2 
CHARCUTERIE
T he fattest pig in the Toronto club district will invariably be found at Buca Osteria & Enoteca, near the intersection of King Street West and Portland Street. So when I dropped by one Monday early in May 2011, I was unsurprised to look in the walk-in fridge and behold the severed head and twin hanging sides of a genuine suino pesante—a voluptuous porcine stunner. The butcher had claimed that when she was still waddling she had tipped the scales impressively close to four hundred pounds. And four hundred pounds undressed was precisely what Buca executive chef Rob Gentile had been dreaming about. For when it comes to the art of charcuterie—of which Gentile is a master—that weight is the magic number. And especially so for prosciuttos, because four-hundred-pounders always have great legs, full buttocks, and good musculature. And if the pig got that way on a quality cereal diet, then good health and great flavour is all but guaranteed, too.
Gentile had known as much for some time. But it had been driven home with fresh resonance on a recent and long-awaited salumi fact-finding excursion to Italy, where he had spent a week as a stage in the hard-working company of the artisan farmer Carlo Pieri at his family estate, Azienda Agricola Poggio Stenti. The farm is in southern Tuscany, up in the hills that roll from the dormant volcano Monte Amiata all the way to Maremma. Carlo is the head of the third generation of Pieris to have worked that parcel of land. It includes an olive grove from which they press their own oil. And it comprises a vineyard, too, which yields much-lauded Tribolo and Pian di Staffa. But it was as usual the pigs that had piqued Gentile’s interest: four-hundred-pound black pigs that Carlo Pieri raises largely on feed that he grows, mills, and mixes to his own highly particular formula.
“You expect pigs to eat slop and scraps out of a trough—at least that was the perception I had, and the image I remembered from when I was young,” Gentile told me. “So it was kind of weird seeing them eat oats and grains and meal mixed up in a dry cereal. It’s powdery and dry and they always had it stuck all over their faces when they finished eating, like they just put their heads in a chalk bin, which is pretty funny. They were the healthiest animals I’ve ever seen.”
Five of those pigs were slaughtered each day at an abattoir two hours up the road, to which Pieri and Gentile drove the pigs themselves (“which was interesting,” Gentile adds, “as the pigs were two and a half times my size”). Il mattatoio was impeccable (“like, in the middle of nowhere and it’s spotless—hospital-clean—I was blown away”). While the pigs were being slaughtered, and the on-site inspectors undertook their meticulous examination of the organs to ensure that they were disease free, Gentile and Pieri passed the time sitting about with the other workers, snacking on salsiccia cruda (raw pork sausage) and various other salumi that Pieri had brought along from his aging cellar or from the family bottega, Macelleria Norcineria, in the village of Sant’Angelo Scalo, in Montalcino.
“He’s a farmer who does it all—a real norcino,” Gentile explained to me, deploying a term that Italians use to denote a salumi master, rather than someone who hails from the de facto salumi capital of Norcia, in Umbria. “It’s the one trip I’ve been wanting to do ever since we opened.”
This was in May 2011; Buca had opened in October 2009. The trouble with getting away any time sooner was that the restaurant had been a far greater success out of the starting gate than anyone involved in its planning had dared to hope. Part of that had to do with the fact that openings of quality restaurants like Buca were a rarity in recessionary 2009—in Toronto and just about everywhere. The element of surprise was that Gentile was just twenty-nine, had never been an executive chef before, and was not a known commodity around town outside of his industry. It was in fact the (Top) chef and restaurateur Mark McEwan who strongly suggested I pop down to club land and try Buca, for Gentile had worked for McEwan for seven years as a sous-chef at his restaurants Bymark, North 44, and One. In the process Gentile had undoubtedly learned something of the finesse, cost planning, and quality control that is the collective McEwan hallmark. And when Gentile applied all that to his true culinary passion—the food of his nonna—the results were golden. It took just one visit to persuade me that Buca was the best and most authentic Italian restaurant in town. Many others agreed, and there had been a waiting list for bookings most evenings since. Success was gratifying, but made it almost impossible for Gentile to get away. Until, in 2011, Buca’s owners, Peter Tsebelis and Gus Giazitzidis, sensibly thought to make their young executive chef a partner. Various Buca spawn—starting with Bar Buca, nearby on King Street—were suddenly on the horizon, and the frequent travels to Italy that Tsebelis and Giazitzidis undertook to trawl pleasurably for fresh ideas to help move those projects along were now open to Gentile, too. The three generally travel together at first, and then Gentile splits off to do a stage somewhere, reconvening with Tsebelis and Giazitzidis in Rome. His first stage was at Poggio Stenti.
“‘I thought I was pretty good, but I’m a novice,” Gentile told me of how his salumi skills stacked up abroad, as he prepared to get to work on his new pig that sunny spring day. “There’s so much refinement there compared to what we’re doing here. This guy made pork liver sausage with gallbladder, cheek, and the bloody parts of the neck!”
Until then, said mozzafegato (which translates as “liverkiller,” a moniker conceived in deference to its fegato-threatening richness) was not something one found hanging amongst the treasures in the glass-fronted Buca aging room. But on any given day there was plenty else of interest that could be seen dangling from the rafters—almost all of it prepared for the hook by chef Gentile. (His uncle had also contributed a cut or two.) Limbs were clearly a family specialty. Some had once belonged to lambs, others to wild boar, and even to goats. Once, I got a text message from Gentile suggesting I drop by to sample his newest take on Italian-Canadian salumi: prosciutto of bison leg. But most of the prosciuttos were pork: modest-sized legs, harvested from Yorkshire and Tamworth pigs, and other, massive ones plucked from their Rubenesque brethren, the Berkshire. There were liverbased salumi, and curing sausages made from minced horsemeat. Pancetta and other basics were always stacked high against the display window, which is across the corridor from the cellar in the passageway leading to the rear dining room. Most intriguingly—or at any rate, representing a first for me—a handful of items hanging there had never been ambulatory. Namely duck egg yolks, drying in pouches of cheesecloth until they became as firm as Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good pecorino and could be similarly grated over pizzas and carpaccios for an enriching kick. And today Gentile was planning on adding two new items to his ever-expanding catalogue: the aforementioned mozzafegato and a second freshly learned trick.
“Carlo taught me how to do prosciutto from the shoulder,” Gentile related, his excitement palpable as he introduced this radical salumi-for-the-masses notion that each pig on earth might conceivably yield four prosciuttos rather than the conventional pair. “You have to bone it, to take the plate out—it’s shaped sort of like a fish. And when you’re done the cut looks fantastic. If you didn’t know, you’d think it was a normal prosciutto from the hind leg.”
Gentile wears his hair buzzed short, if not clean off, and he is fit and trim—rather shockingly so for a man so preoccupied with pork and its myriad fatty trimmings. But then, it takes a certain strength and agility to move whole sides of monster pigs around one’s kitchen—especially a kitchen like that at Buca, which is long and narrow like a Roman slave galley. At the southern end you find the hot kitchen, with the grills, burners, and pizza ovens, wide open and overlooking the main dining room. But the prep kitchen, on the northern side, beyond the service bar, is fully enclosed. Which is a good thing, for this is where the butchery takes place.
Gentile and his (then) executive sous-chef, Ryan Campbell, began with the pig’s right side, placing it gently on the counter lengthwise and skin side down. A row of plastic bins and bus pans had been arranged in a row along the back of the counter, some of them labelled for their contents, others speaking for themselves. The unlabelled tray bearing an inch-deep layer of coarse grey salt from Île de Ré clearly awaited individually filleted muscles of hind leg for prosciuttini, small fillets of prosciutto that cure far more quickly than a full leg. Hard back fat and firm, dark cuts of pork were destined for the bin labelled “salumi,” and softer, paler meat and dry, crumbly fat would be placed in the tray labelled “finocchiona,” to make the Tuscan pork sausage heavily seasoned with wild fennel seeds. Another, marked “mozzafegato,” would take all the dark cuts from the neck and other tasty trimmings allotted to be mixed with pork liver and other offal for Gentile’s inaugural run at this newly learned sausage. Some soft fat would be set aside for sugnatora, the mix of puréed fat, salt, and pepper that is smeared over raw legs of ham as insulation to keep them moist as they age and cure. Then there were large bins for the prized cotenna (skin) and bones, and finally, those off-offcuts destined for staff meals. Off to the side, filleting knives of varying lengths and rigidity were arranged in a row, along with the more rudimentary but equally necessary hacksaw.
“There’s no way this pig was four hundred pounds. Why do they always do this to me? They call up and say, ‘We’ve got one ready, we’ve got one ready.’ Sure you do,” Gentile muttered as he sized up his side of pork. And he continued grumbling as he assessed the location of the cut in the neck that severed the pig’s head from the rest of the carcass. “The second vertebra is the second vertebra! I explained this to him ten times … ”
The head in question was standing upright on the stump of its neck at the end of the counter, eyes shut but with ears erect and seemingly alert. I could not help but think of the Lord of the Flies, glowering at Ralph and asking, “Aren’t you afraid of me?”—but I did my best to instead stay focused on the crisis of the precise vertebral location of its decapitation. The crux of the issue is that if you cut higher than the second vertebra, you compromise the future guanciale, the cured jowl meat that must be used for making, say, a carbonara (even though the standard Americanized Italian recipe book typically suggests pancetta or, worse, bacon). If on the other hand you cut too low, you endanger the coppa—cured collar—or the prosciutto that could be cut from the shoulder.
As for the size of the animal, the fact of the matter is that while smaller pigs lend themselves beautifully to being cooked fresh, bigger ones are always better for the long-term, slow-maturing purposes of charcuterie. For the more developed musculature of a larger pig means more flavour, and the meat retains better texture when dry-cured, just as surely as the smaller animal will yield more supple, tender results after a stint on the grill or in the oven. Most pigs destined for cooking are slaughtered at an undressed weight no greater that 190 pounds. Keeping a few around until they reach double that weight throws the routine on the farm. Most farmers do not want Refrigerator Perry in the barnyard, disturbing the peace at the trough, so they get anxious to see large pigs dispatched to the slaughterhouse even as they crest three hundred pounds. Hence the possible exaggeration of this swine’s weight over the phone.
Regardless, Gentile had already decided to proceed with a different supplier, one specializing in a different mix of heritage breeds. He did not like the way the Tamworth-Berkshire cross he had long been working with filled out when fattened beyond their conventional two-hundred-pound final weigh-in. “That bloodline is just no good for being slaughtered at four hundred pounds,” Gentile explains. “At that weight their fat is just out of hand.” So the chef had instead secured an exclusive-supply arrangement with Max and Vicki Lass at Church Hill farm in Punkeydoodles Corners, near Stratford, Ontario. They specialize in British heritage breeds like Jersey Red and Large Black, which when combined possess ideal qualities for a large pig: more intramuscular fat, less flab, a good layer of top-quality back fat, and fine, crumbly, hard fat, too.
In the meantime Gentile had no choice but to proceed with what he had. To begin, he cut and pried free the ribcage in a single sheet that I was thinking would smoke nicely, for a magnificently Brobdingnagian rack of barbecued ribs. But Gentile had more Italian plans: he would instead braise the ribs, and then shred the exceptionally tasty meat that lies between the bones for scattering over his con cicorilli pizzas. Moving on, the belly was trimmed and separated from the loin. The former would be shaped into a perfect rectangle and then cured as pancetta, while the latter, after a similar treatment, would become lonzino . The hind leg surrendered its muscles as individual fillets for the cause of prosciuttini, which would cure in months instead of the year or so required for a full prosciutto.
The second side of pork was cut very differently. Most of the hind leg was removed as a single large fillet, to be made into that most treasured of Italian hams, the culatello. First its fat was trimmed down to a reasonable covering, then it was tied into the customary pear shape, salted, and dispatched to cure in a cold room for a week. At that point of the culatello process in Italy, the ham would traditionally be wrapped in a pig’s bladder, tied again, and hung up to cure in a cold, humid cellar teeming with eager mould spores. But here in Toronto, where pigs’ bladders are all but impossible to procure, Gentile instead uses an envelope made from reconstituted natural sausage casings—intestines—which does close to the same job. After the ham is wrapped and tied again, the covering is punctured all over so that enzymes may properly penetrate the meat and do their tenderizing work. Then it would be strung up for many months.
As Gentile finished the culatello, Campbell was working on the rest of the fresh side. This time he kept loin and belly attached, trimmed it neatly, and seasoned it heavily with salt, garlic, and rosemary. Then he rolled the loin up snugly in its flap of belly, skin side out, and tied it in a roll. This, of course, is porchetta, the ultimate pork roast. “They did a nice job scalding the skin and getting the hair off it. It’s really smooth. It’s a nice pig to work with,” Campbell said, making peace with the pig as he finished up with the prize cut. The massive roast was then whisked away to the oven, for even at high temperature it would take many hours to cook through and yield its inimitably crisp skin and moist, bellyinsulated roast loin. The porchetta was scheduled as an evening special, and I was sorry that I would not be there to help eat it.
Gentile, meanwhile, was lost in the task at hand—butchering his first foreleg-and-shoulder prosciutto. He too had evidently come to terms with the pig, for rather than complain any more, he was stooped low over the cut he was working on, concentrating hard. He steered the tip of his filleting knife with the fingers of his left hand even as he grasped its handle in his right—to ensure superior accuracy in his cuts. Peeling back the skin and trimming a little of the fat from the shoulder appeared to be a fairly straightforward procedure. But extracting the blade bone from the shoulder was evidently no mean feat. Even with a filleting knife, it involved as much scraping as slicing. Cutting the muscle from the exposed inner side of the bone was the easy part. On the outside, though, there was virtually no insulating flesh between the bone and the skin that covered it, and the two were most stubbornly attached. If the skin was punctured while being separated from the bone, the cut of pork would no longer be usable as a prosciutto, because the boned shoulder needs the skin both for protection as it cures and for structural integrity as it hangs. “You break through, it’s done,” Gentile stated matter-of-factly. Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes spent crouched low over the troublesome bone, Gentile pried it free of the meat and skin around it, pivoted it upward from where it met the shoulder joint, and with a final stroke of his knife, triumphantly detached it.
“YEAH! I got it!” he barked as he stood up straight. “Not as good as Carlo—but good enough to cure!”
After a few more minutes of trimming and general prettification, the foreleg really did give a convincing impression of being a hind limb. Yes, it was a little slender in the shank. But the thick, perfect oval of pork perched on top of that, marbled and capped with generous layers of fat, lent the package convincing hind-leg heft. So the passing parade of sous-chefs and kitchen hands muttered in awe and admiration.
“That’s a foreleg?!”
“Yes.”
“No fucking way!”
The comments continued long after Gentile had wandered off—without saying a word, as if his new trick had been nothing. He then settled contentedly in the back dining room with a laptop, to write the evening menu. Campbell would take on the salatura—the salting—of the foreleg and the rest of the finishing up.
Buca means “pit,” and the restaurant takes its name from its location, which is well below street level. A century ago it was the boiler room for the factory and warehouse buildings that still stand to either side of it. To get to Buca you must first enter a gated laneway off King Street and follow it to its end. Locate the discreet sign, open the glass doors alongside, and descend the curved staircase that overlooks the Buca lounge—which is not so much a draw in itself as a holding bay for diners awaiting tables in one of the two dining rooms that flank it. Once installed there and equipped with an aperitivo or a glass of wine, you may want to have a look around and marvel a little at how local enthusiasts of such hearty and authentic Italian food manage to stay so trim. But in time—if you are anything like me—your eyes will stray upward, over the bar, to the glass window on the aging fridge built into the wall above. A few large prosciuttos that will not fit in the main aging room are always hanging on display there, and the last time I checked, some nine months after I watched Gentile prepare his first shoulder prosciutto, the ham in question was hanging there amongst them, luscious and beckoning, but untouched. It was still not ready.
But fortunately the aging lockers at Buca are loaded with salumi that enjoyed a head start on that intriguing prosciutto. So if you order a salumi board there you will not miss it. In fact the Buca selection has never been better—in variety, or quality. When the restaurant opened, their cured ham usually came from Mario Pingue’s Niagara Food Specialties. And while Pingue’s prosciutto is occasionally excellent, to me it more often than not tastes like it was rushed through its aging paces to meet the burgeoning and generally forgiving local demand. Gentile’s house-made prosciutto is a considerable improvement. And the better that prosciutto turns out, the more adventurous and experimental Gentile becomes.Hence the bison leg. If he has some of that startlingly purple-hued meat on hand when you drop by, do try it, for its combination of assertive flavour and lean, dry bresaola-like texture combine for a unique experience. His culatello is supple and moist. Each of the cured sausages featuring liver or blood are rich and complex and not to be missed. Whether made of pork or lamb, his coppa is creamy and seductive. He also makes great lardo—cured strips of pure back fat—which he serves with an addictive fried bread common to Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont called gnocco fritto. These crisp, salty pillows of deep-fried dough puff up like pommes soufflées, and when you pierce them and then drape the lardo over the fresh, steam-billowing perforation, the cured fat is warmed and becomes even softer and creamier for it.
All the same, I have to say that almost all of the women I have taken to Buca have proved immune to its charms. Neither do they much warm to the idea of Gentile’s salsiccia cruda, the raw pork sausage Chef serves exclusively on days when he butchers a fresh pig. The salumi and charcuterie phenomenon has generally not been a treasured development for the female diner, who, under perennial pressure to stay trim, generally knows that you do not get or stay that way when you snack regularly on strips of unadulterated fat. Many men feel the same way. One of the most intriguing things about the trend of the charcuterie board is that—rather like the tasting menus that ruled fine dining five years previous—it is often more of a chef’s playground and showcase than it is about pleasing the majority of the customers. Innumerable chefs have told me over the years that they do not sell charcuterie in a manner even close to reflecting the coverage the items receive in the food pages. Even at the peak of the trend, in 2008, chef Mark McEwan, who probably knows numbers as well as or better than anyone else in the industry, told me that no other dish on any of his menus would keep its place there if it sold as little as did the charcuterie board at Bymark. Bymark’s was a good one, too, with two excellent terrines (one foie gras, the other rabbit and squab) that were prime examples of the sort of thing one should sensibly order in restaurants—because they take many tedious hours to make, and there was no way of preparing a batch that was not twenty times larger than what a home cook needed or wanted. All the same, few ordered it—but food writers wrote about it.
When I was the food writer and restaurant critic at the National Post, in the early 2000s, I was doubtless one of those charcuterie proponents who did not stop to consider the true level of public appetite for fatty, salty cured meats. But with good reason: my justification was entirely selfish. For one of the more difficult aspects of moving to Toronto from Montreal, as I did in 1995, was the local dearth of decent pâtés, terrines, and cured sausages. Procuring a pricey terrine of foie gras was never a problem. But the day-to-day necessities that I had long been accustomed to keeping in the fridge for a ready snack even on a university student’s budget—pâté de campagne, say, or terrine of rabbit with pistachios, or mousse de foies de volailles—were suddenly all but impossible to come by. When you did manage to find them they were priced like delicacies instead of staples, and even then, the quality was dodgy. You did not go to the store and pick what you wanted freshly sliced from a selection of terrines a dozen strong, as at any Quebec supermarket. Instead you picked from squashed, aging vacuum-packaged pre-sliced cuts of greying terrines that invariably tasted of bread crumbs and other mealy filler. The only rillettes to be found in town were imported from New York State, where they were manufactured at the D’Artagnan factory, which churned the stuff out as chunky as steak and kidney pie. On the cured-sausage front, no one seemed to have heard of gendarmes or rosettes de Lyons. And needless to say, in a town where chefs made the front of the food section just for grilling a bit of horsemeat that you can find at any Métro supermarket in Quebec, chances of finding a nice dried horsemeat-spiked sausage like saucissons d’Arles were nil.
So when local chefs made their initial moves into the arena of charcuterie, it seemed essential to hungrily applaud whenever possible. When the Oliver-Bonacini restaurant group opened an upscale bistro in downtown Toronto called Biff’s with rabbit rillettes on the menu, I overlooked the fact that there was butter in the mix instead of animal fat sourced from a rabbit or pig and just praised it for being smooth and for containing meat that had been properly shredded. And a few years later, when rather basic terrines and pâtés started showing up incongruously on expensive tasting menus—say, a veal-cheek-in-aspic number served to me as a course in a $150 menu at the now defunct Perigee, in Toronto’s Distillery District—I did my best to eat my fix and keep the giggling private.
Soon, those early murmurings of discovery in charcuterie began to snowball. In 2006, cured Serrano ham from Spain arrived noisily in town and immediately began appearing with much fanfare on our most expensive menus—even francophile ones, like The Fifth’s, the once great French restaurant tucked over a club on Richmond Street. Local food writers fell over themselves to praise the stuff; one restaurant critic (okay, it was Amy Pataki at the Toronto Star) even described, in a review of Chris McDonald’s Cava, how the taste of the fat of the Serrano hinted “at the acorns the pigs had grazed on.” Alas, she must have looked up the wrong ham in the dictionary, for the famous jamón ibérico, or pata negra, which does graze on acorns, were still not being legally imported here. Neither were any decent Serrano hams, because Spain was still assessed as a risk for “classic swine fever,” and the only Serrano ham that was being legally imported was the cheap, mass-market stuff that the Spaniards make with pigs sourced from countries free of swine fever such as Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. If you wanted to taste acorns in your cured ham, you would have to wait another two years for the import of pata negra to Canada to become legal.
Or—if like me you lacked that kind of patience—you could instead slip $300 in cash to a certain restaurateur in Little Portugal who each Christmas thoughtfully smuggled a dozenodd full bone-in legs of pata negra vacuum-packed and buried in containers of Mediterranean fish. Or you could lean on a Toronto distributor of fine Quebec cheeses—Cole Snell, founder of Provincial Fine Foods—who by late 2006 had secured an exclusive deal for importing fabulous prosciuttini from an Iowa farmer and charcutier named Herb Eckhouse, whose company, La Quercia, made a ham labelled rossa from Berkshire pigs that grazed on acorns. These were heady days for lovers of pork cookery, which is all that charcuterie really means.
And thinking back to those glorious times, I have to hand it to chef Marc Thuet for presenting charcuterie in the form that I consider to be its apotheosis (even if the chef disagrees). Choucroute garnie first appeared on the menu at his restaurant Bistro and Bakery Thuet, on King Street West, in the dark days of winter, 2005, brightening it immeasurably on the spot. I had first eaten choucroute garnie in 1990 in Paris, with my mother and my father, who was on a book tour for the French publication of Solomon Gursky Was Here. After landing at Charles de Gaulle airport we proceeded directly to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, stopping at Hotel Duc de Saint Simon only long enough to drop our bags and then reconvene in the lobby. From there we headed six blocks (by taxi—my father was hungry) to Brasserie Lipp, one of his old hangouts from the fifties.
It was my first meal in Paris and so I can still recall settling in there and eagerly sizing up the menu—and my slight confusion at learning that this exercise was academic, for my father had long before decided that we were going to share a large platter of choucroute garnie. That was what he wanted. But as it happened I had long imagined my first lunch in Paris being something more like sole amandine or tournedos Rossini or canard à la presse, so I protested a little at the prospect of instead tucking into a boring heap of sausages and sauerkraut. And then my mother confused me no end by declaring that she was opting to partake of the platter, too. This was very odd, because she almost always perceived being in a restaurant as one of those rare, privileged occasions when she could enjoy a quality piece of fish, without my father complaining about having to eat it too.
“Trust me,” she said, with a conspiratorial nod.
So choucroute it was, all around. And what an education it proved to be: the mildly tangy sauerkraut, fragrant with juniper, studded all over with wonderfully tender iterations of pork, from tender, poached shank of ham, barely held together by its skin, to the saucisses de Strasbourg that burst juicily forth from their casings with an audible pop as they surrendered to your hungrily advancing teeth. I thought it was divine.
“I can’t believe how many people tell me that choucroute is the first thing they ate in Paris,” Thuet said to me disparagingly when I told him the story. “I just think, ‘You went all the way to Paris for a fucking choucroute?’ Seriously?”
Thuet hails from Blodelsheim, in Alsace, which is choucroute central, though you will find versions of the dish in neighbouring Lorraine and in parts of Germany. Choucroute did not in fact grow popular in Paris until the end of the Franco-Prussian War, when Alsace and Lorraine were annexed as part of the new German empire and Alsatian refugees made a break for the City of Light—at that time, the Paris Commune. Some of them, such as Leonard Lipp, opened restaurants specializing in their native cuisine (and beer). So Brasserie Lipp opened, like many other Parisian brasseries, in 1871, the second (and final) year of the war, and has been a draw ever since for Parisians and tourists alike. Mostly the latter, of late. Thuet was right: Paris is a long and expensive way to go for sauerkraut with all the trimmings. Especially when there weren’t that many trimmings. For the Lipp version turns out to be authentic but spare. It is quite like the nearly century-old recipe from La Maison Kemmerzell, in Strasbourg, included in my Traditional Recipes of the Provinces of France, Selected by Curnonsky, which features only smoked pork belly, pork loin, and saucisses de Colmar. Such minimalism is sometimes a source of pride. As the celebrated Alsatian artist and French war hero Jean-Jacques Waltz—better known as Oncle Hansi—explained of the recipe, “This is not … the sort of over-complicated, over-elaborate recipe, over-loaded with strange ingredients, that certain scatterbrained fervents of freakish gastronomy would like to impose upon us. It is truly a home-style recipe, the real recipe for good sauerkraut, as our good Colmar housekeepers prepare it.”
Evidently they live larger in Blodelsheim than in Colmar. Or at any rate, garnie means something extra to the Thuet family. For his recipe only begins like the others—with sauerkraut made from the large-headed, pale green cabbage named Quintal d’Alsace. Our green cabbage is close enough. But slicing it, packing it with salt and juniper berries, and pressing it until it ferments is not something you want to do at home in the city or on the site of a nice restaurant.
“It stinks,” Thuet explained to me then. “Back home we stopped making it when my grandmother died. That was in 1995. The basement still fucking stinks. When you ferment the cabbage, the mould gets in the walls and never goes away.”
In other words it is best to buy your sauerkraut from someone else (but avoid the Polish variety, which is sugared and does not work with the dish). Next you need saucisses de Strasbourg, which, when in Montreal, I used to buy for Thuet at Pâtisserie Belge on Avenue du Parc (the veal wieners at some Polish delicatessens make an acceptable facsimile). Then for the full Thuet treatment you also need boudins blancs, boudins noirs, saucisses de Montbéliard, smoked pork loin, ham hocks, and smoked speck—for when Thuet thinks garnie, he means it.
“I think it’s the only dish in the world that has so many meats,” Thuet allowed of his highly elaborate choucroute—which, had it been invented in Toronto, could have been called Pork Seven Ways. “It’s nearly too much. But in Alsace we think it’s not enough, so as well as the cabbage you have to serve potatoes.”
You can bake potatoes for the purpose, boil them in their skins, or even deep-fry them. Thuet always served trimmed pommes vapeurs. Because that was what his mother did. “In France you always cook choucroute like your mum cooks it. What I learned from my mum is that if you put it all in the pot together you get greasy sauerkraut. You have no fat control. So what you do,” Thuet elaborated, “is sweat the onions in a bit of goose or duck fat, fold it into the choucroute, cook it with some Alsatian Riesling or Cristal d’Alsace, poach the ham and sausages, fry the boudins, and put it all together at the very end. My mother makes a mean choucroute.”
So did Thuet, especially in the later years before the restaurant closed (in 2010), when he made all the constituent sausages in-house. My favourite of them is the boudin noir, the classic sausage of pigs’ blood that Thuet still occasionally sells through his Toronto chain of traiteurs, Petite Thuet. The only boudin in Toronto that rivals it is the one made by chef David Lee, co-owner of Nota Bene restaurant. The primary difference between them is that Lee dices the pork back fat that’s stirred into the blood into a slightly smaller brunoise, which does not so much make the sausage less rich as less utterly overwhelming. Lee adds more chestnut flour, too. His is a truly great boudin—and he is typically open about how the recipe came to him.
In Lee’s native London, the boudin is easy to come by, from the corner butcher to the Food Hall at Harrods. Served with nothing more than a side of mashed potatoes and sautéed apple, the boudin noir is a cheap and satisfying bistro staple. Just as it is in Montreal, where one evening in 2007, Lee popped in to Au Pied de Cochon, that highly entertaining but rather unjustly celebrated ode to the pig on Avenue Duluth, in the Plateau. He ordered the boudins. And thankfully it was an unusually good night for the kitchen there, and the boudins were not grainy from having been frozen or made with frozen blood (as when I tried them) but were instead the best blood sausages that Lee had ever tasted. So he summoned the chef, Martin Picard, told him so, and in exchange came home with the recipe. The ingredient that had pleased him so much was chestnut flour—a tweak Picard had presumably borrowed from the French boudin of Auvergne. And when Lee got back to his restaurant kitchen (then at Splendido, on Harbord Street), he started to play around with the Picard formula to make it his own.
The first time I sampled it after he got it right was at the bar at Splendido—a mere sliver, plated alongside some offal from the very opposite end of the price spectrum: seared foie gras (a good pairing, which I had enjoyed previously). After a few variations on that theme came Lee’s porcine pièce de résistance: a six-inch disc of crisp and buttery puff pastry topped with duxelles, Taleggio cheese, arugula, pulled suckling pig, crisp crackling, sliced boudin, bacon, and pork jus. He launched the dish on the opening night of Nota Bene, on Queen Street West, before the restaurant even had a liquor licence (which is why to this day the boudin tart always makes me think of drinking Nebbiolo out of a coffee cup). And it stayed on the menu for a full year before retreating to the back catalogue and being relegated to occasional appearances as a daily special.
For me that boudin and suckling tart is the ultimate lofty expression of pork in Hogtown. The odd thing about the rise of the pig and all its constituent charcuterie there over the last decade is that it has occurred under the broad umbrella of what most people consider to be haute cuisine. Every high-end restaurant in town has had a run at some sort of charcuterie board or at least a variation on braised pork belly plated with seafood (lobster, scallop, crab, or black cod). Roast suckling pig specials have proliferated, and with them, elaborate farming backstories about heritage breeds like Berkshire and Red Wattles, or ordinary Yorkshires fattened on cream or whey. I enjoy all that, but wish it would show up more at the corner bistro, too. Pig is supposed to be pedestrian, not fine dining. In agrarian England the pig is known as “the gentleman who pays the rent,” not the one who makes car payments on the Porsche. So I am impatient for the newly acquired rarefied pork sense to trickle down to affordable, old-fashioned simplicity and the corner bistro (or pub). For as great as that boudin tart may be, there are days when I do not want my blood sausage dressed up with puff pastry and arugula, but rather crave two plump ones in a starring role on the plate, with nothing for company but potato purée, sautéed apples, and a dollop of quality mustard. Thankfully Lee understands: sometimes, if I ask nicely, he lets me take some boudins home.
Suckling Pig and Boudin Tart
Chef David Lee
Serves 6
2 sheets top-quality puff pastry
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 boudins noirs
6 strips top-quality maple-glazed bacon
1/2 warm roast suckling pig with crackling
Salt and pepper
Oil for deep-frying
1 cup (250 mL) duxelles
1 cup (250 mL) grated Taleggio cheese
3 cups (750 mL) lightly packed washed young spicy arugula
1/2 cup (125 mL) pork jus, at a simmer
Preheat oven and deep-fryer to 375˚F (190˚C).
On a floured work surface, roll the puff pastry to a thickness of about 1/8 inch (3 mm). Then cut it into six 6-inch (15 cm) discs and transfer to a baking sheet lined with lightly buttered parchment paper. Brush pastry with beaten egg and bake until puffed and golden––10 to 15 minutes. Leave baked discs on the baking sheet. Meanwhile, fry the sausages until browned all over and heated through. Set aside. Fry the bacon until crisp; drain on paper towels. Pull meat from the suckling pig in 1-inch (2 cm) chunks, cover, and set aside in a warm place. Cut crackling into bite-size morsels and deep-fry until crisp. Drain on paper towels and season generously with salt and pepper.
Spread 2 tbsp (30 mL) of duxelles on each disc of puff pastry. Scatter cheese overtop, distributing it equally among the 6 discs of pastry. Follow with a handful of arugula. Top with about 4 chunks of warm suckling pig. Slice boudins into 1-inch (2 cm) lengths and distribute them equally among the tarts, standing the segments upright on their ends. Follow with a few shards of crackling. Return tray of tarts to the oven for 3 or 4 minutes. Transfer tarts to warmed plates, drizzle with pork jus, and serve.