Larousse Gastronomique & the Food Flock

The recipe below is typical of the great recipes from Larousse Gastronomique, anecdotal and non specific as to measures of volume, time and temperature. A recipe should be an idea to cook with rather than a procedural to follow and cook from. A good recipe will allow the creativity of the cook to be its primary ingredient.

The loose and lovely old style of Larousse shall guide us in our accumulation of recipes; and many of these gastronomical anecdotes will come from you my dear lamb cooks to be gathered up in the Food Flock.

 Agnelet à la Kurde

"This recipe was given to us by Roland Dorgelès, the author of Les Croix de Bois and it is rather an original one.

'On the banks of Euphrates, where I lived among camel drivers and Bedouin, I discovered a dish which I did not know…Take a small milk-fed lamb, one of those little lambs which the nomad shepherds carry about like babies. You clean it out, season the inside and stuff with a forcemeat made from its liver, heart and lungs. You mix this forcemeat generously with rice half-cooked with fat, in which you have incorporated dry, not sweet, apricots which have been cooked in the gravy. Then you serve it with the gravy from which the fat has been skimmed off.'

No doubt the addition of apricots to this dish may appear a little eccentric to certain gastronomical purists (and you may count me as one) but let us not forget that many people relish venison with red currant jelly."

Prosper Montagné, editor Larousse Gastronomique 1938