- Hi.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

You know, I love having people over for dinner.

It's a wonderful way to share a good time, and it's fun to cook with friends as well as share food together.

So today, I'm going to show you my favorite party menu.

We'll start with an arrangement of leeks tossed with a tangy tomato and olive oil sauce.

The main course a delicious roast pork on a bed of braised sour cabbage and raisins.

And for dessert, all-American strawberry shortcake made with a light buttermilk dough.

It's a surefire, no-stress party menu.

So come and join me on "Today's Gourmet."

(lighthearted music) Today, I want to show you how to make a party ahead a little bit, you know, party food.

For that, usually, for me, it's like a large piece of something in the middle of the table, which can be done ahead, like a whole salmon or a whole braised ham.

And this is what we are going to do today, actually, a braised ham shoulder.

It's quite available in different part of the country.

It's relatively inexpensive, and there's a certain way of using it.

Usually, it come slightly smoked, you know, and so-called pre-cooked, that is it's entirely cooked, and you could have it just the way it is.

It gain a great deal, however, if you recook it, which is what I'm doing here.

I have here a piece of shoulder pork, which I put in a lot of water, see, in a lot of water.

And that cook very slowly.

It should not go above like 180 degree.

If it goes too fast, it break, and the pork tend to be dry.

So you keep it at 180 degree, and you can use one of those meat thermometer, you know, to keep it at just under the boil.

And in that temperature, you keep it like an hour and a half.

It does different things.

First, it recook your ham, your pork, you know.

And it may shrink a little bit, but the taste is much, much better.

And secondly, with a lot of water around, it kind of wash up a great deal of the salt in it.

So it makes it milder in taste, too.

So it's a good thing to do.

So water, and you let it cool off.

You let it cool off in the water as I have done here.

Now we want to trim it.

And sometime, you know, depending where the rind here, see, this is the bone is in, I remove that rind from the top.

And sometime, you know, I put it back on top of it, scoring it like this.

But I know a lot of people tend to avoid, you know, the skin, so you can remove it or put it back.

But one way or the other, between the layer of skin on top and the meat, there is a large layer of fat, the top fat, and that, you want to remove.

So I cut right from here to the meat, you know.

That will improve not only the the taste of it, but, of course, most of the fat is in, I mean, a great deal of the fat really is in the surface of the skin, and that's what you want to do, remove it.

And I say again, you know, when you finish removing this on top, you can put that back.

In our case, I think we're going to remove it altogether.

In addition to that, you see the color of the meat here.

It's kind of very leathery and tough.

I want to remove some of that, a small layer of that, because it's too tough.

So just cut a little bit of this.

It is not really wasteful because, ultimately, the taste is going to be so much better.

You can give that to the dog.

That's what I put in my, I have several dog, and I put that in their food.

So you go all around like that to be sure that the thing is trimmed nicely all around.

You remove all of that black skin.

So now it's been recooked.

Now we cook it in the oven.

So there is different level of cooking.

Now we have this.

All of that, we don't use it really.

Or as I say, maybe the trimming for the dog.

And on top of that, now we want to create a type of topping, a type of sauce, you know, that we will put on top.

I me put it this way.

And this is made with dry mustard.

I have cayenne paper, and I have paprika here.

And we're going to mix that in a bowl with a little bit of honey.

And that's going to do our very spicy type of topping.

I'm sure you can do your own.

Sometime I do it with apricot, for example.

Apricot preserve, you know, is very good with that, puree of onion sometime.

But something like that, simple, is good, too.

So all that you do, you spread that on top.

And, you know, I call that party food because it is nice to have when you have guests.

First, you should actually do that ham the day before.

That is, recook it in water the day before.

Then you leave it to cool off overnight, you know, in the water.

Then you can pick it up, and you can trim it, as I have shown you here.

Then put that topping on top of it, and now it's ready to go into the oven.

And even when it come out of the oven, it's not when you serve it really.

You serve it when it's lukewarm.

We're going to have some juice.

It's going to form a bit of a caramel in the bottom, and we're going to do a sauce with that.

So now I put that in the oven for like a good hour, like 375 degree or so, and to form not only a crust but a nice juice on the outside.

And now, with this, you know, the pork, even though we did remove a great deal of fat, is still quite rich.

So what we wanna do with this, it's a kind of sour dish, you know, and I do a sour kind of pickle cabbage dish, which goes very well with it.

And into this, very simply, we put like a small cabbage.

Those are one-pound cabbage, Savoy cabbage type, you know, very leafy like this.

They are nice-looking.

Might as well use a bigger knife here.

And you cut that into inch or two-inch pieces, you know.

It's going to kind of melt, you know, in there.

So we put that into preferably a stainless steel type of pan because of discoloration, you know.

You want it to keep a nice color.

And into this, we put an onion.

Sometime I put apple in this also, and it's quite good with the apple.

But then here, we put only onion, cut into half-inch dice or so here.

That's it.

You know, those are also country dish.

It's done a great deal in Poland, in Germany, you know, that type of thing, sometime with cumin seed.

And here I'm putting just cider, you know, sweet cider.

I try to go get my cider, and I make my own cider, and in a farm which are beautiful apple, organic farm, you know, and I press it myself.

I like the cider when it's cloudy and fresh.

Those are Muscat raisins, again, sweetness.

Cider vinegar in there, put a dash of salt, a tiny bit of oil, tablespoon, and that's about it.

Sometime I put a piece of butter, it's not really even necessary, and I put that to cook.

This has to come to a strong boil, come to a strong bowl, and will cook like a good 35 minutes so that the juice are reduced.

And because of the cider and the sugar in it, it's going to start to caramelize in the bottom of the pan, you know, and give a bit of a color to the onion and the cabbage.

So it's quite good.

And so that will be served with our ham, you know.

But other first course, something which is also very good for party because it can be done ahead, we serve a leek, you know, a leek with a type of vinaigrette.

And that's one, a very French and a very normal dish.

In France, the leek we call the asparagus of the poor because it's very inexpensive at the market, and you cook them, serve them with vinaigrette, do like asparagus.

Here, unfortunately, it is more expensive than asparagus.

However, a lot of people lose a lot of the leek, you know.

All you lose is the bottom part here, the root.

And after that, the first or second layer, just look at it.

If you feel it's too tough and fibrous, you can remove it.

By the time you feel this is a bit more tender, you can cut it here.

This one will be cut here.

This happened to be a large leek.

This one, probably here, just see where the color change.

You see that this one is damaged here, so we'd cut it here.

This one, probably here.

This one, there, and so on.

As you see, as I get inside the leek itself, the color become lighter, light green, and it's more tender.

And this is the way you want to clean it.

Open it in half, and now you have to clean that under water, lukewarm water, you know, under the faucet, to clean it up good.

Even this, you know, I don't even discard that.

I wash it, put it in a pot, and keep it for stock.

You know, that's what we do in professional kitchen.

So this is what I have done here.

I clean up those leek and put them in there, this is stainless steel inside, just with like a cup and a half, two cup of water, so that by the time it's finished cooking, I have almost no water left, so that I have all the nutrient, all the vitamin A that I have and the fiber that I have in there.

Because I have no lost, I don't clean it up.

That is, I don't wash the leek under water when they are cooked, you know.

And we are going to do that, a vinaigrette type of things for the leek.

And I will do it with tomato.

I have Worcester sauce.

I have red wine vinegar and a little bit of olive oil that I'm going to use here.

So French mustard first, maybe I won't need... I like a lot of mustard, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, I've always problem to pronounce the name of that sauce, and the olive oil on top, cracked pepper, dash of salt, cracked paper, and that's basically it.

And to give some color, we are going to do a bit of tomato.

I have that tomato here which has been dipped in boiling water.

I will peel it off like this.

Again, this goes with my piece of leek.

I keep it for stock.

Cut it in half and, again, press the seed out, you know.

I'll press the seed in there.

You see, press all the seed out.

So the juice, the seeds are removed, the skin is removed, and all of that stuff goes in the stock, you know, I keep it.

Cut that in tiny dice.

This is a nice sauce for a poached fish, also, you know.

That's it.

You want to mix this.

Add your tomato to it, and don't mix it too much.

You want it to be separated.

Very often people do a type of sauce and say, I don't want the vinegar to separate from the oil.

Well, I want it to here.

I don't want the mixture like a mayonnaise, you know, very thick.

So I want it to fall in between.

We'll put it on this.

Now, what you do there, just press your leek more or less to remove maybe not all of the sauce but most of the water.

Leftover, this is still lukewarm, you know, the way it would be.

And keep that water to make soup with it.

That's great.

Then we keep, we cut that into two inches, about two, three inches.

And when I arrange it here, you see, I will arrange some of the lighter green, some of the darker green, some of the darker green here, lighter color, and so forth, so that, you know, the thing is nicely mixed together when you serve, all I have here.

You know, if you go in France in small bistro and all that, you're going to have those leek vinaigrette a great deal.

It's a classic dish here.

Do it ahead, also.

Do it ahead and put that sauce ahead on top of it.

This is when it's going to go through it, you know.

The sauce will go through it, the tomato, and it will develop a wonderful taste, you know.

And this is it as our first party dish for today.

And when you make nice party, you know, often you want to decorate the table a little bit.

And a nice way of decorating the table is to do something that I have done here with an apple, apple swan, which is relatively easy to do.

Do it with a green one, yellow one, red one.

The hardest part of it, you know, you cut the base, and that base will become the head of the swan.

And you just have to carve a head free-hand here.

This is really the hardest part of it, you know, just emulate the head.

Often my swan look like duck, but it's okay.

And that's it.

You cut this out of it, you see.

This is the head, the hardest part.

And then I'll make even a little hole here.

The skin is red to make the eye, you know.

So this is your other spot that you can eat.

Put that on the side.

Now you want to do wedge here.

And it's just a question of cutting a little wedge, and cut another little wedge, and another one, those are going to be the wing.

Of course, you do one of those on each side.

I did it four here.

I think I need glasses.

Okay, and you can put them right back on top of it.

This way, they fit.

Then you turn it to do the same thing on the other side.

One, two, this is a classic thing, you know, that you teach student in school, also.

But when my daughter was small, I used to make rabbit.

Look at this one.

It's broken.

Doesn't matter, just put it back.

Don't say anything to anyone.

Put it there, and it's going to work just fine.

Then at the two wing, now we do the tail, and it's on top of it.

What you're doing actually is two or three wedge from the center that is going to extend in the back to do the tail.

Here we have them here.

And in front of it here, you wanna make a hole to put the head.

You just carve a little hole here.

Okay, so now it's a fun time, time to put this back, one this way, one this way, one this way, make a long tail, you know.

Then you extend the wing this way, the other wing, this way, and that's about it, you know.

When you're ready to go somewhere, you fold it back, fold the whole thing back, put lemon juice on it so that it doesn't discolor it, and you take it to a party.

You can fan it, open it on the table to do like, you put the red wing on the yellow one, the yellow one on the red one.

And you can do a nice centerpiece like this.

And now in our menu, what we have to do is dessert.

And for the dessert, we have a classic American dessert, a strawberry shortcake.

And we use half a cup of flour for this, regular flour, half a cup of cake flour.

Notice that I go directly into the flour and level it off.

This is what a cup of flour is for me.

Three cup of flour, when you measure them this way, is going to be one pound of flour if it's measured this way.

And here we have a teaspoon of baking powder and a half a teaspoon of baking powder.

What is the difference?

Baking powder is made from... No, the baking powder, right, it's made from... No, this is not the baking... Yeah, this is baking powder and baking soda.

I'm sorry.

The baking soda is made of baking... Baking powder is made of baking soda and cream of tartar mixture.

What does the cream of tartar do?

It give acidity to it.

So when you have something acidic like I have here with sour milk, and instead of using baking powder, you use baking soda, because you already have your acid in it.

And sometime, you know, it happen that you say, gee, I just have baking soda, I don't have baking powder.

It doesn't matter, put a little bit of acid in it, and it will work, a bit of lemon juice, or in that case here, we have buttermilk.

Now, you grab that together, you know, and you don't really want to... You want little piece left over in this, you know.

You don't want it to be too... And then we put the liquid in it, and you mix it gently.

You want to gather it gently, you know.

You don't wanna make much of a dough with that, a soft type of dough.

Okay, that's about it, you know.

You have to be very gentle with this.

And we spread it out.

We cook it.

You cook it right away, so it's easy to make, you know.

And what I'm going to do, which makes it easy, you know, I put it directly onto my baking sheet here.

I don't want to fool around with it too much.

And it's easier if I take a piece of plastic wrap directly on top, you know, and I use this to press it to the thickness that I want.

Let's, here, I don't want to lose anything, so I'm going to do them like square.

So just press that square, you know, about that thickness.

You feel it be right, then you cut them.

You can move them a little bit away, you know, this way, this one here, and that's it.

I mean, those often are done wrong, but, you know, the shape really doesn't have anything to do with it.

Okay, so this goes into the oven now.

We can brush it actually, the top, with a little bit of that buttermilk, you know.

It is nice to brush it.

Up, directly into the oven.

I have one here, and I have another one which is cooked, right on top here, substitute, that I'm going to put in the back for the time being while we are doing the sauce which goes with that, the strawberry.

And that's very easily done.

You see what I have here, I have strawberry, a lot of them kind of damaged.

So what you do, remove the hull, of course, and any of the white part underneath, you know, which tend to be a bit more sour, you know.

And any other damaged part, just put it in there, and the rest, you keep it.

With those trimming, we're going to do the sauce, you see.

So here I do the piece and, again, in there.

Now I put those trimming in the food processor with some raspberry jam, you know.

And that's it.

You have your sauce right there.

You could put a little bit of liquor if you wanted to.

It's not really necessary.

Here it is.

And we're going to put our pieces of berry in there.

(processor whirring) I think it's about enough, just enough to moisten.

Now, remember, we do those recipe for four.

So there's not that much.

I have enough of a sauce here really.

Here we are, in there.

And that can be done ahead, you know, it's great.

And now we can assemble it together, you know.

You would not want to assemble it earlier, you know, because it's going to get dry.

No, or you don't want to soak the... You don't want to get that too soft, you know.

So look at this one is nice.

I can cut it open.

It's still warm, of course, in the center.

I think it's nice and short, you know.

This is the way I like it, nice and fluffy.

Mm, it's good, smells good.

There, some of those on top, you know, and around.

This is your real classic American dessert, you know, the strawberry shortcake.

And when I have guests coming from France, I always serve that to them 'cause it's delicious and because it's American cuisine, you know.

A little bit of sour cream or even a bit more of juice on top here.

I like it dripping.

A bit of the sour cream if you want to splurge with it.

Maybe a spring of mint, you know, if you want a bit of color here or there.

And that's it.

We have a beautiful dessert here that you assemble at the last moment, remember.

And now we are going to do the pork, which I have in the oven.

She's finally cooked.

Look how beautiful, crystallized it is, you know, dark, with those juice in the bottom.

And in the juice, I'm putting a little bit of vinegar and sometime even a little bit of water just to melt those solidified juice that I have in the bottom.

Remember, there is some sugar, some honey in there.

So you have those glaze juice.

Mm.

And on this, you know, you can baste this with it to have nice shiny, deep, rich color.

I will also show you the cabbage, which now I've reduced, still hot.

And I think we're going to arrange this right in there.

Cabbage on top, do like a bed of cabbage.

They are nice and very earthy-looking.

And we can put our roast, you know, right on top of it, with some of the juice on top.

You can keep some of the juice to serve separate.

Because now, you know, at the table, all you have to do is to cut into this.

See, a beautiful, juicy color, and it's nice and well cooked.

And now, the best part of the party is to enjoy the food.

This is a great-looking roast that you bring to the... It's always like a centerpiece, you know, in the dining room.

You put a big thing like that, a big roast.

And you can let your guests help themselves.

They can slice and all that.

It's nice.

I know that pork, you know, is high in fat, I know.

But remember what we did here.

First, we recooked it, which make it much, much better in taste, which eliminate quite a lot of salt, also.

Then we remove basically all the visible fat from the top, then glaze it in the oven.

And that on top of your cabbage there, you see the cabbage are very high in fiber, and with the raisins in it, the acidity, the sweetness, with the richness of the meat, it's a terrific dish for a party, you know, easy and relatively inexpensive.

Of course, with that, we have a refreshing leek.

Leek is always good in salad like that or warm in gratin.

The juice of the leek make fantastic soup.

And you have that type of tomato oil sauce on top, which makes it also quite special, I think.

And with this, we have, of course, the decoration of our swan there, which can always light up a table, you know, a nice salad.

And finally, we have our strawberry shortcake here.

And the strawberry shortcake, as I said, the dough should be very delicately done so that it kind of crumble, and it's soft, a bit of sour cream on top.

If you want to cut down, you can have light type of sour cream or even some yogurt, it's fine, or omit it altogether.

But it is going to be very satisfying to your guests, and I'm sure they're going to love it.

With that, you know, at a party, we like to serve, any type of wine is fine, but this is a dry Tavel wine, which is a rose from the south of France, very dry, that everyone like.

I hope you are going to like it, too.

I hope you're going to try my dish.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.