Christmas was a boar

I needed to make Christmas dinner for six this year, and wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Last year I did the whole turkey, roast potatoes, red cabbage, spouts with chestnuts malarky that seems to be expected. Even using Mary Berry’s superb guidance (on the whole, prepare and cook everything you can in advance – including par-roasting the potatoes), it was still an incredible faff with countless pots and pans and dishes and a real drama to get everything warm to the table on time. This year I wanted zero effort.

The solution was a wild boar ragu with papardelle pasta. The ragu could be prepared a few days in advance (and, indeed, only improved with flavour) and is sufficiently unusual to look like I was making an effort, while the pasta was freshly made but shop-bought, and just cooked in boiling water for three minutes.

Christmas dinner.

I’ve been eager to make a boar ragu for years now, after a long autumnal holiday in a very rainy Tuscany where there was little to do but sit inside (and little local, seasonal food aside from boar).This dish also has another unintended consequence – simmered as it is in red wine and spices, throughout its long, slow cooking time the entire kitchen is enfused with a Christmassy fug of mulled wine. What could be more evocative of Christmas?

There are thousands of wild boar ragu recipes lurking out there on the internet, but so much about cookery these days seems to be about over-complicating the very simple. Good cooking should be simple at heart, so I stripped the recipes down and combined a mix of ideas to come up with the very easiest recipe I could. I’m not very into reducing down tomatoes when cartons of passata cost less than a pound, and I adapted the recipe to work with Tim Wilson’s oven-roast approach to stews, which has forever proven a more effortless way to make any stew, chili or ragu (and also minimises the washing up).

I swear, apart from ensuring you're organised enough to remember to put together the marinade 12 hours before you want to cook (and ideally several days before you want to eat it), this is utterly the simplest boar ragu recipe I’ve seen while also being a total winner with my husband and in-laws on Christmas Day.

The recipe below makes enough for six pretty hungry people.

1. Put the meat in to marinate
Choose your boar meat – I used leg, but shoulder is probably just as good – and cut off any large lumps of fat and skin (smaller bits of fat are fine, they will vanish into the finished sauce, but no need to make it too greasy). Cut the meat into bit chunks – say a couple of inches square – then put into a glass bowl with the wine and aromatics, stir, cover and chill for at least twelve hours.

Here are the quantities I used:

• 1.5kg boar meat (or about 3 pounds) – prepared as above
• A bottle of cheap Chianti
• 300ml of cold water
• 1 or 2 large onions (or 3-4 small ones), chopped up smallish
• 2 tablespoons of dried juniper berries, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 1.5 teaspoons peppercorns, crushed lightly to loosen but whole
• 6 large bay leaves
• 3 sprigs of rosemary

That all sounds like a faff to pull together, but it’s really very easy. The precise volumes of each aromatic matter very little so don’t get anxious about that. Feel free to add a pinch more of your favourites.

  

2. Twelve hours later, cook the meat

Put the oven on to 180C, then drain the meat in a colandar, catching the marinade in a bowl for later use. Pick out the meat and dry it off with kitchen paper. It will now be pink and squishy and look fairly repellent. Have a lot of kitchen paper to hand, this is messy business.

Coat the bottom of a large, deep roasting tray in light olive oil – just a series of good glugs – warm briefly in the oven then tip in the meat, stir to coat the meat and then roast for 15-20 minutes in the oven until browned all over. You may wish to stir mid-way to keep things moving.

  

Remove from the oven and add the following, in this order:

• 1-2 tablespoons of plain flour – sprinkle over the meat, and stir well
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• Half a small carton of passata – just glug it out by feel, then stir well again.
• The marinade, with all of the aromatics included – and give it a good stir again

Take a piece of baking parchment or grease proof paper slightly larger than the roasting tin and scrunch it up, then unfold and lay across the surface of the food (pushing down so it is in contact - chefs call this a cartouche but that seems a little pretentious). Then seal the whole tin with wide foil so no steam can escape and return to the oven for about an hour an a half to braise. Remove the coverings and leave in the oven for another half hour to reduce the sauce down.

3. Shred the meat and finish the sauce

Pick all of the large lumps of meat out from the juices and shred on a chopping board – I did this with a knife and fork, roughly chopping and tearing to leave good texture.

If the sauce still looks a bit thin then reduce it down a little: leave it bubbling on the stove top while you shred the meat (although of course it will all thicken when you return the shredded meat to the sauce).

Remove the rosemary stalks and bayleaves from the sauce, put the meat back in, season to your taste with lots of salt and pepper (it can take a lot of salt, and mellows when it is resting, but you can add more later if you want to play it safe), stir through and then let cool, chill and store for at least a day in a covered container to mull over.

4. Shortly before you want to eat, assemble

Put the sauce to warm in a saucepan, cook your papardelle in another pan. Papardelle is just really wide tagliatelli, so use that if you can’t get papardelle. You can make your own pasta if you care enough about that sort of thing, althought the fresh stuff I got wrapped in paper from Waitrose was delicious.

5. An optional garnish, if you don’t mind washing an extra pan

At this stage I had a third pan going, but only because I really wanted the dish to be infused with the delicious taste of rosemary, which is how I remembered it tasting when I dined alone one evening at the 14th century La Cisterna hotel in San Gimignano.

I gently warmed some olive oil in a frying pan and added the leaves from about three sprigs of rosemary to cook through and mellow in the oil. This made a not-especially fresh but very aromatic garnish, in a recipe where coriander or parsley wouldn’t really work.

I couldn't eat a whole one.

6. A fresh crisp salad, should you need one

The sauce and pasta makes a great dish, but I also made a simple salad to add crunch and freshness to an otherwise soft and rich meal:

• Green apples – granny smiths, cored and sliced super-thin and dipped in water with a squeeze of lemon to stop them browning
• Fennel – slice super-thin with a bread knife
• Walnuts – chopped into lumps
• Watercress – for bulk
• Fennel fronds – for decorations

Some might like to add a dressing to all of that, but everything else was wet enough already and I didn't want to mess with the freshness. Squeeze on some lemon if you must.

So serve all that up at the kitchen table on any cool day of the year, the whole room embraced in a cloud of mulled wine, and I defy you not to think it's Christmas.


Attribution: photograph of boars by 'anakkml', courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net. I recommend freedigitalphotos.net for all of your boar photo needs.