French Provincial Cooking (101 page)

This is, I think, the best of the many versions of pheasant with apples and Calvados, usually called
faisan normand.

There are so many recipes for
la vraie choucroute alsacienne
and
à la mode Lorraine,
and they vary so much, that the question of how long the
choucroute
is cooked, and whether in butter, goose or pork fat, and of what seasonings to add, is obviously very largely a matter of taste. My own feelings in the matter are that it should be cooked a relatively short time and served before it has acquired that brown, greasy, matted look which it gets from being cooked for hours in an oven. Seasonings must include juniper berries and, if possible, white wine; if I have pork or goose fat I use it, but otherwise butter; and a final glass of Kirsch ought to be more commonly added than it is: it makes the whole difference to the flavour and the digestibility of the dish.

So for 2 lb. of
choucroute
the other ingredients are 3 oz. of butter or rather less of pork or goose fat, a finely-chopped onion, 10 crushed juniper berries,
pint of light stock and a small glass of dry white wine, or
pint stock without the wine, a grated raw potato and a little glass of Alsatian or Swiss Kirsch.

Melt the butter or fat in a heavy pot; put in the onion; when it starts to sizzle add the well-washed and drained
choucroute
and the juniper berries; stir and lift the
choucroute
with a wooden fork, keeping the flame low, for 15 minutes; add the white wine and a little of the stock; keep the mixture over low heat for 1
hours, adding more stock from time to time, but there should never be so much liquid that the
choucroute
is floating in it. Season with freshly-milled pepper and a little salt. Stir in the grated potato and cook another 15 minutes; just before serving add 4 to 6 tablespoons of Kirsch. Turn on to a hot dish in a mound, on top of which you put the pheasant, either roasted, or cooked in butter in a
cocotte,
as explained on page 419, and garnish all round with slices of lightly-fried smoked bacon.

Even if you only have a few smoked Frankfurter sausages or some grilled gammon and potatoes boiled in their skins instead of the pheasant, this is still an admirable dish.

Miniature bottles of Kirsch from the Strasbourg firm of Dolfi and the Colmar firm of Jacobert can be bought at many wine merchants, but if you haven’t got Kirsch, or don’t want to go to the expense, just use gin instead. It does the trick quite well.

If you have any
choucroute
left over, it makes a good soup. Simmer a large cupful for another hour or so with a pint of light stock or water. Sieve, and finish the purée with a little thick fresh cream. Add a few little cubes of smoked sausage, or serve with fried croûtons.

A highly seasoned and highly colourful dish, which makes a most cheering sight on a chilly winter evening.

A large pheasant weighing 2 to 2
lb., 4 Spanish or Basque sausages (chorizos) or
lb. of the type of coarsely-cut boiling sausage sold in delicatessen shops, 6 to 8 oz. streaky bacon, a carrot, an onion, a bouquet of herbs plus a small strip of orange peel, a clove of garlic, pork, goose or duck dripping for frying, 1 lb. of ripe tomatoes, 3 or 4 sweet red peppers or the contents of a 4 oz. tin of Spanish sweet peppers or
pimientos
in oil,
lb. rice, veal stock or water, paprika pepper.

Melt 2 tablespoons of the dripping (failing either pork, goose or duck dripping, olive oil will do) in a heavy saucepan large enough to hold the pheasant. Brown the sliced onion and carrot, then the pheasant, turning it over two or three times, so that it colours evenly. Cover with half-stock and half-water, or all water. Put in the bacon in one piece, the bouquet and the garlic; cover the pan. Simmer gently for 20 minutes before adding the sausages. Cook another 20 minutes if the pheasant is a roasting one, 1
to 1
hours if an old bird, but in this case add the sausages only 20 minutes before the end.

Put the rice into a large saucepan of boiling salted water and boil for 10 to 12 minutes. Strain it very carefully. Put it, with a little more dripping, into the top half of a double saucepan. Pour over it, through a strainer, a ladle of the stock from the pheasant. Put a folded tea-cloth on top, then the lid of the saucepan, and steam for about 20 minutes, until the rice is tender.

In the meantime prepare the following tomato and sweet pepper mixture. Skin and chop the tomatoes, remove the seeds and cores of the peppers, wash them and cut them in strips. If tinned ones are being used, drain off the liquid and rinse them before slicing them. Heat another tablespoon of dripping in a small saucepan or frying-pan, put in the tomatoes and sweet peppers and cook fairly briskly for about 10 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and a dessertspoon of paprika, which is the nearest approach we can get here to the coarsely-ground red pepper called
piment basquais,
which they use in the Basque country. This tomato and pepper mixture must be thick but not a purée.

To serve, turn the rice on to a heated dish. Extract the sausages and the bacon from the saucepan. Cut each sausage into three slices; remove the rind from the bacon, cut into squares. The pheasant may be either carved and arranged in the centre of the rice, or brought to table whole and then carved. The sausages and bacon are arranged round the pheasant, and the tomato and sweet pepper mixture in a ring round the rice.

A chicken may be cooked in the same way, allowing 45 minutes for an average-size roaster, 2 to 3 hours’ very slow cooking for a boiler.

The Spanish sausages can be bought in Soho shops and in quite a few delicatessens.

Nearly all French cooks and gourmets consider that a good roast woodcock is one of the most refined and exquisite morsels one can offer to honoured guests. I can’t say I altogether share this opinion; I wouldn’t, for instance, rate woodcock higher than grouse or partridge.