While dabbling with the blood of sacrifice, don’t think I haven’t been feasting as well!

I’ve wanted to make blood sausage ever since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, “It Takes a Village to Kill a Pig,” where he places boudin noir in his pantheon of “the hundred greatest foods of the world” (de-throning the frozen Milky Way bar!).  I had a chance to eat some last spring, when I was in London and came across a shop selling charcuterie from organic, English meats.  It was ghastly – mealy in texture, with no redeeming flavor.  To get a good boudin, it seemed, I was going to have to make it myself.

Which is not as easy as you might think.  Although it is legal to sell pig’s blood in the US, the slaughterhouse has to have special equipment and has to be specially certified, which almost nobody bothers to do.  As a result, about the only place you can find pig’s blood is at an Asian market, where it will be frozen.  But I wanted fresh blood.  Following the centuries-old tradition of French farmhouses (which you can also find beautifully documented in the opening pages of Stéphane Reynaud’s cookbook, Pork & Sons), I wanted to make boudin on the same day that the pig was slaughtered and encase it in the pig’s own intestines.

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My last post about a new bacon, cured in Hogshead Scotch, was the perfect segue to this post, about what to do with an actual hog’s head – or two!  (How hogshead came to be the name for a 63-gallon barrel, I have no idea!)

In English, brawn, from the Middle French word braon, meaning “muscle” (from which we get our word brawny) also refers to the flesh of a boar and, in cookery, a potted meat made from the pig’s head.  It’s what the French call fromage de tête or “headcheese” as it’s commonly called in this country.  If you’ve ever had this treat down South, you’ll have heard it called “souse,” from the same root as “sauce,” which means to pickle or immerse in brine (hence the term “soused” for someone who’s had too much to drink).

Brawn is my latest attempt effort, following in Fergus Henderson’s offal footsteps, and it’s especially appealing to me because it does literally include both head and feet.  Like the Trotter Gear I made last month, it’s another dish featuring “giving nodules” of meat, suspended in a rich, meaty gelatin. (more…)

Stéphane Reynaud is currently a successful cookbook writer and runs a popular restaurant outside of Paris, but he explains that growing up “in the Ardèche plateau in southern France, where my grandpa was a butcher, and the back of his shop was my playroom, I grew up surrounded by food. Simple, rustic terrines were the staple of our family mealtimes.” This country-style, pork liver terrine comes from his excellent little book, Terrine, and one taste makes you feel like you have stumbled upon a remote French village and been taken in to someone’s home where they barely speak English (Reynaud’s recipes could definitely benefit from a little more translating!), and where the food may be simple but is also simply the best that the area produces.  Food like this could persuade you to forget all about your plans for traveling and sightseeing and make you decide instead to dig in to that small village and sample all it has to offer.

If the Parisian liver terrine is all urbane and sophisticated, delicately scented with powdered cèpes (porcinis) and truffle oil, this is its rustic, country cousin.  Instead of being puréed, it is more coarse-textured and robustly flavored, with rum, lots of carmelized onions, and fresh herbs.  Instead of being coated with a concentrated pork jus, it is wrapped in a thick layer of homemade bacon.  It may be rustic, but it is by no means second-rate or second-class.  It is brimming with freshness and vitality and is perfect for family mealtimes like the ones Stéphane recollects.

Speaking of which, there was supposed to be more of this terrine left, to offer through the Club, but I fed it to my family for dinner, combined with a simple green salad from our own garden and some toasted hazelnuts from a friend’s orchard in Oregon.  Between the four of us, we managed to eat half of it!

I can’t remember now what steered me toward it, but I recently acquired a copy of Charcuterie Specialties, by Jean-Claude Frentz and Michel Poulain, and this recipe comes from their book. I had to try it, because it sounded crazy. This recipe completely turns what I thought I knew about making a pâté on its head.

Pâtés can be “country-style” or coarse-textured, but this one is a smooth-textured, emulsion-type. As Elton David Aberle et al. explain in The Principles of Meat Science, “An emulsion is defined as a mixture of two immiscible liquids, one of which is dispersed in the form of small droplets or globules in the other liquid. [Think of the oil and vinegar in salad dressing.] . . . In sausage emulsions, soluble proteins dissolved in the aqueous phase act as emulsifying agents coating all surfaces of the dispersed fat particles” (128-130). The point of a meat emulsion is to break the fat up into minute particles, because they separate the meat fibers from each other and lubricate the tissue, with the result that the texture seems delicate, light, and creamy. [Think of the tenderness of a well-marbled steak.] Finely-dispersed fat particles also do a better job of slowing down the progress of flavor-bearing molecules over our tongue and thus of “bringing out” the flavor of the meat and other ingredients. In fact, studies have shown that if you remove every speck of fat from meat, tasters can no longer tell if they are eating chicken or pork or beef or lamb.

Now everything I had previously read told me that the secret to a stable emulsion and a good pâté is to keep the meat–and everything that comes in contact with the meat!–as cold as freakin’ possible. In the chapter on pâtés in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, they write,

In order to combine the meat and fat perfectly, they must be very cold. If they become warm, the fat can soften or melt, and ultimately you can wind up with a broken forcemeat, just as you can wind up with a broken hollandaise. Until your pâté goes in the oven, you must do all that you can to keep the meat cold. Don’t let your ingredients and tools get warm. You don’t have to be fanatical about it–moving your KitcheAid out on the back deck in February snow–but do be slightly paranoid about it. Chill your grinder attachment in the freezer for an hour or more before grinding. When not working with any of the ingredients, keep them refrigerated. Set the bowl that will catch the ground meat in a larger bowl of ice. . . . If, you need to stop after grinding for whatever reason, return the meat to the refrigerator or freezer until you’re ready to proceed.” (206)

And they are not alone in this fanaticism or paranoia. In Modern Garde Manger, Robert Garlough and Angus Campbell write, “both the meat and grinding heads must be well chilled to prevent fat separation” (532). The CIA’s Garde Manger book also says, “Temperature control is the key to achieving the best results” (301). And finally, in Fritz Sonnenshmidt’s Charcuterie he insists, “Keep ingredients cold. Keep equipment cold. This is important to the success of pâtés and terrines” (209).

In Frentz and Poulain’s recipe for this liver terrine, all this fanaticism for freezing temperatures, all this paranoia about cold-processing, is tossed out the window.

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