French Provincial Cooking (90 page)

Next day it can be carved into slices as thin as ham. The original dish is served with two sauces, a thick paste of
lb. anchovy fillets pounded with capers, shallots and parsley, which is spread over the meat, and a mayonnaise served separately. The powerful anchovy flavour would be too much for most people and a better solution is a thick
ravigote
sauce compounded of chopped parsley, tarragon, capers, a little shallot, 3 or 4 anchovy fillets, a scrap of lemon peel, olive oil and lemon juice. This may be either spread over the meat or served separately.

With a cucumber salad
veau saumoné
makes a good and original cold supper dish which will be enough for six people. It should, according to the old recipe, be decorated with bunches of parsley and nasturtium flowers.

If needed for a larger party, the amount can of course be doubled, and extra cooking time allowed.

On no account throw away the liquid in which the meat was cooked; with its somewhat acid flavour it makes the basis of an excellent beetroot consommé. Strain off the onions, herbs, etc., skim the fat, and into the liquid put about 1 lb. of peeled, diced, raw beetroots. Simmer gently for about 30 minutes, strain without pressing the beetroots, and the result is a beautifully flavoured deep red consommé which can be served hot or cold.

A very simple, excellent, but not generally known way of serving liver. For two people you need 4 to 6 thin and evenly cut slices of calf’s liver, 4 medium-sized mushrooms and a little parsley, some chives and tarragon when available, a little piece of shallot or garlic, flour and seasonings, oil.

Chop the cleaned mushrooms very finely with the parsley, the shallot or garlic and the herbs.

Season the liver; dust it with flour. Heat about 1 oz. of butter in a frying-pan with a teaspoon of olive oil. Let the liver take colour quickly on each side, put in the herb and mushroom mixture and cook another 3 minutes or so over a gentle flame, shaking the pan so that the liver does not stick. Turn into a hot serving dish; squeeze over a little lemon.

The mushroom and herb mixture is the old-fashioned version of
fines herbes.

Lamb’s liver can be cooked in the same way.

Veal sweetbreads are considered a great delicacy but, like calf’s liver and lamb’s kidneys, now fetch such a high price that it seems doubtful whether they are worth it; they also require lengthy and meticulous preparation which cannot be skimped if they are to become the really delicate morsels they should be.

There are both throat and heart sweetbreads, the latter being the more highly prized. They are rounder and more regularly shaped than the throat sweetbreads, which are elongated and somewhat sprawling in appearance. When they are cooked, however, there is little appreciable difference.

First, the sweetbreads, which must be exceedingly fresh, must be steeped in cold water, frequently changed, for about 3 hours so that all the blood and impurities will seep out. Some butchers sell sweetbreads already soaked, so that all you need do is just put them in cold water until you are ready to cook them.

The preliminary blanching is done by simply putting the sweetbreads into a large saucepan, covering them amply with cold water and bringing this very, very gently to the boil. Let it just boil 2 minutes. Take out the sweetbreads and plunge them immediately into cold water, pouring this off and renewing it so that the sweetbreads cool quickly. This first operation is to make the sweetbreads firm enough to handle.

You now trim off the horny parts and pipes and rough parts, taking care not to damage the thin membrane which covers the sweetbreads and without which they would fall to pieces during the second cooking.

At this stage it used to be considered necessary to lard or to
piquer
the sweetbreads with little strips of pork fat, but this operation is mostly dispensed with nowadays. Escoffier observes that ‘neither studding nor larding enhances in any way whatsoever their quality or sightliness.’

What you do now, then, is to put the trimmed sweetbreads on a board or dish between two pieces of greaseproof paper; cover with another board or plate and on this put a weight. Leave for a minimum of 2 hours; the sweetbreads will then be pressed to an even thickness and they are ready for cooking in any way you please, and so long as they can be stored in a refrigerator or well-aired larder, they can be left until next day. The final stages of cooking are as described in the recipe below.

Lamb’s sweetbreads (
ris d’agneau
) are prepared in much the same way but are used mainly as part of the garnish for a vol-au-vent
à la toulousaine
,
à /a financière
and so on.

So many ambitious sauces and garnishes can be served with sweetbreads and so few of them come up to expectations that I would never willingly order them in a restaurant. But once, at Barattero’s at Lamastre in the Ardèche, Madame announced that there was
ris de veau à la crème
for dinner and that was that. One did not argue. The dish proved to be a very high-class one and I was grateful to be shown how good sweetbreads could really be. I cannot pretend that the recipe which follows is the Barattero one; I can only say that it is in the same manner, and that it is good.

Ingredients for two people are a pair of sweetbreads already prepared as above; 2 thin slices of back pork fat; an onion, 2 carrots, a couple of sprigs of parsley; white wine and water or mild clear veal or chicken stock. For the sauce, 2 oz. of mushrooms, butter,
pint of thick cream. Fried bread for the garnish.

Wrap each prepared and pressed sweetbread in a slice of the larding fat and tie it with thin string. Slice the onion and carrots and put them in the bottom of a pan in which the sweetbreads will just fit and which will go in the oven. On top of the vegetables put the sweetbreads. Pour in a small glass of white wine, set the pan on the fire and cook until the wine gently bubbles. Add water just to cover the sweetbreads; season; bring the water to simmering point; cover the pan; transfer to a low oven and leave with the liquid just barely murmuring for 45 minutes to an hour. If you have good stock, the wine can be dispensed with and the sweetbreads covered straight away with the stock.

Wash and dry the mushrooms, quarter them, stalks included, then cut each quarter into little chunks. Fry them gently in a small piece of butter until the juices run. In more butter fry 2 thick slices of French bread, the outer crust trimmed off. Keep them warm.

Take the sweetbreads from the oven; untie the wrappings. Put them into a frying or sauté pan in which 1 oz. of butter is just barely bubbling; let them take colour on each side, but very gently. They must be the palest gold, but not brown. Add the mushrooms and 2 tablespoons of the liquid in which the sweetbreads have cooked. Pour in the cream, turn up the heat, shake and rotate the pan until the cream thickens. If it gets too solid add a little more liquid. Put the sweetbreads on top of the fried bread in the serving dish. Give the sauce another quick stir over the fire. Pour it round the sweetbreads and serve.

And now you see what I mean about sweetbreads being a trouble to prepare. Although, of course, half a dozen are not all that much more bother than two. If they are to be done at all, however, let them be done properly. As Madame Seignobos observes rather pointedly in an early twentieth-century book called
Comment on Forme une Cuisinière,
‘in certain backward countries, sweetbreads are cooked without a previous steeping and blanching; this faulty procedure deprives the sweetbread of the delicacy which is its principal merit.’

This, says Madame Seignobos in
Comment on Forme une Cuisinière,
is a traditional dish of real old French cookery. The sweetbreads, prepared and cooked in a stock as above, are gently fried in butter; some of the cooking liquid is added and, when the sweetbreads are bronzed and glazed in their juice, you serve them on a purée of sorrel and you sprinkle over the juice to which you must add some more—
étranger
is the word Madame Seignobos uses—because that from the sweetbreads will be insufficient. The sweetbreads, she adds, must be ‘united’ with the sorrel only at the moment of service.

Calf’s head is a dish which is not easily avoidable if you eat the set meals of small hotels and restaurants in France. When it is good, which is to say when it is served really tender and hot and you get a comparatively lean piece and the vinaigrette sauce has been well mixed, then it is quite good. More often, it is repellent. To cook it at home is a scarifying performance and this is what has to be done, presuming first that you have bought a half head from the butcher and that he has either boned and tied it, or else cloven it into about four manageable pieces.

The head is put to steep in cold water for a minimum of 2 hours, but overnight if you have the time. The brains should be scooped out and soaked separately. Then you put the head into fresh cold water, bring it to the boil, let it simmer 10 minutes, drain it, wipe off any scum that is sticking to the skin and remove any hairs that are still on the creature’s snout.

You now bring a fresh saucepan of water to the boil, with onion and a couple of carrots; you put in the pieces of head, which must be covered by water, and again let it simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, removing all the scum that rises to the top. Then put in a tablespoon of salt, a dessertspoon of wine vinegar or lemon juice, a large bouquet of parsley and celery or tarragon and lastly 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Cover the saucepan and simmer very gently for 1
hours. Having freed the brains of skin and blood, blanch them as explained in the recipe on page 359. Take out the pieces of head, remove the bone and serve very hot in a hot dish, with a cold vinaigrette sauce separately. This is made with chopped shallots, parsley, mustard, salt, pepper, olive oil, vinegar and capers, as explained in the recipe for beef salad on page 147, only in smaller quantities.

If the calf’s head has to be kept waiting after it has cooked, take the pan from the fire but leave it covered with the lid, so that it does not get cold.

Some cooks consider it necessary to cook the head in the mixture known as a
blanc
, which is a sort of
court-bouillon
of water plus the flavouring vegetables, salt and herbs, to which 1 oz. of flour for 4 pints is added and stirred in when the water is boiling. The idea of this is to keep the meat white (a
blanc
is also used for certain vegetables, such as salsify) but it is really not strictly necessary, for the vinegar and the lemon juice, plus the olive oil on the top, are just as effective, and then you have the liquid as a basis for clear stock, for which it cannot be used if flour has been added.