Pied de Cochon

I had just been talking to my sister Sabrina on Skype and she told me how she had cooked a delicious recipe for Basque ham hock with lentils.  Both she and her husband are on a mission to lose weight (her daughter is getting married in April, and like Carol Middleton, Sabrina is on a countdown to beauty for her role as mother-of-the-bride) and she’s trying to lure her husband out of his beloved restaurants and into her kitchen for tasty low-fat meals.  Apparently this one was a great success and she urged me to try it!

As it was Tuesday, the day of our weekly market,  I went to the market butcher; he is from nearby Comps and I like to buy my pork from him as his animals are free-range and he has a Label Rouge certificate to prove it (French free-range certificate).  I ask him for a ham hock, or rather jarret de porc, he says he doesn’t have any but he has pied de cochon (pigs trotters).  I’m a little dubious, I’m all for offal and the whole nose-to-tail thing, but I’m sure I tried them once before (at least 10 years ago) and there was a reason I didn’t try them again.

Anyway he and his wife (maybe she wasn’t his wife, but she was on his truck and he was cutting thick slices of steak for her) convinced me that they were really very delicious.  They said I should boil them up with onions, carrots and leeks and eat them hot with potatoes and beans or cold with a salad and vinaigrette.  Either way, they both assured me they would be very good.  I decided to buy two and the butcher slit them down the middle, to make the cooking easier, and wrapped them up in paper.  I decided to also buy a couple of pork chops, just in case, for back up.

Later when I got home I started my research on how best to cook the trotters.  There seems to be a huge dividing line between those who love them and those who hate them, with little room in between.  There are various methods of cooking them; traditionally they were salted like hocks, to preserve them.   Mine were not salted and a lot of the recipes suggested soaking them overnight in brine or salt to get the authentic flavour.  What every recipe agreed on was that they needed to be cooked for at least three hours and up to six hours, before the meat was tender enough to eat.

The Irish, I learned, call them Crubeens, and apparently like to eat them straight out of the pot and they were often served in the pub where they were

‘…eaten with the fingers – a thoroughly greasy and messy business – and washed down with copious quantities of beer or porter.’ Darina Allen.

Their saltiness encouraged the punters to drink more (it was the Crubeens that made me do it m’Lord…).  I’m not sure they are still served as a bar snack, I’ll have to let my Irish readers fill me in on that.

The French seem to like them cooked a la Sainte Ménéhould, which after having been cooked for 3 hours are then buttered and coated in breadcrumbs and put under the grill.  I also found a recipe in Larousse book of French Cookery which stuffs the pig’s feet with veal and truffles, which seemed to defeat the object of this being a cheap cut of meat.  Marco Pierre White cooked them with morels and sweetbreads and made them his signature dish before going on to win 3 Michelin stars; Fergus Henderson suggests peeling and boning them and then putting them back together again with mashed potatoes and then wrapping them in caul fat and frying them in a pan.   Thomas Keller does much the same thing, stuffing them with sweetbreads (he also was awarded 3 Michelin stars, what is it with the Michelin judges and pigs trotters?)

In the end I decided to follow a recipe from Elizabeth David’s ‘French Provincial Cooking’ called Galantine de porc a la Bourguignonne, which was for a terrine and seemed to be the most straight forward.  This is how it went.

I put the trotters in a pot and added 2 carrots, a leak, an onion studded with 2 cloves, a stick of celery, a bunch of parsley stalks, 2 garlic cloves and 2 juniper berries, salt and pepper. I covered everything with cold water and brought it up to boil and then transferred the pot to the oven where I left it on a low heat for three hours.   I then took the trotters out of their stock and left them to cool; however, they no longer looked like trotters, the bones were sticking out at various angles, the skin had pulled away and everything looked like it had erupted from a burst bag.  (I later learned that to keep their shape you are meant to wrap them in cheesecloth).

There was a smell pervading the kitchen, which rather worryingly reminded me of the smell of tripe cooking, (my food hell) and the way Ralph was staring at the trotters sitting on the table, I could tell he had already claimed them as his own!

When the meat was cool enough to handle, I de-boned the trotters, (there are a lot of bones in a foot) and I chopped up some of the skin and all the gristle, tendons and wobbly bits, (there didn’t seem to be much meat at all) which I then put into a shallow bowl.  I then heated up some of the stock with parsley and garlic and poured it over the trotter meat which I then left to cool, before putting it into the fridge.

The next day the terrine or galantine was firm to the touch and I was able to turn it out onto a plate.   I then served it with a salad of mâche,  (lambs lettuce) a crisp loaf of bread and a good dollop of mustard.

Verdict – It was a bit bland (probably would have been better had it been salted) and had a rather rubbery, gelatinous texture, but wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I had read somewhere that pig’s trotters are full of collagen which is apparently very good for skin and muscle tone and will help keep you looking young; I could almost feel my lips plumping up as I ate!

However, I did feel that they are a bit of an acquired taste and I decided that I needed a local’s opinion of my dish.  I called Fred, our neighbour, and he agreed to taste them for me.  By chance he had someone working on his house, a vrai Provencal and they both tucked in and declared my pied de cochon dish to be very good and comme il faut (as it is meant to be).

The Artist and myself didn’t entirely share their enthusiasm for the dish; maybe you have to grow up eating them, or have a 3 Michelin Star chef prepare them for you…meanwhile chez nous it looks like Ralph might be getting what (in my mind at least) is rightfully his after all!

Phillip Reddaway has kindly done a wine pairing for Pig’s trotters, from the balcony of his hotel in Marrakesh (where there’s not much wine to be had…..)

It was one of the Port shippers I believe, forget which one , who once said “the first duty of every Port wine is to be red”
I feel the same way about any wine destined to be drunk with pork trotters, its got to be red. Moreover it has to have a big personality capable of standing up to ( some might say diverting from) such a strongly flavoured dish. The requirement is for the fullest possible body, plenty of chewy tannins and bold fruit flavours. Two wines spring to mind : the Mourvedre based wines of Bandol and the Grenache based wines of Gigondas in the Rhone. Both styles have the power allied to a rusticity that should marry well with the trotters. Very good examples would be Domaine Tempier from Bandol, and Domain St. Gayan from Gigondas, expect to pay around c. €20 for the Bandol and €15 for the Gigondas