The largely unknown city of Compiegne, France, has the distinction of being the site of one of Louis XV’s most extravagant homes away from home. Under him, the Chateau de Compiegne became one of three distinctly opulent seats of government alongside Versailles and Fontainbleau. The latter French monarchs were hardly known for their desire to live simply as visitors to either of those other palaces can attest, and Compiegne is no exception, taking more than 35 years to complete with Louis constantly tinkering at the design to aggrandize it to his tastes. When finished it made the perfect departure point for forays into the nearby Forest of Compiegne, ancestral hunting grounds of French royalty, for some bracing sport. However, Louis was not into taking chances on returning with his game bag empty, and it is said that the forest was so well-stocked that a blind marksman could still expect to feast on wild meats.

Of course, it’s well-known that the rest of the French population were not eating in quite such grand style at that time, and it wasn’t until after the revolution and the rise of the bourgeois class that the French institution with which many of us are most familiar came into being, namely, the restaurant. Happily for us, upon visiting Compiegne in early 2010, we found that these days the city is much more egalitarian in its approach and makes abundant gastronomic accommodation for a range of economic classes. Indeed, the night we arrived, we dined somewhat opulently on escargot ravioli and kir royal before joining the sans culottes at the other end of the social spectrum the following evening with a carafe of vin ordinaire to wash down a marvelously flavorful jarret de porc, poached pig’s hock, a humble dish that was almost certainly never prepared for residents of the Chateau. Served with some whipped potatoes together with its poaching broth that would have been almost as good without the hock itself, le jarret was juicy, incredibly rich and porky, and meltingly tender.

The porcine counterpart to the famed veal osso buco of Milan, the hock is the lower portion of the animal’s shin bone ending just above the trotter, and is consequently tough and full of connective tissues. As with all such parts of the beast, slow cooking is necessary to get the best out of it, and in the case of the hock, poaching tenderizes it perfectly, but ignores the magic of the skin and underlying fat, comparable with the cheeks in terms of porky flavor. To solve this problem, and improve upon the jarret of Compiegne, we roasted it in a hot oven that performed three special functions: 1) it rendered out some of the fat, 2) crisped the skin into some amazing crackling, and 3) transformed the connective tissue into sticky, almost sweet, gelatin. We then deglazed the roasting pan with some of the strained poaching liquid and reduced the mixture into an almost clear gravy, that combined with a squeeze or two of lemon juice to cut the richness, came together on its own with the pig gelatin.

Unfortunately, and this is why we took until the start of fall 2011 to make this dish, unsmoked pork hocks are rather difficult hard to obtain in America even from reputable butchers where their smoked counterparts are ever present, and it was only last week that we managed to get our hands on some, in, of all places, a regular suburban supermarket. Our freezer is now half-filled with pork hocks which will be dropped into Sunday gravy in the near future, and may well also feature in a special attempt at home-making aspic jelly should we run out of inspiration or suffer from pork overload in the interim. We would encourage you to seek out this humble cut of meat too, you won’t be dining royally but it might help you feel wealthy when you check your bank balance.

Our good friend, of whom we have seen very little recently, but who persists as an unwitting gastronomic inspiration to us – Juan Camilo – struck again recently when we spied a mess of veal brains at our local butcher. [I'm not sure what the proper collective noun is for brains, but the term seems appropriate given their form, even if something like "florettes" might be more marketable.] We are forever indebted to JC for introducing us to and instructing us on Colombian food, but also for taking us to Ali Kabab Cafe, happily for him, just across the street from his Astoria, Queens, apartment.

This celebrated, only in New York, hole-in-the-wall, 5 table, nominally Egyptian restaurant is run by the enigmatic, tri-lingual owner, Ali El Sayed, on the back of one tiny assistant, an oven and a single hot plate. These limitations combined with a menu that you should ignore in favor of the daily specials and Ali’s rather, shall-we-say, changeable moods, make for a unique dining experience, during the latter stages of which we were presented with a platter of deep-fried veal brains decorated sparsely with salad greens, a thin harissa sauce, and lemon wedges.

This rosy, if slightly hazy memory (made so by several bottles of heavy Algerian wine), was instantly recalled upon sighting said brains and my hand sprang to pocket, promptly unencumbering it of three and a half of your American dollars. It was only at home, several hours later, after this initial enthusiasm had cooled, that I was left to consider how to make the best use of my grey matter.

I should point out that this is not an uncommon occurrence and in the past, the excited purchase of unusual foodstuffs has frequently prompted breathtaking swerves of culinary daring, as seen in these here web pages, – an outcome I was particularly counting on in this instance since the four pound ox heart I also sneaked into the shopping cart had taken up all available room in the freezer.

But as I sat and stared at them – the passing minutes becoming quarters and then halves of an hour, the milky whiteness of the brains reflecting my mental vacuum back at me, echoing the blankness of my thoughts – nothing at all, even less than usual, sprang to mind. In fact, had not this vacuity coincided serendipitously with the harvest of our very first eggplants (2) and the watching of the TiVo’d episode of No Reservations in which Tony goes to Naples and eats a remarkable eggplant parmigiana, the brains might have been squeezed into a dark corner of the freezer and consigned to a lengthy hibernation.

Inspiration doesn’t always have to take you all that far to rouse you from your stupor, and in truth, I made no greater mental leap than removing the greens, lemon and harissa from that dish at Ali. If Ali’s brains and rudimentary appliances had provided him all that was necessary, I reasoned, there should be no impediment, barring inferior technique and lesser quality ingredients, to my own mental faculties doing likewise. Besides, I was certain that scrambled or boiled brains wouldn’t have any photogenic quality whatsoever.

Thus, the dish you see before you is a play on the combination of eggplant parmigiana and veal or chicken milanese: a roasted eggplant-wrapped package of red sauce and mozzarella seats a pair of breaded and deep-fried brains in cross-section.

For anyone still reading, I want to be clear that, certainly, I am sympathetic to those for whom brains might be an anatomical bridge too far. Had I not been in an expansive (read:tipsy) mood at Ali, I doubt I would have been so bold, though I am glad that I was. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that Juan Camilo did not find the brains to his taste.) Similarly, I am sure that even if it is interesting to them, it will be no incentive whatsoever to the skeptics, to learn that predators, including our very own ancestors, often eat the brains of their prey first, leaving the rest of the carcass until later so as to make sure they partake of the most nutritious parts before anyone can take it away from them.

Nonetheless, we swear that veal brains are the new sweetbreads – which may mean nothing to you unless you’re accustomed to a little nose to tail eating – they are mild, firm but almost creamy in the mouth, and have very little of the minerality typically found in organ meats. Despite only the remotest of chance that you will, we (as always) encourage you to give brains a try. They are by no means an everyday foodstuff and definitely demand a mental leap, but isn’t it true that almost anything really rewarding requires some thought?

When you think of old-style Italian-American restaurants does red sauce spring to mind? Red check wax table cloths, family-style servings, a free salad with your entree, rotund red-faced guys with their sleeves rolled-up, going “ey!” and slapping each other on the back? Sure, it’s a cliché, but it’s also close to the truth in a lot of places, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I, for one, love a classic east coast red sauce and meatballs joint, but it’s not the complete picture.

Ferdinando’s Focacceria on Union Street in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood has been in business as long as any in New York City. In 1910, in the heart of what was then a burgeoning Italian community, it opened its doors principally to cater for expatriate paesani working at the nearby Brooklyn docks, and it’s been serving the neighborhood faithfully ever since. However, unlike many of the other Italian eateries in the area, Fernandino’s does not serve everything with lashings of tomato gravy (not that they don’t offer red sauce – try it with their tripe), instead, they serve their original regional Sicilian dishes as if they don’t care or aren’t aware that long-established Italian restaurants are supposed to top everything with a meatball. They are most famous for their panelle and vastedda (chick pea fritters and veal spleen sandwiches, respectively), which they didn’t just decide to start selling since David Chang and Michael Symon announced it was cool for Brooklyn hipsters to eat offal.

That Ferdinando’s and many other original Italian businesses are still in operation in Carroll Gardens speaks to the fact that descendants of the neighborhood’s original communities remain where their forefathers first landed, in sight of Ellis Island across New York harbor. Not that simply by merit they don’t deserve to be in business, but that health-ninnies and changing dietary proclivities have discouraged most people from looking kindly upon rolls filled with deep fried chickpea dough or boiled calf-innards.

Our recent visit was the culmination of several years of anticipation and a pleasant relief after a terrible, screamy morning with our 5-month old. It was planned as our first lunch out with the baby, and we arrived flustered and desperate that he would nap long enough to allow us to get through a meal in peace. Finding ourselves a table at the rear, as distant as possible from the other patrons, we settled ourselves in and admired the time-worn decor of sepia-tint photos of the old country, a thickly over-painted tin ceiling and some attractive stained glass. The baby sparked awake shortly after we’d ordered our wine, but to our amazement, he emerged from his car-seat cheerful, quiet and relaxed. Maybe he is as susceptible as we are to a relaxing restaurant atmosphere? Whatever the reason, cue a great lunch.

Owner Francesco Buffa’s food is unrepentantly rustic and from the mismatched plates to the friendly but slightly gruff service, it is a truly authentic experience of old Brooklyn that is increasingly hard to find. Starting with a cold octopus and celery salad and a plate of garlicky broccoli di rape with a basket of crisp Italian bread from Mazzola bakery two blocks up, before proceeding with a panelle and mozzarella sandwich and a vastedda special (with the most unctuous ricotta), our happiness reigned for nearly two hours. In fact, so becalmed were we and Paolo, that we had dessert and espresso as the wait staff cooed around the baby.

Buddhists say that expectations are the root of all suffering, but even if we’d had the greatest morning of our lives instead of one of the most grueling, Ferdinando’s would still have been special. We will be heading back again soon to try their famous pasta con le sarde (with sardines, raisins and pine nuts) and rice balls stuffed with house-made ragu and peas. Whether Paolo will cooperate remains to be seen, but the food is so good that it’s worth the risk.

Do you ever wish you had a secret power? I don’t mean like some stupid superhero who can fly, make it rain, or look great in a unitard. I mean like a gerbil’s ability to store tasty bits in its cheeks for later, or a tiger’s ability to eat 30lbs of wild boar at a single sitting, that kind of thing. No? Hmm, well, I do, and sometimes, in my more reflective moments, I find myself wishing I was blessed with a gizzard. After all, would not my diet be expanded and my ‘intestinal transit’ made smoother if I possessed a specialized second stomach that enabled me to grind up and enjoy commonly indigestible foods?

Having recently questioned a sample group of poultry, reptiles and fish (the only three genera of animals that possess gizzards) about this, I can tell you that 9 out of the 10 chickens surveyed credited their gizzards with giving free reign to their more fibrous dietary proclivities. In the course of my survey, I also learned that while addiction and dependency issues brought on by knowingly being bred for slaughter are a big problem for young roosters, the greater worry among concerned hens is the utter disregard for their gizzards demonstrated by the carnivorous public.

“That’s my son’s (second) stomach they’re throwing them away!”, cock-a-doodle-doed one plump mother of 700 chicks, while another squawked that, “they (humans) should be so lucky to have a gizzard of their own. Ingrates!”

Chastened by these plaintive cries, and encouraged to make a salad we ate at a fabulous gastropub in Lille, France, over New Year’s, we recently explored the potential of confit-ing chicken gizzards. We found that nothing could be easier and more delicious, nor could this preparation be more suited to making the best out of what is a potentially tough part of the giblets.

We served our gizzards and some similarly confit’d chicken livers over a green salad with some boiled eggs, just as we had eaten it in Lille, but an alternative preparation typical to the Dordogne region of France, especially the town of Perigeux/Perigord, serves the gizzards over a lettuce salad with walnuts and croutons, which would be just as good, no doubt.

La Cupertina, at the corner of Cabrera and Godoy Cruz in the charming Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Viejo, is reputed to have the best traditional Tucuman empanadas in the city. And, certainly, they are rather good. So tasty, in fact, that we bought a dozen for carry-out the day we left Argentina and nursed them carefully all the way back to our freezer in Brooklyn to enjoy nostalgically a month or so ago.

Replete with savory pastry and chicken, cheese and beef humita (a stew of grated corn kernels, beef, hardboiled eggs, raisins and olives, but more about that in a later post) fillings, we were strolling arm-in-arm along the streets of our own neighborhood when we came across one of the glories of Brooklyn life: a selection of books put out for free on someone’s stoop. Among them was Así Cocinan Los Argentinos (How Argentina Cooks) by Alberto Vázquez Prego — a more timely find would be hard to imagine — and, of course, we immediately grabbed it.

La Cupertina is also famous for other dishes from the province of Tucuman and, in general, its serious approach to the regional specialties from Argentina’s north and north-west — the areas bordering Paraguay and Bolivia — where stews of meats, potatoes, beans and other native ingredients are common. These hearty, one-pot dishes have much more in common with the endemic foods of the peoples of the altiplano (high plains) of Bolivia and Peru due to historic imperial ties to the Inca Empire which once extended south into modern-day Argentina than with the more Europeanized cuisine of the larger cities to the south and east.

Nonetheless, many of them have been universally adopted as Argentine national dishes, emblematic of both the country’s aboriginal inhabitants and the creole (criollo) culture of the first Spanish settlers and gauchos. And, like other national dishes of South American countries, they aren’t the kind of meals that you can, or should, eat every day due to the lengthy preparation requirement and risks to long-term cardiac health. Similarly, there is rarely a single, unified recipe used by all cooks, only certain ingredients which must be included and others which are optional depending on how your mother used to make it and what is available. So it is with locro.

Deriving its name from the Quechua word ruqru, the origins of Argentine locro can be traced to the Andean region of Cuyo in western Argentina from where it spread across the country. Predominantly a winter dish (indeed at La Cupertina they only serve it April through November), locro is most commonly eaten on May 25 in celebration of the May Revolution of 1810 which kicked off the Argentine War of Independence.

In basic terms, locro is a thick soup made by boiling the dry kernels of white hulled corn (hominy/posole) until tender and adding various meats and other vegetables to it. Indeed, what makes locro locro and not puchero or humita, or something else, is the hominy that, by the end of the lengthy cooking process, creates a thick and slightly sweet base. Locro can also be identified by what it does not contain, i.e. anything green. Leafy vegetables are shunned entirely by locro recipes — another reason, perhaps, that one shouldn’t eat it often.

Aficionados of locro usually identify which of the many varieties it is they’re eating by the perceived emphasis on additional ingredients like pig’s trotters (patitas), squash (zapallo), bone marrow (huesos de caracú), chorizo, dry beans (porotos) or beef tripes (mondongo). However, this, of itself, can cause confusion, since some locro recipes call for several of these things. Any uncertainty in this regard, though, should not result in panic. After all, locro is a dish with broad shoulders, a reliable, sturdy presence, that once you get to know it — in all its forms — provides the kind of assurance that is so rare in this flimsy and transient world.

This should not suggest that locro is a one-paced repast, steadfast yet insipid, dependable but dull — quite the contrary, in fact. For not only does it have many faces, but these are given a supplemental spark of personality by the addition of sofrito or quiquirimichi, a spicy, fried lard sauce that is used as a condiment, providing further reasons why Argentines might only eat it on special occasions.

The recipe below, found in Así Cocinan Los Argentinos, and followed reasonably closely in terms of quantities, yields enough locro for a week of lunches of the kind that preclude productive afternoons. If you have a large family or are cooking for a block party, locro is probably the ultimate scalable dish as you can simply add more hominy, beans, broth and pig’s feet as necessary. It’s also great for those type of occasions because all the ingredients are inexpensive, relatively easy to obtain and create a wildly satisfying meal that your guests will be working off until you make it again next year. But, if you’re cooking for fewer people or simply don’t have a large enough pot for all this, you can halve it and still easily feed four adults.

On our honeymoon, almost exactly two years ago today, we arrived in the fair city of Verona thoroughly pissed off. And then things got worse. It wasn’t as if the day had started badly either: waking in Bologna; leisurely sipping a doppio espresso; before strolling along Via Pescherie Vecchie to buy a small, crusty loaf, a giant, but sweet tomato, an immoderately-sized leaf-wrapped burrata, and a serrated knife; then, wandering into the Piazza Cavour to make ourselves nearly sick with buttery cream cheese curds washed down with a half-bottle of bardolino. All in all, a pretty reasonable opening gambit.

I don’t even recall at what point things began to go west, but the supposed simple hour and a half drive between the two cities took us more like four. So, in late afternoon, we lurched into Verona hot, tired, stiff, and needing to pee. And then we couldn’t find our hotel. Another hour of angrily trawling the Veronese streets in our banana-hued rental car, grinding gears, and now with excrutiating pee pains, we finally found it – closed. No amount of banging on the door, honking of the horn or screaming at the windows produced a response. Despairing, I relieved myself copiously in the hotel’s flower bed and, looking up with an air of contentment, spied a large pink elephant beaming at me from across a field. Salvation arrives in many guises, and drawn towards it, things immediately improved.

With a free bottle of valpolicella, a purring welcome from a friendly ginger tom, a pair of iridescent peacocks puttering outside, and a room for the night with breakfast, Hotel Elefante saved us from sleeping in our car and, perhaps, from premature marital counselling. Having regained at least partial equilibrium, we made for the city center dressed for the theatre.

Skirting the wholly-invented balcony of the wholly-invented Capulet family, we ducked down Via Portici and into a restaurant filled with lovers pawing each other under the table and, like cartoon dogs, sucking-up the same strand of spaghetti. Still too flustered to entertain any romantic notions, we ordered what turned out to be a vast portion of fegato di vitello alla Veneziana or Venetian-style calves’ liver, which, with its heady richness of garlic, sage and cream, would have rendered senseless even the most amorous couple. Things continued to improve after dinner as we shuffled onwards to the arena di Verona and, cooling our tails on its ancient bleached limestone blocks, watched an epic performance of Puccini’s La Bôheme that somehow provided much-needed perspective on the day’s minor tragedies.

Periodically, we’ll laugh (or grimace) at our haplessness that day, but as time passes, we’re more apt to remember the liver than the liverishness. During a recent lunch at the very respectable Aperitivo here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, we ate a delicious adaptation of that dish over linguine with a nice dry Valpolicella that was reminiscent of our pre-opera meal in Verona. Here it is, recreated for your visual pleasure. Feel free to eat it on a balcony or at a banquet for quarreling clans, just don’t expect to be feeling frisky afterwards.

There are few things that, when slapped between tortillas and christened with spicy condiments, fail to get me excited. Making it a shame that the vast majority of Mexican restaurants near us have such a limited spectrum of taco fillings. Not that I don’t enjoy carnitas, carne asada, fish or chicken tacos, I very definitely do, but that there is something of a tyranny inherent in this four-point agenda.

Recently, after our meaty dust-up with the Uruguyuan-style tablita parillada, we found ourselves with a surfeit of grilled sweetbreads (aka mollejas in Spanish, aka thymus glands in biology), and were looking for creative ways to use this most succulent of leftovers. Ever the slayers of convention, we sought to break this taco-based tyranny, and gently reheated our sweetbreads combining them with a crunchy, tangy salsa of radish, roasted corn and grape tomato, all wrapped in a blue corn tortilla for a dramatic finish.

In this process, we learned that throughout the South-West USA and northern Mexico, taco stands offering sweetbreads (as well as other tasty fillings including tongue and tripe) are so common you just about fall over them at every corner. All of which made us feel slightly less original in our preparation, but no less enthusiastic about its merits. Indeed, it was reassuring to know that places still exist in this condensed and standardized world where you can be openly and brazenly glandular should the feeling so move you.

As Odysseus was nearly drawn to his destruction on the rocks by the enchanting song of the sirens, so your hardy WANF voyagers were almost powerless to resist breaking themselves on the plentiful tables of Uruguay. However, unlike Homer’s hero, for whom women were the main weakness throughout his epic peregrinations, during our recent travels in South America, we found that grilled organs, specifically sweetbreads, are the likely source of our eventual ruin.

A comparatively short (by Odysseian standards) three-hour Buquebus ferry ride from Buenos Aires across the Mar del Plata – the enormously wide and constantly brown estuary of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) – lies Uruguay’s capital and largest city, Montevideo. Arriving by water feels delightfully old-fashioned, and it allows the visitor to get a sense of the lie of the land in a way that a plane ride cannot. Rather than the confusing meander through a city’s outskirts on the way in from the airport, the city slowly revealed itself to us as we approached it by sea, face-first, so that we could see the way it had been built, outwards from the port.

Centered on the port is Montevideo’s cuidad vieja (old town), which with its faded colonial glory and salty night-time reputation, is immediately charming to the visitor. Only the giant ultra-modern cruise ship towering over everything prevented us from wondering if the ferry hadn’t also been a time machine. The hub of the old town is the Mercado del Puerto, a magnificent Victorian-era market with a skylit roof supported by wrought iron pillars, where the air is thick with the thwack of cleaver on meat, the cries of competing vendors and the sooty warblings of its resident pigeons. It no longer serves as a venue for trading fresh produce, a fact that might be sad if it weren’t now a giant parilla (grill/barbecue) serving all manner of traditional Uruguayan meaty preparations.

More accurately, there are actually a bunch of different parillas within the mercado all in friendly and typically laid-back Uruguayan-style competition with one another for the title of best in the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes cagily circling the mercado trying to figure out some way of discerning which might be leading this contest. After inspecting rack upon similar rack of sizzling meats, we decided to let demographics be our guide and plumped for Estancia del Puerto, the place with the fewest available seats (2), and the most drunken dudes with guitars serenading the patrons (1).

We had left Buenos Aires on a very early morning ferry and, having eaten nothing on the journey, arrived in Montevideo in a terrible, bleary-eyed state of hunger. The only way out of which seemed to be robust servings of charred beast. Happily then, the menu was the most extensive of its kind we have ever seen, containing more than eight choices of steak, five of sausage, 3 or 4 matambres (stuffed beef rolls), chicken, pork, and an intimidating selection of organ meats, not to mention a full range of pasta, salads and sides, in both full or half portions. Understanding, by this point in our carnivorous odyssey, that servings tended to be of a generous nature in this part of the world, we ordered half portions of mollejones (sweetbreads), morcilla (blood sausage), lechon (suckling pig), the potentially gruesome chotos/chinchulines (guts), and a bottle of typically Uruguayan tannat (red wine), in the hope that this might save room for further sampling of the menu.

Since, like all good grills, only certain sections of this parilla were used to actually cook meat, with others functioning as warming areas for ready-to-serve meats, we were presented with our choices within seconds, and what a presentation! No garnish, no sides of vegetables, no wasted real estate at all, just meat on plates and silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, with deep, communal tubs of chimichurri and salsa criolla scattered around the bar. We dived in recklessly.

The star of the show was the lechon, or milk-fed baby pig, which was heavenly. So good in fact, that were it not for the perfectly crispy skin overlying a thin-layer of incredibly sweet fat, and the moist, almost milky-tasting, flesh of unweaned piglet, it would truly be a barbaric dish. But our pause for reflection on the plight of young pork was brief as we tore into the golden beauty of the sweetbreads, the complex spices of the morcilla, and the (surprisingly) wonderful crunchy texture and minerally-tasting joy of the chinchulines. It all tasted to us like no meat had before, even the condiments had a singular tang and freshness to them that we found a step-up from those we’d had earlier in the week. And it seems we were not alone in this.

Glancing up at our surroundings and fellow diners as we approached fullness, it was comforting to see that everyone else was head-down and going full-bore into their lunches too. And who could blame them? Like the irresistible song of the sirens, the evocative combination of wood-smokey atmosphere, beautiful Victorian architecture, and the surround-sound effect of wall-to-wall sizzling would surely stir the soul of any meat-lover and be ruinous to the anti-meat resolve of even the most hardcore vegetarian.

Mercado del Puerto
Rambla 25 Agosto de 1825 y Perez Castellano,
Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo, Uruguay
Mercado del Puerto online

They (we) call it a Sunday Gravy because it really suits a Sunday best.  The long simmering, the wine drinking, the letting-it-sit-on-the-stove-till-the-family-arrives kind of gravy.  Thanks to the Sopranos, people all over the world have heard of Sunday Gravy. Some scratch their heads in wonder as to why some call it sauce and others call it gravy.  It’s a hotly debated topic but, in essence, this “stew” of veal necks, sausage, pork ribs, bracciole, pigs feet, etc. should always be called a gravy over a sauce. It requires long and slow cooking and is flavored by the meat, hence it is technically a gravy. Friend of the blog, Joe, at Italyville has a wonderful post on this debate and I’d recommend all who are still confused to check it out.

To make the debate even more annoying, the Italian Americans in this country have kind of created this confusion about gravy vs. sauce.  For many Italians in this country, whether you call this type of meal a sauce or a gravy is decided by the family you come from and even the area of the country you live in.  For my Italian family, a gravy seems to be ANYTHING that contains tomato sauce.  Come to think of it, my family calls anything you put on top of meat or macaroni as “gravy”.  But, rule of thumb is if you are in Italy and you ask for gravy, you’re going to get a sauce that contains meat (ragu).  Check out Joe’s link for a perfect example of this from the Sopranos.

Sunday gravy can be made with a variety of meats and as long as you have a decent variety, you can not mess this up.  Our Sunday Gravy included pigs feet, bracciole, pork necks, veal shoulder, and sweet and hot sausage.  Other traditional additions include pork ribs, beef ribs, pork chops, some even put meatballs in theirs.  It’s kind of a “what can you get your hands on” kind of meal.  With that said, I would like to recommend that you do not skip two key ingredients in order to get optimal flavor – pigs feet and the pork necks.  I know, guys, some of you may be squeamish about this but the flavor, OH THE FLAVOR, you get by simmering these delicious bits of offal.  If you feel uncomfortable serving them with the rest of your meat, well throw them out after they flavor your gravy.  But, personally, I believe these two bits of pig really make the gravy.

So put on your ‘fat pants’, throw on some Sinatra, pour yourself a big glass of chiant’ (Chianti to all you non-Northeastern US Italians) and give yourself a good four to five hours to watch the porky love grow in your pot.

SUNDAY GRAVY (serves a sh!tload of people – at least 6 hungry men)

Ingredients:

• 2 pigs feet (about 1 1/2 to 2 lbs)
• 1 pound bracciole (about a 8 inch long piece)
• 2 pounds veal, beef or pork neck bones
• 1 pound veal shoulder (in chops form or cut into 3 inch pieces)
• 1 veal shank (bone-in)
• 1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage
• 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage
• 1 large onion
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 28 ounce can of tomatos (preferably San Marzano – I prefer pureed over whole)
• some water
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

What to do:

1. Season meat with salt and pepper and, with a bit of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot (dutch over, preferably), brown all sides of each piece of meat.  Remove and set aside on a plate.
2. After all the meat is browned, add the onions and use the meat fat already in the pan to cook till soft (about 6-8 minutes), adding more olive oil if necessary. Add garlic and stir, cook for about a minute.
3. Add the wine and deglaze, scraping up the bits of goodness that have accumulated on the bottom of the pan.  Allow to reduce for a few minutes until it has reduced by about half.
4. Add tomatoes and one can of water (use the tomato can). Stir.
5. Add back the meat except the sausage and bracciole (which won’t be added until the last hour).  Bring to a simmer, cover and allow to cook for five hours.  Yes, kids, that’s five hours.  Ever once in a while stir.
6. At hour number four, add back the sausage and bracciole and allow to simmer for one more hour.
7. Taste and season with salt and pepper and add some hot pepper if you’d like.  Remove all the meat and serve separately from the gravy. Cut the sausage into 2 inch pieces.  Serve some of the gravy over pasta and enjoy.

Gentle readers, please sympathize with me, for I, like a man who’s been dining exclusively on centipedes, have the bitter taste of defeat in my mouth. That this humiliation and defeat arrived, to twist a metaphor, at the hands of nothing more sinister than a pig’s foot, has only served to exacerbate these feelings of embarrassment and self-loathing.

Those of you already somewhat familiar with our body of work here at We Are Never Full may know that we are always ready to face down even the hardiest gastronomic challenges, frequently with all-to scant regard for liver, waistline and coronary arteries. It’s a kind of culinary cockiness and machismo that, strangely enough, we find so odious in TV food tools like Guy Fieri. I sincerely hope that this foolish trend, which continued during our recent trip to Montreal, has no lasting repercussions on our health.

Having heard about the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon (literally, at the foot of the pig) and its joyful, some may say reckless, use of duck and pork fat (& offal) in the preparation of traditional French and Quebecois dishes, plus several unique heart-stopping creations, we figured that it sounded like the kind of place we should visit.

“…a green salad tossed in warm, duck-fat vinaigrette and topped with a fritter of trotter mush…”

The red sign near the entrance cautioning patrons to be careful on the greasy floor should have been taken as warning, as should the glazed and listless gazes of departing patrons. Heedless, we proceeded to order the sliced tongue and the crispy PDC salad as starters. The former, which was beef tongue, sat nicely in our comfort zone. Meltingly tender and served with a butter-finished veal stock sauce and garnished with sliced cornichons for a texturally-satisfying crunch. We were intrigued by the latter when the waiter explained that it was basically a green salad tossed in warm, duck-fat vinaigrette and topped with a fritter of trotter mush. Yes, that’s right – the nerves, cartilage and natural gelatin from the pig’s foot, mashed together and seasoned, then breaded and deep-fried. Not a salad for dieters, but amazing tasting, wonderful mouth-feel, with the prince of vinaigrettes.

That we had ordered mains after this was our first major mistake, and the second was that one of them happened to be the pied de cochon with foie gras. (The fact that the other was a large tranche of foie gras with a side of poutine (more on this in a later post) barely registered.) Few are the times in my life that I have had a plate of food put in front of me and I have suddenly felt weak, timid and overawed – even at the most trying times I usually soldier bravely on before leaving the table bloated and sweaty – but, on this occasion I was defeated the moment I was served.

“…like the governor of a provincial state thrust into the spotlight of CBS News … I was suddenly way out of my depth and performed pathetically, embarrassing myself in the process.”

Never before have I even seen a plate of food that large for one person, let alone been prompted to eat it. It was gigantic. The pigs foot was large – maybe a foot long - and deep-fried, though that of itself caused little consternation as it was mostly bone, and was topped with a 4oz slice of seared foie gras, again, excessive, but perhaps not fear-inducing exactly. What really intimidated me was that the trotter sat on an inch-deep bed of creamy mashed potatoes and between two foot-long trenches – for that’s what they were – of button mushrooms and spinach in a cream and butter sauce. I would estimate there were two 6oz boxes of button mushrooms plus a cup of cream on the plate, and the whole thing must have weighed about 5lbs and could have served six adults. What was I to do in the face of such magnitude?

You’re right, I could have plowed in and tried to eat it all, and then admitted defeat gracefully later on. I could also have harangued the waiter for not giving me any idea of what a fool I was making of myself, but frankly, my spirit was broken. You see, I’ve always managed to perform creditably at the table before, even if I have ultimately been overwhelmed, but, like the governor of a provincial state thrust into the spotlight of CBS News for the first time, I was suddenly way out of my depth and performed pathetically, embarrassing myself in the process.

As these photos attest, I was barely able to make a dent in it, and in truth, it was my wife who ate the lion’s share. I had been psyched out and failed to regain my composure. Some would say, with good reason, that it was a shameful waste of food, but I prefer to think of it as a lesson in humility.

Indeed, chatting with the maitre d’ later on over calvados (one of the few things that can cut through thick layers of duck fat) I learned that this was Martin Picard, the owner’s, dastardly plan for this dish, — that no-one who orders it leaves unscarred. Everyone is dominated by it and no-one gets anywhere near cleaning their plate. So confident are they at Au Pied de Cochon of their ability to manifest gluttony so vaingloriously that they number every deep-fried pig’s foot they serve. Mine was 5141. So from now on, like a retired GI with a talisman made of shrapnel, I shall wear that number with pride and humility, in place of a hospital bracelet during the bypass surgery I expect to now need.

Au Pied de Cochon
536 avenue Duluth Est
Montréal, QC H2L 1A9, Canada
(514) 281-1114

Check out some other posts you might enjoy:

• Thursday, It’s Gloria Day
• Quickest Meal to Make… Ever – Pasta con Tonno
• Authentic Tortilla Soup
• South African Hot Toddies