Tonight we are remaking our pulled pork parfait, a dish we discovered a while ago, for one of our social food type gatherings. To explain what this dish is and why we made it in the forst place, we should probably go back to the beginning.
Donkey: You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, “Let’s get some parfait,” they say, “Hell no, I don’t like no parfait”? Parfaits are delicious!
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later.
Donkey: Parfait’s gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet!
So we have this family saying, a misquote from the film Shrek. It’s from a scene in which Donkey extols the virtues of parfait. I can’t remember who originally said it – it may have been me, as I have a penchant for misusing french words – but someone at some point used the word “parfait” to mean perfect, to which, paraphrasing Donkey, Alan (Duncan) said “I don’t know no one who don’t like no parfait”. The phrase stuck and became a regular saying at social gatherings. Eventually this lead us to wonder what the parfait to which Donkey was referring was. And, as with most questions like this that get raised in our group, it lead to a food night. The theme for this food night was, unsurprisingly enough, parfait. Each couple was to research and bring a parfait dish.
It wasn’t long into our research that we realised there was an international disagreement on what exactly constituted parfait. The french, on one side of the atlantic, professing it to be a whipped cream dessert, the Americans on the other seemingly calling any layered foodstuff parfait, savoury or sweet. We found countless versions from dishes that looked like knickerbocker glories to layered meat and mash dishes. One regularly recurring theme seemed to be the serving of these dishes in a glass. Having decided that Donkey, played by Eddie Murphy, was probably influenced by american culture, and because it gave us more scope, we chose the U.S. interpretation.
More research followed. It lead to the discovery of a dish called pulled pork parfait. Being fans of slow cooked pork, it looked perfect for our needs. Pulled pork is a favourite at american barbecues. It’s basically a rolled shoulder of pork or, as our transatlantic cousins would have it, ‘pork butt’* that is brined, marinated and then slow roasted to the point that it can be easily pulled into strips. To turn this into pulled pork parfait, the pork strips are layered in a glass with home made barbecue sauce and creamed potato. It’s rich, sticky, meaty, sweet, sour, creamy and salty. In short, pretty damn tasty! And it went down well on the original night.
So tonight, we – and by we I mean Cat – will reprise this recipe and see if we can recreate the original. Yum!
Oh and I’ll get Cat to add the recipe later.
* because it comes from the butt end of the front leg.