THE LAST MAN WITHOUT A YOUTUBE CHANNEL

 And yes, since you ask, I have been doing some cooking. 

(The vast majority of these pics are by Caroline Gannon)

 First, a proper recipe, from Times Easy Dinners, Chicken Traybake with Balsamic Roast Potatoes.  Not much to go wrong but I'll use more balsamic when/if I do it again.

Before: 

After:

After that I busked it recipe-wise, Bream:

Then Rabbit - very local, shot just up the hill (though not by me):

 

And then risotto with the leftovers:

And when all else fails Steak Tartare:

It was all perfectly decent if not totally fantastic. But you know, we can’t all be Fergus Henderson, much as we’d like to be.

GRACE AND FAVOUR, AND TARTARE

I don’t know Grace Dent and she doesn’t know me.  

We were once co-judges of a food and film competition but we didn't judge in the same place at the same time, so we never met.

 

Nevertheless I think she’s a good thing.  And as I continue my steak tartare research and experimentation, I wondered if she might have something interesting to say on the subject.  Well of course she does.

 

Her Guardian review of Six by Nico was illustrated with this image

 

I'd have thought that caption 'little more than a "meaningful glimpse of a dish"' was quite a put down, and I'd feel pretty well cheated if a waiter delivered that to my table, in in the review Grace sounds quite approving.

 

Less so with Tom’s Kitchen, reviewed in the Evening Standard, describing ‘the drab, under-seasoned steak tartare which arrived with a colossal mountain of rocket’

 

And even worse was the Bistrotheque at Cultureplex, Manchester reviewed in the Guardian, ‘A chunky steak tartare with a neatly placed,wobbly yolk looked pretty, but was jam-packed with capers that quashed any subtlety of flavour in the meat.’

 

Well I don’t suppose Grace Dent will be eating my tartare any time soon, which may be a blessing for both of us, but on I go.  I decided to try a venison version, in part because venison is so hard to cook - leave it in the oven a couple of minutes too long and it goes dry as a coir doormat – that raw seemed a reasonable method.  This was my venison tartare.

 

It thought it hit the spot but the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the absence of raw egg yolk.  I think this may partly because of an Oedipal issue – my dad, when he was feeling under the weather, started the day with a raw egg in sherry.  I was appalled in the way only a teenage boy can be by his father.

 

The idea still gives me the willies, but I thought maybe I could handle the yolk of a quail’s egg.  That's it at the top of this post.  It looked fine at least it did until the moment I poured it into little well (or dent, if you will) that I’d made in the top of the the steak at which point it burst – but the overall effect, and the taste, was surely much the same. 

 

Did I need the raw egg yolk?  Not really. Did I think I was making and eating something more authentic?  Yes.

 

And since you ask, those chive sprigs are local, artisanal and grown by me.  Yes, I have been self-sufficient in chives since at least 2019.

TARTARE FOR NOW

 Lately I’ve been thinking about steak tartare. 

It supposedly gets its name from the Tartars (Mongols) who tenderized meat by keeping it under their saddles, and then eating it raw.  This is almost certainly apocryphal, but here is Ghengis Khan – the world’s best known Mongol.

 

A friend of mine, American, worldly, a very good French speaker, used to tell the story of her first time in Paris when she went into a somewhat fancy restaurant and saw steak tartare on the menu.  So she ordered it and asked for it well done.  French hilarity ensued.

 

I don’t disbelieve her but according to Alan Davidson inThe Oxford Companion to Food, the French term for steak tartare is steak à l'Americaine, which spoils the story, and I’d no more argue with Alan Davidson than with Ghengis Khan.

 

Anyway I’d been thinking a lot about steak tartare. I wasn’t craving it exactly, but I was feeling I’d like to have one if the opportunity presented itself, and it did a couple of weekends ago when I found it on the menu of the Bear in Rodborough, Gloucestershire.   Naturally I ordered it.  It looked like this:

 

It wasn’t a standard issue tartare, and actually you know I’m not sure there is an absolutely standard recipe.  Everybody seems to have their own version.  Beef, gherkins, lemon juice, capers, onion, Dijon mustard, Worcester sauce, and a raw egg are pretty much always involved, but some include horseradish and Nigel Slater even favours anchovies but then he’s a maverick.  The menu description at the Bear read ‘Native dry-aged beef tartare, shaved black truffle, Tunworth soft cheese, sorrel oil, beef dripping toast.’ There was no mention of raw egg for example, for which I was on balance grateful. I mean I’ll eat it if it’s there, but if it’s not there I don’t feel deprived.  It came looking like this (it tasted better than it looked):

Photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith

Under the garnish, there was a reddish goo, which I suppose must have contained the cheese since I couldn’t detect it in the beef.  Could there have been ketchup in there too?  And possibly an egg yolk?  As for sorrel oil I never knew there was such a thing but I suppose it would be tart and zingy and much like oil and lemon juice, which was fine by me.  The whole thing was pretty good, though I could have done with a bit less salt.

 

When I got home, having the bit between my teeth, as it were, I decided, a few days later, to make my own steak tartare. Perhaps surprisingly even to me I’d never done this before.  I mean it ain’t rocket science.

 

Being pathologically incapable of following a detailed recipe I consulted multiple sources; the likes of Nigella, Gordon and Martha: the usual suspects. My perfectly ordinary version was much as described above steak, gherkins, lemon juice, capers, onion, Dijon mustard, Worcester sauce, salt and pepper.  No egg.

 

Photo by Luna Woodyear-Smith

The result was pretty damn good if I say so myself. In retrospect I think I could have added a bit more of each of those seasonings, but I didn’t want to go too crazy on my first time.  The Platonic ideal of the steak tartare remains elusive but time is on my side.

FEASTING IN FRISCO

The moderate Peruvian food obsession continues. I was in San Francisco last week and had lunch at La Fina Stampa (1407 Bush Street), which to be strictly accurate styles itself as Peruvian and Spanish. It looks as though the menu gets a lot more ambitious at dinner, but I was very happy with the Saltado de Mariscos.  Hard not to love a cuisine that considers French fries an essential ingredient in a stir fry:

And equally hard not to love a front door that looks like this, which is where the feller at the top of this post comes from:

Later that same day I sat alone at the bar of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and drink a solitary martini.  The barman mixed it in a chemistry lab beaker like this:

 which definitely added to the ritual if not to the taste, though it was a perfectly good example of the beast.

As I was sitting there sipping my drink, a woman came to the bar and said to the barman. “Give me the sweetest drink you serve.

The barman took it in his stride. 

“What kind of liquor do you like?” he asked.  “Vodka?”

 “Yeah vodka,” the woman said.   

She and I watched as the barman juggled various anonymous bottles, shook them up, and gave her a pale drink in a martini glass.  She went away to a table, apparently very happy.

“What was in that?” I asked the barman.

         He said, “Vodka, lemoncello, lemon juice, cheery liqueur and bar syrup.”

         “Yep,” I said, “that’s a sweet drink you’ve got there.”

         Though it now occurs to me that however sweet your drink is, you can always make it sweeter by adding some more bar syrup.  But why would you?

And then later in La Café de la Presse (352 Grant Avenue), a very reliable French restaurant, I was eating my steak tartar and on the adjacent table were two men and their female partners, but the women weren’t saying much as the men pontificated loudly about the state of American politics, which was not very interesting, and then they talked about the judges they knew, which might have been very interesting if you’d known the judges in question, but of course I didn’t. 

At that point I began to assume they must be lawyers, but then one of them said to the other, “I do what I call geo-financial engineering.”  I wasn’t sure that was a “thing,” but in fact a little light Googling reveals that geo-financial engineering is not only a thing but a registered service mark (as opposed to trademark).  You can look it up if you like, but again, why would you?