A Tale of Two Blanquettes

One of the inspiring aspects of food blogging is getting cooking ideas from other bloggers. It's one thing to go to a recipe mega-site and pick up an idea for Sunday lunch; it's another to glean inspiration from a fellow cook with whom I've been in blogosphere contact.

Spacedlaw wondered about the identity of the yellowish main dish in the black pot on my last Sunday Stovetop post. It was a bit strange-looking, but absolutely delicious, and had been inspired by a post by Ken from St. Aignan about Blanquette de veau.

The first weekend of April was indeed stewy weather, but to be honest, as nice as Ken's recipe looked, I'm not a big fan of blanquette de veau, which I often find a bit bland. So I decided it was time to try a local specialty of the southern Aveyron -- blanquette d'agneau.

Comparing Ken's veal recipe and my lamb recipe, we can see that they are similar in their cooking method. But Ken's blanquette de veau includes several vegetables that are lovely in this stew but did not appear in my recipe: carrots, mushrooms and baby onions.

I found "my" version of the dish from the cookbook Recettes en Aveyron which abounds in simple, authentic recipes -- simple if you can read French, that is.

Aveyronnais cooking tends to be rather meat and dairy-oriented, and the farming in the area doesn't include a huge amount of vegetable-growing. So perhaps the fact that carrots, mushrooms and baby onions don't appear in the recipe reflects a lack of availability of those ingredients among sheep-raising farmers on the rocky plateaus of the Southern Aveyron.

Blanquettes can actually be made with veal, poultry, rabbit, lamb and even fish, although blanquette de veau is definitely the most famous version. As the name implies, they are white stews, often prepared in a roux-based white sauce.

Lamb blanquette is very tasty, and in fact the only blanquette in my Larousse Gastronomique is a lamb version by Roger Vergé. His recipe seems to take about a day to make and incldes white beans, carrots, mustard (?) and 3 lambs' feet rubbed with lemon juice.

I'm sure it's delicious, but I think I'll stick with my simple peasants' dish!