CHICKEN
Even the poorest European peasant household could usually support a few barnyard fowl–good egg-layers often provided the wife’s only cash crop. Farmyard hens were primarily kept for eggs rather than meat and although a few young cockerels were fattened up for high days and holidays, peasant recipes concentrate on ways of dealing with tough elderly birds past their egg-laying prime: plenty of soups, stews and slow cooking.
The slaughter of poultry was invariably women’s work, as I discovered during my days in Andalusia when Maria Magdalena, the wife of our local baker in the little village of Pelayo, refused to sell me, as a regular customer, a bird for the pot unless I learned to kill it myself. Maria kept hens and sold eggs as a sideline, but sometimes at Christmas she would act as agent for the farmers who lived in the hills behind, and they would walk their turkeys and geese down to the little bakery beside the main road for her to sell on their behalf. The unwary purchaser, perhaps a motorist on the way home to the town below, was likely to find his Christmas dinner fully feathered and squawking on the seat beside him unless he specified otherwise in advance.
While Maria Magdalena consented to act as chief executioner, she would make her customer secure the bird’s legs, and then, with one swift sure movement, double over the chicken’s head and sever the spine at the base of the skull. For a small extra consideration, she would gut and defeather. She preferred to pluck dry, rather than dipping the bird in a bucket to dampen the feathers first. Sitting out on the back stoop in the sun and working from head to tail, it never took her more than three minutes a bird. Heads, feet, gizzards and necks all went for the stew pot. In a mature egg-layer, any of the little golden unlaid eggs she found inside would go to enrich the puchero. Nothing was ever wasted.
COCK-A-LEEKIE
(Scotland)
Kissing cousin to the ancient English dishes of malachi and gallimaufry, much like the Welsh cawl and the French pot-au-feu, cock-a-leekie–maybe because it’s so good and so simple–has survived in more or less original form. Spoon food for hungry field workers, it can be made with a good strong bone stock rather than the more luxurious fowl–traditionally, the loser in a cockfight, since the bird’s sinewy drumsticks fortify the broth. In these daintier times, a boiling fowl will do.
Quantity: Serves 6
Time: Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: About 2½ hours
1 large boiling fowl (at least 2kg/4 lb)
3.5 litres/6 pints spring water
1 level tablespoon sea salt
1 teaspoon crushed peppercorns
At least 2kg/4 lb leeks
Utensils: A roomy stew pot and draining spoon
Wipe over the chicken and put in the stew pot. Cover with water, bring to the boil, and turn down the heat to a gentle simmer. Skim off the grey foam which rises, then season with salt and crushed peppercorns and leave to cook for 2½ hours.
Rinse the leeks, trim off the tips of the leaves (leaving most of the green) and chop into short lengths. Add half the leeks to the pot after the first half hour. After 2 hours, add the rest. The soup must be very thick with leeks–by the end; the first addition should have boiled down until they’ve become almost liquid themselves. Some cooks further thicken the broth with a handful of oatmeal.
To serve, joint the chicken–just pull it gently apart with a fork–and ladle directly from the pot, chicken and leeks together. Or, for a more substantial dish, cook sliced potatoes in the broth, and serve the soup first, with the chicken and potatoes afterwards.
Suggestions:
• The inclusion of prunes or raisins in the soup is a matter of furious debate among cock-a-leekie experts. If you wish, add a handful of either to the broth after the first hour of cooking. The diplomatic M. Talleyrand, experiencing the dish on a visit to the Scottish capital, suggested that the prunes be cooked in the broth but removed before service. This, he suggests, would colour and sweeten the soup without interfering with the delicate flavour of the leek, a member of the onion tribe and naturally sweet.
• Some traditional recipes advocate the inclusion of a drop of treacle–an addition which serves the same purpose as the prunes. Others, under the French influence perhaps, stir in a handful of shredded greens.
• The soup is sometimes thickened with a handful of fine-ground oatmeal.
BOILED CHICKEN WITH NOODLES
Suppenhuhn mit nudeln (Austria)
An elderly boiler past its egg-laying days makes better broth than any spring chicken, and the flavour of a free-ranging barnyard bird is superior to that of a young battery hen. This is an innkeeper’s dish, very popular among early risers as a second breakfast.
Quantity: Serves 6 (or 4 Austrian breakfasters)
Time: Preparation: 1 hour (if you make your own noodles)
Cooking: 1-2 hours
The soup
1 large chicken
Bunch parsley and a celery stick or parsley root and a lovage stalk
2-3 large carrots
2 leeks or onions
About 4 litres/7 pints water
Salt and peppercorns
The noodles
250g/8 oz strong bread flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 medium eggs
Approx. 2 tablespoons water
Utensils: A large boiling pot, a draining spoon, a strainer, a pasta roller or rolling pin
Wipe the chicken and put in the pot with the vegetables, scrubbed and chunked, with enough water to cover generously. Bring to the boil, skim off the grey foam which rises. Turn down the heat to simmer, add a teaspoon of salt and peppercorns and cook for 1-2 hours depending on the age of the bird. When the chicken is perfectly tender and the broth is good and strong, remove the bird and keep it warm. Strain the soup, leave to cool and lift off the hat of golden fat (reserve for other purposes).
Sift the flour and salt together directly on to the kitchen table. You need plenty of elbow room. Make a dip in the middle and crack the eggs into the dip. Work them into the dough with your hand. Add water, kneading as you go, until you have a soft pliable dough. (This can be started in the mixer and finished by hand.)
If you have a pasta roller, so much the better. It is the easiest way to make noodles and if you like both them and other pastas, it’s well worth acquiring one. A pasta roller is an implement which bolts on to the kitchen table like a little mangle, and operates on the same principle. When you have rolled the dough thinly enough by progressively decreasing the space between the rollers, you then roll it through a slot equipped with cutters–there’s normally a choice of 2 or 3 ribbon widths.
If you have no roller, flour the table and roll out the dough until it is very thin–it’ll spring back, but persevere. Leave the rolled sheet to dry for 15 minutes. Then sprinkle generously with flour, roll it up like a carpet and slice it into rings–as fine as a wedding ring for soup, thicker if you want to serve the noodles plain with butter, or with a cream sauce flavoured with chopped ham or dried mushrooms.
Leave the noodles, made by hand or with the machine, piled in heaps to dry for another half hour.
Bring the broth back to a fierce rolling boil and add the noodles a handful at a time, taking care not to let the broth go off the boil–allow 2 or 3 minutes. Serve in deep soup plates, with a joint of the boiling fowl per serving. Very comforting on a cold day.
Suggestions:
• Egg noodles store well: make double quantities and allow one portion to dry until brittle, and then keep in an airtight jar in the larder.
• Serve either in a broth as above, or cook in plain water and serve sprinkled with sugar and poppy seeds as a sweet after a thick vegetable soup. In the cold farmlands of central Europe, no farmer’s wife would dream of producing a midday meal that did not include a dough dish in some form or another–noodles or dumplings or a fruit-stuffed strudel.
SOUR SOUP MADE FROM CHICKEN
Ciorba de pui (Romania)
A much-loved staple of the peasant kitchen, usually made, naturally enough, with an old hen past her useful egg-laying age, was much appreciated by the traveller D.J. Hall, taking a meal with the village doctor in the 1930s–in Romania, the good times.
‘I have never eaten such a meal as I did the next day; and that is saying a good deal of a meal in a country whose people are the most prodigious eaters perhaps in the world. Though capacities might increase everywhere if food became as plentiful and cheap as it is in Romania. We had first ciorba de pui, a sour soup made from chicken, rich with butter and filled with vegetables. This was followed by a sucking pig. It came on to the table whole, half an apple in its mouth, a blue bow on its forehead. I felt sad till I began to eat it, and then my sorrow passed. That seemed to me to be enough. But then came slices of roast goose with peppers and afterwards a cheese pancake. The wine was good too.’
Quantity: Serves 4 as a main dish
Time: Preparation: 20 minutes
1 chicken–a boiling fowl is best–weighing around 1.5kg/3 lb
Bay leaf and allspice (acquired in Romania from the ‘foreigner’s market’)
3 medium onions
3 medium carrots
1 celeriac root
Parsley root if you can find it
Salt and pepper
To finish
½ cabbage (optional)
2 slices day-old bread
1 tablespoon vinegar
3 egg-yolks
4 tablespoons cream (optional)
Dill and savory, chopped
Utensils: A large stew pot and a draining spoon
Wipe and trim any stray feathers off the chicken. Trim the vegetables; peel and quartered or chunks as appropriate.
If the chicken is a roaster, put it in the stew pot with the vegetables and flavourings. Cover generously with cold water. Bring to the boil 3 times, skimming and adding a little more cold water each time to send the cloudy bits to the bottom. If the bird is an old boiler, it will take twice as long to cook as a roaster, so put it on to boil with the bay leaf and allspice and simmer for an hour in enough water to cover generously, before you add the vegetables. Then simmer for another 1-1½ hours, until the chicken is perfectly tender and the broth rich and fragrant.
Add the cabbage (if using), sliced, 15 minutes before the end of the cooking time.
To finish, mash the bread with the vinegar, beat it into the egg yolks and whisk in a ladleful of the hot broth. Whisk thoroughly. Remove the broth from the heat and whisk in the egg-vinegar mixture to thicken it a little. If you enrich the soup with cream, you won’t need to thicken with bread. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Do not boil it again.
Stir in the chopped herbs just before serving. Serve the soup with bread and wine. A handful of sweet grapes or plums and a nip of Bulgarian plum brandy, tsuica, will make a good digestif.
Suggestions:
• Cook potatoes in the broth and save the chicken itself for the recipe which follows, and you will have two dishes for the price of one. Soup meats are often treated as a roasting joint after the preliminary boiling–a method characteristic of the Transylvanian kitchen in which nothing goes to waste. The method is effective with any tough joint of meat and is a technique recommended by Apicius in De Re Coquinaria in the 5th century, when Romania was the Latin-speaking colony of Dacia.
CHICKEN POT ROAST
Friptura de pui (Romania)
A frugal way with a boiling fowl, a method of enriching and flavouring a precious ingredient which has already given much of its goodness to the broth. The recipe was entrusted to me by a Transylvanian shepherd’s wife who had just bought an oval earthenware casserole, unglazed, in the market at Sibiu especially for this dish. Under Soviet rule, Carpathian shepherds were exempt from collectivisation and their larders, at the time of my visit in 1985, were well-stocked with sheep’s cheese and barrelled sauerkraut. Throughout all but the winter months there was butter and milk from the family cow, eggs and poultry from the yard, and every household kept a pig.
Quantity: Serves 4
Time: Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes
1 boiled chicken or a 1kg/2 lb pre-cooked bacon joint
1 whole garlic head
1 large nugget butter
4 tablespoons thick cream
Salt and pepper
Utensils: An earthenware casserole which will just accommodate the bird or joint, greaseproof paper or foil
Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/Gas 4.
Skin the garlic cloves and slice thickly. Put the chicken or bacon joint in the casserole, sprinkle with garlic, tucking a few slices inside the cavity. Tuck the butter in the cavity and pour the cream over it. Cover with a double thickness of greaseproof paper or foil, and roast in the oven for 30 minutes, till garlicky, crisp-skinned and exquisitely fragrant. Serve with a potato salad and cold white wine. Mme Frunzete, whose recipe this is, grew beautiful grapes in her courtyard and liked to serve them straight from the vine to finish the meal.
Suggestions:
• Serve with mamaliga–soft polenta–and a crisp cabbage salad, as enjoyed by D.J. Hall, travelling the bye-ways of eastern Europe just before World War II: ‘We ate as only Romanians know how to eat, immensely and well. First, mamaliga, a kind of solid corn pudding, soup, a whole roast chicken, with a plate piled high with salad, and much wine.’
CHICKEN WITH PAPRIKA
Porkolt csirke (Hungary)
Porkolt means ‘singed’, which indicates the culinary method that distinguishes this dish from a gulyas: the meat is cooked right down at the end so it is almost frying in its concentrated juices. It can be made with any kind of meat or game or even fish, though chicken is considered the most celebratory. There’s an old Hungarian joke that if a peasant kills a chicken either the peasant is sick, or the chicken. This is the dish served in Austria as a goulash, where it’s usually made with beef. It’s never thickened with flour and is not traditionally served with soured cream–but do as you please.
Quantity: Serves 4-6, depending on the size of the bird
Time: Preparation: 30 minutes
Cooking: 50-90 minutes
A 1.5kg/3 lb chicken
750g/1½ lb onions (plenty)
2 garlic cloves
1 heaped tablespoon lard or schmaltz (chicken dripping)
2 tablespoons mild paprika (Noble Rose is the one to choose)
1 teaspoon ground chilli (optional)
Salt
Utensils: A large stew pot or heavy casserole
Joint the chicken into a dozen pieces, including the whole carcass. Peel the onions and slice finely vertically. Peel and crush the garlic with rough salt.
Melt the lard in a heavy casserole and add the onions and the garlic. Fry them gently until golden. Put in the pieces of chicken. Fry them gently too. The whole operation will take 10 minutes and is more like stewing than frying. Add 4 tablespoons water, and stir in the paprika, optional chilli and season with a little more salt. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat, then lid the pot tightly and stew very gently for 50-60 minutes if you have a young bird and for an hour and a half if the bird is an old boiler. Check regularly that the pot has not boiled dry–adding the minimum of water necessary.
To finish the stew, turn up the heat and take the lid off the pot. Watch carefully as the liquid boils nearly clean away and take it off just before anything burns. Paprika is a vegetable and the flavour is fugitive. Serve with egg noodles or rice-shaped pasta. For the digestion, a glass of palinka, the delicious Hungarian fruit brandy, bone dry and very strong, which is drunk both before and after a meal; the most aromatic is barakpalinka, a white brandy made with ripe apricots which tastes, if you shut your eyes, like liquid sunshine.
Suggestions:
• Fish porkolt: The usual choice for this dish is a mild-flavoured freshwater fish, particularly mirror carp, a large-boned, big-scaled white-fleshed fish originally bred for the Lenten table by French monks during the eighteenth century, rapidly achieving popularity throughout the fastobserving Orthodox Catholics of the Eastern Church, and now found on sale in every East European market. Market weight for the pond-reared fish is 2kg/4 lb reached over two years, sold live from holding tanks in the market, chosen and scooped out in a net, gutted and scaled to the customer’s demand. To prepare for a porkolt, make the sauce first, lay in the fish steaks, bubble briefly, lid loosely, turn down the heat and cook gently for 5-10 minutes, until the fish turns opaque. A 2kg/4 lb fish, cleaned, scaled and sliced into thick steaks, will feed 4. To make a Szeged fish soup, the Hungarian bouillabaisse, omit the preliminary frying of the onion and add enough fish stock (made with the head and trimmings) to submerge the steaks completely.
CHICKEN AND VEGETABLE STEW
Jachnia pile (Bulgaria)
East meets West, as is often the way in Middle Europe. The practice of frying food before stewing liquid is added was introduced into the European kitchen from the Middle East. Though the reason usually given for the process is that the application of high heat seals in the meat juices, in reality it does no such thing, since the function of stewing is the breaking down of such barriers. However, the browning of the meat or sugar-rich vegetables (onions, carrots, garlic), gives the dish an appetizing colour and a lovely caramelised flavour.
Quantity: Serves 4 hungry field workers
Time: Preparation: 30 minutes
Cooking: 1 hour
1 large chicken or 2 scraggy Bulgarian barnyard birds
500g/1 lb spring onions with their leaves
2 fresh garlics with leaves or 1 whole head mature garlic
2-3 aubergines
500g/1 lb tomatoes (tinned is fine)
8 tablespoons oil (sunflower or corn oil)
150ml/¼ pint dry red wine
1 tablespoon each fresh savory, mint and parsley
Salt and pepper
Utensils: A medium-sized stew pot with a lid
Chop the chicken into 12 joints (each bird). Top and tail the onions and fresh garlics–if using mature garlic, skin and chop roughly. Hull, wipe and cube the aubergines. Scald and skin the tomatoes (or not, as you please), and chop roughly.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in the casserole. As soon as it’s hot enough to fry, put in the chicken pieces and fry gently till they brown. Push aside (or remove and reserve) and add the onions and garlic. Fry until they soften and take a little colour. Remove and reserve. Add the remaining oil and lightly fry the cubed aubergine, seasoning to encourage the juices to run. Add the tomatoes and the red wine, bubble up and return the chicken and onion-garlic to the pot. Bubble up again, lid, turn down the heat and leave to simmer gently for an hour.
Chop the herbs finely and add them 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time.
Serve with rice or bread and a salad of finely sliced cabbage and salt-pickled vegetables (torshi).
GARLIC CHICKEN
Poulet à l’ail (France)
The gentleman-of-letters who supplied me with this recipe, my brother’s father-in-law, adds this note of warning:
‘Garlic eaters, assuredly wiser than lotus eaters, have to enjoy their pleasure among themselves. Either everybody eats garlic and delights in its beautiful flavour as well as in the vitamins which make it so healthy–or nobody does. People who reek of garlic are pests to their neighbours at parties and in public places. Neither is it advisable to arrive at any love or business appointment in an aura of garlic. The results in both cases could be disappointing. Enjoy your garlic at home parties only, maybe for lunch in the country; but in town, only for supper, so that everybody has a good night’s sleep ahead to eliminate the fragrance which could be unbearable to others. Garlic has to be restrained to private pleasure.’
Now you know.
Quantity: Serves 4
Time: Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 1¼ hours
1 free-range roasting chicken (a beautiful blue-legged poulet de Bresse is perfect)
40 garlic cloves
1 wineglass olive oil
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
Sprigs of thyme, rosemary and mixed herbs (bay, savory, marjoram, chives, hyssop, chervil–but no tarragon)
Utensils: A lidded casserole which will accommodate the whole bird
Preheat the oven to 400°F/200°C/Gas 6.
Wipe the chicken inside and out and truss it neatly. Pour half the oil into the casserole and then put in the unpeeled garlic cloves. Settle the chicken on this pearly bed. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and pour on the rest of the oil. Tuck the herbs all around and on top. Lid tightly, sealing with a flour and water paste if it doesn’t fit absolutely snugly.
Bake for 1¼ hours undisturbed, turning the oven down to 350°F/180°C/Gas 4 after half an hour. Use the last 15 minutes waiting time to prepare a green salad and to cut for each diner 2 or 3 thick slices of bread. Toast the bread under a very hot grill–in Mediterranean markets you can buy wire-and-grid contraptions for toasting bread over a top flame, a process which gives a deliciously singed flavour. Large napkins and fingerbowls will be necessary.
Call your guests to table and carry in the still-sealed container. When everyone is seated, remove the lid. The scent will be heavenly and the chicken perfectly cooked and deliciously succulent. The diners help themselves to bread, a piece of chicken and a few of the whole garlic cloves which are still sealed in their papery jackets. The garlic cloves are to be squeezed onto a piece of hot toasted bread–you will find baked garlic tender and remarkably mild and sweet–and top with a sliver of chicken. Eat it. There are also those who put the garlic cloves straight into the mouth, and then pop the skin with their teeth, after which you have only to solve the delicate problem of transferring the empty shell to the rim of your plate. Take a big draught of cold white wine between bites. Continue till all is finished up. Now you understand the reason for the napkins and fingerbowls.
ROAST CHICKEN WITH BREAD SAUCE
(England)
The classic English way with a bird. The same method can be used for any game bird–pheasant, grouse, partridge–as well as turkey, the festive bird of choice since the Jesuits first imported it from their territories in the Americas. Today’s battery farmers produce table birds so cheaply that roast chicken has overtaken beef as the British Sunday dinner. Before modern times, the rural housewife would never have wasted her laying hens on such an extravagant dish: only rarely would a young rooster have been fattened up for the oven. The bread-and-milk sauce which accompanies appears in no other culinary tradition–although the bread-based soups of the Mediterranean follow the same principles. A direct descendent of the bread-thickened spiced sauces of the Middle Ages, it has the peasant virtue of frugality, making the meat go further, and is, to other Europeans, something of an acquired taste.
Quantity: Serves 4-5
Time: Preparation: 40 minutes
Cooking: 1 hour
For the chicken
1.5kg/3 lb free-range roasting chicken
Walnut-sized knob butter
½ onion
Handful of fresh herbs in a bunch (thyme, rosemary, parsley)
4 finely-sliced rashers smoked streaky bacon or pork fat
The sauce
300ml/½ pint creamy milk
The other half of the onion
3-4 cloves (a luxury for those who could afford this expensive spice–wartime recipes instruct their readers to rinse them off and use them again)
Salt and pepper
50g/2 oz fresh breadcrumbs
1 hazelnut-sized piece butter
Utensils: A roasting tin for the bird, 1 small saucepan for the sauce
Preheat the oven to 375°F/190°C/Gas 5.
Pluck, draw and truss the chicken if this has not already been done for you, reserving the giblets. Spread half the butter over the bird and cover the breast with the bacon or pork fat, tying it in place with a couple of lengths of string. Pop the half onion (no need to skin) inside the cavity along with the herbs and rest of the butter along with the liver trimmed of any bitter green bits. A hollow bird needs something inside to keep it moist as it roasts.
Put the chicken lying on its side in the roasting tin and roast it for 1¼ hours, allowing 25 minutes per pound/half kilo. After 30 minutes, turn the chicken onto its other side. For the last half hour, roast it breast-side up. Baste it with the buttery juices whenever you turn it. Remove the bacon or pork fat from the breast 10 minutes from the end of the cooking to allow the skin to crisp. Test for doneness by piercing the thickest part of the thigh with a skewer–the juices should run clear. If they run pink, it’s not yet done. If they don’t run at all, it’s still raw.
While the chicken roasts, make a stock for the gravy. Put the reserved giblets–gizzard, neck and heart–to simmer with some peppercorns, a bit of onion skin and a bay leaf in enough water to cover.
Meanwhile, prepare the bread sauce. Stick the cloves into the onion and put it with the milk and the breadcrumbs into a small saucepan and leave to infuse on the side of the stove. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, stirring to avoid sticking. Add another handful of breadcrumbs if it is not thick enough–it shouldn’t be too runny. Add salt and plenty of pepper, and stir in the butter and cream.
When the bird is cooked to a turn, transfer it to a serving dish and put it to rest in a barely warm oven while you make a gravy. Strain the giblet stock into the juices in the roasting tin and bubble up fiercely, scraping in all the sticky little well-flavoured bits into the gravy. Tip in any juice from the serving dish. Taste and season. Serve in a separate gravy boat. Carve the bird at table and serve with roast potatoes and two vegetables–choose among a dish of young peas or baby broad beans, green beans, cauliflower dressed with chopped parsley, broccoli, finely-sliced carrots cooked with very little water and a knob of butter. Hand the bread sauce separately and very hot.
Suggestions:
• If you have more than 4 people to feed, make a forcemeat stuffing: fry a handful of minced pork with the chicken liver and a tablespoon of finely-chopped onion, work with its own volume of fresh breadcrumbs, seasoned with parsley, thyme and pepper, and bind with a forked-up egg; stuff inside the bird instead of the half onion and herbs.
• If you’re roasting feathered game–pheasant, partridge, grouse–cook and serve as above, but with the addition of breadcrumbs fried crisp in butter and a sharp fruit jelly–redcurrant for pheasant and partridge, rowan for grouse.
CHICKEN WITH BEER AND CHICORY
Poulet à la biere aux endives (Belgium)
Belgian food, rich with cream and butter, is among the best in Europe. Beer is used as a stewing broth, much as a French housewife uses wine. Endives or chicory–the torpedo-shaped tightlypacked heads of bitter lettuce, also known as witloof, ‘white leaf’–are forced in warmth and darkness throughout the cold months, providing a crop of winter vegetables in a land which could not come by them in any other way.
Quantity: Serves 4
Time: Preparation: 30 minutes
1 chicken, jointed
2 tablespoons seasoned flour
4 chicory heads (endives)
1 large leek
1 large carrot
3 garlic cloves
75-100g/3-4 oz unsalted butter
300ml/½ pint Belgian beer (or any light full-strength beer) 150ml/¼ pint double cream
Salt and pepper
Utensils: A roomy enamel casserole or Dutch oven
Dust the chicken joints in the seasoned flour. Prepare the vegetables: quarter the endives vertically, trim and chunk the leeks, scrape and slice the carrots, skin and crush the garlic.
Set half the butter to heat in a roomy casserole and put in the quartered endives. Let them brown a little. Remove and reserve.
Add the rest of the butter to the hot juices in the casserole and fry the chicken joints gently, turning the pieces until they brown a little all over. Push the chicken to one side, and add the chopped leeks, carrot and garlic. Let them sizzle for 3-4 minutes.
Pour in the beer and let everything bubble up. Tuck in the endives, season with salt and pepper, lid and turn down the heat. Let the pot simmer gently for an hour, until the chicken is tender–add a little water if necessary. Pile the meat and vegetables onto a hot plate.
Stir the cream into the remaining juices in the casserole, adjust the seasoning (perhaps a little sugar?), and reheat.
Pour the sauce over all and serve piping hot, with brown bread for mopping.
CHICKEN OR TURKEY WITH YOGHURT
Pile s kiselo mlyako (Bulgaria)
The combination of boned-out poultry and thick creamy yoghurt shows the Ottoman influence on the cookery of the Balkans. Also good made with an elderly pheasant, a bird native to those parts.
Quantity: Serves 4
Time: Preparation: 40 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes
500g/1 lb boneless chicken or turkey
2 garlic cloves
Salt and pepper
6 tablespoons pumpkin or sunflower oil
1 level tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 lemon
2 leeks
2 green peppers
500g/1 lb piece pumpkin or carrots
500g/1 lb tomatoes (tinned is fine)
Handful parsley and mint
To finish
150ml/¼ pint thick strained yoghurt
Utensils: A heavy casserole with a lid
Finely chop or mince the deboned chicken or turkey meat. Skin and crush the garlic cloves with a teaspoon of rough salt and work it into the mince along with a pinch of freshly-ground pepper, a tablespoon of the oil, paprika, cumin and the zest and juice of the lemon, and leave aside to marinate while you prepare the vegetables.
Wash and slice the leeks. Hull and de-seed the peppers and chop roughly. Scald the tomatoes–plunge them into boiling water–and slip off the skins (not necessary if using tinned). Peel and de-seed the pumpkin or marrow and chunk into bite-sized pieces. Peel and dice the cucumber, salt lightly and put in a colander to drain. Rinse and finely chop the parsley and mint.
Form the mince into a dozen small patties, kneading to make a soft paste. Heat the oil in the casserole and fry the patties till they take a little colour, then remove and reserve. Add the leeks and peppers to the oily juices and turn them till they fry a little. Add the tomatoes and bubble up. Place the patties on top, bubble up again, lid and leave to simmer gently for 15 minutes. Add the cucumber, bubble up again, then lid and simmer for another 15 minutes. Sprinkle in the herbs and serve in the casserole with the yoghurt spooned over the top. Turkish coffee, fresh walnuts with honey and a nip of plum brandy, slivova, will round off the meal to perfection.
GUINEA FOWL
All recipes for chicken and feathered game are suitable for this recently-domesticated bird, now well-established in the French barnyard and becoming increasingly popular in Britain. The meat is comparatively lean, with a flavour somewhere between pheasant and free-range chicken. Particularly suitable for recipes which include wild mushrooms. Remember the guinea fowl if you come across a few morels in the spring meadows, or chanterelles in the woods in autumn.
DUCK AND GOOSE
Water birds–duck and goose–retain, even when domesticated, the characteristics which allow them to survive in the wild. Their meat is darker and more muscular than barnyard birds and they’re more richly endowed with protective fat than warm-weather fowl–chicken, turkey and guinea fowl–whose ancestors thrived in the tropics. Throughout the Balkans you’ll still see the protective wicker-work fences which keep predators at bay–wolves and bears still roam the remote mountains and forests–allowing barnyard birds to roam free in the yard during the day, protected by the basketwork walls which encircle both isolated dwellings and whole villages.
DUCK WITH CUCUMBER
Patka cucurbita (Romania)
Duck and goose bones weigh heavy, so there is always comparatively little meat on the birds. Romanian farmwives used the soft breast feathers of their domestic ducks for stuffing the household’s bedding and pillows.
Quantity: Serves 4
Time: Preparation: 30 minutes
Cooking: 40 minutes
1 domestic duck or 2 wild mallard
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram
500g/1 lb pickling onions or small shallots
4 tablespoons sunflower oil
1 glass white wine
500g/1 lb baby pickling cucumbers
Utensils: A large casserole with a lid, a frying pan
If using domestic duck, wipe and quarter. If using wild birds, wipe and chop in half. Rub with salt, pepper and marjoram. Skin the pickling onions or shallots, leaving them whole.
Heat the oil in the casserole and put in the duck pieces and onions or shallots and turn them until they take colour. Add the wine, bubble up, lid tightly, turn down the heat and leave to cook gently for 30-40 minutes until the duck pieces are perfectly tender and the onions are soft.
Meanwhile dice or grate the cucumbers, salt lightly and put them in a colander to drain. Ten minutes before the end of the cooking time, add the cucumber, bubble up and finish cooking everything together.
Serve after a dish of mamaliga baked with cream. Cool white wine to accompany.
POTTED GOOSE OR DUCK
Confit d’oie ou de canard (France)
All of Europe’s domestic geese are descended directly from the wild goose, Anser segetum. Best for roasting is the breed known as the grey or farmyard goose which attains a weight of around 5kg/10 lb in its first year. The goose which is fattened up for the sake of its delicious buttery liver is the Toulouse goose, a handsome fellow who attains a net weight of up to 12kg/24 lb–of which up to 2kg/4 lb can be liver. This larger bird, being overly rich, is wasted in the roasting oven but perfect for the confit pot–a large earthenware jar in which the meat to be preserved is sealed under its own fat, a process designed to exclude air, providing one of the most useful of all France’s household conserves.
The meat of a goose or duck preserved in this way is succulent and wonderfully well flavoured, while the goose butter itself is used for flavouring and enriching dishes of vegetables, potatoes, pulses–the garbures and bean dishes which defy the icy winds that sweep the plains of France’s central plateau–transforming the simplest foods into a feast.
The household confit is prepared sometime between mid-October and the beginning of January, when the geese that have been fattened up for the Christmas foie gras are sent to market. Mme Escrieux, my nearest neighbour during a school year I spent with my children in the Languedoc, fattened her own geese on walnuts from the tree in her yard. She prepared two birds for her own household stores and three or four more as a small cash crop. As well as walnuts, acorns and maize formed the diet of the birds, along with hedgerow greens the children gathered on their way back from school. By early September the noisy white and grey birds had disappeared from the yard and la mère Escrieux was to be seen disappearing into one of her steadings with a funnel and a basket of fermented walnut debris from Monsieur’s home made vin de noix. Her goose livers, as you might suppose, were magnificent.
Preparing the geese for market has always been the business of the women, as is all other barnyard business including care of the plump doves in the pigeonnier and overseeing the business of egg gathering–activities which produced corner-of-the-apron money, the housewife’s sole source of income, cash being a crop like any other. Every Saturday, Madame Escrieux would pack whatever was to taken to Revel market into bulging wicker baskets which were loaded onto her son’s battered pickup truck. During the run-up to Christmas and the New Year, the geese were slaughtered, plucked and polished like pearls and laid out on freshly laundered white cloths which covered the trestle tables under the central shelter. Here, along with dozens of other farmwives selling identical wares, Madame Escrieux answered searching questions about the diet and habitat of the birds–necessary since the size of the liver, sold unseen inside the bird, is at the customer’s own risk.
Once her sales were completed, Madame Escrieux would replace the year’s crop with newly-hatched goslings from a box beneath a conveniently adjacent poultry stall. The cycle began again as soon as she returned home and the fluffy little creatures were installed in a warm corner of the farmhouse kitchen, tucked cosily into a shoebox lined with an old winter coat. There they stayed, cosseted like new-born babies, till the first warm days of spring.
Quantity: Enough to keep a small family supplied through the winter
Time: Preparation: Start two days ahead
Cooking: 2 hours intermittent attention
2 foie-gras goose or 3 foie-gras duck carcasses
Salt
6 garlic cloves
Small bunch thyme
Additional goose or duck fat if fattened birds are not available
6 cloves
1 teaspoon peppercorns
Utensils: A very heavy iron pot and a large straight-sided earthenware jar
Quarter the birds and remove all the interior fat, reserving the livers and giblets for the recipes which follow. Put the golden fat to render very slowly in the iron pot until completely liquefied–around 30 minutes–and reserve. Save the little crisp golden nuggets which are all that remain of the solids, and salt them for children to nibble or to toss on a salad.
Meanwhile, rub the goose joints with rough salt and place in a bowl. Leave them to cure in their own brine for at least 24 hours. Brush off excess salt and pat dry. Warm the reserved rendered fat along with as much extra fat as required–you’ll need enough to completely submerge the joints–with the garlic cloves (peeled or not, as you please), thyme, cloves and peppercorns, roughly crushed. When hot but not smoking, put in the goose joints and poach gently for an hour–bubbles should form around the meat but no smoke should be visible–till thoroughly cooked through. Test through the thickest parts with a skewer to make sure the juices run perfectly clear.
Meanwhile, scrub and scald the earthenware crock and dry in a warm oven. Remove the joints from their bath and pack them into the crock. Pour the fat over all, making sure all the pieces are completely submerged. Allow to cool overnight. Next day, pour another layer of melted fat over the top to make a seal. Press a circle of greaseproof paper directly onto the solidified fat, and tie more paper over the top.
Confit can be kept for months in a cool dry larder. Whenever you take out a goose joint, make sure the pieces which remain are completely covered with fat.
Suggestions:
• Essential in a cassoulet and the garbure; there are many other delicious dishes in which the confit stars:
• Confit with Potatoes: Take out a piece of confit and warm it in its own fat. Meanwhile boil sufficient potatoes–bearing in mind that a sufficiency of this dish is never quite enough. When the potatoes are soft, slice them while they are still hot and put them to sauté in the goose fat. They are ready when they are golden brown and flecked with little crisp bits. For absolute perfection, include a few slivers of black Périgord truffle. Even the medieval Albigensians, whose heresy held the world the domain of the devil, judged the dish the closest thing to heaven.
• Confit with Cèpes: Take out a piece of confit and warm it in its own fat. Wipe and slice the fungi and a sauté them in the goose fat. As they fry, toss in a few garlic cloves crushed with salt and a handful of chopped parsley. There’s something deeply compatible about goose and mushrooms.
• Confit with Cabbage: Slice, rinse and cook the cabbage in the water which clings to the leaves after washing. Take out a piece of confit and melt it gently in a pan. Remove and reserve the confit and keep it warm. Fry the cooked, drained cabbage in the melted fat till it gilds a little, sprinkle with caraway and salt, return the confit to the pan and braise all together, loosely lidded for 20 minutes.
POTTED GOOSE LIVER
Confit de foie gras (France)
Selecting your foie gras raw for potting is much easier if it has already been removed from the original owner. If the liver is still in the bird, as is not unusual in French country markets in goose-fattening areas, feel the tautness of the skin and the swell of the curve. A plump skin, pearly with fat, is a fair indication the liver will be equally plump and pearly. If the liver is laid out for inspection, you’re looking for firmness and paleness–ivory is the colour to look for–only lightly tinged with pink and without dark veining. The fattened-liver tradition can be traced back to the days of the Pharaohs in Egypt: the wild geese which gorged themselves on the sweet grasses of the Nile flood-plain found themselves unable to take flight. In France, Toulouse, Périgueux and Strasbourg are the main centres of production. Austria, Hungary and former Czechoslovakia also produce fattened livers, though they never seem to achieve the creamy perfection of the handreared Toulouse goose.
Quantity: Serves 6-8
Time: Start a day ahead
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 1-1½ hours
1 fresh foie gras (1-2kg/2-4 lb)
1-2 tablespoons rough salt
1 tablespoon marc or white brandy (optional)
Utensils: Conserving jars with screw or snap-top lids and a large saucepan or deep roasting tin
If the foie gras is still in the bird, detach it with care, looking out for the dark green gall bladder which must not be allowed to spill its bitter juices on the liver. Check for and remove with a small sharp knife any dark blood vessels or veins. Place the liver on a clean plate and sprinkle with salt; place another clean plate on top and weight it down with a few tins. You may also, if you like, sprinkle a tablespoon of marc or white brandy over the foie. (Madame Escrieux, whose instructions these are, preferred to drink the brandy as she contemplated the pleasure to come.) Leave overnight.
Next day, drain off the juices, dust off excess salt and pat dry. Sterilise the conserving jars–wash thoroughly and pop in a low oven for 20 minutes to dry. Cram the liver, divided as appropriate, into the conserving jars, seal down and place the jars in a pan of water which comes right up the sides. Boil steadily for 1 hour if each jar contains 500g/1 lb foie, for 1½ hours if the foie is 1kg/2 lb. Or stand the jars in a baking tray with boiling water and bake at 350°F/180°C/Gas 4 for 10 minutes longer than you need for the top heat.
The jars will keep perfectly, unopened and in a cool larder, for several months–if you can withstand the temptation. The French enjoy their foie gras with a glass of the finest sweet wine the neighbourhood can produce–Montbazillac, Sauternes, those who live near Chateau Yquem are doubly blessed.
BRAISED GOOSE GIBLETS
Alicot de gesiers (France)
Yet another use for another part of the mighty goose–even the bones make a wonderful stock for a lentil soup. In fact, there’s barely a part of the creature which cannot be made into something delicious. For an alicot, you will need the giblets (all but the foie gras, of course) from 2-3 fine fat geese on market day–delicacies often sold separately from the liver and the carcass. If fattened geese are not a speciality of your area, the dish can be made with the giblets of an ordinary roasting goose or duck. However, you will miss the pale sweet goose fat which Roman gourmets, who prized it more highly than butter, considered an aphrodisiac. Their ladies, more sensibly, used it as a cosmetic–as a body cream and to beautify their complexions.
Quantity: Serves 6-8
Time: Preparation: 30 minutes
Cooking: 2 hours
1kg/2 lb goose or duck giblets (heart, gizzard, neck, wingtips, livers if available)
500g/1 lb onions
4 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons goose-dripping or pure white pork lard
250g/8 oz salt pork (petit salé) or unsmoked streaky bacon, diced
3 large carrots
500g/1 lb tomatoes (tinned is fine)
300ml/½ pint stock or white wine and water
½ teaspoon crushed peppercorns
small bunch bay leaf, rosemary, thyme, parsley
Utensils: A heavy casserole with a lid
Pick over, trim, wipe and slice the giblets as necessary. Skin and chop the onion and garlic. Melt the dripping in the casserole, add the onion and garlic and leave to fry gently while you dice the pork fat or bacon. Push the onions to one side and add the giblets and the diced pork or bacon.
Preheat the oven to 300°F/150°C/Gas 2.
Leave all sizzling gently while you scrape and slice the carrots, Peel and chop the tomatoes–to loosen the skins ready for peeling, cover with boiling water. Tomato skins never seem to break down however long you cook them, and end up, even after a couple of hour’s stewing, marooned in the sauce like spars from a shipwreck. Tinned tomatoes come ready-skinned.
Add the tomatoes to the pan, bubble up and stew all together for 5 minutes. Add the stock or wine and water, crushed peppercorns and a little salt, bubble up again and tuck in the herbs tied in a bunch. Cover tightly and transfer to the oven to simmer slowly for 2-3 hours, till perfectly tender.
Delicious with a dish of plain-cooked white beans, stewed at the same time with a few garlic cloves and a clove or two for flavouring.
Suggestions:
• The giblets cooked plainly without vegetables or pot herbs, can be potted in the same way as foie gras–delicious warmed in their own fat and tossed onto a plain salad of bitter winter leaves.