One French word: olive, a French recipe: tapenade

Olive, feminine noun (une olive, l’olive, des olives) = olive (pronounced oh-leave)

Olive verte = green olive, olive noire = black olive, de l’huile d’olive = olive oil, de l’huile d’olive vierge = virgin olive oil, des olives dénoyautées = stoned (pitted) olives, un olivier = an olive tree, une branche (or un rameau) d’olivier = an olive branch, du bois d’olivier = olive wood, une oliveraie = an olive grove.

It is also a colour: vert olive = olive green,

and a (very out of fashion) female first name, Olive; but a quite fashionable and inter-generational male first name, Olivier.

Olive oil is of course widely used in Mediterranean, and therefore French, cuisine, as are olives. My recipe for today is tapenade, a paste made with black olives and used to spread on bread, toast, biscuits, blinis, etc. as apéritif nibbles. Recipes for tapenade vary, ingredients sometimes trade green olives for the black, and it is used widely also as an ingredient in other recipes such as lamb or rabbit stew, pasties, etc.

Main ingredients for tapenade

For a cupful you will need:

• 100gr stoned black olives
• 25gr capers
• 25gr anchovy fillets
• 1/2 clove garlic
• about 15cl olive oil
• a little lemon juice

The anchovy fillets can be the very salty, thin, deep red kind, or the less salty, fatter silvery kind. Do not re-salt your mixture.  I also added a few dashes of tabasco, but this is not traditional.

Drain the olives and the anchovies and put all the roughly chopped ingredients plus a tbs or two of olive oil into a mini blender and pulse to obtain a smooth paste. No recognizable bits should remain. If the paste is not smooth enough, add a tiny bit more olive oil, until you get it to the right consistency. It should be like jam that does not fall off your piece of toast, not sloppy.  A bit more liquid than peanut butter? Difficult to say really. It is a little bitter and should be moderately salty.

Spread it onto biscuits, blinis, or squares of toast, or slices of baguette cut at an angle. You may garnish these with chopped chives, half a cherry tomato, or any other embellishment that comes to mind (but you don’t have to, it’s nice just by itself, but not very exciting looking). Try it with a glass of wine before a meal.

Tapenade will keep in a jar, covered, for a few days in the fridge. Do cover it or it will garlic up your whole fridge.

Not brilliant presentation, but never mind...

Bon appétit!

Day 66 – a French word: moutarde, a French recipe: filet de boeuf, sauce moutarde

Moutarde, feminine noun (de la moutarde, une moutarde, des moutardes) = mustard (pronounced moo-tard, no particular stress).

Mustard was used as a condiment in very ancient times, by the Egyptians and the Chinese notably. It was used by the Greeks and the Romans in cooking and for medicinal purposes (antiseptic and digestive).  It is made by macerating the seeds of the mustard plant in vinegar, wine, must or water and then crushing them to a pulp.

Mustard in France is used a lot in cooking and not simply as a condiment; it is always quite strong and hardly ever sweet. It is made mainly in the Dijon area in Burgundy in east central France, where wine and vinegar are obviously in plentiful supply. But there are other regional mustards (Meaux, Bordeaux) where the main difference is in the wine or vinegar used.

The expression “la moutarde me monte au nez” (which is also the title of a French film) (literally that sort of feeling in your nose when you eat mustard (wasabi often!), a sort of burning, almost wanting to sneeze) means that you are getting more and more impatient or angry.

Filet de boeuf sauce moutarde

My recipe for today is filet de bœuf, sauce moutarde (pan fried filet of beef with mustard sauce).

Per person you will need:

• 150gr to 200gr filet of beef
• a small piece of butter
• 1tsp strong French mustard (moutarde de Dijon) 
• 1 tbs liquid cream
• 30gr blue cheese (St Agur, Roquefort…)
• 1tbs cognac, armagnac or Calvados

Filet de boeuf sauce moutarde - main ingredients

Preparation:

Preparing the sauce

1. Before cooking your steak, prepare a green salad with lettuce and tomato. Heat the oven to very low and put a plate per person to warm.
2. Prepare the basis of your sauce: mix together the mustard, cream and blue cheese into a paste.
3. Put a heavy frying pan to heat, add a little butter and fry your steak on both sides to suit your taste (I like my steak rare, my slice was about 1.5cm thick (almost 2cm), I cooked it for 3mns on the first side, and about 2mns on the second). The butter makes a nice brown crust.
4. Remove the steak to your heated plate and keep it warm in the oven.
5. Wipe the pan to remove the butter, which will have burnt a little. But do not wipe so thoroughly that you remove any bits of steak and juices that may have stuck to the pan. Off the heat (the pan will still be very hot), pour in the alcohol of your choice and stir, scratching up pan juices. Most of the alcohol will evaporate immediately.
6. Add the sauce mixture and put the pan back on very low heat. Stir to melt the cheese and heat the sauce, but leave a few lumps of cheese, it looks more rustic on the plate that way.
7. Pour the sauce over your steak, add the garnish of salad leaves and tomato, add pepper if you wish, but little or no salt, the cheese is often salty enough. Chips (French fries) are good too of course, but I’m off chips at the moment.

Filet de boeuf sauce moutarde with lettuce and tomato

Bon appétit!

Day 65 – a French word: mouillettes, a little chat about boiled eggs (hardly a recipe)

Mouillettes, feminine noun (une mouillette, la mouillette, but more often des mouillettes – you don’t usually just have one) = soldiers (the little fingers of bread that you dunk in a soft-boiled egg) (pronounced moo-yet, no particular stress).

Back to childhood, comforting, fun food. Perfect soft-boiled eggs and trying to dunk to just the right degree, so that the bread is coated in egg yolk without causing the latter to overflow the egg shell and dribble down the side. Remember?

Mouillettes

Mouillettes are literally “little things that get wet”. Mouiller = to wet (mouillé = wet (adj.m.), mouillée (f.), mouillés, mouillées (pl.). Expressions include une poule mouillée = a coward (literally wet chicken). Une mouille = a pool in a river; or wet ground around a spring.

A soldier, a real one with camouflage and a machine gun, is un soldat.

When we were children, we called mouillettes “dip-dips”; don’t know where that came from. We still call them that.

A close-up of a mouillette

I did boiled eggs for an American visitor some time ago, and he said it was years since he had had them. It seems we in Europe fear contamination from raw or undercooked eggs less than our transatlantic cousins. Yet there are few things nicer, quicker, simpler. When there is nothing else to eat, one can often find eggs in the fridge, and some bread to dunk with.

Maran eggs I brought back from England last week from my Mother's hens

You can turn a boiled egg into an art form: choose a real, fresh, free range, farm egg - from a Maran hen for instance, deep brown, almost chocolate; a Maran hen who has been fed a good proportion of maize so that the yolk is deep orange. One can use nice fresh wholemeal bread, ever so lightly toasted so that the little finger holds up better under the strain of dripping yolk (nothing worse that it breaking and falling all over the place). Buttered cold, not hot (the toast), so that the butter is still there, between the yolk and the bread. And a pretty egg cup, to set the whole thing off nicely. An egg becomes a feast…

Hand made pottery from the south of France, available from Trenchermans.com

I like my boiled eggs very soft, with the white just hardening. I just cover them in cold water and bring them to the boil. Then I start timing. 2½ minutes. You may prefer longer. Very personal thing, boiled eggs. They must be eaten immediately they are ready of course. If you are doing several, bash the tops as soon as they are removed from the saucepan, to let steam escape and stop the cooking, then take all the tops off. Mouillettes should be prepared before you put the eggs on, or at least the toast should be toasted (if you are toasting). I toast just lightly, barely a minute. Let the toast cool, butter and cut fingers on a wooden chopping board. If you do it on a plate, they very often break. While the eggs are boiling, prepare a plate for your eggs, with egg cups, spoon and salt, another for the mouillettes. Get a large spoon ready to remove the eggs quickly from the boiling water, and a knife to top them with. I can’t be bothered with those machines to take the tops off eggs.

Look at the colour of that yolk!

And there you are, return to the nursery, dip away, savour one of nature’s miracles.

Bon appétit!

Day 63 – a French word: courge, a French recipe: soupe poireau/courge

Courge, feminine noun (une courge, la courge, des courges) = squash (pumpkin or marrow) (pronounced coorj).

Une courgette (zucchini) is a baby courge.

The family is enormous, of course, here are two photos of the type I used: a courge musquée. It is one of the tastier types of squash, a bit like a potimarron. Not just tasteless pumpkin which needs added flavouring to be in any way interesting. Quite sweet and nutty.

A packet of Courge Musquée seeds from Vilmorin, the French seed specialists

A photo of a courge musquée from Rustica.fr

The family of recipes is enormous too, of course. Mine is for a leek and squash soup: soupe poireau/courge. This is a soup which is not mixed, not smooth; the vegetables are left whole.

Soupe poireau/courge

For two people you will need:

• A very large fat leek, washed and chopped
• A little olive oil or butter
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 250gr of chunked steamed courge musquée (or raw, just cook the soup longer)
• 1 stock cube  and 600ml water (or 600ml home made stock)
• A thick slice of stale wholemeal bread (2.5cm/1″)
• 100ml liquid cream
• Grated cheese

The slice of bread in the soup pot

Preparation:

1. Sweat the cleaned, chopped leek in a little olive oil or butter, on low heat for 5 minutes
2. Add the garlic and the stock cubes followed by the water (or home made stock instead of cubes and water)
3. Cut a thick slice of stale wholemeal bread and add whole to the top of the soup (this will pump up a lot of liquid, so make sure you have enough).
4. Cook gently  for 20 minutes if you are using steamed courge, or for 30 minutes if you use it raw.
5. Serve the soup as it is, with the chunks and slices of vegetables, one garlic clove per warmed bowl.
6. Add a good dash of cream, and share the slice of bread between the two bowls, generously covered with grated cheese.

Grated cheese to top the soup

You can also add the bread at the end, a thinner toasted slice, covered in cheese. But I prefer the rusticity of the big soup-soaked slice.

This is not a tidy dish to eat. Slurps and strings of cheese and so on abound. But it is cheap and healthy fare, and a way of using up the courge that you have left at the end of winter.

Bon appétit!

Day 61 – a French word: amande, a French recipe: crème de riz aux amandes effilées

Amande, feminine noun (une amande, l’amande, les amandes) = almond (pronounced a-maand, slight stress on the second syllable).

NOT to be mixed up with une amende = a fine (for bad behaviour).

Amandes effilées = sliced almonds; amandes décortiquées = shelled almonds; amandes mondées = skinned almonds; amande amère = bitter almond; de l’huile d’amande douce = sweet almond oil; de l’essence d’amande = almond essence; de la pâte d’amande = marzipan; vert amande = the pale green of fresh almond husks;  les yeux en amande = slanted, almond shaped eyes.

My recipe: crème de riz aux amandes effilées = creamy rice with almonds.

Crème de riz aux amandes effilées

Some people loathe any form of rice pudding. I love it. I’ll share a memory of mine: when I was a child, quite a small child, I went to boarding school, where the food was fairly good. And if we were still hungry at the end of the meal, seconds were always, always rice pudding. It was so delicious, I had it every day.

This recipe is rich, creamy and flavoursome.

For 4 people, you will need:

• 100gr pudding rice or risotto rice
• 500ml milk
• 100ml whipping cream (or 200ml if your rice is too thick)
• 3 tbs honey
• 6 cardamom pods
• 1 vanilla pod
• 1 slice of dried orange (or fresh orange, optional)
• a handful of raisins
• 1 tsp rose water or orange flower water (optional)
• 50gr toasted sliced almonds (amandes effilées)

Preparation:

1. In a fairly large saucepan, put the rice, the milk,  the crushed cardamom pods, the vanilla pod cut in two lengthways (i.e. two long thin strips to release the seeds), and bring to a simmer. Cook very gently for 20 minutes until the rice is tender, stirring often to prevent the rice from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan. Check that it is not thickening unduly, add milk if it does. The end result needs to be fairly thick (but not lumpy and cloggy), because you are going to add honey and cream.
2. Remove the cardamom and vanilla and scrape out the seeds to put back into the rice. Stir. This may look a bit funny, with bits and pieces in the rice, but it will taste good. You can also leave all the pods in whole and just discard them when eating. This is not a gala dish, but a good rustic family dessert.
3. Add the rose water, the cream and the raisins and the honey. Reheat without boiling for a minute or two, stirring.
4. Serve warm or cold, garnished with the toasted almonds and the orange. (I cooked my slice of dried orange with the rice, so it doesn’t figure in my photo.)

Crème de riz

Gosh, this is good.

Bon appétit!

Day 59 – a French word: aubergine, a (French) recipe: salade Marocaine aux aubergines

Aubergine, feminine noun (une aubergine, l’aubergine, des aubergines) = eggplant (pronounced oh-bear-jean with a soft j, with equal stress on each syllable).

Une aubergine is used to denote a bruised and violet bump resulting from a fight (il a une aubergine au front = he has a violet coloured lump on his forehead).

Aubergine is also a colour, of course, and then becomes an invariable adjective.

No information on the etymological origins of the word seems to be available.

Une aubergine used to be the familiar name for a lady traffic warden, the kind who gives parking tickets, because of the colour of their uniform. That colour has now changed to an awful bright blue (at least you can see them coming a mile off), and they are known as pervenches (= periwinkles, a blue flower). The proper term for a traffic warden is une contractuelle. I don’t know why these are all female? Maybe just Paris? Where I live it is men that give parking tickets. Often.

Salade marocaine aux aubergines

My recipe is a salade marocaine aux aubergines,  a Moroccan eggplant salad, called zaalouk in its country of origin.

Moroccan aubergine salad, main ingredients

For four people you will need

• 3 large aubergines
• 6 large cloves of garlic
• 8 large cocktail tomatoes (larger than cherry tomatoes, that you buy on the stem)
• some good quality tomato sauce, or pasta sauce
• 3tbs olive oil
• 1tbs honey
• 1tsp whole cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp chopped dried whole chili
• 3tbs chopped parsley
• 2tbs chopped fresh mint
• salt
• pepper

Preparation:

Aubergine frying

1. Put a saucepan of salted water to boil.
2. Cut the aubergines with their skin into dice sized cubes.
3. Peel the garlic and cut three cloves in half. Finely chop the other three.
4. Poach the aubergines and the halved garlic cloves for 10 minutes in barely boiling water.
5. While this is going on, cut the cocktail tomatoes in half and fry gently in olive oil. When they soften, add a tbs of honey, the other three garlic cloves, finely chopped. Stir and continue to fry gently.
6. Add 1tsp cumin, 1tbs chopped parsley, 1/4 tsp chopped dried chili (optional, this dish should not be hot, just full of flavour).
7. Drain the aubergine and add to the pan, stir and crush the cubes with the back of the spoon.
8. Add 3tbs tomato sauce and continue cooking until the aubergine is quite soft and no longer forms cubes.
9. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
10. Serve sprinkled liberally with more chopped parsley and fresh chopped mint.

Salade d'aubergines marocaine

This “salad” can be served hot as a vegetable with a meat dish, alone as part of a vegetarian meal, warm as a salad, or cold. It keeps well until the next day, and so can be used in two different ways. It is smooth, slightly sweet, slightly chili hot, with lots of textures and flavours to discover.

Salade d'aubergines marocaine

Bon appétit.

Day 58 – a French word: épice, a French recipe: gâteau aux épices

Epice, feminine noun (une épice, des épices, l’épice) = spice (pronounced ay-peace, no particular stress).
Remember what I said in previous posts about an accented é transformed into an s in English? This is another one.

Epicé = spicy; pain d’épices = literally spice bread, but nearer to ginger bread; Route des Epices = the Spice Road; cinq épices = Chinese 5 spice; quatre épices = allspice.

My recipe for today is a gâteau aux épices, with a good mixture of spices and some seeds thrown in for good measure.

Gâteau aux épices

You will need for a cake serving 8 people:

• 200gr butter
• 200gr sugar
• 4 eggs
• 200gr flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder (not necessary if you use self raising flour)
• 1 tbs turmeric
• 3 tbs caraway seeds (carvi in French, or you can use cumin)
• 1tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger

Mixing the batter

Preparation:

1. Pre heat the oven to 180°C
2. In a mixer, cream the butter and the sugar until fluffy and white
3. Add the eggs and mix
4. Add the flour, baking powder, turmeric, allspice and ginger and mix well to a smooth batter
5. Add the seeds and incorporate gently, spreading them well throughout the mixture
6. Pour into a cake mold (buttered if you are not using silicone)
7. Bake for about 40 minutes (but keep an eye on it, and test with a skewer if you think it is ready)

Gâteau aux épices just out of the oven

The turmeric gives a beautiful saffron yellow colour to the cake; the seeds get in your teeth but are interesting and delicious! Any leftovers that go a bit dry can be used to make a dessert in individual glasses. Put a half slice of cake in the bottom of a large glass and pour on a tablespoonful of alcohol (grand marnier, brandy…). Add fresh fruit (raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, banana, mango etc or a mixture of several fruits), and top with whipped cream and a few toasted almonds.

Mmmm, lovely crumbly slices

Bon appétit.

Day 55 – a French word : volaille, a French recipe: crème de volaillle

Volaille, feminine noun (une volaille, la volaille, des volailles) = poultry (pronounced vau-lie (like telling a lie). In the singular, it’s a farmyard bird, in the plural, poultry.

It comes from the verb voler (to fly). No clever definitions and examples today, I can’t find any.

But my recipe is for crème de volaille = cream of chicken soup, which is the ultimate comfort food.

Crème de volaille

For a large pot of soup, for about 6-8 people, you will need:

• three medium sized leeks, washed and chopped
• 2 small potatoes
• a large bunch of parsley
• a couple of handfuls of meat from a cold chicken
• 2 litres of water and 2 stock cubes (or 2 litres of home-made chicken stock)
• pepper
• butter and flour to make a beurre manié (1tbs soft butter, 1 tbs flour, mixed well with a fork to form a paste)
• a little whipping cream
• a few celery or fennel seeds

Preparation:

1. Sweat the leeks in a little oil or butter until softened.
2. Add the cubed potatoes, the chicken pieces chopped into smallish pieces, and the parsley and cook for a further minute or two.
3. Pour on the stock or the water with the cubes.
4. Simmer gently for a good half hour.
5. Mix well with a soup mixer, until very creamy with no bits and lumps.
6. Add the beurre manié and stir well. (The beurre manié thickens the soup.)
7. Test for seasoning and add a little pepper.
8. Whip some cream with a little celery salt,  and pipe a large rosette into the middle of each serving, topped with a few celery or fennel seeds, to garnish.

Bon appétit.

Day 49 – a French word: veau, a French recipe: blanquette de veau

Veau, masculine noun (un veau, du veau, des veaux) = calf or veal (pronounced vo, you never hear the x in the plural).

This is one of the rare “meat” words in French that is the same for the animal and what one finds in the kitchen. In English, calf is the animal, veal is what we eat; pig is the animal, pork is what what we eat, and so on.

Expressions: pleurer comme un veau = to weep copiously; tuer le veau gras = to kill the fatted calf; c’est un veau = someone who is soft, a dummy, useless, or a bad racehorse, or a bad car… not very complimentary to calves all that.

When I buy veal, that is to say rarely, I always buy organic veal which has been raised sous la mère (under its mother). I personally think this is important for the animal, quite apart from the fact that the meat tastes better.

Blanquette de veau

My recipe for today is blanquette de veau, a creamy, winter, country dish with veal and vegetables, usually served either with boiled potatoes or rice, so that you have plenty to pump up the juice with. But the original, old-fashioned recipe is complicated and needs small quantities of lots of ingredients. I have come up with a version which, although not entirely orthodox, is very good and much easier to do (don’t be put off by all the steps in the instructions).

Cuts of veal. Taken from wikipedia (the calf looks distinctly unhappy...)

For 4 people you will need:

• 1kg of veal from the belly and chest (see diagram above, flanchet, tendron, poitrine on its underside). It is a good thing to mix pieces with and without cartilage and bone, for more flavour.
• a large onion, peeled and stuck with 4 cloves
• 4 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 2 large carrots, sliced
• 2 stock cubes
• a bouquet garni (see picture below)
• 300gr small firm mushrooms
• 3 egg yolks
• 100ml liquid cream
• the juice of a lemon
• 1tbs plain flour
• butter
• salt, pepper

Bouquet garni: celery, bay leaf, thyme

Some of the ingredients

Preparation:

1. Cut the meat into very large cubes (3-4cm).
2. Place in a heavy pan, just covered with plain water, no salt, and bring to the boil. Simmer for one minute, and drain.
3. Put the meat back into the same heavy pan, with the onion and cloves, bouquet garni, sliced carrots and stock cubes. Cover well with water (1½-2 litres) and bring to the boil. Simmer for 50 minutes.
4. In a large bowl, put the three egg yolks, saving the whites for another preparation. Add the cream and whisk. Set aside.
5. 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time, in a frying pan, put a couple of tbs butter, slice the mushrooms thickly on top (or quarter them), sprinkle with a little salt and fry gently for three or four minutes. Squeeze the juice of one lemon on to the mushrooms, stir, and take them out onto a plate with a slotted spoon.
6. Add a tbs flour to the mushroom pan and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon, scraping all the pan juices. Change to a whisk, remove any flour lumps, add one at a time about five ladles of stock from the veal pan, whisk, and simmer for a minute to cook the flour.
7. When the veal is cooked, take a ladleful of stock and pour into the cream mixture, whisking briskly so that the hot liquid does not cook the egg.
8. Pour the contents of the frying pan into the veal pan, stirring, and bring to the boil to thicken the sauce.
9. Add the mushrooms to the veal pan.
10. Off the heat, pour the contents of the cream bowl slowly into the veal pan, stirring.
11. Taste for seasoning. Add salt and pepper if necessary.
12. Serve in deep plates, with boiled potatoes or rice, and lots of the creamy juice.

Blanquette cooking

Blanquette de veau ready to eat

Bon appétit.

Day 45 – a French word: mâche, a French recipe: croustillant de canard sur lit de mâche

Mâche, feminine noun (la mâche, de la mâche, but one doesn’t say une mâche or des mâches) = lamb’s lettuce.

Not to be confused with the verb mâcher = to chew (je mâche, tu mâches, il/elle mâche, nous mâchons, vous mâchez, ils/elles mâchent)(= I chew, you chew, he/she chews, we chew, you chew, they chew). Do you remember the lost ‘s’ denoted by the circumflex accent (^)? This comes from masticate, (mastiquer en français).

Il ne mâche pas ses mots = he doesn’t mince his words, he’s not afraid of plain speaking.

Lamb’s lettuce is not as frequently used as other salads, but it is becoming more “fashionable”, especially since it is now presented ready washed in packets. That’s the problem with lamb’s lettuce, it’s tricky to wash, because it grows on sandy soil which get stuck between the lower leaves. But it is worth the trouble, its emerald green adds sparkle to any dish, and it has a pleasant chewy texture and fresh flavour. I bought my mâche fresh this morning from a local farmer.

Croustillant de canard

My recipe today is for a croustillant de canard sur lit de mâche (crispy duck on a bed of lamb’s lettuce). Let me explain. It consists of a cuisse de canard confit (a duck leg and thigh preserved in duck fat), and radishes and lamb’s lettuce. I think in our family it was my brother who first cooked a cuisse de canard confit crispy this way, my son also does a great version, but some people, in the south west of France particularly, thought it pretty heretical.  I find it less rich and definitely economical, as one duck leg and thigh will do two people.

Une cuisse de canard confit

You will need for 2 people as a main dish:

• one cuisse de canard confit (I used a frozen cuisse, tinned is better for this recipe, there is more duck fat)
• a couple of good handfuls of mâche
• about 10 good sized radishes
• a little raspberry vinegar, salt and pepper

Mâche et radis

Preparation:

1. Wash the lamb’s lettuce in a basin of water, swishing it around so that any sand falls to the bottom. Repeat several times with fresh water.
2. Dry delicately in a tea towel.
3. Nip off the root end but try to keep the rosette whole, it looks better.
4. Clean and trim the radishes. Dry.
5. Arrange the lamb’s lettuce on two plates, slice the radishes.
6. Unless you make your own, duck legs are sold in tins surrounded with duck fat. Remove the duck leg leaving a little fat around it.
7. Place it in a heavy frying pan, one which is not going to be damaged by the shredding process, warm it up, and with two forks, remove the meat from the bone; discard the bone, but keep the skin.
8. While continuing to heat the meat, separate it with the two forks until it is completely shredded.
9. Gradually pour off the duck fat (into a pot which you will keep for frying vegetables). Keep stirring and shredding the meat, turning it frequently so that it crisps on all sides. And continue pouring off any excess fat.
10. When the duck is golden and completely crispy, divide it in two and arrange a little pyramid in the middle of each plate.
11. Sprinkle half a tsp raspberry vinegar over the salad (not over the duck), and add several grinds of black pepper and some fleur de sel or salt flakes.

This dish is not as fatty and rich as plain confit, because the grease has been progressively poured off. And the thick salad leaves offset the duck perfectly.

Bon appétit.