frugal food
10/02/2010 - 11:12 am
On Monday we were invited out to dinner.
After surviving on Chilli con carne in various guises for the previous week, it was a relief to be out of the kitchen and away from the Mexican ragu which had finally been finished off spooned over a bowl of nachos and laden with vaguely luminescent cheese.
The Le Creuset was washed down, the crusted edges scraped clean and we left it drying on the rack beside the sink as we drove the half hour towards Bedfordshire.
‘We thought about getting a curry tonight,’ he said as a cold lager was passed towards me ‘but the Indian is closed on a Monday. So we’ve cooked a chilli instead.’
The giggles were stifled until the GF and I were alone in the dining room when we simply had to embrace the irony and laugh silently and uncontrollably, resigned politely to enjoy just one more, like the erstwhile butler James in the magnificent Dinner For One.
But it was a very good chilli. Even after the following incarnations
Monday – Burritos
I won’t patronise by offering a recipe for chilli con carne. You have one. I know that much and it would be foolish to think you would change it in any way. It matters not whether it is a genuine Texan number with chuck steak or a basic ragu pepped up with kidney beans and spices.
A burrito should be aching at the seams, the contents desperate for liberation, hence the need to employ a foil girdle. The meat sauce sits atop a layer of Mexican style rice and is piled high with grated cheese, chopped salad, sour cream, guacamole, salsa and as much hot sauce as you can handle.
Tuesday – Enchiladas
The chilli was stuffed into toasted tortilla wraps, rolled and topped with a reduced passata pepped up with a little garlic and chilli pepper. The whole lot was then baked for 25 minutes until steaming hot to the core. Sliced avocado was the ideal accessory.
Wednesday – Keeping it simple…
We got drunk. Accidentally. Returning home with the munchies we ladled the sauce and leftover burrito rice into a bowl, put the microwave on high and shovelled it into our mouths in an effort to soak up excess cheap white wine. It was nigh on perfect. There is no photo.
Thursday – Chilli and Cornbread
Cornbread is one of those items that has a shiny stars and stripes mystique. A hallowed national dish from across the pond that until last week remained a mystery, like a sloppy Joes or Jambalaya or grits.
It was with caution I tipped the recommended amount of baking powder into the batter mix (cornbread is more of a cake than a standard loaf) and as expected it was the overriding flavour to a deeply unpleasant degree. Such excitement, such expectation, such disappointment. Sorry, America, I remain unconvinced on this one.
Friday – Nachos
What better way to end the week than with that Brit pub/diner classic/lazy fallback of last decade, nachos?
Clearly the best part of this dish is the slew of lurid orange cheese that seeps between the crispy tortilla chips and covers the fingers with a layer of tasty grease. But the cooling elements of guacamole, salsa and sour cream and chives were a welcome addition too.
A satisfying and fun experiment in thrift. The cost of the chilli itself? No more than £4, the sundry additions another fiver. Two of us ate for a week (including lunches comprised of the previous night’s leftovers) for about ten pounds.
Now to get some bloody steak…
Not enough for you? How about some Twitter?
01/02/2010 - 5:14 pm
T.S. Eliot was wrong. February is the cruellest month.
With the day:night ratio still brutally weighted towards darkness and the good intentions of January ending in frustration or failure there is little to cheer come month number two.
What’s more, financially imposed restraint withers the bud of any frivolous relief: one must pay for midwinter exuberance at some point and that is usually about 30 days into the year. There shall be no steaks or fine wines in February.
But it presents the enthusiastic cook with a challenge. With budgets slashed more brutally than an American teenager in a bad horror movie, the cogs of invention begin to splutter and whirr into gear in an attempt to answer the age-old question: how does one eat well – cheaply?
I found the answer in the 1980s.
When we moved in together, the GF and I inevitably meshed media collections. This explains why Destiny’s Child now cosy up to The Dears and how Badly Drawn Boy ended up in such close proximity to Band of Horses (the alphabetisation is all me, sadly).
The cookbook collection was also enriched by this collision. In addition to the Nigels and Nigellas were some fabulous items from the mid 1980s which 20-some years on have managed to recapture their appeal, if only for kitsch value.
The Austrialian Women’s Weekly Dinner Party Cookbook No.2, its cover adorned with a domed fruit jelly, whipped cream piped around the perimeter, is a particular favourite. How to Make Good Curries is another I adore, chiefly because of the modest ambitions of its title.
The good folks at the Aussie Women’s Weekly are also responsible for The Barbecue Cookbook including – I kid you not – a section on a barbecued wedding breakfast.
But our favourite discovery, and one that caused much mirth when we were going through our new collection is a small undated pamphlet issued by the British Sausage Bureau entitled A Month of Sausages.
I think that warrants some thought.
Firstly, it is both commendable and highly amusing that such an organisation existed given that it sounds like something dreamt up by Edmund Blackadder or the writers of The Thick Of It. An entire (government funded) organisation dedicated solely to the advancement of the sausage. Magnificent.
But what’s more surprising and sadly archaic is the notion that a tentacle of the government would recommend eating sausages – albeit in various guises – every day. For a month.
In an era of five-a-day, low-sodium, low-fat, no-butter, no booze, no fags, no eggs, no cream, no bacon – the very idea that a publicly funded body could recommend eating processed pork for thirty straight days like some sort of inverse Lent is anathema to modern health proclamations.
Towards the end of the booklet they seem to be getting a little short on ideas (sausage kebabs – a sausage on a stick, Welsh Sausage Supper – sausages fried with leeks) but one has to admire the sentiment even if the execution is a little suspect.
However, despite my adoration of pork, I fear that a month of sausages is a challenge beyond even my capabilities but I was tickled by the notion and it chimed with the rather timely need for thrift.
For the next week we shall be eating chilli con carne. But we won’t be eating the same meal twice. The chilli shall serve as inspiration and base but the format shall vary.
At the moment it is bubbling away slowly in the oven and has been for four hours. The total cost of the ingredients was under a fiver and I’m as yet unsure where to go beyond chilli with rice and enchiladas but we’ll get there.
It might not be a month of sausages but a week of chilli is a darn good way to start a frugal February.
Results next Monday but for more regular updates tune into my Twitter feed right here
26/06/2009 - 11:00 am
Carnivorous detachment is something many of us are guilty of.
By that I mean there is a deliberate and tangible epistemic distance between product and animal. It’s one that we gloss over. Choose to ignore, and prefer to exist in a state of happy ignorance about where meat comes from.
Of course, when it really comes down to it we know that something, some thing, died so that we can consume the animal protein on our plate but there is a vast chasm between the casual awareness of this and the genuine hands on reality.
A few weeks back I went to a slaughterhouse. It was clean and quiet and had been shut down for the day. But the pervading atmosphere was one of death.
It was discernable not only in the smell, but in the walls, the floors, the shape of the pens and the grim actuality of the chains, hooks and instruments required to turn a cow (or in this case a water buffalo) into something the consumer is happy to eat.
There was no slaughter that day. But it wasn’t necessary to see it in order to have beliefs affirmed: that, for me, eating meat comes with a responsibility to appreciate the reality of husbandry, slaughter and butchery.
I’m not here to proselytise. Merely explain the position I’ve chosen to take and hopefully use that as a springboard for what follows.
Naturally there was a culinary dimension to cooking a pig’s head. It’s a challenge. A gastronomic gauntlet. A badge of honour, almost. But it also represents the face-to-face dimension of being a carnivore. Literally.
Where one can cook a steak with little thought to animal from which it came, a head doesn’t offer this luxury. It is clearly an animal, and one that we are familiar with. Looking at the apparent smile that seems to spread across the face of a dead pig one can’t help but think it is in a state of blissful ignorance as to its fate: the dinner plate.
I’d set myself the task of cooking a rather ambitious menu and then serving it up to brave diners who had kindly volunteered to accompany me on this little culinary journey. As a perfectionist, though, this wasn’t going to happen without a practice run.
The brain dish wasn’t a winner and certainly not worth the effort of cleaving open the head – a task which took close to three quarters of an hour. But the rest had potential.
So, here it is. A first draft anyway. Complete with recipes
Trio of Pig’s Head
[NB – The only element of this I had help with was asking the butcher to remove the eyes. I have a funny thing with eyes. I was 21 before I could consider the possibility of getting contact lenses.]
For this you will need one pig’s head. Remove the eyes and discard. Remove the ears close to the head and wash well. Use a boning knife to remove as much of the cheek meat as possible, cut into inch long pieces and set aside.
Cut off about an inch and a half to two inches of the snout and discard (a large saw is probably the best piece of equipment for this).
Place the head and ears into a large stockpot with a crude mirepoix of carrots, onion, celery, leeks and garlic. Cover the whole lot with water and bring it to a gentle boil. Let it simmer for half an hour, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. After thirty minutes reduce the heat and let it bubble away very gently for three hours.
To confit the cheeks, finely chop some rosemary and bay leaf. Salt the cheeks and sprinkle over the herbs. Put the whole lot into a roasting tray and add enough duck or goose fat to come halfway up the cheek pieces. Cook in a cool oven – about 125 degrees C – for three hours. Turn the pieces every half hour or so. Once cooked leave to cool.
Remove the ears and head from the stock pot and let them cool. Strain the stock through a sieve and then a muslin cloth, bring it back to the boil and reduce it by about half. Remove about 250ml from the pot and add it to another saucepan. Reduce that by half. This will make the setting jelly for the brawn pâté. The rest of the stock can be used to make soup.
Once the head is cool enough to handle strip it of its meat, of which there should be plenty – about 300-400g. Set to one side and discard the bones.
Take a deep breath. You’re almost there.
Confit of pig’s cheek
Remove the meat from the duck or goose fat and slice off the skin (which can be used to make pork scratchings – bake ina moderate oven for about 20 minutes). Use two forks to shred it roughly, a little like making rillettes. Heat the leftover fat and strain through a sieve.
Season the meat with salt and black pepper then stuff it tightly into a sterilised jar. Pour over the liquid fat, screw on the lid and let it cool. This should keep for weeks and is great served with cornichons and fresh, crusty bread.
Brawn pâté
Brawn is a rough and ready item of charcuterie usually made with the entire head with chunks of meat set into jelly. This is a more delicate, refined version, much more similar to a pâté or rough sausage. The jelly is almost indiscernible and is used predominantly as a binding agent.
Finely chop the meat. Season it with salt and pepper then add some chopped sage, about six or seven leaves. In a mixing bowl add about 50ml of the reduced stock to the meat until it starts to come together then turn out onto a square of cling film or tin foil.
Roll the meat into a tight sausage and leave in the fridge overnight. Once set, slice the meat into circles, fry in a little olive oil for thirty seconds each side and serve with salad leaves.
Crispy fried pig’s ears
These are delicious. Not just passable or ‘OK. For an ear’, but really tasty. A little like calamari but slightly tougher.
Thinly slice the ear and coat in seasoned flour. Make up a batter (I used the ginger beer batter again – it works really well) and deep fry the battered ears for about two minutes. Drain on kitchen paper and serve with sea salt, a little lemon juice and some mayonnaise or sweet chilli sauce.
23/06/2009 - 2:59 pm
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single foodstuff in possession of good batter can be rendered not just palatable, but delicious through the simple action of deep-frying.
So said Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice.
I think. Or something along those lines anyway.
But it is a fair argument. Golden batter can hide a multitude of sins, provide a satisfying crunch to an otherwise flabby ingredient and even impart its own magical flavours.
It’s a culinary sleight of hand used the world over from the feather-light tempura of Japan to the more, ahem, heavyweight Scottish offerings (deep-fried kebab meat pizza, anyone? And is it wrong that I find that slightly alluring?).
My old boss once told me of a dinner he enjoyed after a long day’s trek through a mountainous region of the States. In the mood for seafood, he ordered a large plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters.
They arrived not on the half shell as expected, but a steaming mound of golden brown delights, fresh from the deep fat fryer, just the right size to pop into the mouth.
It was only after eating half the portion that his colleague informed him they were not the salty molluscs he thought, but rather the inevitable leftovers of the messy business of cattle castration.
‘Quite tasty,’ he relayed to me, almost romantically.
It was this approach I thought best when contemplating the prospect of eating, for the first time, brain.
The menu tete de porc is gradually taking shape. It needs some work, some gentle refining before it is unleashed upon intrepid diners but it is mostly good.
One course, however, will not make it onto the final bill of fayre.
Removing the brain from the head of a pig is a chore of such magnitude that the final result would have to be rapturously delicious and close to orgasmic in order to make the task worthwhile. It is far from being either of these things. About as far away as it is possible to be.
After stripping the head of the cheeks, ears and snout you are left with something that resembles a science project. What then follows is an hour of finely tuned sawing, cleaving, chipping and brute force in order to remove its contents.
Which are surprisingly small. A disappointing fact at first sight but one that I grew grateful of very quickly when eating time came around.
A pig’s brain is about the size of a large duck egg. Before eating it must be soaked in water for at least 24 hours and then gently poached for about ten minutes. You can use plain old water with a splash of vinegar but we used chicken stock.
What emerges is something that looks like, well, it looks like a brain. There is no getting away from that fact: those familiar little lobes with the swirling labyrinthine pattern twisting across their pale surface.
Each hemisphere was sliced into three, dipped into batter (made with plain flour and ginger beer seasoned with salt, pepper and cayenne) and then deep fried in sunflower oil and suet for about two minutes.
They looked great. Appetising little nibbles whose true origins had been thoroughly and carefully disguised.
My dining partner on this occasion was a chef, also in possession of an adventurous and willing palate. ‘Batter looks good,’ he mused in an attempt to distract us both from its contents.
The small portion was taken outside along with some homemade mayonnaise, plenty of water and a pinch of bravado.
Sitting opposite each other in unintentional gladiatorial style, we each picked up a piece of battered brain and took a bite.
It is not necessary for something to taste actively bad in order to be unpleasant. Texture plays a major role in how we enjoy food. Few westerners enjoy the sticky, glutinous quality of many Asian delicacies such as Natto, made from fermented soybeans.
In that respect brain is unpleasant. Deeply so. What little flavour there is, is not nice. Faintly eggy but not strong enough in of itself to warrant being labelled disgusting.
But the texture of brain is what made us wince. Hard to pin down we tried to find a foodstuff with which to compare it to. The uncooked top of an inadequately fried egg. The slight ickiness of a cloying curdled milk product. Yoghurt that has gone flying far, far beyond its best before date.
It’s somewhere ethereal beyond liquid but stopping short of being solid and it disappeared in the mouth in an alarming fashion, almost flooding the palate with its bizarre nature. The brief respite of the batter only accentuated the downright unpleasantness of what was inside.
We ate another, with slightly more mayonnaise and slightly less gusto in order to galvanise our findings hoping that having removed the shock and awe factor, our second taste wouldn’t be clouded with prejudice. But prejudice merely gave way to knowledge and expectation. I’m not sure if it was better or worse. There was certainly no pride.
The remaining two nuggets were dissected and picked apart in order to pin down what the texture was like but we were still left without an adequate comparison.
A truth universally acknowledged? There is an exception that proves every rule and brain is the one.
Verdict? Brain has made the list. The. List. The list of foods I will happily go a lifetime without tasting again. It has happy company along with tinned tuna and hundred year egg. Don’t try this at home.
19/06/2009 - 9:04 am
As the old adage goes, you learn something new everyday.
Yesterday I learnt three things. Did you know, for instance, that the greyhound accelerates to 45 miles per hour in a single second from a standing start? Zero to forty five in a second? Amazing. It is the second fastest land mammal on earth.
The other two factoids I gleaned through empirical, hands-on research and part of me wishes I was still in a happy cloud of blissful ignorance. Here we go: the brain of a pig is surprisingly small. Tiny, in fact. About the size of a duck’s egg.
['Two squeaks, or not two squeaks? That is the question']
The second? There is a wonderful nugget of meat that sits just below the eye socket behind the cheek bone, only accessible with an adventurous finger after the head of a pig has been simmered long and slow. It falls away in a rather satisfactory fashion, a neat little piece of tasty pork.
I know this because of Project Napoleon.
Project Napoleon, named after the Stalin-esque character in Animal Farm, began quite by accident.
I’d had a request to cook (and eat) brain for the Nose to Tail Tuesday feature (thanks for that). With calves’ and lambs’ brain still illegal, it was up to the reliable old porker to provide the means by which this terrifying prospect could be realised.
I put in a reluctant request with my butcher and received a phone call on Wednesday: ‘I’ve got a pig’s head here for you? Do you want the whole thing or just the brain?’
The question was a no-brainer (ha ha ha – sorry). The head is a culinary challenge I’ve been keen to take on for quite some time: a real test that separates those who merely profess a predilection for the holistic approach and those with genuine gastronomic fortitude.
Why does the head divide the cooking fraternity so? It’s about emoting. As humans we have evolved to read faces, to try and glean as much information as possible from them. The slightest movement can give away a secret, a feeling or an emotion.
Presented with the head of an animal, there is a near certainty that we will lean towards anthropomorphosis. And pigs, even deceased and decapitated ones, look like they are smiling. They look content. Happy even. So turning it into food is difficult.
Once this hurdle has been leapt over, the rest is easy.
One option for turning this insanely cheap meat (this one cost just under three pounds) into a viable foodstuff is to make a tête de fromage, not a uniquely male medical condition but a rustic pâté also known as brawn.
Here the entire head is simmered gently for three hours in water and stock vegetables. Once cooled, the meat, fat and skin is stripped from the skull, the stock strained, reduced and turned into a jelly into which the meat is set.
Yum.
Or not.
I wanted something more refined. I’ve always believed that true culinary skill lies in turning the ridiculous into the sublime. The drab into the delicious. Here was a challenge.
Driving home from the butcher’s I started putting a menu together, one that would showcase this unusual ingredient to its full potential.
Head Over Heels
So, here is the plan – to be served to adventurous dinner guests, just as soon as we find some. Any takers?
Pre dinner drinks with pork scratchings and ears Ste Menehould
Deep fried brain on toast with champagne
Sour Apple amuse
Pea & Bacon Soup made with ‘head stock’ with homemade bread
Refined brawn pâté with sage
Confit cheek with apple jelly, candied bacon and summer leaves
Dessert
Cheese and port
Let’s see just what this head can do…
01/05/2009 - 10:37 am
I recently wrote a piece for a regional magazine here in the UK about how tighter budgets don’t necessarily mean that we have to shelve our ethics when it comes to buying meat.
Here it is. Comments and thoughts appreciated.
With consumers having to tighten their purse strings thanks to the economic downturn, many of us might be tempted to head towards the budget aisles of the supermarkets and start filling our trolleys with meats of dubious origin in order to make savings.
Of course, thanks to Hugh and Jamie et al we know about the plight of the ‘three-quid’ chicken and continentally raised pork. But when it comes to the bottom line, many of us are hampered by simple economics.
But the answer doesn’t necessarily lie at this end of the market and the good news is that we don’t need to temporarily shelve our principles in order to enjoy meat on a budget. There is, in the words of chef Fergus Henderson – advocate of a more holistic ‘nose to tail’ approach to meat cookery – a world of delights ‘beyond the fillet’.
Before you switch off entirely, we’re not talking about offal here, although liver, kidneys and their ilk remain a very cheap option for those that aren’t squeamish about such cuts. The answer instead lies in the ‘forgotten cuts’ that for so long have been unfashionable but are making a swift and timely return to the fore.
‘There is some wonderful meat that is so cheap it is almost unbelievable,’ says Miles, head butcher at Gog Magog Hills Farm Shop. ‘For a while it has been hard to sell, but we’re finding that they are getting more and more popular.’ They are the cuts whose very names evoke an earlier age of cookery and thrift, ones that perhaps your grandmother would have made the most of.
Kevin from Andrew Northorp Butchers on Mill Road agrees: ‘The one cut we’re selling a lot of is pork belly, people love it and we’re selling more than ever. Brisket is brilliant as well, it makes a great and economical pot roast.’
Pork hand, cheeks (both pork and beef), beef shin, and chicken thighs are also all ideal for a credit-crunched menu. And what’s more, as well as being staggeringly cheap, they are supremely delicious: far tastier than fillet, loin or chicken breast in many cases.
Although they may lack the convenience of the more familiar pieces of meat – you certainly can’t cook beef cheeks as you would a fillet steak – they invariably lend themselves to near effortless slow cooking, a process as close to culinary alchemy as it is possible to get without donning a wizard’s hat.
The animal perhaps most synonymous with this time of year, though, is undoubtedly lamb and that too has no shortage of cuts ideal for those looking to cook on a budget. Lamb neck makes a better curry than almost any other meat and, left on the bone, adds an unsurpassed flavour and richness that lends itself beautifully to spiced dishes. Perhaps slightly more unusual is lamb breast which is the cheapest cut on the animal. Similar to pork belly, it is delicious rolled around rosemary and garlic stuffing and slow roasted.
Although they may be hard to find at the supermarket there are many excellent butchers throughout the region (see LocalFoodAdvisor.com for more details) that would be delighted to talk you through these wonderful pieces of meat that are well worth hunting out for both economic and culinary reasons.
01/04/2009 - 4:23 pm
You can be so cruel. I was worried for this one.
Kidney has been my bête noire for quite some years.
Fifteen years ago, I made a solemn vow never to knowingly eat it ever again. Ever.
When I was twelve I stayed over at a friend’s house. For dinner, his mother (an excellent cook) pulled a stunning looking pie from the oven. The golden suet pastry glistened and the gravy inside was rich and dark.
It looked great.
One mouthful in was enough to put me off kidney forever. The strong uric smell. The faint ammonia tang. I gipped uncontrollably – not ideal behaviour for a house guest – and decided that some things were not meant to be consumed.
Kidney rapidly moved into second place on the list (tinned tuna still resides proudly and unwaveringly at the list’s summit).
I knew that it was a grim inevitability that this particular piece of offal would grace N3T at some point. I didn’t expect it to be so early on but thanks to a request from Tiramisu, here it is. In week four of the project.
‘Would you like me to take the fat off for you?’ asked the butcher. Each dark brown conker-like organ was surrounded by a dense covering of cream fat.
‘No thanks,’ I replied, wanting to experience the entire process and also hoping to acquire a large quantity of dripping, perfect for roasting potatoes.
By the time I got them home, I’d formulated a dish in my head: kidneys fried in their own fat and served with mustard mash, wilted greens, glazed shallots, slow roasted lamb breast and parsley and mint sauce. A red wine, lamb and rosemary jus would hopefully mask the flavour of the centre-piece enough to repress the gag reflex.
The lamb breast was there to ensure a decent meal even if the kidney proved to be totally inedible. A substitute already in play.
After the kidneys had been peeled (peeled!) I cut them in half bracing myself for the smell of men’s nightclub toilet at 1AM…
…but it wasn’t to be. Cue surprise one.
The niff was gentle, not unpleasant. Very faintly uric, of course, but no where near as pungent as I was expecting.
The centre of each was cut out and they were soaked in a water/vinegar bath (3:1) for about fifteen minutes (to neutralise the alkalinity) before being dried. For the cooking, they were seasoned with salt and pepper and fried over a high heat in some of the rendered suet fat.
The lamb breast was braised then slow roasted before being fried in olive oil just before serving (more on this wonderful cut next week) and the whole lot piled onto a plate in a faintly ordered fashion with the potatoes, onion, greens and sauces.
Cue surprise two: the kidney was good.
Let’s not get carried away, however. In this sense ‘good’ means ‘didn’t make me dry heave into a napkin until my stomach muscles ached.’
But it was perfectly edible. Tasty even. The richness of the sauce proved sufficient in masking the flavour I was so scared of and although half a kidney was more than enough and I won’t be making any efforts to cook them again, I was pleasantly surprised.
As were my guinea pigs. This week due to location it was my younger brother and his girlfriend. Both cleared their plates. Bruv even went back for more. A good sign indeed.
So, another success for N3T, albeit a partial one. But at 50p each (the same price as the hearts) you can’t really complain.
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[Note on the photos - no DSLR this week so had to wrestle with a compact. More difficult than I remembered.]
05/01/2009 - 2:40 pm
Happy New Year to you all. Christmas came and went with a rapidity not seen since Usain Bolt jogged to victory in Beijing. Then 2008 limped into the vast unshakeable void of history giving way to a pristine and virginal ’09 just waiting to have its clean slate sullied by time and memories. Naturally, food and drink were consumed with appropriate abandon.
But now, as we rub the sleep from our eyes and wake, blinking, into the new year, reality once again begins to claw at our consciousness and offers us another twelve months to approach, each in our own inimitable way.
It will be an interesting one, that’s for sure, no doubt full of surprises, disappointments, excitement, boredom, smiles, tears, peaks and troughs. But that’s what makes everything so exciting – were it not for the lack of certainty, life would be a long, dull ride – much like driving up the A1.
One thing, however, is certain: we all have to eat. And with the full reality of the current economic malaise due to bite hard some time within the next couple of months, it looks like we are all going to be eating in more often and living on more beans, seeds and pulses than we have become accustomed to.
Say goodbye to midweek fillet steak and pork loins and hello to skirt and belly. Time to wave a farewell to all those exotic must have ingredients that have been damn near rammed down our throats by chefs and pretentious foodies for the last decade and welcome to the stage low-cost, low carbon and local alternatives.
In my book this is no bad thing and a food philosophy I have been trying to embrace for quite some time. There are many things I won’t miss and many more that I am very excited about seeing on menus again thanks to the increasing popularity of local shops. Yes, the supermarket may still rule the vast majority of households in this country but try asking the student behind the meat counter for half a kilo of beef skirt, a pork knuckle or a brace of oven ready rabbits and you will likely get a look more vacant than a soiled nightclub toilet at 2am.
Request these from the butcher, however, and you will be welcomed in with open arms and embraced like an old friend. You can apply the same thing to the greengrocer, the fishmonger or even the baker (although don’t forget to substitute meat requests for the appropriate items, else you’ll just look silly).
I hear the sound of a thousand over-priced restaurants closing their doors for the last time. The silence of self-important ‘food fanatics’ who only buy their flour from a convent deep in the Appalachian Mountains is blissful. No more shall we be made to feel nutritionally inferior, like a Victorian street child, just because we can’t afford to buy the latest must-have kitchen ingredient according to the weekend newspapers’ food editors.
So, here’s to 2009 – a year of health, frugality, simplicity, locality and appreciating the little things, the things that really matter. And for that I am deeply, excruciatingly, tinglingly, ball-bouncingly excited.
07/11/2008 - 12:25 pm
After whetting my charcuterie whistle with a rip-roaring rillettes success, I thought the creation of something a little more adventurous might be in order. Being without certain items such as a meat grinder, nitrates and sausage casings, salamis and their ilk were out. I didn’t fancy smoking anything (not on a week night, at least) and I didn’t have the patience for curing. This left pâté.
If you have ever felt the pressing urge to experience life as a mentally unhinged doctor from a late Victorian gothic horror or empathise with the deranged protagonist in a David Cronenberg movie, then making pâté is an excellent place to start.
If, on the other hand, you prefer to see your food neatly packaged in cellophane bearing no resemblance to any living creature or are liable to feel a little nauseous at the sight of blood and guts then I’d advise you stay away. Well away. This isn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of constitution.
All good pâté begins with liver. Liver, like all offal, is a foodstuff that featured rarely in my childhood and only now am I tip-toeing into this murky world. My only memory of liver was being presented with a seething brown mass topped with a hemi-sphere of mashed potato during one school dinner. It’s liver, I was told.
With a trembling fork I lifted the tiniest possible piece to my mouth and took it between my teeth. I remember the harsh ferric smell and the gritty texture. I remember the dark brown colour and the slimy grey onions in the drab gravy. And I remember a swelling tide of bile making its way up my gullet as the weird meat like substance shifted around my mouth. I sat there for what felt like days whilst it congealed and grew cold on my plate. Just eat half, said my primary school teacher. Half? Oh good god, please no.
I don’t remember the outcome, perhaps I blacked out or have packaged away the memory somewhere deep in my sub-conscious but that was my last experience with liver: as a timid six year old far, far away from the comforts of my mother’s cooking surrounded by giant teachers and snotty nosed compatriots who all seemed to be able to eat the disgusting bubbling brown mess on their plates without too much trouble. I went home that day and asked, nay demanded, that I take a packed lunch to school every day.
But the scars could not have been that deep because last week while at the butchers I spotted some fresh pig’s liver on the counter and was intrigued enough to buy it. Much like with rillettes, the constituent parts of pâté are cheap. For a little under three pounds I was able to buy a kilo of organically reared Gloucestershire Old Spot liver from a pig I was assured had led a happy life. This would be enough to make a large loaf of pâté, about a kilo and a half in total. Considering you pay about three quid for a tiny slice of the good stuff in a deli, this was too good a bargain to miss.
Having only ever made chicken liver pâté, I assumed, wrongly, that the process would be the same no matter which animal’s dark organ was lying on the counter. Slice, fry in butter, add booze, blitz in a food processor then leave in the fridge covered in a layer of melted butter.
It soon became apparent that this wasn’t the case. Instead the liver needed to be picked over (to remove any weird bits of I don’t know what), sliced and processed along with some breadcrumbs, milk, onion and a little pork shoulder to add a more meaty texture. This is fine when you are in possession of a full sized food processor. When you have one of these:
…it becomes a little trickier and a lot more time consuming.
I used the catch-all recipe from HFW’s River Cottage Meat Book and so was prepared to get a little mucky during the process. What I wasn’t prepared for is just how sticky raw liver is. It behaves like some weird 1950s B-movie monster gradually sliding across the plate, finding its own level and seemingly multiplying at will. By the time it had been picked over and sliced, it appeared to have doubled in volume and I was growing increasingly concerned as to whether it would fit into the loaf tin I had prepared.
The next step was to blitz up the various ingredients in my tiny food processor. Fine, I thought, no problems here. The resultant gloop (half an hour of whizzing, pouring, scraping and refilling) was, quite frankly, disturbing and if you’ve never tried to mince pork shoulder with a stick blender I don’t recommend trying. By the time everything had been thoroughly mixed and blitzed and processed I was slightly concerned that my sleep time would be plagued with horrific visions.
Regular readers will know that I don’t squeam easily. I’ve gutted things, I’ve cooked trotters and ears, I’ve sniffed and munched on durian, I’ve tried century eggs and even come very, very close to eating salted bugs (until a small Thai lady shook her head with a slightly concerned expression on her face) but a pork liver smoothie was almost too much. Almost. Thee are no pictures, for obvious reasons.
For the cooking, the mixture (‘pretend it’s a cake, pretend it’s a cake, pretend it’s a cake…oh jeez it’s pink and lumpy and smells like wet rust) was seasoned and poured (more like slopped) into a loaf tin and covered with a double layer of buttered foil before being placed into a roasting pan filled with water. After an hour or so in the oven, warm meaty smells were starting to fill the kitchen and it was removed from the bain marie ready to be pressed (cue enormous heavy wooden chopping board) and cooled.
By this time it was getting late and the prospect of homemade pâté that had only recently looked like a special effect was not too appealing, so I waited hoping that time and a sleep would ease my prejudice.
Which is exactly what happened. I had my first slice for lunch the following day and was completely, utterly, totally and unashamedly won over by the flavour and general texture. It wasn’t coarse like a pâté de campagne but nor was it too smooth. It had enough resistance to be meaty and a subtle taste that was nothing like the iron-y tang of liver. Definitely one to be recommended.
03/11/2008 - 6:43 pm
Charcuterie is an aspect of the culinary arts that has long interested me both theoretically and on a more practical level. I find it truly wonderful that something that began as a necessity grew into the art form that we know today.
On the broadest level it encompasses the vast gamut of skills from curing and smoking to drying and salting. In short it is about preservation. It was about making sure that precious parts of an animal that would spoil quickly were not wasted and could be eaten throughout the year, long after the prime cuts had been roasted and consumed. It was about thrift. It was about economy. It was about the reality of slaughter and respect for the animal that had just been killed, making sure that as little as possible was wasted.
In the days before refrigeration and deep freezing, our ancestors had to come up with myriad other ways in which to preserve the meat from the pig or cow or sheep that was far too large to eat within the few short weeks (days sometimes) before the meat started to spoil.
Thankfully, these were tasty and delicious enough for the practice to continue and flourish even after technology made it possible to preserve meat simply with the application of cold temperatures and even now we still enjoy the salamis, hams, pâtés, terrines and other items that they perfected over generations.
But charcuterie is not a practice that many home cooks embrace and it is becoming a lost art beyond the specialist. Which is a shame because many aspects of the practice are easy enough to replicate in any domestic kitchen – not to mention, incredibly cheap.
This surprises some people – pâtés, terrines and salamis are expensive when bought in delicatessens – but the components themselves are the cheaper cuts of meat, those which could not be simply roasted over hot coals: the tough bits, the offal, the bits that need a little more care and attention in order to become delicious.
In the spirit of adventure we set about attempting the charcutier’s art for ourselves this weekend. Keen to keep things relatively simple we shied away from chorizos, salamis or cured hams (plus we really don’t have the space to hang a full pig’s leg just yet) and chose instead to make a pâté and some rillettes, which are one of my single favourites in the charcutier’s entire armoury.
The first time I ever had rillettes was when I lived and worked in west London and invariably got my lunch from the best deli-café I’ve ever had the pleasure to dine in (sadly now a hair salon). They are rich, decadent and so tasty that even the mere mention can bring a smile to my face (see above for Tony Bourdain’s rather excellent summation of this glorious food).
Made with either duck, goose or pork cooked long and slow in fat they are not for those who view calorific items with scorn or trepidation but given the scarcity with which they are eaten, and the all-natural origin of the ingredients, I personally don’t think this is an issue – I’d much rather eat a few spoons of this sort of food once a week than gorge on a microwave chicken tikka masala or other such culinary monstrosity.
For our version of this classic French pâté type preparation we used pork belly and shoulder to be cooked down in some back fat. Once the belly had been skinned (which we use to make pork scratchings – nothing wasted here) it was cubed and placed in a large pot with the cubed shoulder cuts (often used to make high grade sausages) and the rendered fat. After the addition of a little water and a bouquet garni it was cooking time. And it takes a while. Three hours at a tremulous simmer so that the occasional bubble will make its way to the surface before bursting is necessary in order to cook the pork to the ideal texture.
Once cool, the pork was then shredded, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little allspice, before being left for a day or so to allow the flavours to develop, meld together and take on that distinctive Gallic character.
This is food alchemy at its finest. The gradual transformation of base ingredients into a finished product that is infinitely more than the sum of its parts and just to be sure, we made a lot. Certainly enough to keep us, and others, dwelling in happy porcine reverie until well into the New Year. Mmm, rillettes.
