Lucky dip - pieds et paquets from Provence - uggh?
"Pieds et paquets" is one of the finest, most subtle dishes of Provence cuisine. The recipe was born out of poverty, generations ago, when meat was rare and every animal part, whether noble or not, had to be used."
Robert Arnoux - Iter
Feeling a bit uninspired after yesterday's lovely Caesar salad, so I chickened out again and went for a lucky dip which turned up Robert Carrier's Feasts of Provence and a recipe for Pieds et paquets - which you will still find everywhere in Provence, including in jars and tins in the supermarkets. He also waxed lyrical about the tiny restaurant whose recipe he provides, but I might save that for lucky dip part two - the restaurant that is. And I'm not going to provide the recipe - I suspect none of you will be rushing to make it, however enticing it may look, in a rustic sort of way. Today I'm just talking about the dish and tripe in general.
I just can't come at tripe - it's the idea and the presumed texture mostly and I suppose an imagined taste. It has to be imagined because I've never tasted it. For those who don't know, tripe is the lining of the animal's stomach or stomachs and usually it's from the cow which has three stomachs. But this recipe is for sheep's stomach and sheep's trotters. I suppose the trotters are really lamb shanks but with the actual foot left on - well there looks to be a substantial portion of bone in the picture above anyway. I'm pretty sure I could cope with the trotters - I have eaten pig's trotters and chicken feet in Chinese restaurants and they are Ok - quite nice in fact. But not the tripe. And the more I think about it the more I think it's because of what I presume the texture to be like - rubbery and chewy like squid and octopus which I also don't like. That and the imagined taste I think.
However, having read an article by Jay Rayner of the Guardian about eating stuff we are not attracted to, I'm now feeling a bit guilty. Not that I'm going to rush out and cook this.
Apparently the flavour is pretty bland:
Tripe's flavour is subtle to the point of neutrality." Tony Naylor - The Guardian
"In a way somewhat similar to tofu, tripe tends to absorb the flavors of the other foods it is cooked with." Spruce Eats
Not that a comparison to tofu is going to make me change my mind. I think I may have once tried tofu - didn't like it. Which brings me back to the texture. And I'm sort of right on this I think. I assume the stuff you buy has been cleaned - not that I think you can buy it very easily. I must check out the butchers at Queen Victoria Market next time I go there. Anyway, first of all it has to be cleaned - apparently quite difficult. Then you need to cook it for ages. Robert Carrier's recipe boils it briefly, cuts it into pieces that are then stuffed with a herby, garlicky, salt pork stuffing. Then it's cooked for ages, 3-4 hours, like a Provençal stew - well the ingredients are typically provençal, with the trotters. It's slightly more complicated but, as I say, I doubt you are going to make this. The point is that it is a recipe that takes time - time for the preparation and time for the cooking.
But the fans say it's wonderful when finished. Simon Hopkinson has a recipe for a similar tripe stew which Jay Rayner says:
"had a deep, dark sticky quality as of the very best dishes made from the forgotten bits of animals. Yes, there was a hint of the farmyard and there was an echo of death. But that's a good thing; some of the greatest of foods are like that." Jay Rayner - The Guardian
'An echo of death' - hardly a phrase that's going to make you rush out and buy some or make at home is it? It's typical peasant food - long slow cooking of the toughest, least attractive bits of an animal - because that's all they could afford.
"People ate tripe, as they ate many things on this list, because they were the unfancied byproducts of the slaughterhouse, the add-ons of the abattoir. They were cheap, and eating them kept you alive and relatively well nourished." Alex Clark - The Guardian
The list referred to here is a list of foods in England that are disappearing because the English don't like them anymore. Tripe topped the list - along with eel and giblets. I did eat some offal when I was a child - steak and kidney, liver, hearts but never tripe, which, in England, is more of a northern dish for some reason. We never ate brains either - indeed I didn't know you could until I came to England. I may have had blood sausages but I don't really remember that very often. I actually quite liked the hearts and the liver - not so much the kidneys. We had lots of cheap cuts though, like scrag end of neck and rabbit - quite a bit of rabbit - now pretty expensive of course.
And probably tripe is too. I suspect that it's one of those minor fashionable things - for haute cuisine rather than your supermarket aisle. I'm talking about here and in England of course. In the south of France pieds et paquets are everywhere, including the supermarket aisles. David almost ordered some once until I explained what it was. They go for the giblets too in their salads. Apparently the Vietnamese like them too.
Some chefs think we owe it to the animals to eat the whole thing and also to make use of everything rather than throwing it away or feeding it to our pets.
"We have a moral obligation to use this stuff, but it's also a challenge from a chef's point of view, and it's part of my food history. As a northern chef, that's what I should be cooking with, offal, tripe, liver. I shouldn't be getting bloody mangoes shipped in from Brazil. I should be using the best of my region's food." Owen Brown
The challenge being persuading people to eat offal. Even the word offal is so unattractive isn't it? But it is a thing with some chefs, inspired by Fergus Henderson a British chef who only seems to cook offal, because:
“If you're going to kill the animal it seems only polite to use the whole thing,”
So far it hasn't become a thing for the populace in general though. McDonalds doesn't do an offal burger. Maybe one day when steak becomes just too expensive for anyone.
I'll leave you with two versions of pieds et paquets from the three Michelin star chef Alain Ducasse. This is how haute cuisine treats a peasant dish.
