Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter designed to inspire your Sundays in the kitchen. This week’s newsletter contains recipes for rillettes-roasted potatoes and an onion and anchovy tart.
We’re in France. Duck country. Sunflowers and maize and an army of hornets and children and sometimes, honestly, it’s hard to tell the difference.
The holiday began in Cognac where we more or less ate and drank incessantly for two days. Other than an andouille de Gémené - which further entrenched my already trenchant if admittedly subjective view that you’ve got to draw the nose-to-tail line somewhere, and that line should probably be in amongst the very guts of the animal - I don’t think we put a foot wrong. We arrived at midnight to a pork chop and left two days later after a breakfast of baguette, butter and jam. These book-ended bavette, langoustines and crab, very good tomatoes, many anchovies, heart-stopping amounts of aioli, an apricot tart, an extremely late-night seafood pilaff, and a fair bit of the local moonshine*.
And then we drove three hours south to join friends in the Gers, tittering as we passed through Condom, and ending perhaps half a mile from where four of the six adults had celebrated the end of university some 15 years ago. That time there were 25-odd - some odder than others - graduates, having a high old time of it, oblivious to how different things would be when we returned with kids. We were kids.
There’s certainly less boozing this time around though in my memory at least even that first excursion wasn’t excessively Dionysian. Perhaps we were subconsciously beginning our lives as real adults. Or perhaps my memory was incinerated by bidons of rosé**. I remember it was easier to read a book when there weren’t seven children screaming at one another, and us. I remember that I read and enjoyed Kitchen Confidential. I remember that Michael Jackson died during dinner. Not literally.
So here we are. When the daily cooking rotation found its way to me, in a fit of nostalgia I made an onion tart, which is something I used to do in my sleep - sometimes literally - while working as a cook in a chateau in the Tarn in 2005. Probably another story for another day.
It is a very good tart. I think tarts and quiches are underrated food items. Discuss.
What was also very good, if less mindful and demure, were new potatoes roasted with goose rillettes. Why, I thought, roast potatoes in goose fat when you can lob in some of the goose itself. Each mouthful yielded healthy, if ‘healthy’ can ever mean ‘not that healthy’, enhancements of both crispy and soft rillettes, the potatoes themselves caressed, if that’s not too emetic a word, by the good fat that the rillettes rendered. We ate them with chicken and obviously more aioli. When in Rome.
Tonight I will barbecue some duck hearts. For now here are the recipes for the tart and the potatoes.
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Onion & Anchovy Tart
French shop-bought rolled pastry is very good and a perfect round shape. Jus-Rol is adequate and maddeningly rectangular. If you want to make your own there are plenty of recipes for shortcrust pastry. It’s worth it, if only for your self-esteem.
Serves 6
230g rolled shortcrust pastry (pâte brisée if you happen to be reading this from France)
baking beans / dried chickpeas /something to weigh down the parchment
an egg, whisked
50g butter
5 brown onions, peeled and thinly sliced
(a little) salt
8 anchovies in oil
1 tsp chopped thyme
2 more eggs, lightly whisked
350ml double cream
150g grated gruyère or emmental or I suppose cheddar or, or, or
lots of black pepper
toasted pine nuts, optional
preheat the oven to 160C.
carefully line a 24cm (or thereabouts) tart tin with the pastry. Prick with a fork and refrigerate for 20 minutes, or freeze for 10.
meanwhile melt the butter in a large pan over a medium heat and allow it to start to brown, then add the onions and a very timid pinch of salt. Cook for 30 minutes, stirring regularly, until golden, soft, sweet. For the last 10 minutes add the anchovies and thyme. Leave to cool.
while you’re on with that, line the pastry with baking parchment and fill with the baking beans. Bake for 25 minutes. Remove the beans carefully and jettison the parchment. Brush with the single whisked egg and return to the oven for 5 minutes.
OK. You’ve done the hard bit. Add the remaining two eggs, double cream, and cheese to the cooled onions (they don’t have to be cold, just not hot-hot) along with a hearty twist of pepper. Decant into the tart shell and bake for 35-40 minutes until just set. Switch the oven to the grill setting and grill for a minute or two to get some colour on top. Remove and cool for at least 20 minutes before serving, though this is lovely at room temperature and indeed cold.
you may like to toast a few pine nuts in a frying pan to scatter on top as a final flourish, but this is far from vital.
serve the tart with a green salad, some tomatoes, and a wine that would almost certainly be undrinkable if you brought it home.
Rillettes Roasted New Potatoes
I’m not sure this requires a fully laid out recipe. Here’s what you do.
Get some waxy potatoes, though you could do this with old/floury potatoes and be very happy with the results (do peel them in this instance).
Cut them into sensible shapes and par-boil them in salted water for 8-10 minutes until they’re on their way to being cooked. Drain well and let them steam themselves dry.
Tumble them into a roasting tin. Get yourself some goose - or duck or pork - rillettes and tear into morsels. Toss through the potatoes along with a good pinch of salt, some whole, unpeeled garlic cloves and a few rosemary twigs.
Roast at 200C for an hour, tossing around occasionally. That’s it.
*my extremely kind and generous hosts may not appreciate the description of cognac as moonshine so I reassure them with unending gratitude that this is meant fully tongue-in-cheek.
**I’ve just asked for any further info from one of the others. “Well I remember being topless at dinner which isn’t something I’ve done before or since. There was a bar in the barn with a pool table [no recollection of that]. There was lots of snogging [fml].” And then I looked at the Facebook pictures and goodness how memory can deceive. Absolute carnage.
Loved that Superman t-shirt. What a tool.
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