No. 1808

Spare Ribs, Parisian Style

Petit Sale a la Parisienne

Take some of the breast ribs of a pig and salt them for twelve hours in a light eight degree brine; remove and wash off in cold water. To cook them it is better to take an already salted broth, one in which a ham or any other meat has been boiled. When this reaches boiling point, throw in the ribs and leave to cook without boiling.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two short lines of instruction hide a specific technique: a very brief cure followed by a poach that must never reach a rolling boil. Get those two things right and the rest is scheduling.

The hinge: no boiling"Cook without boiling" is the whole method. Hold the liquid at a bare shiver, around 180F/82C, so the meat between the rib bones stays succulent; a true boil tightens the muscle and leaves the ribs stringy and dry even though they are surrounded by liquid.
An eight degree brineThe eight degrees is most likely degrees Baume, read with a hydrometer, though Ranhofer does not say which scale he means. Read that way it is a light brine of roughly 8 percent salt, about 80 g of salt per litre of water. The exact figure matters less here than the short twelve-hour contact time.
Twelve hours is a seasoning, not a cureThis is petit sale, lightly salted meat meant to be eaten within a day or two, not preserved. No saltpetre or curing salt is involved and none should be added; the ribs are simply seasoned through and then fully cooked.
Breast ribsThe cut is the belly end of the rib cage, what a butcher today sells as spareribs or the rib rack cut from pork belly. A slab of about 3 lb serves four. Country-style ribs from the shoulder work but are meatier and need longer.
The cooking liquidHam broth is the ideal because it is already saline and gelatinous. If you have none, use unsalted stock or water and taste before adding salt at all: the ribs come out of the brine carrying plenty, and a doubly salted bath will make them inedible. Rinsing in cold water, as directed, is not optional.
TimingRanhofer gives none. At a bare simmer, reckon on 1.5 to 2 hours, until a skewer meets no resistance between the bones but the meat still clings to them. Let the ribs cool in their liquid if serving later.
ServingThe classic Parisian accompaniment is green lentils or braised cabbage, with the cooking broth spooned over. A sharp mustard on the side does more for the dish than any sauce.

A Little History

Petit sale is one of the oldest habits of the French kitchen: pork given a short stay in brine so it keeps a few days in a cool larder and tastes of more than plain boiled meat. In Paris it became charcuterie-counter staple, sold by weight and taken home to be simmered with lentils, and petit sale aux lentilles remains a bistro fixture. Charles Ranhofer, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, wrote for professional kitchens that had a stockpot of ham broth standing anyway, which is why he can recommend it so casually as the cooking liquid. The eight-degree brine measured on a Baume hydrometer — itself an inference — is a reminder that the nineteenth-century commercial kitchen worked with instruments as much as with judgment, salinometers and brine gauges being, it seems, familiar enough tools where meat was salted in quantity.