#298 Pulled and Devilled Turkey, Chicken or Pheasant

“One of the most delicious dishes of eighteenth-century cooking, indeed one of the best of all English dishes“, says Griggers. That’s quite a statement. The idea behind this receipt is that it uses up that left-over Christmas or Thanksgiving turkey “with the glory it deserves“. It is nowhere near either of those two holidays, but in the receipt a roast or boiled chicken or a brace of roast pheasants can be used, and I must admit it does seem like a good dish for summertime as it is serve with bread and salad rather than stodgy potatoes and vegetables. Plus I was in the mood for some nice chicken. Perfect for hot, hot Houston eating, I reckoned. I made this for some friends to try – Danny, Eric and a Neil Cooks Grigson virgin, Jahnavi.

The turkey, chicken or pheasant is both pulled and devilled because the brown meat (i.e. leg and thigh) and the white meat (i.e. breast) are treated differently, with the brown getting a spicy marinade – the devil! – and the while meat being pulled apart into thready pieces the “thickness of a large quill” and cooked in a buttery-cream sauce presumably to temper the spicy devilled meat. Though this is an old recipe, I could find no information on it, though the inclusion of the mango chutney and the Cayenne pepper suggests an early Indian influence on English cuisine.

The actual devil, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Notice the devil is two-faced – quite literally –

one face in the usual place, the other on his arse

Although there is the big #300 coming up, this recipe marks the mid-way point through the leviathan of a chapter – the meat section. I’ve not done half as many of the strange or tricky ones that I have intended, but expect some when I move to St Louis later this month. I won’t have much of an option soon, as that’s all will be left to do!
Here’s what you do:
First prepare the appropriate fowl for the dish:
Roast turkey, you’ll need a leg (slightly underdone, if possible) and around a pound of cooked breast meat.
For chicken, you can use a boiled or roasted one, but try and undercook it. I did roast chicken and just missed off the final twenty minutes of cooking time.
For pheasants, a brace of either stewed or roasted ones will suffice!

Take the brown meat from the leg bones, keeping the pieces quite large and make some good, deep slashes in the meat. Now make a devil sauce by mixing together a rounded tablespoon each of Dijon mustard and mango chutney, a tablespoon of Worcester sauce or half a teaspoon of anchovy essence (I went with the former), a quarter teaspoon of Cayenne pepper, a little salt and two tablespoons of corn – or some other flavourless – oil. Pour this over the brown meat, making sure you work it into the slashes you made. The easiest way is to do all of this inside one of those zip-lock freezer bags. Let the meat marinade for a few hours, though I wouldn’t leave the chicken more than two as it is the most bland of the three birds here; pheasant or turkey could easily take four or five though, I reckon. Now lay the devilled meat on a baking tray and grill it under a high heat until it turns a delicious dark brown colour. Keep it warm.

Whilst the devil does its work, get on with the pulled part of the dish. Pull the breast meat apart with your fingers and set aside. For the pulled sauce, melt seven ounces of butter in a wide pan and then add half a pint of double cream. Bring to a boil and let it bubble for a couple of minutes before adding the breast meat plus any bits of jelly, then season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Lastly, stir in some chopped parsley. Spoon into the centre of a serving dish or plate and place the devilled bits around the outside.
Eat with bread and a salad.

#298 Pulled and Devilled Turkey, Chicken or Pheasant. Griggers really built this one up, and I have to say that it more than lived up to expectations. The devilled bits were deliciously spicy and salty and were perfectly complimented by the creamy and surprisingly light pulled sauce. Definitely the best recipe from the Poultry section so far, but then what can be bad about spice, butter and cream? That’s the three major food groups, isn’t it? I can’t wait for Christmas now, I’m going to get an extra-large turkey just so this can be made the next day, and it is infinitely better than turkey a sandwich, that’s for sure! 9.5/10.

Pheasant and Celery Broth

There was no way I was throwing out the carcasses of the roast pheasants, so I did my research and came up with this soup which used up all the celery trimmings and unused potatoes from the game chips too. I also found pigeon carcasses in the freezer, so I added them in. The idea here is that you can use any poultry or game bird carcasses as long as you’ve got enough of them. The point is to use whatever left over vegetables you’ve got, so I’ve not given amounts – I even chucked in the leftover cooked peas and beans that hadn’t been eaten right at the end.

You will need…
Carcasses of 2 pheasant, cut up (or 1 chicken, turkey or several smaller game birds, etc, etc)
4 pints of water
Bouquet garni
5 peppercorns
1 teaspoon salt
Stock vegetables/trimmings – i.e. celery, onion, leek etc. all roughly chopped
1 pint of light beef stock
4 ounces of pearl barley
Sliced/cubed broth vegetables – potatoes, carrots, etc
4 or 5 sticks of celery, sliced or cubed

What to do…
Place the carcasses into a large saucepan or stockpot with the water, the bouquet garni, the peppercorns, salt and the stock vegetables. Bring to the boil, cover tightly and simmer for 2 to 2 ½ hours. Strain the stock and return it to the pan and add the barley, beef stock, celery and the other stock vegetables and simmer for a further hour. Whilst you are waiting, pick any meat from the carcasses and put them in with broth at the end. Check the seasoning. Serve with buttered brown bread.

#123 Bread Sauce

Ahhh! The bread sauce. A total necessity to go with roast pheasant (or with any roast game or poultry). You don’t get much a more English accompaniment to a roast dinner than this – though not many seem to have tried it, put off by the soggy bread aspect. Don’t you be put off, reader; the bread completely disintegrates to make a nice smooth sauce. Plus, the sauce is prevented from being at all gluey by the addition of butter or cream (or a mixture of the two). If you’ve never made it, have a go – it’s very easy and can be made ahead of time as long as you cover it in cling film to prevent a skin forming and you reheat it in a bowl over a pan of simmering water.

FYI: This is a very old recipe, bread sauces go back to Medieval times though stock was used as a base more often than milk. Thick sauces were required then because trenchers (plates made of dried bread) would have gone soggy otherwise. Sauces thickened with flour or eggs would not work for that as they would either glue or custard respectively!

OK, the recipe:

Begin by putting ¾ of a pint of whole or Jersey milk into a basin along with a small onion that has been halved and studded with 3 or 4 cloves. Place the basin over simmering water and keep the milk just below boiling point for as long as possible so that it can be infused with the flavours. Whilst that is going on use a food processor to make 4 ounces of white breadcrumbs. Take out the onion and cloves and whisk in the breadcrumbs until it is thick. The suace will thicken up after a few minutes, but if it’s a bit on the thin side make some more breadcrumbs and whisks them in. Season the sauce with mace or nutmeg (or both), salt, white pepper and a pinch of Cayenne pepper. Lastly, enrich the sauce with 1 ½ ounces of butter or 2 tablespoons of cream (or a bit of both). Pour into a ‘sauce tureen’ and add an extra sprinkle of Cayenne, says Griggers.

#123 Bread Sauce – 9/10. I loved this; creamy, rich, but not sickly at all. I’ve made it before, but this definitely the best recipe for it so far. The old fashioned spices really made it work for me.

#122 Roast Pheasant

The Roast Pheasant was obviously the star of the meal – not just because it is a meat we don’t eat enough of, but also from my point of view because to tick it off I had to do lots of accompanying dishes, so some organisation was required. If you want to have a go, you can have as many of the elements as you wish, though try to do as many as possible as they do go so very well together as a dish. The trickiest part was getting hold of pheasant giblets – however, the nice game butcher at the Farmers’ Market got me them when I asked. Make a point of ordering them as they are routinely thrown away. So, the roast pheasant is made up of five individual parts:

1. The pheasants themselves
2. The game chips
3. The giblet gravy
4. The browned crumbs
5. The bread sauce (dealt with separately as #123).

Most of this can be made in advance and reheated, that which is not, is easy and quick to prepare and will not keep you from your guests for very long.

To prepare the brace of pheasants, begin by removing the giblets and setting them aside for later on. Stuff each bird with 2 ounces of butter, plus the liver (make sure you remove the green bitter gall bladder) and a good seasoning with salt and pepper, then lay a thin sheet of back pork fat over them that is large enough to cover the beasts and legs. Secure the back fat by tying string around the pheasants. Place them in a roasting tin and set aside for when you want to roast them – they should be roasted at 190°C for 20 minutes per pound plus an extra 10 minutes. You calculate this for the heaviest bird; in my case 2 pounds, so 50 minutes in all. For the final 10 minutes of cooking, remove the back fat and dust the breasts lightly with seasoned flour. Remove from the oven and allow to rest. I did this just before the guests arrived so that the birds could rest as the leek tarts were cooking. To serve it, I removed the legs, then sliced the breast meat and placed on a bed of watercress.

When the birds were prepared, I started on the gravy: first place the giblets (minus livers) in a saucepan along with a sliced carrot, a sliced onion and a bouquet garni and enough light beef stock to cover everything generously. This was simmered gently for two hours before being finished off later (see below). Next job was to get the game chips sorted. Game chips are basically crisps cut very thinly on a Chinese mandolin using the ridged blade to produce a lattice, or gaufrette, pattern. Peel 1 ½ pounds of firm potatoes. Put the mandolin at its thinnest setting and slice downwards, turning the potato a quarter-turn as you bring it back up to make the next slice to get the lattice effect. Put the chips into a large bowl of water to remove starch and then dry thoroughly. Deep fry in batches at 200°C until golden brown, and drain on kitchen paper and salt them well. This can be re-heated in the oven whenever you need to use them.

Once the starters had been eaten, I put the game chips in the oven and got to work on the buttered crumbs and rest of the giblet gravy. For the crumbs, 3 ounces of stale white breadcrumbs were fried gently for 5 or 10 minutes in 1 ½ ounces of butter until golden. They were placed in a serving dish and kept warm with the game chips. For the gravy, the stock with all the lovely the giblet flavours poured into the roasting tin. The stock was boiled hard and all the nice sticky bits that were found on the bottom of the pan were scraped off. When reduced, a glass of port was added, there was a quick seasoning, and the gravy was strained into a sauce boat.

So that there was a bit of green, also served some peas and green peas, but also Bread Sauce (as instructed) and (#124) Creamed Celery – Grigson says that either celery or mushrooms should be eaten with roast pheasant.

#122 Roast Pheasant – 9.5/10. What a brilliant meal! It was well worth the effort, I cannot fault it in any way really, and will definitely make it again, though maybe not with all the required elements. The pheasant was juicy and just-cooked, the gravy was beautifully rich and luscious, the breadcrumbs provided a nice crunchy texture and the game chips were tasty, some crunchy and some soggy in the gravy and bread sauce. For me, pheasant is the king of the game birds, and after this, it is going to be very difficult to knock it off the top spot.

FYI: to be a bit thrifty, I made soup from the carcasses and left over veg and trimmed celery etc and it was lovely – I’ll put a recipe up for it. I am never chucking out a carcass again!

An Eighteenth Century Feast

I’ve got a bit of catching up to do – this weekend was a Grigson frenzy; 5 in one day!! I had been toying with doing a reasonably elaborate meal – and in particular the roast pheasant that appears in the book. It was meant to be the 100th recipe but I couldn’t get hold of pheasant giblets, but look and ye shall find.

So basing a meal around this I came up with a loose theme – the Eighteenth Century. It was quite a time-consuming set of recipes, but none are particularly complex. Plus I had lots of help from my sous chefs Iain (Butters) and Charlotte (Charmolian). Also, in the times of the credit crunch, the whole meal was actually pretty good value, so it won’t burn a hole in your pocket. Anyways, here it is:

~Starter~

Little Leek Tarts served with a rocket salad (the latter, my own addition, obviously)

~Main Course~

Brace of Roasted Pheasants

Served with: Game chips, green vegetables, buttered crumbs and a rich giblet gravy

Accompanied by: Creamed celery and bread sauce

~Dessert~

Whim-Wham

Not a mean feat, but we started well ahead of time so that we never seemed rushed, plus much of this could be made in advance. Paddy, Kate and Pete came over, so there were no heirs and graces and if anything did go wrong it wouldn’t matter (nothing did!). So if you fancy making any elements of this meal, I shall naturally be adding the recipes alongside any wee factoids I may find over the next couple of days.

#44 English Game Pie, #45 Cumberland Sauce

I invited Clive from work to help me finish off the last of the game I got from Bury Market last night in the form of (#44) English Game Pie. Looking through the ‘Stuffing, Sauces and Preserves’ chapter of English Food for something to go with game, I found (#44) Cumberland sauce. I’ve never had it before, and had no idea what it was. Everything was straight-forward, though the pie had lots of preparation. Anyways, here’s what I did…

The day before I simmered a brace of pheasants and a pigeon (essentially everything I had!) in a very light chicken stock along with a good seasoning and a bouquet garnei of parsley, bay leaves and thyme springs. Jane recommends between 2 and 4 birds. It took an hour and a half for the meat to become tender enough for me to pull the meat from the bone with relative ease. I cut the meat into chunks and kept them in a sealed tub topped up with the stock so it didn’t dry out over night and reserved the remaining stock.

Next day I arranged the meat in one large dish, and a smaller, as I made an extra one for my PhD supervisor too. Then hard-boiled and quartered three eggs and tucked them between the pieces of meat along with small rolls of grilled bacon (though not in yours Jason, don’t worry!), and chopped parsley. Next, I fried a large onion and about 8 ounces of mushrooms in 2 ounces of butter until they were golden. A tablespoon of flour was mixed in to the mushrooms and onions and stirred around so that the butter got absorbed, and then stock was added a ladelful at a time until a thick sauce had developed – about the thickness of double cream. Make sure the sauce is seasoned very well. It was simmered for about 5 minutes, and I added extra stock whenever the sauce thickened too much. The sauce was poured over the meat and then a puff pastry covered the pies. The large pie was cooked at 200 degrees for 20 minutes and then the oven was turned down to 170 for a final ten.

The Cumberland sauce was very easy. Make sure you make it in advance as it should be served cold. Whisk together a jar of redcurrant jelly and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard in a pan over a low heat. Meanwhile blanch the thinly pared peel of a lemon and an orange that have been cut into matchsticks for 5 minutes, then drain. Once the jelly has melted, add the peel, the juice of the two fruits, 5 tablespoons of port, plenty of black pepper and salt and ground ginger to taste (I used a scant teaspoon). Pour into sauce boat. Easy peasy.

FYI: Cumberland sauce is, in fact, German – the recipe was brought over with the House of Hanover in the late Eighteenth Century, and is named after George IV who was the Duke of Cumberland.

#43 English Game Pie – 10/10. This is my first full point dish I think! It was absoluely delicious. Although I’d never had it, there was something very familiar and comforting about it. It was also, for me, the epitome of English Food. The meat was beautifully tender, and he sauce had turned into a delicious gravy and the salty bacon added an extra dimension. The full flavour of the pheasant and pigeon coped very well with the rich Cumberland sauce…

#44 Cumberland Sauce – 8/10. A perfect complement to the game. Although it was very rich and sweet, the savory additions such as the pepper and mustard allowed you to add loads. All in all a fantastic meal!

Bury Market

Greg and I went to Bury Market for the day on Saturday. I’m apologising in advance for the lack of photos. We both forgot to take them because we were so cold. I managed to get hold of some ingredients for some more recipes,along with some nice produce too. The cheese stall there is one of the best you’ll ever go to; Greg and I scoffed a load of it last night night – Yorkshire Blue, a nice young goat’s cheese, and a lovely mature farmhouse cheddar. It shits on anything you can get in a supermarket, no matter how many ‘Extra special’ stickers, or whatever they put on them. I also got some game – pigeon and pheasant – so hopefully there’ll be some nice things coming my way! I love pheasant, but have never had pigeon – I once tried to cook one by roasting it, and it was so tough I couldn’t eat it. The Grigson says to never roast a pigeon. I have seen the error of my ways.

I also got myself a black pudding – a must if you go to Bury, as it is the place where the best are made. I also got white pudding, which I’ve never had before. I’m saving them for when I have NO visitors!