From Chocolat · 2000 · Reconstructed
Turkey in Cocoa and Burgundy Sauce
Serve when
Carry it out as the main course of Armande's seventieth-birthday feast — after the tomato soup, when the candles are lit and the table of the town's renegades has stopped pretending it isn't happy.
In the movie
Theatrical
- ~01:28:00 Armande's birthday dinner: in the kitchen montage Vianne and Joséphine build the feast's savory-chocolate main course, melting dark couverture into a bubbling wine sauce. It reaches the long outdoor table between the soup and the chocolate finale — the meal that thaws the whole reluctant village.
Armande's birthday is the film's answer to Babette's Feast — a table of the town's irregulars eating their way to joy while Lent frowns outside. Vianne cooks with the old Maya trick her mother taught her: chocolate as a savoury thing, bittering a dark wine sauce rather than sweetening a dessert. It is the same magic she works on the villagers, turning something the church has taught them to fear into the thing that finally warms them.
Ingredients
Method
- Season the turkey well and brown it in the butter and oil over medium-high heat until deeply golden on all sides. Lift out and set aside.
- Lower the heat and soften the onion, carrots, and garlic in the same pot until sweet, about 8 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook a minute more.
- Pour in the Burgundy, scraping up every browned scrap, and let it reduce by a third. Add the stock, tomato paste, thyme, and bay leaf.
- Return the turkey to the pot, cover, and braise gently — in a 325°F oven or over the lowest stovetop flame — until the meat is falling-tender and pulls easily from the bone, about 1½ hours.
- Lift the turkey out and keep it warm. Whisk the chocolate and cocoa into the simmering sauce until it turns glossy and dark, then sharpen it with the vinegar and reduce to a coating gloss.
- Return the turkey to the sauce to glaze, and send it to the table under a slick of the cocoa-Burgundy sauce.
Substitutions
- Turkey: a whole turkey crown or bone-in chicken thighs both braise beautifully in the same sauce — shorten the braise to about an hour for chicken.
- Dark chocolate: hold the cocoa and use a little more chopped chocolate, or the reverse; the point is a savoury bitterness, never sweetness.
Beyond the recipe
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