salami, olives, and peppers
—
polenta with partridge, squab, sausage, onions, carrots, and celery
melting mustard greens
—
chocolate-orange mousse
The 4th of December is Mark’s birthday. Required: polenta, sausages. Optional: anything else.
So I turned to Jamie at Home and found his recipe for a Roast of Incredible Game Birds with Proper Polenta. And I gave Mark a special, special birthday present: one Chinese meal a week. If for some reason I can’t cook it, we’ll take our usual Friday night out at a Chinese restaurant. But now that I’ve gotten comfortable with my wok, it’s time to add to my Chinese skill set.
salami, olives, and peppers
Antipast’ from the deli counter and the olive bar at Whole Foods.
polenta with partridge, squab, sausage, onions, carrots, and celery
Scaling back a recipe like this can’t be done with mere arithmetic. To serve 8 portions, Jamie calls for:
1 pheasant
2 wood pigeons
4 quails
1 guinea fowl
1 partridge
4 Italian sausages
It doesn’t work to scale back to 2 portions by using a quarter of a pheasant, half a wood pigeon, one quail, etc. I had to choose which meats to include and which to exclude. So I called the butcher at Whole Foods, and with his advice had him set out one small pheasant and a squab (baby pigeon) to be thawed by the time I arrived to pick them up. One spicy Italian sausage and one mild Italian sausage finished the array.
I oiled a roasting pan, made a bed of onions, carrots, and celery, and laid on the well-washed and well-dried pheasant and squab and the sausages. I put them into a very hot oven and then turned the temp down to 350° and cooked everything for ninety minutes, turning the birds once. Then I let them cool off a little in the oven.
Meanwhile, I had made polenta, a signature dish in of my household. I’ve experimented with dozens of ways of cooking polenta, and I always seem to revert to the easiest: cooking it in a double boiler. All you have to do is stir it up from time to time. The proportions depend on what you’re planning to do with it. For soft, oozy polenta, use four cups of water to every cup of polenta. For extra-firm polenta, especially if you’re planning to cut it and fry the slices, use two cups of water to every cup of polenta. And everything in between.
Jamie enriches his polenta with cheese and butter, but with such rich toppings we prefer the polenta more contrasty; all I used was salted water.
We felt the pheasant needed brining; it was a little dry. But the squab was crunchy and sweet, both kinds of sausage were grand, the vegetables were unctuous, and the polenta was just how we like it, tight, tight, tight and sturdy.
melting mustard greens
You’re probably getting tired of reading that I once again made melting greens from How To Eat Supper. This time I used only salted water, and I laid garlic slices on top of the greens to steam rather than in the bottom of the pan to fry. Delish, as usual.
chocolate-orange mousse
This mousse, which comes from Mireille Johnston’s The Cuisine of the Rose (Random House, 1982) is a sentimental favorite. When Mark and I were first together, he thought he was allergic to milk protein; eventually that turned out not to be so, he just has a rather severe lactose intolerance, nicely held at bay with all the various remedies available. But for some years I cooked milk-free for him, and it was a royal pain in the neck. Just about every recipe in my repertoire began with “Grate a cup of best-quality cheddar cheese” or “Take a cup of heavy cream” or “Start with a half cup of sour cream.” Johnston’s recipe for a mousse with no cream gave me hope that I might be able to find some good food to eat without milk, buttermilk, half and half, cream, sour cream, and cheese. Thank heaven I don’t have to any more.
I’ve changed Johnston’s recipe enough over the years to make a new recipe of my own:
You need three bowls, two of them small and the third big, plus:
1 stick of butter
1 orange
2 Tablespoons of orange juice
4 ounces of dark chocolate
2 eggs
2 Tablespoons of vanilla sugar
1. In bowl #1, let 1 stick of butter soften enough to be able to work it with a fork.
2. Also in bowl #1, with a fine-toothed grater, grate the peel of 1 orange into the butter and fork it through till it’s evenly distributed.
3. Bowl #2 needs to be microwave-safe. Squeeze the orange and measure out 2 Tablespoons of orange juice into bowl #2.
4. Also in bowl #2, add 4 ounces of dark chocolate, as bitter as you enjoy and as excellent as you can afford.
5. Put bowl #2 in your microwave and melt the chocolate. In my microwave, that’s about 3 minutes on medium-low, but you know your own microwave.
6. As soon as the chocolate has melted, cool bowl #2 off till you can rest your hand comfortable on the bottom indefinitely.
7. Separate 2 eggs, putting the whites in bowl #3 and the yolks in bowl #1, with the butter and the orange peel.
8. In bowl #3, with a handheld mixer, beat the eggwhites stiff. (A handheld mixer is better than a stand mixer for such a tiny amount.)
9. Move the mixer over to bowl #2 and mix in the eggyolks, the orange zest, the butter, and 2 Tablespoons of vanilla sugar. (If you don’t keep vanilla sugar around, use plain sugar.)
10. With the hand mixer, fold half the eggwhites from bowl #3 into bowl #2. When ingredients are going to be cooked, it’s fine to leave visible bits of eggwhite in a folded mixture, but this mousse doesn’t get cooked, so you have to incorporate the whites thoroughly.
11. Now slide the mixture from bowl #2 back into bowl #3 with the rest of the eggwhites, again mixing till you can no longer see any flecks of eggwhite. Don’t mix any more than that.
12. Spoon the mixture into cups or glasses and chill for at least eight hours.
This amount makes 4 nice servings or 2 gigantic servings, which you will not be able to finish and so will put into the refrigerator and have for breakfast the next day.
MB: I’ve been curious about that recipe of Jamie’s specifically. I mean, I don’t think of pheasant and guinea fowl and wood pigeons as normal, everyday ingredients. Quails, well, yes. They are more towards the “everyday” end of the scope. But the others? I was intrigued to know that your local Whole Foods carries them, and curious if mine does the same.
After doing some research, here’s what I found. Not only does my local Whole Foods not carry any of the above birds regularly, but the first guy I talked to seemed utterly mystified at my question about whether or not I could order them specially. Obviously he wasn’t the smartest bird in the poultry case. But then I asked to talk to his manager and was much happier with the response. The manager apologized for not having any of them on hand. He said he knew it was surprising, especially considering that it was the Christmas season, and that he’d be getting some in soon (well, all of them but the wood pigeon because he didn’t know of any place to get those in the US). He then took down my name and number to call me when they arrived. Much better.
Now, I know I’ve had pheasant, because I remember eating it in a small dark restaurant in France. I remember it specifically because it’s also the only meal when I remember eating hare. And quail I’m sure I’ve eaten at some point or another in my life. But guinea fowl? Wood pigeons?
So now I think that when the manager of the meat department at my local Whole Foods calls me and tells me that they’ve arrived, I just might go pick them up. I might cook this very same recipe or try some other way of cooking them. Perhaps it’s time to try something new!
2 Takes 