A Pig in Provence (23 page)

This is just one example of the lengths that Provençal cooks, often of modest means living in isolated farmhouses, have gone to in order to prepare not just good food, but food that lives on in memory, refueling the spirit each time it is eaten. In listening to people recount their food memories around a table, I’ve seen their eyes glow and their body language soften with the telling of the taste, smell, and texture of a beloved dish, and heard the smack of lips in reply.

One memorable instance involves another lamb’s foot preparation,
beignets des pieds d’agneaux,
or lamb’s foot fritters.
I remember Marie’s cousin Josephine talking with Marcel’s aunt, who, at ninety, was a hearty eater and enjoyed her wine. She was as fine a listener as a raconteur.

As we sat under the mulberry trees on the terrace at Robert and Françoise Lamy’s house, just across the road from mine, finishing the celebratory lunch that ended the grape harvest, Marie’s cousin asked
la tante,
a tiny woman with a wrinkled birdlike face, if she remembered when they used to make lamb’s feet
beignets.
I listened raptly as they recounted memories of long ago.

“Oh my, do I. So much work. First scraping them, then flaming them to burn off any wool left, like burning feathers off a chicken. Then we blanched them to get them nice and white. We’d have a pot of at least twelve, sometimes more, going on the
braise.
No one cooks on a
braise
anymore.” She laughed and shook her head, her thin gray hair catching on the breeze.

“Oh my, but they were good. Once they were cooked, we’d sit around, my daughters, my mother, my grandmother, children, all of us around the big wooden table, gossiping and telling stories, sometimes with a glass of
eau-de-vie
to keep us warm. I’d cut each foot in half, hitting it hard with a cleaver, then hand them out. We picked out the bones, then picked out the meat. The skins were set aside to be stuffed. All the meat came back to me and I chopped it very fine with the wild thyme. Next I added the salt and pepper, sometimes anchovies, if we had them, and mixed it all with olive oil. Everyone took a little stuffing and stuffed the skin of the half foot, then we put them back together, binding them with string. Whew. What work in the old days!”

“Ah, that’s how you did it,” Josephine said. “I just remember the taste and being astonished that it looked like a foot, but had no bones. What next?”

“Next? Ah, ah, yes.” She paused, then pulled the train of thought back to herself.

“Yes, next, well, we dipped them in flour or bread crumbs and fried them in a deep pot of olive oil.”

“We ate them with lemons, didn’t we? And a sprinkle of parsley, too, I think. I loved the way they were crunchy on the outside, soft and meaty on the inside. I remember stealing them off Raymond’s plate.” Josephine said, looking down the table at her brother.

“You were a bad sister. You took them when you knew I wasn’t looking, then lied about it. But Tatie always gave me more anyway.” He laughed and poured himself a little more wine.

“Could we make some?” I asked Josephine and Marie, fascinated by the idea and imagining how good they must taste.
“Ah, non.
It’s too much work,” they both replied, letting the memory be enough for them.

Nevertheless I was determined to make them, but it wasn’t until recently that I did. The feet took more than two hours to cook, and I tore some of the skin when picking out the bones, which wasn’t catastrophic, but the stuffing poked out. The feet looked a little lumpy after I bound the two sides together, but they were recognizable. I learned that the dish was basically a type of terrine. You can accomplish a similar dish by wrapping the meat mixture in plastic wrap and poaching it for about ten minutes. After the packets are chilled, the meat is sliced, breaded, and fried. The combination of the crunchy texture, aromatic herbs, and delicate meat is held together by the gelatin and sinews that dissolve during the initial cooking. Just like
pieds-et-paquets,
lamb’s foot fritters make for an eating experience that is well worth the effort.

Any dish is only as good as the ingredients you begin with, and in Provence the finest lamb is considered to be Sisteron lamb, characteristically sweet, mild meat from lambs that graze on the wild herbs and grasses of Haute-Provence and are slaughtered locally. This regional specialty has been awarded an Indication Géographique Protégée, an official EU designation that merits the Red Label, which guarantees to consumers a top-quality European product.

In this case, the label ensures that the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered in the area of production under certain established rules and conditions. For example, the reproductive herd of ewes and rams must be composed of three regional breeds: Mérinos d’Arles, Préalpes du Sud, or Mourerous, or crosses of these breeds. The herds must also practice the traditional grazing patterns inherent in the
transhumance,
the lambs must be raised on their mothers’ milk for a minimum of sixty days, and the lambs must have traceability at all stages, from reproduction to slaughter and transport. A lamb must weigh between twelve and nineteen kilos and be between seventy and one hundred fifty days old at the time of slaughter.

A butcher shop, such as the one I go to in Aups, that sells Sisteron lamb proudly advertises so with a sticker in the shop window bearing a drawing of a fluffy lamb and “Agneau de Sisteron” printed on it. The meat of a Sisteron lamb is firm yet tender, and as my butcher tells me, a
gigot
is perfectly cooked after only forty-five minutes at the equivalent of 375 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve found that shopkeepers and vendors are more than happy to tell you the different ways to cook or prepare what you are buying from them.

“Now,” the butcher says to me each time I buy a leg of lamb, “you be sure to rub it all over with olive oil, then lots of fresh
thyme, a little fresh rosemary, then make slits about this deep”—he indicates them with his thumb and forefinger—”and fill them all with garlic slivers. Don’t overcook it. Nothing worse than a nice
gigot
spoiled by overcooking.”

He and his wife look alike, both
costaud,
or hefty, with round faces and big wide smiles, though his hair is white, matching his apron, and hers a soft brown.

“Ah,” his wife often says, as she adds a gift, a house-made
saucisson pour l’apéritif,
to my purchases, “you are so lucky to have a nice gigot. I love them, but no one else in my family does, and my husband, poor soul, can’t eat them anymore. No point my cooking a
gigot
just for myself.”

I like to peek through the shop door into the back. The butcher disappears behind the heavy door of his cold room, then emerges with a whole lamb or a quarter of a hog carcass slung over his shoulder, drops it onto to his thick, scarred butcher block, pulls one of his long knives from the rack behind the block, and sharpens it with fluid arcs against the steel. Soon I can’t see his movements because his back is to the shop front, his head bent over his work. Shortly he reappears with a pork loin or a neatly tied roast larded with thin slices of back fat, a sprig of thyme held beneath the string, or a rack of lamb loin chops, perfectly trimmed.

Once, I asked him about
rognonnade,
a cut I had seen in the window of a butcher shop in another town a couple of hours away, but I was on a summer day’s excursion and couldn’t buy it for fear that it would spoil.

“Ah, now that is a noble cut. Did you see it whole or was it sliced into chops?”

“Sliced. There were four pieces that looked like …,” I searched for a word, “well, like eyeglasses.” I cupped my hands,
nearly touching the fingertips to show him. “They were two centimeters or so thick”—I demonstrated the thickness with a thumb and forefinger—”and each of the two sides were wrapped around a bit of kidney.”

“Yes, cut from the
selle,
the lower part of the back.” He turned, putting his hands on his lower back to show me. “Right here, where the kidneys are.” Turning back to me, he said, “So when you cut those chops, you can cut each with a slice of kidney. It’s a delicate matter to do, one for a real butcher, not those people behind the counter in
grande surface
where all they do is arrange precut meat on trays. Those supermarket butchers, they don’t butcher the carcasses themselves. That takes knowledge and expertise.”

I had heard similar opinions from him and other butchers about the current state of the
métier,
the demise of the true butcher, and the lack of young people to come behind him and his generation when they retire.

“Now, the
selle
can also be cooked whole, but I haven’t filled an order for that in quite a while. I don’t know if anyone knows how to cook it anymore. It used to be I sold several every holiday season, which isn’t bad for a village of fifteen hundred people.”

I was intrigued by all this and immediately ordered a
rognonnade
chop. He went into the cooler in the back of the shop and came out with the hindquarters of a lamb on his shoulder, flipped it down on his butcher block, wielded his knives, and brought me a chop for my inspection. It looked just like the one I had seen earlier and I could hardly wait to cook it.

That night I rubbed the chop with olive oil, fresh thyme, and sea salt. I crushed some black peppercorns in a mortar and rubbed that over it as well. Since it was early September, and still warm, I didn’t want to grill the meat in the fireplace as I would have later in the season, and instead broiled it, for just four or
five minutes per side. “You don’t want to cook it too long,” the butcher had told me, “or you’ll ruin the kidneys. They get tough when they’re overcooked.”

The kidneys, two small, rosy bites, were cooked to perfection, as was the rest of the chop. I ate it with creamed spinach, one of my favorite dishes, and slices of fresh tomato from the garden, and poured some Gigondas.

If
selles,
or “barons” in English, and
gigots
are the noble cuts, the other cuts aspire to the same heights, though they require, like the feet, more time and inventiveness. In the traditional rural households where home butchery was routine—this lasted well into the 1970s and even longer in the remote regions in the mountains—several lambs would be fattened and slaughtered over the course of a year. Any injured lamb or sheep was slaughtered as well, and consequently there was a substantial supply of meat, none of it to be wasted.

Old people tell of preparing the inelegant parts of the animals, like the trotters, heads, testicles, kidneys, heart, blood, and breasts. Some of these, like the
pieds-et-paquets, brochettes de rognons, blanquette d’agneau,
and
soupe courte,
can still be found in homes and family restaurants across Provence, classics handed down through generations. Since goats were kept as well, the preparations were used interchangeably for
chevreaux.

Brochettes,
for example, made with pieces of lamb’s kidney, heart, and liver interspersed with onion, green peppers, and bacon, all well seasoned, are omnipresent at festivals, grilled alongside sausages by sidewalk vendors and sold by the skewer. The vendor also gives you a chunk of
baguette
slit open. You put the skewer inside, clamp down on the bread, and pull the skewer, removing it. You’ll also find ready-to-cook skewers, packed in Styrofoam trays and covered with plastic wrap, in any supermarket.

Soupe courte,
short soup, is made from the lesser cuts of lamb such as the neck and the breast, though sometimes chops are used. The meat is browned in rendered lard or olive oil along with onions, garlic, carrots, and herbs, then very slowly simmered in a little broth. Once it is done, which takes about two hours, water is poured in the pot and brought to a boil, and rice, saffron, and more seasonings are added. The soup, called “short” because there is not a lot of it, resembles a thick rice porridge. It is served in a bowl, with the meat alongside, which can then be removed from the bones and stirred into the soup. This substantial soup is a favorite on the menus of traditional family-style restaurants and
bistros
throughout Provence, a sign that people still revere and enjoy the old preparations, and seek to preserve them.

Lamb or mutton breasts are held together with muscle and cartilage and are small, not very meaty, and often quite fatty. The ingenious Provençaux cook them like
blanquette de veau,
the classic French veal breast stew, giving them a long simmer in a broth aromatic with a
bouquet garni,
onions, and carrots, skimming and straining the liquid and finally finishing with a creamy, white, egg-based sauce to create a
plat
worthy of any good
bourgeois
household.

Lamb breasts are an inexpensive cut of meat, even today, and like other inexpensive cuts, they take time and care to prepare successfully. I’ve stuffed them, according to directions from my neighbor Marie, as I would a boneless breast of veal, with a mix of ham,
lardons,
mushrooms, and shallots, adding some spices. I braised the stuffed breast, resting on its bones in broth, for an hour or more. I let it cool just a bit to let the juices jell, then cut the meat into slices, which makes a presentation as elegant as the dish tastes. I’ve even barbecued lamb ribs, marinating them first in a classic American-style barbecue sauce. This was my own
idea, but not a success. They were not meaty enough to eat like pork or beef ribs, in spite of the spicy sauce, and tasted fatty.