Hello everyone – I thought you might want to know that the new season of ‘The British Food History Podcast’ has begun. All the information you need is in this reblogged post from the other blog:
Just the quickest of quick posts to let you know (in case you didn’t know already) that the 6th season of The British Food History Podcast has started. I’ve already recorded several chats and still have a good few more to do. I’m really pleased with them: I think I have got a good mix of diverse topics, with England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland all covered.
If you don’t already follow or listen to the podcast, you can find it anywhere you normally find your podcast. Two episodes have already dropped, which you can listen to via this page in case you’re not usually a podcast kind of person.
Episode 1: Cake Baxters in Early Modern Scotland with Aaron Allen
Episode 2: Recreating 16th Century Beer with Susan Flavin & Marc Meltonville
Other episodes to come include Tudor cooking, medlars, the Tavern Cook Richard Briggs, canned food and…
In the cooking and eating of #446 Lincolnshire Chine I have now ticked off all 17 recipes (by my reckoning) in the Cured Meats section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter of Jane Grigson’s English Food. The recipes contained within it were key in developing my own skills in traditional cooking and I acquired skills I didn’t think I had in me: dry and wet curing, pressing, smoking, potting, etc. Aside from acquiring new skills, cooking the recipes really made me appreciate good food, properly made: proper ham, bacon and salted (corned) beef – foods that have now largely become diluted-down commodity products. The majority of the recipes are pork-based; it seems that Jane wasn’t keen on fresh pork (there are just 2 recipes in her Pork section that use fresh pork joints) but finds pork products delicious. I must say I’ve never been that keen on roast pork myself, I’d much rather have a glazed ham!
A beautiful illustration of smoking meat from Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England
In English Food, Jane opines on how ‘bacon was once our passion’ but is now outsourced to the Danish who turned pig farming into a real industry well before British farmers. As a country that in general prefers cheapness over quality, often discounting false economies, means that bacon filled with brine and injected with smoke flavouring has become the norm. So many of us have never eaten proper dry-cured butcher’s bacon, and I am glad to have been educated so well by Jane in the preparation of these foods that are considered very British – and the bacon sarnie is certainly one of those foods! And it’s not just a ‘cheerio’ to shrinking, scummy bacon: it’s a big ‘see you later’ to gammon and ham made from reformed offcuts, similarly injected with brine and additives.
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We’ve forgotten just how important cured meats used to be to households all across the country. When autumn began to wane, all livestock, except for the breeding stock, were killed: of course, some fresh meat was eaten straight away, usually the offal because it didn’t keep and couldn’t be cured as well as meat from the carcass, which was salted down and eaten throughout the winter – this is why bacon was our passion. For many households, this meant ploughing through a great deal of bacon, gammon and ham, but beef was salted too, as was duck and even lamb and mutton. Salt beef was extremely important to the crews of sailing ships on long voyages: a sure way of providing protein to hardworking sailors.
Not my finest photo, but a great dish: #366 A Fine Way to Pot a Tongue
I remember putting off any of the curing for a good while, fearing it slightly, but eventually I had to put my trust in Jane and her instructions. Of course, everything worked. Whenever things went awry, it was due more to my naivety than anything: for example, I used joints that were far too small to poach successfully; luckily I now know to cook as large a piece as possible, and pot what isn’t eaten in the next couple of days. Jane also taught me the importance of aromatics: cures are not simple brines, but they are flavoured with dark brown sugar, juniper, bay, allspice and nutmeg (to name but a few). The only thing I haven’t taken with me is the liberal use of saltpetre. Also going by the name potassium nitrate, saltpetre cures meat well and also gives the meat a nice pink colour, but there are associations with whole a host of diet-based diseases, so these days I miss it out. I don’t mind my bacon being a little less pink.[1]
The very delicious #228 Spiced Salt Beef
One of the most fun elements of this chapter was potting: there were simple ones like #205 Potted Tongue, more complex ones like Elizabeth Raffald’s #434 To Pot Ham with Chicken, and then Hannah’s Glasse’s #366 A Fine Way to Pot a Tongue: a whole pickled and poached ox tongue stuffed into a boned chicken, immersed in spiced butted and baked. Glorious stuff.
One of the best recipes didn’t use cured meat: #375 Boiled Silverside of Beef (not boiled, but gently poached) was sublime, cooked with vegetables and eaten with horseradish. If you can spare the time and resources, I recommend #441 Smoking Meat(the only 10/10 score) and attempting the aforementioned potted tongue by Hannah Glasse (9.5/10). The most revisited recipes are Jane’s #150 How to Cure Meat in Brine, and #228 Spiced Salt Beef– the latter being very good indeed, and which makes a delicious potted beef; something I used to sell on my market stall right at the beginning of my career in food.
#331 Boiled Ox Tongue: To Serve Hot (in this case with sour cherries)
As usual, when I complete a part of the book I give you the stats for the section.[2]Cured Meat scored a mean of 7.53, putting it on level pegging with Porkand Poultry. The median score was 8, and there were two modes: 7 and 8.5. The only significantly better scoring section of the Meat, Poultry and Game chapter thus far is the section on Meat Pies and Puddings.
Below, I have listed the recipes in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts with their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.
[1] Correlation is not necessarily causation of course. If you want to know more, I wrote about it on the other blog a while back. Read that post here.
It’s been a while since my last post hasn’t it folks? Well thanks for sticking with me. After over a year, I have a new recipe for you: Lincolnshire Chine.
Why has it taken such a long time to hunt this one down? Well, the cut of meat required to make this regional speciality is only available in Lincolnshire, and even then, it is pretty tricky to find. It’s also a long way from Manchester!
Jane Grigson explains the special cut needed: ‘It is across the back of the neck, across the backbone, a section of which is included.’ Hence the name chine. The resulting piece of meat which is square in shape is then dry-cured.
I researched the chine and discovered so many other Lincolnshire specialities that I thought I should make a podcast episode about it. I was lucky to talk to chef Rachel Green about chine and Lincolnshire food in general. She also managed to get me a square piece of chine from one of her suppliers: Woldsway Meat and Game.
Listen to the podcast episode here:
Today the original chine cut is no longer used, instead, a square cut taken from the side of the spine is taken. The meat is then cut with deep slashes, stuffed with parsley, wrapped up and poached. After cooling it is sliced to reveal stripes of meat and parsley. Rachel said there should be no other ingredients, however, Jane includes several more in hers: marjoram, leeks, onions, and even optional lettuce and raspberry leaves. Rachel had never heard of any of these ingredients being added to the stuffing of a chine. Later, I found an article Jane wrote in the Guardian way back in 1984 where she said that, indeed, today just chopped parsley is used. Her additions come from a very curious source: the 19th century French poet Paul Verlaine who ‘in the mid-1870s, spent a year as a schoolmaster just north of Boston [Lincolnshire]. He like chine so much that he tried to find it elsewhere in England but without success.’ It was his description that Jane used as the basis of her recipe, and it is he who described the unusual ingredients listed above.
As it would turn out, weighing in at 6 kilos, the chine Rachel gave me was far too big for any cooking vessel in my house, so I had to divide it in two, freezing one half for a future stuffed chine. As it would turn out, a 3-kilo piece of chine, is what Jane calls for in her recipe.
With the meaty side facing up, I cut deep slashes going to within a centimetre of the skin about 1½ centimetres apart in the direction of the grain of the muscle. If you have somehow got your hands on an old-fashioned chine cut, make cuts toward the bone, then turn over and repeat on the other side.
Next, I prepared the stuffing from 2 very large bunches of parsley, stalks and all, plus two, trimmed and cleaned, leeks. (Jane gives an alternative to the leeks in the form of 2 bunches of spring onions and a lettuce.) I roughly chopped the greens and put them in my food processor for chopping, along with some fresh thyme and marjoram leaves. Jane also suggested a handful of young raspberry leaves as an optional extra; it’s the wrong time of year for raspberry leaves, so I had to give those a miss. I seasoned the whole thing with ground mace and black pepper and then chopped it all finely – don’t go too far with this, they should be chopped, not made into a paste.
I took the stuffing and filled the slashes as deeply and evenly as I could – it was quite a satisfying job actually, sort of meditative. Next, I wrapped the meat tightly in a double layer of muslin and tied it into place with butcher’s twine.
It now needed to be poached, but it was still too big for any of my pots, so instead I popped it into a large roasting tin, poured over hot water and sealed it with foil before gingerly sliding it into my oven set to 160°C. Whether you go by this method or simply bring it to a simmer in a stock pot, it should take 3 hours cooking.
When it’s ready, remove from the water and sit it on a chopping board or large plate, place another board on top and then a weight (I used my heavy-based food processor) so that the meat sets: it makes the meat firm, easier to cut, and it removes any air bubbles, lengthening its shelf-life. Cool overnight; my kitchen is cold, so I left it out overnight, but if you’d rather, do this in the fridge.
Next day, unwrap the meat and slice it as thinly as possible. I was very impressed with the look of it I must say: pale pink flesh and deep green stripes. Very effective.
Jane suggests eating the chine with a vinaigrette, bread and butter, and salad. I also tried it sprinkled with a vinegar and sugar dressing (approximately a 2:1 ratio) as suggested by Rachel.
#446 Lincolnshire Chine. After all this effort and after being told it was an acquired taste, I was worried I wouldn’t like the chine, but it was really good. The meat was tender and salty-sweet, and the parsley intensely grassy, and aromatic from the marjoram and spices. I have to say, the sugar-vinegar dressing elevated it from a good dish to a very good one. If you can get hold of a chine, have a go at making it. I shall certainly be making it again. Score: 7/10.
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Regular readers of the blog will know that I have been working on a book all about sugar’s dark side over the last couple of years, and I am very pleased to announce that A Dark History of Sugar will be published on 30 March 2022 by Pen & Sword History. It is – as far as I know when I write this – available in the UK and Australia from this date. North America, you’ll have to wait a little longer for it: 30 May.
Before I tell you all about the book, I thought I’d let you know that if you pre-order via Pen & Sword’s website (so there’s not long left) you can get 25% off the cover price. The book is, of course, available from other booksellers. I will be receiving some copies, which of course will be signed by Yours Truly. I’ll let you…
It was quite a big section – 21 recipes in all – and because the English have a rich history regarding pies and puddings, it covers quite a lot of ground. I found Jane’s choices really evocative of both history and regionality, both of which have declined over this – and the last – century.
#70 Cornish Pasties
Of course meat pies have a chequered past, and factory-made ones with their homogenous pink insides, or their non-specific minced meats, have sadly become the norm for us Brits; but once every home had their own repertoire of meat pies and puddings, and perhaps popped into their butcher or grocer for special pies for special occasions. Jane pines for times past: ‘We were once known for our pork pies’, she says, ‘and other pies as well. Pies, like puddings, were a great English speciality. I suppose that the reason for our modern failure is that our butchery trade was not stiffened by the same legal props and alliances: with the increasing demand for cheap food, cheapness rather than quality, all professional skill has gone.’ They were so prized that folk owned special leather pie cases used for storing and protecting pies over long journeys. Jane also blames modern farming methods that have left us with pork that’s ‘had the succulence bred out of it.’
#322 To Make a Goose Pye
The historical ground she covers is amazing: and the English medieval raised pie receives plenty of deserved attention. There are the celebration pies of the 18th and 19th centuries, and includes Hannah Glasse’s #322 To Make a Goose Pye and #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye. From medieval to Tudor times when pastry is a more delicate and pies are made from shortcrust pastry we have the classic #70 Cornish Pasty, designed to be held and tough enough to slip into a worker’s pocket to survive a morning’s work. Then, as we move into the Stuart era, pastry get even more rich and ‘puff pastes’ begin to appear, perhaps to top your #43English Game Pie. All types are in there, and I have to say I have come quite adept at almost every aspect of pie and pastry-making, right down to the #283 Jellied Stock.
Jane had her own thoughts on pastry, bringing up ‘the question of taste and discretion. If you make a Cornish pasty for a miner…the pastry has to be very thick, or the whole thing will spoil. If you are making mince pes for the end of as large meal, you will need to roll the pastry thinner than if they are destined to fill up hungry young carol singers.’ Therefore she gives little information on how much pastry required, or indeed how to make it – something one would not get away with today. She says: ‘This is the kind of cooking accommodation we rapidly become used to. Therefore…only the type of pastry will be indicated, not its weight.’ I must admit I agree; after you’ve made a couple using your own dishes, you do get an instinct for how much you may need.
#284 Veal, Ham and Egg Pie
I have to say I got so much pleasure from cooking these recipes, especially the raised pies. Indeed it was making these pies in the US in my science days, and seeing how well they went down with folk who do not have them as part of their food culture, stirred up thoughts of starting my own food business. Years later I would become known for my pies making them in their hundreds for the restaurant. I have much to thank Jane for.
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There are many recipes that are not included in the chapter, but I suppose Jane had to stop somewhere, there being thousands of pie and pudding recipes. But some omissions are glaring: my main issue being the lack of puddings – one recipe in the whole section! If there is anything more English than a meat pie, then it is meat pudding. To be fair the one she does include – #200 Steak, Kidney & Oyster Pudding– is the classic, but I would have added maybe minted lamb, oxtail and plough pudding at the very least. Her niche, regional pies were interesting, but not always a success. If I were to write a pie chapter I would certainly add beef & potato, minced beef & onion and a proper pigeon pie of old: pigeon, beefsteak and bacon baked in a double layer of suet and shortcrust pastry.
I have to give a special mention to the showstopping pyes from Hannah Glasse: #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pyebeing possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever made in my life.
Time for the stats: there were 21 recipes, but I only counted 18: #282 Raised Pies and #283 Jellied Stock being constituents of other recipes, and the Christmas pye which I never got to eat.
#233 Devonshire Squab Pie
The section scored a mean of 8.11/10, the second-highest score so far (9.1 Stuffingsbeing the highest). It has a median and mode of 8 – high, but others have been higher measured this way.
As usual, I have listed the recipes below in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts and their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.
And so here we have my interpretation of Hannah Glasse’s Yorkshire Christmas Pye I made for the Channel 5 show Our Victorian Christmas (click here for part 1: history) Before I go on though, I found that the Christmas pye sequence had to be cut out for time – the show having to be cut down last minute to just one episode of an hour’s length. Boo!
I am still in the episode though: I also made Wassail and did a few to-camera bits about Victorian Christmas food. It’s on Channel 5, 9pm, 22 December (I’ll post a link when one becomes available).
Ingredients:
1 turkey
1 goose
1 chicken
1 partridge
1 woodpigeon
2.5 kg salted butter
1 hare
A selection of oven-ready small game e.g. woodcock, grouse, teal, snipe
2 eggs
Spice mix:
15 g each ground mace, nutmeg and black pepper
8 g ground cloves
50 g salt
Hot water pastry. Approximately 15 batches of the following:
500 g plain flour
500 g strong white bread flour
1 tsp salt
350 g lard
350 ml boiling water
First make the hot water pastry: mix the flours and salt in a bowl, then place lard and boiling water in a saucepan, put on a low heat and let the lard melt – don’t let it boil as it might erupt, so be careful. As soon as the lard has melted, make a well in the centre and pour in the water and fat. Mix with a wooden spoon to make a dough. As soon as it is cool enough to handle, knead slightly. Cover and cool. This can be done a couple of days in advance – simply store in the fridge.
Using a very sharp knife and poultry shears bone the turkey, goose, chicken, partridge and woodpigeon. Begin by cutting out the birds’ spines with the shears, then cut away from the carcass. Don’t worry about keeping the drumstick or even thigh meat of the partridge or wood pigeon.
Lay out the birds cut side up, then make the spice mix by mixing together the ingredients and scatter it over the birds. Now wrap the partridge around the woodpigeon, so that the pigeon fills the cavity inside the partridge, making the partridge look whole. Wrap the chicken around the two birds and so on until you have what looks like a whole goose, albeit a somewhat gory one. Refrigerate.
Now make the base of the pie. Line a large baking tray with greaseproof paper. Knead together two or three batches of pastry and roll out, making sure you flour your worktop. The pastry needs to be 5 or 6 cm thick. To get dimensions, use the whole goose as a template: it needs to fit inside snugly and there needs to be a border wide enough to build up a 5 to 6 cm thick wall. I built up the sides by rolling thick bricks of pastry and glued them on by cross-hatching the pastry and brushing with water. Then I smoothed the pastry. I needed a final height of around 30 cm. If possible, refrigerate to firm up the pastry.
Sir the 5 birds in the pie, then joint the hare (ask your butcher to do this) and tuck in pieces, along with your small game: I used 2 grouse and 2 teal, but snipe and woodcock would also work. Scatter over any remaining spice mix and then pile on large cubes of salted butter, tucking it inside and between the game.
Roll a lid with more pastry, cut a large steam hole and place on top of the pie. Decorate with a pastry rose and leaves. Glaze with egg wash.
If you can allow the pastry to firm up in the fridge or somewhere cool. Preheat the oven to 230°C.
It needed two people to get the pie safely in the oven. It’s important to have a high heat at first, so the pastry can seal up. My pie started to collapse as the front and leak butter because the heat couldn’t get round. (I found out later that that was prevented by tying card or metal around the pie, rather like a corset, keeping things from oozing out.)
It took 8 hours to cook the meat inside to a safe temperature – a meat thermometer should read 74°C. The pastry will be very black by this point – remember it isn’t for eating, it is for protection.
Not looking very impressive is it? Hm
We let it cool for a little while, packed it up and drove to a local restaurant so we could place it their walk-in fridge. The next morning it was whisked away – not by coach or train, but by car.
#445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye. A recipe I really thought I would ever cook, and what an experience! In all it took me 5 days (on and off) to make the pie. When it started to collapse in the oven I thought all was lost, but when we took it out of the oven, I saw the side closest to the back of the oven was absolutely fine. I just wish I could have tried some of the contents: the poor old bits of game on the top got a bit blackened, but the 5 birds together looked well protected. I don’t know how it turned out, and I can’t seem to get a photo of the contents. I am going to attempt this again one day, but I shall use a different recipe. My score? It’ll have to be a ?/10!
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Oh my goodness! Here is a recipe in Jane Grigson’s book, English Food that I never expected to make because it’s so big, expensive and complex: Hannah Glasse’s Yorkshire Christmas Pye. These huge raised pyes were choc-full of meat, usually several species of poultry and game. They were very popular in the nineteenth century, but the first ever recipe appears in Hannah Glasse’s classic cookery book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747. Here it is:
Jane Grigson simply transcribes the recipe, and her advice on its preparation is simple: don’t bother. Hannah’s rather grotesque sounding pye is present in the book to let us know something about the impressive pyes of our past. Instead she suggests making Hannah’s slightly less ostentatious Goose Pye.
The recipe requires 5 birds, deboned, heavily seasoned and stuffed inside the other in order of size, popped into a pastry case with pastry made with a bushel of flour (that’s around 27 kg). Any gaps are filled in with hare, small game birds and a huge amount of butter.
Every Christmas I look at this recipe and wonder how on earth I could make it, but this year I was asked, because I received an email from the folk at Channel 5 who enquired as to whether I would have a go at making a Yorkshire Christmas Pye for their show Our Victorian Christmas. Not only that, but they wanted me to make Hannah’s original recipe – what are the chances of that? The show is due to be broadcast on 22 December at 9 pm, or you can watch it on their streaming service afterwards (I’ll leave a link once its live). I also made some Wassail. Anyway, back to the pye…
TheFoods of England website gives us a definition: ‘An extremely large, highly decorated, raised hot-water crust pye filled with a mixture of meats or game in jelly. A celebration pye. Repeatedly mentioned in 18th and 19th Century literature as an indication of good times and full bellies.’1
As we go into the Victorian era, the Yorkshire Christmas Pye becomes more refined, with forcemeat stuffing and gravy being introduced, they also became bigger and more ornately decorated.
If you look at the end of Hannah’s recipe, she says the pyes were actually meant as Christmas gifts to friends and family living in towns and cities. The get there, they would have to travel by coach, and later train, so you can see why huge amounts pastry were required: protection. These huge pyes took a long time to cook, and the pastry would end up being scorched, but its job was to keep in the meat inside well protected, sterile and appealingly moist. Here’s a description of Earl Grosvenor’s Christmas Pye as reported in the Stamford Mercury on 15 January 1808:
At Earl Grosvenor’s second dinner at Chester, as Mayor of that city, on Friday the 1st instant there was a large Christmas pie, which contained three geese, three turkies, seven hares, twelve partridges, a ham, and a leg of veal: the whole, when baked, weighed 154 lbs [70 kg].!2
This was not an isolated case: Queen Victoria had a Christmas Pye so large, it required four footmen to carry it into the dining room!
Queen Victoria’s Christmas pye
Pyes such as these were kept for Boxing Day, aka the Feast of Stephen. ‘The concept was to cut off the crust lid, chop up the cooked meat within [and] serve everyone’3 or the meat could be sliced and served with the jellied stock of the meat and spiced butter – delicious! In making a pye like Hannah’s, all one is doing is making a giant version of a classic potted meat or fish (e.g. #268 Potted Shrimps); a layer of meat cooked and sealed in butter – a delicious preservation method.
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Hannah’s recipe must have been a good one – it was heavily plagiarised: I found her recipe in John Farley’s classic The London Art of Cookery (1783) and even an 1882 edition of the Ohio Practical Farmer.4 Neither credit their source.
Hannah didn’t invent the pye though, in fact it seems to be of medieval origin. Raised pyes themselves go back to time where it was much easier and cheaper to form a tough pastry shell rather than purchasing some expensive earthenware in which to cook your meat and vegetables. These pyes appear in medieval manuscripts as ‘coffyns’. This may seem wasteful, but often the flour was stale or was made up of bran and grit, left behind after sifting ground wheat. But the practise of making pyes with a vast array of different meats seems to go back to at least the 14th century, when a special festive pye was made by the Salter’s Company as a gift to the City of London in 1394. It contained – amongst other things – pheasant, hare, capon, rabbit, kidneys, forcemeat, spices and mushrooms.5
So there we have it – a history of the Yorkshire Christmas Pye, but how did I go about making it I hear you ask? Well, I’ll publish the recipe – or my interpretation of it – in another post when the programme airs.
It’s always fun looking back after I have cooked all the recipes over a chapter or section of English Food. The Saltwater Fish section contained just 16 recipes (see the full list below), but Jane manages to pack in a decent variety of both dishes and fishes. Having variety in there was important to her, because: ‘[w]e live in islands surrounded by a sea that teems with fish, yet we eat fewer and fewer kinds, and those that are not always the best.’1
That said, she doesn’t shy away from focussing upon certain species, and she gives a very big nod to the herring – and the mackerel too – recognising its importance, both culturally and economically, to English history. Recipes for this oily fish range from the simple and sublime such as#386 Herrings in Oatmeal, #380 Gooseberry Sauce for Mackerel or #159 Creamed Roe Loaves. However, that’s where the enjoyment stops; of the 18 recipes in this section 10 are for either herring or mackerel, 4 were good and the rest mediocre at best. Overcooked fish with stewed apples and onions, with #390 Isle of Man Herring Pie being the worst, scoring a rare 1/10.
Conspicuous by their absence are the other historically important fish: cod and haddock (and the rest of the cod family too). There is no grilled cod steak and no haddock in parsley sauce – there is no fish and chips! Perhaps she omitted them because of her disapproval in the English focussing too much on these fish, and therefore did not require representation. It would be fair enough, but why put in all the bad herring recipes? It makes no sense: I wish I could ask her.
There is variety in the remaining recipes: whitebait, turbot, halibut, skate and sole are represented, but where are the sardines, pilchards, John Dory, mullet, monkfish and bass? Where is the star-gazy pie for goodness sake? She certainly cooked with them all – she even wrote a massive cookery book on fish2 – maybe she held back, knowing that a saltwater fish section would be largely ignored by her readership?
#386 Herrings in Oatmeal
I am being overly harsh perhaps, because in this relatively small selection of recipes, I feel like I have cooked a variety of sea fish in a variety of ways, enough now to be confident in cooking anything I might come across at the fishmonger’s shop; after all, you can never be sure exactly what will be there, as Rick Stein has pointed out: ‘Don’t be too dogmatic about what you mean to buy at a fishmonger. If another fish looks fresher and shinier than the one you came in for, buy that.’ We forget that, ‘[sea fish] is wild food; you have to take what you can get, not necessarily what you want.’3
Much has happened since Jane wrote English Food: right now fish – or, rather, fishing – is being used as a political pawn by the British and the French post-Brexit. Since the first edition of the book was written, fish has been caught unsustainably, without regard to the animals caught and killed in what was regarded as collateral damage: today, the veil has been lifted and in response we can buy line-caught mackerel and dolphin-friendly tuna, and my fishmonger (Out of the Blue in Chorlton, Manchester) only sells fresh fish that has been caught sustainably. Not all fishing is ethical, but at least there is now a choice.
#376 Eliza Acton’s Sole Stewed in Cream
This section of the book was a real mixed bag, with as many poor ones as delicious ones. No dish scored 10/10, but one – the aforementioned #386 Herrings in Oatmeal – scored a 9. There was too the discovery of the fact that mackerel can be paired very well with gooseberries, and that herring roes are surprisingly delicious.
Of the non-oily fish recipes, #218 Whitebait was great, ending up on a pop-up restaurant menu, though I avoid them these days now they are off the sustainable list after it was discovered that these fish are the fry of several species, rather than a single species in their own right as previously thought. It was great to eat fish like turbot and halibut, fish I would never have dared cook before I started the blog. I was surprised – and very much delighted – to see #302 Caveach of Sole, fish cured with citrus juice or fruity vinegar, something rather trendy these days, and not considered English at all.
#342 Halibut with Anchovies
Because of the high proportion of underwhelming recipes, this section score a mean of just 6.63/10, making it the second worst so far – only 7.3 Griddle Cakes & Pancakes score less. That said, these data should really be analysed with the median or mode. Looking at the data this way, we get a median of 8 and a mode of 8.5/10 – the cluster of bad recipes just small enough to be ignored. Looking at it this way, it comes out as one of the best chapters: that’s statistics for you.
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As usual, I have listed the recipes below in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts and their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.
This simple-looking recipe has been a long time coming. Why? It’s not the turbot, they’re quite easy to find and not too expensive, no it is the shrimps that have been causing the problem. Brown shrimps are required for this recipe – again, easy to find as potted shrimps or frozen in bags – but this recipe required them unshelled. This has proven nigh-on impossible; in fact I was imagining having to go out to Morecambe Bay with a shrimp fisherman to get them or something. There are only 2 left; the history surrounding shrimp is very interesting, but I have little space to go into it in this post, but I have added it to my list of future podcast episodes.
The reason it’s so difficult to buy them in the shell is they have become rather a niche food (their hey-day was the 1920s), they have also dropped in population size, and have become more expensive. They are also very fiddly to shell. The shrimpers need to be sure to sell their catch, so they prepare them in the way most desirable: potted in butter, and a few frozen. None are ever left intact.
Or, that’s what I thought until one day last month, walking around Didsbury, Manchester, I walked past Evan’s fishmonger’s shop and there they were, a big pile of them in the shop widow. In I walked and purchased an approximate half-pint’s worth – that’s the amount needed for the recipe.
When I got home I popped them in the freezer and last weekend I invited some friends over who I hadn’t seen in ages, and used to come to my early ‘blog dinners’ back when I was doing my PhD at Manchester University.
The best place to begin this one is with the shrimp sauce; Jane makes out that shelling them takes a matter of minutes. Well it doesn’t, it takes ages. I was sure there is a knack to shelling the tiny blighters quickly, but I couldn’t work it out, though I was sure that I had seen footage on TV showing people shelling them using a pin to draw them out, but found nothing on the web to support this so I might have misremembered.
Anyway, you need enough unshelled brown shrimp to fill a half pint glass, remove the shells and then pop the shrimp meat in the fridge as you make a simple stock from the shells by placing them in a saucepan along with half a pint of water. Bring the whole thing to a boil and simmer for just 10 minutes, pass the liquid through a sieve into a measuring jug, squeezing the shells with the back of a spoon. Top back up to half a pint with more water.
Now it’s time for the turbot. Jane asks for one 3 pound in size. Ask the fishmonger to gut and trim it. Before poaching make a cut all down the length of the spine of the knobbly (upper) side of the fish and place in knobbly side down a large deep pan. I used a large wok. Fill the pan with a mixture of half milk, half water so it just covered the fish. Season well with plenty of salt and pepper and add a slice of lemon. Bring to a simmer and poach ‘for 10 minutes or until the flesh loses its transparency and the bones can be raised from the bone very slightly’. Not having cooked a turbot before, I wasn’t sure if Jane’s description would be very helpful, but in the end it was! I use the blunt side of a knife to inspect the meat close to the back bone and it was easy to see it was cooked. It took my turbot about 12 minutes to cook through.
As the turbot poaches, make the sauce. Measure a tablespoon of plain flour in a cup and pour in around 2 tablespoons of the made stock to form a smooth paste, then tip the rest of the stock into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Once simmering, whisk in the flour paste, allow it to come back to the simmer. Now the butter: cut 6 ounces of butter (I used slightly salted) into cubes and whisk them in a couple at a time. You should end up with a nice smooth sauce. Don’t let the sauce boil or the butter will split; keep that heat very low. Season with salt (if it needs it), black pepper, cayennepepper, mace and nutmeg.
When the fish is cooked gingerly lift it from the pan and onto a large serving plate. Jane recommends those ones with a strainer at the bottom. I didn’t have one of those, so I made sure the plate was quite deep, so it was easy to pour away any poaching liquor. Before you serve take a knob of butter and spread it over the top of the fish to give it a nice sheen, then sprinkle over some chopped parsley.
I served it with simple steamed potatoes and green beans.
Don’t throw away the poaching liquor by the way – simmer the bones and skin left over and make a stock. I used leftover sauce, potatoes, beans and turbot meat to make a chowder the next day and it was great.
#444 Poached Turbot with Shrimp Sauce. What a great recipe to finish off the Saltwater Fish section of the book. I’m still a little nervous cooking fish like this because it happens so rarely, but it was really good: delicate meat that was just at the right point between firm and tender. The shrimp butter sauce was delicious, so glad after waiting all these years to make it. I’ll be making it again, but next time, I’ll make the sauce from small prawns instead. Excellent stuff 8.5/10
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Well another milestone has been reached: with the cooking up of a vegetarian tri-gourd garnish I have completed the Poultry section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter of English Food by Jane Grigson. In just 18 recipes, Jane manages to cram in a surprising variety and runs the full gamut of poultry: chicken and capon, turkey, goose, duck and guineafowl are all represented(quail is covered in Game). On top of that she includes lesser used parts of birds too: neck, liver and giblets all get a mention, as do boiling fowls.
It might not surprise you that the majority of the recipes are chicken-based. I am working from her 1992 third edition a time when chicken is ubiquitous, but when she wrote the first edition in 1974, the battery ‘farms’ was in its infancy. Prior to the 1970s, chicken was an expensive meat, saved for special occasions, but with the great ‘success’ of the factory bird, it took over the world. Today there are 23 billion chickens on the planet. Jane muses: ‘Poultry and game are, for very different reasons, the mavericks of the meat trade, representing its worst – frozen battery chicken – and its best – woodcock and grouse.’ Of chicken in the 1990s she despairs: ‘I didn’t realize quite how far we had lost flavour in poultry’. What would she say now in a Britain threatened by imports of chlorinated chickens and lab-grown chicken meat?
#235 Lisanne’s Chicken with Mussels
It isn’t news to anyone that the vast majority of chickens are raised in filth and squalor, but it’s not all bad, and there still places where chickens are raised free range – and I mean truly free range, not technically. Such fowls can be found at farmers’ markets across the country. Personally, I worry about the freedom of the bird other whether it is organic. A good example of this is Packington who farm their chickens (and cockerels) the traditional way. They are more expensive, and therefore I eat chicken less. It should be the way of things, after all. They have an excellent flavour that is essential for when a chicken is to be poached, say, for example, when preparing #225 Cockie-Leekie.
Only on the rare occasion I buy a chicken from a supermarket, do I insist upon it being organically farmed; for animals, being certified organic does not just mean it has been fed organic grain etc., but has received a higher standard of husbandry than for a regular farmed animal.
I am in the minority with this view. Chickens – or maybe birds in general – simply do not provoke the same empathy us that mammals do. Some possibly don’t even consider them animals at all. Maybe we would care more if they had more expressive faces, paws not claws, and fur instead of feathers.
The chapter is about more than chickens though, though Jane does make the point that our farmed poultry – especially ducks – don’t resemble the old traditional breeds either:
We know and are told too little. Wool is pulled over our eyes to the point of blindness. Take Aylesbury duck. Sounds nice and historical. It was once the preferred breed for its rich, fine deliciousness. Don’t be fooled. What you have on your plate has barely an Aylesbury gene in its body…
#399 Duck Stewed with Green Peas
She opines too for the breeds lost because they do not fit with today’s capitalistic farming systems. Perhaps we should all buy goose – they stubbornly resist mass farming methods.
Cooking the recipes in this part of the book introduced me to a whole new world of poultry: I had never ‘boiled’ a whole turkey or eaten a capon, nor had I really cooked with poultry offal or made my own (#276) Giblet Gravy. One of the best discoveries was the delicious combination of mussels and chicken, and the deliciousness of guineafowl was a revelation.
There were only a couple of duds: #443 Three-Gourd Garnish was two thirds underwhelming and one third unpalatable, the bitter gourd being so bitter, just a tiny piece was completely inedible – I, or Jane, must have got something wrong there. And then there was #339 Hindle Wakes, the bizarre cold, prune-stuffed chicken, painted with a congealed lemon sauce. In my little review of the meal, I described it as a monster, ‘a cross between something from Fanny Cradock’s 1970s repertoire and the centrepiece of a medieval feast.’ Why it would be included, and a traditional roast chicken or goose missed out, I don’t know.
#339 Hindle Wakes
Due to a minority of poor recipes, the 18 recipes of the Poultry section scored a mean of 7.56/10, putting it in second place after Pork (8.06/10). For who like their stats, Poultry had a median and mode of 7.5. Measuring averages this, actually puts Beef & Veal at the top of the meat sections thus far, though Poultry remains in second place.
If you like the blogs and podcast I produce, please consider treating me to a virtual coffee or pint, or even a £3 monthly subscription: follow this link for more information.
As usual, I have listed the recipes below in the order they appear in the book with links to my posts and their individual scores, so have a gander. It is worth pointing out, that my posts are no substitute for Jane’s wonderful writing, so if you don’t own a copy of English Food, I suggest you get yourself one.
Neil Cooks Grigson 