Mangetout for November: chickens, eggs, sauces and winter cocktails

In spite of being told not to count our chickens, apparently there are three times more of them than humans in the world. Some 231 million are in France – which is just as well, as according to the statistics, we eat around 32kg of chicken per person per annum, making it the country’s most popular meat. If you reckon the average weight of a supermarket chicken is about 1.4kg, then it means we each eat about 20 a year. And about 240 of their eggs.

The domesticated chicken is descended from wild Asian fowl that pecked and clucked several millennia ago. Back then, they only laid about a dozen eggs a year, but selective breeding now means that chickens each produce around 300.

In the UK last summer, Sainsbury’s created a hoo-hah with their decision to sell only white ones, upsetting brown egg devotees. Frankly, a load of cock. All in the mind. No difference other than the look of the shell. Chickens with white earlobes lay white ones; those with red earlobes lay brown ones. That’s all. Un oeuf said, as the Franglais would say.

Gutsy cocktails

With winter on its way, it’s time to check out some gutsy yardarm cocktails to warm the cockles of your heart.

One of the feistiest is the Bullshot, a heady mix of vodka and beef consommé, spiced up with Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. It was invented in the early 1950s by an American adman who handled the Campbell’s soup account. One evening he popped into the Caucus Club in Detroit and moaned to the owner that he wasn’t having much luck building sales of Campbell’s beef consommé. It didn’t take long for them to put their heads together, and the resulting concoction soon became a favourite of Adland and Hollywood, although when Marilyn Monroe took her first sip, she allegedly said, “What a horrible thing to do to vodka.”

You might like to try a different take on the other famous vodka cocktail – the Bloody Mary. Invented in the 1920s in Harry’s Bar in Paris by adding tomato juice to vodka, it was named after Queen Mary I of England, who was thus nicknamed for burning Protestants at the stake. You can Frenchify it by substituting the vodka with pastis to create a fortifying ‘Marie Sanglante’.

Enough of your sauce

The French adore their sauces. There’s almost one for each letter of the alphabet: aïoli, béarnaise, chasseur, demi-beurre, etc. My favourites are sauce ravigote and sauce gribiche, often served with tête de veau. Ravigote, after the word ravigoter, meaning to refresh or invigorate, is made by adding shallots, capers and herbs to a vinaigrette. Gribiche, in Old French, described a cantankerous woman or shrew. In Middle Dutch, kribbich meant ‘grumpy’. Both confirm gribiche sauce’s humble origins but strong, lively character. Although similar to ravigote, the addition of egg and cornichons adds a tangy sharpness. Very shrewd indeed.