Читать книгу Len Deighton’s French Cooking for Men: 50 Classic Cookstrips for Today’s Action Men - Len Deighton - Страница 27

Both words mean cooking in water on top of the stove, but the temperatures are different. The French are more precise in their words: when water is heated enough to shiver – frémir – it is just right for poaching – pocher; when it gets hotter there will be a bubble now and again at the same place. That is called mijoter and as far as the cook is concerned the water is boiling. (Beware, the cook seldom wants anything boiling.) If the water gets very hot it will go into a great rolling boil – bouillir – which is fine for reducing the volume of liquids but not for very much else.

Many dishes are called boiled but very few are actually boiled. (This word usually indicates that the liquid in which the food is cooked will not be served with it, i.e. boiled bacon, boiled mutton, etc.) Foodstuffs that are actually put into boiling water include eggs in their shells, vegetables, dried vegetables, cereals, and a few flour mixtures like pasta, suet puddings, and dumplings. Of these only the flour mixtures wouldn’t be just as good if cooked more slowly. (That’s because there are air particles which must be kept hot or they will collapse just as in baking pastry or cake.)

Most foods are best poached, i.e. kept at that gentle simmer or frémir as in poaching an egg. In English cookery it is very often the salt meats that are cooked in this way: salt beef, salt pork, bacon, and ham; that’s because immersion in water takes some of the salt taste out of them. Originally such foods were salted for the winter as a way of preserving them. By the time they were used they were very salty and needed a soaking in cold water before they were cooked. If you take my mother’s excellent advice about salt meat you will choose a suitable piece of meat and then ask your butcher to salt it in his brine tub. This will take about three days. After this brief salting it shouldn’t need any soaking, just go ahead and cook it. Don’t buy salt meat at random from the brine tub because the butcher sometimes consigns his old unsold meat to it and if it’s been in there too long it will be excessively salty. The standard rule for cooking salt meat: twenty-five minutes per pound plus twenty-five minutes. However I find that long cooking improves it and I suggest a four-hour minimum for any large piece. You need a pan big enough for the meat to just float and the water to circulate freely.

The French cook is not fond of salt meat; perhaps that has something to do with having a less severe winter and therefore not having to slaughter the animals at the winter solstice. More likely it’s because the liquid in which salt meat has been cooked is quite unusable as stock. With unsalted meat, however, the cooking liquid is served alongside as a soup; see pot-au-feu (pages). Clever frugal French. There’s more about poaching on pages.