In Spain, on a farm where he was helping slaughter pigs, chef Hugue Dufour encountered a woman who had peculiar ideas about feeding her children breakfast. “You know how when you have liver problem is good to have liver?” he asks me in his thick French accent while drinking a glass of red wine at his runaway success of a gourmet diner, M. Wells. “Well, this lady say, ‘If you eat brain, you’ll be more intelligent!’”
So every morning this woman would make a tortilla Española for her children using blood sausage (good for the blood, I suppose?) with brains hidden inside to make her kids smart. Which explains why on the counter before us, there’s a cooked calf brain sitting on a spiral of blood sausage ready for us to use in Dufour’s take on that same dish.
“I’ve never had brain,” I say timidly.
Dufour cuts me off a piece. “Try it,” he says and, unsure of how to react, I do.
It’s creamy. It tastes vaguely of, well, chicken. Dufour laughs and tells me about a dish he once served called “rabbit oysters.” “We took rabbit heads and we poached them for an hour; there’s a natural seam that shows up on the skull. We’d cut them open with an oyster knife and serve them like oysters.”
Dufour is as creative with animals and animal products as is a vegetarian chef who works exclusively with vegetables. For example, one of the dishes he teaches me is called Bone Marrow and Escargot.
From the butcher, Dufour gets bone marrow sliced vertically, so you get this long bone with the fat marrow inside. He scoops out the marrow with an offset spatula (one of his favorite tools), trying to keep it together in one big piece so that when it cooks, it will stay whole. (If it were in pieces, because it’s pure fat, it would all melt.)
Onto the bone he slathers a shallot puree that contains garlic, peppercorns, and good red wine; on top of that, he lines up escargot from a can. He rests the marrow back on top and sprinkles everything with garlic, parsley, and bread crumbs. Into a hot oven it goes and when it comes out, it’s impossible to stop eating: fatty, crusty orbs of marrow resting on garlicky, shallot-ensconced snails.
Dufour’s meat infatuation started early. When he was eleven, growing up in Canada, his dad gave him a gun and took him hunting and Dufour shot everything in sight. “Squirrels, little birds,” he recalls, somewhat solemnly. “It was never easy, though. I remember going home and crying.”
Those tears would later inform his career as a chef. “It’s like harvesting a carrot,” he explains. “If you pick it, you care about preparing it properly. You know you should do something with it. It’s the same process.”
Which takes us back to that brain in the tortilla. As Dufour lays it in, I think, “This animal died and it’s wasteful if we only eat the parts that don’t look like animal parts. Using all the parts is the only real way to honor the animal.”
And maybe I’m just saying this to further my point, but after eating the calf brain out of the hot pan with the potatoes, eggs, and blood sausage? I felt a tiny bit smarter.
“Spring is beautiful for testicles.”
Serves 6
This recipe begins at the butcher, where you’ll buy marrow bones; it takes you to a gourmet shop, where you’ll buy escargot in a can. There will be peeled shallots, a bottle of good red wine, and a blastingly hot oven. You’ll wind up with one of the most astonishing dishes you’ll ever produce in your kitchen.
FOR THE SHALLOT PUREE
10 whole shallots, peeled
1 small carrot, peeled and diced
4 stems of thyme
3 fresh bay leaves or 1 dried
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 head of garlic, cloves separated and peeled
1 bottle of good red wine (such as Pinot Noir)
8 tablespoons (1 stick) very cold unsalted butter, cubed
Red wine vinegar
Kosher salt
FOR THE PERSILLADE
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ bunch of parsley, chopped
1 cup fresh bread crumbs
A pinch of kosher salt
FOR THE REST OF THE DISH
3 marrow bones*, sliced in half vertically (ask the butcher to do this; you don’t want rings of marrow bone)
One 7½-ounce can of escargot from Burgundy (see Resources)
Kosher salt
To make the shallot puree, combine the shallots, carrot, thyme, bay leaves, peppercorns, garlic, and wine in a large pot. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 3 to 4 hours until the liquid is absorbed*.
Remove the thyme and bay leaves and, in a food processor, puree the mixture. As it’s whirring, slowly add the butter. Add a splash of red wine vinegar and taste to adjust for salt and acid. Set aside.
Make the persillade by combining the garlic, parsley, and bread crumbs in a food processor with a pinch of salt. Pulse just until it all comes together but the bread is still textured. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 500°F. On a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil, place the 6 bone marrow halves. With an offset spatula, and trying to keep the marrow intact, scoop out the insides and set aside.
Spread each empty bone half with the shallot puree and line up a few escargot on each bone. Sprinkle the escargot with salt and top with the reserved marrow. Sprinkle the marrow with salt and then sprinkle everything with the persillade–bread crumb mixture until covered.
Bake just until the bread crumbs are brown but before all the marrow has melted, 3 to 5 minutes. Serve right away with some crusty bread.
Serves 2 to 4
What makes this salad so notably great is the smokiness from the herring; it’s as if a regular Caesar salad dressing spent some time hanging around the bad kids at school. The Worcestershire also adds another layer of umami to the proceedings; give this a try and chances are, you won’t go back to regular Caesar again.
1 fillet of smoked herring (with any bones removed)
1 cup red wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 egg yolk
⅓ cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for later
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
13 turns* of black pepper, plus more to taste
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
3 large heads of romaine lettuce, cleaned and sliced
To soften the herring a little, soak it in the red wine vinegar* in a shallow plate for a few hours at room temperature before you use it. Discard the vinegar after soaking.
In a food processor, combine the herring, garlic, egg yolk, Parmesan, Worcestershire, and pepper until you have a paste. With the motor running, slowly drizzle in the olive oil until you have an emulsified dressing that looks like an aioli. Taste the dressing for salt and pepper and adjust.
In a large bowl, combine the romaine and the croutons. Add a big spoonful of the dressing and toss, adding more dressing as you see fit. When you’re happy with the amount, transfer the salad to a soup tureen (see Kitchen Know-How) or cold individual salad bowls. Top each with lots of Parmesan* grated on a Microplane grater and more freshly ground pepper.
Serves 4
Yes, this recipe was originally taught to me with blood sausage and calf brain, but when I make it at home I apply the same technique to a more common ingredient that I usually have on hand: chorizo. If you want to be brave and try the blood sausage and the brain, the only important step is that you cook them both first (preferably, by poaching). Once cooked, simply sub in the blood sausage for the chorizo and add the calf brain just before you place the tortilla in the oven. Either way, it’s a robust, filling breakfast.
3 large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and quartered
Kosher salt
½ cup olive oil, plus more for the pan
1 yellow onion, diced
Freshly ground black pepper
6 large eggs
2 to 3 links Spanish chorizo, sliced into fat rings
Prep the potatoes by boiling them in salted water until very tender. Meanwhile, in a sauté pan, heat the ½ cup olive oil slightly on medium-low heat and sweat the onions with a pinch of salt until they are just translucent but not brown, 8 minutes or so. When the potatoes are done, drain them very well* and add them to a bowl with the onions and the olive oil from the pan. Mash everything and season with salt and pepper until it tastes great (like olive-oil mashed potatoes).
In a separate medium bowl, crack the eggs and whisk them with salt and pepper until the whites and yolks are homogeneous. Add enough of the potato mixture* to achieve a ratio of three quarters potato and one quarter egg.
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Squirt olive oil all around a 10-inch cast-iron pan and heat it on medium heat, then add the chorizo. Cook just until it’s slightly crusty, then add the egg-potato mixture. Stir and then allow it to set and cook for 30 seconds or so. The outside should cook to the point that when you shake the pan, the contents shift together. Finish in the oven until the egg mixture is just set on top*, 10 to 15 minutes. Serve with crusty bread.
