This is a smoky little number adapted from Nigel Slater. Very tasty, but if you cook it indoors I recommend opening all the windows and disabling any smoke alarms you may have. Mr Slater recommends a soothing pile of buttery couscous with it — in my experience it’s a good idea to have some yogurt and cucumber salad on hand as well.
Category: Main Course
Gigot aux haricots
A classic French dish, very sustaining.
Friginat
This is a Languedoc speciality traditionally made the day the pig was killed. Nobody keeps pigs these days so it tends to come out on special occasions (although it’s not particularly expensive to make). As with most traditional dishes, everyone has their own ideas on exactly how it should be made. Steve went to the charcuterie the other day and asked for some pork and pig’s liver to make friginat with. The charcutière told him firmly that what he was proposing to make was not friginat, it was fricassée. Friginat is made only from the neck of the pig, she said. Our two Languedoc cookbooks, with three recipes between them for fricassée and friginat, do not make matters clear. Anyway, since the pig’s neck was not available, Steve went home and made fricassée more-or-less according to the charcutière‘s instructions. This is not fricassée as in cream, chicken and mushrooms, but a pork, liver and kidney stew. It is a surprisingly refined dish, very tasty and much less rich and stodgy than cassoulet.
French-style curry
This is nothing like real Indian food, but it’s very nice nonetheless, and easy to do.
Dora’s pigeons in red wine
Simple to do, and delicious.
Daurade au four bis
Another recipe picked up and adapted from Marmiton.org. A high score on the effort versus results scale — if you spread the potatoes and tomatoes out on a large, solid, baking tray they caramelise nicely, leaving a small quantity of syrupy juices and giving the dish an excellent flavour.
Daurade au Four
Daurade is sea bream. You could equally use sea bass for this recipe. Whatever you use, it must be very fresh.
Couscous
The chicken can be a scraggy old boiler as it’s going to cook for ages. Similarly the meat should be cheap stewing cuts — breast or shoulder of lamb, shin of beef, hacked roughly into pieces. This is not an elegant dish!
Ras-el-hanout is a North African spice mixture. If you can’t get it or the French 4-épices, use paprika, cayenne, and coriander to season the stew.
Harissa is a kind of very hot chilli paste.
The vegetables can be varied although I think turnips and carrots are essential for the flavour.
You can cook the chickpeas from scratch yourself, but you have to soak them for ages beforehand. I think it’s easier to just use a can or jar (particularly if you didn’t think of making the couscous until the night before).
You will need a large stockpot with a lid which will take all the ingredients with room to spare.
This quantity will feed at least ten people.