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Pigs' Trotters in Blanquette
Any part of pork or veal is good done in this way. Take your pieces of meat and fry them in butter till they are a good golden brown color. Put them in a pan, covering them with water, and adding a sliced onion, a bay leaf, a whole carrot, a leek, pepper, salt,--let it all simmer gently over a slow fire till the meat is cooked but not boiled. Take the pieces from the liquor and pass it through a sieve. Mix a little rice flour in a cup of cold water, stirring well. Drop in the juice of half a lemon and the beaten yolk of an egg, which stir round quickly. Put in the meat again for a moment and serve it with boiled potatoes.
Loin of Mutton in the Pot Put in an earthenware pot three shallots, finely minced; take a bit of garlic, cut it close and rub it round the side of the pot; put in as well a lump of butter, pepper and salt, and some rather fat gravy. Divide the loin and put six chops in to simmer for three quarters of an hour on a moderate fire, covering the pot with the lid. Before you serve it, stir in a little lemon juice and stir up the sauce. To be served with Cauliflower a la Aerschot as follows: Cut your cauliflower into medium pieces, seeing that it is very clean, while you have some salted water boiling up. Put in the pieces, boil till tender, then drain them on a sieve. Put leaves and trimming of the vegetable into the pot to simmer and serve as basis for a vegetable soup. Make a good white sauce, adding the yolk of an egg, and flavoring it with nutmeg. Put the vegetable on a dish and pour over the sauce, letting it stand for a few moments by the fire before it is eaten.
Ox Tongue with Spinach and White Sauce Boil the tongue in salted water till the outer skin will peel off. Take this off, then put the tongue back in the liquor to simmer while you prepare the same. Take a piece of butter the size of an egg, melt it and mix it with two dessertspoonfuls of ground rice, add some of the liquor, pepper, and salt, stir well, so that it makes a good cream; drop in the yolks of two eggs, always stirring, and a little lemon juice. Serve the tongue whole with this sauce poured over it and spinach done in the following way: Wash the spinach in running water till every bit of grit has gone. Put some water on to boil, salt it well, and throw in the spinach which you have freed from mid-rib and stalk. The water must be boiling and the fire brisk. When tender, pass the spinach through the sieve, then put a bit of butter into an enameled saucepan, then the spinach, which heat for six minutes, add a little pepper. Serve it with the tongue, and you can garnish as well with little croutons of bread fried in butter.
Four dishes run together on one page here, in the terse style of a cook dictating from memory rather than writing for a beginner. Quantities are largely left to judgement, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- The hinge: never boil the liaisonOnce the lemon juice and egg yolk go into the strained broth, the sauce must stay below a simmer, around 170-180F. A boil scrambles the yolk and the blanquette turns grainy and thin. Return the meat only to warm through.
- Trotters need far longer than the text implies"Till the meat is cooked but not boiled" reads as an hour to a modern cook; pigs' feet need 2.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer before the skin and connective tissue soften. The text offers only "any part of pork or veal" as an alternative; leaner cuts of either are done in 60-90 minutes.
- Rice flour as thickenerBoth "rice flour" and "ground rice" mean milled raw rice rather than the prepared cream-of-rice cereal, though ground rice is usually the coarser grind of the two. It thickens without the pastiness of a wheat roux and stays clearer. Reckon on about 2 tablespoons slaked in cold water per 2 cups of strained cooking liquor.
- Slow fire, moderate fireA "slow fire" is the lowest steady heat that keeps bubbles breaking occasionally at the edge. The "moderate fire" under the mutton pot is a low-to-medium burner; the point is that the chops braise in their own fat and gravy for 45 minutes without the shallots catching.
- Browning firstThe trotters are fried golden before the water goes in. Dry them thoroughly first, or they will steam in the butter. Trotters bought raw are usually split lengthwise; buy them scalded and cleaned.
- Cauliflower and its trimmingsThe instruction to simmer the leaves and stalk trimmings for a soup base is worth keeping. Boil the florets in well-salted water 5-7 minutes only; taken much past "tender" they go waterlogged under the sauce.
- Ox tongue timingA whole beef tongue takes 3 to 3.5 hours of simmering before the skin peels cleanly, and it peels best while still hot. It then goes back into the liquor to stay warm and moist while the sauce is made.
- Spinach through a sievePassing boiled spinach through a sieve gives the smooth purée these recipes generally favour. Modern cooks who want leaf spinach can simply squeeze it dry and chop; either way the six minutes in butter is enough.
- YieldThe blanquette gives no quantity, so judge by the meat: allow one trotter or a good portion of pork or veal per person, with potatoes. The six mutton chops serve three; a whole tongue with spinach serves six to eight.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, with the proceeds going to relief work — which explains its plain, unmeasured, from-memory character. Blanquette is the standard French and Belgian term for a white stew: meat that is never browned in the ordinary way of a brown ragoût, and a broth finished with egg yolk and lemon rather than a dark roux. The instruction here to fry the trotters golden first is a slight departure from the strict French blanquette, which keeps the meat pale throughout. Pigs' feet are classic thrift cooking in the Low Countries, valued for the gelatin they give a broth as much as for their meat, and they remain a fixture of Flemish and Walloon home cooking. The Aerschot in the cauliflower dish is a town in Brabant.