Author: Thom Eagle

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

Noble Rot

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It’s a little strange that Britain, for all its love of tracklements and preserves, has no particular tradition of lactofermentation, the preferred method of pickling vegetable matter from Korea to High Germany, and indeed further afield. In the United States, it is understood that the word “pickle”, unmodified, means a sour dill pickle; that is to say, a small cucumber, lactofermented in the Continental tradition mostly associated here with polski skleps and salt-beef bagels, though very similar to the pickles of Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt, where they fill the same role as a foil to rich, smoky meats and sour dairy. Here, I suppose, “pickle” (“cheese & pickle”) means something anonymous, mixed and brown in the Branston mode, malty with vinegar and brown sugar – although if you were offered “pickles” you might reasonably expect onions, perhaps some beetroot or sweet, sliced cucumber; even, if you’re lucky, an inky Opies walnut. If we pickle cabbage, it will, most likely, be red and, once again, vinegared; the bacterial tang of sauerkraut is alien to the national palate. (Was, anyway; the Reuben has joined pulled pork on the supermarket shelves, and kimchi, we are told, is ubiquitous. As so often happens, these things have gone straight from out-there trend to mass-produced commodity.)

Lactofermentation is a chemistry experiment, or if you like, an artistic exploration into decay. Fruit or vegetables (generally) are placed into salted and perhaps sweetened water – or in the case of sauerkraut, dry-salted, the cabbage itself providing the required liquid – and left for some time, the exact recipe varying with ingredient, temperature, season. The amount of salt is important – you need enough to kill off any rogue yeasts, and the majority of bacteria, but not so much as to see off the lactobacilli, which will, given time, eat their way through natural and added sugars, creating lactic acid – after the manner of acids, a preservative – in return. This is one of those extremely useful processes, symbiotic between humanity and microscopic life, which form the foundations of our culinary history – and one of the more baffling ones. You can see how some sour grape juice was sampled, liked, and polished off; how old dough was found to swell fuller in the oven’s heat. To leave cucumbers entirely immersed in salt water for a period of time takes a certain amount of idle curiosity. However. To get back to those pickles, perhaps it’s the decay that puts us off; we don’t like to watch the cloudy, mysterious bubbling as the bacteria do their work. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve never had much truck, historically speaking, with sourdough bread either, or, our noble cheese aside, soured milk products.

It’s a shame, anyway, as fermentation is an excellent method of pickling, preserving (haha!) as it does a lot of characteristics normally masked by heavy, sweet vinegars. I fermented some tomatoes recently, to an (I think) Ukrainian recipe via Olia Hercules, and they were delicious. Sour almost to the point of fizziness, they nonetheless taste of tomato – and of different varieties of tomato – in a way which chutneys and ketchups, however tasty, do not. It’s odd, when British cooking has such a reputation for plainness (simply boiled or roast meat, potatoes, vegetables) that in pickling we frequently pile on so much ornamentation, to the point where it overpowers the content – we don’t eat piccalilli for the beans and cauliflower, or Branston pickle for the whatever-they-put-in-Branston-pickle – although the same could be said of our charcuterie tradition. All across Europe, people dry-cure whole or boned pork legs in masses of salt, trusting in the quality of the animal, fed on acorns or herbs or common swill, to shine through; we, on the other hand, immerse the same in treacle, beer, sugar, cloves, marmalade, vinegar, saltpetre, peppercorns, herbs and hay, roast it, and still serve it with nose-tickling mustard, pickles, pickle, and piccalilli. We have a thousand sausages, but no salami – salt beef but no cecina. You could blame the climate, but I’m not convinced. I stuck a salted sheep’s leg up a chimney all through summer and it came out fine. I think it’s that same fear of rot, of seeing the white bloom of mould creep across the skin; deep in a Puritan part of our souls we are scared of decay – although that doesn’t account for Stilton or, for that matter, Stichelton.

Simple Suppers

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If you take a clear, well made, lightly gelatinous fish stock, season it with salt and sweet white vinegar and infuse it with lovage, mint and celery leaves, the result is a clean soup – a bone broth, if you must – which sits happily in the sometimes awkward period between summer salads and the dense potages of winter, although it might seem a little austere. Add some diced golden and orange tomatoes and gently warm through until the jelly round the seeds seeps out into the pan, then spoon the lot into a plain white bowl, where it will glow with brisk, late summer health. You might have started the bowl with some flakes of salt-baked gurnard, poached, shredded skate wing, or a lightly cured mackerel fillet, barely cooked through in a little spare broth; you might finish it with a fistful of chopped dill, fennel tops and parsley or a spoonful of a pungent, quivering aioli.
This is a way of cooking, precise and simple, that can only proceed from abundance, and as such is incredibly irritating to read about. No-one wants to hear about your well-stocked larder, your fridge full of home-made condiments and seasonings – I’m sorry for bringing it up. In my defence, ours is professionally so, with space to spare in cupboard, freezer, and dishwasher, and the time, inclination and imperative to do the kind of housekeeping, the straining, simmering, bottling, pressing, potting and drying which formed the backbone of our imaginary peasant cuisines; outside of work, it’s a fantasy, but one that it’s nice to inhabit for a while. I don’t think I’ve ever made fish stock at home. Meat broths can be thrown together out of ham bones or roast chicken carcasses, a few scraps of veg, simmered for hours with little attention, but fish needs a bit more care.
If you wanted to follow the non-recipe above, taking the mackerel option, then you’d need to start with another fish entirely. The bones of oily fish do not make a good stock. You want white fish carcasses (flatfish are good), which you’d need to ask your fishmonger for, if you have one and he likes you, or save from a previous meal of, say, fat bream you’ve filleted yourself – which brings us back into the realms of fantasy. I don’t think I’ve ever filleted bream at home either – I roast them whole, and the roast bones do not make a good stock. Cheap white fish fillets will do. Put them, or the bones, in a pan with onion, fennel, celery, peppercorns, bay – you know, all the standard stock accoutrements you have lying around your well-stocked pantry. Cover with water and bring to a bare simmer, which is where it should stay for about half an hour. “There was silence throughout heaven for about half an hour” – that’s when they were making fish stock, carefully watching the bubbles to ensure it never broke out into anything as frantic as a putter. I assume so, anyway.
When it’s ready, you can lift out all the bits with a sieve and pour the clear liquid into a bowl or tub containing lovage, if you can find it, mint and celery, leaving behind any fishy sediment. Lovage is an excellent herb, something like an intensely astringent celery, which I have never seen for sale anywhere, although it grows in this country fierce and strong. You can leave all that to infuse like some unpleasant, medicinal tea, before straining and, if you like, freezing the result. If you do the latter, then take the opportunity to clarify it upon defrosting – it’s an extremely easy process, but one I can’t be bothered to explain here; just writing all that about stock has exhausted me. Google, google, google. Time to cure the mackerel, if you’re still with me. You need ridiculously fresh fish for this. Red gills, bright eyes, rigor mortis, the works. You’ll probably need to find it whole, to ensure freshness, and then fillet and pin-bone it as quickly as possible. The flesh of oily fish degrades incredibly quickly. I generally put the fillets in a tub, floating in an ice-bath, then put the lot in the fridge and make the cure. Equal parts salt and sugar, some crushed fennel and coriander seed; mix together and spread out in a tray. Pin-bone the fish with your fish tweezers and place the fillets, flesh side down, in the cure. Put back in the fridge for half an hour, then wash the cure off and do any necessary trimming. A faff, yes, but it really helps to keep them in the first freshness – and as we know, there is no second freshness.
It’s plain sailing from here, anyway. Warm a saucepan of the stock, add salt, pepper, white balsamic vinegar (fine, white wine vinegar and a pinch of sugar if you must) and some very good, very ripe diced tomato. Separately warm a couple of inches of stock in a pan wide enough to take all the mackerel in one layer. When it’s just bubbling, add the fish and cook very gently for five minutes; lift the fillets out into bowls and spoon over the tomato broth. Top with herbs, and if you want more of a kick, some good, strong aioli, which of course you have in the fridge. Or if you’ve run out –

2 large egg yolks
a spoon of Dijon mustard
8 cloves of garlic, crushed with salt
pomace oil
juice of two lemons
extra virgin olive oil

Blitz the first three in a food processor or whisk together in a bowl. Slowly add pomace oil until it goes really thick. You DON’T have to do this in a constant stream, but it does have to be gradual. When it looks a bit too thick, mix in the lemon juice. Slowly add the olive oil until it looks and tastes right. That was easy, wasn’t it?

Sourer Wine

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It used to be thought that standing wine was turned into vinegar by vinegar flies; or perhaps it was that these little insects were bred spontaneously out of vinegar, or maybe both, at different times – I don’t remember when or where I read this fact, these facts. Leave a cup of vinegar uncovered for an hour or two, anyway, and you’ll see why this possibly fictional belief persisted – flies you never knew were there will have suicided within it. I don’t know why they do this.
We now know, of course, that wine (or beer, cider, or fruit wine) is turned into vinegar by a helpful bacterium, the acetobacter, which – as far as I understand the matter (about as far as I could throw a gallon of barrel-aged sweet Modena) – consumes alcohol and pisses acid; vinegar-making is a process of controlled decay, whereby leftovers, left to rot, turn eventually into a preservative, without which British cuisine would be particularly bereft. The cured items, tracklements, chutneys, ketchups and sauces with which our food is scattered – roll-mops, pickled onions, pickled red cabbage, brown sauce, mint sauce, Branston, and so on – all rely heavily on the clanging collision of sugar and vinegar, with little recourse to simple salting and lactofermentation, as is found in other pickle-heavy cultures (Germany, Turkey, the US); and where would the chip-shop be without vinegar?
My brother, who has always had a love of extreme tastes, used to use malt vinegar, or possibly non-brewed condiment, as a universal seasoning, for which he was roundly mocked, and rightly so; pasta doesn’t need to be drowned in it. Still, he was on to something. A splash of vinegar works wonders on a long-cooked stew, revivifying what was lost in the murk; the magic that chilli sauce works on simply cooked eggs comes as much from the vinegar as from the heat, that welcome touch of sweet and sour. To my mind, seasoning a dish – that final adjustment, as it’s often called in recipes – means not just intensifying our apprehension of flavour with salt, but a balancing of all the basic tastes on the tongue. To a simple tomato sauce, already rich in umami, we might add a pinch of sugar, a little lemon juice or vinegar; bitterness comes from pepper and olive oil, which also contributes the pleasing taste of rich fats.
Come to think of it, forget that tomato sauce – make a salad dressing, one with a little anchovy in it, designed to perk up gentle, buttery salad leaves. Dissolve sugar and salt in good vinegar, add pounded garlic and anchovy, whisk in grassy oil – you have sweetness, salt, a sour kick, heat and deep savour, and a cleansing, fatty bitterness – you have, in other words, a powerful hit of all tastes, which is why (some) salad dressings are so delicious to drink by themselves. Taste, as distinct from aroma, is a real bodily pleasure that puts you firmly in the present. On the other hand, we are told – we know – that smell is the sense most hard-wired into our memories, to the point where it might have been designed for the express purpose of recollection.
Everyone must have had that feeling when, walking along entirely in the here-and-now, you smell an ex-girlfriend’s perfume, or the sweet, submerged scent of chervil and jump back five or fifteen years into the past, which slices through the present like a good knife through sweating fat. Flavour, then, although we experience it as one thing, is a combination of two very different sensations which dance around each other like two pigeons on a tiled roof, tending first one way and then the other, hopefully, in the end, to meet somewhere in the middle. The goal is that the taste lives up to the promises made by the first drifting smells.
T

his can be particularly hard to achieve when the smell is one happily remembered from childhood, which is why the trend for house-made ketchups, baked beans and so on can be such a minefield – they have such intense early sense-memories to live up to that they must nearly always fall short. The goal is that the opposite happens; that the new, fresher version retroactively transforms your childhood meals, making them seem daring, original and tantalising, in the same way that the most innocuous 50s ballad becomes, after its use in a David Lynch movie, haunting, rich and strange.
I don’t know if this version of brown sauce achieves this universally, but it does for me. HP sauce is a fine thing, the perfect foil to a heavy full English, and a good riposte to anyone who would insult the national palate; how can a country where a spiced date and tamarind sauce is eaten with dry-cured pork as a breakfast item be accused of dullness of cuisine?
BROWN SAUCE
This makes rather a lot, but it seems to keep indefinitely (sugar and vinegar there) in the fridge. You could bottle it properly if that’s your thing. It goes extremely well with black pudding, as well as bringing the bacon sandwich one step closer to perfection.
700g chopped onion
800g chopped fresh tomato
500g dates
500g prunes
250g dried sour cherries
500g light muscovado sugar
2tbsp salt
1l white wine vinegar
a pint of porter
1tbsp peppercorns
1 dried chilli
2 cinnamon sticks
1 tsp cloves
2 star anise
an optional splash of sherry vinegar
Tie up the spices in a little bag or resign yourself to sudden breakfast crunches. Put everything in a big pan, bring to a simmer, and let it putter for two or three hours until soft, cooked and dark. It’ll need some attention to stop it sticking.
Remove the spice bag and blend smooth in batches, adding an optional dash of sherry vinegar to each batch (it perks it up a little). Bottle or fridge, and leave for a week to get to know itself. Apply liberally to cured pork items.

Pickled Fruitfulness

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From the amount of water currently falling from the sky, the drop in temperature, and the vast profusion of brambles covering every bit of roadside and waste ground, I think it’s fair to say that autumn has arrived. Last night I made a celery gratin, straight out of Marcella Hazan, braising the stalks in chicken stock and bacon, then grilling them under a blanket of parmesan; warm and savoury but stopping short of outright rib-sticking, it was a good way to usher in the most British of seasons – the one where you can really get down to the business of cooking, after all the saladeering and cold-cut-arranging of summer. Nuts, mushrooms, stone and orchard fruits, the first of our local shellfish; so much that is good comes from autumn. It also, of course, marks the start of the game season.
There is a tendency among chefs to lump in all game as equally good (ethically, environmentally speaking) wild meat, free of the endless problems of welfare and sustainability that surround the farming of domestic food animals; certainly, you can see why. A wild bird is shot in its natural landscape, never having seen the inside of a barn of abattoir; what is killed is sold and eaten. The management of grouse moorland, meanwhile, is claimed to be an outright ‘good thing’ for the local wildlife, although it should be said that this claim is largely made by hunters and gamekeepers. Conservationists, pointing to the killing and persecution of legally protected raptors which seems an inevitable consequence of, particularly, driven grouse shooting, tend to differ.
It is, perhaps, unfortunate that the people making such great strides in terms of ethically produced domestic meat should think so little of wider issues, especially since those issues – of habitat and ecosystem – are familiar from debates on fishing; so it goes. Since the whole thing seems designed, not for any gastronomic benefit, but for the sport of a gilet-clad, blunderbuss-toting aristocracy, of which the meat is almost a by-product, I find the whole thing rather distasteful; perhaps we should leave them their sport, lest they take their guns to the urban poor. Perhaps, though, it should be banned outright, and those who kill protected species fully prosecuted. I don’t know. Best to steer clear of the issue, sticking to the rough shoots, the meat of pests and vermin which can be enjoyed with a fairly clear conscience – that is to say, of rabbits and of pigeons.
I’ve written about rabbit twice before, and it remains one of my favourite meats; pigeon, though generally available pretty cheaply year-round, has a much more gamey character, a rich redness which makes it worth saving for the game season proper. I suppose you could stick one on the barbecue, but for me it isn’t really a summer meat, its affinity with peas notwithstanding. Pigeon does very well, however, with any of the produce of early autumn, with a little mushroom sauce or cobnut salad, or, as here, with blackberries. It is a truism that meat goes well with things that it like to eat; rabbit with carrots and radishes, venison with mountain herbs, pork with pretty much anything – although as pigs apparently dislike plants of the oregano family, I try never to include them in recipes. Presumably grouse live on bread sauce and sherry.
With pigeon, though, there seems a little truth in it, insofar as the aforementioned pea plants they love to rob, and in the fruit of the bramble, which goes as well on a plate with them as in their stomachs – though it should be noted that blackberries, especially when lightly pickled, go pretty well with all game, their inky sharpness cutting through the animal rankness of wild meat. This is an extremely simple recipe, for which I make no apologies – the first meals of any season should always be simple.
PIGEON & BRAMBLES
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again – if you buy blackberries, you’re an idiot. Unless you live in a dystopian city block or a desert, go and find some.

Serves 2
2 whole pigeons or 4 breasts (depends what the butcher has)
2 knobs of butter
2 handfuls of blackberries
200ml white wine vinegar
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
A dash of gin
Salt, pepper, oil

First get your pigeon out of the fridge and out of whatever packaging. Pat it dry and maybe give the skin side a preliminary salting. If the birds are whole, pull out the hearts and set aside for a snack.
Put the blackberries in a bowl – it’s hard to cook with them in your hands. In a small pan, bring the vinegar to the boil with the salt and sugar, making sure they’re dissolved, then add a little gin and pour over the berries. Leave to cool.
If you’re using breasts, cooking them is really simple. Find a pan big enough to hold four breasts without touching, and get it really hot. Add a splash of oil and then the pigeon, skin side first, pressing down a little to prevent curling. Sear for two minutes each side, then remove to a plate to rest.
Whole pigeons are only slightly more involved. Heat the oven high and get an ovenproof frying pan really hot. Oil, then sear the birds on each breast until nicely brown, then sit on their backs, stick a knob of butter inside them, and put in the oven; eight minutes should do it. The butter should have melted. Put on a plate to rest, breast-side down so the juices flow through it.
Done! Carve the meat (breasts horizontally sliced, birds cut through the middle with a cleaver and opened out) and serve with a spoon of pickled blackberries on the side. Perfectly delicious.

A New Lump

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Where does yeast come from, asks Elizabeth David in her quietly impressive work on bread and yeasted baking, out of the everything? Yes, is the simple answer. Wild yeasts float and permeate and surround us, settling and breeding where they find food, moisture and the conditions of their tiny lives; the act of collecting, taming and cultivating them to serve the specific purposes of man has been the work of millennia. In Middle English yeast was known as goddisgoode, God-Is-Good, because of the mysterious ways in which it works its benefits to mankind; until quite recently, we hadn’t got much further in understanding it. Now, of course, every kitchen and artisan bakery has their own culture of wild yeasts, among other entities, in the form of a sourdough starter or mother; more precisely, this is known as a SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, to include the lactobacillus whose fermentation provides the sour part of the equation. The balance between these two factors, maintained and controlled by careful feeding, regulation of temperature, and culling of the livelier elements, is what gives each sourdough starter, also called a ferment or leaven, its particular character. It is undeniable that sourdough yeast provides a crust and flavour quite unlike, and in many ways far superior to, that created by commercial yeast, and the rhetoric (there is always a lot of rhetoric) around sourdough bakeries is that of proper, traditional, real, old-fashioned and true baking – the implication being that immediately prior to the invention of sliced bread in 1928, every village and street-corner bakery, every farmhouse and country home, had their own carefully nurtured sourdough culture; naturally, the facts are more complicated.

Time and again the emphasis in David’s narrative is on the avoidance of sourness and excessive fermentation; rather than keeping their bacteria alive, the protagonists, from ancient Egypt to modern Britain, discard excess starter, keeping perhaps a little dough aside for the next batch. Sometimes, though, they start afresh each time. The story of bread-making, in tandem with the rest of human progress, is thus not that of preserving wildness but of the steady elimination of the wildest aspects of it to leave only what is useful. Strange, half-live leaven was Biblically associated with corruption, both bodily and moral (see, for example, I Corinthians 5), and therefore looked on with, at best, suspicion, particularly in Protestant countries; that weird yeasty funk was filled with sourness, rot, taint, the creeping horror of the natural – was filled with the devil. I AM LEGION – WE ARE MANY could be the haunting scream of a teeming sourdough culture, invisible yeast and bacillus working as one. The good bakers of old England took no chances, and got their yeast from the breweries, while those households which continued to use home-made yeast did so despite rather than because of its sourness, which was kept in check but accepted as a fair price for the superior depth of flavour and texture achieved. Even this limited and somewhat hidden tradition had died out by the time David came to write her history; she describes home-made barms (only very occasionally does she use the now-ubiquitous term sourdough, and then to describe an inferior, rustic bread) as one of those lost tastes, alongside perhaps sylphium and dodo, flavours lost to the march of progress. In her businesslike fashion, she wastes no time mourning this apparent total break in the thread of tradition – admirable, perhaps, but she does consequently miss the fact that the tradition was alive and well elsewhere. Our artisan bread bakers of today take their cues not from the narrow field of the English farmhouse kitchen, but from the cuisines of Poland, Germany, of France and Italy and particularly America, which has refracted all of these into its own traditions. Things survive in immigrant cultures long after progress or turmoil have destroyed them at home, kept alive if only by force of nostalgia, and sourdough (I assume the word came to us from America) soon found its own niche, with an amenable ecosystem (the most common lactobacillus is named after its home city of San Francisco) and suitable attendant mythology. The Alaskan gold prospectors kept pouches of wild yeast round their necks through the long grey marches, a portable miracle-worker to help them eke more sustenance out of their long-stashed dry stores; old hands of more than a season were known as sourdoughs.

Although it’s been a long time, for most of us, since we had to rest so heavily on the staff of life, we still make bread do much of the symbolic work of food. Our daily bread, our bread and butter, the bread of heaven – its ubiquity was such that it could readily be used as a synecdoche for all sustenance, which is still how it is largely understood in much of the Islamic world. Wasting bread is a sin to many Muslims, and if a loaf is dropped you might see it retrieved, kissed and blessed, before being stashed in a nearby nook in case it should be needed; as is likely, given that quantities of bread are consumed at every meal, as they are also across the Mediterranean and most of Europe with the odd exception of Britain, which, as already noted, lacks what we might call a real baking tradition. It’s strange that the current generation of bakers, who really are doing something quite new in trying to raise the average quality of sustenance by such a degree, should so insistently define their work as old-fashioned or traditional. Like the Taoist acolytes who muddied the waters of history by ascribing all their insights to Lao Tzu, they hide real ability under the bushel of tradition; which is odd, when on the other side of the scale, you see countless food bloggers, writers and broadcasters continually talking about my this and their twist on that, constantly boasting originality – or perhaps it isn’t odd, but it is nevertheless a fact. If you consider what you do a craft, and if you look back into its long history as a craftsperson should, then everything you make will always be new and different, because it will always be imperfect; and it will always be the same, because it is all a part of the same process which started thousands of years ago. Each object, each meal or figure or painting or sentence, is only the local expression of that process, and as such is under constant threat of alteration, always a work in progress; that, anyway, is my view. I couldn’t tell you what bakers think.

Bottled Light

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If you buy, forage or find a boxful of ripe plums, greengages, blackberries or cherries, their taut skins full to bursting of the warm south, then the first thing you should do is sit at an outside table and eat them, greedily and alone, with sticky chin and stained fingers, until you feel nearly ill; this is the appropriate response to abundance. The next thing you should do, though, is make jam. I’m not really a fan of half-cooked fruit, soggying cakes, hanging around with pancakes and meringues. The ripest of raw materials loses a lot of itself when just partially cooked (think of miserable grilled tomatoes), regaining its isness only through thorough boiling; the fact that you can keep the product long into the winter is a definite bonus, although it takes a certain amount of self-restraint.
I always find raspberry and strawberry jams a little too frivolous. Blackberries, if you find them wild (and if you don’t, you have more money than sense), should more properly be made into a jelly, unless you like picking the woody pips out of your teeth all morning; a spreadable jelly, that is, not a wibble-wobble one – although that would also be an option. Clear, jewelled jellies are a fine thing, but take a little more investment of time and equipment than a simple jam, for which the best starting point is the fat, fleshy stone fruit of later summer and early autumn, with their complexities of sweet-sour juice and bitter almond, all of which can be played up, down or with in the cooking process.
I must have read a hundred recipes for jam, often lengthy and enlivened with rose petals or various boozes, which is ridiculous when you consider that there is really only need for one, which could be expressed as a haiku –
weigh prepared ripe fruit,
an equal weight of sugar,
cook, add sugar, boil –
although I suppose recipe writers need to make a crust somehow. Where else would they spread their jam? If you are entering a WI competition or are very fussy about your set, you might need to follow particular recipes or at least guidelines for different kinds of fruit; if you stick to stone fruit, and add a couple of lemons to help the pectin along, though, you should be fine, although I suppose there are a few extra guidelines I normally follow.
I stress prepared fruit, as the stones (especially if you are decadently making peach jam) add quite a bit to the weight. Don’t believe recipes that tell you to skim the stones off during cooking, either – it is a nightmare without end. Always cook the fruit to the consistency you want before adding the sugar, which seems to stiffen them; the slow cooking needed to bring them back to softness will caramelise the sugar, introducing a taste you don’t want – unless you do, in which case ignore this advice. A few well-chosen spices, added with the fruit, can really lift a jam. Don’t just reach for the vanilla pods; Vanilla Is Not A Universal Seasoning (a rule to live, or at least make dessert, by there), and in any case its heady sweetness isn’t really what you want in something so sugary. A star of anise adds a lovely boiled-sweet note to a simple plum jam, but in general I like to add ‘savoury’ spices – peppercorns, cloves, bay and cardamom all contribute a tiny bitterness to the mix. Put in a pinch of salt too, as you should with everything.
Setting point, assuming you have cooked the fruit enough and your proportions were correct, is 108°C. It’s useful, if you have a probe thermometer, to use it alongside the plate test or that thing with the spoon, as one day the battery to your probe thermometer will run out or rust, and you will never buy another. I can never remember how to do that thing with the spoon, but the plate test is easy. Before you start cooking, put a plate in the fridge, then, when you think the jam might be ready, turn off the heat and put a spoonful onto the cold plate. Let it cool and poke it. If it jellifies, wrinkles, and otherwise looks like jam, it is ready; if not, cook for a bit longer and keep testing. Resist the urge to try the hot jam. I forgot to say you should be cooking in a really big pan – if you didn’t, it will probably have boiled over, ruining your hobs and possibly badly burning you, so make sure you do.
The jam should be bottled while hot, a process which again requires a certain amount of care and attention. I suppose once you have poured boiling jam over your foot you will, for one reason or another, never do it again. Of course you should sterilise your jars in some fashion, but if you don’t, just keep the jam in the fridge – although this would be a shame, as jams, jellies and cordials should all really be stored where the winter light can stream through them, casting stained-glass shadows on the kitchen floor.

Another Man’s Poisson

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Fish and the sea remain deeply mysterious to me. It would seem that fish has always been regarded as something quite different from meat, from the ancient Greeks – who kept their land animals for the gods – to the Catholic church, which, most notably in medieval times, set aside a great many days for fasting and fish-eating. The implication there is that all eating is more or less sinful, on a sliding scale down from red meat; we might remember that the eating of animals was a sop to the debased postdiluvian world, as Jahweh realised that his creations would never quite be able to control themselves. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant will have noticed that a lot of people, devoutly or not, still eat fish on Fridays (the chippy is usually heaving then too) – abstention has become a treat. This is not, I think, how the ban would have been experienced originally, at least by the rich, monks and the priesthood included, whose meals consisted not of a main protein and trimmings but of a number of different dishes and delicacies, fish, fowl, fresh and salt meat, cakes, pastries and so on; the injunction to eat fish would, rather than involving a straight swap between creatures, have meant the loss of a great deal of variety at table – though I doubt anyone (I’m still talking about rich people) went hungry because of it. At any rate, although fish may now be eaten as a pleasurable rarity rather than under duress, the distinction between it on the one hand, and birds and mammals on the other, is still maintained. Personally, I almost never cook fish at home. The difficulty first in sourcing it (fishmonger’s can be wretched places, reeking and dripping – when you find a good one, hold on to it) and then in cooking it, which seems to need pans of an impeccable non-stickness, or fish kettles and racks of a different size and shape for every species, always appears insurmountable.

It isn’t, of course, as I rediscover every time I actually do it. Most fish cooking is actually very easy, an excellent vehicle for bold simplicity. As I think Hugh FW points out on a few occasions, all you have to do to cook fish, with a few exceptions, is get it hot. None of the angst of rare beef, medium-rare lamb, slow-cooked, melting pork – just get it hot, but not too hot. To cook a fillet of bass or bream to crisp-skinned, melting perfection, just oil and salt a cold frying pan, and put the fish, skin-side down, into it. Place over a low-medium heat, and leave there. If you’re worried about the skin sticking, use a lot of oil. By the time the flesh is cooked – opaque, flaking – the skin should be a lovely golden brown. If you’re bothered about such things, then you can fry it on the other side for a minute to sear the flesh. Spoon some butter around it at this point, perhaps some herbs and black pepper, and the fish is done. Poaching fish is even easier, but seems to have fallen out of fashion somewhat.
Despite all this, you might still prefer to eat your fish out of doors. Fair enough. Fish, as is well known, tastes significantly better by the sea, the spray of which provides an elementary seasoning to the tongue, as well as a not-entirely-reliable guarantee of freshness, and in the dying stages of extreme sunlight, accompanied by a glass of something very cold and quite possibly fizzy – Bass shandy, at a pinch. Experts differ as to whether the best seasides for fish-eating are found in North Norfolk, pebble-strewn Kent, urban Barcelona or Palermo, the cruel beaches of Yorkshire or the softer ones of the Suffolk heritage coast, the Greek Islands, the rocks of the Hebrides, the drunken evenings of adulthood or the gentler exhaustion of childhood; this is surely just a matter of taste, though, and any opinion is necessarily partisan. Everyone agrees, however, that while white fish is best by the seaside, the flavours of oily fish and shellfish travel a little better – though since their flesh does not, they must generally be preserved in some form or another for their journey.

Time was that every fishing town would have had their specialities, and many still survive in odd little cafes or the right kind of gastropub – roll-mops (although the Italians are the undisputed champions of food-related insults, ‘roll-mop’ as a term of abuse for someone with ‘no guts and no spine’ is a particularly excellent British one), kippers, bloaters, smoked and jellied eels, hot- or cold-smoked salmon, mackerel, herring, pickled winkles, cockles, and mussels in little pots or bags; although we still tend to keep these molluscs for seaside treats, you see them in jars at the supermarket, and I presume people eat them. Although heavily smoked fish makes a pungent addition to the breakfast table, the only sea-creature to really cross over into the day-to-day meat-eating world is the tiny anchovy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fresh one, which are to be found in great heaps in Mediterranean fish-markets, in this country, and although the soused ones the Spanish call boquerones are making inroads here, it is the salted fillets – brown, rottingly pungent, barely recognisable as fish – that found a real place in British cooking. The Romans left fish guts to ferment in the sun, bottled up the remains and called it garum; South East Asia has its intensely savoury fish and shellfish sauces; we have Worcester sauce, a deeply odd concoction containing, among other, secret things, anchovies. There are few things that are really, genuinely better to eat than Cheddar cheese, melted onto thick white toast, with a few splashes of Worcester sauce on top; add some pickled onions and you have a complete if smelly meal. Although you might, as you grow older, come to prefer a few anchovies spiked, alongside garlic and rosemary, into a Provencal lamb roast, or melted into oil that is to dress mustardy bitter greens, or hidden in slow-cooked onions, lending depth to a simple pasta sauce, the effect is always the same. By some alchemy, the aged fish lose what can only be called their fishiness – which, you’ll remember from when you opened the tin, was extremely developed – leaving only a profound savour which enhances the taste of almost all animals and animal products (apart from cheese, anchovies go extremely well with eggs, while the smell of them melting into butter is up there with onions for me), though it does tend to overpower the more delicate flesh of white fish. Having left the seaside long ago, they are not readily welcome back.

Red Terroir

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There’s an odd idea – started who-knows-when but currently perpetuated by the incurable romantics of the locavore movement – that cuisines (regional, national, local) are (and, more dogmatically, should be) products entirely of place, sprung fully-formed from their unique surrounds, an expression of soil and flesh and air – of what is called terroir. This idea, originally applied to the particular makeup of wines, has been taken to its logical conclusion, with extremely impressive results, by restaurants such as Noma and its imitators, or closer to home, the Sportsman in Kent. In these kitchens, localism is treated less as an ethical imperative and more as an aesthetic challenge – an attempt to create masterpieces with a severely limited palette – and as such operates above (or at least separately to) anything as parochial as ‘a cuisine’; they aren’t what I’m thinking of here. The problem is in attempts to define and identify the ‘real’ or folk cuisines of countries, counties, regions, where such localism is either ignorant, or worryingly reactionary.
The problems here, I think, stem from a simple lack of historical perspective. There is a tendency to look on the peasant traditions of various countries (though especially Mediterranean Europe) as historical artefacts, still living in some parts but essentially static – we see what, say, the Sicilian farmer has for lunch, and assume that it is the same lunch he has had for centuries, torn from the harsh earth by his own sun-dried hand; then, lamenting the loss of our own peasant tradition, we try to recreate it, with our British vegetables, our British wildlife, our British climate. Some of this is admirable – there are many odd herbs and wild greens, old forgotten dishes, which deserve rediscovery – but some of it is just stupid. It leads to otherwise-respectable chefs espousing the virtues of rapeseed oil (a mass-produced, violently yellow vegetable oil with a marked aroma of cat’s piss – when it has any at all) and worse, taking the moral high ground in doing so. Local here is seen as intrinsically better, and the implication is that rapeseed is what the wise old Italian would be eating, were he to find himself transplanted to East Anglia. Well, probably, but only if it was all he could afford. There is a deliberate refusal here to acknowledge food as a global trade, and one with a very long history.
Take that olive oil. The best and most abundant producer of olive oil is Spain, and has been since Roman times; it was shipped to Rome because they liked it, and because the whole of the Empire was their locale. They could afford to source the best, and to move it around their whole territory – the Empire, in fact, was responsible for an astonishing movement of ingredients, without many of which our ‘British’ cuisine would be bereft. We all know that we have the Americas to thank for the potato, now seen as a very British provider of stodge – but imagine culinary life without asparagus, cabbage, carrots, onions, even, all picked up from around the Med and taken to the corners of Empire; Celtic Britain must have been either a prelapsarian paradise of now-lost abundance, or a flavourless pit. Take away the rabbit too (introduced and bred for eating by the Normans) and the English country kitchen is looking pretty poor. (Conversely – and this is odd because we think of Mediterranean cooking, if anything, as having deeper roots than our own – imagine the food of Southern Italy before Columbus. No chilli, no peppers, no tomato…) Perhaps I’m being deliberately obtuse to make a point. Of course our peasant tradition isn’t meant to be pre-Roman; we’re thinking of the sturdy medieval peasant of Merrie England, and his diet of beef, cheese, pickles and beer – except the beer would have been short-lived, one-dimensional ale, because the hops which flavour and preserve it hadn’t yet made it across the channel. And, of course, he couldn’t afford beef.
Meanwhile, the feudal aristocracy, taking full advantage of the reopened spice routes, were enjoying a systematic derangement of their cuisine, marked by a wild use of sugar, dried fruit, and what are now mainly dessert spices in dishes which have in them something of Morocco and something of a creative child in a gigantic sweetshop. Although the cooks calmed down eventually, a lot of this stuck, particularly in festive food, with traditional pickles, pies and cakes packed with dates, currants, ginger, cinnamon and pepper. Never being grown here, unlike the fully naturalised alliums and brassicas, these spices perhaps retained some of their exoticism; nevertheless, they form an important part of our national palate, a taste for contrast and spice which in ‘modern traditional British’ cuisine is all too often expressed only by semi-ironic curried dishes. Much, in fact, of what is thought of, both affectionately and disparagingly, as good old-fashioned British food – plainly boiled and roasted meats, dauntingly bland nursery puddings, as well as those bastardised curries – we owe to the Victorians, with their mix of an austere, Protestant Christianity and a general cultural inclination towards greyness. Looked at over a longer period of time, our cuisine becomes more interesting – if it can be seen coherently at all.
I’m focussing on Britain, but the same could be said of almost any world cuisine. Even insular, chauvinist France has the sun-drunk Italianisms of Nice, the borrowed luxury of vienoisserie; much more obvious are the rich collisions of Europe, Asia and Africa you find in Sicily and Turkey, where trade, migration and invasion have all played their part. The point, really, returning to that (very French) idea of terroir, is that we have a mistaken tendency to think of cuisines as inherently rural, of dishes as springing somehow from the soil and the quality of the light, passed down through generations – and we think of the rural in turn as essentially conservative, static or at least very slow and resistant to change. This is perfectly natural. Food (forgive me for stating the obvious) comes from the land – but the ability and the motivation to move it, to share it, comes from the city, crowded, mutable, filled with a thousand influences. Food, once you have more than a couple of pigs to rub together, is commerce, and commerce is movement, exchange, growth. It is the slow sea-change of North Atlantic cod into the rich baccala of the Mediterranean, the trip back of salted anchovies fermented into a splash of Worcester sauce, with its baggage of Empire, its echoes of the fish sauces of Asia as well as the garum of the Romans; it is the burgeoning spice trade that opened up the new world.
So? I’m not sure really. Just that I think it’s easy for chefs to become too chauvinist, too inward-looking; by all means, use foraged this and local that (I certainly do), but remember that great cuisines come just as much from diners and bars, little dockside cafes, as they do from grand country estates and secretive rural ritual – and please stop putting rapeseed oil on everything.

A Drop To Drink

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  The first cookbook I ever bought, through the book club at my primary school, posits, across 13 recipes and accompanying poems, the idea of the cook as magician, of recipes as spells gleaned from witches, ogres and dragons; otherworldly, perhaps, in origin, but applicable to the day-to-day, The Weird and Wonderful Cookbook shows cooking as a mystery to be learnt, mastered. “When you’re cooking, you are the magic” is its closing, rallying cry, and the recipes it collects (being a children’s book, it doesn’t have to pretend to originality) – a simple yoghurt cheese I still make now, ginger beer – suit its transformative rhetoric entirely. We are shown here how ingredients can be rendered entirely other by the application of heat, the introduction of air or water, as Neil Gaiman has a character of his point out, making a case for cooking as one of the fine arts – which is the same, really, as saying it is magic. For myself, I would rather consider cooking as a craft, as the Renaissance painters saw their work – one capable, from time to time, of a powerful and nagging beauty, but rooted always in the work of many hands, capable of repetition without dilution, and always in some sense useful. Craft, focusing less on individual genius and more on gradually accrued knowledge, allows more space for hand-me-downs and for the folk artefacts, the products of time and history, which are the basis of most cuisine outside of the world of multiple Michelin stars.

The Weird and Wonderful Cookbook, then, with its collected recipes of aliens, monsters, and various beasts, was in a sense the precursor (for me, that is, not chronologically) to my most-loved cookbooks – Luard, Roden, Apicius and the like – the writers of which never put a “my” before a tedious salad but are keen only to give you the best, the truest, the most interesting recipe of a kind. It’s surely as much the fault of readers and editors, but the absolute worship of the new which animates a lot of modern cookery writers is something I find really astounding. As is the case with fairytale and myth, and indeed with learning of most kinds, the accumulated wisdom of generations is considered suitable only for children, while adults are fed on an artificial stream of stunted newness, blind to history and shallow of scope. The unique experiments of a lifestyle blogger from Chelsea are praised to the uncaring skies by people who struggle to slice a tomato competently, let alone master the patient skill of boiling water. The combination of encyclopaedic rigour and wine-eyed Romanticism which the French bring to food make them easy to mock, but the fact of their 17 words for stages of boiling does not deserve its share of disdain. We could do with a few more in English, and perhaps would lose the spectacle of otherwise intelligent adults pouring water from a kettle straight over pasta, or cracking eggs into roiling foam.

Life came up out of the water and loves to return, and it is one of the first ingredients most of us learn to manipulate, in mud-pies, in sandcastles and rivers, in cups of squash or tea, while boiling meat is perhaps as old a way of cooking as any, developing alongside roasting as taste or circumstance allowed; we say boiling, but stewing or simmering would be more appropriate words. Before casseroles, saucepans, skillets, or cauldrons, the stew-pot would have been a hole in the ground or suspended hide, the water heated, as Reay Tannahill explains in The Fine Art of Food, by fire-warmed stones. The result of this slow process, the author continues, would be the loss of a great deal of the meat’s flavour into the stock; like the good scholar he is, he holds his tongue on the matter, but I’m sure that these primitive chefs must have drunk their broth. The water in which meat has been slowly cooked – especially when salted or smoked, as ox tongue, ham hocks, or pig’s feet – is, like the oil from roasted tomatoes or chicken, the crisp skin you snack on as you pick through a slowly cooked lamb shoulder, one of those by-products almost better than the main event, well worth the price of admission alone. The process of poaching involves a gradual giving up of meathood into the water, in the form of collagen, gelatine, proteins, essence of muscle and tendon, until, if overdone, your ham hock a ghost form of watery strands, your water a dense, deep stock, the two ingredients entirely change places. This, of course, is the point of stock-making, an alchemical transference of flavour – and with it nutrition and strength, though not, perhaps, as much as the bone-broth advocates would have you believe – from a solid to a liquid form. Stock is one of those frugalities only really available to the professional or dedicated domestic cook – such an investment of space and time – and a lot of chefs seem to regard it as the ultimate form or perfection of water, using stock in soups, stews, and braises, as a poaching medium or the basis for further, stronger stocks, to cook pasta, polenta, rice or noodles, vegetables both green and underground; I’m sure people boil eggs in stock, but I haven’t met them. While a well-made broth gives essential body to a lot of dishes, its constant use, especially in the concentrated form of jus, can become a bit samey.

As I said, though, this is a luxury of storage space and labour time, and presumably the broth from poaching meat must have originally been used as a one-off, part of the meal, as it is in the pot-au-feu, the bollito misto, the New England boiled dinner, and the cucida of Spain, all of which make a virtue of plainness and depth. An older form of water max would have been seawater, still used by fishermen, fishing communities and Romantics as a cooking medium for fish and especially shellfish; although the Italian adage tells us that fish should be drowned in wine, the use of heavily salted water, as well as seasoning, helps to keep moisture from leaching into the shells of crabs and lobsters; wet, over-cooked dressed crabmeat is an all-too-common insult to an excellent ingredient. Away from the beach, you can scoop handfuls of sea salt into boiling tapwater. A little more precision, some sugar, perhaps garlic, cloves, juniper and peppercorns, and you have a brine; once used as a blunt instrument for preserving, refrigeration means you can now ease up on the salt and use brines mainly for the seasoning of otherwise plainly cooked meats. This aside, though, the point at which food for utility edges into food for pleasure is hard to guess at. In this matter of broth, Reay Tannahill, as elsewhere in his excellent little book (I’ve always wanted to say that), confines himself to the evidence. In a little over a hundred pages, he sketches a history of the food of the world, drawing lines from prehistory to the modern age, and from India to Peru; most importantly for anything desirous of ‘excellent little book’-hood, he combines a gift for broad strokes with a deadpan eye for the animatingly ludicrous detail. Illustrated with a number of colour plates (hence the title) and enlivened by anecdote and poetry, you can tell that Tannahill relishes the eccentric task he has set himself, but it’s a shame he doesn’t aim for greater precision in his use of language. A lot of culinary explanation and misunderstanding could be avoided by a more careful use of the word boiling.

Meat, really, should never be boiled, which implies a continuous agitated roll, a constant motion and loss of heat from the surface of the water. Green vegetables, pasta and jam should be boiled (some disagree) – some beans, such as kidney, at the start of cooking, to kill off toxins in their skins – but that’s about it. For almost every other preparation involving heated water, a simmer is what you want. Of course, this contains a number of subdivisions, but it’s still a useful category. Egg-poaching water, tomato sauces, puttering ragouts, stocks, flour-thickened sauces, soups and stews, all suit a simmer with, at the most, Champagne-like bubbles rising to the surface, while fish, blood, custards and so on take even less than that, with proteins that coagulate at a temperature far lower than you might expect – lower, in fact, than the legally recognised threshold for cooked food, but that’s another matter. There are, in fact, so few cases in which boiling is appropriate that it’s strange that that is the word we have latched on to. Of course, we boil water for other reasons too, like tea, originally, we’re told, a response to the undrinkability of natural water supplies; I’d rather have the wine, and keep my water patiently simmering at the back of the stove.

Oil & Vinegar

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Back, recently, from a trip to Naples, where despite the pungent cheese shops, the dripping, writhing fish stalls, the oily black coffee, the dangerously rich ice-cream, the puffy delights of deep-fried pizza, the foods that really stick in the mind are the vegetables. (Well, the stewed tripe was pretty memorable, but that’s another story.) Like Sicily, Naples has always been poor, and even flour might be too expensive, especially once those polenta-eaters up north had got a taste for pasta. So the Neapolitans, derided as leaf-eaters (a lot of Italian regional prejudice seems to revolve around food), had to fall back on what they had – which, luckily, was an astonishing abundance of fruit and vegetables. The British version of Italian food has tended to focus on pasta, and the meat-and-cheese-and-olives side of antipasti – all delicious, of course, but they give a somewhat lopsided impression of the cuisine. The Southern love for bitter greens – at one meal, we had the Neapolitan signature, friarelli, as well as braised escarole and fiercely grilled radicchio (not green, true, but you get the idea) – is starting to make an impression here, which is good. It suits our vegetables, as well as the small-plate style a lot of newer Italians are turning to. The ubiquitous vegetable antipasti are perhaps a little naffer, but still worth checking out. No-one’s going to get excited about a roast pepper, but that doesn’t mean it’s not nice to eat.

A lot of this, though, does rely on the afore-mentioned astonishing abundance of fruit and vegetables, which, in most cases, are significantly better and significantly cheaper than you can get in Britain. In Naples, they pretty much give away that roast pepper – dressed heavily in oil, sprinkled with capers – which here would be ruinously expensive. So you get the slightly unpleasant spectacle of new London restaurants offering up cucina povera at new London prices – and doing it rather badly, because the raw materials weren’t good enough to start with. If your pepper isn’t beautiful, do something else with it – and accept that that something might not be especially cheap. Why should it be? It’s not YOUR peasant cuisine. Feel free to live on turnips and gruel. Anyway, for a dish that relies slightly less on freshness and quality (slightly, mind you), as well as appealing to the deep British love for sweet pickles, you could do a lot worse than caponata. I think originally Sicilian, we had this in Naples too, and it ticks a lot of Southern boxes – the vegetables, the sweet-and-sour flavours, the prodigal use of olive oil – though I warn you again that it won’t be very cheap. Buy the veg from a market or greengrocer, and the oil in large quantity from a wholefood shop, and you’ll lessen the burden slightly. Supermarkets seem to conspire against this kind of food.

CAPONATA
This is a very Italian, high-summer caponata – they change the vegetables according to the season, little artichokes being a particular favourite. The only real constant is the agrodolce, sharp-sweet sauce. Feel free to sub in more ‘British’ veg (a glut of courgettes might find a home here) as you wish.
Makes a lot, but keeps well under its oil.
4 large mild onions, finely diced
6 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 red chilli, sliced
6 large vine tomatoes, diced, skins and seeds and all
200ml red wine vinegar
3-4 tbsps sugar or honey
Juice of two lemons
A handful of capers
A handful of raisins
4 aubergines, chopped into little dice
1 head of celery, trimmed and chopped into chunks
Chopped mint and parsley
Salt, pepper, and LOTS of olive oil

Make the sauce first. Sweat the onion, garlic and chilli (tuck in the vine from the tomatoes as well) in a hefty glump (bigger than a glug) of oil, until soft and nearly turning brown, then add the diced tomatoes and a pinch of salt and cook down to a mush. Stir together the vinegar, sugar (or honey) and lemon juice, then add that too and boil down a little. Taste – at this point it should be too sweet and too sour, without enough salt to balance it. That comes later. Stir in the capers and raisins.

Put the diced aubergine in a colander and toss with a big pinch (about a tablespoon) of Maldon’s salt. Leave to drain for about half an hour. (This is NOT to get rid of ‘bitter juices’, but to lightly break down its spongy texture, drying it slightly and making it absorb less oil. It makes quite a difference.)
Meanwhile, heat another glump of oil in a frying pan and sauté the celery, in batches, until nicely browned. Scoop out with a slotted spoon (although you’ll probably still need to top the oil up) and chuck straight into the sauce. Do the same with the aubergines – which will need even more oil – when they’re ready.
Let the whole thing simmer for about ten minutes, then stir in the herbs (a good handful of each) and leave to cool to a warm room temperature, then check the seasoning. It might need a bit more salt, but there’s a lot on the aubergines. Eat with white bread and wine, and get it down your shirt. Get angry and go for a nap. You’re on holiday.