Potjevleesch

Potjevleesch belongs to the Flemish-speaking corner of the Nord, around Dunkirk and Cassel, and is one of the emblematic dishes of French Flanders. Like most jellied terrines it began as a way of preserving and stretching meat: lesser cuts and the white meats of the farmyard were packed into an earthenware pot, cooked down and sealed under a sour jelly that, helped by the vinegar and the cool cellar, kept for days. The four-meat formula — rabbit, chicken, pork and veal — is the one fixed by tradition and now protected as a regional speciality. It remains the archetypal estaminet dish of the Flemish plain, eaten cold with beer and frites.

Cold from the pot, the jelly is firm but trembling, clear and sharp with vinegar and white wine, and the four meats pull apart in soft strands rather than slices — pale rabbit and chicken, denser pork and veal, all tasting cleanly of meat and a little of bay and juniper. There is no smoke and little spice; the sourness of the set broth does the lifting, cutting the richness of the fat. A forkful of cold meat and quivering jelly with a few hot frites is the way it is eaten across the Flemish cafés.

The jelly is the point. Cooking bone-in white meats — rabbit and veal especially — slowly in stock dissolves their collagen into gelatin, so the strained broth sets to a clear aspic as it cools, without any added gelatine. Vinegar and white wine do double duty: their acidity helps tenderize and season the meat, and it lowers the pH enough to slow spoilage, which is what let the old pots keep in the cellar. Packing the meats tight and weighting them as they cool gives the close, sliceable set; the cold both firms the gelatin and the rendered fat that caps the pot.