Le farci - a bit of a grim looking lucky dip

"C'est une recette composée d'un mélange de chou, d'oseille et de toute sorte de verdure que l'on a dans le jardin : poireau, salade, ail, oignon, persil, ciboulette, bettes mais aussi épinards ou pissenlit et pourquoi pas orties ou ail des ours... " Je Peux Lécher la Cuillère?

Which roughly translated means:

"A recipe made of a mixture of cabbage, sorrel and every kind of vegetable that one has in the garden: leek, lettuce, garlic, onion, parsley, chives, silver beet, but also spinach, or dandelions and why not nettles or wild garlic ..." Can I lick the spoon?

Obviously the French write blogs too.

So today's lucky dip comes from Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, which I have written about before. Le farci is what I found when i closed my eyes and picked a page. Le farci - means literally, 'the stuffed' and generally, in France, refers to some kind of stuffed cabbage. What she is talking about here is a specific dish from the Poitou-Charente region of France, which is behind and on the Atlantic coast above Bordeaux. According to the lady who wrote this blog and provided the picture, it's actually a dish that is little known outside it's home in Poitou. I wonder why.

It is a regional dish though and the French are very good at exploiting and promoting this. As well as being able to find these dishes in restaurants big and small you can find jars of them in the hyper and supermarkets of France. There is always a section on local food and here it is - just for you DD!

Le Farci itself doesn't look very tempting does it? And although I looked for other pictures of this dish, none of them really looked much better. Which isn't to say that it wouldn't be delicious. Somebody described it as a kind of vegetable terrine and that it could be eaten hot or cold. It should certainly please the vegans anyway. It's a peasant dish, a dish made from whatever is to hand in your garden - and the French are really big into vegetable gardens - in the countryside anyway. Here is Jane Grigson's recipe, just for interest because I don't imagine that any of you are going to try this.

LE FARCI

1 round tight cabbage, about 1kg

15 large chard or spinach beet leaves

good handful of sorrel

250g piece fat streaky bacon, cubed

2 tablespoons lard

4 medium onions, chopped

2-3 cloves garlic, crushed with salt

4 eggs

50g breadcrumbs

chopped parsley, chives, tarragon, savoury, etc.

salt, pepper

quatre-épices or ground nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon

Cut away the outer leaves of the cabbage, blanch them in boiling salted water for five minutes, then drain them and spread them out on a double muslin cloth, overlapping each other to make a large circle.

Chop the inside of the cabbage with the chard and sorrel.

Cook the bacon gently in the lard, allowing it to colour slightly once the fat begins to run. Put in the onions and garlic, cover the pan until the onions are soft, then raise the heat and remove the lid so that they can cook to a golden colour.

Put the chopped greens into the frying pan, bit by bit. Stir them round and cook until they wilt down to a reasonably solid mass. Boil off excess liquid if necessary, leaving a moist rather than a wet mixture. Put it into a bowl. Add the eggs one by one, then the crumbs, herbs, spices and seasoning to taste. Put the mixture on to the cabbage leaves, tie up the cloth, after pressing the leaves round the stuffing and boil for two hours in beef stock or water. Eat hot or cold.

She features it in her chapter on silver beet - or swiss chard as it is known in England. Well now anyway. I truly did not know what silver beet was when I arrived in Australia back in 1969. I had never seen it - either in England or France, but I gather that here in Australia it's been a household staple since forever, now mostly outed by the fancier spinach and kale, but making a comeback, particularly when the stems are multi-coloured.

It's actually one of the few vegetables that I am able to grow as long as I protect it from the rabbits, and don't let it go to seed. I haven't protected it of late, so I shall have to plant another lot. In France and Italy it's the stems that are particularly prized - they taste earthier than celery, more like beetroot, to which the whole plant is related, but they can be cooked in much the same way as celery. Lots of gourmet cooks and chefs swear by them, so next time you have some silver beet don't throw out the stalks.

"For flamboyance, lush greenness and leafy generosity, it's hard to beat chard. A great fistful is a vegetable bouquet, a gift worth leaving piled on the kitchen table for a bit of admiration before you set to work and cook it." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

And you can cook so many different things with it. When I embarked on this post I wasn't quite sure which way to go - stuffed cabbage - there are endless versions of this throughout the world, or silver beet and all that you can do with it. The options of what to do with it are almost endless and mostly a long way from stuffed cabbage, so I have chosen not to go there really.

"It's a powerhouse of nutty, green-leaf flavour, so pair it with feisty partners: olives, cream, tomatoes, spices, strong cheese, smoked fish. It will not let you down." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

And don't forget it's health-giving properties too. Packed with vitamins and iron, it has been used since the Romans for curing cancer and toothaches, vertigo and headaches.

"The iron-rich, sharp-tasting leaves pair incredibly well with cheese (in a chard and comté tart, say, or in a soup with crumbled feta) and are robust enough to take centre stage as a main course. If a recipe calls for the leaves only, for heaven’s sake don’t chuck out the stalks: they’re succulent and delicious in their own right. Just roughly chop, saute with olive oil and garlic, then pile on top of cooked bulgar; or cook them down slowly with meat and/or vegetables into a rich, lemony stew." Yotam Ottolenghi

And since we are on stuffings and silver beet I shall end with a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi for some filo stuffed rolls - the stuffing being mainly silverbeet.

Looks rather more tempting does it not? Or you could try a French rival - Le Farci Limousin, which does look slightly more tempting than its Poitou cousin.

Or maybe we should just reflect on whether food has to look beautiful to be tasty? After all this is a dish that has survived the centuries. If it was that bad it surely would have completely disappeared by now. French comfort food perhaps?