#164 Sorrel with Eggs

It’s always exciting trying a new food, and this one – sorrel – is completely new to me, even though it is a common part of many a British meadow’s flora. At least that’s what the foragers’ books keep on telling me. I’ve kept my eyes open and only found the quite similar, though inedible, dock leaf when I’ve been on the look-out. So, I was very lucky to happen up some at the Unicorn grocery whilst I wasn’t looking for it. It’s good really, because now I know what it looks like and tastes like I’m much more likely to see it in the grassland in the future.

Sorrel is one of our forgotten vegetables, and was once part of every garden as it grew happily in the early Spring when the store of over-wintered fruit and vegetables had run out, but the new springtime plants were not yet laden with their bounties. Famine time. These days of, course, we have no gap to fill in the food year and so it has gone out of favour. Another reason for its decline in popularity is that, because of its acidic zingy sharpness, it was used a lemon substitute and is therefore required no longer. It's very easy to grow - I shall be growing some next year, for sure. Here's a nice article about it from The Telegraph.

This recipe uses pureed sorrel that takes seconds to make, so if you find any, either in the meadow or the greengrocers, try this to get you started. It serves six, but you can decrease the amounts if you don’t have enough sorrel (or people!).

First boil six eggs for 6 minutes exactly (unless they are large, then boil for 7), this will achieve a boiled egg with well-cooked whites but still squidgy yolks. Whilst they are boiling, prepare 8 ounces of sorrel by rinsing, draining and removing the stalks just as for spinach. Add the leaves to a saucepan that’s over a moderate heat, after a few seconds it will reduce to a dark green puree, then add salt and pepper and 3 ounces of butter. Keep warm. Now fry six slices of bread in butter or oil until crisp, and cut into triangles (12 altogether). Now arrange the ingredients in a bowl or serving plate: sorrel first, then the eggs (whole or halved) and then the fried bread. Finally decorate with orange wedges (which I forgot to do!).


#164 Sorrel with Eggs – 7/10. I really enjoyed this usual and forgotten vegetable. The flavour was intense and was tempered well with the oily bread and creamy yolks of the eggs; it could be best described as lemon but with a strange astringency, like that of green rhubarb or raw gooseberries. It would be delicious with fish I expect. This is the only recipe that uses sorrel in English Food, but I am on the look out for other recipes elsewhere.

#163 Wild Apricot Fool or Ice Cream

Seeing as we’d had a very un-summery meal of beef and dumplings, I thought I’d better do something nice and cool and refreshing for pudding. This fool is classed as a winter fool by Jane Grigson, I assume because it has dried fruit rather than fresh fruit in it. However, she says it can also be made into an ice cream, transforming into a summer pud.

It uses an ingredient previously unknown to me – dried apricots; not the semi-dried apricots you get from the supermarket, but whole, tiny completely dry ones from Asian supermarkets. They really are rock-hard dry so make sure you soak them in cold water overnight before you use them.

In case you didn't know what to look for -

the apricots in their dry state

This recipe uses six ounces (dry weight) of the apricots.

Simmer the soaked apricots in their soaking water for 5 minutes. Remove them with a slotted spoon and boil their soaking liquor down to a syrup. Meanwhile, remove the flesh, reserving the stones, and mash it into a coarse puree. Crack open the reserved stones, to reveal the kernels, chop them roughly and add those to the puree. When the soaking liquor is syrupy add that too and allow to cool. Add some icing sugar and lemon juice to bring out the flavours, if needed. Beat ½ pint of whipping or double cream and fold this into the puree. If you are making this into a fool put into glasses and chill, or alternatively pour into an ice cream maker.

Griggers suggests serving it with almond biscuits, but I went one better – I served them in ice cream cones with home make monkey blood (that’s raspberry sauce to you).

#163 Wild Apricot Fool or Ice Cream – 6/10. Very nice, though lacked flavour; this was, I think, due to it being cold and therefore requiring a lot more sugar and lemon juice than I gave it, as it tasted fine before freezing. That said it did have a nice honey-like taste and the chopped kernels were delicious and made it texturally more interesting than a bog-standard ice cream. I think the recipe was best suited to a fool rather than an ice cream. With a few changes though, this could be bumped up to be a 7 or 8 out-of-ten ice cream.

FYI: apricot kernels contain potent anti-cancer drugs and have been used to treat tumours since the 6th Century. They are also believed to cleanse the respiratory system and have been used to treat coughs. Combine this with the super-high carotenoid content of the apricot flesh, and you've got a serious super-food on your hands, mister!

#162 Horseradish Sauce

To accompany the salt beef, I made this classic accompaniment, though it goes very well with smoked fish such as trout.

It’s very easy to make: lightly whip ¼ pint of double cream and stir in 2 tablespoons of grated horseradish, then season with salt, pepper and the juice of up to half a lemon. It’s important to just lightly whip the cream as the acids in the lemon make it much thicker. Griggers also make the point that the outside of the horseradish root is alot hotter than the centre, so if you like it milder, grate across the root, rather than down the side.

FYI: horseradish can be found growing wild in most places in Europe and has been cultivated by the Egyptians and Romans and, according to Greek Myth, Apollo was told by the Delphic Oracle that it was worth it’s weight in gold, though why I don’t know.

Again, no pic, sorry – my camera’s doing some funny things

#162 Horseradish Sauce – 6.5/10. This very pleasant and creamy, though lacked the punch I expected, even though I was pretty generous with the horseradish. It was ok, but I think I prefer a jar of proprietary horseradish sauce! Is this bad of me!?

#161 Boiled Salt Beef and Dumplings

After the reasonable success of the ham I cured, I was keen to try something else so I went for salt beef. You can of course just buy your beef already salted, but if you want to have a go at your own, follow this link. My friend Evelyn had also made a request for it a while back, and although beef and dumplings are in no way summery I thought I’d do it anyway.

Put your beef – silverside or brisket – in a large pot and pour in enough water to just cover it. Bring it slowly to a simmer – taste the water after 10 minutes, if it’s salty change the water and start again. Add 2 unpeeled onions that have been studded with four cloves each, a small piece of nutmeg, two blades of mace and a generous seasoning of black pepper. Once the beef is simmering turn it down to the lowest heat possible so that the tiniest amount of bubbling occurs. Now cover and leave to simmer – the time depends upon the weight of the meat, to calculate it use the same method as on this entry, but a 3 pound piece of beef will take 3 ½ hours in total.

Toward the end of the cooking time, make your dumpling mixture: sift 4 ounces of plain flour with a teaspoon of baking powder and a good pinch of salt into a bowl and stir in 2 ounces of shredded suet (i.e. packet suet). Add just enough water to make a slightly stick dough and with floured hands make little balls of the dough (about ten, I’d say). Add a little grated horseradish in their centres. Alternatively use a cube of fried bread or mix chopped parsley into the dough.

When the beef is cooked, remove it and let it rest. Add the dumplings and let them poach for 10-15 minutes.

Serve it with gravy made using some of the cooking liquor and glazed carrots, says Lady Griggers. I did peas too and some horseradish sauce.

#161 Boiled Salt Beef and Dumplings – 8/10. Really delicious and definitely the best of the cured meat thus far. The beef was flaky and pink with the saltiness perfectly balanced with the aromatic herbs, spices and sugars from the brine cure and stock. I’ve never bought salt beef, so I’ve nothing to compare it to, but I shall be definitely doing this one again, but perhaps during wintertime! The dumplings were okay – they could have been fluffier, however, they were cooking for longer than 10 minutes as I lost track of time getting everything else ready. Oopsey!

Sorry there's no photo - I took one, but for some reason it's no longer on my camera's memory! Double oopsey!!

#160 Rice Cake

Every Wednesday at work, one of us tries to make a cake and bring it in so we can all get together for a chat; something we rarely get to do. We have been a bit slack as a department recently, so I thought I’d make one. This seemed perfect, I had all the ingredients in, it seemed a little unusual, but basically a normal cake mixture, so great stuff… I expected this cake to be a real hidden gem – Jane Grigson write quite a lengthy entry on this cake and she says that she was easily converted from the ‘traditional’ flour-based cake.

Here’s how to make a rice cake:

Cream 4 ounces of butter with 8 ounces of caster sugar and beat in three eggs one at a time. Stir in 8 ounces of rice flour and the grated zest of a lemon. Pour the mixture into a greased and floured 7 inch cake tin and bake at 180⁰C for anywhere between 50 minutes and an hour and a half. Jane doesn’t say to fill it with anything, so I used raspberry jam and Butter Cream I.

The world's most boring cake:

you saw it here first!

#160 Rice Cake – 2/10. Totally crap! It was so bad I didn’t even bother taking it into work. The cake was so hard and dry, there was no spongy texture as there was no raising agent or gluten there. Also, because of the lack of gluten, the grains of flour remained granular. Bad, bad, bad! Its only saving grace was the jam and butter cream, and I did the butter cream wrong!!

#159 Creamed Roe Loaves

Here at Grigson Towers, we don’t like to let anything go to waste, and our tasty fishes are certainly something that should be at treated with a huge amount of respect. So do your bit by making your mackerel (or herring) go further by asking your friendly fishmonger to fish out the fishes’ roes when he guts them. After all you have paid for them anyway.

There’s quite a few roe recipes in English Food and I’ve tried them, so I thought I’d better get started. This one seemed straight-forward and is very similar (and cheaper!) to the oyster loaves recipe, so I was sort of on familiar ground. The good thing about this recipe is that you can reduce the amounts accordingly depending upon how many roes you have – in fact I only had enough to make one!

FYI: In case you didn’t know (and don’t let this put you off) the soft roe of a fish is the sperm, and therefore from a male fish. They’ve gone out of favour, with some fishmongers just throwing them away instead of selling them! Another thing we need to try and bring back, people!

Prepare 8 small rolls of bread just like for the oyster loaves. To make the filling, soften 3 shallots or 3 tablespoons of onion in butter over a low heat. Add ½ pint of double cream and cook until it thickens. Cut the roes into one centimetre cubes and place them in the cream and allow them to poach gently – this only takes a few minutes. Add parsley and chives and season with salt, black pepper and Cayenne pepper, plus a squeeze of lemon juice to cut through the creaminess. Spoon the mixture into the hollow loaves and serve immediately.

#159 Creamed Roe Loaves – 7.5/10. I really enjoyed my first foray into roe gastronomy, though a dated dish, you could modernise it easily by serving it on toast instead, or something. They are very soft and have a very delicate flavour. Try them, don’t fear the fish sperm – you’ll like the flavour and texture – and, after all, you’ll happily eat fish eggs (or bird eggs), so what’s the difference?

#158 Gooseberry Stuffing for Mackerel

Apart from Britain and the Netherlands, gooseberries are not grown and eaten in large numbers. This is because they’re not a particularly popular fruit for desserts. However, they are often served with mackerel as in this traditional English recipe. It seems to be a combination that has gone out of favour these days – I’ve certainly never eaten them with fish, though I have has tuna and rhubarb before and that was lovely, so I've high hopes for this one.

This makes enough stuffing for 4 mackerel:

Top and tail 8 ounces of gooseberries and cook them gently in ½ an ounce of butter until they just begin to soften and pop. Mash them with the back of a wooden spoon, and when luke warm add another 1 ½ ounces of butter and 4 tablespoons of breadcrumbs. Season them up with salt, and both black and Cayenne pepper, plus a little sugar if the gooseberries are too tart (they need quite a lot of tartness, to cut through the oily mackerel).

Bone the mackerel, or ask your fishmonger to do it (if you want to do it yourself – and it is very easy – follow this link for instructions) and divide the mixture up between them. Place them in a buttered ovenproof dish and season the skin with salt and pepper. Bake for 30 minutes at 190⁰C. I served them with salad.


#158 Gooseberry Stuffing for Mackerel – 8/10. This was a taste sensation. The piquant gooseberry stuffing cuts through the rich oily mackerel so well. This really is a recipe that needs a resurgence. Now is the perfect time to make it people – both gooseberries and mackerel are in season. Isn’t it funny how things that are in season at the same time, seem to go so well together? It’s almost as though God planted them all there for us. Unfortunately, I’m too old to still believe in God, so I assume that there’s a better explanation.

#157 Gooseberry Fool

Technically the first of the British soft summer fruits, the gooseberry is one of my all-time favourites. It seems to have gone out of favour these days and quite tricky to track down. I suppose it’s because you have to top and tail them and cook them before you eat then. It’s big shame though. It seems that some people don’t even know what gooseberries are, seeing as one woman in the greengrocers told the lady on the till that there was “something wrong with your grapes, ‘cos they’re all hairy”. I despair sometimes, I really do. Oh well, if you come across some and don’t know what to do with them, start of by making a fool. If you don’t find any, you can substitute any soft fruit for the gooseberries and still have something delicious.

This was enough for three:

Top and tail 8 ounces of gooseberries, place them in a pan with an ounce of butter, cover and cook them gently. Once the gooseberries turn a yellow-ish colour and have softened – around 5 minutes – crush then with a wooden spoon and/or a fork. Try to avoid making them too pureed and mushy; you still want a bit of bite. Now add sugar, not too much as the fruit is supposed to remain a little tart, however, this is all down to personal preference. Allow to cool. Now whip ¼ pint of double cream and fold in the gooseberries and spoon into serving dishes. Grigson suggests serving with an almond biscuit (I didn’t)

#157 Gooseberry Fool – 8/10. This is my kind of pudding; small, yet perfectly-formed, I love stewed fruit and cream (or custard) of any type, but gooseberries especially and they are such a short-lived treat that you need to show them off as best – and as simply – as you can.

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie

I bought a nice new pie dish last week, so I thought I’d Christen it with a nice big pie for Sunday dinner. I decided upon this Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie because it needed to be pretty quick to do (no cooking of the filling beforehand) as I had to be in the lab in the morning. Plus there was a load of Cox’s Pippins in Unicorn in Chorlton – apparently the last of the stored apples from the previous autumn.

This is a very traditional pie – essentially meat stewed in liquid (in this case cider) under a pastry crust, and comes from Hannah Glasse. It is a little odd in that it has a double crust; I’d have no problems with it if it was cooked in a thick sauce. Surely the pastry lining the pie dish will just turn into a soggy mess? To pre-empt this, I used a previous trick of The Grigson – to place a baking sheet in the oven as it heats, so that when the dish is placed on it, the underside quickly cooks.

First of all make some shortcrust pastry using 10 ounces of plain flour and use two-thirds of it to line a 2 ½ pint capacity pie dish.

To make the filling you need to prepare your pork – you need 2 pounds of boned pork loin. Cut off the rind and trim away the fat with a sharp knife, then slice the loin and chop into chunks. Next peel, core and slice around 12 ounces of Cox’s orange pippins. Then mix 8 ounces of chopped onion together with 4 chopped rashers of cured, unsmoked bacon. Now layer the ingredients in the pie dish: half of the pork, then half of the apples, scatter them with some brown sugar and then sprinkle over half of the onion-bacon mixture. Season each layer with salt and pepper plus some grated nutmeg. Repeat with the remainder in the same fashion. Dot the top with around 2 ounces of butter and then pour on ¼ pint of dry cider. Cover with the remaining pastry sealing and glazing it with beaten egg. Make some fancy pastry decorations if you fancy. Bake for 20 minutes at 220°C, and then turn the oven down to 160°C for a further 45 minutes. Jane doesn’t indicate what to serve with it, but I went with mustard mash and some asparagus.

Check out the arts & crafts spectacular atop the pie!

Oink!

#156 Cheshire Pork and Apple Pie – after much deliberation on this one, I give it 5/10. I think it was pretty average – I wasn’t sure about the amount of liquid in the pie, which after my efforts to prevent it, still made the pastry soggy. I think, it could be easily improved, however by making a roux with the butter and some extra flour and using the cider to make a sauce. I think it would have made this okay effort into a very hearty one that would stick to your ribs, as we say in Yorkshire!

#155 Welsh Rabbit (Rarebit)

Apparently it is incorrect to call a Welsh rabbit a rarebit, it is a “false etymological refinement”. There are, in fact, three types of rabbit: Welsh, English and Scottish. The Welsh is the classic, but I can’t find anywhere that states it was the original rabbit, though people assume it is. I suppose it’s one of those dishes that have just been around for a long, long time. Also I have no idea why they are called rabbits, but there are theories abound. One is that the Welsh peasants of yore were not allowed to eat rabbits caught in hunts by the nobles, so they substituted it for cheese (which has, of course, always been a popular staple in Wales). That’ll do me.

These days we are used to a very thick cheese topping piled on our toast for Welsh rabbit, but traditionally it was meant to be quite liquid so it soaked into the toast whilst it grilled.

For 2 slices of toast

Toast two thick slices of toast. Meanwhile gently melt 4 ounces of good grated Cheddar (or Lancashire or Double Gloucester) with 3 tablespoons of ale (or milk). Stir until the mixture becomes a thick, liquid cream. Add an ounce of butter to the melted cheese, alongside some salt and pepper and some mustard. Taste and add more seasoning or mustard if you like. Place the toast in a heat-proof dish and pour the cheese mixture over it. Place under a very hot grill until the cheese toasts nicely and develops brown spots.


#155 Welsh Rabbit – 6.5/10. It may not look as nice as a more modern Welsh rarebit, but how could toasted cheese and mustard possible taste bad? It was quite unusual having the runny cheese soaked up into the bread, so although it was delicious, I think I prefer the cheese to be stacked on top, with an egg yolk include plus a bit of Worcester sauce. That said, I did hit the spot! I think I could eat some form of cheese on toast every day if I let myself.

#154 Mrs Raffald's Bacon and Egg Pie

I’ve cooked some recipes by Elizabeth Raffald before and they’ve come out well each time – there’s a potted history of her life in Salford in Greater Manchester in this earlier post. It comes from her book The Experienced Housekeeper, and I must try and get hol of a copy (if it still exists)

Technically this bacon and egg pie can be made any time of year, but I thought it seemed perfect for this time of year, served warm with a salad. The English bacon and egg pie seems to have gone out of favour, with people preferring quiches with roasted vegetables etc. added these days. Well, I love bacon and egg pie – in fact it was my second favourite school dinner (spam fritters came first) – and I think it deserves a come-back. It’s great for picnicking too, I reckon, due to its double pastry crust. I would advise to make this pie only with proper free-range farm eggs (surprisingly cheap in delis and fishmongers and the like) and good dry-cured bacon, it’s well worth spending a bit more money for what is, overall, a pretty cheap recipe.

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Place a baking tray on the shelf that the pie will be cooked on (important for later!)

Start off by making some shortcrust pastry with 8 ounces of flour (or more, or less, depending upon how thick you like it). Use two-thirds of it to line a flan dish; Griggers doesn’t give sizes, but an 8 inch one was perfect. Chop 8 ounces of smoked streaky bacon and sprinkle it over the pastry base. Next, whisk up 4 large (or 6 medium) eggs and pour out a little of the mixture into a ramekin for later. Beat the eggs along with ½ pint of crème fraiche and some salt and pepper. Pour the custard into the pie dish and roll out the remaining pastry to form a lid, using some of the reserved egg to glue it on. Trim excess pastry and paint more egg over the top so that it glazes nicely in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes on the hot baking tray (it stops the base from going soggy), then lower the heat to 170°C for another 30 minutes. Serve warm with a salad.


#154 Mrs Raffald’s Bacon and Egg Pie – 9/10. This did not disappoint! I must admit I was unsure about not blind baking the pastry first, but it worked a treat. The inclusion of crème fraiche over cream or milk plus good quality eggs and bacon are the key to it though – so don’t skimp. The pie was ten times better than the one I used to get at school, yet it brought back all the memories at the same time. Bring on the spam fritters!

#153 Mocha Cake

This recipe contains absolutely no seasonal produce whatsoever. I’m not even sure it has any nutritional value either. This bizarre pudding was greatly loved in the Grigson household, particularly at birthdays and it seems to be some odd post-war version of a tiramisu: fresh coffee replaced by instant (fine by me), cream and cream cheese replaced by butter, sugar and ground almonds, and coffee liqueur replaced with sherry. It harks back, I think, to World War II where ‘mock’ foods were commonly made, e.g. mock cream, mock apricot tart, mock mayonnaise. They usually involved whipped margarine or lard. I know the apricot tart used carrots as its substitute.

Jane Grigson also mentions how good the French are (were?) at coming up with new and exciting puddings using boudoir biscuits. However, this one’s not French, it’s English, and was originally published in the Daily Telegraph. Alarm bells should have started ringing at that point…

Makes enough for 8–10 people:

Begin by creaming together 4 ounces of lightly salted butter with 4 ounces of vanilla sugar, once fluffy, beat in a large egg yolk. Next, measure out ¼ pint of milk and 4 ounces of ground almonds. Incorporate these into the creamed butter and sugar by adding alternately, a little at a time. Now slake a generous teaspoon of instant coffee in 2 teaspoons of boiling water and mix that in. Give it a taste – add more coffee if you like.

Now pour another ¼ pint of milk into a bowl along with a glass of dry sherry. Dip boudoir biscuits in the milk, but don’t let them soak, and arrange them in the bottom of a shallow oblong or oval dish. Now spread a quarter of the almond mixture over those. Repeat so that you have a total of 4 biscuit layers and 4 creamy layers. Make sure that you put cream over the sides so that all biscuits are covered. Cover with toasted slivered almonds and glace fruits if you like.

It's hard to believe, but this tasted worse than it looked

#153 Mocha Cake – 2/10. Not precisely inedible, but just so unbelievably sweet and sickly. I have no idea why the Grigson clan like this pudding so much. There amount of sugar put my teeth on edge, and I may have woken up the next morning diabetic. The pudding was left out for a few days and was still okay to eat (it was slightly better in fact as the biscuits had gone soggier), no fly or microbe seemed to have touched it. I think that it may remain perfectly preserved for ever more due to its humongous sugar content.

Flaming June

Well May seemed to fly by in a hazy blur, I’m surprised I got so many recipes done and typed-up for the blog (though there is one pending, and it’s very special). I was pretty pleased that managed to stick with seasonal produce. I’ve found – or should I say, Butters has found – a very good seasonal guide: The River Cottage Seasonal Food Guide. If you don’t know anything about River Cottage, then look at their site. Headed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, they are championing self-sufficiency on whatever scale you can manage. The good thing is that their guide includes wild food. Anyways, here’s the list for flaming June – again, not all appear in English Food, but all is here for completeness:

Vegetables:
Asparagus, broad beans, carrots, cauliflower, lettuce, peas (including sugar snap, purslane, radishes, rocket, sorrel, watercress.

Fruit:
Cherries (European), gooseberries, rhubarb, strawberries.

Wild greens and herbs:
Broom buds, horseradish, sea spinach, wild fennel.

Wild flowers and fruits:
Elderflowers

Fungi and nuts:
Pignuts, St George’s mushrooms.

Fish and shellfish:
Black bream, spider crab, signal crayfish, cuttlefish, mackerel, pollack, salmon (wild), sea bass, sea trout, river trout.

Game:
Wood pigeon.

So that’s the list – I’ll see what I can do. The big highlights for me are gooseberries and strawberries. Keep an eye out for me folks for anything on the list you find, especially gooseberries since no bugger seems to sell them anymore!

#152 Glazed Turnips

To go with the glazed ham, Lady Grigson suggests glazed vegetables – glazed onions or turnips. I thought I’d do turnips as it has a recipe in its own right in English Food. It’s very easy and will go with any roast meat. Grigson suggests eating it with duck as well as ham.

Peel 2 pounds of young summer turnips – don’t go for the big ones, they are fit only for cattle, apparently! Cut them into 1 centimetre dice (about 1/3 of an inch) and blanche them in boiling water for 5 minutes, after which they should be just tender. Once done, drain them and add them to a pan that already hot and contain 2 ounces of butter. Toss the turnips over in the butter and then add a tablespoon of sugar. Cook on a moderate heat until they begin to caramelise. Sprinkle in some chopped parsley, give them a final stir and serve. Couldn’t be easier.


#152 Glazed Turnips – 5.5/10. I find it hard to get too excited about turnips; I’m a swede man myself. That said, I think this is the best method for eating them as a vegetable in their own right, and they certainly went very well with the ham. So overall, good, but there are better vegetables out there that don’t need to be played around with to make nice!

#151 To Cook Salt Pork or Hams: Part 1 - To Eat Hot

After a 5 day wait, the pork I had put in the brine tub was ready for cooking. Jane outlines three different ways to cook your salt pork or ham if you want to serve it hot, but they all start with the same process: simmering in water with stock vegetables.


The first thing to do is to rinse your joint and weight it on some scales. Place the joint in a heavy casserole or stockpot, cover it with cool water and let it come to a boil slowly. Let it simmer for 5 minutes and taste the water – if it’s too salty throw the water away and start again (though it was fine when I tasted mine). For hams up to 4 pounds (2 kilos), cook for 30 minutes to the pound (1 hour to the kilo) plus an extra 30 minutes. However, this can be reduced if the joint is slim. To improve the flavour of the ham, add some stock vegetables: carrot, onion, leek, turnip, that kind of thing. They also flavour the stock with which delicious soups can be made – like this one.

It now depends on how you want to serve your ham:
1. Simply boiled – easy-peasy! Serve it with whatever vegetables or salad you like.



2. Encased in pastry – yes, you heard correctly! Remove before the final hour; encase it in thick pastry, glaze with egg and bake in a moderate-hot oven for an hour.

3. Glaze it. This the one I went for. Remove the ham half an hour before the end of cooking and remove the skin. Criss-cross the fat with a sharp knife and stud the crosses with cloves. Then make a glaze:

Sorry about the shit picture - I'm sure I took a better one than this!

Mix together a tablespoon of French mustard, one of double cream and one of either brown sugar, marmalade or apricot jam (or anything else sweet you like), next mix in a teaspoon of ground cinnamon or cloves. Spread this mixture all over the fat. Place in a roasting tin, add a ladleful of the stock to the bottom to stop any glaze from catching if it falls, and bake for 30 minutes at 190°C. When done, remove and let it rest before carving.

To accompany it, make a sauce with the pan juices by boiling them up with some cream, white wine or fortified wine, depending on the glaze you used. I went for cream as I used dark brown sugar.

Serve with seasonal vegetables and glazed onions, Grigson says. However, she also says that glazed turnips go well too. So I made those, plus boiled potatoes and peas.

#151 – To Cook Salt Pork and Hams: Part 1 – To Eat Hot: 7/10. I really enjoyed this – the ham cure was beautifully seasoned and salty and the spiced sticky sugar glaze complimented it perfectly. It was a little dry though, but I have a feeling that I cooked a little too long in the stock though as it was a slim piece of meat. That said, it was still delicious and we all polished it off quick-smart. I think that with a bit of practise at this kind of thing, the scores will quickly creep up to the high 8s, 9s or 10s!

#150 How to Cure Meat in Brine

Well here we are – 150 recipes in. I didn’t realise I was at this milestone until yesterday – unfortunately it’s not some magnificent feast, in fact it’s really a recipe as such, and I can’t really give it a rating (at least not yet).

Jane Grigson has quite a few recipes that require salting and brining, so I thought I’d better start to get to grips with this completely ignored section of the book, by making roast ham from start to finish as the best way for me to get started, though I’ll discuss that in a separate post – this one is just concerned with brining generally.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the subject of brining and it seems a bit of a lost art – there’s not much information about the history of it or how to do your own curing by the method. Obviously it’s gone out of favour to some degree because it is a method of preservation first and foremost, and now with frozen and refrigerated meats on tap these days we don’t have to do such things. However, brining also lends good flavour – we all like good ham, gammon or salt beef – so you would think it popular (seeing as it’s easy too). The thing is that it is time-consuming, and we can all just pick some up ready brined or ready roasted meat, but one thing I read was that for many wet-cured meats, the wet-cure part of the process is missed out! These days they are cured with nitrating bacteria – nitrates help preserve things – resulting a lack of flavour. I’m certainly not insinuating that this method is ubiquitous, but I reckon most supermarkets (and many butchers) use it.

Brine contains three magic ingredients that help preserve meat: salt, sugar and saltpetre. The first two do so because they are in huge quantities in the brine, and can affect the normal osmotic pressures of cells – both animal and microbe. Salts and sugar enter the cells, and water rushes out in an attempt to equal the concentrations inside and outside of the cells. This results in the death of the microbes and the preservation of the meat. Saltpetre (or potassium nitrate) is antibacterial and also gives the meat a pleasing pink colour (it is what makes corned beef so pink, for example). Aside from these three ingredients there are several herbs and spices that improve the flavour of the meat.

FYI: In days of yore, saltpetre was produced by pouring stale urine to huge haystacks where it would drain and crystallise. Yum!!

To make the brine, start off by cleaning a tub or bucket with a close-fitting lid and a plate that will comfortably fit inside with soda crystals. I used a six litre Tupperware tub with a handle. Do not use a metal tub as it may react with the salt or saltpetre. Allow them to drip dry. Whilst you’re waiting for that, make the brine: To a large stockpot or similar add 5 pints of water, 12 ounces each of sea salt and brown sugar and an ounce of saltpetre. This is the basic mixture, but now you need some aromatics (all of which are optional): 1 level teaspoon of juniper berries, a small piece of grated nutmeg, a bay leaf, 3 sprigs of thyme, a level teaspoon of black peppercorns and 4 cloves, Grigson says, but anything you like in that goes with the meat you are brining. Bring to a rapid boil and skim off any scum should there be any. Allow to cool in the pot. Once cool, strain it into your cleaned tub. Place in the joint of meat and keep it submerged in the brine with the plate you washed earlier. Place in a cool cupboard or pantry – though don’t allow it to go below 4°C. The length of time it sits there now depends upon the type of meat and the reason you are brining it (see your recipe, or below, for guidelines). When it is done remove with some clean tongs.

The brine won’t last indefinitely – it may grow mould on it’s surface, which some people say just to skim off. The reason is; the amount of salt depletes every time you use it. For a corrective dose, boil 1 ¾ pints of water with 7 ounces each of salt and sugar and a heaped dessertspoon of juniper berries. Let it cool and add it to the skimmed brine. You could of course just make more from scratch.

Pork leg joint magically being tranfomed into ham

Brining times:
To convert shoulder or leg of pork into ham, or for pork loin: 3 to 10 days
Pig trotters and halved heads: 24 hours
Small tongues (e.g. pig): 36-48 hours
Large tongues (e.g. ox): 5 days
Duck (minus giblets): 36-48 hours
Beef silverside or brisket: 7-10 days
Lamb or mutton shoulder, leg and loin: 7-10 days.

The meat needs to be cooked by boiling – check the cooking water is not too salty after about 5 minutes cooking. If it is change the water and start again. If it’s okay, then add your stock vegetables or whatever the recipe requires.

However, if you are making a roast joint for Sunday lunch, try popping the joint in brine overnight to season it.

So there you have it – hopefully all works out and it doesn’t taste completely foul. My fingers are crossed that it ends up being worth the effort.

#149 Broad Town Mince Pie

This recipe is not seasonal at all, but I remembered it whilst having a look through my cupboards and came across the last half jar of mincemeat I made at Christmas. After having a peek inside and a quick taste, a realised that everything was still perfectly preserved – in fact it was a lot nicer with much better developed flavours. I consulted the book and lo! and behold! I had all the ingredients to make it. If you have half a jar of mincemeat in your cupboard and don’t know what to do with it, make this easy pud. It is very Christmassy with first its layer of boozy mincemeat and then a layer sweet almonds. I can find no reference to what this pudding has to do with Broad Town.


Make a quantity of shortcrust pastry using 8 ounces of flour and both lard and butter (I am now a total covert to adding lard to pastry…unless I’m cooking for vegetarians that is). Line an 8 inch tart tin with two-thirds of it and spread the half-jar of mincemeat evenly over the pastry base. Now make the almond layer – mix together 4 ounces each of caster sugar and ground almonds, then an ounce of melted butter, 2 egg yolks (one if large) and 2 tablespoons of cream. Dollop and spread the mixture best you can and cover the pie with the remaining pastry, brush with egg white and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 15 minutes at 220°C, then turn the oven down and bake for a further 30 minutes at 180-190°C. Serve it hot or warm with cream – or, if it is near Christmastime, then add some brandy butter.

#149 Broad Town Mince Pie – 6/10. Good, but rich, pudding that is useful for doing away with the endings of a jar of mincemeat. I actually found I enjoyed it a lot more once cold the next day. Not a bad dessert, but it didn’t get any juices flowing; and it’s certainly not better than a good old mince pie.

#148 Venison Sausages

Contrary to what you may think; I am not a big meat eater – I’m just not picky! However, I’ve been having a hankering for meat recently, not sure why. Anyways, at the butcher, I spotted some venison sausages that looked very fine indeed so I bought them. They turned out to be from Lyme Park not too far away from me in the Peak District, so the old food miles were happily reduced. Venison sausages are available pretty much anywhere, but a word of warning people – venison from supermarkets probably won’t be British. Supermarket venison usually comes from big deer farms in New Zealand. It’s not bad meat; it’s just flown a long way! Buy yours from your local butcher to get local venison.

This is what the Lady Grigson says to do with your venison sausages:

Fry them in lard or oil very quickly so that they develop nice dark stripes and arrange them closely in a shallow oven dish. Pour in enough red wine to come half-way up the sausages and season them. Bake in a hot oven – 200°C – for 15 minutes. Serve them with mashed potato and some seasonal greens – she says Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, but as it’s Maytime, I plumped for green beans. Pour a little of seasoned wine over the sausages if you like.

#148 Venison Sausages – 7/10. A great way to cook special sausages of any kind I reckon. I’m not giving an excellent score because the venison sausages were good, but not the best ones I’ve ever had. However, the red wine did improve the flavour a lot. The most important thing was that it scratched my red meat itch. The best thing about the whole thing was the fried mashed potato sandwiches I made the morning after. You must try it – fry patties of left-over mash in lard until a crispy crust develops, turn them over and put them in a buttie with brown sauce.

#147 Devilled Chicken Livers

A cheap treat. I love chicken livers, yet so many people seem to turn their noses up at them – I suppose it’s because it’s offal and folks are squeamish. It is silly though, since they are the main ingredient in pate. Any road, any local butcher should sell them very cheaply – I bought 250 grams for about £1.20 and they were prepared too, which reduced the amount of faffage later. If you buy them – do check they have had their bitter green fall bladders removed or the food will be ruined. This recipe appealed to me because of its simplicity, but also because of its ‘devilled’ (i.e., spiced) nature – a very Victorian way of cooking things (eggs and kidneys spring to mind). Devilling seems to be having a resurgence recently – the day after I cooked this, some chef on The Great British Menu competition that’s being shown on the BBC cooked devilled crab claws. Hopefully it will get popular again.

Have a go at this – it’s enough for 4 people as a starter.

Finely chop a medium-sized onion and fry it in 2 ounces of clarified butter gently. Whilst you wait for the onions to soften, chop up 8 ounces of chicken livers roughly, raise the heat and fry the livers quickly, do this for only 2 minutes, 3 at the most. This is why clarified butter is required – it doesn’t burn when you heat it as the ‘butter solids’ have been decantered off. I made my own by melting some butter gently, skimming off any scum from the top and decanting and solids away that had sunk to the bottom. Take the livers off the heat and add 2 teaspoons each of Worcester sauce and Dijon mustard, Cayenne pepper, 3 tablespoons of breadcrumbs, ¼ pint of whipping or double cream, and finally some salt and black pepper. Mix well and check your seasonings. If you like you devil a spicy one add more – I did! Divide between 3 or 4 ramekins and sprinkle with more breadcrumbs and melted butter. Bake at 190°C for 15 minutes and serve with toast.


#147 Devilled Chicken Livers – 9.5/10. I may change this to a 10/10 as it was a perfect starter. Absolutely delicious – the devil was fiery yet it was perfectly tempered with the cream and breadcrumbs. The big strong flavours had no chance of drowning out the rich creamy chicken livers. Brilliant stuff. I haven’t stopped thinking about since I made them, and my stomach is rumbling as I type. This is definitely a Grigson classic!

#146 Asparagus with Melted Butter

Does anyone know if Britain has had an asparagus shortage this year? I’ve looked high and low for days and not found any from the UK, most are from Peru and the nearest were from Catalan. Then, I happened upon some in Asda of all places. I love asparagus, but refuse to eat the important stuff – aside from its flavor, the reason it’s special is because it is such a short-lived treat. I don’t want to eat it all year round. Griggers didn’t agree, it seems, and scoffed it whenever she could get her mitts on some.

There’s no other way of enjoying this excellent vegetable – simply steamed with butter. The only addition I’ve made is a serving it on a slice of toast to turn this from a starter to light supper dish.


You will need at least 10 stalks per person – or more if you have those delicate thin fronds. Trim away the woody ends by cutting or snapping them off and tie the stalks up with string. Stand the asparagus in a saucepan with an inch of boiling water seasoned with salt and pepper. Cover the pan (or make a dome with foil if your pan is not deep) and simmer until tender and cooked – anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes depending on thickness. Alternatively, cook them in an asparagus kettle or steam them. Meanwhile melt an ounce of butter for every serving and season it with salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. Lay the asparagus on a plate and pour over the butter or serve it in a separate jug.

FYI: Asparagus is famous for producing smelly wee – though some people haven’t made this observation. This isn’t because their urine hasn’t taken on the smell, but that they lack the specific receptor in the nose that detects it. It is all down to one particular recessive allele of a gene – if you have both copies of the allele, you won’t be able to smell your sticky asparagus wee – but everyone else will! Nice.

#146 Asparagus with Melted Butter – 9.5/10. This is pretty hard to beat – the bitter-sweet asparagus with the rich salty and tart lemon butter are a marriage made in heaven. I could eat this forever.

#145 Singin' Hinnies

This is a teatime treat that I’ve been wanting to make for ages – Griggers really bigs this one up, as does her daughter Sophie. Singin’ Hinnies hail from the North East of England around Newcastle and are regarded one of the best of the griddle cakes, apparently. Everyone, no matter how rich or poor, ate them at teatime or parties. If you were lucky, you’d find a shiny sixpence inside. Health and Safety would have a field day. Singin’ Hinnies sing because of the fat content – the lard and butter make a rapid sizzling noise. The word ‘hinnie’ is a colloquialism meaning honey, a term of endearment equivalent to luv or duck.



To make the Singin’ Hinnies rub 4 ounces of butter and 4 ounces of lard into a pound of flour that has been sifted along with ¼ teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, ½ a teaspoon of cream of tartar and half a teaspoon of salt. Stir in 6 ounces of currants (or raisins or sultanas) and finally make a firm dough using a little milk (how firm? I don’t know – but mine rather like pastry). Roll out the dough and cut out into rounds of around 2 ½ inches (how thick? again I don’t know, but I did about ½ an inch). Grease a skillet or griddle pan with some lamb fat tat’s been “speared with a fork”. I happened to have some, but if you don’t, I’m sure you could use lard. Cook the cakes until they pick up brown spots, turn them over and cook the other side. When cooked (how long? I don’t know!), open them up and add a small knob of butter to each one and keep them warm in the oven whilst you cook the rest.






#145 Singin’ Hinnies – 4/10. Disappointed with this one. I’m not sure if it was me making them incorrectly, but they were either too dry due to overcooking or too squidgy and raw tasting the middle. The currants prevented them from being inedible as did the glug of maple syrup I added too!

#143 Boiled Leg of Mutton (or Lamb) with (#144) Caper Sauce

When Jane Grigson wrote English Food in the 1970s, she complained – quite rightly – that the general quality of lamb in England had declined rather. This was mainly due to the importation of cheap New Zealand lamb, which rendered mutton almost obsolete. These days things have changed and British lamb in a staple even in supermarkets and mutton is having a well-deserved comeback.

I popped into Manchester City Centre at the weekend and, by chance, the monthly farmers’ market was on so I had a little browse around the stalls and bought myself a leg of lamb from Bowland in Lancashire – a farm that outdoor-rears lamb, beef and pork. Here’s their website. The man at the fruit and veg stall spotted my purchase and commented that the best meat he’d ever had was from there. Great stuff. Now all I had to do was decide what to do with it and went for the boiled leg of lamb with caper sauce – mainly because it requires very little effort, but also because it is a very Victorian way of cooking meat and wanted to try it.

It’s well worth mentioning that caper sauce is also traditionally served with fish too, so if you’re a piscitarian, or whatever you fair-weather vegetarians like to call yourselves, you can try it with salmon or skate.

The original recipe asked for either a leg of mutton or of lamb – if you are to use lamb as I did, get hold of a real free-range one, otherwise it won’t stand up to the boiling.

Trim the leg of any large amounts of fat if it hasn’t been already and place the leg in a large pot with enough water to cover it. Add stock vegetables – 3 quartered carrots, 2 quartered parsnips, one quartered turnip and three whole onions (all peeled) – plus a very good seasoning with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and turn down to a very low simmer and leave for 2 to 2 ½ hours depending upon size. Don’t dare to throw the stock away – use it make the caper sauce and with the leftovers, a soup (I did lamb and mint soup).

Whilst it is cooking you need to make a turnip puree as an accompaniment – also traditionally Victorian. Peel and slice 3 pounds of turnips and boil them in salted water until tender. Puree them in a blender, return to the pan and then whisk an ounce of butter into them. Next mix ¼ pint of double cream with a level tablespoon of flour and whisk this into the sauce. Cook the sauce until it thickens up slightly.

When the meat is cooked, remove it from the water, place it on a serving dish flat-side down and make a paper ruff (yes, a paper ruff!) to fasten around the shank for decoration. Spoon the turnip puree around the outside and scatter the quartered carrots over the puree.

Loving the ruff!

Serve it with caper sauce that has been made using the stock from the lamb.

For the sauce melt ½ an ounce of butter in a small saucepan and stir in a tablespoon of flour. Cook and stir for a few seconds before adding ¾ pint of the lamb or mutton stock (or indeed fish) bit by bit to avoid getting lumps. Simmer until it is the thickness of single cream. Season with salt and pepper and add an egg yolk that has been beaten with 2 tablespoons of cream and stir for a minute or two. Lastly add a generous tablespoon of drained and rinsed capers and ½ a tablespoon of chopped parsley. Serve immediately, says Griggers.

Sorry about the shite picture!

FYI: If you are looking for an alternative to capers – the flower bud of an Asian shrub, you can try using the buds of nasturtium, buttercup or marigold. I’ll stick to the original, though I think.

#143 Boiled Leg of Mutton (or Lamb) with (#144) Caper Sauce – 7.5/10. I really enjoyed this meal. It was so easy to cook, you could not go wrong with it, even if you’ve never cooked anything before in your life. The lamb was tasty and moist and not fatty as most of it had dissolved into the stock – I’m definitely going back to Bowland for my meat. The turnip puree was rather odd – unsurprisingly, it was quite bland and I suppose they were the bland carb element. I would’ve preferred mashed potato though. It’s very hard to mark the caper sauce separately as it is part of the dish. I really liked it – it was piquant and married with the lamb perfectly. The only way it could have been improved would be to chop the capers up first so that the sauce was very capery indeed!

#142 Ballymaloe Fruit Tarts

As Grigson says in her entry for this recipe – “in no way are these English”. Seeing as they’re obviously Irish; a recipe from a lady called Myrtle Allen who lived/lives in Cork (I wonder if she’s related to Rachel Allen?), but came up with it in France, I’d be inclined to agree. However, as you’ll see if you make them, they seem quintessentially English – the whipped cream, the chewy ground almond base and, most importantly, the use of seasonal fruit. One fruit on my seasonal list for May is rhubarb. However, there’s no rhubarb recipe in the book, at least not specifically rhubarb. This seemed like the only opportunity to use it. You can of course use any fruit: “During the first part of the year, top them with chunks of lightly cooked pink rhubarb, next come gooseberries, then the wild possibilities of the full summer…”.

FYI1: If like me, you love rhubarb, don’t make a habit of eating too much of the green rhubarb as it causes kidney and bladder stones due to the oxalate contained in the green areas – it dissolves in the blood no problems but in large amounts precipitates once it’s been filtered by the kidneys.

FYI2: All of the pink forced rhubarb in Britain comes from West Yorkshire - the rhubarb triangle. It’s a triangle because all farms are located within the triangle that Leeds (my home town), Branford and Wakefield make up. Read about it here.


This is a very easy recipe; summery and light, just right to finish off the skate salad I had made. For the base you need ground almonds, caster sugar and lightly salted butter all in equal amounts. Griggers says 4 ounces of each, but I went for 2 ounces of each seeing as there was just me and Butters to feed. This made 12 little tarts.

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Cream together the butter, sugar and almonds and place teaspoonfuls of the mixture into a small tart tin. Bake for 10 minutes, maybe more, maybe less; what happens is magical – the blobs of mixture spread out to form perfect little tart bases that are cooked once they are rimmed with golden brown. Take them out of the tins when they’ve cooled a little bit with a butter knife or a teaspoon and allow to cool and harden on a wire rack. Don’t leave them in there too long or they’ll stick to the tins. Now whisk some cream, and a little sugar if you like, and place a teaspoon of it in the tart case and some of the fruit on top. (For the rhubarb, I stewed it lightly with some sugar and a vanilla pod.)

#142 Ballymaloe Fruit Tarts – 7.5/10. Really simple and delicious. The base is chewy and the topping, light. Even if you don’t bake these sorts of things, have a go at these – you get a lot of return for little effort.

#141 Warm Skate Salad with Shaun Hill's Dressing

Another fish dish. Skate is one of my favourite fish and liked the idea of having it in warm salad – perfect for this time of year when the weather is often bright and sunny but will a chill still in the air. Classically, skate is poached or fried and served with either a beurre noisette or capers, so I thought having it in strips with warm vinaigrette would be a new thing that might jazz up this tasty, though bland, fish.

Start off by preparing your skate wings (one per person). Rinse each one under the tap or soak in a change or two of water – take heed of this advice, this gets rid of the taste of ammonia found in fresh skate. I didn’t know this, even though I’ve cooked it many times, it’s never been ponged of ammonia. However, this time it was different (for one of us anyway!). Dry the wings and fry them in a little olive oil until cooked through – a few minutes a side, you can tell they’re cooked as the flesh starts to raise itself up from the cartilaginous bones. Whilst you are waiting, wash and dry some green salad leaves (I used watercress to be seasonal) and place a pile of them in the centre of each plate.

Now make the dressing. Set up a bowl over some simmering water. Add three tablespoons of fish stock and around 6 tablespoons of olive oil to the bowl. Chop up a handful of parsley leaves with a shallot and a small clove of garlic. Add this and season with salt, pepper and lemon juice.

Remove the cooked skate from the pan and strip the meat of the wings with a fork. Pile the stripped fish on the salad leaves and sprinkle the whole thing with the dressing. Do this for each plate. Serve immediately.


FYI: Shaun Hill is still a chef, working at The Walnut Tree Inn in Wales. Here’s an article about him.

#141 Warm Skate Salad with Shaun Hill’s Dressing – 5/10. What a weird dish this turned out to be. None of the ingredients were bad , they just didn’t do together. The skate was nice and moist and gelatinous, but it’s delicate flavour was completely drowned out by the dressing with its strong garlic, shallot and olive flavours –delicious that it was. The ammonia was a cause for concern – it obviously doesn’t happen every time one cooks it, otherwise I’d have noticed before, but it’s worth bearing in mind in the future. Overall, I prefer my skate the old-fashioned way… Skate was very popular, but recipes like this won’t be doing it many favours in making it popular again.

#140 Crab Tart

I’ve mentioned before that a much ignored chapter in English Food is the Fish chapter (I must tell you what the chapters actually are, so you know where the seemingly random recipes fit). The fish that are in season during May and are in the book are salmon and crab. A quick phone call to Butters to help me decide which fish/crustacean to try first was required – I’ve never cooked with crab other than tinned, and salmon isn’t my favourite. We went for the crab. There’s a few crab recipes but this one seemed relatively straight-forward.

It seems the oceans were a much more plentiful place in the 1970s compared to now (though we knew that already!). The original recipe asks for a boiled crab weighing 2 pounds or one kilogram. Fat chance of that says the fishmonger, however I asked for the biggest one and it wasn’t too far off. It only cost a fiver! I was well happy there – a tiny tin of it cost about 3 quid. Bargin. In fact I noticed the fishmonger was stocked with loads of nice things at the minute...

Butters gets a crab infestation. Again

To make a crab tart, start off by making (or buying) some shortcrust pastry and lining an 8 to 9 inch flan or tart tin with it. Bake the pastry blind in a hot oven - 220°C – for 10-15 minutes. Do this by lining it with greaseproof paper or foil and pouring in some baking beans. For the final couple of minutes remove the beans so that the base can crisp and dry out a little.

Now you have to pay the boiled crab some considerable attention. It’s quite an arduous task but quite satisfyingly so. I won’t go through how to remove the meat here, but I’ll instead send you to this link to Deliaonline, which I followed and it did the job. In fact go to that website if there’s any techniques you want to reference. Once you’ve extracted as much meat as your patience will allow mix the white and brown meats together and season well with sea salt, black or white pepper and Cayenne pepper. Stir in one whole egg and two egg yolks (keep the whites) and 8 fluid ounces of whipping cream. Now add a tablespoon each of Cheddar and Parmesan cheese and stir in. Whisk the two egg whites until firm of peak and fold it into the crab mixture. Pour the whole thing into the case and bake at 220°C for 5 minutes and then turn the heat down to 190°C and bake for a further 25-40 minutes. The tart is ready when it has set and lost its eggy wobbliness.

Not the most photogenic of tarts, I know, but tasted lovely.

Griggers says to serve straight away with brown bread and butter, but to be extra-seasonal, I made a quick salad from rocket, sliced radishes, olive oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper. It went very well.

#140 Crab Tart 7/10. I really enjoyed cooking with and then eating crab. The brown meat dissolved into the cream and eggs making it deliciously sweet and moist and the white meat gave the whole thing good texture. The genius of the dish was the whisked egg whites, which lifted to so well. A definite success that really made me feel Spring is finally here! Great stuff.

Getting Seasonal

It’s tricky to choose recipes to cook when there are still so many to choose from in the book – plus, many ingredients are unknown to me, and because of a certain amount of trepidation I’ve ignored some. I have decided that the best thing to do here is to follow the seasons more closely (I try to do this as much as I can anyway). This means that anything new to me as a cook, should be in tip-top shape and therefore be much less likely to go wrong. At least that’s the theory. So, after a little bit of research on the internet, here’s a list of meat, fish, vegetables and fruits that are in season and/or at their peak in May. Not all are used in English Food, but I’ve included them for completeness. We shall see how many I can do this Maytime:

Lamb
Salmon
Sea trout
Sea bass
Crab
Beetroot
Cabbage (all kinds)
Carrots
Cauliflowers
Kale
Turnips
Samphire (I don't know where I'm going to get thhis from! Help anybody?)
Asparagus
Jersey Royal potatoes
Watercress
Radishes
Rocket
Spinach
Spring onions
Cherries
Rhubarb
Elderflowers

Not quite the Good Life, but it's a start...

Aside from a bit of baking to help me relax I’ve been attempting a little bit of gardening. I have no idea what I’m doing at the minute, but I’m aiming for two things: one, some kind of fresh produce for myself – though in very small amounts as my back yard is tiny; two, British flowers that will not only look nice but attract any passing wildlife that has dared enter darkest Levenshulme. I’m hopefully choosing plants that tick both boxes simultaneously. Thus far: rosemary, red basil, chives, leaf beet spinach, mint, marjoram, blackberry, raspberry and blackcurrant. I also plan to attempt some broad beans and maybe some peas too, as well as extra hard-to-get herbs like tarragon and chervil, plus some wild flowers too. All this should add up to a lovely little oasis in a sometimes miserable South Manchester.

Thus far only the red basil has germinated, I shall keep you posted. Has anyone got any tips or suggestion as to what else I can plant? It has to be something easy to look after that takes up little space. Any comments are very welcome. Ta!

Everything you wanted to know about bouquet garnis but were afraid to ask...

Ok, you weren't afraid to ask...

Not really had time to add extra entries other than the stuff I’m cooking from the Tome. However, I did come across this information in the very excellent book A Celebration of Soup by Lindsey Bareham on the subject of bouquet garnis – I usually guess as to what should go in mine, and try and match it to the ingredients of the soup/stew etc, but Lindsey gives an ultimate list here, which I’m reproducing – I’m using it as a benchmark from now on and thought you might like to know too… So whenever I mention that I’ve used a bouquet garni, unless Griggers is very specific as to what should go in it, it’ll be one of these and I’ll link back to this post. Hope it’s useful!

Poultry – stick of celery cut in half, parsley stalks, a couple of sprays of tarragon, a bayleaf, a sprig of thyme and leek trimmings.

Game – A sprig of rosemary, ½ an onion, 3 inches of pared orange peel and a sprig of thyme.

Fish – A couple of fennel stalks or leaves, a sprig each of chervil and tarragon and leek trimmings.

Meat – One clove of unpeeled garlic, parsley stalks, a bayleaf, ½ an onion studded with a few cloves and a sprig of time. (I’m also adding a spring of sage with pork and rosemary with lamb).

#139 Bakewell Pudding

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve got quite a lot on at the minute – the main ball-ache being that I’ve been in work almost everyday over the last few weeks including weekends. Therefore, on Saturday after a big lab sesh, I really felt the need to do some baking, so for pudding on Saturday evening I plumped for the Bakewell Pudding. Don’t be getting this confused with a Bakewell tart – they are similar, but with important differences: Bakewell tarts have a pastry base, a thin layer of cherry jam, frangipane, and then a covering of icing with a cherry on top. A Bakewell pudding, pastry, raspberry jam, then a layer of egg custard mixed with ground almonds (in fact, in days of yore, there would have been no almonds at all, so the emphasis is definitely on the egg custard). These may not seem like important differences, and they are not, but just pointing them out for any pernickety people out there who like their factoids.

Anyways, have a go at this pudding – serve it warm or cold. Griggers doesn’t mention cream when serving it or anything like that, but I can’t imagine it would do any harm!

Start by making a sweet shortcrust pastry – I made mine from 6 ounces of plain flour, 2 ounces of icing sugar, 4 ounces of butter and a little milk. Griggers says to line an 8 inch tart tin with the pastry, but I found that there was mixture left over, so make it in a 9 inch tin if you have one – alternatively make additional mini ones as I did! Once lined, spread over a thin layer of raspberry jam – not too much, a good dessert spoonful will do it.

Now make the main filling: gently melt 4 ounces of unsalted butter in a pan and leave to cool. Then beat or whisk together 4 eggs with 4 ounces of caster sugar until creamy and frothed up (use an electric whisk/beater, unless you like doing it by hand). Slowly pour in the butter and mix gently before folding in 4 ounces of ground almonds with a metal spoon. Pour the mixture into the case and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the filling has set, at 200-220⁰C.


#139 Bakewell Pudding – 7/10. A real homely comforting pudding/tart, very sweet and moist. It reminded me of the cakes my mum used to make when I was little – I think hers was coconut rather than almonds, but the effect is pretty much the same. Really nice with a cup of tea or a glass of milk.

#138 Cheese Souffle

For the last few weeks, I’ve been dreaming about soufflés – I don’t know why but I had a real hankering. I hope I’m not pregnant. Luckily for me Lady Grigson always obliges – there are loads of soufflé recipes in English Food. Obviously the soufflé does not have English roots, but up until recently, they were pretty popular – particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when English Food was written. They do have a bit of a reputation for being tricky little devils – I had only cooked one once before when I was about 10 – I remember it completely sinking, but being delicious.

I like one comment Jane makes about soufflés when they are ready to come out of the oven:
“…it is better to have everyone sat at table. In a properly trained household, the cry of ‘Souffle!’ should have the same effect of assembly as ‘Fire!’”

We loves her.

FYI: the soufflé was invented in the late eighteenth century – around 1782, but the first recipes didn’t not appear until 1813, when several were published in Louis Ude's The French Cook of 1813. The idea being they were cheap as they are essentially just eggs and air with some kind of flavouring so they were a good meal the common man.


This cheese soufflé feeds between 2 and 4 people depending upon how greedy they are. There’s a couple of stages, but they're pretty straight-forward and not as tricky as people seem to make out:

First of all make sure you have a soufflé dish (or similar) that has a capacity of around 2 ½ pints and grease it with butter, then preheat the oven to 200°C. Next, heat ½ pint of milk to just below boiling point and melt 2 ounces of butter in another (decent-sized) saucepan and add 1 ½ ounces of flour to it. Allow to cook for a minute, take off the heat, and add the boiling milk. Whisk well to form a smooth sauce and then incorporate 4 large egg yolks, one at a time. Mix in 3 ounces of Cheddar (or Lancashire) cheese and season with salt, pepper and Cayenne (which I forgot!). Put back on a low heat and stir until all is nice and smooth. Easy-peasy thus far.

Next, whisk 5 large egg whites together with a pinch of salt until they reach the stiff-peak stage – you should be able to upturn the bowl without any of the contents to fall out. Take a tablespoon of the whites and mix it in to the cheesy sauce to slacken the mixture, then tip in the rest, folding the whites in carefully with a metal spoon until incorporated. You need to do this with minimal stirring, so don’t worry if there’s a few specks of white knocking around. Stir in a tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese and pour/spoon the mixture into the soufflé dish. Lastly, sprinkle over another tablespoon of Parmesan and a tablespoon of stale breadcrumbs. Bake for 30 minutes – do not on any account open the oven door until the time is up. Serve straight out of the oven with a nice green salad.

#138 Cheese Soufflé – 8.5/10. This was really nice, and definitely English – just like Chicken Tikka Masala become part of our cuisine more recently. The top was very crisp and the centre was just cooked and extremely light. We wolfed it down. Bring on the other ones, I say – but which to do next..? You have to make sure everything is ready – salad dressed, plates laid out etc – otherwise as it does collapse, but I have to say, not that much. All I have to say is – give it a go if you’ve never made one, it’s no way near as tricky as I thought it would be.

#136-137 Sponge Cake II and Butter Cream I

April has not been a bumper Grigson month like March was. This is due to the fact I am uber-busy with my PhD work at the minute, plus I’m doing the tiling in the kitchen too which does not help. No indeedy. Anyways, enough of the excuses… A kick up the arse came from the fact I had to provide a cake for the Dictyostelium group lab meeting, so I thought I’d do something straightforward – a sponge cake with butter cream. Great stuff; they have separate recipes in the book, so it would be two Grigsons with one stone. There are two recipes for sponge cakes and two for butter cream in English Food and I have already attempted one of each (see here and here), although in a funny order as you can see – this is because the Butter Cream I required a sugar thermometer, which I didn’t have at the time.

Ok, here’s the cake recipe. A word of advice though before I carry on – do not attempt this cake unless you have either an electric mixer or a very strong wanking hand…

Start off by whisking three whole eggs together with 6 ounces of caster sugar until light and frothy – this took 10 minutes using the Kitchen Aid on full whack. Stop when the eggs have reached the ribbon stage. Whilst you are waiting for that to happen, heat the oven to 190°C and grease and lightly flour two 7 inch sandwich tins. Also, gently melt 2 ounces of slightly salted butter with two tablespoons of water. Once melted, leave to cool until at least tepid. When the eggs are whisked, gently stir in the butter. Now fold in 4 ounces of self-raising flour by sieving a small amount in at a time and gently folding it in with a metal spoon to prevent the air bubbles from popping. Divide between the two sandwich tins and bake for 15-20 minutes until cooked – use a skewer, or whatever, you know the drill. Cool on a wire rack. Griggers says jam and cream is the best, or a nice butter cream, like this one…

The butter cream can be made whilst you are waiting for the cake to cook – especially if it takes two attempts to get the bugger right!


Melt 4 ounces of caster sugar and a tablespoon or two of water in a small saucepan. Once dissolved, raise the heat and boil it until it reached the ‘soft crack’ stack, or 135°C. Be careful here: use a very small pan – too large and the sugar overheats too easily becoming a caramel, which will ruin the whole thing. Whilst it is heating up, put two egg yolks into a bowl and lightly whisk them. When the sugar is ready vigorously beat it into the eggs with a whisk. The mixture thickens up as the yolks are cooked by the hot sugar. When just tepid, beat in 4 ounces of unsalted butter in small amounts until it is all amalgamated. Once cool, you can add all sots of flavourings – I went with some vanilla, but Griggers recommends plain chocolate or a tablespoon of slaked coffee granules. Just go crazy, kids!

#136 Sponge Cake II – 9/10. When Griggers this recipe is foolproof, she did not say it was foolproof and brilliant. The sponge extremely light and not at all rubbery like the usual Genoese sponge on account (I assume) the addition of the melted butter. This is the best sponge cake recipe I have used. Excellent – go make it right now!


#137 Butter Cream I – also 9/10. Griggers totally slagged-off the half-butter (or even margarine, heaven forbid!), half-icing sugar as essentially awful. Having a soft spot for that type of butter cream I was keen to see the difference. The difference is huge – I know it is a bit of a faff using the sugar thermometer etc., but it is well worth it. Once you’ve tried it, ladies and gents, you’ll never go back…

#135 Butterscotch Cake

I was a little bored on Tuesday evening so I thought I’d bake a nice cake for Cake Wednesday at work. I knew there had been no takers this week with it being close to Easter. Plus I’ve not made a normal cake for ages. This one is a variation on the pound cake – I’ve made them before (here is the blog entry) so I won’t go through it. The only difference is that caster sugar is substituted for soft dark brown sugar which gives it a richer, denser molasses flavour. The exciting thing being the butterscotch icing – I’d bought a sugar thermometer recently and not used it yet. I went a bit wrong with icing. Because I was in a rush, I heated it too rapidly before the sugar dissolved properly. Plus I accidentally heated it to the firm ball rather than the soft ball stage, which meant it went a bit too stiff. Hey-ho. If you try it, remember that slow and steady wins the race here. A little practise is required I feel. Any hints and tips are happily accepted!

For the icing (do as I say, not as I do…):

Slowly heat 6 ounces of soft dark brown sugar, an ounce of butter and two tablespoons of double cream until everything had dissolved. Now raise the heat and boil until the sugar reaches the soft ball stage using a sugar thermometer (turn the heat off as it approaches the temperature, as it keeps on a-rising!). Allow to cool until ‘tepid’ and beat. I’m not sure what it’s meant to turn into, but mine was a very stiff blob of sugar. I managed to spread it over the cake top with a wet palette knife and everything looked okay.

FYI: In case you were thinking that butterscotch doesn’t sound very English, but rather Scottish, you would be a fool (as I was). Scotch is a ye olde English word for score as proper butterscotch is hard and needs to be scored before it is broken.

#135 Butterscotch Cake – 6.5/10. I liked the cake as it was piled with dark brown sugar, so it could not be bad, but it was a little dry. I have a feeling that it was overcooked though – I still haven’t got to grips with the old fan oven and sponge cakes. I remember getting a handy hint from Anthea (a sometimes commenter on the blog) that you should put a some boiling water in a roasting tin and place it in the bottom of the oven to stop it drying the cake out. Needless to say, I forgot to. Oh well. The butterscotch topping was very sweet and very tasty, even though it didn’t quite turn out as expected…

#134 Mushrooms, or the Pearls of the Field

The male cook/chef that seems to appear often in English Food is one Alexis Soyer – he wrote a book called Shilling Cookery for the People in 1854. I’ve done one of his recipes before (reproduced in English Food) using oranges. This one is a method of doing good service to a large field mushroom, should you find one, as I did in Asda the other day. I thought I’d quote what he says about this dish straight from English Food as the language is brilliant, though the people for whom he was writing probably thought he was a right old ponce:

“Being in Devonshire, at the end of September and walking across the fields before breakfast to a small farmhouse, I found three very fine mushrooms, which I thought would be a treat, but on arriving at the house I found it had no oven, a bad gridiron and a smoky coal fire. Necessity, they say, is the mother of Invention, I immediately applied to our grand and universal mamma, how should I dress my precious mushrooms, when a gentle whisper came to my ear…”

This is what he did:
Place the mushroom on a round, or rounds of toast, depending on size, that have been spread with clotted cream (I had some left from the junket I made the other day). Have the mushroom stalk side up and spread that with more cream. Season well and place in inverted Pyrex dish over it and bake in a hot oven (200°C) for 30 minutes. He used a glass tumbler – to prevent the smoke spoiling the flavour of his precious mushrooms. It’s a good method, as it does keep all the mushroom juices in.


He goes on to say:
“The sight when the glass is removed, is most inviting, its whiteness rivals the everlasting snows of Mont Blanc, and the taste is worthy of Lucullus. Vitellius would never have dined without it; Apicius would never have gone to Greece to seek for crawfish; and had he only half the fortune left when he committed suicide, he would have preferred to have left proud Rome and retire to some villa or cottage to enjoy such an enticing dish."

OK...

#134 Mushrooms, or the Pearl of the Fields – 8/10. I have to say, although he talks a load of nonsense, he knows how a treat a mushroom fairly. This simple supper dish is maybe the best way to show off the earthy flavour of those large meaty, juicy field/Portabello mushrooms. The clotted cream soaked into the crispy bread and also formed a rich sauce in the cap. Brilliant.

#133 Welsh Supper Herrings

After the creamy and rich oyster loaves last night, I thought I’d go for something a little bit more fresh-tasting and the Welsh Supper Herrings seemed to fit the bill. I chose herring because, like oysters, I’d never knowingly tried them except, of course, in the form of kippers. Herring are quite cheap as are most of the other ingredients so it didn’t break the bank. The odd ingredient here is the Bramley apple, but apparently it’s a traditional thing, herring and apple. First I’d heard.

Gut, clean, descale, behead and fillet a pound of herring – ask your fishmonger to do this, I tried to fillet them myself and was reasonably successful but was a bit of a ballache. Now mix an ounce of softened butter with a tablespoon of mustard made up from mustard powder (Why? Because Griggers says so, that’s why). Spread the butter over the cut side of the fish fillets and roll them up.

Next get to work on peeling and then finely slicing a pound and a half of firm potatoes – Jane recommends using a mandolin for this. Please, please, please be very careful here – I managed to slice a piece of my thumb off doing this last night so watch out. You have been warned. Don’t go suing me if you open a vein… Plunge the potatoes into boiling salted water for a minute she says – though I would do them for 2 or maybe even three (see below). Then slice a large onion and two Bramley (or other cooking) apples that have been peeled and cored. No need for the mandolin for those. Use a little more softened butter to grease a pie dish and make a layer using half the potatoes, then half the apples and half the onions, seasoning as you go with salt and pepper. Next, the rolled up herring fillets and sprinkle them with half a teaspoon of dried sage (Why not fresh? Because Griggers says so, that’s why). Then add the remaining apple, onion and potato, adding a brief painting on of melted butter to the last layer of spuds. Pour boiling water so it comes around half way up the dish. Bake for around half an hour until the potatoes are cooked.


#133 Welsh Supper Herrings – 3.5/10. Not sure if this was a bad dish or a bad recipe for a good dish. The potatoes, apples and onions were very nice – the apples especially lifted it, but the potatoes were not cooked after half an hour even though I blanched them in the boiling water. They were done after an hour, but unfortunately this meant that the herrings had cooked down into a mush not unlike cat food. So pretty disappointing seeing as I almost sacrificed a digit for it. Hey-ho, such is the nature of this undertaking…

#132 Oyster loaves

One of the least-explored chapters in English Food is the Fish chapter. The main reason for this is that I have the least experience of the foods therein. Being English (I won’t say British as Wales, N. Ireland and Scotland may be different) means, generally, the only fish you get to eat is white fish – cod and haddock. Though I love the fish I’ve tried, one thing we have never eaten as a family growing up in Yorkshire is shellfish. The only exception is prawns because my Mum likes them. Because I’ve never really tried the bivalves – cockles etc., I find them tricky to get my head around them – they look like something from a biological specimen jar and do not resemble anything else that might turn up on the dinner table. I felt an inauguration coming on, and “why not” I thought, start at the top, with the king – oysters.

I popped on down to the Arndale Market in Manchester, got some rock oysters for 70p each and an oyster knife for a fiver from the cooks stall. Hopefully I’ll get to use it more than once…

I thought I’d better not go straight in at the deep end with a raw squirming oyster, but instead get there by degrees. First step – oyster cooked and smothered in some kind of sauce with lots of other flavours. Second step – oyster cooked but by itself. Final step – raw oyster. Griggers was there to help, natch, with this recipe straight out of the 1970s:

This recipe is per person, so multiply up depending on how many you’re cooking for:

Begin by heating your oven to 220°C whilst waiting for it to heat up, open 4 oysters with an oyster knife. This can be tricky if using large rock oysters with big gnarly shells, but with a bit of patience it’s quite easy to get the knack for opening them. Give them a rinse and a scrub under the cold tap first and make sure you hold the flat side of the oyster uppermost and with your grasping hand wrapped in a tea towel. Use the knife to prize the hinged back part of the oyster open. Do this over a bowl so you can keep any liquor that escapes – very important for later. I found that placing a sieve lined with some kitchen paper filtered away any sand or cracked bits of shell.

Now hollow out 2 bread rolls by first slicing the top off and then scooping out the centre, making sure you don’t make any holes in the side. Brush the lid and roll inside and out with melted butter – about ½ an ounce – and bake for 10 minutes until crisp and golden.

Meanwhile, melt another ½ ounce of butter in a pan and cook the oysters for around a minute and a half until they are opaque and firm. Remove them and cut them up into two or three pieces. Pour the oyster liquor into the pan along with 2 tablespoons each of double and soured cream, and season with salt, pepper and 3 or 4 drops of Tabasco sauce. Reduce it down to a thick sauce, stirring all the time, and warm the oysters through in the sauce. Check for seasoning. Lastly, divide the mixture between the hollowed bread rolls and serve immediately.

"Feed me, Seymore"

#132 Oyster Loaves – 7.5/10. I really enjoyed this. I’ve heard people say that oysters taste of ‘the sea’, or ‘ozone’ or iodine’; I’ve never been sure what they meant by that, but now I do! The oysters were sweet, rich and very soft and the piquant, yet creamy sauce really worked well. The idea of putting them in a hollowed bread roll might seem a bit naff now, but you could serve on a circle of bread fried gently in butter to make look more with the times. One would make a really good first course. I am very impressed with my first oyster adventure and would definitely encourage anyone who is squeamish about them to give this recipe a try – it simple and not expensive.

FYI: In days of yore, oysters were considered food for the poor and were largely ignored by the posh. They were used as a substitute for mushrooms (hence steak, kidney and oyster pie) in many dishes as they were very rare due to the fact no-one had worked out how to cultivate them. It wasn't until they became scarce due to loss of habitat and pollution that they were thought to be a delicacy.