Tag: French

There are many ways of combining rabbit and mustard, many of them complicated and most involving cream. This one is a bit different, and it’s my favourite as well. It may look fiddly at first sight, but you can cook the vegetables, and even fry the rabbit, well in advance, leaving only the roasting and reheating to do at the last minute.

Caution: it will only work with a nice fat farmed rabbit — if you’ve got a wild one, make something else! Here you can buy packs of ready-jointed rabbit — for two of us, I use a saddle cut into four pieces. If you use a whole rabbit, you will need to leave the legs in the oven a further ten minutes after you have taken the rest out. For 4.

Source: the Roux brothers’ French Country Cooking.

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A more traditional version of this classic dish than my roasted version, and good for serving in winter, when choice of vegetables is more limited.

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Still trying to recapture the flavour of the wonderful “seven-hour lamb” I had at Le Manchot d’Henri in Paris … this isn’t quite it, but it is delicious. Like all casseroles it’s even better kept for a day and reheated.

Most recipes seem to assume one shank per person; that’s too much meat for me, but carnivores may differ.

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An easy way to delight your guests. If you want extra vegetables, grilled or baked tomatoes are an excellent choice; we had tomates à la crème.

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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.

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This is nothing like real Indian food, but it’s very nice nonetheless, and easy to do.

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