Duck rillettes - a good recipe for Christmas

This is a popular way of using up duck carcasses once you have removed the breast fillets - maigrets -and the legs which can be used for confit de canard.

At one time we had  lots of ducks to process so I saved all the fat and used the carcasses to make rillettes.

This recipe  uses  just one duck  and it all goes into the rillettes which is why you have to add fat as the breast meat is quite dry.

Makes roughly  four pots

Take one large duck with all the fat if possible from the cavity.  Chop into pieces, including legs and breast.

Put duck bits in a bowl and sprinkle pieces sea salt - don't overdo the salt at this stage and a couple of spoons of brown sugar, some mixed spice,cinnamon,  nutmeg, pepper, two bay leaves and a little dried thyme or fresh thyme but not too much as it's quite pungent and you want a balanced flavour here.

Leave the meat to marinate for a couple of hours.

Melt some duck fat in a big pan and place the pieces in it.
Don't  fry them just keep the heat should constantly low so that all the fat melts and gradually the meat cooks very slowly and falls off the bones.  This process will take a few hours. Stir it from time to time and make sure it does not burn at the end of the cooking.  At first you get duck juices but then the water evaporates and you're left with meat and fat.

The meat is ready when its really soft and easy to pick off the bones.

 Leave it to cool until you can handle it.  Remove all the meat from the bones and mix by hand the meat with the fat.   Add 500g of fresh unsalted butter.  Work the meat  with your hands until you have a fine paste with not many fibres and no bones or bits left. You squeeze it in your hands until its smooth.

Taste the mixture for seasoning and adjust salt if necessary.

Put the mixture into jars and pour some melted butter or fat on top.

 If you want to keep them for more than a couple of weeks, sterilise the jars  in a water bath for an hour and a half or 30 mins in a pressure cooker. Use the preserving jars with rubber rings for this.
Otherwise serve the rillettes  cold on hot toast or bread  and a few gherkins if you like them.

Cost approx £8 for the duck and £2.50 butter.  4 pots would cost you at least £24 in the shops and would never be as nice.

By request - French Apple Tarte - my way.

For those of you who have a metal French tarte dish with corrugated edges in thin tin -
For this is what you'll need to make this apple tarte.
250g of plain flour
125g unsalted butter - not marge or any of the other horrible things people eat now a days
About 1k of eating apples - not cooking apples please ie Bramleys wont do for this.
A pinch of salt
A teaspoon of sugar
More unsalted butter
Sugar
Rub butter into flour until you have fine crumbs, add a tiny amount of cold water  - just enough to hold the dough together. If you put too much in it makes the pastry go hard.  It should melt in the mouth
Heat the oven as hot as it will go - put the shelf high up.
Roll out the pastry nice and thin and line the tin tarte dish.
Peel and core the apples and slice thinly and arrange like a flower on the pastry starting in rings working to  the centre.
Sprinkle sugar over the apples - quite generously and dot pieces of butter all over the sugar.
Cook in a very hot oven until the apples begin to go golden brown.
The pastry should be cooked by then but if in doubt leave it a bit longer.  Around 20 minutes should be enough.
The trick is a very hot oven and a very thin metal dish.= properly cooked pastry.
Best eaten warm with cream or Chantilly  cream - whip cream add some icing sugar and vanilla extract.
Custard best kept for Apple Pie as it will make the pastry soggy.

More about the Pig

I will not venture to disgust you with an account of how we sacrificed the pig and what we did to it next.   But I thought I would whet your appetites with something very French and very delicious.

That a dog finds rotting rabbits very delicious is not surprising, it’s all a question of taste.  There may well be a being out there who observes us benevolently but finds both us and our habits quite repulsive.

Being young and curious when I went to France, I had no difficulty embracing French food and was prepared to taste anything at least once. 

Which takes us back to the pig.  My friend, the belle Paulette had come to help out and appeared in the kitchen with a plastic bucket.

'We must go to the wash house and clean these,' she shoved it under my nose.  There was nothing pleasant in there at all.

'What are you going to do with that?' I asked in disbelief.

‘Andouillette,’ she announce emphatically.

‘Andouillette?’

'A kind of sausage,' she beamed.

'Alright, let's go to the wash house, then.'  Having a washing machine, I had not yet visited this oddity but had heard that for some old ladies it was a habit that died hard.

We drove to the next village and parked by a smallish building with a low tiled roof.  Paulette threw open the stout oak door and ushered me in.  A square basin, the size of a smallish swimming pool, brimmed with river water which flowed in one end and out the other. Funny little wooden boxes, like hassocks but open on one side, were stacked at the far end.  Paulette grabbed one and placed it besides the pool.

‘Look, we used to do it like this,’ she knelt down as if to pray but instead mimicked scrubbing on the sloping stone rim.  I tested the water.  It was icy. 

Chilblains must have been a common ailment for those poor women who had to do their laundry in winter.  I knew all about chilblains, having had them often enough myself.  My father, who sometimes came up with some earthy lore from his childhood had told me that the best remedy for them was to whip them with fresh nettles.  Needless to say, I had not been in a hurry to put that particular remedy to the test.  When I was a child I just thought he was being cruel but learnt subsequently that fresh nettles were also good for rheumatism and arthritis.  It’s the acid in their sting that is supposed to be efficacious.

 A three sided lean-to roof provided some shelter from the elements and gave the place a cloister like tranquility.  Only the gushing water and the soughing of the great grey willows that overshadowed the opposite bank broke the silence.  I could have sat there for hours.  But it was not to be.  Paulette went back to the car and fetched her plastic bucket and contents. 

‘We must wash them now.’  I nodded dubiously. I really didn’t want this job at all. She knelt down in the box and extracted from the bucket a very long and bloated pig’s gut. 

‘We do it like this,’ and niftily turned the gut inside out like a stocking and as she did so freed a very long turd which floated off into the clean pool.  I tried to breathe through my mouth.

‘Andouillette are very good,’ she reassured me.  I had got the message but was far from convinced.   When the gut was empty, she produced a knife and showed me how to scrape the inside lining clean and rinse it in the pool.  Bravely, I set to work.

Just then the door flew open and a man with a bundle of osier walked in.  He seemed to me to somewhat out of place in this very female sanctuary where devotees of the river goddess were want to worship.

‘Bonjour,’  I cried, embarrassed, seeing that the offending turds were still bobbing around in the pool. I should not have worried. Pointedly ignoring us both, he dumped his bundle in the pool and left.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked Paulette who was a fountain of wisdom when it came to local doings. 

‘Gipsy,’ was her laconic answer as if that explained everything.  He came back a bit later and pulled out a few willow wands from the pool and in no time at all a basket began to take shape, teased and twisted into place by his very nimble fingers.  How I would have loved to be able to do that.

The man was a very typical Rom, swarthy with dark hair and brown eyes. If he spoke French, he did not let on and  made a point of ignoring us, as if we did not exist in his world at all.  I could only gawp and admire his skill.  Before we had finished with the guts, his job was done.   Leaving his osier to soak, he took his new basket and left.  He made baskets but the women folk peddled them around the village.  I exchanged a fine roasting chicken for one of them and it lasted for years.

I digress.  To get back to the Andouillette…  The secret to making these sausages is as follows

First clean the guts as explained above.  Scrape the insides clean but be very careful not to pierce the gut.  Use the back of a knife.

Put the cleaned guts into a jar or earthen ware pot with dry sea salt until you want to make the sausage.  These pots are called saloires in French or Charnieres in patois from the West of France.  It’s what you use to salt pork or anything else.

To make the sausage, you have to rince and soak the guts to get rid of the salt and you need lots of welsh onions.  They have green tops and make bunches which grow into clumps.  So you need to slice up a lot of these onions and you take the big gut and stuff it with the little guts and the onions to make a firm sausage.  You season with pepper and a few spices and tie up both ends with string.  Then you poach them very gently in simmering water for a good thirty minutes.

To prepare.  Best light the barbecue and place on an oiled grill until crispy.

Delicious once you have got over your initial repulsion to eating things that contained sh…  

Some say they taste like sh..  but then maybe sh.. is an acquired taste!  I will leave that debate to others.  

Chase out the demons

St John’s Wort.

This is the one!

 It chases away demons, also called in French Chase the Devil or Thousand Holes because its leaves are covered in tiny holes.

Should be gathered only on 24 June at 12 noon.

The red colour of its juice makes it good for wounds and bleeding.

To make oil of St John’s wort – Macerate 250g fresh chopped flowers in one liter of olive oil. Leave in sun to macerate five days.  Strain oil and add same amount of flowers again, repeat process three times until the oil is dark red.

Keeps well and can be used on burns and cuts, sciatica and sprains.  I made this and I can assure you it works.

St John’s Wort Ratafia – popular drink in France in the 19th century.

Macerate 25g of flowers in 500g vodka/ eau de vie and leave in the sun for a month.  Strain and ad 60g of white sugar.   A good way to keep your mood up, have a small shot, no more!!

The Queen of the Meadows

Meadow Sweet

This beautiful plant grows in water meadows by the Cam and along the chalk stream on Coldhams Common.  In France it’s called the Queen of the Meadows.  It was gathered to be strewn on floors because of its sweet smell.  

In the past it was added to beer and mead and imparted a muscat grape flavour.  This plant helps rheumatism and arthritis and gets rid of excess water.   Also good for fevers by bringing on sweating. Use the dried flowers to make tea but not with boiling water, just very hot water. 

Too much of the good things in life?

Wilde Thyme

This little plant can be found in flower in June/July  in the Chalk Pit in Cherry Hinton. Also called Serpyllum and Mother of Thyme.

Wild Thyme is a sovereign remedy for overeating as I found out a long time ago.  I had over indulged on home-made waffles, Chantilly cream and strawberry jam. I felt really sick but a cup of thyme tea did the trick and sorted out my indigestion in no time at all.   

The tea is good for colds, coughs and asthma.  It has an immediate effect on your mood and gets rid of anxiety and chases away nightmares. 

 It’s a nerve tonic and sorts out stomach upsets and urinary infections. 

Some say it’s also good for your brain, your sex life and stops hair loss. And for all of you boozers out there, it get rids of hangovers – what more could you ask for?

You can grow it in the cracks between paving slabs and gives off a lovely smell when you walk on it.  A must have in every garden.

A dog walk into another dimension.

The dog ran ahead his tail waving importantly.  He always had to be in front as if his dignity depended on it.  I thought I was taking him for a walk but in reality it was the other way round.  Even though it was still early, the heat hit you like a brick wall . So I avoided the open common and headed for the leafy shade.  We followed the well worn path along the chalk stream, overshadowed by hawthorns that hid it from the sun.

 I stopped on the little bridge were a colony of harts tongue ferns flourished in the damp shade.  They only grew above a little spring that ran into the stream.  If you watched carefully you could see a trickle running down the chalky bank creating little eddies that cut through the swift flowing water. From the vantage point on the bridge, occasionally, if you’re lucky you might get a glimpse of a kingfisher, a mere blue streak flashing above the ripples, speeding through the dim tunnel.

I stood in an arbour of thorn and elder and removed my glasses to rub them clean. My eyes relaxed as I gazed around me into the leafy gloom. I could not see much at all.  Everything was just an indistinct blur of light and shade.

Then something magical happened.  As I kept looking, my eyes adjusted to the panorama around me.  Dappled sunlight filtering through the canopy transformed into translucent balls, like three dimensional stars radiating light in all directions.  Each ball had it own distinct colour, some bright green as light filtered through the tender new leaves, pink, blue of the sky and others yellow or translucent like crystal.  Form had lost all solidity and existed only as the essence of light. 

Each ball was perfectly distinct yet transparent, radiating coloured rays from a central core.  Overlapping each other they gave a three dimensional quality to the picture, rather like frogs spawn in a pond.

I gawped in wonder too absorbed in the spectacle to go any further. Christmas trees and baubles came to mind, though this was way beyond anything I could have imagined.  Dragging my eyes away from the canopy I looked into the murk of the glade. Here the quality of light was much softer, a gentle glow that picked out certain features in a very different way. 

Branches and twigs beside the path, mere shadows of themselves, merged into a shimmering translucent membrane that quivered like living water.  Dim pink light hit the slender stalks of the dried out cow parsley and transformed them into thick brush strokes, a perfect calligraphy.    Bigger branches loomed out of the gloom, garlands of long rounded oblongs, the colour of sienna earth, jewels of light hanging in space all the more luminous against the  dark velvet shadows.   The dog had sat down and waited patiently for me to move.  He turned towards me and I saw red light flash from his jaws in stark contrast to the shimmering black void of his coat. 

Being short sighted has its advantages after all.  What might appear to be a defect can also be a window to another dimension.  So all you short sighted people, try taking off your glasses and relax.  You may well be very surprised by what you’ll see.