5.4 Cured Meats – Completed!

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 Pork and 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.

#212 Bradenham Ham8.5/10

#150 How To Cure Meat in Brine 8/10

#151 To Cook Salt Pork and Hams 1: To Eat Hot 7/10

#265 To Cook Salt Pork and Hams 2: To Eat Cold 7.5/10

#446 Lincolnshire Chine7/10

#441 Smoking Meat10/10

#161 Boiled Beef and Dumplings 8/10

#375 Boiled Silverside of Beef 8/10

#202 Pressed Beef 8.5/10

#228 Spiced Salt Beef8.5/10

#258 Boiled Ox Tongue 1: To Serve Cold 5/10

#331 Boiled Ox Tongue 2: To Serve Hot8.5/10

#205 Potted Tongue 4/10

#434 To Pot Ham with Chicken7/10

#366 A Fine Way to Pot a Tongue 9/10

#296 Tongue and Mushroom Crumble 6.5/10

#292 Isle of Man Salt Duck7/10

[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.

[2] Is anyone interested except me?

#446 Lincolnshire Chine

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.

5.7 Meat Pies & Puddings – Completed!

With finally cooking recipe #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye, I have completed the Meat Pies & Puddings section of the Meat, Poultry & Game chapter of English Food by Jane Grigson.

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.

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.’

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 18^th and 19^th 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 #43 English 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.

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.

There were some very, very good recipes: #43 English Game Pie (hot, with puff pastry) and #369 Game, Chicken or Rabbit Pie (cold, with hot water pastry)both scored full marks, and the excellent potato-topped #416 Cumbrian Tatie Pot narrowly missed out with a score of 9.5/10. Then, #320 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pie and its pudding equivalent (#200) both scored 9/10.

I have to give a special mention to the showstopping pyes from Hannah Glasse: #445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye being possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever made in my life.

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie was the only disappointing one really.

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.

The section scored a mean of 8.11/10, the second-highest score so far (9.1 Stuffings being 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.

#70 Cornish Pasty 8/10

#320 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pie 9/10

#129 Dartmouth Pie 7.5/10

#233 Devonshire Squab Pie 6/10

#416 Cumbrian Tatie Pot 9.5/10

#388 Sweet Lamb Pie from Westmorland 8/10

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie 5/10

#303 Cornish Charter Pie 8.5/10

#209 Chicken and Leek Pie from Wales 7/10

#324 Rabbit Pie 8/10

#43 English Game Pie 10/10

#214 Venison (or Game) Pie or Pasty 7.5/10

#282 Raised Pies n/a

#283 Jellied Stock n/a

#312 Pork Pie Filling 8/10

#284 Veal, Ham and Egg Pie 8.5/10

#403 Raised Mutton Pies 8/10

#369 Game, Chicken or Rabbit Pie 10/10

#445 To Make a Yorkshire Christmas Pye (Part 1 & Part 2) ?/10

#322 To Make a Goose Pye 8.5/10

#200 Steak, Kidney and Oyster Pudding 9/10

#441 Smoking Meat

Hello folks! Did you know its been almost a year since I wrote my last post proper on the blog? I do apologise; I’m down to the final ten recipes and each one has been eluding me in one way or another – that is until now. In fact I’ve lined up a few so that there will be a steady stream of posts for the remainder of the year.

This one, oddly, is not really a recipe because smoking meat, says Jane, ‘is something that few people care to undertake now’, and rather than providing us with a method, advises us against having a go; that is, unless you have ‘an experienced friend to guide.’¹

My intentions were to have a go at constructing my own cold-smoker and installing it my backyard, but I never seemed to have the time or wherewithal, then I moved to an apartment and assumed it just wasn’t going to happen. However, home smoking has moved on a bit since Jane’s day, and it can be both simple and inexpensive simply, as I found when I stumbled upon the ProQ Eco Smoker Box online; essentially a cardboard box with metal shelves. I immediately purchased one along with some oak wood dust. Exciting times.

I was soon eager to be tasting some proper home-cured-and-smoked foods that would preserve whatever meat I decided to cure properly: today, smoking is purely ‘cosmetic’¹ because we like the flavour, but our refrigerators are doing the preserving for us these days. (For the same reason, less salt is used in the curing process too.) Indeed, the whole process of smoking is sidestepped; many ‘smoked’ meats in today’s supermarkets are merely injected with a woodsmoke ‘flavouring’, a far cry from what our recent ancestors were tucking into.

When smoking was done at home, a smokehouse was not typically used. The housewife of a medieval home hung her salt pork in the rafters above the central chimney. Then, when stone chimneys were built in dwellings, a recess was made so that hams would benefit from a good smoking with being cooked. According to Dorothy Hartley, these recesses are discovered in old houses and are ‘often mistaken for “priest-holes”’.² In other buildings an external wooden hatch was built in the highest section of the chimney so that year’s hams could safely cold smoke. Hartley also gives us a lovely illustration of a home-made smoker made from a hogshead, which essentially works exactly like the ProQ smoker I bought. Very pleasing.

Illustration from *Food in England* (1954) by Dorothy Hartley

If you want to try and smoke your own meat you need to cure it first, and there are many examples of that in the blog/book. However, I decided upon making my own smoked bacon, which I could either fry in rashers or cook a large piece as an accompaniment to #374 Pease Pudding or in a nice #98 Cawl. Oddly, there is no recipe for a bacon cure in English Food, so I had to look to others for help.

For the bacon I used a 2 kilogram piece of pork belly because it looked like it would fit just right in my smoker. I adapted a recipe given in River Cottage Handbook No.13: Curing & Smoking by Steven Lamb.³ I changed a few things: I used dark brown sugar and the tried-and-tested Jane Grigson cure combo of crushed juniper berries, allspice berries and black peppercorns, just like one of my favourite recipes #228 Spiced Salt Beef, though I toned down the amount of spice somewhat. I avoided using nitrates and I’m sure Jane would agree with me on that today, even though she used ample amounts of it in her Cured Meat recipes.

For a 2 kg piece of pork belly (skin on and bone in):

750 g fine sea salt

750 g soft dark brown sugar

2 heaped tsp each juniper and allspice berries, crushed

1 tbs black peppercorns, crushed

6 or 7 bay leaves, crushed or roughly chopped

Mix all of the cure ingredients together, then scatter a handful of the mix over the base of a container large enough to fit your piece of pork, then scatter a second handful over the pork.

Now rub the mix into the underside, skin and edges of the pork, making sure you work it into any holes or flaps in the meat.

Cover and leave in a cool place – a larder or fridge – for 24 hours.

Next day lift the pork out of the container and pour away the liquid brine, then repeat what you did yesterday: one handful of cure beneath and another on top of the meat and rub in.

Repeat this over the next 5 or 6 days – i.e. until you have run out of cure mix – then rinse away any spices under the tap, pat dry with a clean cloth or kitchen paper and rub in a little malt vinegar all over the meat.

Use two hooks to hang your meat in a cool airy place for 2 weeks – I used my garage which is very cool and dry, especially in the late winter/early spring here in the UK.

Now all you need to do is smoke it! Rather than type the process, I thought it quicker and easier if I showed you what I did next:

#441 Smoking Meat. Not a recipe, but it has forced me to dry cure and smoke my own meat, and my goodness, how delicious it is! You really should try it yourself – the Lamb-Grigson hybrid recipe worked like a dream and the smoker gave off so little smoke I doubt neighbours would notice it ticking away. The salt, butter and cheese worked a treat too. 10/10.

References:

1. Grigson, J. English Food. (Penguin, 1992).

2. Hartley, D. Food in England. (Little, Brown & Company, 1954).

3. Lamb, S. River Cottage Handbook No.13: Curing & Smoking. (Bloomsbury, 2014).

#434 To Pot Ham with Chicken

This is a fairly straight-forward recipe from the book that I have only just got around to making as I have never had a situation where I had left over ham and chicken at the same time! In fact, I ran out of patience with myself and manufactured the situation.

This recipe is one of several taken from Elizabeth Raffauld’s 1769 classic The Experienced English Housekeeper. Back then, and right up to the early 20th Century, in more well-to-do houses, cold roast meats were served up for luncheon. The meat was left over from the previous evening’s roast. If the meats had to be kept longer, or eked out, they would be potted, i.e. made into a pâté. Follow this link to see all the potted meat & fish recipes cooked thus far (this is the tenth!).

Jane only gives an abridged version of the receipt, but here it is in full:

Take as much lean of a boiled ham as you please and half the quantity of fat. Cut it as thin as possible, beat it very fine in a mortar with a little oiled butter, beaten mace, pepper and salt, put part of it in a china pot. Then beat the white part of a fowl with a very little seasoning, it is to qualify the ham. Put a lay of chicken, then one of ham, then chicken at the top, press hard down, and when it is cold pour clarified butter over it. When you send it to the table cut out a thin slice in the form of half a diamond and lay it round the edge of your pot.

Jane also updates the recipe: she allows us to use an electric food processor, and she uses already ground mace. She also uses clarified butter to make the pâté, not just to seal it.

She also suggests letting it sit for a few days before eating it, so that the flavours can develop.

If you’ve never potted your own meat or fish, this recipe is a good place to start. In fact, it more of a system than a recipe, and can be adapted easily for other meats. I’d just add that a smoked ham would work best here – I used a smoked ham hock – and that you should over-season everything ever-so-slightly. If you are using cold meats, add a tablespoon or two of boiling water when blending to produce a nice smooth paste.

At Christmastime, you’re more likely to have left over turkey than chicken and I think it would work just as well.

#434 To Pot Ham with Chicken. Rather a subtle one this one, but no worse for it. Many of the other recipes are quite strongly flavoured, so this is a good introduction. The combination of salty ham and bland chicken is a good one, and it was great spread on toast with a little medlar jelly. As mentioned above, a great way to use up left-over meat at Christmastime. 7/10

5.3: Pork – Completed!

Pigs and pork were – and still are – fundamental to life in Britain, Europe and many other places around the world. So easy they are to look after, and so unchoosy they are in what they eat, that most households kept a pig of their own for food. The family pig would be fed kitchen and table scraps and garden waste, quickly fattening ready for slaughter in early winter.

So dependent were people upon pork, that when folk moved into the cities, they brought with them their pigs to rear. There wasn’t enough space for absolutely everyone to keep a pig, many simply had to get their fix of pork from one of the many city piggeries.

Mediaeval pig slaugher

Pigs were often let out of their pens to have a good old rummage around the vicinity of the household, gobbling up scraps of food and other garbage; very useful in a time when waste wasn’t collected up and taken away like it is today. Inevitably, pigs escaped, and they could be seen on the city streets eating anything and everything they came across. It became a huge problem – they didn’t just eat rotting food, but also human excrement from gutters, as well as the blood and pus collected in barber-surgeons’ buckets. They became feral and ferocious, with reports of errant hogs eating babies! London’s Shepherd’s Bush was particularly overrun.

Saint Anthony

This problem was compounded by the fact that in many cities, pigs came under the protection of St Anthony, Patron Saint of pigs and swineherds. If you were unlucky enough to live in a city where Antonine monks also dwelled, it must have felt it was the pigs’ city not yours. In many households, the runt of the family pig’s litter was named St Anthony’s pig.

It didn’t take people long to realise that if pigs were eating diseased and rotten matter, then the pork from the pigs that we ate in turn would be very poor. Indeed, pork was teeming with parasites such as tapeworm and trichinosis. Parasites love pigs, it seems, and even with our modern hyper-strict food regulations, we have only recently been able to sell pork that can be cooked a little underdone safely.

When Jane wrote English Food in the 1970s, she complained bitterly of the state of pork products in the UK; sludgy sausages made from mechanically-retrieved meat and inert rusk, and grey pork pies were (and still are) standard fayre. However, these foods can be some of the most delicious produce in Britain, and when made properly, we excel. Luckily there are small-scale local butchers everywhere who make their own sausages and pork pies to a high standard, we just have to root them out like any self-respecting hog would.

Making Cumblerland Sausage

Although as a nation we consume a lot of pork, there are just eight recipes in the Porksection of the Meat, Poultry and Game chapter of the book, but this is not because Jane was shirking her responsibilities but because most of the pork we consume is in pie form is cured in some way, therefore most porcine recipes appear in other sections of the book. The mean score for the section is an impressive 8.1 – the second highest score so far – her recipe for #415 Cumberland Sausage is sublime and scored full marks from me, and she introduced me to the delights of #373 Faggots and #336 Brawn.

Wrapping faggots in pig’s caul

Jane managed to cover quite a lot of ground in just eight recipes, but it did mean that a few were missed out. If the book were to be reprinted, I’d like to see a few more cuts represented; pork belly, hand of pork, cheeks, chitterlings and pigs’ ears don’t get the look-in they deserve. What’s more, there are no recipes for sausage casserole, pork in cider, pulled pork (a British, not a U.S., invention!), Scotch eggs, pork scratchings, hog’s pudding or a good quality country pâté such as a nice pâté de campagne.

The gruesome initial step of brawn-making

As mentioned already, this section is a very high scorer with a mean score of 8.1 (and a median and mode of 7.5 and 7 respectively). There were no disasters, the lowest score being a 7, with classics such as #415 Cumberland Sausage (which scored full points), #290 Roast Pork with Crackling and #82 Toad-in-the-Hole driving up the final mark.

As usual I have listed the recipes ordered as they appear in the book, along with the scores I gave them and hyperlinks to the original posts.

#290 Roast Pork with Crackling and Baked Apples 9/10

#433 Stuffed Pork Tenderloin 7/10

#415 Cumberland Sausage 10/10

#82 Toad-in-the-Hole 9/10

#35 White Puddings 7/10

#34 Black Puddings 8/10

#373 Faggots and Peas 7.5/10

#336 Brawn or Headcheese 7/10

#433 Stuffed Pork Tenderloin

I hardly ever buy or eat prime cuts these days, going instead for the underused bits and bobs of cows, sheep and pigs, so it’s nice to have the excuse to indulge myself for this blog entry. The tenderloin is the fillet cut of a pig and runs down the length of the spine. These fillet cuts are very tender because the muscle controls the posture of the animal and is not used in high stress activities such as locomotion, toughening it up.

The pork tenderloin is less used in English cookery compared to its cow and sheep equivalents, but I think it is the best value of the three, they are pretty substantial, cheaper by the pound and not as prone to drying out in the cooking process these days now that British pork can officially be served medium.

Jane reckons that the best way to eat this cut is to roast or braise it, so here is her recipe which also involves ham and bacon! A porky trinity and no mistake. There’s also the unusual inclusion of crumbly Lancashire cheese. Pork, ham, bacon and cheese; that’s all of the major food groups, right?

Take two pork tenderloins and trim away any fat and sinew with a sharp knife, should there be any, then slit them lengthways, but not all the way through, so that you can open them out. Now beat them with a tenderiser or a rolling pin until they are much wider and flatter.

Next prepare the ingredients for the stuffing: take two large slices of ham and shred them finely, thinly slice three ounces of Lancashire cheese, then blanch eight sage leaves in boiling water for one minute, then half them. If you prefer, you could strip some thyme leaves and use those instead of the thyme, the bonus there being that no blanching is required.

Scatter the two opened tenderloins with the ham, then the cheese and sage (or thyme). Close and then tie with string and brown them quickly in a little butter.

Now, slice two large onions and scatter them on the base of an ovenproof dish and lie the tenderloins on top. Adorn them with two rashers of streaky bacon each, then pour over a quarter of a pint of brown sherry, Madeira or port.

Roast for 45 minutes at 190C.

Remove the tenderloins and keep them warm. Strain the juices and reduce them in a pan if you wish – I found there was no need, but it did need a seasoning with salt and pepper.

Remove the string from the tenderloins and serve immediately with the sauce and some seasonal vegetables.

#433 Stuffed Pork Tenderloins. Well this was a good one, though I did mess up a little bit as I forgot to beat out the tenderloins, and to tie them, AND to brown them in butter. Nevertheless, it was still delicious, though a little dry (probably because they weren’t tied up). Oh well, I can’t be expected to be perfect all the time, now can I? I’d certainly recommend you give it a go, though I’d check them after 30-35 minutes to see if they are done. The sauce – like most of Jane’s – was delicious. I give it a solid 7/10.

#415 Cumberland Sausage

Unlike other sausages, Cumberland sausages are not made into links, but are allowed to form large coils. You can buy whole coils to fry or bake for a family dinner, or buy lengths of it. In Richard Woodall’s butcher shop in Waberthwaite, he would measure out yards of sausage using two drawing pins stuck on his counter. Amazingly the shop is still going strong over eight generations!

For me, the Cumberland is the quintessential English sausage; highly seasoned with salt, black pepper, herbs and spices. It shouldn’t have much else added to it, other than a little rusk or bread to soak up the fat. They have been made like this for centuries. Indeed, all sausages were made as one long coiled piece, until the addition of links was introduced in the early seventeenth century. The meat should be coarsely chopped or minced, not like your typical bizarre and homogenous cheap supermarket sausages that are ‘a bland, pink disgrace’, as Jane puts it.

A Cumberland ring is fried or baked, often secured in shape with two skewers before cooking. It is commonly served as part of a breakfast. Jane mentions that at Rothay Manor, it is served with bacon, tomato, fried egg on fried bread, apple, black pudding and mushrooms; surely the breakfast of champions! It can be served with mashed potatoes and peas, or with a stew of green lentils and bacon cooked in red wine.

To make sausages, you need some natural sausage casings, which you can buy very cheaply from any butcher who makes his own sausages. Often he’ll give you them for free. They are very easy to prepare. All you need to do is soak the in cold water for an hour to remove any salt, find an end (this is quite tricky, as they are very long and not too dissimilar to tapeworms!) and carefully fit a funnel into it to rinse out the insides of the skins with more cold water. Once the water as run all the way through, the skins are ready to use, so pop them in the fridge until needed. Any unused skins can be kept in the fridge for four weeks. For these sausages you’ll need hog casings.

First of all, prepare your meat ready for the mincer by cutting the following into strips: one pound of boned shoulder of pork, 6 ounces of pork back fat and half (yes, half!) a rasher of smoked bacon.

Pass all of these through the mincer using the coarse blade, then again using the medium blade. (I have no medium blade, so just used the coarse one again.)

Using your hands, mix all of these together in a bowl along with an ounce of white breadcrumbsand a quarter teaspoon each of ground nutmegand mace. Season with salt and pepper. I used a teaspoon of salt in all and was pretty heavy on the pepper too. Curiously, Jane does not add any herbs to the mixture, but if you wanted to, dried sage or marjoram are typical.

Now it is time for the fun and games: filling the sausage skins. To do this, I used the sausage stuffer attachment for my Kitchen Aid. The amount of sausagemeat made here easily filled a single hog casing (each one is at least 3 yards/metres long, I reckon).

Prepare the sausage skins as described above. Take one and slide it over the funnel of the stuffer, tying a knot in the end. Now feed the sausagemeat through the machine and into the casings. Here, you need to grasp the sausage as it comes out so that it fills the skin properly making no major air bubbles. This is tricky to do if you are simultaneously feeding the machine with sausagemeat, so an extra pair of hands will come in useful.

As you make more and more sausage, let it land upon a plate to form the characteristic coil. When all the meat has been stuffed into the skin, cut and knot it, leaving some slack for expansion when cooking. Chill the sausage overnight (which I forgot to do, in my eagerness, making it rise up in the centre when in the oven).

Now you can fry the sausage in a pan, turning it over at half time. Alternatively, bake in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes at 180⁰C, pricking the skin before it goes in. Of course, you don’t have to cook the whole thing at once; you can cut lengths off it and fry those up instead.

#415 Cumberland Sausage. This was absolutely delicious, and quite simply the best sausage I have ever eaten! With something simple like this, it is all in the seasoning and the half-rasher of bacon worked wonders in that department. Who’d have thunk it, a real bona fide secret ingredient!? This, along with the freshly-ground pepper and the warming mace and nutmeg, made such a winning combination, that I have been making vast amounts of sausages, sometimes for frying up, or sometimes for sausage rolls. I cannot gush any more than this: 10/10

#360 Apple Sauce I

This is the third of four different apple sauces in English Food. I have had to wait to cook this one as it requires a quince.

Quince are an ancient fruit, related to apples and pears, that is not seen around too much these days as they have fallen out of favour somewhat and also have a very short season. They have also suffered because of the terrible wet weather we’ve had this year.

Apple sauce should not be reserved just for roast pork, by the way, use it with sausages, black pudding, chicken, turkey, goose or game. It is a surprisingly versatile condiment.

Chop up 8 ounces of Bramley’s seedling apples (those in North America, use Mackintosh apples) and slice one ‘small or moderate quince’. You don’t need to peel or core the fruit, but I would scrub off the naturally-occurring fluff from the skin of the quince, should it have some. Place in a pan along with ¼ pint of water, a heaped tablespoon of sugar (omit if using Mackintosh apples) and a pared strip of lemon peel. Cover and simmer until a puply, then pass through a sieve or mouli-legumes to remove peel &c.

Put back on the heat and stir until it thickens up; you don’t want it ‘sloppy and wet’ as Griggers says. Stir in one ounce of butter and give the finished sauce a healthy seasoning of black pepper.

#360 Apple Sauce I. I liked this one very much and ate it with some rabbit which it complemented very well. The quince mellowed the Bramley’s, making them much less tart. Tres bon. 7.5/10.

#336 Brawn or Headcheese

At Christmas time, be careful of your fame,

See the old tenant’s table did the same;

Then if you would send up the brawner head,

Sweet rosemary and bays around it spread.

William King, Art of Cookery 1709

Brawn, which is also known as headcheese or pork cheese, is essentially a terrine made from the head meat of a pig. All European countries have their recipes for it and appeared sometime during the Middle Ages as a peasant food where the head would be boiled to make a soup. Not that many people seem to eat brawn anymore in Britain, but it seems pretty popular still in America, maybe because of the influence of so many European countries there.

Sports Fan: Queen Elizabeth I

In 1571 Queen Elizabeth I breakfasted on “brawn, mustard and malmsey” on one of her Twelfth Days, so it had obviously reached higher status since its invention. It might interest you to know that after her breakfast in the hall, she watched some hounds kill a fox and a cat beneath the fire for sport and later, during the Twelfth Night play, a fox was let loose so that it could be chased by dogs.

The word headcheese baffled me a little. Where does it come from? Obviously, brawn is nothing like cheese in appearance or taste, but then I found this recipe from The Compleat City and Country Cook by Charles Carter, dating back to 1732 which seems to solve the mystery:

A Hog’s Head Cheese Fashion.

You must bone it and lay it to cleanse twenty-four Hours in Water and Salt, and scrape it well and white; lay Salt on the Inside, to the Thickness of a Crown-piece and boil it very tender; then lay it in a Cheese-Press, cover it with a Cloth, and when cold it will be like a Cheese; you may souse it.

Brawn is a great thing to make ahead of time for a meal, but beware you don’t make it too soon; most of the references I found to headcheese concerned food poisoning. The problem with jellied stocks is that they are the perfect food for microbes; indeed we essentially use stock in the laboratory to grow many microbes. You don’t want to use brawn, or any kind of stock more than three days since it was last boiled.

First of all you need to order half a pig’s head from the butcher, you want the tongue too, but not the brains. Ask him to chop the head into two or three pieces for you (I learned my lesson when attempting to chop that lamb’s head in twain with a now blunt meat-cleaver and a hammer a month or two ago). Whilst you are there get yourself two good lengthy pig’s trotters and ask him to chop those in two aswell. Lastly, you need a pound of shin of beef with the shin bone too.

Bundle your meaty horde back home and if you can put the pig bits (not the cow bits) in the brine tub for a day, or at least an evening. See this post right here if you want to try and make your own brine.

Place the meat in a large stockpot, cover with water and slowly bring to a boil. This slow rate of temperature increase is important in order to achieve a nice, clear jelly because the albumin proteins are let out from the meat at a steady rate, which becomes grey scum that floats to the top. Fast boiling makes a murky, grey stock. Skim the grey scum until it runs white and then add the stock vegetables and aromatics: 2 chopped cloves of garlic, a good sized bouquet garni, 10 black peppercorns, 2 tablespoons of red or white wine vinegar, a teaspoon of salt, 2 onions that have both been studded with 2 cloves, 2 quartered peeled carrots and 2 leeks that have been split lengthways. Phew! Bring back to the boil, then cover and simmer very gently for 2 to 2 ½ hours.

When the meat is tender and can be parted from the bones, extract the head and get on with the task of rifling through the head to find all the meat. When cooked, this is not the gory task it may sound. Leave the stock simmering as you do this, adding back any bones to the pot as go along. You should find a good amount of meat with a good variety of colours and textures. Chop the meat into good-sized pieces and cover, adding a ladleful of stock so they don’t dry out.

Strain the stock through a sieve lined with muslin into another pan and reduce the stock to concentrate both the flavour and the gelatine extracted from the bones. Put the meat back in the pan with the stock and simmer for 20 minutes. Season with more salt, if required, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Meanwhile boil three eggs and chop some parsley, chives and chervil.

Now it is time to assemble the whole thing. Start by lining a loaf tin with some cling film – you don’t have to do this step, but it will make it easier when it comes to turning out the brawn onto a serving plate. Next, spoon in stock and meat until you have filled up to just under half way.

You need a good balance of jelly and meat, our Grigson says: ‘you don’t want the brawn to look mean. On the other hand, if the meat is too solidly packed, the brawn becomes too heavy to be enjoyable.’ Sprinkle in half the herbs and line up your hard-boiled eggs.

Sprinkle over the remainder of the herbs and fill the tin with more stock and meat. Let it cool and then set it fully in the fridge, covered with more cling film. When it is time to serve the brawn, turn it out onto a serving plate and press onto it brown, toasted breadcrumbs.

Serve with wholemeal or rye bread and butter, mustard and salad. Alternatively, swap the bread and butter for some mashed potatoes. I went with the bread option as I couldn’t imagine cold jellied meat with mashed potatoes to be in any way delicious.

#336 Brawn or Headcheese. I have to admit when I turned it out onto the plate it looked like a giant slab of dog food. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The meat was very flavourful and tender and the jelly, very soft, was very nicely flavoured with the infused flavour of the herbs. As much as I enjoyed it, I’d much prefer a nice simple paté as a starter, nevertheless, I reckon it deserves 7/10.