Charcuterie_ The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing - Michael Ruhlman [2]
I began to explore the technique. You could do so many things with duck confit: stew it in some beans (as in cassoulet, the well-known French bean dish), make a salad of it with some greens and a vinaigrette, put it on mashed potatoes or polenta, add chunks of it to a country pâté. You could even tuck it between slices of Wonder Bread and it would still be fantastic.
But the ideal way to serve it, I realized, is on a bed of diced potatoes that have been fried crispy and flavorful in that amazing duck fat. Duck served this way has what chefs call integrity: both items are cooked in the same medium, with different effects, and the dish retains the rustic simplicity embodied by the duck and the potato. This is what you would eat on a farm in France, where the technique of preserving duck has thrived for centuries.
Yet originally duck that pleased the palate and satisfied the soul wasn’t the point. The goal of the confit was preservation; that’s what confit means: preserved. A French farmwife cooked and stored duck in its own fat because that kept the duck from spoiling for a long, long time. She and her family, frugal by necessity, could eat it as they needed it, wasting nothing. That pleasure happened to a by-product of economy and survival underscored the ingenuity of the method.
As my obsession grew, I made and ate a lot of duck confit. I annoyed my wife at restaurants by demanding to know from our waiter the exact method, type of cures, type of fat the chef used in the confit (one chef, for instance, used half pork fat because he liked the flavor). But my appreciation for it didn’t peak until its greatness dawned on me: preservation techniques, while no longer necessary today, could result in astonishing food.
I asked a chef friend, a teacher expert in the ways of preservation, Dan Hugelier, why now, given that we can “preserve” food fine in a fridge or freezer or in Cryovack, sealed in oxygenless packages, why was confit, why was charcuterie—a culinary specialty largely defined by preservation methods—still relevant? Dan looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, “Taste.” Having solved the survival issue, we have the luxury to think about pleasure, about refinement.
You can confit many cuts of meat. Goose, in addition to duck, of course, chicken or turkey—or a pork loin. It’s a remarkable thing: you can buy a supermarket pork loin, unnaturally lean now and as flavorful as cardboard, and, with the basic confit method, turn it into something so tasty you’d swear voodoo were involved. You can also turn pork shoulder into a mean confit. At a restaurant in Seattle, I once ordered deep-fried pork belly confit—more or less a chunk of deep-fried fat—and I nearly fell over backward it was so good, crisp on the outside, melty and spicy inside (see page 264 for the recipe).
A pâté, a way of alchemizing scraps into culinary treasure, is another form of food preservation. As are sausages, bacon, ham, smoked salmon, smoked trout, or simple lox, salmon cured with salt and seasonings. All these items are part of the specialty called charcuterie, and each grew out of the need for preservation. Contemporary chefs have adopted some of these preservative techniques for foods you might never think of trying to preserve. Halibut confit would sound ridiculous to a French farmer, but prepared carefully, it’s delicious.
Derived from the French words flesh (chair) and cooked (cuit), the term charcuterie came to designate the shops in fifteenth-century France that sold products of the pig as well as from offal. The Romans, who made standards of raising, killing, and cooking of pork points of law, regulating its production, were likely the first to turn pork butchery into a trade, but it was the French charcutier who brought the greatest ingenuity to pig preparations. In the fifteenth century, charcutiers were not allowed to sell uncooked pork (though they