Poussins agro-dolce

The title of this recipe sounds much better in Italian than in English: sweet and sour poussin sounds unpleasantly close to sweet and sour chicken, that vile battered aberration with the sickly, MSG-laden virulently red sauce in Chinese takeaways across the country. That said, Gordon Ramsay has a lovely sweet and sour poussin recipe: the poussin is roasted and served with a sauce made from red peppers and vinaigrette and served over tagliatelle. It is stunningly easy and remarkably tasty and most surprisingly, it pre-dates Gordon's attempts to reach out to the common cook, featuring in one of his earlier recipe collections. Jamie's recipe for pot-roasted poussin is quite different - in Jamie's words it is 'comforting, deep and dark'. Just the thing for a November Sunday evening, a twist on the traditional roast but with losing none of its trademark comfort.

Firstly, I stuffed each poussin with an orange quarter, half a cinnamon stick and a sprig of rosemary, before browning them lightly for 10 minutes or so on the hob and removing them to rest on a plate.

To make the sauce, I fried chopped onion, celery and rosemary in the pan that the poussins had been in until soft. Meanwhile, I blitzed sun dried tomatoes with Chianti in the Magimix. I returned the poussins to the pan, turning up the heat and adding vinegar and sultanas plus the mixture of tomato and red wine. After reducing the sauce slightly, I covered the pan and tranferred it to a preheated (200 C) oven to pot-roast for 30 minutes. At this stage I removed the lid, turned the poussins breast-side up and scattered them with pine nuts, before draping over strips of pancetta. I had used a pan that was border-line too small (it fitted the birds very, very snugly, almost too snugly) so I couldn't arrange my pancetta with much artistic dexterity - never mind! I returned the pan to the oven for another 10 minutes, lid off, until the pancetta had turned golden and crispy.

You can see from the picture how close my two poussins got in the pan. In retrospect I should perhaps have used a larger pan, but my larger pans are laughably larger and the little birds would have been lost inside the space. You can almost see the deep red sauce that the poussins are sitting in, which is utterly delicious.

I served this dish with olive oil mash, another recipe from the book that I have previously made with steak - mash with olive oil and Parmesan which is as yummy as it sounds.

The picture above was taken before I poured over the deliciously tomatoey, red winey sauce, and before we tucked hungrily in! This is the sort of dinner that warms you from the inside out, that you should eat with the wind howling outside and a log fire in the hearth (we don't have a fire, and it wasn't even that cold, but it didn't matter; the dish created that kind of atmosphere). Since someone is bound to ask me to compare this recipe with Gordon's (probably my sister-in-law, who is a bit of a Gordon fan secretly), here goes: Jamie's is a sultry, mysterious sort of dish, whereas Gordon's is brightly showy; Jamie's is winter and Gordon's is summer. I have to say though that the poussin itself has more depth of flavour in Jamie's recipe - you can really taste the orange, cinnamon, wine, vinegar and tomatoes, not all at the same time, but fleetingly, intriguingly. I really liked how this dish came together - it just seemed to work, perfectly and utterly satisfyingly. Comfort food with a touch of mystery - what more could anyone ask for?