Pheasants, troublesome chefs, and a commis who looked like a serial killer
Part 1 - A recipe for pheasant consommé
Pheasants
He scuttles along the drive, his head nodding from side to side, suddenly changing direction and stopping in front of the car. I push hard on the brake and come to a stop whilst he darts around in a confused panic. The wattle around his eye flashes red, his feathers shine bright sapphire blue, iridescent in the sunshine. He is brilliant, with a white ruffle around his neck, a handsome bird. Dressed in black, tan, bronze and copper, his feathers were marked by the woodland’s colours, patterned in geometric order. Bars and dots mark his plumage, his magnificent long tail feathers bunched into a point. His beak the colour of ivory curves downwards, his crop stuffed full of seeds and the leaves that he’s dined on as he struts and waddles nervously, a fine bird, nervous though, and with good reason. The feathers of the female in comparison are duller. Shades of cinnamon and cream, the same ordered pattern of black bards and chevrons mark her, but the bright blues and greens and the scaly red face belong only to the boys, she is a little smaller, less boisterous and with a shorter set of tail feathers.
After pacing around in circles for half a minute they decide to duck into the hedgerow and disappear through the fence, camouflaging them instantly. I can hear that odd cackling honk from the cocks in the long grass and look to see if I see them, but they are gone for now.
Often a bird much maligned by cooks, thought too dry and troublesome to cook. They can be just this, though only usually by the error of the cook in my opinion. You have to work at a pheasant, the legs are sinewy and the breast overcooks in a careless minute. No amount of lardo, bacon or butter will rescue an overcooked pheasant from the feeling of eating fluff.
Tasty fluff but still fluff.
I thought that I’d share a time-consuming recipe, not one for the faint-hearted or the cook who’s looking for a quick supper.
Pheasant consommé.
Like the recipe for the Sauce Americaine that I shared a while ago, it is something that needs the best part of a day for an amateur cook to complete. There are hours of gentle cooking where you might go and read a book or something, but you will need to check in every hour or so, and as that’s the case then I think it best to read that book in the kitchen, next to the pot that will bubble for a few hours, but will need a skim here and there. Then when all seems ready and the stock is cooked it will be time for stage two. The clarification. This must be carried out with care and patience. It is not something that you should rush.
If you’ve never clarified a stock before then you’ll most likely think that I’ve lost my mind, and you may be right, but this is the way of classical French cookery. Deeply rooted in obscure skills, many irrelevant nowadays, but those skills build the foundations of refined, beautiful cookery.
I’ll write this in two parts. Both will be freely published here.
I’ll do this as there are two parts to the creation of a consommé, the initial stock making, then the clarification. Think of it as a project to embark on rather than making a quick sauce to stir through spaghetti for dinner.
Read through the process below. Familiarise yourself with the details, then wait for part two next week. This will give you time to organise your ingredients so that let’s say in a week’s time you can set aside a lazy day to begin the cooking.
It is certainly not quick, but know that it is worth the effort.
If indeed you are a terrible cook, then perhaps don’t make it at all. It will most likely cause you trouble. It might possibly frustrate you, even make you angry. If that is the case then just read my words and imagine that you’ve made it instead.
You will need patience, a calm mindset and a day where you have nothing much to do. If you enjoy the minutiae of cookery, the techniques of sauce making, attention to detail and have an obsessive mindset then you will enjoy this task. If however, you were to throw the ingredients together in a pan, skip the order of steps and generally make a bit of a hash of everything like Alex would have done (on whom there will be more later), then perhaps this recipe is not for you.
Professional chefs may have two or three such consommés bubbling along, on the stove in front of them, along with three or four other sauces to look after, along with being tasked to defeather, debone and truss boxes of birds with fat and bacon before cooking lunch for eighty people, then spend the afternoon deboning trotters before cooking dinner for a further eighty guests still finding time to cook, clean and clarify everything, so it’s nothing too tricky, but it needs care and attention to detail.
You will need some pheasants. You might find these in a good butcher or perhaps know of a shoot. They are not expensive, at least they shouldn’t be. We aren’t in the realms of grouse here.
I use a large Le Creuset-style pot for this and I think if you were to find yourself two perhaps three birds then that would be right. If you are to pluck them yourself, then good luck. I’ve lost interest in pulling feathers from dead birds after too many years of meticulous plucking. Buy them cleaned, it saves a big fluffy mess. You will be finding feathers for days afterwards otherwise.
You will need a piece of smoked bacon, the size of the palm of your hand, a piece of celeriac, carrots, onions, celery and a leek. You will need bay and thyme, rolled together and tied with string to make a bouquet garni. You will need a few juniper berries, some mixed peppercorns, one or two stars of aniseed, a strip of orange zest and a cinnamon stick. You will need a little cider vinegar, a shot of brandy, and a glass or so of white wine.
You will be making a stock, but not just any old stock.
Not stock as how Alex would have made it.
No.
Definitely not like that.
Alex, a colleague and friend who stood next to me for many years in many places, would come and help me out years back, as he had worked for some of the finest chefs, and was keen as mustard, though was very good at showing my juniors lazy ways to ruin sauces in his eternal pursuit of an extended cigarette break. For instance, I would take a morning off to go to the dentist or something, Alex would come in as requested, and I would come back to the kitchen in the afternoon and find pale sauces, that tasted of precisely nothing bubbling away on the stoves. The ingredients were correct but the methods had been completely ignored. My young French commis Grégoire, who funnily enough bore a striking resemblance to the serial killer Fred West (and of which there was corroboration of this fact from the local police- don’t ask- it’s another story which I’m sure I’ll get around to one day) was proud to tell me that Alex had shown him how to knock two hours from the prep time for duck sauce, just by putting all the ingredients in a roasting tray and shoving it “au feu” for half an hour.
To create deep flavours there are rules to follow, orders for the addition of ingredients and a timeframe in which to do these things. Bacon goes first. A great chunk of smoky cured belly with its skin. Smoked, oily and dry. Roast slowly for at least ten minutes so that the piece is crisp and deeply coloured all over. The rendered fat is now ready for the next stage. The first ingredient of classical saucemaking, flavouring the pan intensely before anything else. Only then should you add the thinly sliced carrots. Carrots in sauce-making take a long time to caramelise, using low heat. They shrivel and darken, their sugars and carotene only released after about twenty minutes of careful stirring in hot bacon fat. Sliced on a mandolin to expose the maximum surface area, a huge part played in achieving the shine in a sauce. And only then should you add the onions, beginning the careful caramelisation all over again.
And there you have it.
Not onions first.
No.
Bacon first, then carrots then onion.
At this point, I expect most of you to have either fallen asleep, navigated away, unsubscribed or died of boredom. I can’t blame you if I’m honest. Here I am discussing the finer points of what I perceive to be the correct order for the addition of vegetables to a pan of sauce with strangers on the internet. Anyway, I’m sure there must be someone still here so I should continue.
How to make a pheasant stock
If you had assembled all of the ingredients above, located your pot, had a sharp knife, a couple of small trays and a selection of bowls to put things in, then we should start.
Taking two pheasants, roughly joint them into the legs, backbone and crown of the breasts. A butcher will do this for you if you ask them nicely. Keep one crown (two breasts attached to the bone) intact and reserve it for later. If you had three birds to start with, then just keep one crown. The rest is for the pot.
Firstly take the piece of bacon, place it in a pot and start to caramelise it slowly so the fat collects in a pool in the pan, hissing and popping as it roasts the bacon. This is important, so don’t rush. When the fat is crispy, remove it and add the jointed birds, leaving the skin to develop a crusty deep golden colour, moving the pieces of pheasant around for about five to ten minutes. Then add the carrots, keeping them moving with a wooden spoon for let’s say twenty minutes or so on a lowish heat. They will smell fragrant, shrivel up and turn the colour of dark orange tinged with brown.
Don’t let them burn.
That would ruin everything before we’d even started.
Next, you should add the thinly sliced onions, cooking them till caramelised.
Keep them moving, preventing hot spots that might turn things black before you realise. The flavours you are creating should smell wonderful.
Now add some of the skin from the celeriac, the celery and leek, all cut thinly, letting it all sweat and soften a little alongside the roasting pheasants. You could put the lid on at an angle to encourage the steam from the vegetables to break down. A pinch or two of salt at this stage is also important. Now add the aromatic spices and herbs, stirring them through the mixture of caramelised bones, fat and vegetables. Your olfactory senses will tell you that this is a fine combination.
Let everything cook together for around ten minutes, then pour in a small splash of cider vinegar. Sherry vinegar would also work very well here. Let the vinegar bubble away till it’s absorbed.
Now add the brandy, letting the flame from the stove ignite it to drive off the alcohol. You could also use a lighter. Only when it is syrupy do you add the wine, again letting it reduce to be absorbed by the other ingredients. The pot should be thick and sticky.
You must now cover the contents of the pan with cold water, bringing it slowly to a simmer, never a rolling boil.
Make tea, sit down and let the stock develop for around four hours. Every now and then using a spoon, remove some of the fat that has collected. Don’t stir it, just every now and then poke down anything that has broken the surface. The pot really looks after itself, know only that your job as guardian of the rich evolving broth is to clean away any fat and froth that might rise and to not let it boil.
It must gently tick along.
You will see the sticky bay leaves on the surface, the star of aniseed and the bouquet garni, glisten with the fatty juices as they give their character to the broth.
When you can lift a chunk of pheasant out with a slotted spoon and the meat and skin fall from the bones, then the stock is ready. It will give no more.
It is now time, ladle by ladle to pour it through a fine-meshed sieve. Don’t be tempted to pour it through in a great gush. This will add the settled detritus that will make everything cloudy, and that would be a shame as you've taken such great care to get to this point. Slowly tilt the pot and ladle by ladle, or as in previous days knelt on the kitchen floor, saucepan by saucepan, to pass the stock through the sieve or sieves into a clean bowl.
Now you must leave it to cool.
You will have a metal bowl full of a deeply coloured, aromatic stock. There will be a glistening of fat on its surface, and if you taste it it should be rich, savoury, aromatic and well-rounded. Don’t be tempted to add any salt at this stage.
This is stage one. You have made pheasant stock.
Better than Alex does.
Let it now cool to room temperature, and then we will begin stage two.
The clarification from stock to consommé.
The magical bit that uses egg whites in a raft.
Yes, that’s what I said.
This shall be with you in part two which I will publish on Monday next week.
In other news
Vinegar
In the last few days, we collected over two hundred litres of raw pressed apple juice, now sealed into fermenting vessels, stuffed with rubber bungs and airlocks, to ferment into cider.
It gurgles and pops on the shelves of an outbuilding, neatly lined up in a burping chorus. This is the beginning of this year’s cider vinegar process, double fermented, then left to change to vinegar. It will take till mid-next year, all being well.
Black truffles
We’ve also discovered black truffles of all things whilst digging post holes for the new chicken coop last week, and have arranged for the UK’s finest truffle-hunting spaniel and his owner to visit us in the coming weeks to conduct a survey of the woodland, to see if what we found was an anomaly or perhaps the beginning of something very special.
Until Monday,
William
I've never before encountered a cliffhanger in a recipe...
"Your olfactory senses will tell you that this is a fine combination." - a wonderful sentence. 😊