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.

SETTLE DOWN DEER

 I was prepared to be a little disappointed by St John, Marylebone, not because I thought it would be bad but because the inamorata and I love the other two branches – Smithfield, and Bread and Wine - so much.  

This and the vast majority of the other pics by Caroline Gannon

Also the menu didn’t include bone marrow, which is the single thing I like best about the other St Johns.  But we had an American friend over from California and he said he wanted to go to St John, any St John, and since you apparently have to book months in advance for the other two, off we went to Marylebone.

 

Well, I was a fool even to have contemplated disappointment.  Admittedly the appearance of the martini (above) didn’t reassure completely.  How on earth do you make a martini look as cloudy as that? Though it tasted absolutely fine.

 

But then the food arrived and it was as good as anybody could wish.  The so-called Rarebit was a revelation.  I expected it to look this this:

but in fact it was a Deep Fried Rarebit, so it looked like this:

which if I hadn’t known better I might have thought was a rissole or even a croquette.

 

There were Crispy Sweetbreads with Aioli which were top notch:

But star of the show was the Roe Deer with Celeriac.  I’m not sure exactly what they did with the venison, slow-cooked it in a fine broth I expect, but the result was fantastic.

     Now, I’m not sure I could tell a plate of roe deer from any other kind of deer but some apparently can.  I remember a terrific piece by AA Gill in which a waiter tells him the special is venison. 

“What kind of venison?”  

“It’s the fillet sir.”

“No, where does it come from?”

“From our specialist supplier.”

And so on for some time, until in the end, having eaten the meal, Gill concludes, “Anyway, the deer was roe and it was a buck … I could tell.  It had that odd tang buck gets when it’s rutting.  It’s some sort of secretion.”   No competing with that.

 

And to round it off there was an Eccles Cake with Lancashire Cheese, for the inamorata and I:

and our American friend had a Bread And Butter Pudding, seen here in a mise en abyme:

SOME THINGS I PUT IN MY MOUTH - 2023 EDITION

AWAY FROM HOME:

 

A Negroni at Iberica, Victoria.

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A sausage roll at Delice, Lloyd Park – beef sausage for some (in fact I suppose fairly obvious) reason. 

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A pasty on an appealing plate, at the caff at the East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden.

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Toasted sandwiches served on slate at the Copr Bar, Swansea, though I actually forget what was in them:

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Zestily presented sausage bap and chips at the Sun, Dedham:

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It’s a wrap at the Welcome Institute.

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Anchovies, at the Orford Saloon in Walthamstow.

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Crispy squid, chips and salad, at the Rising Sun, Twickenham, eaten in the unexpected company of pre-game rugby fans who were consuming vast quantities of pizza.

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Seared Ahi tuna with ‘resort grown avocado pickled shallots, shaved Fresno pepper, gochujang bbq drizzle,’ at Edna’s Eaterie, Tucson Botanic Gardens. No, I’d never heard of gochujang either but it’s a kind of chili paste apparently.

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Spoiled for choice at the caff at the Horniman Museum.

Photo by Caroline Gannon, as are quite a lot of the others.

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AND AT HOME

In fact it’s a venison fillet but I know it looks like a sausage:

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Cheese straws, made by following (not very closely) a recipe for ‘Dishoon’s cheese and masala sticks’ 

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Devilled kidneys – my butcher is a good butcher but you have to ask him to order in kidneys specially:

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Another steak tartare in a universe of steak tartares:

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Taco night – not so much deconstructed as self-destructed:

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White Lake Cheese Somerset Dairy Tor, from Teddington Cheese in Richmond.

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Comparatively sophisticated - smoked mackerel. asparagus, Hollandaise sauce:

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Cheese on toast and beans (less sophisticated)

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A haggis pie with what looks like a fox’s face, though it was supposed to be a heart:

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Shepherd’s pie, post-Xmas – made with leftover duck (I read that Giles Coren was having the same.)

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FUN WITH MEAT - ENGLISH STYLE

What I ate on my travels.

Some barbecued venison in Essex:

Some barbecued lamb in Gloucestershire:

A might pile of miscellaneous meats at the Anatolia restaurant in Hackney:

And a pile of kebab meat from a place in West Hampstead called, I kid you not, Lezziz Express, which turns out not to be an outpost of lesbian separatism, but a halal joint.  The yoghurt sauce was hiding a multitude of sins.  And I was left thinking I should have ordered the chips and cheese: ah well, there'll be another time.

THE PHEASANT OUTLOOK

My old university college sometimes served pheasant stew, or I suppose casserole, for dinner.  If this suggests we undergraduates were a sophisticated and libertine crew, it’s worth saying that the number of complaints (none of them from me) was quite astronomical.  Many of them were about the presence of shot in the flesh.  This caused plenty of derision among the dons, with the suggestion that the college just wasn’t getting the caliber of students it once had.

When I lived in Suffolk, long after I’d left Cambridge, pheasants used to roam in my garden, but I didn’t shoot of them.  I bought most of my meat at a butcher in Halesworth High Street, CA Palmer and Son, been there since 1947.

They had rabbits and partridge and pigeon too, but pheasant was my go-to game. I cut my pheasant into portions, fried it in flour and cooked it with bacon, apple, onions, carrots, a bit of brandy, red wine and a lot of herbs.  It was pretty good (though it wasn’t as dark or as rich as the version from my college), and I’ve been trying hard to remember whether I ever found any shot in it. 

I just looked up the Palmers website and they say their game is “locally grown by our trusted local suppliers,” and that all their meat, poultry and game is “home killed.”  Well I suppose if some local farmer shoots a pheasant in his own field that’s pretty much the definition of home killed, but it all sounds to me as though the wording is deliberately unclear.

When I started living in America I assumed there’d be pheasant, and indeed every kind of game, available everywhere: venison, possum, bear why not?  So many Americans have guns, so many Americans hunt (certainly compared with the English) surely game meat would find its way into every local butcher.

Leaving aside the problems of finding a local butcher in the States, it seems that the Food and Drug Administration is fiercely against the buying and selling of game meat unless it’s been farmed.  This is done in the name of both public health and conservation.  Remember the buffalo. The picture below is "Taking the Hump Rib" by Alfred Jacob Miller.

On the other hand if you shoot something yourself it seems you’re free to eat it to your heart’s content, and as far as I can tell, it’s perfectly legal to give meat to friends, or even complete strangers.  When I lived in upstate New York, a neighbor once showed up on the doorstep with a bloody bag of venison freshly cut (you couldn’t exactly say “butchered”) from a deer he’d just shot.  It made half a dozen pretty good meals.  These days I live in suburban Los Angeles, and I just don’t count enough mountain men among my acquaintances.

Anyway you can imagine my delight when someone, knowing my love of game and of sandwiches, sent me this wonderful ad from a World War Two magazine, celebrating the American Red Cross Canteen, based in the railway station at Aberdeen, Milwaukee.  It turns out that more than half a million service men and women ate pheasant sandwiches as they traveled through Aberdeen.  Pheasants were "donated" by locals,  sometimes a thousand at a pop.

We even have the recipe: cooked, chopped pheasant (the chopping was very important – it was never to be ground), chopped hard boiled eggs, chopped carrots, grated
 onion, chopped celery, sweet pickle relish, salt and pepper,  mayonnaise or salad dressing. 

I have to say that the sandwich in that soldier’s hand looks as though it really doesn’t have very much filling.  But hey, there was a war on.  Holy smokes indeed.