French Provincial Cooking (93 page)

‘Today, a veal rump (this is the classic term) is served. It is presented whole upon a great dish, with its tail and kidneys nicely arranged upon a bed of big fat leeks.’

The French housewife mixes chopped fresh pork or pure pork sausage meat with eggs and herbs to stuff a big fat fowl, she poaches it with vegetables and a bouquet of herbs and the result is that
poule au pot
which good King Henry of Navarre wished that all his subjects might eat on every Sunday of the year. Or perhaps that same housewife will cook her chicken without a stuffing and serve it with a dish of rice and a cream sauce; or if it is a plump young bird, she will roast it simply in butter and serve it on the familiar long oval dish with a tuft of watercress at each end and the buttery juices in a separate sauce-boat. The farmer’s wife, faced with an old hen no longer of use for laying, will (if she has inherited her grandmother’s recipes and has a proper sense of the fitness of things) bone the bird, stuff it richly with pork and veal and even, perhaps, truffles if it is for a special occasion, and simmer the bird with wine and a calf’s foot to make a clear and savoury jelly, so that the old hen will be turned into a fine and handsome galantine fit for celebrations and feast days.

If she is in a hurry, the French cook will cut up a roasting chicken into joints, fry them gently in butter or oil, add stock or wine, perhaps vegetables and little cubes of salt pork as well, and the result will be the
poulet sauté
which, in a restaurant, will be glorified with some classic or regional label, or named after a minister or a famous writer or actress.
Parmentier
it will be if there are little bits of potato;
provençale
if there are tomatoes;
chasseur
or
forestière
if there are mushrooms;
Poincaré
if there are asparagus tips;
Mistral
if there are aubergines;
Célestine
if there are tomatoes and wine and mushrooms and cream all together. (Célestine was one of the Emperor Louis Napoleon’s cooks, and he came from the Ardèche, but the dish became celebrated at a Lyon restaurant so whether Célestine invented it or not I do not know nor, I suppose, does anybody else.)

The old-fashioned
fricassée
is a sauté of chicken with a sauce thickened with egg yolks, not a dish of left-overs with a white sauce such as we understand it in English cookery; a
poulet à /a crème
is another of these sauté chickens with a pure cream sauce, but for all their versatility I must confess that these cut-up chickens seldom appeal to me. However good and carefully cooked the dish, one nearly always finds that the chicken is a trifle dry, that it has lost some of its juices and its melting quality and, in fact, that it would very likely have been better had the bird been cooked whole and then jointed before serving. For this reason I rarely cook a sauté chicken and shall give only one or two examples of such recipes but it is, of course, a question which every cook must judge for himself.

The accomplished restaurant chef is apt to use chicken as a background to show off his skill in making fine cream sauces and
mousses
and aspic jellies; and when freshwater crayfish are to be had, perhaps he will serve you with a cockerel surrounded by a sauce or
coulis
of these crayfish, creamy and rose-coloured. You think it sounds outlandish. But it is delicate and poetical. You have a dish of plain rice to go with it and your wine will be a Meursault, a Montrachet, a Chablis or an Alsatian Traminer.

In Burgundy your cockerel will be served in a wine-dark sauce surrounded by little glazed button onions, mushrooms and cubes of salt pork, with a bottle of Chambertin to drink. Is it a little over-sung, this dish, I sometimes wonder? In Lyon there will be dark patches of truffles slipped in between the skin and the flesh of your poached
poularde de Bresse.
In Normandy the sauce will be compounded of thick white cream and Calvados. In Provence olives, tomatoes, oil, garlic and the aromatic herbs of the sun-baked hillsides will go into the pot with your chicken. In Touraine as well as in the modest Paris restaurant, ten to one it will be flavoured in some way or other with tarragon. Perhaps it is the best of all.

 

As for other domestic poultry and game, such things as ducklings, turkeys, geese and guinea fowl do not come one’s way so often as to make it necessary to know a large variety of different recipes for cooking them.

The renowned
canard à la presse
and
canard à la rouennaise
require not only special implements but a special breed of duck, the Rouen duck being a cross between the common wild duck of the Seine estuary and a domestic duck. This duck is killed by strangulation, so that all its blood remains in the body; it has a strong gamey flavour which is something of an acquired taste, and it is really at its best plain spit-roasted. The
canard à la presse, au sang, à la rouennaise
and
à la Duclair,
in which the blood pressed from the half-roasted carcase of the animal constitutes a necessary part of the sauce for the dish, belong essentially to restaurant cooking. The Nantais ducks and ducklings more resemble our own domestic breeds and, when young, are best plain roasted; when elderly they can make, provided that they are painstakingly cooked, excellent farmhouse and country dishes, either with the traditional vegetables such as little turnips, young peas, olives or haricot beans, or with more fanciful garnishes such as bitter cherries or oranges for those who feel that something with a sweet-sour taste is needed to offset the richly-flavoured flesh of the mature duck.

Young game birds, pheasant, partridge and grouse (for which the nearest French equivalent is the
coq de bruyère
) are best roasted either on the spit, in the oven or in a heavy pot on top of the stove. The professional chefs, of course, like to do all sorts of elaborate and expensive dishes with them, usually involving truffles and
foie gras.

Pâtés and terrines offer an excellent solution, perhaps the best, to people who have plenty of game at their disposal, while the deep freeze is kinder to game than to vegetables, meat or fish.

For people who have to buy their game, hare usually offers very remarkable value but it takes courage, I find, to cook it often, for the smell of a civet or of any other hare stew, as indeed of venison, is an overpowering, penetrating and lingering one; but every now and again it is well worth making the effort, for in some of the traditional recipes for cooking hare is to be found the very essence of old French country cookery and of the French genius for the gradual amalgamation of wine, vegetables and aromatic herbs with the flesh of the animal itself, all slowly, patiently simmered to form a richly flavoured, sumptuous whole.

Some of these old recipes call for ingredients which seem at first glance to be terribly discordant, and for methods which would make the school-trained cook recoil, so that their preparation may sometimes require an act of faith as well as one of courage. The cook with an adventurous spirit will not be daunted but, all the same, these dishes are quite a test of skill, taste and understanding.

Stuff a plump 5 lb. roasting chicken (dressed and drawn weight) with a large lump of butter, about 2 oz., into which salt, freshly-milled pepper and, if possible, a little chopped fresh or dried tarragon have been incorporated. Place the chicken on its side in a baking tin and rub more butter plentifully over the exposed surface. Put in a fairly hot oven, Gas No. 6, 400 deg. F., and, after 20 minutes, turn the bird over. Add more butter. After 20 minutes more turn the bird again, and baste with the juices in the pan. In 1 hour altogether the chicken should be cooked and will be a most beautiful golden brown all over. The only sauce needed is supplied by the butter and the juices in the pan, which are poured off into a sauce-boat and served separately.

For a larger chicken, weighing say 4
to 5 lbs. dressed and drawn, allow 30 minutes on each side at Gas No. 5, 375 deg. F., then about 30 minutes with the heat reduced to Gas No. 3, 330 deg. F.

Pot-roasting is a very easy way of cooking a chicken
provided
you have a suitable utensil. It should be deep enough to contain the bird, lying on its side, with the lid fitting tightly over the top; it should also be rather narrow, so it is all but filled by the bird, for if it is too big the butter or other fat in which the bird is cooking will be spread over too large an area and will dry up or burn. Also, of course, the pot must be a thick and heavy one in which the contents will not stick and in which an even temperature will be maintained throughout the cooking. A Le Creuset cast-iron cocotte of the type shown in the drawing on page 58 is suitable for pot-roasting. Le Creuset also produce a highly useful pot-roaster which goes by the name of
Doufeu,
meaning literally ‘gentle-fire’.

To make an olive stuffing for a roasting chicken weighing 2
to 2
lb. when drawn and dressed, stone and chop 20 black olives (about 2
oz.) with 2 oz. of stale white bread weighed without crust, soaked in cold water and squeezed dry, a little piece of onion or garlic, a sprig or two of parsley; bind with a beaten egg and season with a little pepper and nutmeg but no salt. Stuff the bird and, if you have it ready in advance, keep it
out
of the refrigerator.