salad & serve warm

>a word on blanching:

The idea behind this is to bring out the intensity of colour in whatever is being blanched, in this case peas & broad beans, but the same principle applies to all vegetables. In the process, the edge is also taken off the raw ingredient, meaning that at service time the actual cooking time is reduced to little more than the time it takes to heat through. 
30 seconds in boiling water followed by immersion in cold cold water is sufficient to shock the colour out & colour-fast the veg at stage 1. The veg is put aside until stage 2 is ready, then plunged a 2nd time into boiling water for a minute or two, & the result is that your veg hold their colour & keep just enough of their crunch. 
Goodbye grey soggy greens & limp pale carrots!
In a restaurant, the chef Entremettier will prepare his veg through the afternoon in preparation for service that evening, bringing it back either by emersion or in a steamer somewhere on the line.

This is a dish best described as being greater than the sum of its parts. The fact is, morcela con favas was one of the great discoveries on my magical culinary journey through Portugal. Since Monte Saraz, I have prepared this dish a number of times in different company, often with friends who were admittedly hesitant when the subject of blood sausage came up. On each occasion, morcela con favas was a triumph. 

Of course outside of Portugal, quality Portuguese charcuterie can be hard to come by. In France I cooked this dish using a good local boudin-noir from the Gourdon markets, in the Nederlands bloedworst, in Ireland black pudding; finding the best product locally available. Variations are experimental, & worth trying. For instance, when coriander wasn't on hand I substituted it for mint; on one occasion I used all three herbs, parsley, coriander & mint - the result, delicious! Fresh, crisp, crunchy, soft, rich, aromatic, zesty, warm...at the risk of sounding repetitive, at every sitting, this dish really was a triumph. 

As a main item or side, morcela con favas will always find a place on my table.