While we can enjoy rillettes all year round, they’re particularly good to make and eat during the Christmas holidays. Since Christmas is coming soon, I wanted to share what I’ve learned about why rillettes make an excellent addition to any Christmas tradition.
10 reasons to make rillettes every Christmas:
- They’re easy to make.
- It’s très French and they know food.
- You don’t need to shop for specialty ingredients.
- They’re versatile enough to suit your high-fat and light-fare friends.
- Noël rillettes make a delightful hostess gift.
- With rillettes in the fridge, you’re always ready for unexpected guests.
- The veggie version will please your vegetarian Christmas guests.
- They take you back in time, just like A Christmas Carol.
- Santa loves them (and so does his waistline).
- They’re perfect for the Feast of the Seven Fishes.
Now let’s dig into all these reasons for rillettes to become part of your Christmas tradition. But first, I’ll define what rillettes are including Noël rillettes. And while I cover the 10 reasons for Christmas rillettes, I’ll include a few links for rillettes recipes to consider this Christmas.
Definitions: What are rillettes?
Rillettes is a meat spread that has a chunky texture. The main meat is pork and it’s common for rillettes to be made of pork and another type of meat, such as rabbit, duck, turkey, chicken, game, etc. The second main ingredient in rillettes is fat, usually pork fat such as fatback, pork belly or lard. Other fats such as duck, goose and chicken fat can be used to cook rillettes.
In English, it’s common to use the French term rillettes (prounounced: ree-ette). You can also call it potted meat, if you’re thinking about old-timey food processing like Jonathan Townsend covers on his 18th Century Cooking channel. But we’re not talking about North American canned potted meat which looks like cat food.
It should be said that tinned or jarred rillettes from France are generally artisanal foods with a focus on quality. No mechanically separated chicken in those tins.
Rillettes are also made of seafood, more on that later.
Definitions: What are Noël rillettes?
So, my research leads me to believe that Christmas rillettes and Noël rillettes are about when you eat them, not what’s in them. There’s not one type of rillettes that are particularly Christmassy. Though if you associate a certain type of meat with Christmas, such as duck, goose or turkey, then you can feel free to use one of those meats to give your rillettes a holiday feeling.
Now let’s get into the 10 great reasons to make and eat rillettes this Christmas.
Christmas rillettes, reason #1: They’re easy to make
After confit, I think rillettes are the easiest food to make under the forcemeat/charcuterie umbrella. Which is one big reason to love them. To make rillettes, you put meat, fat, spices and/or aromatics, water, stock or wine in a pot, put the pot in the oven for a few hours, let it cool down when done, remove the bones and other chunkies (i.e., bay leaves), mash up the remaining ingredients, put the results in small containers and cover them with a layer of fat.
The margin for error is wide. You really can’t mess these up. And on the other side of the coin, rillettes aren’t that common so people get impressed when you crack open a jar.
Plus, one batch makes at least three or four small jars and they last a long time. [To learn more about the staying power of rillettes, check out my article, How Long Do Rillettes Last? A Long Time So Eat Up!]
I value delicious foods that are easy to make. Maybe you do too. If not, you can search for most difficult Christmas foods to make and spend your holidays weeping in the kitchen while I eat rillettes out of a mason jar, ha ha.
Christmas rillettes, reason #2: It’s très French and they know food
Rillettes are a French dish so special that there are laws to protect their origins. The Guardian article, What’s better than a rich French paté?, reported that “In 2013, producers of Rillettes de Tours secured EU protected geographical indication status for their product. Producers further north have been trying to obtain the same protection for Rillettes du Mans for 20 years.”
Only artisanal producers from the Indre-et-Loire area (also known as Touraine) can call their product rillettes de Tours. The name guarantees authenticity.
Bertrand Simon, on his Chef Simon website says, “As an appetizer or in a sandwich, rillettes are a true symbol of French charcuterie.” [Translation from French to English by me.]
All this to say, the French take their food seriously; they’re passionate about ingredients, where those ingredients come from and how the food is prepared. If the French regard this simple food so highly, it bears investigation in my books.
Christmas rillettes, reason #3: You don’t need to shop for specialty ingredients
Rillettes are a versatile food. You can make them with regular old pork butt, pork belly and even chicken legs. Or you can get a little fancier with wild boar, duck legs or wild pheasants. But you don’t have to buy specialty items to make most rillettes.
Of course, I’m assuming you have a supply of fatback in your freezer and a stockpile of lard or bacon grease in your fridge. To me, these are no longer specialty items. [By the way, if you bought fatback and are wondering what to do with it, have a look at my article, Can You Eat Fatback? Yes: Here’s How!]
But if these are specialty items for you, you can use other ingredients that are easy to find in most grocery stores.
If you don’t have fatback, go for a recipe that calls for pork and fatty pork (like pork belly) and lard. Or, you could even substitute pork belly for the fatback, just make sure it’s super fatty.
If you don’t have lard, get a large pack of bacon, lay the strips on a cookie sheet, bake for 20-ish minutes at 375°F and drain the bacon grease into a mason jar. Now you have a lard replacement.
Like I said earlier, there’s a large margin for error with rillettes so you don’t have to worry too much about substitutions, as long as you’re substituting like for like (for example, fatty meat for another fatty meat, duck leg for turkey leg, etc.).
You should be able to make great rillettes with ingredients from your regular grocery store.
The first recipe I ever used sold me on rillettes and I’ve made variations of this one ever since.
Recipe suggestion for rillettes: Classic French Pork Rillettes by Rebecca Franklin on The Spruce Eats website.
However, I don’t want to dissuade you from making specialty rillettes if you have access to uncommon ingredients. I’ve included two recipes for you below, just in case you were wondering what to do with the pheasant in your freezer that your dad’s neighbour gave you after his last annual hunting trip.
Recipe suggestion for pheasant rillettes: Nordic Christmas – Pheasant Rillette
by Mia Irene Kristensen at the Honest Cooking website.
Recipe suggestion for wild pheasant rillettes (sous vide method): Wild Pheasant Rillettes by Florian Pinel on his Food Perestroika website.
Christmas rillettes, reason #4: They’re versatile enough to suit your high-fat and light-fare friends
Rillettes are pretty fatty. As I said in my article, 8 Reasons to Eat Rillettes on Keto, Carnivore or Zero Carb, you can meet high fat macros without even trying. For that experiment, I picked a random rillettes recipe and calculated the macros which ended up being 79.9% calories by fat.
People who enjoy fatty foods will appreciate the richness of rillettes. Even so, most people have a fat “off” switch and too much rillettes will flip that switch. That’s probably one of the reasons it’s so common to serve rillettes on crusty bread or crackers; it cuts the fat.
But some people, like my husband, Jack Sprat, don’t agree with fatty foods at all. Fortunately, there’s still a rillettes option that can satisfy these folks: seafood rillettes.
Chef Simon, on that same site mentioned above says, “For a lighter and more refreshing option, fish rillettes are ideal. Tuna, salmon or sardine rillettes are easily made oneself and are nicely decorated with cheese, fennel and chilis.” [Translation from French to English by me.]
Personally, I’ve made sardine rillettes from canned sardines and I don’t recommend that unless you’re down to the last tins in your bunker—then I’m sure they’ll be quite delicious. (To be fair, I don’t really like tinned sardines but I love grilled sardines so I bet sardine rillettes from fresh sardines would be a much different experience.)
If you want to make fish rillettes, I suggest starting with salmon as people tend to love salmon!
Here are three recipe options for salmon rillettes:
- Salmon Rillettes recipe by Sarah Copeland on The Kitchn website – Sarah uses smoked salmon, butter and a few other ingredients for this simple dish.
- Smoked Salmon Rillettes recipe by Nicole on her Culinary Cool blog – Nicole is living her “best life on the Canadian Prairies” and that includes these cream-cheesy salmon rillettes.
- Making Treasure from Trash: Hot Salmon Rillettes! by Lorraine Elliot on her Not Quite Nigella site – Lorraine makes salmon rillettes more affordable by using salmon off-cuts instead of prime cuts. [I love how Lorraine uses an exclamation mark in her recipe title.]
Christmas rillettes, reason #5: Noël rillettes make a delightful hostess gift
People like edible gifts but around the holidays, there are always mixed feelings about junk food, especially store-bought stuff. But even top quality, artisanal baked delights made with 100% butter can cause these mixed feelings. Because shoving that top-notch junk food into the old pie-hole will be glorious, we all know we don’t need it. And yet, we also know we won’t be able to resist it. [Ladies and gents, I’m talking from years of experience before I got off the sugar train. My super-duper kryptonite was Lindt balls. God, I ate so many of them.]
So, when you go over to someone’s house for a holiday gathering, why not bring your host or hostess something wholesome and unique?
The no-fuss way is to hand your hostess a jar of rillettes as you enter and say, “It’s rillettes, a French meat spread.” But does that sell the gift? Not really.
Instead, make a little gift basket or gift bag with your rillettes, a mini jar of artisanal jam (fig perhaps) and some crusty bread or fancy crackers.
If you think that trio of ingredients doesn’t spell it out well enough or you want to add one more flair, put chef Simon’s quote on a notecard and pop that into the gift bag or basket.
“As an appetizer or in a sandwich, rillettes are a true symbol of French charcuterie.”
Chef Bertrand Simon
Things can get so hectic during the holidays it’s easy to get to mid-afternoon and realize you forgot to eat and yet there’s no time to prepare a proper lunch. Your gift can come in real handy if your hostess finds herself in this situation as it’s basically an emergency picnic.
Christmas rillettes, reason #6: With rillettes in the fridge, you’re always ready for unexpected guests
This premise works the other way too. When you’ve got rillettes in the fridge, you’re only a few minutes away from putting something together to welcome guests. And unlike when you put out a plate of brownies and other sweet treats, your guests won’t say, “Oh, I shouldn’t” before digging in.
To make a quick rillettes snack for guests, simply pull out the fixings for a small charcuterie board. This can include the jar of rillettes, some jam, Dijon mustard, cornichons, cheese and some nice crackers and/or crusty bread. If you’ve got some dried fruit, throw that on the platter too.
If you need to make a quick light dinner for you and your unexpected guest, you can also feature rillettes as the protein. I might pry the rillettes out of the jar and cut them into slices to add as the meat feature on top of a leafy salad. Serve that with some crusty bread and perhaps the charcuterie board ingredients mentioned above, and your guest will be impressed with what you can throw together in only a few minutes.
This tip also applies for those days when you don’t feel like making dinner. With rillettes in the fridge, dinner is made. You just have to assemble it with whatever bits you have kicking around in the fridge and cupboard. What a relief!
Christmas rillettes, reason #7: The veggie version will please your vegetarian Christmas guests
If you’re already serving rillettes for your meat loving guests, it’s a nice gesture to provide an equivalent experience for your vegetarian guests too. They’ll appreciate your efforts and probably be pleased to try another type of vegetarian food. [During my decade as a vegetarian, the food I fell most in love with was veggie cretons, a vegetarian version of a Quebecois pork spread, like rillettes.]
If you made a vegetarian version of meaty rillettes, it’ll probably be vegan because there’s no dairy in regular meaty rillettes. If you make a vegetarian version of seafood rillettes, it will probably be vegetarian (not vegan) because seafood rillettes often contain creamy dairy products.
Out of all the recipes I looked at, there was only one that looked like meaty rillettes. If you make this one (with jackfruit, mentioned below), please put little signs/labels in front of your meat and veg rillettes to be respectful to the vegetarians who don’t want to accidentally eat meat. This helps the carnivores who don’t want to eat plants too, by the way (but you’re more likely to have a vegetarian at the table than a carnivore).
A couple of the vegetarian/vegan rillettes recipes I reviewed looked disgusting, either like vomit or oily dirt. So I haven’t included them in my list, even though they might taste amazing. [This reminds me of the time my husband and I had dinner with vegan friends, back when we were vegetarian. They served this delicious mushroom soup except, for some reason, it was totally black and lumpy. I don’t recommend appetizers that look unappetizing unless you’re at home alone, eating them in the dark in front of the TV.]
Anyhoo … now let’s get onto the veg-friendly recipes I hope you’ll like.
Recipe suggestion for vegan rillettes: Vegan Rillettes by Thomas, a vegan in France on his Full of Plants website. This is the version that looks rather meaty because of the shredded jackfruit. If you have vegan foodie friends, I think they’d really like this site!
Recipe suggestion for vegetarian rillettes: Onion and Parmesan Rillettes by Ricardo Larrivée on the Food Network website. This one looks super tasty and even though the recipe is only rated as 3.5 stars out of five, I don’t see how you could go wrong with these ingredients.
Recipe suggestion for vegetarian rillettes: Mushroom Onion Rillettes by Adrienne D. Capps on her Vegetarianized website. This one looks tasty. The only animal product here is butter. If you have a vegan coming to dinner, you could swap that out for olive oil.
Christmas rillettes, reason #8: They take you back in time, just like A Christmas Carol
In the article, Rillettes, on the British Food History website, Dr. Neil Buttery says, “They’ve been around for at least six hundred years, yet of recent times they have fallen out of favour in Britain, though they were very popular in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.”
The beloved story, A Christmas Carol, published in 1843 by Charles Dickens gained its popularity during the Victorian era (this era lasted between 1820 and 1914, approximately). In this story, we see food such as roast goose, gravy, apple sauce, mashed potatoes and Christmas pudding.
So when you eat rillettes at Christmas, you’re eating a celebrated and essential food of eras gone by. But rillettes, along with the food Mrs. Cratchit makes for Christmas and the recipes included in Isabella Beeton’s 1861 guide, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, shouldn’t be left in the past. They deserve a place at the modern table more than many of the processed foods we now allow into our homes.
If you want to go back in time this Christmas, make some rillettes and a classic Dickensian Christmas dinner.
Recipe suggestions for a Christmas dinner Ebenezer Scrooge could get excited about:
How to Serve a Dickensian Christmas Dinner by historian Chris Gehrz on his The Pietist Schoolman website. Chris compiles the recipes for this Christmas dinner from Mrs. Beeton’s book and links to them over on that site.
Christmas rillettes, reason #9: Santa loves them (and so does his waistline)
Have you heard? Santa’s generous waist circumference puts him at risk for pre-diabetes and Mrs. Claus doesn’t like that. So, this year, Santa doesn’t want to eat cookies and sweets at every house he stops at. He needs snacks made with real food to keep his energy up.
You can help Santa by leaving him a ploughman’s lunch fortified with rillettes. If you do this, you’ll also be helping yourself—surely this extraordinary snack will get you on Santa’s good list!
[And for more ways to avoid the naughty list, read my article, Terrine for Christmas: 7 Ways to Get on Santa’s Nice List.]
Carrots aren’t standard in a ploughman’s lunch, but you can include a few for Rudolph and friends.
Christmas rillettes, reason #10: They’re perfect for the Feast of the Seven Fishes
Karen Kerr, in her article, Salmon Rillettes for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, says the Feast of the Seven Fishes is “an Italian American Christmas Eve meal that takes the Catholic “fish on Fridays” to another level. Southern Italian immigrants brought the tradition of having a fish feast on Christmas Eve to the United States. Here it became the Feast of the Seven (at least) Fishes.”
I’d heard of the Feast of the Seven Fishes from my Italian American friend from New Jersey and as soon as I heard about it, I wondered how I could possibly get an invite.
I also wondered how Italian people coordinate cooking fish so well that nothing gets overcooked, even at such an epic event. [I’ve turned more than a few shrimps into pink cardboard in my life, is why I was wondering about that, ha ha.]
If you’re paranoid about turning your seafood into rubber (or cardboard) and embarrassing yourself in front of the whole family at the next Feast of the Seven Fishes, why not make seafood rillettes? They’re possibly the most forgiving seafood dish you can make.
In the Bon Appetit article, How to Cook the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve Dinner, author Rochelle Bilow suggests salmon rillettes or a smoked trout dish would go perfectly in the first course which is “something snacky.”
You can use one of the recipes I mentioned in reason #4 or Bon Appetit’s Salmon Rillettes recipe, which is heavy on the wine and mayo but includes no dairy.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it: 10 reasons to make rillettes this Christmas—and maybe every Christmas! Wishing you and yours a wonderful Christmas season and may your rillettes always be festive!