Ch-Ch-Charcuterie

Char means flesh. Cuite, in this case means cooked. Together they form a word, Charcuterie - the French craft of preserving meats. Friend of Saucyman, Charles Seluzicki, fills us in on one such specialty, rillettes.


RILLETTES, or Going Medieval on Pigs (and Geese)

A recent excursion to a tapas restaurant in Portland, Oregon featured an encounter with rillettes, a little pot of overly smooth and heavily spiced meat, served with grilled apricot halves filled with whole grain mustard and a side of house orange marmalade. The matter of texture momentarily aside, my experience was a delightful one and my curiosity about this dish was reawakened.

I had not really thought of rillettes since my trips to Paris where it is a staple in the charcuteries. And, frankly, my associations with the dish there were not always pleasant. Some preparations appeared motley strands of gray protein, heavy with fat of who knows what origin. I tasted a bit here and there but never ate rillettes of legend in Paris which friends with palettes that I trusted assured me could still be had.

The etymology of “rillettes” is, in my preliminary researches, is uncertain. However, the word itself is richly suggestive. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the direct origin of the English word “rill” (a tiny stream) in the German “rille”. Which is exactly where my thoughts “go medieval.” Bear with me.

In the first chapter of her brilliant volume GREAT COOKS AND THEIR RECIPES (1977), Anne Willan makes trenchant observations on medieval cookery based on her examination of recipes in the first printed edition of Taillevent’s (1312-1395) LE VIANDIER (1490). “Where we try to develop the flavor and texture of ingredients to the full,” she tells us, “medieval cooks pounded and pureed them out of all recognition, then spiced them in such profusion that the original taste was lost.” This was done because food was always vulnerable to spoilage but also for reasons of what Willan calls “food snobbery.” Willan vividly elaborates. Taillevent, you see, cooked for kings and their courts and they derived considerable status from the elaborate use of spice. A pound of saffron cost the price of good horse, the same quantity of nutmeg was worth the same as seven fat oxen. Meat was almost exclusively the province of the rich, spice more so.

Rillettes are traditionally pork belly, pork shoulder (sometimes in combination with goose) very slowly cooked for hours in fine leaf lard. The mixture is drained and pounded to fine threads of meat, flavored aggressively with quatre-epices (pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon or ginger), packed in crocks and sealed with the reserved drained fat that has been scrupulously separated from any meat juices. Jane Grigson describes all this in detail in her indispensable first book THE ART OF CHARCUTERIE (1968). She indicates that the mixture must never be ground and, if not using the pounding method, dropped cold into an electric blender, making sure not to “reduce the meat to a porridge-like slush.”

Which brings use back to the mysterious matter of etymology. Might not the German root of the English “rill”- a little stream- visually invoke the little threads of meat in what has become rillettes with its distinctly French identity in our time? It seems possible. In French, pave is the term for the ubiquitous cobblestones of Paris, but the word is used to describe a particularly thick steak, even certain forms of packaging.

As time progressed and meat and spice became more and more the province of the middle class this distinctly medieval recipe has survived, at least in France, as a convenient picnic food. In America, in its most industrial incarnation, Underwood’s Deviled Ham with its mixture of mustard powder, turmeric and “spices” is a not so distant relation. Its’ paper wrapped tins, replete with awards, seem fancy next to competing products, betraying the company’s European roots and echo the even more elaborate packaging of specialty meat preparations in better shops around the world.

-Charles Seluzicki