- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

There is a type of cooking in France that's much less famous and easier to do than classic French cuisine and just as tasty.

I'm talking about earthy country cooking.

Today our country menu starts with a warm gratin of green onions.

I'll make a ragu of rabbit, a delicious and hearty stew that is great, along with its warming cornmeal made with gruyere cheese.

For dessert, a fondue made with fresh fruit and apricot preserve.

It's a meal that you might find in an old French farm house, coming up on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) You know, often I discuss cooking with friend.

Most of the time they are confused about French cuisine.

There is different type of French cuisine.

People know the cuisine of the three star chef, which of course, use a great deal of butter, cream, and so forth, probably less now.

But remember there is 19 three star restaurant in France and there is approximately 135,000 restaurants throughout France.

You also have a type of cuisine bourgeois, which is already indigenous to an area and maybe a country, kind of peasant cooking, you know, that people do in farm or at home, type of home cooking.

Very simple, completely indigenous to what grows in a certain area of France.

That type of cuisine will use a lot of root vegetable, a type of cuisine that is passed from mother to daughter.

You know, it's rarely a type of written cuisine.

Simple, not much decoration and good earthy fair.

And in that cuisine we use rabbit as we're going to have rabbit today.

You know, simple type rabbit is a very good meat, you know, very lean.

But before that, we are going to do a gratin of scallion and often we call that in French oignons nouveaux, you know, the new onion.

At the beginning, they're like this.

And what I want to do is just to start steaming them, and I put them into a large skillet.

All I have here is approximately a quarter of an inch of water in the bottom, so that it steam them and cook them.

By the time they are cooked, a good five minutes there or partially cooked because we're going to put them in the oven in a gratin dish, most of that liquid should be evaporated so I don't lose anything.

All the nutrient stay in it.

Remember that those green leafy vegetable are high in vitamin A. And next, before I continue on the scallion, I wanna show you how to do it.

First I want to cut the rabbit and discuss rabbit with you.

Now look at the color of the flesh here.

It's very pale, very pale, white pink, like a good quality, like milk fed veal.

This is a domesticated rabbit, of course.

Most of the people in the world eat rabbit.

You know, the Chinese, I mean in Europe it's quite common.

It is not quite as common in America, although it is changing and people are getting used to eat the rabbit.

The two back leg, you know, we cut into two piece are quite meaty.

Sometime we do certain type of dish where you roast the rabbit whole.

Remember you have to have a sturdy knife with this because the bone of the rabbit is real tough and will damage another knife.

And you use the back of your knife to cut it.

So we cut the two front shoulder here.

On each side you cut it in two pieces and in the rabbit, which come directly from the super market, often you will have the liver and we use the liver in there.

You can put it.

The back of the rabbit is cut in two pieces.

And what we want to do is just to put it to rolls, you know, with a bit of olive oil that I have here and a little dash of butter that we put in there.

Now remember, that first we're going to put a bit of salt on top of it and freshly cracked pepper.

There we are.

Nice ground pepper.

We're going to put more pepper at the end.

I mean, that recipe is actually just roasted.

You know, we're going to roast that rabbit, kind of dry cook it, that is without a liquid, and at the end only finish it with garlic and with tomato and so forth.

So most of the recipe, we're going to keep that rabbit browning in there for like half an hour, so that the pieces are really nice and brown.

And during that half hour of cooking, of course, it may get a bit too dry and if you see it's starting burning in the bottom a little bit, just put a tablespoon of water on top of it.

So that will cook, as I said, like 30 minute.

And then we look at my scallion here.

They're doing beautifully.

Cook them a bit longer and I will show you some of those scallion what we do with it.

I feel that people tend to cut the green of vegetable like this very often, like for leek.

I don't, you know, just look at it.

For example, this one I will cut the end of it.

I feel that the first layer is kind of tough and fibrous so I may remove this and even I even put that in stock and maybe that leaves a bit here and that's about it.

All of this is eatable.

Now this is nice and tender so that's how we clean it.

You know, very simply.

Use a great deal of scallion in my cooking.

You know, in Chinese cooking you do that, in Japanese cooking you do that in stock, in soup, with meat, with garnish in omelet.

I mean you can use scallion all the time.

So they cook about five minute here and what we are going to do is to put them into a gratin dish after and prepare the mixture for the gratin dish, which is going to be done with a slice of fresh bread here that I put into that little food processor and some Parmesan cheese.

You can use another type of cheese if you want and that will make.

(food processor whirs) You make a topping out of that.

Remember that it will make a difference whether you use fresh bread, rather than the dry one.

A big difference but I tend to use it.

I already have a slice of bread at home, even in the freezer, you know, that you can use.

So my scallion, you can see now are approximately tender enough.

Beautiful green you see and again, I don't want to rinse it or do anything to it.

I want to keep all the nutrient.

There is basically no water left in that pan, you know, and that's the way it should be.

To keep so you can, 'cause if you do that a long time ahead, then this may turn a little bit yellow.

So if you do it too much ahead, you may want to refresh that.

Like we say that is run it under cold water for a minute to stop the cooking.

Then the gratin mixture, again with pepper.

And a dash of salt in there.

We put some half and half.

I mean you can put heavy cream but half and half is of course much less caloric.

So we do it this way.

I mean if you totally want to cut down than you may omit, just brown it in the oven with the bread and maybe a little bit of olive oil and so forth.

And that will go into the oven about 450 degree at high temperature for about 10 minutes, 10, 15 minutes.

I have one done here which is just finished gratin, which I will bring right here and serve.

And this is the way you may want your gratin to look.

(gentle music) To serve with the rabbit, I want to do a cornmeal cooked with a little bit of stock and water and gruyere in it.

And the first part of it I'm going to put some leek.

I have some stock on the stove cooking.

Notice that I cut the leek here.

You know, one leaf after the other.

That I don't just cut the leek out.

All of the tender, I mean the center is tender so that's what you do.

Then after you can cut it up and this way across because most of the dirt is going to be in the center here, and that's what you have to wash but notice it's a white and light green that is in the center which indicate that it's fresh or tender rather.

So it doesn't really have to be discarded.

And this is easier actually to wash it.

You know, when you do this to wash the inside.

There is nothing which replace leek for me in soup and even in stew.

You know, it have a very definite taste which is terrific.

Actually we use leek, it the same family than the onion, than the scallion, garlic, it's all the allium family, but they all have a little bit of distinction on their own, you know.

Therefore the amount that I have here, one cup about of leek should be enough, depending on the size of your leek.

And here I have more than enough so I am going to put this to cook with the chicken stock that I have here now.

Right in there.

And it should come, should cook for like a minute.

You know, I still want to keep a little bit of crunch in it and taste and color as well, you know.

I keep that for soup.

I have every, all my ingredient for soup underneath here.

So what we want to do is to cook that for like a minute and after that, we put the cornmeal in it.

And this is just the regular yellow cornmeal.

You know that in Italy you do the polenta with it.

Where I come from in France actually we do eat, we do eat corn also.

We do a type of soup that we call gaude, G-A-U-D-E, and it's a type of cornmeal which is roasted in the oven.

So the the flour, almost the color, not quite of coffee but a light brown because it's roasted and we cook that with water and a little bit of salt for a long time.

My mother used to do that, put it on the plate, and it would form a thick skin on top, and we put cold milk when we were eating it.

That's really farm cooking also.

But the rabbit is browning beautifully here now.

That's really what I want.

Sizzling and browning and we continue cooking it a bit further and I feel that this is boiling nicely now.

As you can see I can put my cornmeal in it.

Just let it fall and mix it with a whisk.

And this will take four, five minutes, you know, of cooking.

You bring it back to a boil, a strong boil, and after it come to a strong boil, you don't want it to boil too much, just gently so you cover it.

I will lower the heat to low, and cook it for about five minutes.

And during that time, I wanna show you something which is very important to me in the kitchen, knife.

What do you do with knife?

Do you sharpen knife and so forth?

There is so many misunderstanding about knife.

To start with, you know, I use about three size knife, a big knife, a medium kind of utility knife, and a small one.

You know, this is basically what you need even though I must have 150 knife in my house, but basically three knife is important.

Now this and I will show you how to use this, is not really a knife sharpener.

This is something which keep your knife sharp.

Providing the knife is sharp, that if you look, if you look at the cutting edge of a knife, it is made of tiny teeth, like any cutting instrument, from a saw to a scalpel.

Now when I bang the knife around, cutting those teeth get out of whack.

Do I run it on that to realign the teeth?

That's all it does.

But by the time you worn out that layer of teeth, which is your cutting edge, then you have to use something bigger to create a new edge.

This is really the butcher's best friend.

You know, it has three blade on it, one very coarse, one medium coarse, and one very fine.

With this, this is an oil stone and you use, this is mineral oil, very important.

People will tend to use olive oil or something like this in it.

That will kill the stone.

It's not fine enough.

You really have to have a fine oil.

Mine is not full but the butcher fill that up in oil so that when you turn your, when you change, you know the grade of your stone, it's always dipping in oil.

You place your knife on like 30, 35 degree angle.

It can be more or less.

It's not that important.

What's important is that you don't change the angle, and you do apply pressure on it on one side and then on the other side.

You know, this is your first layer.

Now look what happened when you do that, you actually ground the stone, you know.

And by grounding the stone, this is why you clean it up after.

And you can see the dirt here of the grinded stone.

And this is why you have oil.

If you don't have oil and you scrape that on top, the grinding of the stone itself gets reincorporated back into the stone and eventually you finish with a stone which look like a piece of marble.

It has lose all the abrasiveness and that's why you need to keep that to clean up your stone with the oil if it's an oil stone or with water if it's a water stone.

So this is a very good one that I use all the time at home occasionally when I really need to put my knife through.

Knife sharpener, which are electric.

I'm not that crazy about it.

This one happened to be very good.

It is very good because it has three position, and the stone turn very slowly, so it doesn't destroy my knife.

So I put it on at the first one.

You let it run, let it run right through it.

That actually takes some metal out.

This is the big wheel.

The second one will sharpen the knife, and the third one will hone the knife.

When you put it down there with a magnet, so it goes in the right position automatically.

So you don't have to worry.

Just run it gently.

And I think they recommend to do it three times on each of those.

You don't do that all the time, only occasionally.

So that's very good also, an electric knife sharpener.

Finally, the one that I use by hand will be those.

And this at an angle.

So when you put your knife in the center and apply pressure, it have the right angle to finish the sharpening of your knife.

That's very good.

And finally this one that you see most commonly, which as I say, hone the knife.

Now you will see me doing that very fast and all that and what people will do often, they do it very fast like this.

And when you do that it does absolutely nothing because you see what you do, you actually cover about one inch of the center of the knife.

So be sure that you start here and finish here or start here, finish here.

If I do this or this.

The second thing, very important, don't let it just run on top.

You have to apply pressure.

And even more important maybe don't move the angle because if you start doing this and move your angle here, you're scraping all the teeth out.

So I see often people do that start here and moving their wrist and scraping the whole teeth out of the knife.

So you have to be sure that you apply pressure, that you cover the whole blade, and you don't change the angle, and that will sharpen your knife.

Now what is a sharp knife?

I go to place and people say I sharpen the knife because I know you were coming.

And I look at the knife, I say, which side did you sharpen?

You know, so it depends what you mean by sharp.

If I have a tomato, like I have a tomato here, that tomato is over ripe, but you can see very soft and all that.

If I can take my knife and go right through here this way, that knife is sharp to do this, you know.

That's an indication if you want.

So it become your best friend and it become very important to know how to sharpen that knife properly.

And believe me, if you have a very sharp knife, you rarely cut yourself in the kitchen.

With only when the knife is dull that it's slide out and so forth.

Proper position of the knife.

Like when you cut bread for example, people will tend to apply pressure here and you know, now each side of bread will have to be reopened individually to go because people use only need the center of the knife.

Again, start here and finish here.

If I start here and apply pressure, I will cut slice out of my bread without problem, rather than applying pressure and crushing the bread.

So be sure to use your own knife.

It is your best friend in the kitchen.

And now I think that my cornmeal must be cooked now.

So let's see what it looks like.

Yes.

You can see it's thickened quite a bit.

Good, and this is basically the way you want it.

Remember that if you do that ahead, if you do that too much ahead, that may thicken a bit too much.

If it thicken a bit too much, just put a little bit of water in it.

Now we put the gruyere.

Of course you know the gruyere, this is a gruyere which is low in sodium.

The gruyere, the Swiss cheese from a valley in Switzerland, which is called the Valley of Gruyere.

Unfortunately it's high in fat also.

It's pretty rich.

So if you want to cut down, well you may emit the gruyere in this or put another type of lower type of calorie cheese, you know.

And that's all we do here.

We are going to pour that cornmeal.

Remember as I said, this will tend to get thicker eventually.

So if you do it ahead, you may want to put a little bit of, a little bit of water later on in it.

And now I think we're going to continue on our rabbit.

And as you can see, the rabbit here is nicely brown all around.

This has been cooking for like 30, 35 minutes.

It's like roasting.

I mean it's actually roasting in pieces, you know, right in there.

But look, and because of the quality of equipment, I have a thick heavy metal here, which happened to be copper with stainless steel on the outside, I have beautiful crystallized juice here.

That's important.

Those juice, crystallized juice are what we call the glaze.

And if the metal is no good, this will burn.

If it burn, it's going to be black and the juice will be bitter.

So this is nice.

The glaze, we put liquid in the glaze to deglaze, that is to get the juice out of it.

First we put onion in this.

And that knife is sharp.

Again, you see the process is not crushing.

It's down and forward or down and backward.

It's always, there is always a cutting motion, not crushing.

And keep the roots here for stock.

And we put our onion to saute in there.

Here we are.

A little bit of garlic.

I cut the stem of the garlic, bang it to release the skin, take any damaged part out, then crush the garlic to release the essential oil.

I'm going to add the garlic to it.

I think I could have another piece of garlic actually.

Need at least two clove in there or even more.

(knife clatters) You can use a garlic press also.

If it works, it works.

Deglaze now with vinegar.

We let the vinegar cook a little bit and we add tomato to it.

To finish the sauce, fresh tomato.

Just coarsely cut or chopped.

That will expand the juice a little bit.

And I also put maybe a tiny bit of water in there.

Then, the rabbit piece in that basic sauce now.

Do a bit of salt in there.

Can put those rabbit piece in there and simmering, simmer it a few minutes.

Now before we serve it.

And during that time, we're going to do a beautiful fruit dessert.

Yeah, and that fruit dessert is very simply done of dry and fresh fruit.

What I have here and a sauce, you know.

The sauce that I have is apricot.

I have apricot preserve here, which I use a great deal in the kitchen and into this, we're going to put maybe a little bit of lemon juice, some kirschwasser.

The kirschwasser is actually a liqueur made of cherry and cherry pit and a bit of water, you know, and that you mix together.

It is your dipping sauce.

We call that a fondue of fruit, you know.

And into this, shredded, shredded mint, you know.

That sauce is terrific, you know, for fruit, any other type of dessert.

So any type of fruit that you have is going to work great with that.

Just put your dipping sauce in the center of it and arrange an array of fresh fruit around, you know, and the fresh fruit that I have around, I'll use pear.

You can peel your pear if you want.

It's fine.

Or leave them whole this way.

What you have to be careful however, is to put a little bit of lemon juice on top of it, so that they don't discolor too much, you know, here and there.

And now I have some fresh fig.

I have some dry fig mission, the black one.

I have some calimyrna, other type of fig.

I have some dry muscat around, and of course, different type of berry, from strawberry to other type of berry.

When they are in season, I'm sure you can arrange them nicer than what I'm doing here.

Or you want to have a lot of color, a lot of array, maybe a few sprig of mint on top of it for color.

And you know, all you have to do is grab your piece of fruit, dip it into it, and eat it.

So this is terrific this here to do.

And now I think we can finish our rabbit, which we have now.

Here been finishing boiling.

Mm, I can smell the taste of the vinegar, you know, and garlic together.

So, and the cooking, the extra little cooking that I gave will actually melt all those solidified juice that you add in the bottom.

And that's what you want.

This is how the sauce are made.

And you see, the rabbit is a very lean type of meat.

I mean, most of the fat of course come from the olive oil that I put at the beginning in it.

And if you want, you can even cut a little bit on that.

But you can notice, whoop, this is hot.

Notice that the bottom of my, the bottom of my sauce pan is completely clean here.

Deglaze, that's what I want.

On top of this, we can decorate maybe with a little bit of green.

One way of cutting chive like this is to cut it directly on top with a scissor.

And here you are with a country rabbit stew.

This is peasant dish, but of course, quite elegant.

And actually, you know, in that menu, even though we have rabbit, you know, saute and we have that cornmeal with the gruyere and all that, our whole meal is like 25% from fat, which is way under the recommended guideline of the surgeon general.

So we have here, the gratin of scallion.

We done with the half and half, of course.

And we have that cornmeal mush, which now thickened a little bit will go well with the ragu.

We call it a ragu.

The type of earthy stew, you know, of rabbit and a salad always with it.

And we have that beautiful array of fruit.

Dessert, actually, you know, you can do this as an individual dessert.

If you want to splurge a little more with a piece of pound cake that I have here, you can take a piece of white fruit like this and just put it directly on top of it.

That's it.

So it gives you the sauce for it, and that you can put a fresh fruit berry around and you have a beautiful dessert by its own that you can do that with it.

With this, we have a nice glass of pinot noir from the Sonoma Valley.

I hope you enjoy our meal today.

I was glad to cook it for you.

Happy cooking.