Home › Removes or Releves › Removes or Releves: Soubise
Removes or Releves: Soubise
Longe de porc rôtie is a loin roasted. A la Soubise, it is served with Soubise sauce.
Pâté à la Leicestershire is a pork pie in a crust made with lard.
Pâté à la Devonshire is a pie of layers of slices of pork, bacon and apples.
Croustade à la Chipolata is a raised pie filled with sausage-meat, bacon and chestnuts, and brown sauce.
Salt pork boiled and served with cabbages and other vegetables, is called Petit salé aux choux, or à la Fermière; aux panais, it is served with parsnips.
The pork section of the heavy-joint chapter: one roast loin, three pies, and a boiled salt joint with cabbage. It is the shortest and plainest run of meat in the book.
- Petit salé is cured, not freshSalt pork boiled and served with cabbages, says the page, and that is a brined joint, not a roast. The nearest things on sale now are a piece of unsmoked gammon or salt pork belly, and both want soaking in cold water, with a change or two, before they go anywhere near the vegetables. Skip that and the dish is inedibly salty.
- A crust made with lard is hot-water crustPâté à la Leicestershire is a pork pie in a crust made with lard. Flour scalded with boiling lard and water gives a dough you mould by hand while warm; it sets hard and stands up without a tin, which is how a raised pie is raised. Butter shortcrust cannot do it, and this is the one point on the page where substituting fats breaks the dish.
- Modern pork is much leanerA loin roasted the old way assumed a thick fat cap and a fat-marbled eye of meat. Pigs have been bred lean for decades, and the same joint given the same time comes out dry. Keep the fat on, score it, and take it out earlier than the period’s timings imply.
- Layered raw piePâté à la Devonshire is a pie of layers of slices of pork, bacon and apples. Pork with apple survives; building it as alternating raw layers under a lid and baking it long does not. It is worth trying, and it wants a deep dish and a slow oven so the apple collapses into the meat rather than drying above it.
- Parsnips with salt porkAux panais, the boiled salt joint comes with parsnips rather than cabbage. The pairing has quietly disappeared, and it is a good one: the sweetness of the root against brined meat does roughly what apple does for a roast.
- Chestnuts in the raised pieThe Croustade à la Chipolata is filled with sausage-meat, bacon and chestnuts in brown sauce. Peeled cooked chestnuts come vacuum-packed now and are the easiest part of the dish to get hold of, which was not true when the page was written.
Look at the names: Leicestershire, Devonshire. English regional pies entering a French menu vocabulary under English place-names, by exactly the device the French kitchen used for Soubise and Bretonne — attach a place, and the name carries the recipe. The other thing the page records is how low pork ranked at a dinner of this kind. It gets six lines where mutton gets pages, and the dishes offered are a plain roast, three pies and a boiled salt joint, which is to say the pork of ordinary houses brought in with very little dressing up. Salted pork was the preserved meat everybody knew, and it appears here almost as a courtesy.