Well, it's New Year's day and, as is more or less traditional, it's cold, gray and pissing down with rain. God knows what the poor Parisians are doing up on the ski slopes - probably looking glumly out at the muddy pistes and counting exactly how much every half-hour not spent out there skiing has cost them. Well, that's what I'd be doing, anyway.
Down here in Saint-Pierre, it means that the day (well, afternoon) is ahead of us and nothing much to fill it apart from cooking, eating and drinking, although not necessarily in that order. And quite frankly, nothing incites me to commit baking as much as the combination of a warm cosy kitchen and gray miserable weather. Just the thought of how the kitchen is going to smell gets me all excited.
So given that you're unlikely to be out of bed and capable of coordinated movement much before midday, something to get done during the afternoon would be some spice cake -
pain d'épices. Unfortunately I'm the only one around here who really likes the stuff, as Margo is apparently capable of detecting one part per million of anis in anything and it really puts her off. On the other hand, the star anis in Chinese food doesn't seem to bother her ... go figure.
Whatever, pain d'épices is a seasonal thing and has the great advantage of keeping well - in fact, it tastes better after at least a couple of days maturing. You will need a large, high, square cake tin: I would suggest you butter it and line it with waxed paper because otherwise it'll be a right bugger trying to get the cake out when it's cooked.
Getting the cake tin ready is probably the most complicated part of the recipe. For the rest, you just need to:
- put 200 gm honey, 125 gm sugar, 80 gm butter and 20 cl of water into a small saucepan and bring to the boil to dissolve everything
- mix together in a small bowl the zest of an orange and the zest of a lemon, 50 gm slivered almonds, 1 tsp anis seeds and the chopped peel of an orange
- mix together 275 gm of flour (can use rye flour if you like, in which case you may need a bit more as it tends to be gloppy) and 2 tbsp baking powder in a large bowl
Now incorporate the liquid into the flour little by little, stirring well: when that's finished add the remaining dry ingredients and mix well. Then pour the lot into the cake tin and bake for half an hour at 200° C, after which you need to turn the heat down to 175° and let it carry on for another hour. Do check on it from time to time, and cover it with tinfoil if it looks like browning too much. When done, leave it to cool in the tin at least overnight, then wrap it well in tinfoil and keep it in the fridge until hungry. But like I said, try to leave it at least three days before attacking it.
(Do note that if, like us, you have an old woodburner in the kitchen, you can forget about the temperatures: just get the fire burning nice and hot and put the cake in "until cooked". Believe me, it's how it used to be done.)
Once that's underway, or out of the way, it'd be a good idea to think of dinner. And I think that
diots au vin blanc are rather nice, even if no-one else does. (This is turning into rather a selfish entry, isn't it?) Diots are a Savoyard speciality: they are basically pure pork sausages; chunks of pig ground coarsely with their own fat (a 50/50 mix is about right) and stuffed firmly into the poor animal's intestines, then hung to dry (or some smoke them - in fact they used to be hung to dry in the chimney, so you got both for the same price).
If you're going to try this, do go and get decent sausages: eschew those with breadcrumbs or coyly unspecified "other ingredients". Go find a bloody good butcher who makes his own, or you might be lucky enough to find a farmer who does sausages ... or you could do your own. It's not that hard.
Anyway, the only other thing that might be considered exotic about this is the s
arments de vigne, or vine shoot clippings. I have no trouble finding these: I just have to wander down to the garden with a pair of secateurs in the hip pocket, slip through the barbed-wire fence into the paddock behind, and in five minutes I've all the clippings I'll need. You may have a bit more difficulty.
You start by browning the sausages evenly in a hot, heavy saucepan. No extra fat is required, just start them off slowly and then turn the heat up and they'll render all that's required. When nicely brown, fish them out, turn the heat down and fling in a sliced onion and a sliced carrot: when the onion starts to go transparent it would be a good time to add some thyme, some squashed juniper berries, maybe a bit of rosemary and a bay leaf or two. After a minute or two, sprinkle a tablespoon of flour over it and stir it around, then pour in a glass of beef stock and two (or three) glasses of white wine.
If you want to be obsessional about things it would have to be a Jacquères, I'm not that worried and in fact the real point is that there's still at least half the bottle left, and that will need to be dealt with at some point. Just saying. (Come to that, you could use a Mondeuse if you want. It'd come out as
diots au vin rouge, but who cares? You'll still have the rest of the bottle to take care of.)
Bring that to the boil and then - and this is the tricky part - you need to build a little sort of mesh or raft of vine clippings over the liquid, on to which you place the sausages before putting the lid on the saucepan. The object of the exercise is to have the sausages (which are already browned, remember?) steam in the alcohol and water vapour, rather than simmer in the sauce. It also gets rid of a fair bit of fat (not that it goes that far, it'll wind up in the sauce) as it slowly melts during the cooking, bastes the sausages from the inside, and then drips onto the onions and wine ... oh, and the tannins and things from the vine shoots sort of intermingle with the wine and stuff like that. Sounds a bit New Age to me, on a par with knitting your own yoghurt.
After about 45 minutes simmering on top of the woodburner fling in some potatoes, peeled (or not) and cut into chunks so that they too can steam and get slightly drunk: 45 minutes more and you can probably eat it. Personally I just remove the vine shoots and then serve the whole lot from the saucepan: this is not an elegant dish and there's no point in trying to make it so.
Finally, I'll leave you with this one: the
galette des rois. Traditionally it's served on Twelfth Night, the kings arriving too late for mince pies and steamed Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, but it doesn't really matter.
This unfortunately calls for about 400gm of flaky or puff pastry. You can either buy 2 x 200gm rounds of the stuff or make it yourself: the only advantage of doing the latter is that at least you know there's nowt but butter in it. But it takes about two hours rolling, folding, and waiting for it to chill out in the fridge - I suppose you can at least drink while you're waiting.
Assuming that you have, one way or another, procured yer flaky pastry, I'd start by making some sugar syrup, which is simple enough: boil hell out of 8 clof water and 50 gm or so of sugar until it goes ... well, syrupy. Leave that on a low heat and add the zest of an orange, finely chopped: let it sit and simmer for ten minutes. While that's happening, get the frangipane ready: knead together 100gm of powdered almonds, 50 gm of softened butter, 50 gm of sugar and a shot-glass of Grand Marnier (or Cointreau if that's all you've got). When that's done add an egg yolk, the sugar syrup with its cargo of orange zest, and a good tbsp of lemon juice - mix it all up well.
Now beat the egg white up till stiff and fold it delicately into the frangipane cream: pretend you're getting a soufflé ready. Which is, more or less, what you're doing. Then roll out (or unroll) a 25cm diameter circle of flaky pastry and spread the frangipane out over it to within an inch of the edge.
At this point, tradition has it that you should stick in either a dried bean or a small porcelain figurine (used to be the baby Jesus but these days you can pick characters from Tintin, the Simpsons and, for all I know, the French national rugby team): when you get around to eating the thing the lucky person who gets the bean is King for the night, and has to host the event next year. I gave up on that early on: the first year someone chipped the enamel on a tooth on the porcelain, and the year after someone actually ate the bean without noticing, so there seemed little point.
Whatever, it's up to you. In any case, brush the edges of the pastry with water, and then unroll the other circle of pastry over the top, and pinch the edges well to seal. Then brush the whole thing with some egg yolk diluted with a bit of milk, and bung it in the oven at 210°C for about 30 minutes. Best eaten warm rather than hot, and please don't stick cream on it.
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