CONFUSION CUISINE

 Seemed like a good idea at the time - gyoza and black pudding.

But just because it's fusion doesn't necessarily mean it's good.

I MAY HAVE EATEN WORSE

As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, 'No worst there is none.' Here's one I ate about a week ago.

Of course, Mrs Lovett's pies have the great advantage of being fictional.  Mine was all too real, and admittedly it wasn't in London.

But not all the pie news is bad. A few days back, in London, we were in the Viaduct Tavern. Some sources will tell you that there are jail cells in the cellar, once associated with Newgate Prison, though other sources say this is nonsense.  Even so the place is happy to call itself a gin palace, as well they might.  The interior looks like this:

 And there we were presented with a pie-based menu, which ticked a great many boxes.  I briefly fantasized that there was some rehabilitated Mrs. Lovett working out back expressing herself through pastry, but no, these were Mr. Barrick’s Pies:

 

PHOTOS BY GANNON-NICHOLSON STUDIOS.

We went for the Pork and Black Pudding

 

and the Chorizo Style Pork and Wensleydale.

 

The Pork and Black Pudding was good, though I could have used a lot more black pudding. but the Chorizo and Wensleydale was superb - a highpoint in pie art, largely because of that cheese topping.  I can’t tell you exactly what they do to the Wensleydale to create the effect, something to do with curds and whipping I imagine but don’t hold me to that.  In any case they’re doing something very right.

 

       And possibly the most exciting thing I discovered in my recent pie research was that it is apparently possible to own a prop pie as used in Sweeney Todd, such as this one belonging to a collector who goes by the name of ‘Guardian Devil.’  What a time to be alive.

BLACK AND SHINY

It's so black and shiny!

Yes, that'll be the plastic.  Tasted pretty good though.

And let us never forget David Goodis:

Where black pudding is a metaphor for revenge.  Who know?  Nobody in the black pudding-making community, I suspect.

A TONIC FOR THE TROUPE

Sometimes I wonder when the gin bubble will burst and it’ll stop being cool.  Not any time soon I expect since, as my pal Jonathan and I were discussing, gin is essentially so very easy to make.  You take some neutral spirits (which are more or less vodka), add various flavors, historically juniper but these days take your pick – hyssop, frankincense, strawberries, whatever - mix ‘em up and there you have an artisanal uniquely flavored gin.  The possibilities are endless.  Exhaustingly so.

I was having this conversation in the Port House House on the Strand in London, a Spanish wine and tapas bar where they have a gin and tonic menu (of course they do).

What you see above on the left is made with Aviation Gin, which I thought was a basic  gin that I bought in California in supermarkets, but I guess I may have been wrong about that. There’s some lavender in there too. I forget the name of the gin in the one on the right (which is the same as the one at the top of this post) but there’s orange peel in the glass and it tasted vaguely of marmalade. 

And these were just fine but they weren’t the real reason I was there.  When I’d been there before I’d had the morcilla con heuvos cordones, black pudding from Burgos with a fried quail egg on top, which was spectacular - the morcilla rather than the egg - so I had to go back and have it again – and I did – and it was every bit as good as I remembered it, though now I’m thinking I could do it myself if I found a source for the right morcilla.

Also on the menu were Papas Arrugadas, Canarian wrinkled potatoes with a mojo sauce, which seemed irresistible but they were a disappointment – a bit soggy I’d have said, but maybe they were meant to be that way.  

Here’s something similar I made earlier, in fact years back. 

And as if my gin ruminations had come back to haunt me today I got some targeted advertising (yeah right) for non-alcoholic gin and tonic.  I mean, really, why would you? Really.

AND WHAT DID YOU EAT, MY DARLING YOUNG ONE?

Like all men of the library, I tend to think that the change from one year to the next as an essentially artificial and not all that important moment, but I’m not altogether averse to taking stock, not least because Blogger uses days, months and years as a way of counting the number of posts you’ve made, and the hits you’ve received.

So I’ve been looking in my photo files, at the pictures taken in the last year, that so far haven’t made it to the blog.  I’ve been trying (and in some cases failing) to recall the exact details of where and when I ate the food depicted.  Here are ten of them: not in any sense a “top ten,” and not in any coherent or historical order.

1) This, early in the year, was the smallest portion of ceviche I’ve ever seen, served at Loteria, a pretty good Mexican restaurant in Hollywood, which in general gives perfectly generous portions:

2) A sausage roll eaten in the café of an art gallery in Letchworth Garden city where there was an exhibition of prints by Eduardo Paolozzi, top artist.

3) Mushy peas in a pub in Saxmundham:

4) “Breakfast” in Chicago when I failed to find a cheery diner and ended up with a sugar overdose at Stan’s Donuts.

5) This is something very fancy at the Savoy – black pudding balls, I think, but I’m not sure what else.

6) This is Sunday breakfast at an Israeli restaurant somewhere in West Hampstead: 

7) An heirloom tomato eaten and artfully arranged in my very own test kitchen.

8) In a restaurant named Ravi Shankar, in Somers Town  – I’m sure that giant poppadum thing has a more specific name but I haven’t been able to find it on their website.

9) A Burns Night Haggis:

10) And finally, the last cheese board of 2018. Most of the cheeses here were bought at a farm shop in Gloucestershire with the terrible, terrible name of Jolly Nice.  Perfectly good cheese though, even if I have no idea of the name of that bomb-like thing at the front. It was good though.

DELICATE AND TENDER

You’re surely familiar (I mean, I’ve banged on about it often enough) with the great early scene in the movie The Quiller Memorandumin which Alec Guinness (Pol) recruits George Segal (Quiller) for what sounds like a suicide mission.  Guinness toys with sandwiches throughout the scene. The screenplay is by Harold Pinter.

POL bites into his sandwich and grins at QUILLER … He offers the sandwiches to QUILLER.

POL. Some leberwurst ?

QUILLER. No thanks.

POL. Or some schinken? (He examines the sandwich.) No, wait a moment, what am I talking about, this isn't schinken, it's knackwurst. What about some knackwurst?

QUILLER. I'm not hungry.

P0L. Aren't you? I am.

He bites into the sandwich, chews a moment and then stands.

     You don't mind if I eat while we walk?

Comedy of menace – we got it!! So imagine my excitement when I was shopping in the Waitrose by Russell Square in London, and found the “Delicate & tender German sausage selection.”

Now you and I may not think that German sausage is especially delicate or tender but you can’t argue with Waitrose, can you?  As you see, the collection consists of “coarse Shinkenwurst, succulent Bierwurst, and smooth Extrawurst. 

I’d have thought those adjectives were unnecessary, but again Waitrose is the boss

Now, only a fool would attempt to parody our Harold but I find myself imagining a scene in which some British spymaster in Berlin might say to one of his charges,  “No, wait a moment, what am I talking about, this isn't succulent Bierwusrt, it’s smooth Extrawurst. What about some smooth Extrawurst?”

And then imagine my further excitement in finding that Waitrose also sells Bury Black Puddings, from a company that claims (and once again I wouldn’t argue) that black pudding is a superfood.  

Their website also has recipes for Vegetarian Black Pudding Samosas, which does raise suspicions, I mean come on, have the courage of your convictions, guys.

I don’t think these were the tastiest black puddings I ever ate.  I think they needed more fat, and I wish I’d bought some that I saw when I was up in Sheffiield, but fried up with potato they were good enough.  The thought that they were a superfood didn’t help much.

My friend Phil was once offered a job as an apprentice black pudding maker in Lancashire.  The job description said something like “Mustn’t mind wading ankle-deep in blood.”  He declined. The main objection to doing such a job, I imagine, is that it would take all the joy out of eating black puddings, and nobody wants that.

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Obviously, once you find a source to buy blood, you’re going to buy blood.  And then you’re going to find something to do with it.  The mind reels at various sacred and profane possibilities but I decided to make blood sausage: black pudding, boudin noir, possibly even morcella.

I looked an online for a good recipe.  This wasn’t as easy as I hoped.  Of course I knew that pork fat is involved, and I had some pork fat in the freezer.  But quite a few of the recipes used a pork shoulder, in which case it sees to me you’re just making a pork sausage with a bit of blood in it.  And I happened to have some Atora beef suet in the cupboard, which may be only borderline legal in the USA.  I also, as it happened to have both pork and beef blood.

Other recipes required large quantities of groats – often barley, and I’m not a huge fan of barley.  I was prepared to use oatmeal but I didn’t want to go further than that.  But I thought having some liver in there might be no bad thing. Pretty much all the recipes, and this did surprise me, involved allspice

As regular readers know I’m constitutionally incapable of following a recipe but I did find this one on recipeland.com.  And yes, I did use beef blood rather than pork. 

I wasn’t absolutely sure what the target audience was – the kind of cook who needs to be told what mincing is, evidently.  And as for a shortage of blood and casing - well, you've just got to try a bit harder.  
 It's described as for “Black Pudding (Irish)” and incidentally it appears on the Facebook page for Irvington Farmers Market, identical but unattributed and it’s lost its Irish designated.  

          
Since I was looking for inspiration rather than precise instructions, I didn’t follow the quantities or the proportions and I definitely didn’t steam for 4 or 5 hours.  I found a rival recipe that suggested 20 minutes – so I followed that instead, obviously.

Came out looking pretty decent.

And even more decent once the sausages had been steamed.   

Do you want a bit of Irish in you?

*

And how did they cook up?  And how did they taste?

Well, I was a bit worried that they might burst open during cooking but no, these are obviously strong, though yielding, sausage skins.  They kept their structural integrity very nicely.

And they tasted really remarkably, perhaps surprisingly, authentic; quite rich but quite subtle.  They could have used more salt and certainly more fat, but as a first effort, there was no reason for complaint.

I remember when I used to go out for curries with the lads in Sheffield, one of our number would say after a good meal, “You couldn’t fault it.”  This was high praise indeed, an indication that you certainly would fault it if you possibly could, but try as you might you just couldn’t.  Not sure I, or my sausages, could quite live up to that standard.