The new butcher of Broadway Market

A brand new butcher

Broadway Market has seen a change or two over recent weeks. Henry Tidiman’s has finally closed after a year of seeing reduced hours.

Hopefully, Henry can now enjoy a long and relaxing retirement.

But just as I was lamenting the loss of a butcher on the street – the premises will, from what I’ve heard, be turned into another eatery of some variety – something unexpected happened.

Another butcher opened, on almost the opposite side of the street.

The shop has been through various incarnations since the street started to revive, but it had, many, many years ago, been a butcher.

It’s quite possible that it had even been the shop that Henry’s father had run, giving us a rather pleasing sense of synchronicity.

Anyway, Hill & Szrok, master butcher, is now with us – and most welcome.

By day, it is a traditional butcher – very traditional, as the design reveals. Tom Richardson Hill is most certainly a butcher who combines a serious commitment to traditional butchery with an understanding of what a modern clientele in an area such as ours needs.

In the evening, an hour after closing, Alex Szrok takes over and operates it as a cookshop, taking a fresh look at that aspect of our culinary heritage.

There are a couple of important things worth noting. The shop will open to 6pm – pretty much essential these days for any new, independent food outlet that wants to catch people on their way home from work and offer a real alternative to supermarkets.

It helps to allow a Paris-style of shopping for food: being able to buy fresh, from independents, after work.

Since Broadway Market now has a fishmonger with a similar approach – Fin & Founder – and two organic greengrocers that open late (plus a range of very good Turkish general grocers) and La Bouche, which doesn’t close early, I can travel home and still shop for that evening’s meal.

The next thing to note is that Hill & Szrok is an organic butcher.

Forget the plastic

The area has changed – it doesn’t matter if some think that’s good and some think it’s bad – but it’s simply a fact that we’ve become the next stop on the eastwards-moving trendification of London’s East End.

That causes issues – not least in terms of the prices of housing in the area – but also in terms of prices on Broadway Market.

However, it’s also important to be realistic.

Broadway Market was all but dead little more than a decade ago.

The myriad shops that Henry described to me had, apart from his own, been consigned to history – in part because local people had decided that shopping at a big box Tesco was what they wanted.

Anything opening now has to ride the wave of the revival of interest in food.

However it’s characterised by some, that isn’t just ‘foodieism’, but reflects a number of trends – particularly among more middle-class people who can afford not to have to shop as cheaply as possible.

Lovely burgers

Last year’s horse meat farce is one such reason – people care increasingly about provenance for a very good reason. They’re also increasingly concerned about GM, about the use of antibiotics and hormones in their meat, about the sustainability of fish and about seasonality.

What’s happening on Broadway Market merely reflects that.

There is, as I’ve mentioned previously and touched on a few paragraphs ago, a question of money.

The UK has long seen households spend a lower percentage of their income on food than households on the Continent. And in the last few years, that gap has widened further.

While there are myriad issues with a wide cultural attitude of seeing food as fuel, and nursing a deep-seated suspicion of anyone who spends ‘too much’ time and money on it, it remains almost certainly the case that the recent further decline is down to stagnating and declining wages.

We know that incomes for everyone apart from those at the very top have fallen steadily for the last 30-odd years, while the cost of living has risen – not least in areas that are not even counted for the sake of inflation figures, such as housing and domestic fuel bills.

This is what I call a butcher

But since the 2008 crash – and even more so since 2010 – that decline has increased for many. The rise of foodbanks is an indicator of that.

And when many of our fellow citizens are having to make choices about whether to pay the gas bill or to cut back on what they spend on food, then this is not the best time to finger wag about how they should all eat better.

Mind, even with all the ‘added value’ at Hill & Szrok, it’s not as pricy as I expected.

But let’s go back to our new butcher: we’ve had a few things from there now – I admit to an almost giddy delight in being handed a package that is not bagged in plastic with a sticky red tie at the top, but wrapped carefully in proper paper, tied neatly and then handed to me in a simple paper bag.

When you walk in, there’s usually some serious butchery going on in the centre of the shop, often involving some huge pieces of meat – Tom also ages his own beef. This is the antithesis of the supermarket, with its pristinely-packed cuts sweating under plastic.

Beautiful pork

And Tom does not believe in all the nonsense about low fat being vital for continued good health either.

Oh my goodness – proper layers of creamy fat on meat, the like of which you suspected you’d never again see in a UK butcher.

A week ago, it was time for a piece of pork. I don’t often cook pork, because I’m terrified of that entire business of drying it out too much, but this was far too tempting.

It was a 2kg piece of boned, rolled leg – not done as a perfect tube, but, Tom explained to me, more like a bloomer in shape, because there are three types of muscle in that cut and, unless you butcher it the way he does, it will not cook evenly.

So, the oven was heated to its maximum and the meat brought out of the fridge to come to room temperature before having good salt rubbed into the scored skin.

It was given 20 minutes at the high temperature and then 20 minutes per 450g at 160˚C (fan), before being rested for 15 minutes.

Real gravy, reheating. Eat your heart out, Knorr

Gravy was made not from some pre-bought pot, but by first sweating shallot, carrot and celery, then adding dry cider and chopped apple, and simmering gently to reduce.

When the meat came out of the oven, the roasting dish was deglazed with that cidery mix, before having the fat separated off (my Lidl fat separator has proved a great bargain) and decanted into a small, copper pan, where it was reheated and then thickened carefully with beurre manié. Good enough to keep what was left over and reheat during the week.

Indeed, the pork did us a number of meals: how old-fashioned – buying a joint for the weekend and having plenty left for the days that follow.

And the pork itself was wonderful.

A wonderful leg of lamb

We’ve also had some of Tom’s burgers. Dense and lightly spiced, they produce actual blood when grilled – in other words, these are the real deal.

And a piece of boned, rolled lamb was excellent too.

This Easter weekend, being a traditionalist, it was back there for a leg of lamb. Longwood has had so little fat on its lamb in recent weeks I wanted to make sure I got some with a decent coat.

It was 2.1kg, so was started at 190˚C (fan) for half an hour, before being given a further 30 minutes per 450g. So three hours in total, give or take a minute or so, and followed with 15 minutes resting.

Served with English asparagus and the first Jersey Royals of the year – you know winter is really behind us when these appear – with a lovely jus from the meat juices, it was an absolute, melt-in-the-mouth joy.

Broadway Market has a new butcher – and it is most welcome. 

Forget a sacrificial (British) lamb at Easter

For more pics and info, follow @herdyshepherd1.

It seems that most everyone is feeling depressed at the unrelenting tramp tramp of winter, but if you think you have it bad, then spare a thought for the country’s hill farmers, for whom this latest snow is proving fatal to many new-born lambs.

There’s something particularly poignant about that as Easter approaches, given that the most traditional celebratory meal in many western countries is roast lamb.

That’s not just a matter of seasonality (the best lamb you could eat at this time of year would have been born last August), but it has a long religious tradition too.

In Christian terms, the use of ‘lamb of God’ to describe Jesus originates in John’s gospel, where it is credited to John the Baptist.

My school in Manchester, Fairfield High School for Girls, which was linked to the Moravians, had as its badge the lamb of God carrying a vexillum – a well-known motif and the seal of the Moravian church.

It goes far further back than Christianity, though: the paschal lamb, for instance, was one sacrificed and eaten at the Passover.

Although eating lamb at Easter seems a rather odd tradition in terms of Christianity: given that the lamb is a symbol of Christ, it’s a trifle cannibalistic, albeit not nearly as much so as transubstantiation.

Anyway, there have been calls on social media to support our farmers by making sure that any lamb we buy for Easter comes from the UK.

Actually, what would be far better would be to try to buy British throughout the year and not just as a sort of charitable act when headlines raise awareness.

British farming shouldn’t be a sort of charity case.

Agnus dei – lamb of God with vexillum.

There are a number of reasons why supporting our farmers would be positive.

To start with, we need to seriously consider sustainability in terms of the food chain – the first months of this year have surely proved to everyone just what a convoluted food chain means in reality, as the horsemeat scandal proved to have a large reach.

If we buy as locally as we can, we reduce that chain, and in doing that, we reduce the carbon footprint of our food too.

Better yet, if we can possibly buy from farmers’ markets and the like, we help to ensure that the producers get a decent rate for the product – not one that’s been squashed down as low as possible by a big company with the power to do so.

Nor are these the only points. We also need to think seriously about the UK’s food security. We produce a decreasing percentage of our own food, and that’s not good.

Some politicians appear to believe that this is not a problem – we can just fly food in from somewhere or other. So we get asparagus from Peru, which is pretty tasteless to start with – unsurprising, given the distance it has had to come: it’s a vegetable that needs to be eaten as soon as possible after harvesting to be at its best.

But setting aside the question of taste, the mass production of a non-indigenous crop for the foreign market is damaging Peru’s own water supplies, with wells that local communities rely on drying up.

And could anything really be as crazy as carnations grown for the European market – grown in Kenya?

They’re not even easy to grow in the south of Europe because of the vast amounts of water that they need – just think Jean de Florette.

There’s something that’s almost beyond screwed-up about that. After all, nobody needs carnations out of their natural season in this country or anywhere in Europe.

For anyone who thinks that such situations are good for developing world countries, no they’re not – as Joanna Blythman illustrates perfectly in Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets.

And indeed, an article from January by Blythman reveals similar problems with the ever-so-trendy quinoa.

Yet again, it’s a good reason for anyone who likes to think of themselves as a shopper with a conscience to shop as locally as possible and as seasonally as possible.

But back to food security – it has to be a matter of simple logic that we should be producing as much of our food as possible. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

And that means remembering who produces out food – and reconnecting with them.

Personally, I’m not planning on lamb this weekend – but whatever I do decide to cook, the fresh ingredients will be bought, on Saturday, from farmers and artisanal producers and small, independent suppliers.

And please, if you can, help to support our domestic farming and agriculture. You’ll get a far better product too.

Won't somebody think of the felines?

Easter – like many another festival in the UK – is frequently described these days as being ‘really just for the children’.

Which is quite intriguing given that torture, betrayal and death by crucifixion feature rather highly in the Christian Easter story.

Or if you have a more folksy, pagan-stylee idea of what this spring festival is about, then those will probably be rather more sensual ideas, and pretty much an invitation to behave like one of those rampant bunnies that populate popular Easter imagery.

Now obviously the Christian religion has had a large impact on the traditions and culture of the UK – and the rest of Europe. It would be plain daft to suggest otherwise.

But I do start wanting to growl a tad when people pretend that somehow it’s the only part of our history and heritage that has had any real impact and has any relevance today.

For starters, such people seem to have a remarkably poor comprehension of just when the country was declared Christian – and even an idea that it happened within some very brief period of time.

It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen in such a way that it acts as some sort of definitive end to primitive life and start of civilisation. And there was no such primitive ‘before’ – any more than there was an instantly ‘civilised’ after that can only be put down to a specific religion.

In many cases, it was a situation of the aristocracy converting – and then Christianity living alongside other religions for a number of years.

Some of what I have skated over in recent posts on the roots and traditions of Easter illustrates this: the pagan traditions being either borrowed by the church to encourage conversion or simply continued by the ordinary people – and in particular, those in rural communities.

And indeed, at perhaps the most simplistic level, one could say that everyone in the UK use days of the week that still carry names derived from non-Christian gods – which is far more than regularly attend Christian church services.

Don't get me wrong – believe what you want to believe, and I\ll defend your right to do so. Just don't try to make me believe the same thing – or try to have your beliefs foisted on me.

But setting all that aside, even if all such interpretations of Easter fail to give adults something to enjoy at Easter – won’t somebody think of the cats?

This was a very good weekend for our trio. It started on Thursday, when both The Other Half and I won raffle prizes at work. His was an Easter egg from Cadbury, with (at least) one of those sickly sweet crème eggs in it.

Mine was a plastic ‘suitcase’ of eight plastic eggs, made to look like chicks, with little plastic bags of strawberry jellybeans in each.

I don’t do jelly beans. But the plastic egg-chicks are proving hugely popular with The Kittens – and particularly Loki.

She spent much of yesterday evening batting one around the flat; occasionally having to inform one of us that it had got stuck in a corner or under some furniture and that an Easter egg hunt was not what she was after.

I never had envisaged a career as a toy retriever for cats.

But we were most fascinated when, somehow, she managed to pick it up in her mouth and carry it around: when she put it down, she made a specific noise that we’ve only heard before from Boudi, when she’s carrying her favourite toy around.

It seems as though there is a specific sound – a word – for use when carrying things.

Not that that was the only festive fun on the feline front.

The weekend’s gardening saw the arrival from Columbia Road of three small pots of catnip – or ‘drugs’, as cats know it.

It’s remarkable stuff – providing an upper when snorted and a downer when eaten.

Apparently. And for cats, that is.

Many years ago, when we still had ‘flower beds’, we brought some from the market to plant. Getting back home, we plonked our big market bags down, only for Mack to hurl himself straight into the bags holding the catnip plants.

Amazingly, they revived. And he didn’t do it every day, but intermittently, he’d throw himself into them and sniff and rub away, sending himself into a totally bonkers, zoned-out state.

Neither Boudi nor the kittens had seen catnip in its natural state, only having enjoyed it previously in its dried state, in toys. But it didn’t take long before they were all snuffling around the garden table onto which I’d emptied my bags.

Snuffling from below – and then jumping up for a closer inspection, followed by taking it in turns to pretend to be guarding the plants (that's Boudi in the picture above).

In Otto’s case, this meant taking surreptitious opportunities to rub her face against the leaves when she thought my back was turned.

Although it has to be said that the irritating thing was getting home this evening to find that Other Cats had been in the garden and pretty much wrecked the catnip, with two of the little plants now pulled up – doubtless in a frenzy of druggy delight. I have to rethink this. I have ideas, but I can't do anything until the weekend.

And much as I have little inclination to hurt Basil, Reggie or The UnNamed Mystery Cat, I also have no intention of providing their drugs for them. It's drugs for my girls or for no cats.

But setting that aside – you see? It really isn’t just a festival for children.

Easter starts here – but what does it mean?

Of course Easter has really been going on for almost a week, but in reaching Maundy Thursday – as we call ‘Holy Thursday’ in the UK – I found myself wondering just what traditions existed for the day.

Most scholars appear to agree that the English word ‘Maundy’ has come to us through a combination of Middle English and Old French, from the Latin mandatum.

This is the first word of the phrase “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos”.

You didn't think you were going to find yourself reading Latin here, did you?

Well, in case you can't translate it, it means: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you” and it's from John 13:34.

Now in the Bible, this was about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples and this has been ritualised by certain Christian denominations to see a priest or bishop wash the feet of 12 others during a mass.

On the other hand, some people believe the name of the day comes from the “maundsor baskets” or “maundy purses” of alms that the king of England distributed to certain poor at Whitehall before attending Mass on that day.

Of course, that explains why Brenda goes and hands out a bit of non-legal tender to some people at a church somewhere every Maundy Thursday. And did you know that the Maundy purses that HM gives away include a groat and a half groat?

Which won't help anyone much in these austere times.

Unrelated to such religious connotations is the good old fashioned wayzgoose.

Quite apart from being an absolutely fantabulous word, the wayzgoose started out as an entertainment given by a master printer for his workmen on or around St Bartholemew’s Day, which is 24 August.

That was partly because St Bart was the patron saint of leather workers and, therefore, book binders. It was also the end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight.

There is some speculation that the first wayzgoose bash was held in Mainz, Germany, at the Fust-Schöffer shop, after the first Gutenberg Bible had been printed – on 24 August, according to legend.

Later, wayzgoose came to refer to an annual dinner or outing for the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.

And in terms of the latter, it was often held on Maundy Thursday, since that was a day off because there would be no paper to print for the following day.

Back in the days I worked on a national newspaper, we regularly used to consider hiring a charabanc and going off on an extended pub crawl somewhere by way of marking a wayzgoose. But unfortunately, we never quite got around to it, and I don’t work in such an environment any longer.

But surely there’s some sort of Maundy food traditions?

Well, not really.

Some high-church Christians hold a form of seder – the traditional Jewish meal that starts the Passover – as this was what Jesus was doing at the Last Supper.

According to catholicculture.org, the centrepiece is a white, frosted cake that’s been moulded in the shape of a lamb.

You’ll also have the symbolic foods – matzos in memory of unleavened bread, some wine, bitter herbs, “greens” (parsley or watercress) with salt water to dip both these in, and haroses, a dish of apples, nuts, cinnamon and wine, which is chopped and mixed together to look like a mortar that the Hebrew slaves used.

You might also display the bone from a roasted leg of lamb – but you won’t have eaten any if you’re still strictly observing the Lenten fast. It symbolises the lamb the Israelites apparently sacrificed and ate on their departure from Egypt.

The bitter herbs is reflected in German culinary tradition, which sees either a chervil soup or a dish of eggs in green sauce – the sauce being made from a selection of herbs.

In fact, in Germany, Maunday Thursday is known as Gründonnerstag – ‘Green Thursday’, although the ‘grün’ bit might actually come from the word ‘greinen’, which means ‘to weep’.

But whatever the background, Germans often eat green-colored foods, such as the dishes mentioned above, on Gründonnerstag.

And that’s about it for Europe. Elisabeth Luard, in her European Festival Food doesn’t mention anything else, except an Hungarian paprika soup.

Indeed, for a festival that is preceeded by a month’s fasting, the main event seems pretty thin when it comes to big, set-piece meals to break that fast – apart from the lamb that I mentioned yesterday.

One of the few quirks to mention is that only us Brits apparently break the fast before Easter Sunday itself, with sweet, fruity hot cross buns being eaten before then.

So for the first evening of this short spring break, I don’t think there will be any food with a traditional meaning.

After the heatwave of last week, the temperature has dropped quite dramatically.

So tonight could well be something as warming and comforting as pie.

The sacrifice of the lamb

With Easter now only a couple of days away, it seems like I might actually have to do some proper planning for the festive fodder.

There are some aspects of this that are nice and easy. This afternoon, for instance, I nipped to St Pancras on the way home for the chocolate run.

Nestling under the platforms is a Neuhaus, a premier Belgian chocolate chain with a history going back to 1857. It is a wonderful experience. Not one you do every week - or even every month. But when you do, then even the selection of your chocolates is a wonderfully voluptuous experience.

But the big question is what to eat on Easter Sunday. Roasts are traditional throughout Europe – well, apart from anything else, you want to make a bit of a splash when ending Lent, don’t you?

And lamb is particularly popular. Of course, it’s available at this time of year, but it also works nicely from the Christian symbol point of view.

The Lamb of God, sacrificed for us all – a sacrificed lamb to mark the end of the difficult winter and the beginning of spring.

Like other festivals, the early Christian church purloined a lot of pagan and non-Christian religious pageantry and celebration for itself: good sense, of course – it made selling Christianity to the people as a whole far easier.

Indeed, the word ‘Easter’ comes from Ēostre or Ostara, who was Germanic goddess and also lent her name to Ēosturmōnaþ, which was, in essence, the Anglo-Saxon name for April and which, by Bede’s time, had become ‘Paschal month’.

The centuries since have seen considerable debates about Ēostre, but one train of thinking appears to link her with the Norse goddess of fertility – who gave her name to Friday – Freya (the Germanic version was Ing, which may be where the name Ingham originates – the ‘ham’ bit is ‘home’ – and is the name of one part of my own family).

Both, it seems, have had customs involving hares and rabbits linked to them by some scholars.

For instance, in Leicestershire, “the profits of the land called Harecrop Leys were applied to providing a meal which was thrown on the ground at the ‘Hare-pie Bank’, according to 19th-century scholar Charles Isaac Elton, who went on to suggest that this was a link to the worship of Ēostre.

And in his work of the same period, Charles J Billson lists a number of incidents involving hares around the Easter period in northern Europe.

According to Joseph Bosworth and T Northcote Toller, in their An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898), Ēostre was “the goddess of the rising sun, whose festivities were in April. Hence used by Teutonic Christians for the rising of the sun of righteousness, the feast of the resurrection”.

Of course those great icons of the festival, hares and bunny rabbits, are just there for cuteness – and have nothing whatsoever to do with celebrating the arrival of spring and, in its sidecar, a certain rising of the sap.

But such a thought doesn't really tie in with our rather infantilised incarnation of Easter. We have forgotten, as adults, how to celebrate - beyond a spot of booze - and have delegated most of the pleasure to the children. Christmas, for instance, is 'for children,' we're so often told. Of course, that helps to promote all these festivals as spending opportunities.

Yet the older and uglier and (hopefully) wiser I get, the more I have a sense of the seasons and of the need to celebrate the rise and fall of each year - even if without any specific religious content.

Gradually, I am reconnecting with the Earth - and please, that does not mean I have become or am becoming a hippy or a New Age convert. But there is a real joy I'm discovering to that sense of the cycle of the seasons.

However, let’s get back to the big question. I want to have roast lamb – I love roast lamb. Yes, I love the little springy-wingy fluffy things in the fields too, but most of them wouldn’t even be born were it not that we also love the taste of their roasted flesh after a few months of that gamboling malarky.

With mint sauce.

Or lemon.

Mouths watering yet?

But there is just a slight question mark: in my dentally-challenged state, can I eat roast meat?

Should I, perhaps, make minted lamb meatballs instead? Or even a kleftiko?

The answer may be near – but for that, my loyal readers, you’ll have to wait a day or two to find out!