Lucretia B's Fondue (Bourguignonne)

Yield > 1
Servings
Ingredients :
MEATS
Beef
Chicken breasts
Italian, (or any other pork) sausage
HOMEMADE SAUCES
Salsa verde, (grandma's recipe)
Tartare
Champinaise, (Lucretia B's own
recipe)
Bearnaise, (Lucretia B's easy
version)
Tzaziki, (for veggies in particular)
Horseradish sauce
Mayonnaise
Anchovy & cream cheese sauce
PACKAGED SAUCES
French & English mustards, (Amora,
Maille, Colman's)
Method :
• In my family, Fondue Bourguignonne (with raw
vegetables as a side dish, to dip in the same sauces as the
meat) has been the basis of New Year's Eve late dinner for 15
years at least. Yet, we tend to stick to just one
• "recipe", which I describe here - leaving out the details
about the sauces.
• I don't know whether this has anything to do with the
*real*, original, French recipe - but we like it very much
anyway!
• Fondue Bourguignonne is a very sociable way of eating
meat. One or more different types of meat are cut into bitesized
pieces and cooked in a special pan in the middle of the
table. The pan, half-filled with hot oil, is placed on a "grill",
above a small flame. Guests are usually given special plates,
with different "compartments" for meat and sauces. They cook
their own meat in the common pan, using long skews (usually
with a wooden handle). When their meat is ready (1 minute or
less is usually enough), they take the meat off the special
skew, and with a normal fork dip each chunk in one of the
sauces in their plate. There's a version of fondue using broth,
instead of oil - it's probably healthier, but it requires VERY
tender meats and it's not my favourite, anyway ;-) There's also
another type of Fondue, typical of Valle d'Aosta (a region in the
north west of Italy), which uses a cheese based sauce instead
of oil - but this is a completely different story... :-)
• We usually start making our homemade sauces (my
sister has another two or three recipes, which I can't
remember just now) a few days in advance, as most of them
will keep well in the refrigerator for up to a couple of weeks.
• In the afternoon of New Year's Eve, we clean the
vegetables (carrot, celery, fennel, yellow+green+red
capsicum) and cut them so that they can be nicely arranged in
serving containers - we use glasses for carrots, celery and
capsicums, cut in long strips, and bowls for the quartered
fennels. In Italy, we also add what we call "Roman salad" -
which is a "sweet" kind of chicory I haven't found here in Oz...
• Then, we prepare the meats. It's better to use freshly
bought meat, as defrosted raw meats tend to lose all the juices
and become too dry to taste nice. So, we cut the beef and
chicken breasts in bite-size pieces, discarding all the "white"
parts. We also cut the sausage in thick (1 inch)
• slices, and arrange the meats in three separate serving
bowls. As all this is usually accomplished by all the members of
the family together, it takes much less time than you think...
and it's fun, too! ;-)
• A few minutes before 10 pm (we usually wait for
midnight while sitting around the table and enjoying our
Bourguignonne) it's time to get the oil ready. We place 1 small
potato, with skin (it has to be perfectly clean and wiped), in
the special pan for bourguignonne, then add peanuts oil and
heat the pan on the stove until the oil starts "bubbling" around
the potato.
• Always leaving the potato in the pan, we place the pan
on its special grill on the table - and we're ready to go! BTW,
we use 1 pan for every 6 people, otherwise things get too
"messy" around the table ;-)
• I hope this is what you meant - if there's anything that
needs explaining, just let me know!