Author: Thom Eagle

Author, fermenter and chef at Littleduck. Big fan of brassicas.

“It’s not a concept, it’s common sense” (Part Two)

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Barcelona. This was a very different proposition to my road-trip, a city break with my girlfriend, also a chef, which was inevitably structured around eating, and took in a far greater variety of eateries, from scuzzy diners to deceptively posh-looking restaurants. The one thing that seemed to unite them was an abundance of ludicrously cheap wine.

We started out at the more comfortable end of the scale, at Senyor Parellada, a restaurant that is all white tablecloths and ties, but with a cheap and robust menu of Catalan dishes and – yes – a very cheap house rosé. We had a gigantic plate of snails, sharp and sweet with garlic, oily, rich and earthy, and a comically large octopus tentacle – it must have been at least 8 inches long – that had just the right amount of resistance, sitting in a creamy pool of mash. Maybe it was the wine (or the gigantic cocktails that followed), but this is held in my mind, in a hazy sort of way, as one of the nicest meals I’ve eaten. Everything was so perfectly itself, from the tiny purple olives we were brought with our drinks to the deep, nutty coffee and the just-so crema catalana, fragrant with cinnamon and orange, we finished with. Catalan cuisine, I subsequently learnt, largely does without the backbone of smoked paprika that defines Spanish cooking in my, and I guess most people’s, minds, a restraint which allows the main ingredients to express themselves more freely.

That restaurant was a lucky find, just round the corner from our apartment, but for our next night we ventured a little further, to the much-recommended Lolita Taperia. Clean, tiled, definitely cool, this is at the lower end of the more up-market tapas bars (the top probably being the Adrias’ Tickets) that are the hip thing in Barcelona. Just as Paris’ modern bistros find top chefs applying their skills to more casual cuisine, so Barcelona’s bright young things (many of whom trained with Adria) are turning their attention to plates of food that are small, accessible, and fun. Not that there was any molecular gastronomy on display at Lolita – the considerable skill of the kitchen was confined to getting a number of small things very right. We had little meat and potato bombas with a deep and satisfying crunch, and a beautiful burrata with that wide, rich blandness elevated by pitch-perfect seasoning. There were pleasingly trashy chicken strips tossed in crushed-up crisps, and, best of all, tender little rabbit ribs, deep-fried in a KFC-style coating. It wasn’t perfect – the burrata came with a distractingly bitter tapenade that overpowered the excellent cheese, and, more worryingly, they seemed to be using Hellman’s as the base for all their sauces – and it certainly wasn’t cheap, although that was partly our own fault for treating tapas as dinner. Pretty damn good, all told, although we resolved to be a little more frugal with our remaining meals.

Having started off in this upmarket fashion, we went more local the next day with one of the excellent Culinary Backstreets tours. My girlfriend had been on one of these in Istanbul and found it a really good introduction to the city’s cuisine, and so it was in Barcelona. The tour took us round the slightly less known Gràcia district, focussing on local cuisine and neighbourhood haunts, and involved more food than I can easily remember. We had churros and hot chocolate by way of breakfast, then coffee, nougat and ‘gypsy’s arm’ cake – I forget the reason for that name – at a long-established patisserie (everywhere we went was at least decades old and family-run), the simple Moorish sweetmeat and the elaborate cake showing two very different strands of Barcelona’s history; after that we went straight on to brunch, or “fork breakfast” as they call it, another favourite of hip young chefs. In a bare room with industrial lighting, we had jellied pig feet and head terrine, fried until crisp and served with soft white beans, and a plate of sobrassada (a sort of spreadable chorizo, rather like the Calabrian n’duja) topped with eggs and honey. The salted minerality of Vichy Catalan water settled our stomachs, and after a quick jaunt around the market (and a tasting and explanation of Iberico hams) it was time for lunch.

This took place in a rather stately old neighbourhood bistro (or whatever the Spanish equivalent is) and was a deliberately unusual menu of of traditional Catalan dishes. We had some sort of aubergine salad to start (I forget what exactly – I had stopped taking pictures by that point, and we had already taken in a lot), then snails, cooked the same as at dinner the first night. This time, though, we learned that in Spain (or at least in Barcelona) they don’t purge or clean their snails before cooking, instead just not eating the guts – which explains the occasional grittiness of the first ones. These were accompanied by a pale, fluffy allioli and a punchy salsa verde. Our main was a hefty chunk of salt cod, coated in more allioli and browned under a hot grill. This was both weird – I’d never seen cooked allioli before – and incredibly delicious. The grilling gave the sauce something of the texture of baked bèchamel or a soufflé, while the cod, insulated from the direct heat of the grill, came away in soft pearlescent flakes. A dish of breathtaking simplicity.

After that we went for vermouth (apparently the coming thing in young Barcelona) and pickles; we picked up some horchata, sweetened tiger-nut milk; and we stopped in another local bar for pan con tomate, warm, just-cooked tortilla, and some sheep intestine, wrapped around twigs, grilled, and served with lemon. A glass of cava in a wine shop stacked 15 feet high with bottles and casks rounded off the tour. I haven’t done justice to either the knowledge or the fierce pride of our tour guide – she peppered the trip with personal and historical anecdote – but we left with an impression of a cuisine that was both deeply rooted in the land and strongly tied to national cultural identity, every dish a little snapshot of history. We also left incredibly full, and I don’t think we had any dinner that day.

The next two days were almost as varied, if not quite as greedy. Both dinners were in small, slightly grotty diners, the first near the sea in Barceloneta, the second in a street off the Ramblas. These were neither trendy nor particularly traditional, at least in the deep historical way the previous day’s lunch had been. What they were was “authentic”, perhaps, and certainly cheap and popular – especially the first, Can Maño, where you queue outside with tourists and locals for a small table in a busy room, around which waiters dash, barely making eye contact as they slam down plastic bottles of wine and plates of grilled or fried vegetables, fish and sea-food. You can get meat dishes, but what’s the point? No-one else is. We had a fat tender cuttlefish and juicy, blackened sardines, scattered with parsley and garlic, fried aubergine, the apparently obligatory pan con tomate, and a salad of sorts. It was hot and fast and loud, and a great meal.

Looking for brunch the next day, we wandered into a food festival on the Ramblas, featuring chefs from a few dozen top restaurants offering tapas-sized dishes at €4 a pop. I’ve been to similar things in London, but they are usually both ticketed and tucked away in odd yards and corners of the city – this was right on the main tourist drag, where you could wander in and out as you pleased. Imagine ambling down Oxford Street or through Leicester Square and finding chefs from St. John, L’Enclume, Polpo, the Fat Duck, whatever, lining the streets and offering their signature dishes for a fiver to whoever was passing through! We had a few bites – salmorejo with anchovies and cheese, a deep broth of ox cheek and chickpeas, an astounding bun from Tickets, stuffed with the meat from a pig’s double chin – and wandered off past the still-busy tourist-trap restaurants feeling smug. Wanting to make the most of this opportunity, we came back for pre-dinner tapas, focussing on the “auteur” section of the festival – higher-end dishes from Adria’s disciples (still only €4 though). Yes, there were foams and things, a something of something on top of an escabeche of mackerel, but there was also a steak tartare of great depth and piquancy and some calamari that was just really, really good calamari. Our meal in the afore-mentioned diner, the Romesco, was something different again – although coming mainly from the grill and the fryer, and accompanied by rough white wine, the ingredients were, in the main, of the land – although we did have some enormous prawns. I had a crisp and succulent rabbit, and to start, half a sheep’s head, which I think had been braised and then deep-fried. Eating this was an extremely enjoyable activity that I would recommend to anyone. From the caramelised shreds of the cheek, to the juicy and fibrous tongue and the cloudy pap of the brain, it was like getting the whole hands-on nose-to-tail experience in one neat package, and, somehow, a fitting last meal.

If this all seems quite exhaustive, it’s because I wanted to convey the sheer variety of food available in a cuisine that has not ossified, as you sometimes find in France or Italy, nor lost the thread of its own tradition, as it has here. Yes, I know Barcelona is a major city, and I know you could find a similar variety if you knew where to look in London, say – but not, I think, in the same top-to-bottom and nose-to-tail way, where food is traditional and varied and good and accessible to all. We didn’t even eat a single paella.

Tomato & Pomegranate Ketchup

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I’ve spent the last couple of days developing recipes for Pickle & Smoke, curing rabbit, salting and pickling various things. This ketchup was a late addition, as I wanted to replace the rejigged bought stuff we had been using before.

House-made ketchup has become pretty common in cafés and gastropubs, in a form that’s now almost as standardised as Heinz – based, I think, on the excellent recipe in the River Cottage preserves book, it is a roast tomato passata that gets spiced, seasoned and reduced. This results in a sort of relish, which is delicious in its own way but a little wholesome, and not much like the glossy, sweet sauce that everyone secretly loves. It also takes bloody ages to make, what with roasting and puréeing and boiling and passing and reducing.

I wanted something a bit more Heinz-y, a bit trashier, for Pickle & Smoke, so I though I’d try the recipe in Marc Grossman’s New York Cult Recipes, which is basically a stock thickened with tomato purée and cornflour. The result is satisfyingly shiny, triggering that gastronomic nostalgia, with the added bonus that you can add whatever else takes your fancy, at either the stock or thickening stage. A bit of messing around yielded this, heavily adapted from Grossman –

POMEGRANATE KETCHUP
About 2 litres, but it should keep well. Easily halvable, anyhow.

For the stock –
2 sticks of celery
1 onion
6 garlic
1 carrot
1 tblspn smoked paprika
1 tsp allspice
Oil
900 ml water
400 ml pickle juice (I had some left over – half and half water and lemon, with a splash of vinegar and some salt and sugar. You could just use water and up the seasonings later.)

Finely dice the vegetables and sweat in a little oil until the onions turn translucent and soften slightly. Add the spices and cook, stirring, until they lose that raw smell. Add the liquids, bring to the boil, and simmer for 10 minutes or so. Strain, discarding the spent vegetables, and make the stock up to 1300ml with some water if it’s reduced too much.

For the ketchup –
The stock
280g tomato purée (2 of those little tins)
250g caster sugar
4 tblspns pomegranate molasses
1 tblspn really hot hot sauce, or to taste. (I used a home-made West Indian style one with loads of scotch bonnets in it)
2 tblspns mustard powder
4 tblspns cornflour
400ml white wine vinegar

Put the stock in a pan with the purée, sugar, molasses and hot sauce and bring to a steady simmer, whisking as you go. Let it bubble away for about 5 minutes, giving it a stir occasionally.

Beat the mustard powder and cornflour into the vinegar, making sure there are no lumps, then add to the pan. Simmer for another 5 minutes or so until nicely thickened. If you didn’t use pickle juice, it’ll need a fair bit of salt, so give it a taste, remembering that it’ll be less aggressively sweet when it’s cold, and that inhaling hot vinegar is not fun.

Done. Put into bottles or jars or whatever (you should do the sterilising thing if you want it to keep for ages) and you have minor gifts sorted for the next year. Or keep to yourself for secret chicken nugget feasts.

“It’s not a concept – it’s common sense” (Part One)

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I haven’t posted anything here for a while, partly because I’ve been going through a fairly major life upheaval, and partly because of a couple of holidays I’ve been on. Both gave me quite a lot to think about in terms of food and culture, and it’s taken me this long to sift through my impressions of the two.

First up was a trip around Europe with two of my brothers, taking in France, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg, not a place I ever thought I’d have occasion to visit. This wasn’t a particularly food-based trip – the reason or excuse for it was a journey round various WWI and WWII (and some Napoleonic) battlefields and monuments, some with a family connection, most not – but obviously we had to eat every day, and I was put in charge of finding places to do this.

I don’t really know what place French food has in the popular imagination any more – obviously it will always have a certain cachet, but I think the rash of bad or indifferent restaurants, serving 3-course set menus to tourists, have long since damaged France’s (or at least Paris’) reputation as a place where it is impossible to eat badly. Away from the denser tourist areas, though, and across the border into Belgium and Luxembourg (both places that suffer less from the weight of reputation), the general standard of restaurant food is still very high. Aside from the endless and ever-changing parade of continental breakfasts, which were ever bad so much as peculiar, and fascinating in their minor regional variations, I think we barely had a disappointing meal. There was one, I think in Cambrai, where I had a serviceable andouillette, my offal-sceptic older brother accidentally ordered veal kidneys, and my other brother an indifferent carpaccio.

That was a blip, though, and at any rate somewhat our fault. In the main, guided partly by recommendation, and partly by a mix of instinct and slightly mystical criteria – the only restaurant that had no English reviews on tripadvisor, a green rather than a red frontage – we managed to eat very well in a succession of small towns about which we knew nothing. Granted, I think our best meal was in Luxembourg City, at a place which came recommended by the Guardian – a wood- and leather-lined place called Mousel’s Cantine, where we ate pig feet in a rich and sharp mustard sauce, roast hock, salt-pork shoulder, with choucroute and beans and potatoes, swilled down with stone mugs of beer overflowing with foam – but we dined almost as well in Verdun, where the first place we happened to walk past (away from the main tourist strip) turned out to be a tiny, slightly hipsterised bistro with excellent pastis and beer, and a great set menu featuring an outstanding salad of confit gizzards and a lovely plate of guineafowl. Even the one obviously touristy restaurant we went to, on the main touristy square in Metz, had, on an illustrated and laminated menu of ‘local specialities’, an impressive dish of whole veal head, boned and rolled, with a punchy sauce gribiche and something else, garlicky and sharp, that I couldn’t quite place.

Fergus Henderson likes to declaim that the idea of nose-to-tail eating is not a “concept” but merely “common sense”, which I think is slightly disingenuous on his part. Over here, it is a concept, and one which he has done extremely well out of. But it really is in France, on the Continent, along with the idea that food should be good, and affordable, and the entire process of eating it pleasurable and satisfying. Many of the places we went to were small, boring, provincial towns, famous because Verlaine had been born there and never come back, or Rimbaud had grown up there and hated it, or for their proximity to heroism, some glorious act that had little to do with the sleepy bourgeois town it is commemorated in. Imagine going on a tour of Civil War battle sites in the Home Counties and the MIdlands, and finding, in every village and commuter-belt ghost town, a cuisine that was rooted in tradition and place yet alive, moving with tastes and times and fashions, animated by quality of ingredient and pride in technique. Imagine that was common sense.

I think that’s enough for now. More on Spain soon.

How Do You Like Your Eggs?

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“How would you like your eggs?”
“Over-medium, please – ”
“Just poached, fried, or scrambled, sir”
…
“Why are Americans so picky about eggs?”

Good question. I think my reply was something along the lines of “eggs are more of a thing over there – diners all do them to order, as you like” which wasn’t really an answer, just another way of saying “Americans are picky about eggs”. I did him his eggs over-medium, anyway, partly because I like American pickiness about eggs, and partly because I didn’t want him to think we had all the eggs pre-cooked, sunny-side-up, in a congealing proteinous mass under the hot-lamps. I kept thinking, though – why are Americans so picky about eggs?

An easy answer would be that they aren’t, particularly – maybe they are just more vocal than the reticent British about their pickiness, more active in getting what they want; I don’t think this is true, though. A hungover Englishman is perfectly capable of being quite vocally and unpleasantly picky about his breakfast, although this more often seems to manifest itself in a lust for the exact shade of burntness on a sausage, or a peculiar hatred of black pudding. When they do make specific egg requests, perhaps remembering the lost estate of their mother’s fry-up, or some half-forgotten greasy spoon, they will fumble for the words; a Brit could never coolly ask for “eggs over-medium” – instead, you get semi-coherent requests for “er, flipped, but sort-of runny”, “something between a fried egg and an omelette”; occasionally, someone will ask for their egg sunny-side-up, because they saw it in a movie, only to discover they meant over-easy, if they meant anything at all. We lack the vocabulary to be picky about eggs.

More generally, and setting aside professional and keen amateur cooks, I think we lack a vocabulary to talk about the processes of food. I saw, recently, on a cafe menu that an American friend of mine posted on Facebook, a bagel filled with (among other things) “minced” onion. I just don’t think you’d see that on a menu here; most people would not know or, more importantly, care what “minced” meant in that context. “Onion” would suffice – the process by which it got into a bagel is irrelevant.

Why we don’t seem to have developed a layman’s vocabulary for talking about one of the most fundamental activities of life is another matter. In America, I think, eating is a much more public activity than it is here. In England, there seems to be a strong divide between eating in private, which can be a pleasurable, even hedonistic, experience (yes, I know we have a very lively restaurant scene, but I consider that a form of semi-privacy), and eating in public, which must be functional, food-as-fuel, and hopefully a little unpleasant. I’m talking about eating on the street, at service stations, in shopping centres, even diners or whatever – places or occasions where you eat out because you are out and you need to eat, not because you have gone out to eat.

Take a petrol station sandwich – sliced bread, margarine, some imitation of cheese, perhaps the ghost of ham, the wilting corpse of salad, all packaged at some indeterminate location some indeterminate time ago. There is no enjoyment here at any level. This is fibre and protein, designed to stop you feeling hungry so you can carry on with whatever you’re doing. It’s barely even nutrition, just fuel, bought along with your petrol. The vast majority of gas stations, on the other hand – or at least the ones that I went to – have their own deli counters, where your sandwich will be made for you, to order, to your specifications, with a choice of breads, of cheese, of meats… These are not places where people go to eat; they fulfil the same function as the shops at service stations, they just do so much better, with attention to detail and some kind of deep-seated belief that all food should be worth eating. Yes, of course there is also an America of chains and mall food courts, but that is relatively new and not, I think, as pervasive as the back-road small-town America of grocery store delis and of diners where you can get your eggs or your burger or your steak cooked any damn way you please, and where that is not pickiness but simply a reasonable thing to expect of food that is being cooked for you in exchange for money.

There are, I’m sure, any number of reasons why this is lacking in Britain – a hangover from Victorian uneasiness about taking pleasure in food, a class-based distaste for the service industry in general, our supposed love of privacy in our pleasures – and it is, perhaps, gradually changing, although it is telling that the current crop of more casual, cheaper eateries (Pitt Cue Co., the Polpo group, Yalla Yalla) all look East or West for their food and decor. Yes, we have farmers’ markets and delis and food vans, but until we are no longer expected to eat a day-old parody of a sandwich entombed in plastic as a punishment for wanting to eat in public, we will not have a ‘food culture’, just an eerily accurate impression of one.

“I Love Transitions”

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So. The Sportsman, self-styled “grotty rundown pub by the sea”.

It is traditional, it seems, to begin any review of this Michelin-starred Kentish institution with a lengthy description of the bleak Whitstable coast, the windswept seaweed, the desolate, unforgiving car park. Well, we arrived for lunch on a sunny April day and it was beautiful, lambs playing in the Monkshill fields, windfarms turning lazily in the distance. We weren’t here to look at the landscape, anyway; we were here to eat it.

The other leitmotif in reviews of the Sportsman is the focus on terroire, on the sourcing and creation of ingredient, a fetishisation of produce that often comes at the expense of the quite remarkable range of technique on display. This is, I suppose, quite understandable; ingredients are easier to understand, to quantify, than craftsmanship, and at any rate, those used at the Sportsman are worthy of comment. I went into all this in my last blog post so won’t rehash it here, but they make their own salt, for God’s sake, a commitment to the handmade and to the local which puts most other restaurants to shame.

Happily, though, they wear all this lightly. I was half-expecting a lengthy spiel about localism, a tediously didactic recitation of ingredient and providence, with each one of our 13 courses; it never came, either from the succession of cheerfully knowledgeable waitresses, or from the printed menu we were given at the end. They point up their “home-churned butter with Seasalter salt” – but that, I think, is fair enough – and they mention their Monkshill lamb, and that’s all. Remarkable restraint, considering the vast majority of their ingredients are grown or foraged in the immediate vicinity of the pub.

Anyway, the food. Never having eaten a tasting menu or any other Michelin-approved meal, I was both excited and almost nervous at the prospect of so much food, but our first few bites were so tiny, so playful and approachable. We started with a little cheese and onion biscuit, and a cocktail stick of pickled herring, rhubarb cream, and something that may have been flapjack; I forget exactly, and these little bites aren’t listed on the menu. Both just-so, biscuits that seemed mostly butter sandwiching a cheesy goo, a neat square of sweet, tangy fish, these sharpened the appetite and were gone, as they should be. Next was a pretty impressive piece, consisting of a poached egg yolk, smoked eel, and parsley sauce, housed within an eggshell and topped with a light whipped layer of something. Everything was at a different temperature, warm yolk, cool cream, the rich eel somewhere in between, sharpened with a violently green parsley puree; a lot of technique for two bites.

The next course was quite a contrast – two oysters, one of the Whitstable natives and one plain old rock, almost unadorned. The native was raw, topped with a still-warm disc of their own (of course) chorizo, the other poached, sprinkled with dried seaweed and crystals of a rhubarb granita. Again, both offered a nice little contrast of texture and temperature, but here the emphasis was firmly on the ingredient. I heard Stephen Harris chatting to another customer about the oysters, and got the impression that he didn’t think much of rock oysters, hence the amount of dressing they received; the native, with its crispy, spicy hat, was far nicer anyway. The menu continued in this vein, with ingredient and technique switching the lead, each reasserting their dominance in turn. Some crab followed the oysters, tender (but not overcooked – the first time I’ve really enjoyed crab) strands of white meat sitting atop carrot of an identical texture, the whole dressed with hollandaise, plain, buttery, apparently simple; this was followed by a salmagundi of, well, all sorts of stuff – the waitress started listing ingredients and concluded with “…and whatever else you find”. I found another poached egg yolk, ribbons of carrot and courgette, crisps of parsnip of beetroot, roasted beetroot, a celeriac (I think) puree, more of that parsley sauce, and some pellets of cauliflower that may have been inspired by Jamie Oliver, although I hope not.

After this confusing, if delicious, plate, a riot of craft and texture (and a lot of fun for a salad), we were presented with a slip sole each, grilled with seaweed butter. Back to the ingredient. This is one of Harris’ signature dishes, local fish, extremely local seaweed, and my first thought was that it was extremely, almost perversely, underseasoned. Relaxing into the simple ritual of eating, teasing the delicate flesh away from the bones, and letting the gentle umami of the fish and seaweed wash over my tongue, it made sense, a moment of calm, a chance for some breathing room before the main courses (if a tasting menu can be said to have such things). Each of these – fish and meat – was preceded by a little deep-fried nibble from the same animal. So we were presented first with battered turbot skirt, juicy and ridiculously tender, accompanied by wild garlic mayonnaise, before a bowl of braised turbot with sea vegetables and a sauce of smoked roe. I’m not a massive fish fan, but if forced to choose a favourite dish from this menu, I think this would be it. The rich, saline hit of the roe was astonishingly powerful, especially after the soothing grace of the sole, the fish itself meaty and tender, and the vegetables – sea purslane and sea beet – a welcome and vivid splash of iron green.

Lamb was next, first in the form of tender chunks of neck, breaded and deep-fried, with a mint sauce seemingly inspired by nuoc cham and the like – thin, sweet, sharp, aromatic – and then as a plate of roast rump and shoulder. Although this dish (lamb, some sweetly tender cabbage, a thin gravy) showed off its ingredients with a grace and a pride in simplicity that was almost Italian, it was also a bravura display of technique from the kitchen, a masterpiece of meat cookery. The rump was beautifully, perfectly rare, evenly pink and tender, with an outside layer of crisply crackled fat; the shoulder a crisp, even nugget which collapsed into shreds when poked, slow-roasted to perfection, powerfully savoury and delicious.

Desserts. A rhubarb ice-lolly, sitting in a shot glass of cornflake milk – pinched, I think it’s fair to say, from Momofuku – was pretty and fun, some comic relief after all that cooking. Both components were spot on but I’m not sure they had much to do with each other. Next, a buttermilk mousse, sprinkled with buckwheat, drizzled with raw honey, and accompanied by a buttered slice of madeira cake and a shot of cold camomile tea, was a rather more serious proposition, and one which the kitchen was rather unsure about, judging by the waitress’ questions. Desserts aren’t exactly my thing, but this was well judged as the end of such a big meal, sweetly indulgent but still – thanks to the buttermilk and camomile – refreshing, clean. Coffee and a pair of miniature tarts – salt caramel and chocolate, custard and nutmeg – rounded off an incredibly impressive meal.

One of the most impressive things, I think, about the Sportsman, is that the food remains dominant. Jay Rayner remarked, in his Observer review, that the menu read like a “greatest hits” of modern classics, but it doesn’t, in the eating, come across like that at all – apart from that glass of cornflake milk. Stephen Harris has managed to subsume his influences and his cornucopia of produce into what he calls “a narrative, a story almost of this area” but which seems to me more like an edible landscape, a snapshot of his domain, caught between the sea and the land.

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Location, Location

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I’m going for a meal next week at The Sportsman, in Seasalter, and have been researching it avidly, scanning old reviews to get some idea of what we can expect from the (rather large, pre-booked) tasting menu. Although a few dishes pop up frequently (oyster and chorizo, some kind of arrangement of lamb and seaweed), it is not individual dishes as such which form the focus of most reviews. It is the Sportsman’s location that really holds the interest – its position as a “grotty rundown pub by the sea”, as their Twitter profile has it – and the astonishing range of ingredients they wring from that location, their fierce commitment to localism.

Localism, in the world of food, comes in two main forms – localism of recipe, and localism of ingredient. Long since used to getting our spices, our fruit and our vegetables, from various colonies and allies, it is the former, I think, which is more prevalent in Britain today. Cornish pasties, Bakewell tarts, Melton Mowbray pies – all are very much a part of our everyday food culture. Localism of ingredient, on the other hand, has become privileged in Britain, a treat for the foodie classes. Although supermarkets are happy to tell you that your asparagus was grown by Dave in Lanarkshire, genuinely local produce is confined to the farmers market, and requires time and money that many are unwilling or unable to spend.

And why not? Local produce is not necessarily better. Ethically, perhaps; although the whole subject of ‘food miles’ has turned out to be more complicated than everyone thought (cf. Jay Rayner’s latest book), it’s still nice to support local businesses, maybe. Maybe not, if they charge twice as much, offer terrible service, and are in any case wealthy hobbyists with no real need to do well.

It’s different, I think, elsewhere, where local produce is still affordable and attainable, and necessary for making the local recipes. This is why the French have a word for terroire and we don’t. The best dishes from what we are pleased to call ‘peasant cuisines’ are the ones which combine a long human tradition with fine native ingredients, a powerful expression of social and natural history, heavy with a sense of place – bouillabaisse, caponata, fabada.

The closest we seem to come to this in Britain, fittingly enough, is with booze. The rolling hills of Kent, the fuzzy warmth of the West Country, find their perfect expression in the local ales and ciders (when Keats asked for a “beaker full of the warm south”, he was not talking about Biddingdon’s, though he might as well have been), while the multitudinous whiskies of Scotland, peat and smoke and ozone and brine, might be the landscape bottled.

Stephen Harris, along with Simon Rogan and perhaps a few others, seem to be trying for something similar in their cuisine. Although untethered from local culinary tradition (Harris applies techniques from French to Japanese to his ingredients), their food, foraged, farmed, boiled from the sea, is an attempt to offer up an expression or an excretion of the landscape itself, where localism is not an ethical or economic but an aesthetic choice, one seen through to its logical conclusion. I’ll let you know how lunch goes.

Tongue & Cheek

Thom Eagle2 Comments

In the rather macho world of nose-to-tail eating, there is, I think, some confusion as to what is being propounded – a confusion which can easily put off interested newcomers. Offal is never going to become big business – even when you get past the idea that you are eating a specific, named organ with specific functions, there is still that taste to contend with, that weird, ferric tang, as well as the texture, a dense sponginess that makes it quite hard to cook, responding to heat differently than muscle fibre. I love offal, but I can see why people don’t – and some vaguely ethical idea about eating ‘the whole beast’ is not going to convince them otherwise. It’s no less ethical to feed the weird bits to dogs.

At the other end of the ‘variety meat’ spectrum, though, you have perfectly meaty cuts of meat which we, as a culture, have simply fallen out of the habit of using, cuts which maybe take a little more time or effort to prepare but which are, if anything, more delicious than their more familiar neighbours. It wasn’t that long ago that pork belly fell into this category – look at the first Nose To Tail Eating, published in ’99, and you can find good old St Fergus preaching its virtues as if for the first time – and now it is everywhere, the go-to pork cut for gastropub and restaurant alike. Brisket, thanks largely to the American barbecue craze, is making similar headway, and we are getting more used to ‘difficult’ steak cuts (bavette, flat-iron, onglet) that require more careful cooking than the bleeding/shrivelled dichotomy of old. I think the slightly dubious ‘ethical’ aspect of nose-to-tail has more weight here – you don’t have a responsibility to eat things you hate, but it is irresponsible to ignore cuts of meat that are cheaper, tastier and often healthier, simply because you don’t know what to do with them. With that in mind, here are a couple of suggestions.

OX TONGUE, BREAD, GREEN SAUCE

While in Sicily, I saw, but never got the chance to eat at, a restaurant called Casa Del Brodo, which specialised in tortellini cooked in a rich meat broth (brodo). Presumably to supply adequate quantities of this broth, they also seemed to specialise in simply boiled meat dishes, generally beef or veal, and generally served with green sauce. Having been denied this pleasure, I ordered a brined ox tongue from the butcher when I got back. To cook the tongue, simply poach it with a few stock vegetables until very tender – it’ll take about 3 and a half hours – and then peel it as soon as it’s cool enough to handle. Then do as I did, and follow Fergus Henderson’s excellent recipe, which can be found here. A tongue is still obviously a tongue when you acquire it, and might induce some squeamishness, but the meat is firm, tender, lean and delicious, like a perfection of corned beef. We also ate the broth, with some macaroni and a few veg cooked in it, as a starter. A meat based meal that was clean and simple.

BRAISED OX CHEEK WITH SHERRY & ORANGE

This is quite different, a ridiculously rich and beefy concoction. It requires a couple of days planning, for the brining.

STEP 1

1 fat ox cheek

75g sea salt

50g caster sugar

a few cloves

1 cinnamon stick

1 clove of garlic

Put all the ingredients except the cheek in a pan with 500ml of water, bring to a boil (making sure your sugar and salt are dissolved) then cool completely. Put the cheek in a Tupperware box or similar, pour over the cold brine, cover – you might need to weigh the cheek down so he’s covered completely – and stick in the fridge. Leave for 3 days or so, turning once or twice.

STEP 2

2 onions, finely sliced

1 celery stick, finely diced

1 carrot, finely diced

2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced

1 orange, juice and a couple of strips of zest

1 cinnamon stick

a little bundle of thyme

a few bay leaves

250 ml of sherry – something sticky and dark, not leftover Bristol Cream

a splash of sherry vinegar

Put the oven on low – gas mark 1-and-a-halfish, about 150 Celsius, whatever that is in Fahrenheit. Sweat the veg with a little oil in a casserole until they are really soft, which will take a while. Remove your cheek from its holding tank, rinse and dry, then brown in a frying pan over a fairly fierce heat. Put the cheek to one side, deglaze the pan with sherry vinegar, and pour the juices in with the veg. Assuming they are now soft and golden, tuck in the zest, herbs and cinnamon (tied in a little bundle if you can be bothered), then pour in the orange juice and sherry. Reduce until the liquid is pretty syrupy, then sit the cheek on the onions and pour over enough water to nearly cover (see Fergus Henderson’s alligator-in-the-swamp principle). It shouldn’t need any seasoning, thanks to its briny days. Bring up to a simmer again, whack on the lid and put in the oven. Leave for about 6 hours. Take it out and poke with a spoon. If you can poke through it, it’s ready.

STEP 3

This is entirely up to you. You could cut the whole cheek into a few happy chunks, sit them on some mashed potato and serve with greens; you could do the same with pools of cheesy polenta and some bitter raw leaves, lurking with anchovies. I shredded it up, left it overnight, and did this –

CASARECCE WITH OX CHEEK RAGU & TALEGGIO

for 2

half your ragu

200g casarecce

75g taleggio, diced

flatleaf parsley, chopped

a knob of butter

a splash of extra virgin olive oil

reheat the ragu with a splash of water in a small pan. In another, bigger pan, cook the pasta in only lightly salted boiling water. Have everything else ready to go, as well as some arrangement for catching the pasta water, so you can work quickly. When the pasta is just cooked, drain, then put back in the pan. Let it steam for a second, then add the cheese, the butter, and the oil; stir, melt, add the hot ragu and a couple of tablespoons of your pasta water (I told you!), stir, add the parsley and some pepper, tip onto hot plates (I should have mentioned that) and serve with a little salad of broad beans, rocket and capers, dressed with vinaigrette and lemon zest, which hopefully someone else will have prepared while you were messing around with pasta.

Spaghetti con Ricci

Thom Eagle4 Comments

Palermo is a cartographer’s nightmare, a psychogeographer’s dream, a tightly wound warren of streets and alleys overlain on centuries and centuries of growth, where modern concrete rubs up against a bombed-out Norman church, where Roman utility sits next to swirling Arabesques, the whole thing surrounded, threatened by the savage outcrops of the wild Sicilian hills. Two hulking cartographic engines sit in the ethnographic museum on Palermo’s outskirts, monuments to the tremendous effort it must have taken to map that intricate city. This physical complexity, itself a reflection of the long histories of occupation and control which Sicily has undergone, is reflected in the culture of the island, particularly, as you might expect in Italy, in its food.

I don’t, it should be said, know a huge amount about Italian food – my main impression of it before visiting Palermo was of a fierce and ossified provinciality, of a formidable tradition of dishes, refined over decades or centuries, that would admit little in the way of regional or cultural variation. This was largely confirmed in Palermo. Restaurant after restaurant served variations on a theme, the same few sauces skipping around between the same few pastas, a seemingly endless, albeit delicious, procession of caponata. Look closely into these dishes, though, and you can see the way they have gradually assimilated their influences, the lessons they have learnt from their invaders.

The Greeks are there in their mania for fish, as simple and fresh as possible, and in their bracing mountain herbs; the universal Roman seasoning of garum, fermented fish sauce, has found its expression in the universality of the anchovy, often used, it seemed to me, as a substitute for salt, while the influence of the Arabs is everywhere. The dried fruit and nuts with fish, the meat ragu incongruously stuffed into sweet biscuits, the granita’s echo of sharbat, the love of sugar and pastry and bizarre contortions of both; even pasta, I believe (an argument I am not getting into here) is a legacy of the Arab occupation. 

Then again, there were things which seemed wholly of Sicily, chiefly the street food, which seemed the product of a poor and inventive population – boiled spleen transformed into something resembling doner meat, stuffed into a bun with two kinds of cheese, chickpea flour cooked like polenta and served in little deep-fried triangles, lengths of sheep intestine threaded onto skewers and grilled over scorching heat – I’m sure these, too, had their origins and their influences, but like the rest, they had been assimilated into the odd fusion, the fascinating tapestry, of Sicilian cuisine.

Having said all that, the finest thing I ate in Palermo was also one of the simplest, the least expressive of any outside culture or influence beyond the sea which the city crouches round – spaghetti with sea urchin, at the Trattoria Piccolo Napoli. Sea urchin is becoming something of a fashionable ingredient – the various St. John’s have been serving it for a while now, and even old Hugh F-W was getting in on the act on his Scandinavian show – which I had never tried, so it was a bit of a must-eat for me, even though I’m not much of a fish lover. I had heard it variously described as ‘delicate’ (which often seems to mean tasteless) and tasting ‘of the sea’ (which usually means salty), so my expectations weren’t particularly high, especially when my spaghetti arrived, plain except for a little parsley and what looked like bloody mucus.

Well, it was absolutely, outrageously, delicious. Forked through the pasta, the urchin dissolved and thickened into a rich sauce, perfectly coating the spaghetti, which tasted, delicately but powerfully, of the sea. It was elusive, only just on the tip of your tongue, and yet the aftertaste lingered and lingered, tasting the way the seaside smelt when you were young and everything was fresh and clean. The dish as a whole was an absolutely perfect collision of skill and ingredient; the pasta was cooked to absolute al dente perfection – and there the chef’s interference stopped. Parsley and urchin were dumped upon it, and there you go. Easily one of the nicest dishes I have ever eaten, and one which seems to epitomise much of what is admirable about Italian cuisine – the absolute primacy of ingredient, the vicious simplicity of execution.

I’m not going to attempt to give a recipe for this – for one thing, I’ve never cooked it, and probably never will. I could try for the rest of my life to approximate that experience. If you’d like to, it should be pretty simple – scoop out a sea urchin, cook some pasta, chop some parsley, combine. Good luck.

Egg, potato, onion

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I think it’s fair to say that I am not generally a fan of fusion cuisines, especially when they are perpetrated unthinkingly. Culinary traditions are rich cultural artefacts, developed over hundreds or thousands of years; to interfere in that simply for the sake of dinner seems trivial, insulting. Pasta used as a dumping ground for leftovers, bacon flung irresponsibly into couscous; worst of all, fashionably exotic food terms flung around menus, misapplied until they lose their meaning (a ceviche of shallots, a carpaccio of pretty much anything), seem like cultural vandalism, a colonialist looting of an alluring past. (Yes, I have been told that I take things too seriously).

Having said that, everyone needs a go-to dish, a vehicle for the current contents of your fridge, a base around which to build supper or a lazy lunch when the shops are too far away or too closed and you don’t give a damn about culinary traditions. Brunch is a good occasion for such dishes; the whole affair suggests a cheerful dissolution, and disparate ingredients can be brought together with the unifying influence of toast or egg. I’m a big fan of the hash in this context, and many differences can be resolved with a base of toasted bread, but my favourite catch-all dish is probably a tortilla. A sturdy structure of potato, onion and egg can be adapted to almost any cuisine, sharpened with chilli or spice, warmed with chunks or strands of cheese, enriched with little nuggets of sausage or black pudding or ham, freshened with clean herbs and vegetables. I’m sure the Spanish would be outraged, and when I’m feeling particularly high-minded I try to justify this bastardisation, pointing to the tortilla-equivalents across the world – the markode of Algeria, the Arabic eggeh, the Italian frittata, the Persian kuku – but fundamentally I don’t really care. Tortilla are pretty much universally delicious, the sweet, umami-rich combination of potato, onion and egg hiding any weakness in the rest of the ingredients.

i’m not going to give a recipe for tortilla, as that is not really how something like this is cooked – quantities depend on what else you want to throw in, which in turn depends on mood and resources. Even the basic method is up for debate. I will, however give a few general observations on tortilla-making. I’ve eaten a lot in my time.

ESSENTIALS

onion

potato

egg

For your own sake, the onion and potato should be cut as fine as possible. I like the onion diced, and the potato first halved lengthways and then sliced across, but that is a personal preference. Sweet Spanish onions and small waxy potatoes are the way to go, I think; the potatoes need to hold their own in the cooking process.

Never boil the potatoes first – you lose so much flavour (yes, potatoes have flavour) and so much of their protein-enhancing umami that way, as well as missing out on the beautiful, fudgy texture they get from a purely oil-based cooking. Chips are tastier than boiled potatoes. Learn from this. Sweat the potatoes together with the onions in plenty of olive oil (nice olive oil – you can always reuse it) and a good amount of salt until they are tender. If you’re adding meat you might want to put it in now so everyone gets to know each other.

You want to eat this delicious combination as the main event. The egg should be the binding agent, not the star of the show; it’s not an omelette in that sense. Two or three eggs to a 10-inch pan is fine. Let the onion-potato mix cool a bit before you stir in the eggs, to avoid weird lumps. Add other bits like fresh herbs and cheese at this point too.

I know it’s wrong, but I always start my tortilla on the hob and finish in the oven – it skips the whole messy hassle of flipping it. If you do this, let it set and colour on the bottom before putting it in the oven, which will help it slip out of the pan later. If you must flip the tortilla, on your own head be it. Don’t have the oven too hot. Let the whole thing cool a bit before you take it out of the pan, and then some more before you eat it.

EXTRAS

I’ve got a Turkish-style tortilla in the oven at the moment, with bits of halloumi, sucuk sausage, green chilli, and plenty of herbs. Other things I have added in the past include –

ham hock

black pudding

pork sausage

merguez sausage

chunks of manchego

grated manchego

grated Dapple

roasted peppers

pickled chillies

marinated artichokes

handfuls of dill

paper-thin courgette slices

tiny broad beans

frozen peas

and probably loads of other things I’ve forgotten. 

Have a go.

Artichokes and Lies

Thom Eagle2 Comments

No one likes being lied to. Working in a restaurant, it’s easy to forget that, while this may be the hundredth plate you’ve sent out today, for the customer it might be a rare treat, a special meal – depending on the restaurant, it could be a once-a-month or a once in a lifetime thing. Get it right. Still, you can excuse minor inconsistencies. Eating at St John Bread & Wine, I had a dish of oxtail, turnip and watercress, which turned out to be a dish of oxtail, turnip and spinach. They had clearly run out of watercress, which they neither apologised for or even mentioned; pretty shoddy for such an establishment, perhaps, but I didn’t really care. It was a delicious, unctuous bowl, with the peppery bite of the turnip and, well, pepper, making up for the lack of the watercress. It certainly didn’t spoil our meal, which was one of the finest I’ve ever eaten. Still, with a short, ever-changing menu, and the brutal simplicity of the St John school of menu-writing (dishes are generally just written as “Ingredient, Ingredient, and Ingredient” – we had Rabbit Offal, Back Fat, and Dandelion, for example), they should be able to get it right.

A worse problem is when restaurants have such mistakes/lies built into their menus. I recently had a meal at a favourite cafe-bar in Norwich – our local, basically, and one I go to very often. It has an extensive menu of small mezze items that changes daily, and they make an effort, I think, to educate their customers, introducing unfamiliar words and ingredients. I’m told the owner makes frequent trips to the Turkish markets in London, giving him access to a range of produce not easily available in Norwich. All very laudable. Anyway, our meal was, for the most part, lovely – we had a beautiful braised chicken dish, a leg in a rich and shimmering broth shot through with Turkish pepper paste. One of our dishes was described as “roast Jerusalem artichokes with marinated feta and parsley and preserved lemon gremolata”. I had a problem with this from the description; I don’t particularly like the habit of shoehorning new ingredients into traditional recipes. Gremolata is a thing, and if you make it with preserved lemon it is a different thing entirely. Still, I can see why it’s done, as a form of shorthand or a shared reference point, and I’ve probably done it myself. In fact, I’ve done it myself on this blog. It’s a forgivable sin, anyway, and the dish sounded nice, so we ordered it. 

What arrived at the table was, yes, roast Jerusalem artichokes. They were perfectly cooked, soft and fudgy and just starting to char around the edges. They were covered in a thick paste of parsley, bound with olive oil, that might have featured a little preserved lemon – it was hard to tell – and sprinkled with a soft, fresh, mild cheese. It was quite a nice little mezze, if a little underpowered and underseasoned, and much of a muchness texturally; it was all squidge and no bite. What it wasn’t was roast Jerusalem artichokes with marinated feta and parsley and preserved lemon gremolata. Gremolata is a traditional Italian garnish, used to finish and cut through rich stews and seafood dishes; it is properly made with lemon zest, garlic and parsley. To quote Russell Norman, who is something of a pedant after my own heart and also knows what he’s talking about, “gremolata is a dry crumbly dressing and so requires no oil or other liquid”. So. A parsley and preserved lemon gremolata, if it must exist, should be parsley, garlic, and the rind of preserved lemon, finely chopped. That it wasn’t was offensive for two reasons. Firstly, the establishment in question makes a big deal about educating their customers; they have a (barely) passive-aggressive sign up by the till explaining the concept of a ‘sandwich’ or ‘wrap’ and why you shouldn’t need cutlery to eat it. If you’re going to do this, you really need to get things right. To make some kind of bastardised Middle-Eastern salsa verde and call it gremolata is rude both to people who know what gremolata is, as they will feel they’ve been lied to, and to people who don’t know, as they will now go around thinking that every other restaurant is wrong about gremolata, and be embarrassed in front of their supper club when they get it wrong. Secondly, the dish would have been nicer with actual gremolata on it, providing a freshness and a welcome textural contrast to the soft artichokes and ‘feta’. Oh, the feta. If the gremolata made me angry, the feta was just disappointing. More like ricotta than any actual feta I’ve ever eaten, I’d guess it must have been that insipid ‘salad cheese’ you get. At the time I assumed they must have just run out of feta, but I’ve since eaten the same parody of cheese in other mezze there. As for the ‘marinated’ part, it just wasn’t, unless it had been soaked in milk. It didn’t taste of anything beyond a mild lactic tang. Again, none of this would be relevant if it had made the dish nicer, but it didn’t. The salt and acid of a good feta, perhaps with a few aromatics in the marinade, would have been lovely. Did I complain? No. I don’t like complaining unless there is an actual mistake by the kitchen – under- or over-cooked meat, for example – whereas this dish was made with malice aforethought. Will I go back there? Yes, definitely. It’s still one of the nicest places to eat in Norwich, and this blog is something of an overreaction to a minor complaint. But I love it less, and I find their patronising signage more annoying, than I did. Here is my recipe for the same dish, by way of closure. 

serves a few, depending on what you’re serving it with

ROAST JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES

500g jerusalem artichokes

4 lemons

olive oil

thyme

Give the ‘chokes a scrub, cut into equal-sized pieces, and put in a pan of salted cold water with two of the lemons, halved and squeezed. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about ten minutes to parboil. Drain, then put in a roasting tin with some thyme sprigs, the other two lemons (also halved and squeezed) and a good glug of oil. Toss well. Season, then put in a medium-to-hot oven for around 20-30 minutes, until brown, fudgy, and starting to catch.

PARSLEY AND PRESERVED LEMON GREMOLATA

small bunch of parsley

2 preserved lemons

1 clove of garlic

Quarter the lemons and cut out the flesh. Peel the garlic (obviously). Finely chop everything, using your sharpest knife (the top, not the heel) and a little patience. Mix together.

MARINATED FETA

200g good feta cheese

100 ml extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp cumin seed

1 tsp coriander seed

1 tsp fennel seed

Pinch chilli flakes

zest of half a lemon

Put the oil in a bowl with the chilli and lemon. Separately toast all the seeds in a hot pan, then add to the bowl. Carefully cube the feta, then put that in the bowl too. Mix carefully, trying not to mash the cheese up. Leave to marinate for as long as you can be bothered.

Hot artichokes on a plate, cheese, gremolata.