Home › The World's Kitchen › Pieds-Paquet, Marseillaise
Pieds-Paquet, Marseillaise
Plunge four mutton feet in boiling water for ten minutes. Drain, then detach all the meat from the bones and cut the meat into very small square pieces. Cut two ounces raw, lean pork into the same size, also an ounce larding pork; place these articles in a bowl, adding four finely chopped shallots and one finely chopped bean garlic. Season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and a half saltspoon mace. Mix well. Cut two pounds well-drained fresh honey-comb tripe into three-inch-square pieces. Divide the preparation evenly in the centre of each piece of tripe, fold up the four corners, then tie all around with string. Place in an earthen dish a half ounce butter with one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, two bay leaves, two cloves, a sprig of thyme and the tied-up tripe, and cook on the range for fifteen minutes or until a nice brown colour. Moisten with a pint broth, one and a half gills white wine and two tablespoons brandy. Tightly cover the pan, set in the oven to braize for three hours and a half, remove, arrange the packages on a large hot dish and untie. Skim the fat from the pot, add to the sauce one gill tomato sauce, reduce on the fire for five minutes, strain the sauce and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over the package and serve.
A classic Provençal tripe braise, here written in Delmonico's-era shorthand. Two things need translating before you start: the measures, and what the butcher will actually hand you.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of wine is 3/4 cup and the finishing gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the seasoning about 1/2 teaspoon white pepper, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg and a pinch of mace.
- Mutton feetSheep's trotters are not a supermarket item; a halal or Middle Eastern butcher is the reliable source, and they usually need ordering. Four give very little meat, and note that here the bones are thrown away once picked, so nothing of them goes into the braising liquid.
- Larding porkThis is fresh pork fatback, unsmoked. Salt pork rinsed of its cure is the usual substitute; bacon is not, as the smoke overwhelms the shallot and mace.
- "One bean garlic"Apparently a loose Englishing of the French gousse d'ail; either way it means one clove, not one head.
- The tripe is the hingeHoneycomb tripe sold in the West is almost always bleached and partly blanched, so three and a half hours will bring it to the right yielding, gelatinous texture. Genuinely raw tripe wants five hours or more; test a packet before committing, because undercooked tripe is unpleasantly rubbery and no amount of sauce hides it.
- Cutting and tyingThree-inch squares of tripe are floppy and slippery; pat them very dry, fill sparingly, and tie each parcel like a small purse with butcher's twine. Kitchen string that is not cotton will melt or shed dye over three hours.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. "Braize" implies a low, steady oven, so somewhere around 300 to 325F, with the liquid barely trembling, is a reasonable modern reading. The initial fifteen minutes of browning is done on the stovetop in the same earthenware or heavy pot.
- YieldTwo pounds of tripe makes roughly eight to ten parcels, enough for four as a main course with bread and a dry white. Traditionally the trotters are served whole alongside; this version dices them into the stuffing instead.
Pieds et paquets — "feet and packets" — is a Marseille and lower-Provence speciality, the packets being squares of sheep tripe wrapped around a stuffing of tripe trimmings, salt pork, garlic and parsley, cooked for hours with the trotters in white wine and tomato. Its invention is generally traced to Marseille, though Sisteron in Haute-Provence claims it with equal energy and sells it in tins to this day. It belongs to the family of long, cheap, overnight offal braises that are often said to have fed market porters and dockworkers at daybreak. The recipe's fussier touches — the shallots, the nutmeg and mace, the spoonful of brandy — are the restaurant kitchen's polish on what was originally a peasant dish of scraps.