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?

#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

#391 Soft Roe Paste

The last of three recipes that use mackerel or herring roes.

There are two types of roe: hard and soft. The former comes from female fish and contains the egg, and the latter, sometimes called melts, are from the male fish and contain the sperm. This recipe, just like the other two, use soft roes. Eating the sperm sac of a fish might appear to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure, but they are tasty and can be picked up very cheaply at the fishmongers. Alternatively, when buying mackerel or herring, you can ask the fishmonger to keep behind any roes that might be present as he scales and guts them. At home, simply sequester them in a freezer bag until you have for a recipe. They are an acquired taste because they are very slightly bitter and so they lend themselves to creamy and buttery ingredients (for example see #159 Creamed Roe Loaves).

Jane makes a point for this recipe to try and buy nice neat matching pairs of roes, rather than just the cast offs that ‘have been flung on to a separate tray’. I would have thought that this recipe would be perfect for the roes that are so carelessly thrown onto the roe tray. Not that this happens anymore – because they are not so popular these days, you almost always have to buy frozen packs.

This recipe just shows how the British just loved to pot things: meat, fish, cheese. It can all be potted and preserved for a later date. In this case the roe paste will only last maybe 4 or 5 days in the fridge, but that’s a lot longer than raw roes would last.

To make your roe paste, first fry 7 ounces of soft herring or mackerel roes in an ounce of butter, then, Jane says, to pass them through a sieve.

This was a tricky task, which was made much easier by the utilisation of my mouli-legumes. Beat the warm roes into 6 ounces of softened butter. Jane recommends using slightly salted butter, but I have to say, I prefer normal, salted, butter; after all you’ll only add more salt when it comes to seasoning later!

Next, mix in a tablespoon of double cream, then season with salt, Cayenne pepper and lemon juice. Finally add a little chopped parsley.

‘Serve chilled, but not chilled to hardness, with thin toast or baked sliced of bread.’

#391Soft Roe Paste. I liked this paste, the bitter flavour of the roes was cut with the lemon, cream and parsley whilst still maintaining the roe flavour. However, it didn’t exactly make me do backflips. Good, but not great, and nowhere near the dizzy height of previous fishy pastes like #378 Elizabeth David’s Potted Crab. 5.5/10.

#366 A Fine Way to Pot a Tongue

Jane Grigson gives this recipe no introduction or explanation, but one can tell from the title that this was an old recipe. It consists of a tongue inside a boned chicken that covered in butter and baked. After a quick sift through the cookbooks, I found that it is adapted from a recipe of Hannah Glasse’s that appears in the 1774 book The Art of Cookery, and the original is a little more ostentatious:

‘Take a dried tongue, boil it till it is tender, the peel it; take a large fowl, bone it; a goose, and bone it…Put the tongue into the fowl; then season the goose, and fill the goose with the fowl and tongue, and the goose will look as if whole. Lay it in a pan that will just hold it, melt fresh butter enough to cover it, send it to the oven, and bake it an hour and a half…this will keep a great while, eats fine, and looks beautiful. When you cut it, it must be cut cross-ways down through, and looks very pretty…’

It resembles recipe #322To Make a Goose Pye.

Here’s Jane’s recipe (in my words):

First of all you need to tackle your pickled ox tongue – you can buy these from your butcher pretty cheaply as I did this time, but you might want to have a go. I usually do this but the butcher didn’t have any fresh (which is understandable seeing as very few people buy them nowadays). Have a look at the post #150 How to Cure Meat in Brine for some guidance on this. Once pickled, you need to poach your tongue for 2 to 3 hours and then peel it. You don’t need to press it or anything, but see #258 Boiled Ox Tongue: To Serve Coldand #331 Boiled Ox Tongue: To Serve Hotfor more information on this.

Next, bone a 5 to 7 pound chicken. This isn’t as difficult as you think. I’ve given instructions already on how to do this in the post #322 To Make a Goose Pye. In fact this is easier because the chicken can be first split down the back with poultry shears or a hefty knife. Of course, you could ask your butcher to do it – you might have to flutter your eyelashes a little though!

Now trim your tongue, cutting off the root to remove gristle and the front portion of the tongue so that it will fit snugly within the cavity of the bird.

Before you fit it, make a spice mix from the following: a teaspoon each of ground black pepper, ground mace and ground cloves plus ½ a freshly-grated nutmeg and a level dessert spoon of sea salt.

Flip the bird over with the cut side facing you and rub in around two-thirds of the spice mix into the cavity, then place the tongue inside and wrap it in the chicken. Quickly but carefully turn the bird over to produce a surprisingly normal-looking chicken. Pop it into a close-fitting ovenproof casserole dish and rub in the remainder of the spices.

Now get on with gently melting the butter – the amount you need will depend upon how well the chicken fits into its pot. I needed four 250g packets of butter in all – that’s 2 ¼ pounds approximately. Once melted, pour it over the chicken so that it just covers it.

Pop on a lid and bake at 200⁰C (400⁰F); if your casserole is very full, as mine was, it’s a good idea to put a roasting tin on the floor of the oven as the butter will bubble hard. When it is bubbling and boiling, turn the heat down to 180⁰C (350⁰C) and bake until cooked through. After 45 minutes see if the chicken is cooked: use either a meat thermometer (the meat should be a temperature of 73⁰C, that’s 163⁰F) or a skewer and check for any pink juices. If it’s not quite done, bake for another 10 minutes before checking again.

When cooked, gingerly take the chicken out so it can drain on a rack and pour the butter and meat juices into a bowl. Let everything cool before boiling the butter up in a pan – however, make sure none of the juices go in. Put the chicken back in its pot and tip over the butter.

You need to leave chicken for at least 36 hours before slicing it and eating with wholemeal bread spread with the spiced butter. If you want to leave it longer than 36 hours, add more butter to fully cover the chicken.

#366 A Fine Way to Pot a Tongue… and what a fine way it was indeed! The tongue was salty and tender with blander spiced chicken that actually balanced it very well. The spiced butter was unbelievably tasty. Three cheers for Hannah Glasse! 9/10

#358 Bloater Paste

The thought of eating fish paste may make people shudder, people would think differently if this recipe were named smoked fish pâté, I feel. However we are not French so fish paste it remains. Perhaps people think back to those nasty cheap homogenised pots of meat and fish paste from their childhood. If you make your own it is a very different creature and I am sure this one will be same.

The other thing that may put one off from this recipe is the name of the fish in question – the bloater. It’s not the most delicious sounding fish is it? There have been several bloater recipes and this is the final one, but if you are not in the know a bloater is in fact a cured herring. The cure is very similar to that of the kipper and the only real difference is that bloaters are cured completely whole giving them a more gamy flavour than a kipper. Because they are intact they bloat as they smoke, hence the name.

This is a nice straight-forward easy affair. Start by gutting your bloaters, removing any membranes from the cavity. I had just one, but was lucky to find two nice fat roes inside within so I reserved those and tossed the rest of the innards in the bin.

Pour boiling water over your fish and roes; the skin will curl and the body of the fish will noticeably tense and plump up. Leave for around 10 minutes to poach in the water. Remove the skin and flake the flesh, being careful to pick out any bones, don’t worry too much about the very thin hair bones, they will not be noticed.

Don’t forget to fish out the roes, should you have any. Weigh the fish and place in a food processor along with its equal weight in softened butter. Whizz up until you have a spreadable consistency you like. Season with ground black pepper, lemon juice and a little salt. Serve with hot toast.

You get quite a lot of paste – I got two 250 ml pots from just the one bloater. Not bad at all I reckon.

#358 Bloater Paste. This was delicious and light – the butter helped whip the bloater into a wonderful consistency and the lemon juice really accentuated the fish’s own natural piquancy. Very good. 7.5/10.

#351 Potted Cheese

Sorry for the quiet blog folks, I am still organising my life after my recent move back to Manchester. The dust has settled enough however, for me to do this recipe for potted cheese that I have had my eye on for a good while; I couldn’t make it in America as I couldn’t get hold of the required Cheshire cheese for love nor money (and if I could it would have cost a pretty penny, let me tell you).

Potted cheese was very popular from the mid-18^thcentury as a way to use up left-over dry cheese and rinds and pep them up a little and make them edible and delicious once more. The cheese is potted just like potted meat or fish: mixed with butter and seasoned with alcohol and spices.

Any cheese can be used: Cheshire, Stilton, Gloucester, Wensleydale, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, whatever you have available. It then needs to be moistened and seasoned. Jane makes some suggestions as do many 18^th century books: white wine, sherry, port, Worcester sauce, chili vinegar, black pepper, chives, mustard, Cayenne pepper, ground mace. The list goes on. Jane uses any leftover cheeses and combines them to make a single that is ‘a far more rewarding result than any cook deserves’, we mix our grapes to make blended wines, so why not cheese? Hannah Glasse says ‘a slice of [potted cheese] exceeds all the cream cheeses than can be made’. This is all high praise indeed. The recipe that Jane specifies uses Cheshire cheese, port or sherry, Cayenne pepper and walnuts.

Take 3 ounces of butter out of the fridge in good time so that it can soften. Next prepare 8 ounces of Cheshire cheese – cut into cubes and reduce to a crumble in a food processor or grate if doing by hand. Add the butter and two tablespoons of port or brown sherry to form a paste. Add a good pinch of Cayenne pepper. Jane now tells us to either form into small cheese truckles and roll them in chopped walnuts, or to put in pots and cover with clarified butter if the potted cheese is to be kept for a while. I found the cheese truckles easier to make after the mixture was allowed to sit in the fridge overnight.

#351 Potted Cheese. I was very much looking forward to making this recipe, mainly because Jane is so enthusiastic about it. When I first made it I wasn’t too sure, I found it grainy and thought the alcohol didn’t quite work. However, I tried it again after a night in the fridge and it had transformed – the port had soaked into the grains of cheese to produce a creamy homogenous cheese truckle. It’s very good on an oatcake. On the strength of this, I’ve gone out and bought a few different cheeses so I can try a few combinations myself. 7/10.

#268 Potted Shrimps

Hugh and I invited our mates Maartin and Ninja around for some food so I thought it would be the perfect excuse to do a couple of Grigsons. Poor things. For a starter Hugh made some mackerel pate (I should get the recipe from him and put it on here) and I did these potted shrimps. I wanted to cook a recipe that I couldn’t do in America and this is one. I so far haven’t found anywhere in Texas that sells brown shrimp.

For those of you that don’t know, potted shrimps are a Lancastrian delicacy – they are going out of favour as many traditional foods are these days and, as far as I know, the only place that makes them is a small fishery in Morcambe Bay. They used to be very popular across the whole of the country after Young’s opened a shop selling them in London. The shrimps are fished and boiled on the boat before being dunked in the sea to cool off quickly. As the boat returned to land with its catch, the women and children of the town would be waiting to pot the shrimps. If you happen upon some brown shrimps, try making them yourself because they are pretty easy to do.

For every pint of shelled shrimps you will need to melt 4 ounces of melted Danish butter along with ¼ teaspoon of powdered mace, a pinch of Cayenne pepper and a grating of nutmeg. Once melted, mix in the shrimps and let them heat through. Pack into pots and cover with clarified butter and then some foil or cling film. Allow to set. Serve spread on brown bread or toast. Piece of piss.

#268 Potted Shrimps. I loved these. The shrimps are sweet and well-flavored and the traditional spices such as mace really complimented them. It’s a shame that mace isn’t used more often these days as it goes so well with fish. 7.5/10.

#205 Potted Tongue

There are several recipes in English Food that involve tongue; a bit of the animal now much ignored by most, including me. It’s one of the few things I’ve never tried, so I thought I should make sure my first foray into tongue cookery a simple one. Potting is nice and easy as long as you have a food processor or blender, plus I always need sandwich fillings for work. It uses eight ounces of cooked tongue – this can be calf’s or ox tongue, pickled or fresh. The calf’s tongue that I got from Winter Tarn was exactly eight ounces in weight after it had been cooked and trimmed. However, if tongue is not your bag then you can use beef, salt beef, venison or any other game.

Chop the calf’s tongue and place in a blender or food processor – use a blender for a smooth finish, a food processor for a slightly coarse one – along with four or five ounces of clarified butter, some salt, pepper and mace (if you are potting a different meat, you could use a different spice or even a couple anchovy fillets). Blend until the right consistency and place in pots, making sure you pack them down well and leave flat surface. Pour more clarified butter over to form a seal.

#205 Potted Tongue. In Yorkshire, potted beef is still quite popular, but for me, the tongue did not work quite as well as I’d hoped. The tongue tasted okay when it had been cooked, but perhaps stronger tasting cured ox tongue would have been more appropriate. Oh well, never mind – you can’t win ‘em all. 4/10.

#192 Elizabeth David’s Prawn Paste

In days of yore, we English loved potted meats and fish. You don’t seem to see many potted foodstuffs around these days: though potted beef is still popular in Yorkshire. Pate does not count. This one at first sight seems a bit weird, and perhaps foul, but there are some interesting ingredients in there. One of the great things that Elizabeth David did in the sixties and seventies was introducing us to Mediterranean flavours, and she managed to sneak a few in here: olive oil instead of butter, basil instead of parsley, lime rather than lemon. She transformed our eating habits; along with Grigson, Floyd, et al. of course. It may seem odd these days – all those continental ingredients mashed up in a now-defunct method of preparing meat and fish – but there you go.

Place eight ounces of cooked, peeled prawns in a blender along with the juice of a lime and around six tablespoons of olive oil – use extra virgin if you have it since as it’s not going to be cooked. Blend until smooth and add half a teaspoon of dried basil and a heaped saltspoon (!) of crushed coriander seeds. Season with a little salt and some Cayenne pepper. Divide between some small ramekins, cover and refrigerate. Serve with hot, thin toast.

By the way, I don’t know the capacity of a saltspoon as I don’t own one, so don’t ask me. Actually, I’d not even heard of one. I guessed and added a quarter of a teaspoon. Also, don’t buy dried basil, as it has no flavour; dry your own in a cool oven for about 20 minutes until crumbly: much better.

#192 Elizabeth David’s Prawn Paste. It may have sounded like horrible soggy fish pap, but this was delicious. The prawns were sweet, the olive oil was fruity and the basil and coriander seeds combined with the lime juice provided a morish tang. Really good – go and make some. 7.5/10.

Fifty Grigsons Young – Kipper Paste

I didn’t realise that the kipper paste was my 50th Grigson recipe; if I had been on the ball, I would have done a feast. Never mind – when it’s the hundredth I’ll do something special.

I chose to do cook with kippers because not enough people eat things like kippers these days, and I hoped maybe people may be inspired to cook with them now I have. I remember thinking how foul they smelt as a kid when my mum used to eat them, but then when I tasted one, I couldn’t believe how sweet and piquant they were with out being horribly fishy. Also, kippers are cheap – even good quality ones should only cost about a quid each. Jane only has one proper kipper recipe, and it is kipper paste, a real Seventies dinner-party staple. I’d never had it, but I like that kind on thing.

Here’s what I did:

I covered the kippers with boiling hot water straight from the kettle and let them poach in the residual heat for 10 minutes. Next the skin and bones were taken off. This is not as laborious as it sounds; the fish is made up of longitudinal muscles, so you can peel strips of, as it were, and take the bones out as you go (you don’t need to removed the very thin hair-like bones – you wouldn’t ever notice they were there). These were allowed to cool slightly and weighed so than an equal weight of soft butter could be measured – it seems that one kipper equals around 100 grams. These were then carefully beaten in the food processor along with pepper, a little salt, some cayenne pepper and ground mace. Then the juice of half a lemon and a couple of table spoons of whipped cream were quickly mixed in (taste at this point – you might want more spices: they do make all the difference). The mixture was spooned into ramekins and a layer of clarified butter was poured over, and the whole thing was set in the fridge. Serve with toasted brown bread.

FYI: the kipper is the most recent of the cured fishes – fish were not split before hot-smoking, but left whole. All this was first done by a chap called Woodger in Northumberland. However, I happen to know that the best kippers can be bought in Whitby. However, because of stupid EU regulations, they cannot be posted to you, so you’ll have to simply drive there!

#50 Kipper Paste: 8/10. This dish should totally have a come-back. It is sweet and light, yet rich and salty. Really nice proper food. Go uot and buy some kippers this instant