Weekend Breakfast-at-Camont. Asparagus & HAM

It begins here, with two good ingredients.

Ham- Eric Ospital’s Ibaiona brand from the Basque Country.

Asparagus- local, just picked and carried to the market so fresh it snaps.

This week, my Kitchen Godmother, Vétou Pompele,  came by for weekend breakfast (a decidedly not French event) and asked me what I would make for her.

I grabbed a copy of my first cookbook that chronicled my early days sailing on the Julia Hoyt and said,

“Your Asparagus and Ham dish, of course”.

She had forgotten about what was long one of my favorite dishes.  It’s easy. When you cook everyday, EVERY DAY, that’s a lot of recipes under the bridge. We have both forgotten half of the wonderful dishes we cooked together over years of sailing the canals and rivers of France on the Julia Hoyt. This was always one of my Spring favorites, because unlike my life BF (Before France), asparagus is a once a year event, a few scant weeks of spear-ful delight.  Read More

My Keeping Kitchen! A is for Asparagus

I’ve always loved the term “a keeping kitchen.”

Keeping Kitchen…

• a place for making food to keep for the winter.
• an edible way of keeping traditions alive.
• a gathering then sharing of abundant harvest.

Over the years, I’ve referred to my French pantry, the way of keeping it stocked, and the very kitchen at Camont as the “Keeping Kitchen”. Within these stone walls at Camont, I have been keeping the traditions of Gascon cooking alive as well as adding to it with my own fresh take on authentic recipes- folding in a new good idea here, leaving out an old bad habit there but always keeping true to the spirit if not the actual letter of the laws of the kitchen.

Good friend and co-conspirator in Italy, Judy Witts- the DivinaCucina diva and I hatched the idea of another combined blog effort like the Going Whole Hog blog project we did a couple years ago. We wanted more than a way to keep tabs on each other’s gardens, kitchens, and lives in Tuscany and Gascony. We want to share our euro-view of what surrounds us as not-quite natives/not-quite-expats. Trends come strong and fast up the internet pipeline but from here they can actually be old world news.  We decided to share our everyday cooking habits for stocking the Euro-Larder otherwise known here as the Keeping Kitchen.

Pancetta + Ventrèche= it’s about the pig…

I swim in a sea of charcuterie every week as I plow the waves of good food produced by the neighboring farms of the Lot-et-Garonne: salted hams, meaty saucisson, head cheese, terrines, patés, and other cured and confited parts of the fatted pig. As a cook, I began my sea trials in meat here as I discovered the extraordinary flavors of each cured piece of the pig. I started to learn my hind leg for jambon from my forward leg- shoulder for fresh saucisse de Toulouse. Then it was loins and chops, ribs and collar. Next came the innards…

Like all novices, I worked my way up and down the coast of liver, kidneys, brain, lung, and blood. I watched as pigs were slaughtered and butchered on family farms, one at a time, with care and respect for the ‘year of meat’ to come. Then I began to help- trimming meat, carrying ourt orders from the grand-mères as whole pigs were put up in jars- canned, sterilized in a water bath and stored, or salted, peppered, and hung to age in a corner of the barn.  But it wasn’t until I barged into the life of a small pig farm that I learned the most important past of this ocean of charcuterie. It’s the pig. Just simply the PIG.

Imagine the first visit to the Chapolard farm in 1997 with my good friend Elaine Tin Nyo. She wanted to do a series of photographs and videos for one of her edibly inspired art exhibits. I had already begun cooking my way through the pig with the market advice of Marc Chapolard, who selling me a piece of pork a week talked me through the process of cooking boudin, salting a tail, or roasting a collar. There is an image of that first visit to Baradieu- Marc holding out his hands full of ground grains- grain that they grew on the farm to feed their pigs.

Oh, Pigs eat too. I want to know what I am eating eats. What? What do pigs eat?

My brain was moving slowly forward. These pigs eat wheat, barley, corn, oats, sunflowers, favabeans, soy… How big are they? Oh, big. Very big as these meat growing pigs are intended for charcuterie as well as fresh meat. Twelve months old, 400 lbs+ of solid red meat and firm flavorful fat. The Chapolards know that their mature pigs’ meat is fully developed in both flavor and structure. Here in Gascony, we believe that the best charcuterie is not just from certain types of breeds finished on fancy diets, but rather from a well balanced diet fed its entire life and a ‘grownup’, fully mature animal. Oh, this pork meat is like beef. Not veal. Can you imagine making corned veal, veal jerky, or veal bresaola? The meat cells must develop sufficiently to be able to cure properly both in flavor and in texture.

There are technical reasons behind all this, but for us amateurs of good meat our best chance to getting good pork is to ken your pork producer or artisan butcher and learn as much as you can, piece by piece. I have the luxury of, after 14 years, knowing the Chapolards well.  Baradieu is not a pigshit-free showcase farm; but they raise their Large White/Pietrai/Duroc pigs with the sort of care over 12 months from birth to slaughter that produces delicious and tasty meat. Like this slab of pork belly I used for my ventrèche géante.

“THE PRESENCE OF A BUTCHER IN A DISTRICT SAYS AS MUCH FOR ITS INTELLIGENCE AS FOR ITS WEALTH. THE WORKER FEEDS HIMSELF, AND A MAN WHO FEEDS HIMSELF THINKS.”

H. De Balzac- “The Country Doctor”

Projet Cochon- the Butcher & the Kids

The white blackboard read: Project- “dans le cochon tout est bon” . And so it was.

This week, twenty-four French lycée students between 16-20 years old and their professors M. Franck LAPIERRE and M. Jean Marc BOUILLY allowed three American kitchen-crashers to look over their shoulders as Dominique Chapolard, artisan butcher and pork producer, demonstrated in the expansive  school kitchen that “in the pig, all is good!”

The attentive white-clad chefs-in-training crowded around as M. Chapolard reconstructed the whole pig carcass, piece by piece, organ by organ. Silence reigned as Dominique, our master butcher mentor here at Camont, explained what goes into making good pork from field to table.

Only when he split the skull to reveal the tiny brain did squeamish teenage yelps erupt.  Quickly silenced by Chef Lapierre, he teased them that they see more blood on the horror films they watch. After the initial hour of dissection, as the muscle groups began to resemble familiar meat cuts, this next generation of France’s good cooks began to chop and grind, season and taste, while the scent of Gascony’s prized pork filled the kitchen. A hind leg became a Jambon, a shoulder a Roti de Porc. The large rib cage transformed into ventreche, poitrine and travers. Legs broke down into jarret and pied de porc while the caul fat was washed and leaf lard rendered out before grattons were drained and pressed into a terrine.

This fine piggy day was a part of “Cooking at the Source-Gascony“, a collaboration between Robert Reynold’s Chef’s Studio in Portland, Oregon and my own Kitchen-at-Camont. We spent the morning with our good friend and farmer/butcher Dominique Chapolard as he did a day long demonstration for the students of  the Lycee Jacques-de-Romas in neraby Nerac. For upcoming Duck workshops in the U.S. and France consult our program pages.

Day two… this Gascony, this terroir.

Driving to the Chateau St. Loup en Albret this morning was like flying between cloud and earth- rows of golden vines turning in sunshine alternated with blankets of fog concealing house and farm. Montagnac’s church spire floated above the mist.

First stop after gathering Melissa, Robert, Tag, Porter and Nick was the morning market at Lavardac- a good beginner’s guide to local good food.

What we bought and then cooked and ate this day:

• pâté de grand-mere-  a black pepper-studded liver pâté from Patricia
• 2 magrets de Canard. 1 1/2 pintade
• pâté de langue- pork tongues en gelée
• 3 cheese from Bruno-a Pyrennes sheep cheese, a creamy goat cheese from the Perigord, a slice of perfectly ripe Brie de Meaux
• from the Chapolard’s charcuterie stall- saucisse de toulouse, boudin noir, an aire-cured noix de jambon, saucisse sèche
• black radishes, mustard greens, radicchio, spinach and sunchokes form Francoise’s organic garden
• mushrooms-  cèpe and girolles from Paul
• bread
• wine, armagnac and little shot glasses with a pruneaux drowning in Armagnac in each one

We ate lunch, a picnic near the river at Vianne before driving to Camont.

Camont in sunshine on a November day- the kitchen warming to the fragrance of a richly perfumed Gateau Basque,  a pintade braising in a short wine broth enriched with pruneaux, la cruchade cooked and steamed, and several bottles of Domaine la Galine.

Dinner was the rich and savoury terroir of Gascony on a plate.  Fotos to follow.