Elk Milanese

Last week, poking around on the net, I ran across Hank Shaw's recipe for Jaeger Schnitzel and immediately I wondered why on earth I had never made elk Milanese.  My wife spent time growing up in Argentina and her family made Milanese whenever good veal was available.  I whipped this dinner up last night after a long day at work.  Call it what you like: Milanese, Wiener Schnitzel, Steak and Frites, Chicken Fried Steak and Fries.  Whatever, it was a truly excellent meal that I can hardly wait to repeat.

Elk Milanese:
Slice an elk steak into thin slabs, maybe 1/2" thick and then, covered with a piece of plastic wrap or wax paper - pound/press them even flatter.  I used a wine bottle. A quarter of an inch thick is fine and even thinner is not unacceptable.  Salt and pepper the meat.  Have three shallow plates - one with flour, one with a beaten egg and the third with bread crumbs. Heat 1/2 a stick of butter and olive oil in a large pan (I use a cast iron frying pan).  Add as much olive oil as needed to make the oil  1/4" to 1/2" deep in the bottom of the pan.  Dip the meat in the flour, then coat with egg and finally drop it in the bread crumbs, sprinkle a bit more on top and press.  Once the oil is hot - place the breaded meat into the pan and cook for a few minutes a side - until golden brown.  Put them on a paper towel to soak up any remaining oil and then put them in a warm oven while the next batch cooks. Garnish with sliced lemon wedges.

A favorite food book.

Packed away somewhere in my basement is a copy of Joseph Wechsberg's  book The Cooking of the Vienna's Empire. I can't remember the exact trick but I seem to recall that he has rather excellent advice on how to flour, egg and bread the meat so that the crust lifts off in a thin layer.   Maybe it was in his other excellent book Blue Trout and Black Truffles - also some in my basement.  I could not find Wechsberg's technique in any of the cook books I do have access to.  I was surprised that it is not mentioned in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat Book, but it isn't.  I am surprised that Nicola Fletcher does not include a Milanese recipe in her excellent book Ultimate Venison Cookery.

*                                      *                                      *

Between the two of us, we shared a small elk steak, a large potato and a bottle of Chardonnay.  The potato was cut into fries using an inexpensive but handy mandolin.  A salad would have been a nice addition - but it was late and I was tired and we were hungry.  Properly done, this a rather delicate presentation - a thin golden brown crust, with the meat still pink inside.   The earthy and slightly gamey flavor of the elk was magnificently present. We drank a Chardonnay with this - perhaps not the best choice, but it was the bottle we first opened when we got home and really, it was just fine with the meal. Next time perhaps we may uncork a light red - perhaps a Pinot Noir.   This meal is highly recommended.

Cassoulet with Pheasant Leg Confit

A pot of cassoulet and confit being browned for serving.

A bit more than two years ago, in a fit of obsessive frenzied desire for confit, I bought a gallon of duck fat.  The internet is an astounding resource for those of us not living anywhere near a major city.  The fat was ordered through Amazon came from Hudson Valley Foie Gras.  A gallon of duck fat cost less than forty dollars but the shipping accounts for 2/3 more again.  I've been keeping mine frozen, but even frozen, fats can go rancid. I'm just now using the last of that stash, it's almost two years later and it is still good.  At the time of my first confit attack I made batches of Canadian Goose, Blue Grouse and Jackrabbit confit.  I occasionally use the duck fat to brown meat for stews but until recently, I have not gone on another confit making binge.

Pheasant legs in duck fat ready for the oven.

Confit (pronounced in English as "con-fee") is a ancient method of preserving meats and goes back at least to the Romans. Traditionally, the meat is salted and rested for a day or more and then submerged in its own fat and simmered in a stoneware pot very slowly until tender.  When stored in a cool place, the fat congeals and forms a barrier against air.  To eat a confit, the pot is heated again until the fat softens and the meat is plucked out and the pot is returned to the cool storage.  Meats preserved in this way and stored in a cool place can be good for months. Most commonly confits are made of duck, goose and pork but rabbits, hares and game birds are excellent. Other fats and oils can be used to make confit and even olive oil.  Of course game birds are lean so do not have enough of their own fat for confit; but if you gave a gallon of duck fat it is an astoundingly rich way to prepare them.  A game bird leg and attached thigh, submerged in fat and slow cooked will not dry out, it just gets falling off the bone tender.

Cassoulet is a baked white bean dish originating in southwest France that often includes, among other things, pork belly, pork rind, pork sausages and duck or goose confit. The bible on confit and cassoulet is Paula Wolfert's book The Cooking of Southwest France.  The one linked to here is a new edition. The book was first published in 1983 and my own copy is an early one which is unfortunately still in a box in my basement waiting for me to build bookshelves.  Wolfert's book popularized these dishes and she acknowledges that there are as many "authentic" cassoulet recipes as there are cassoulet cooks.  Because of the difficulty of obtaining exotic ingredients in  locally I often have to improvise, but that is part of the tradition of the dish.

Other cook books that are on my shelf (and not in boxes) that have confit and cassoulet recipes are Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook,  Jane Grigson's Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, and Hugh Fearningley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat Book   Hank Shaw's wild food cookbook Hunt, Gather, Cook includes confit recipes for game.  Hank's recipe (also available online here) uses a kind of Sous Vide method which requires the meat be sealed in plastic with just a little of the fat and slow cooked in a water bath; I don't have one of those sealers. Hank uses Olive oil and specifically warns against using duck fat claiming it will overpower the flavor of the pheasant - obviously I don't agree with him.  I'm thinking that the commercial duck fat I'm using must be far milder than what he is used to because the pheasant certainly is not overpowered by ducky flavor it in my experience.

A plate of cassoulet and confit.

I make my cassoulet using the fattiest pork bits I can find. Bourdain uses two pounds of pork belly. This time the best I could find were some fatty loin chops.  Ribs can be good too.  I dusted the chops with flour salt and pepper and browned them in duck fat. Of course if you don't have duck fat, just use some bacon fat. Add the browned chops to the bottom of the pot you will cook the cassoulet in. I cook mine in a large cast iron pot. In the same frying pan, saute a chopped onion and a hand full of garlic cloves. When the onions are browning up nicely, add 1/4 bottle of white wine, a bunch of thyme, salt and fresh pepper.  Let the wine boil for a few minutes and then pour that into the pot over the meat.  Pour in the haricot beans (which have been soaked overnight) and top up with 1/2 trotter gear and 1/2 water - to just cover the beans. If you don't have trotter gear, just use chicken broth.  Put the whole thing in the oven (uncovered) and cook at about 230°F for six to eight hours.

For the confit.  Rub the legs well with salt (this is a salt cure) and sprinkle them with some finely chopped thyme and pepper. Put them into a baggie in the refrigerator overnight while the beans are soaking.  To prepare the leg-thighs for cooking, remove as much of the salt as possible, dab them dry and place them in a casserole dish and cover them with duck fat. Put them into the oven at 230°F for six to eight hours. If they are not completely covered by the fat you may need to turn them occasionally.

When the cassoulet and confit is cooked, finish up the confit by browing the leg-thighs in a hot frying pan.  Serve a leg-thigh with a healthy serving of cassoulet and a bitter salad.  I have previously been publicly chastised for recommending a white wine with this meal but, barbarian that I am, I stand by my recommendation.  Most recommend a hardier red but perhaps because I do not have as much pork fat as some recipes call for (Bourdain wants two pounds of pork belly) my dish is lighter fare.

Pig Trotters

Growing up, my family would drive from Delaware and later New York  to Louisiana to see my fathers parents for a couple of weeks each summer.  My grandparents, Wilmer Otis Caldwell (Tieb) and Vera Lola Caldwell (nee Payne),  lived out in the country ten miles west of the tiny town of Waterproof.  Waterproof  lies low behind the levy guarding it from the flood waters of the Mississippi River, it was obviously named in a moment of optimism.  My grandparents ran a little country store with a gas pump outside west of town.  In the early to mid-1960's, before farming became completely mechanized the local plantations grew cotton. Later, as factory style farming took over, most all of them switched to growing soybeans.  In those early days weeds were controlled by field hands with hoes, not pesticides;  when they were hoeing or during cotton picking time, a white driver would drop a truck load of black men at my grandparent's store for their lunch; sometimes twenty at a time.  The tiny store would be packed, shoulder to shoulder with sweaty men, and my grandparents quickly sliced meats and cheeses, making sandwiches as fast as they could for the hungry crowd.  Sitting up on top of the deli cooler was a 2 1/2 gallon glass jar of Pickled Pig's Feet.  The contents of the jar were obviously feet and that jar was always a curiosity and wonder to my sister and I.   It could not be easily explained.  Almost forty-five years later I've cooked my first pig's foot dish. 

                          *                 *                 *                 *

Fergus Henderson waxes poetic about pig trotters in his astounding cook book The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating.  He writes, "These are one of the most gastronomically useful exterminates. If your butcher has pork, there must be a trotter lurking somewhere. They bring to a dish an unctuous, lip-sticking quality unlike anything else. The joy of finding a giving nodule of trotter in a dish!"  Henderson calls for them in at least seven different recipes in his book.  Penelope may be alarmed to know that one of them, his recipe for Jellied Tripe (which calls for four pig trotters) looks especially good to me.  I do not believe I have ever eaten tripe before; and I must say P has been enthusiastic about my recent cooking adventures so I am not being fair.

In his description of the merits of pig's feet Henderson uses the word  unctuous.  It's funny how you may have lived a life and have almost never noticed a word before, and then suddenly it seems it's everywhere.  I took notice when Dan Barber used it in his beautiful talk A Surprising Parable of Foie Gras.  When I watched the video of the talk the first time I stopped it and backed up to hear him say it again. As an adjective to describe a person it is rather an insult; used to describe the gravy in a stew or the texture of a rich stock it is flattery.

It's not just Henderson who praises the pig foot.  In his River Cottage  Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes about the "glutinous stickyness" and "gelatinous texture" of  a stock or terrine liquor to which a pig trotter has been added for good measure.  Of course gelatin comes from boiled bones, skins and tendons of animals so it is natural that adding a pig's foot to the broth will add texture and nicely thicken it. When I saw the pig's feet on the shelf at Safeway the other day I grabbed them and in the process proved Hugh wrong (a result he'd hoped for). It seems that even if  pig trotters can not be purchased in supermarkets in the UK, they  can be found in American supermarkets, even rather pedestrian ones like the Laramie WY Safeway store. 

The day after I bought the pig trotters, Reynaud's book Pork & Sons arrived in my mailbox.   Like his terrine book, it is beautifully put together.  Not to be outdone by Henderson, Reynaud's book has ten recipes calling for pig's feet.  Except for the slab bacon, I had all the ingredients (if not the required quantities) for his recipe for Pigs feet with walnut oil and caramelized onion.   I only had three pig's feet while Reynaud's recipe calls for ten, which I misread as six - the recipe serves six and, on the next line calls for ten pig's feet.    I do not believe I own a pot big eoungh to hold ten pig's feet.

Some days in the kitchen are pure hell.  Each imperfect solution to an unanticipated problem slowly but surely diverts you further and further from your original intention. Trying new techniques with only a vague impression of how they are supposed to work adds to the pressure.  Problem solving certainly is a key component of the creative aspect in cooking and yet, when the solutions don't come easy, when time is of the essence and when the techniques are new it can be an emotional roller-coaster.  Each successfully completed step or imperfect solution results in unwarranted optimism, each new obstacle seems it will surely lead to total failure.  Learning can hurt your head.  Forging new patterns of though and opening unfamiliar neural pathways is not easy.

The main problem was that I (obviously) had far too few pig's feet for the dish I was attempting.  When the feet were done and I picked the meat from the bones I had no more than a few tablespoons.  This was a problem.  I did have more than a gallon of rich gelatinous broth. Aside from a large frozen shoulder roast the only pork I did have was a couple of rather large frozen chops. I poached one of the chops in the stock and when it was thawed and mostly cooked I chopped it and added it to the tiny pile of meat.  One step further form my intention, but the dinner was saved. I sliced some of the pig skin into thin strips and fried it and added it to the growing pile of forcemeat. Of course the meat from the pork chop did not compare in tenderness or flavor to the few tender bits from the feet, but I had enough to feed the two of us. The recipe says to soften some onion in walnut oil and then to add the meat and salt and pepper to taste. The cooked mixture is then wrapped in plastic wrap in a sausage shape and, while you make the caramelize onions, is cooled to set. Mine did not set. A problem. The final step would have been to slice sausage shapes and to reheat under the broiler. To solve my problem I simply put it in an oven proof pan an reheated. An imperfect solution and another step further from my intention.  Did I fail to include enough fat or soft tendons when picking the meat from the bones?  I thought I had been generous. Should I have added some of the gelatinous broth to the mixture? It seemed quite soft as it was.

An hour later than I'd hoped,  I served my pig's fee topped with a balsamic vinaigrette and the caramelized onions. We ate it with a light salad, bread and a glass of wine; Pinot Noir for me and a Chardonnay for P. It turned out to look nothing like the image in Reynaud's book, but it was a delicious meal none the less.  I put the leftovers (what turned out to be two small servings) in a small terrine and added three chopped prunes and a few walnuts. The sweetness was a good addition and I enjoyed it for dinner alone for two more nights. (P is in the Canary Islands at a conference.)

Perhaps the best result is the stock. I got more than a gallon of rich unctuous liquor.  As promised, it jelled in the jars as it cooled to room temperature.

Jack Rabbit Cuisine

Stéphane Reynaud's beautiful book Terrine contains a number of recipes for Rabbit and Hare terrines. My own terrine was based on his Hare terrine with Marc de Bourgogne. Having no European Hare, I substituted Jack rabbit. Having no Marc, I generously substituted Cognac.

My Jack rabbit, killed the day before, was hung undrawn overnight in a cool (but not freezing) room. I skinned and butchered it the next morning saving the liver and heart. Rabbits and hares may carry Tularemia so inspection of the liver is required. It was beautiful. In my own experience, hanging game meat is a crucial step in bringing it to the pot, or grill, or oven. In the excellent  River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discusses hanging meat and game.   Fearnley-Whittingstall is a leader of the locavore movement in the UK and runs a farm called River Cottage in Dorsett.  He notes, that for any meat, a period of hanging relaxes the meat so it will be more tender. I am convinced this is a must for deer, elk and antelope.  He recommends hanging hares (undrawn) with a plastic bag over the head to collect the blood for the sauce.  I did not collect the blood (and have had bad luck with it curdling when added to a hot liquid in the past.) Oddly, he recommends gutting rabbits in the field (and thus not hanging them undrawn.)  Also, he recommends not marinating hare in alcohol because it pickles the meat.  I did marinate mine following Reynaud's recipe.

 

Mostly, I followed Reynaud's recipe. I have no kitchen scale so I was guessing at weights.  The body of the dish consists mainly of about 1/2 hare and 1/2 pork meats. I marinated the meats: Jack rabbit saddle and haunch, liver and heart, pork shoulder and bacon (pork belly) overnight in the Cognac, wine, and herbs (rosemary and thyme.) The next day I drained and dried the meat and mixed in the cream (seemed like a bit much) and added an egg hoping to get better results in terms of how it holds together.  This was a warning from one reviewer; that many Reynaud's recipes fail to hold together with American ingredients.

I do not own a terrine so I used a bread pan.  I especially like the black cast iron Staub terrine shown in the photo above from Reynaud's book, but it is not available in the US. Le Creuset makes one that is sold here.  Terrine's are cooked double boiler style, by placing the terrine pan half submerged in boiling water in a roasting pan.

The finely chopped meat was layered into the bottom of the pan with the Jackrabbit saddles (whole) laid in the middle and then another layer of meat with the top covered with bacon strips. Some terrines are covered for cooking, this one is not.  It is baked at 350F for two hours. As it cooked quite a bit of liquid built up in the pan and I siphoned that off with a turkey baster at one hour and again at 1 1/2 hours. Once cooked I put it in the refrigerator to cool. It is served cold.

After chilling I unmolded the terrine.  It held together reasonably well, not as well as I might have liked, but it could be sliced and served cold. We ate it with a fresh loaf of bread and a sharp blue cheese, some pickles and a glass of  Chardonnay.  I thought it was quite good and although I was worried that Penelope might not care for it, she declared it to be excellent.

Next time, I will use a bit less cream, add another egg, and perhaps add a dash of Cayenne to give it a bit of a bite.