France

This is a wonderfully strange and delightful recipe that requires intimate knowledge of the main ingredient. 

You braise new spring peas in a little liquid for a comparatively long time. This means the tiniest spring peas would be overdone, but fully mature summer peas lack the sweetness of their adolescent kin, and it's that sweetness that so perfectly complements the peculiar choice of lettuce as a seasoning. 

This is a coarse pate, hearty picnic fare, best served in slabs with crusty bread, cornichons, and coarse mustard, and washed down with young, rustic wine. It is typically made with a mixture of pork and veal or with a mix of lean and fatty cuts of pork such as loin and shoulder. This one has long strips of ham steak laid lengthwise through it so when you slice it you get those flavorful little nuggets.

This decadent brother of the delicious Sauce Madere is best reserved for special occasions and the finest cuts of beef. Please see the Notes before attempting this expensive dish.

Sauce Madere is a spectacular savory sauce to accompany your finest beef. This recipe is kin to and the base for the even more decadent black truffle infused Sauce Perigueux.

The recipe comes from the incredible Escoffier Cookbook, but the recipe there is very confusing. This is because M. Escoffier works backwards from the finished sauce to the base ingredients (make the Sauce Madere from half-glaze and Madeira; make the half glaze from Brown Stock and Sauce Espagnole; make the Sauce Espagnole from Brown Roux, Brown Stock, and Mirepoix...) All of those recipes are written for different volumes of resulting sauce, so there's quite a lot of math involved.

Fortunately for those of us in the Plymouth area, Erik Piantedosi at Piantedosi Butcher Shop in North Plymouth saves us most of the hard work by selling the demi-glace in frozen 14-oz containers! That excellent product brings this delicious sauce into reach for regular cooking.