French Provincial Cooking (53 page)

A fine salmon trout, either hot or cold, is what I usually choose in the summer season, or sometimes a cold lobster with the sauce described on page 325, and then a vegetable dish or salad. This sounds odd after a meat dish, but in France they seem to have fewer inhibitions about planning the menu than we have here, and on at least three occasions I remember being served with fish, not specially ordered but on the menu of the day, after sausage dishes: after the brioche sausage, it was
sole meunière
; after sausage in flaky pastry, fish
quenelles
; and skate with black butter followed the sausage with hot potato salad. In Alsace, the hot sausage with horseradish sauce was followed by an open, creamy, onion tart. But a roast or grilled chicken with salad, a cold chicken in a cream sauce, a veal roast, escalopes, a duckling, pheasant or partridge, according to what suits the occasion, would all make a lovely meal. For a simple lunch, one of the sausage dishes followed by a hot vegetable, cheese, and some little creamy sweet or fruit in wine would be perfect.

This is a charming, light-hearted dish but shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It involves rather lengthy preparation for such trifles as miniature chipolata sausages, but it is a dish which always has a great success, especially with young people, so it’s worth it if you have the time and the aptitude for this sort of entertainment.

Having bought a pound of the miniature chipolata sausages sold as cocktail sausages (about twenty-five to the pound), poach them very gently in stock for a few minutes only. Prepare a
choux
paste as follows: put a full teacupful of water into a thick pan with 4 oz. of butter and bring to a fast boil. When the butter has fused with the water and is foaming, pour in, all at one go, 4 oz. of sieved flour. Stir, lifting the batter up and round, until you have a smooth mass which comes away from the sides of the pan. This takes only a minute or two. Now add, away from the fire, and one at a time, 4 whole eggs. Each egg must be thoroughly incorporated into the paste before the next is added. The paste should have something of the appearance of a very thick custard but with a slightly elastic spring in it. Spread it on a flat dish and, with a palette knife, coat each little sausage, well drained, so that it is completely encased. This is finicky work, but no worse than icing a cake. It can be done in advance.

Finally, the prepared sausages are plunged into a large, wide pan of very hot oil, a few at a time so as to leave room for them to swell. When they are golden and beautifully puffed up, drain on large sheets of crumpled kitchen paper or on paper towels ready near the stove. Pile them up on a very hot dish, fry a few sprays of parsley to garnish them with and serve as soon as possible, as a first course, or with drinks before dinner. No sauce is necessary but have some mustard to hand.

Large peeled prawns are highly successful cooked
en chemise
in this fashion, and should be accompanied by halves of lemon.

Gently fry 1 lb. of
chorizo
or other coarse-cut, spiced, pork sausages in goose or pork fat or olive oil. When they have turned colour, transfer them to a fireproof dish with a little stock or water and finish cooking them in the oven, while in the same fat in which they have browned you cook a mixture similar to the one described for the wild duck recipe on page 422, but minus the carrot, i.e. 2 or 3 finely chopped shallots, a slice of ham or gammon, half a sweet red or green pepper cut in small pieces. When the shallots start to take colour, add a glass of medium sweet white wine, or dry white wine with the addition of a little Madeira. Let this bubble and reduce, then simmer very gently until the sausages are ready. Fry some triangles of bread in oil, or goose or pork fat. Put the sauce in the serving dish, the sausages on the top and the fried bread all round.

The best
chorizo
sausages, which are highly spiced with red pepper, are to be bought in the Spanish shops of Soho, and are the nearest equivalent we can obtain here to the Basque spiced sausages. Passable imitations are sold in most of the more enterprising delicatessens. This recipe also offers a good way of dressing up our own ordinary pork sausages.

These are fresh, pure pork sausages, coarsely cut and with a fairly large proportion of fat. Apart from their use in
cassoulets
and other such substantial dishes, they are often fried or grilled and served with a purée of potatoes, with stewed haricot beans or with apples. If the sausages are to be fried or grilled, it is advisable first to stiffen them by dipping them for a few moments in boiling water. Fried gently in butter, then transferred to an oven dish and baked at moderate heat for about 20 minutes, while half a dozen sweet dessert apples, peeled, cored and sliced are fried in the same butter, they make an attractive first-course dish, or they can equally well be served with a hot potato salad, as for the Lyonnais recipe on page 228. If for a first course, one sausage per person will usually be enough, for they are very rich and fat.

Boudin,
black pudding, or blood pudding which, in France, is nearly always heavily flavoured with onion and so much less insipid than the kind usually to be found in England, is cut into lengths of about 5 inches, painted with olive oil or pork fat and grilled about 5 minutes on each side. Serve it on a bed of peeled, cored and sliced sweet apples, six to a pound of sausage, gently fried in pork fat.

An old-fashioned way of serving these blood sausages was on a bed of onions similarly fried in pork fat, with the addition of little pieces of pig’s liver and heart; the onions were then removed and kept warm while the sausage was fried in the same fat. This makes good rough food for those who like such things, but it is not exactly easy on the digestion.

Saupiquet
consists of a
sauce piquante à la crème
served with slices of ham fried in butter. It is a modernised version of a famous and very old speciality of the Nivernais and the Morvan districts of Burgundy.

To make the sauce, which is one well worth knowing, a clear well-flavoured meat stock, preferably made from veal and beef, is a necessity. To 1
teacups (about 8 fl. oz.) of this stock the other ingredients are 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour, about 4 shallots, 6 tablespoons of wine vinegar, 2 or 3 crushed juniper berries, 6 tablespoons of white wine,
pint of very fresh thick cream, and a little extra butter with which to finish the sauce.

First of all chop the shallots very finely and put them with the juniper berries in a small saucepan with the vinegar. Bring to the boil and cook until the vinegar has all but dried up and only the shallots are left.

In another saucepan melt the butter, stir in the flour, continue stirring until the mixture is quite smooth and turns pale coffee colour; pour in the heated stock, rather gradually. Keep on stirring until the mixture thickens; add the white wine and then the shallot mixture; cook gently for some time longer, about half an hour, until all taste of flour has disappeared, and removing any scum which comes to the surface; then sieve the sauce. Return it to a clean pan, reheat it, taste for seasoning, stir in the bubbling cream and a small lump of butter. Keep the sauce hot in a
bain-marie
until it is wanted. It should be a beautiful pale coffee-cream colour, smooth, but not very thick.

Have ready 2 or 3 large slices of uncooked ham or gammon weighing about 6 oz. each, steeped in water for half an hour or so. Fry them gently in butter on both sides; transfer to the serving dish; pour your hot sauce over them. Enough for three.

I also quite often make this dish with about
lb. of cold cooked ham or gammon cut into thinnish slices. Instead of frying them, simply arrange them, overlapping, in a big shallow baking dish, pour the hot sauce over, and heat very gently, uncovered, in the oven, for 10 to 15 minutes.

This is another version of the foregoing dish, a whole boiled ham served hot with the same piquant cream sauce. It is usually made with a ham from the Morvan, a district of Burgundy where the mild cured hams have a great reputation. The dish is in fact often called
jambon à la morvandelle.

However, it is not often nowadays that one wants to cook a whole ham to serve hot for it is rather extravagant in the carving and since, in England, uncooked hams are usually only sold whole, the same dish can be made with a piece of gammon.

It should perhaps be explained that whereas a ham proper is cut from the pig as soon as it is killed and the salting, curing and maturing carried out slowly over a period of several weeks, or even months, a gammon is a leg ham quick-cured by the bacon method on the whole side of the pig. The texture and flavour of a gammon, which may be smoked or unsmoked, is therefore somewhat different from that of a ham, but a whole leg of gammon or a piece of one is cooked in very much the same way. So although there is not, so far as I know, any precise equivalent of our gammon produced by French pork curers, I see no reason why we should not adapt some of the French recipes for ham to this excellent and relatively cheap product of our own.

In recent years we have taken to the American system of serving pineapple, peaches, apples and oranges with our hams and gammons. The Burgundian cream sauce makes a welcome change.

Now here is the method of cooking the gammon. It could hardly be simpler.

Buy a piece of middle gammon, which is the easiest to carve, weighing 4 to 4
lb. Soak it in cold water, changed at least once, for 12 to 24 hours. To cook it, cover it completely with fresh cold water, and bring it very, very slowly to a bare simmering point. Calculate half an hour to the pound from the time you put it on to cook, and throughout the whole process keep the water just murmuring, not boiling. If you are going to use this water for soup stock add carrots, onions and a bouquet of herbs.