Mique

The mique is an old peasant dish of the Périgord, Quercy and Limousin, its name taken from the Occitan 'mica', a crumb of bread. In a household that baked bread only now and then, a dumpling poached in the stew-pot stood in for fresh bread between bakings. The early mique of the poorer south-west was a maize dish: maize reached south-west France in the late 16th century and was widely grown across the region by the late 17th, becoming a staple grain of the rural poor and the basis of cornmeal foods such as millas. As wheat became more affordable the leavened wheat-bread mique sarladaise took over, and it is the version most often made today, traditionally served with a petit salé or a pot-au-feu.

Sliced from the pot, the wheat mique is pale and soft, full of an airy, bread-like crumb that has soaked up the salty, porky broth at its surface while staying tender within. It tastes mildly of bread and of the pot it cooked in, a plain, comforting foil to the rich boiled meats. The maize version is denser and a little grainy, yellow and more rustic. Served swimming in broth alongside salt pork and root vegetables, it is filling, warming winter food.

Leavening is what sets the wheat mique apart: yeast (or a sourdough levain) ferments the dough so carbon-dioxide bubbles raise it, and poaching in hot broth sets that open, airy crumb much as oven heat would set a loaf. Gluten in the wheat flour forms the elastic network that traps the gas and gives the dumpling its spring. The maize mique has no gluten to build that structure, so it leans instead on starch gelatinisation — maize starch swelling and setting in the heat to bind the dumpling — which is why it comes out denser and more crumbly. Poaching in a fatty, salty broth both hydrates the dumpling and seasons it from the outside in.