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Jacobin's Pottage
This is a particularly tempting dish, popular in the old convents in France before the Revolution. Chop the meat of a cold turkey fine; add 2 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Make four or five slices of toast, put in the bottom of a dish, and add 1 cup stock, then the chopped meat and a sprinkling of crumbs. Bake 1 hour, add lemon juice on top.
A leftover-turkey gratin under an older name. The original gives no oven heat and a baking time that will punish already-cooked meat, so both need adjusting before you start.
- The hinge: don't bake it an hourThe turkey is already cooked, so all the oven has to do is heat the dish through and set the top. Twenty-five to thirty minutes at 350F is enough; a full hour dries the meat into threads and boils away the stock.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the original. Read it as a moderate oven, 350F, uncovered.
- LiquidOne cup of stock is scant for four or five slices of toast plus a bowl of chopped meat. Use closer to a cup and a half, pouring enough over the toast to soak it and moistening the turkey with the rest so it does not bake out dry.
- ParmesanTwo ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly two-thirds of a cup, loosely packed. Buy a wedge and grate it; pre-grated shaker cheese is drier and saltier, so hold back on the added salt until you have tasted.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a light hand — an eighth of a teaspoon for this quantity. Nutmeg with poultry and cheese is a standing French pairing, but pre-ground jars go soapy and dominate.
- CrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and dot the top with a little butter. Without fat they toast unevenly and stay pale in half an hour.
- The lemon at the endAdd it after baking, off the heat, as the recipe says. It is the seasoning that keeps the cheese and stock from tasting flat, and it dulls if it goes into the oven.
- YieldAbout three to four servings from a dish this size — supper rather than a centrepiece, which is what leftover cookery was for.
"Pottage" here has drifted a long way from its medieval sense of anything cooked in a pot, and means a baked dish of chopped meat over sopped toast — the kind of thrift cookery a large kitchen produces the day after a roast. The name is usually traced not to the revolutionary Jacobin Club but to the Dominican friars of Paris, long nicknamed Jacobins after their house on the rue Saint-Jacques; the political club, which met in the Dominican convent on the rue Saint-Honoré, took its name from the same order and its nickname, which is why a convent dish ends up sounding like a partisan one. Convent and monastery kitchens had a reputation in French writing for eating better than their vows suggested, and recipes labelled as coming from them were a familiar flourish in English-language collections like this one.