French Provincial Cooking (81 page)

Cut the pork, rind included, into cubes, and the ham or gammon into strips. Slice the onion and carrots. Arrange all these ingredients in a braising-pan or earthen pot (in the Béarn they use a fat round pot narrowing towards the top, called a
toupin
),
²⁸
and set over a low flame. When the fat starts to run put in the meat arranged in overlapping layers, with the bouquet in the centre. No salt. Cover the pan and cook gently about 10 minutes. Pour over the wine, bubbling hot. Cook another 15 minutes or so on top of the stove, and then transfer to a very low oven. If the lid of the pan is not a well-fitting one, seal the pot with a piece of foil or greaseproof paper.

Cook very slowly, Gas No. 1 or 2, 290 to 310 deg. F., for 4 to 5 hours; about half an hour before serving, put in the tomatoes, roughly chopped, and the goose or beef stock, and cover the pan again.

A purée of potatoes, or rice, goes with the daube, which is even better when heated up again next day. Enough for four.

Cut 4 to 6 oz. of fat bacon or salt pork into little cubes and put them, with a tablespoon of olive oil, into a heavy and fairly wide iron or earthenware pot; when the bacon fat runs add a large sliced onion. On top, arrange about 3 lb. of shin of beef, off the bone, skin and excess fat removed, and cut lengthways into thick pieces. Add a clove or two of garlic, and a big bunch of parsley, thyme and bayleaf, all tied with a thread. Pour in a large glass (6 to 8 fl. oz.) of red wine, previously heated. Let it come to a fast boil and leave 3 or 4 minutes. Add an equal quantity of hot water, or stock should you chance to have it, and allow to boil again. Season with 2 teaspoons of salt.

Cover the pot with paper or foil and a well-fitting lid. Transfer to a very slow oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F., and in about 3 hours it will be cooked. Or you can half-cook it one day and finish the process just as slowly the next, for, as explained in many of the recipes in this chapter, wine stews improve and mature with reheating. The sauce is to be neither thickened nor reduced; it is to be mopped up with plenty of bread, rice or potatoes. And if your oven is too small for your cooking pot, then it can simmer extremely gently on top of the stove. There should be enough for six people.

Recipes for this dish vary quite a bit, every cook having his own idea as to the seasonings and herbs, but the essentials are always the same. They are a large piece of a secondary cut of beef such as topside, top rump, or even sometimes a shoulder cut, plus calf’s feet, carrots and wine. The dish can be served either hot or cold, but is at its best cold when the juices have set to a beautiful soft, limpid jelly, but although this aspect of the dish seems to make it an ideal one for summer, beware of making it in sultry or thundery weather, for the jelly easily goes sour under such conditions.

Ingredients are a 4 to 5 lb. piece of roll of silverside, top rump or topside, 4 oz. of strips of back pork fat, 2 onions, a bouquet of herbs, 2 lb. of carrots, 2 calf’s feet,
pint of red or white wine, a small glass of brandy, meat stock or water, butter, oil or lard, and seasonings.

The meat must be boned, and preferably, although not essentially, tied in a large sausage shape. It should also be larded lengthways with little strips of back pork fat as explained on page 75, and if you do this yourself, season the pieces of fat with a little salt, pepper, chopped herbs and, if you like, garlic; if the butcher has already done the larding, simply rub the meat well with the seasonings.

Slice the onions and let them take colour in a little fat; put in the meat and let it brown on the outside. Pour in the warmed brandy and flame it. Then add the wine. Let it bubble a minute or two. Add the calf’s feet, split and rinsed in cold water, a little more salt, 2 carrots, a big bouquet of parsley, bayleaf, thyme (sometimes a little piece of orange peel is included in the bouquet), and a crushed clove of garlic. Pour in enough stock (veal stock is ideal) or water to just cover the meat. Seal the pot with a couple of layers of greaseproof paper or foil, then a well-fitting lid.

The beef must now simmer extremely slowly for 3
to 5 hours, either on top of the stove or in the oven. When the dish is to be served cold, it can be cooked a little longer than when it is to be served hot, because even though the meat appears to be very tender indeed it will still harden up a little when it is cold. It should, in fact, be tender enough to cut with a spoon, hence the alternative name of
bœuf à la cuiller
sometimes given to
bœuf mode
.

The time taken for the beef to cook depends very much upon the cut and quality of the meat; but should it appear to be cooked in too short a time, that is to say in less than 3
hours, it probably means it has been cooked at too high a heat or that your piece of meat is rather small. What you do then is to remove the meat and let the rest of the ingredients go on cooking slowly, to make sure that the gelatine from the calf’s feet is thoroughly extracted, otherwise the sauce will not set to a good jelly.

The final operations are the tricky ones. The usual instructions are that, having untied the string from your meat, you arrange the rest of the carrots, separately boiled, all round it, and pour over the hot strained stock, leaving it to set and taking off the fat when it has done so. The dish is then ready to serve.

A more satisfactory method from the point of view of final results is to pour your strained stock into a separate bowl and leave it overnight to set. You then clear it completely of the fat. This process is explained on page 73. The meat itself can be sliced for serving (although this is only to be recommended to those who have a sure hand in operations of this kind), reconstituted into its original shape and placed in the serving dish, which should be a deep and capacious one, with the carrots all round. The jelly, heated until it is just melted, should be poured over the meat when it is quite cold but before it starts to re-set. If you pour it warm over the meat, more fat will be released, and when the jelly is set the surface will be once more studded with little particles of fat. This does not really matter, but detracts slightly from the beautiful limpid appearance of the finished dish; it can be remedied, however, to a certain extent by wringing out a cloth in hot water and with this carefully removing the little fat globules. ‘What are you doing?’ a guest once asked me as he saw me at this task. ‘Polishing the beef?’ Which I suppose is what it really amounts to.

All that is needed to go with the
bœuf mode
is a plain salad. Do not, I beg and beseech, subscribe to the English custom of serving hot vegetables with cold meat. In the first place their presence on the plate will melt the jelly and nullify the whole idea of the dish, and in the second place they are totally out of keeping. You already have meat, carrots and a wine-flavoured jelly; a dish in fact quite complete in itself; nothing else is needed.

The calf’s feet are sometimes cut up and minus their bones arranged round the beef with the carrots; sometimes they are coated with breadcrumbs and melted butter and grilled to make a little hot hors-d’œuvre for another meal, sometimes they are cooked again with fresh vegetables, herbs and seasonings plus perhaps some meat to make a second lot of jellied stock. And, incidentally, when calf’s feet are unobtainable, as they quite frequently are in this country, at any rate in London, pigs’ trotters will do instead, but remember that they are much smaller, so you will need three or four instead of two. Or two plus some strips of pork rind, which are also valuable for their gelatinous qualities.

Whether you use red wine or white is really a matter of taste or of what is available. Red wine makes a darker, more sumptuous-looking jelly; white produces a somewhat milder, lighter flavour.

For 2 oxtails the other ingredients are olive oil, brandy, white wine, stock or water, a big bouquet of bayleaves, thyme, parsley, orange peel and crushed garlic cloves, about
lb. of stoned black olives.

Have the oxtails cut into the usual pieces by the butcher. Put them to steep in cold water for a couple of hours so that the blood soaks out. Take them out and drain them. Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a big heavy stew-pan or
daubière.
Put in the pieces of oxtail and let them sizzle gently a few minutes. Pour over 4 to 6 tablespoons of warmed brandy and set light to it. When the flames have died down, add a large glass, about 6 to 8 ounces, of white wine. Let it bubble fiercely a minute or so. Add just enough stock or water to come level with the pieces of oxtail. Bury the bouquet in the centre. Cover the pan. Transfer to a very slow oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F. Cook for about 3 hours. Pour off all the liquid and leave until next day. Remove the fat. Heat the remaining stock; pour it back over the oxtail. Add the stoned olives. Cook for another hour or so on top of the stove, until the oxtail is bubbling hot and the meat coming away from the bones. Serve with a dish of plain boiled rice.

This dish can, of course, be cooked all in one operation but, for those who don’t like very fat rich food, the system of getting rid of most of the fat from the sauce makes a better dish. The flaming with brandy also does much to strengthen the flavour of the sauce, but it can be left out if it seems a rather extravagant ingredient in a dish which should really be a cheap one.

These quantities should make plenty for six people, but the dish is one which can very well be made with one oxtail only.

For a good way of using up left-over oxtail see the recipe on page 350.

Oxtail ‘as cooked by the winegrowers’ is a lovely dish made out of what should be inexpensive ingredients, but as in England grapes are not to be had just for the picking, one should perhaps only attempt it when imported grapes are plentiful and cheap. To make the lengthy cooking worth while buy at least 2 oxtails, cut into the usual 2-inch lengths by the butcher. The other ingredients are 3 to 4 oz. of salt pork or of a cheap cut of fat unsmoked bacon bought in one piece, 2 large onions, 4 large carrots and 2 Ib. of white grapes. Seasonings include, besides salt and freshly-milled pepper, a little mace or allspice, a bouquet of 2 bayleaves, parsley, thyme and 2 crushed cloves of garlic tied in a little bunch.