JINGLE SOME OF THE WAY

 I was once at a wedding where some unpleasantness broke out over the crumpets.  The host presented guests with a platter of crumpets that had been pre-buttered and spread with jam.  More than one wedding guest expressed the opinion that a crumpet was a savoury thing and that spreading it with anything sweet was an abomination.  I tend to agree, though I wouldn’t get unpleasant about it.

 

It would probably have been worse on Christmas morning to be served Jingle the Reindeer Crumpets, the pack of which tells the consumer to “top with jam for a fantastic festive breakfast.” Yeah, right.

 

These crumpets are are shaped like reindeer faces though I think you wouldn’t necessarily know it just from looking, but in any case spreading jam on them wouldn’t have helped.  

 

I slapped a poached egg on top. It was fine, if some way from being fantastic or festive.

 

I was born and brought up in Sheffield where crumpets are generally known as pikelets: some sources say pikelets are thinner but I never noticed that.  This is the kind of pikelet shop they used to have in Sheffield:

 

 

My dad, who was a very ordinary man in many ways and very odd in certain others, once had the idea of becoming a mobile pikelet seller.  It was never very clear if he was intending to have a van or whether it would be some kind of hand cart and he’d walk the streets, going from door to door selling his ware.  This kind of thing (although in fact it’s a hot potato seller from Sunderland):

Fortunately my dad didn’t pursue the idea but he did have a slogan “Get ‘em while they’re hot!”  I don’t think that’s the worst.

IT'S STARTING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE DESPERATION

 You know me, I love a martini and I’m not averse to a sprout, but do I want them in the same glass?

Above is just one of the ‘Sproutini’ images doing the rounds in this yuletide season.  Well, the media have to be filled with something.

 

Also, Apricity, I’m no expert in these matters but I have an idea for how you could sell more alcohol. Maybe fill the glasses?

TARTARE FOR NOW

You know me, it doesn’t take much to get me salivating over venison, and there had been a loin of venison lurking in the freezer for a couple of weeks.

 

This photo and the majority of the others by Caroline Gannon.

And then when I was in London, back at the Coal Hole in the Strand, venison croquettes were on the menu, so how could I not order them.

Actually they were described as Venison Pancetta and Red Wine Croquettes which were pretty decent in themselves.  The liquid round the edge is ‘brown sauce mayonnaise’ which sounds like it might be a mix of mayo and HP, and for good or ill, that’s pretty much what it tasted like. And that is a watercress and pickled onion salad on the side, should you be interested.

 

And then last Saturday morning I was listening to Jay Rayner’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and there was much discussion of, and enthusiasm for, eating venison, not least because there are apparently more deer in England than there have even been, perhaps because not enough people eat them.

 

So in order to even up the score, the inamorata and I thawed out the venison loin and made a tartare.  It was way better than the croquettes, if we say so ourselves.

INVITATION TO THE EXOTIC

I can’t remember when I first heard of, and started reading, Fuchsia Dunlop, the great scholar, eater and creator of Chinese food.  In some ways it seems like she’s always been there.   

Illustration by Anna Higgie

But I do know she was in the anthology The Wurst of Lucky Peach, a celebration of the sausage, in which she writes about opka hesip — sausage and stuffed lung — a favorite of the Uyghur people apparently.

Fucshia Dunlop wrote in that anthology “Cooked, the sausages are pleasantly piquant, the lung a strange hybrid of savory custard and offal that appeals, surprisingly, to those who like English puddings.” Now as then, I have to take her word for that.  Apparently opka hesip looks like this: 

Anyway I was in Hatchards bookshop last week and I bought a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to A Banquet – The Story of Chinese Food. And it’s signed!!

 

It’s a deeply serious and erudite history of Chinese eating culture, with chapters on rice, knife scraped noodle, shunde and cultural appropriation, among many other topics.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. 

 

It may be a measure of my own shallow-mindedness that the chapter I’ve liked best so far is titled ‘The Lure of the Exotic.’

 

Now we all now that in these days of saving the planet there are all kinds of things we’re not supposed to eat, including Chinese delicacies such as bear paw and shark skin soup, and Fuchsia Dunlop is a great cheerleader for sustainability, but back in the day she was obviously an enthusiast for eating the unusual if not the downright forbidden. 

 

     Mea culpa: I did once eat bear, which was terrific, cooked (and I assume killed) by Steve Rinella.  And it is in fact legal to hunt and eat bear in much of the United States.  I’m rather more upset that once, at a Chinese wedding, I did have shark fin soup – I only knew what it was afterwards – and I don’t think it was worth killing a shark for.

 

Nevertheless, I do still get a frisson when I read Fuchsia Dunlop’s tales of the eating of leopard foetus which might on occasion be imitation leopard’s foetus, or the ovarian fat of the snow frog which can look like this:

 

And then there's the Moose face.  Fuchsia Dunlop has a friend who gave her a dish called ‘red braised qilin face’ (hongshao qilin mian).  The qilin is a mythical creature, somewhere between a unicorn and a musk deer, and is sometimes depicted like this:

 

But the one she ate was made with the face of an elk.  “And there it was, an actual elk’s face, or rather its large nose, bizarre and amazing, lying in a pool of sauce on a great round platter and there I was staring into its enormous flared nostrils.’ Reader I salivated.  She continues, “it was utterly delicious, neither meat nor fat for skin, springy and sticky, while also soft as butter.” I’m convinced!  And she adds, “I knew I would probably never taste such a thing again.”  

Anyway, I’m glad she said probably and didn’t rule it out altogether.

 

 

 

THE REASON FOR THE SEASONING

Photo: Caroline Gannon

I really love Christmas food, and every year I‘m, deeply  moved by the thought of Mary and Joseph and the Three Wise Men sitting down to a plate of turkey with roasties and giblet gravy.  The baby Jesus obviously had his own special arrangements.

But you know, what I personally like best, rather than the big roast bird, are the extras and the afters, the stuffing, the bread sauce, the mince pies, and I suppose pigs in blankets fit into that category too.

 

And I do wonder when pigs in blankets became a “thing.”  My mum never served them, and I suspect she’d never even heard of them.  But now they seem to be ubiquitous – pigs in blanket flavoured crisps for instance.  And I understand there is even pigs-in-blankets flavoured vaping liquid, though that might be an urban myth.

 

And at the Goose pub in Walthamstow, a name that in itself evokes the spirit of Christmas, they are, at the time of writing, serving “Giant Pigs-in-Blankets, Yorkie and Mash; Cumberland sausages wrapped in bacon served in a giant Yorkshire pudding, served with mash, peas and onion gravy.  1042 calories.”

Photo - Caroline Gannon

 

So obviously the inamorata and I had to order a plateful – it was the mention of the giant Yorkshire pudding that really clinched it, though that proved to be a bit of a letdown, being more like an-oblong shaped pancake, but it tasted ok.  The peas were surprisingly good too.

 

Of course in reality you’re just eating sausage and bacon, and if you buy a Marks and Spencer Pigs-in-Blankets Sandwich, sausage and bacon is pretty much what you get, though with the addition of some amazingly weird, sticky onion and port chutney. 

 

Of course we must suppose that Jesus never knew the joy of pigs in blankets since he presumably grew up eating kosher, but thanks to later developments in Christianity we are now free to eat pigs in all their many forms, from ears to trotters to crackling and beyond.  Don’t let anybody tell you that religion is all bad.

 

BLOOD AND GUTS

   So the Guardian had its  ‘Cocktail of the Week’ - Lyon’s martini x2, devised by Anthony Lyon of Lyon’s Seafood and Wine Bar, London N8,  and described as ‘An almost savoury, nori-infused gin martini to enjoy as an aperitif, perhaps with an oyster or two on the side.’ ‘Almost savoury’ as in almost pregnant and almost dead?  i.e. not savoury?  Though it sounded entirely savoury to me.  And in any case the drink looked like this:

Creating the nori-infused gin is the hard part, Mr. Lyons favours Beefeater, and the drink also involved seaweed bitters which I’ve never encountered.

To make nori-infused gin, he says, “Toast the nori over a gas flame (or barbecue or with a blowtorch) until it turns brown and smells slightly nutty: be careful, though, because it can catch quickly. Crumble the toasted nori into a clean jar, add the gin, then seal and leave to infuse for 12 hours. Strain the gin through a coffee filter, then decant into a clean jar and seal; it will be good for three to six months. Then serve with a strip of nori on the rim.’ 

 

Well that sounded like a lot of fuss, and although nori is a perfectly good thing it’s always struck me as not at all fancy, just the kind of thing you can have with a beer.  I felt I would make my own version of the seaweed martini.

 

My local, very reliable, fish man down in Manningtree market sells two different kinds of seaweed, neither of them nori, and both of them come wet and salty as the North Sea.  The thing I usually do, thanks to the ingenuity of the inamorata, is soak them to get rid of the salt and then blend them into a pile of mashed potatoes.

 

But imagine you had a couple of small fronds of the stuff and you soaked them and dried them (using a blow torch if you insist) and then dropped them into a martini – that would be good wouldn’t it? Not a substitute for olives but part of the same food group surely.  So I did it and it looked like this.  

It tasted fierce, much fiercer than nori would have.   It was a nice experiment and a change but I can’t see it making its way into the regular rotation.

 

And then I started thinking about the things people have in or with drinks, and my mind drifted back to a bar in LAX airport where I had a Bloody Mary which came with a slice of Beecher’s cheese, made in Seattle.  Like this:

It seemed great at the time, although when a man’s waiting for his plane’s departure gate number to be announced, his connoisseurship may not be at its finest.  But even in the cold light of day it still seemed like a pretty good idea.

 

And it so happens that the Manningtree market has an Italian cheese man, Solo Cheese, from whom I only ever really buy one thing and that’s pecorino with olives in it. 

 

And I bought some at the weekend but when I tasted it I realized it wasn’t just olives in there, there was some kind of red hot pepper as well.  And that worked really well with a Bloody Mary. You don’t need Tabasco in the drink when you’ve got a slice of hot cheese perched there on top.  Another small but significant triumph.