Foodbuzz 24×24: Lapin à la moutarde avec Thierry

It’s been awhile since I participated in Foodbuzz’s 24×24 event. Every month, I received the notification in my inbox, put it on my things to do, and then allowed the deadline to come and go without a single idea for a proposal passing through my head. I think part of the reason might be the fact that in my life, cooking has evolved from something I was just discovering when I first started this blog to become a part of my daily life. I post my recipes as background to my stories, and food has slowly become less about learning and more the one constant in a life that is all about learning and changing.

But this month, when the 24×24 notification appeared in my inbox, I knew immediately the proposal I wanted to submit: I had had my eye on a traditional recipe for lapin à la moutarde from the moment it graced my palate a few months ago; this was the perfect opportunity.

When I proposed this dinner, I outlined the proposal as Lapin à la moutarde avec Thierry, a real Frenchman from rural France who, for some reason, made the best rabbit I had ever tasted in my entire life. But let’s be frank, here. It’s not as though I just pulled a random Frenchman off the street and demanded that he teach me to cook. I’m laying all my cards on the table: Thierry is the Country Boy’s father; my first lapin à la moutarde was the “meet the parents” dinner. Receiving the go-ahead from Foodbuzz opened a whole other can of worms.

The Country Boy made fun of me for days as I stressed over how I was going to ask his father not only to share this recipe with me, but to allow me to take pictures and publish his recipe on the Internet. I don’t think his father was even aware that the strange American girlfriend who had suddenly appeared every so often at their dinner table in the Loire Valley was even stranger in that she publishes pretty much everything she eats on the Internet… and that she often refers to herself in the third person. Top it all off with the fact that ever since I sent an overly-polite thank you note–vouvoiement, “Monsieur et Madame” and everything–I’ve been pulling my hair out over the fact that they told the CB to ask me to tutoie them, but it’s become a tic I can’t abandon.

So finally, carefully, over our afternoon coffee, I asked in one long sentence without drawing breath, so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “Je-voulais-savoir-si-ca-vous-dérangerait-de-me-montrer-votre-recette-pour-le-lapin-à-la-moutarde-que-vous-avez-fait-la-dernière-fois-pour-que-je-le-mets-sur-Internet-?”

Luckily, the CB had already hinted at the question I wanted to ask, and Thierry (I am trying very, very had to call him Thierry, despite 23 years of etiquette training that begs the contrary) was more than happy to accept.

The CB’s family’s rabbits come from a nearby farm: giant things the likes of which you’ve never seen in a French supermarket–or an American supermarket, for that matter. I’ve never seen a rabbit in an American supermarket. Thierry was stunned and started listing all the other things he would make me try–offal, tongue, liver, horse–to exclamations from other members of the CB’s family over how delicious all of it would be and how incredible it was that I hadn’t tried any of it.

As I listened, I snapped pictures of Thierry’s hands preparing what had become second-nature to him over several years of preparing the same dish. Every once in awhile, he noticed and threw out some instructions, but as I’ve slowly gathered over my time here, the French aren’t very exacting, at least when it comes to home cooking. There aren’t well-worn, sauce-spattered recipes like I’ve seen in American kitchens, nor are there measuring devices of any kind… just a lot of sighing and shrugging whenever I ask for numbers and amounts. “C’est le savoir-faire.”

I copy the only numbers that there are–200 degrees Celsius and 250 grams of butter (even Paula Dean would be impressed, but as Thierry assured me, “Il faut que ca fasse de la sauce,” you need it to make the sauce. I decide that he knows better than doctors who care about cholesterol and move on to the entire jar of good French mustard that is going into this dish, mustard that my aunts covet and wait for every Christmas. The Country Boy’s family goes through a jar a week and saves them to use as drinking glasses at dinner.

I’m surprised at the simplicity of the recipe–it really is just savoir-faire: rabbit, the jar of mustard–usually applied, I’m told, with the fingers, but a brush was used for the sake of these pictures–and 250 delicious grams of butter. “Pas de sel, pas de poivre,” Theirry warns me. “Après, tu peux dire que ton lapin est pas mal.” No salt, no pepper, and your rabbit’s not bad.

As he puts it in the oven and the smells of melting butter and warm, spicy mustard fill the air, I’m considering the natural litotes in Thierry’s modest speech.

He reaches for an armful of potatoes and begins to peel them as he casually lays the instructions out for me, as best he can, though I can tell that, like for my mother, it isn’t natural to think about something that comes so naturally to him. The rabbit needs to be basted every 10 minutes with the buttery sauce; the word in French for basting–arroser–is the same as the word for watering plants, which to me seems quite appropriate, poetic even.

“T’as le temps d’éplucher tes pommes de terre, de les faire cuire et de les mettre autour,” Thierry tells me as he tries to gage the cooking time. The time to peel and cook your potatoes, then to arrange them around the rabbit so they soak up the sauce–about an hour’s cooking time in all.

Tom appears 20 minutes in, as the smell of mustard and butter wafts around the house. “Ca a l’air bon,”–smell’s good. And it does.

Thierry lets me know I can disappear for the next few minutes–he’ll call me when he’s ready for the next step–but I’m too interested in what’s going on in the kitchen, the dish slowly and easily creating itself as Thierry oversees everything. The potatoes cook on the stovetop, the whistle of the steamer moving from jarring and annoying to just another background noise. The cat appears, begging to be fed, and so Thierry opens a can of food–rabbit, we noticed, amused–and serves it to the cat at the table, which amuses me even more.

The kitchen smells warmer and spicier as the rabbit cooks, and every ten minutes, when Thierry opens the oven door to pour more buttery sauce over the rabbit, it looks more and more inviting.

He disappears for a moment and comes back with a bottle of Calvados, which he pours into a tiny saucepan–the alcohol needs to be warm to flambé. “On prépare le feu d’artifice,” he says. We’re preparing the fireworks. He burns off the alcohol with a match–“tu laisses l’alcool là, le four va faire BOUM.” There’s no real translation necessary for BOUM–onomatopoeas are great for language barriers.

He glances once more into the oven and cuts a tiny slit into one of the pieces. “Encore 10 minutes,” he speculates. “Le temps de boire un coup, quoi.” Just enough time to have a drink.

And so we did.

Thierry’s Lapin à la moutarde

1 rabbit, butchered into legs, thighs and breasts
250 g. butter
350 g. good French mustard
10 cl. cognac or calva

500 g. potatoes

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Butter a rimmed baking sheet. Using a pastry brush (or your fingers) coat the pieces of rabbit with the mustard. Place them on the baking sheet and add the rest of the butter to the sheet. Try to forget your last cholesterol count. Set a timer for 1 hour.

Place the baking sheet in the oven. Every 10 minutes, baste the rabbit with the sauce in the pan.

Meanwhile, peel and steam or boil the potatoes. Do not add salt. Cook 20 minutes, or until a paring knife slides in and out cleanly and easily. Drain and arrange around the rabbit.

When the timer rings, heat the Calva or Cognac in a saucepan over medium heat. Remove the rabbit from the oven and quickly pour the warmed liquor over the rabbit. Flambé carefully using a match.

Serve the rabbit and the potatoes with baguette to sop up the extra sauce.