The heart of the matter

As the end of February rises into view, it seems to be the end of a funny old period; busy and distracting.

There’s been little of inspiration on the food front to report – things that I’m working on, but you’ll have to wait until I’ve got a couple of things actually sorted out before they're worth writing about.

However, last weekend I did take the opportunity afforded by The Other Half’s trip to Perpignan for the Rugby League to try a foodstuff that, to the best of my knowledge, I’d never eaten before – let alone cooked.

The item in question was heart – in this case, lamb’s heart. A single one was enough for me.

Surprised first of all to find that Jane Grisgon’s highly-regarded English Food didn’t even mention heart, I turned my attention to the wonders of the internet.

Various suggestions came up for stuffing heart, but I decided against that.

The recipe that struck me as the perfect way to start was a Canterbury casserole.

The first task was prepping the meat. I’d read that you have to ensure that any white tubes are removed. Well, this didn’t prove difficult – primarily as there seemed very little to remove.

The heart was then opened out and cut into strips about the width of a finger, which were then cut in half lengthways.

These pieces were dredged in seasoned flour and browned carefully in melted lard, before a peeled and chopped carrot, a peeled and sliced onion and two chopped sticks of celery were added and stirred around a bit.

A little more flour, a little more stirring, and then some stock was added. I used beef stock, which I’d defrosted overnight. And because I’d been able to get a tiny bit, I also added a piece of marrowbone.

It’s then brought gently to the boil, lidded and, with the heat turned right back down, cooked for an hour and a half, when parsley dumplings are placed on top, the lid is replaced and it's left for a further half an hour.

This was pretty good. But there are things that I’d do differently.

First, I’d get a bit Frenchified and add a little red wine after cooking the flour through – it’s the best way to deglaze anyway, but it does add layer of flavour to the liquid.

In his book Eating for England, Nigel Slater comments pithily on the nature of the generic English stew, and one of the things he notes is an absence of booze.

Now given that England has no history of wine production, it's hardly surprising that there's little wine in our classic, one-pot dishes, but there are alternatives in terms of beer and cider.

Yet I’ve noticed over the course of recent years, as I've started exploring such dishes, that most recipes that suggest using beer – particularly stout – don’t give enough cooking time for the liquid to become rich and sweet: it usually leaves a slightly bitter taste that, in the context of a meat dish, isn’t what you want.

The reason, I'm beginning to understand, is simple: we have lost the art – or at least the understanding – of slow cooking. Recipes now for anything more than an hour and a half are regarded as a long cook. It’s as though writers are convinced that, if they suggest something of double that (never mind longer), the modern English cook will be horrified and simply refuse to countenance such wanton times.

The Canterbury casserole benefits from the sweetening quality of the heart. Like kidneys in a Lancashire hotpot or a turbigo, they impart a richness to the dish. The marrowbone that I added also helped, while the stock was a proper one. But wine would have added something worthwhile, methinks.

The dumplings give a lovely soft, soothing and deeply comforting touch to the finished dish.

But the second thing I’d change from the recipe would be to reduce the initial cooking time from 90 minutes to a straight hour.

Now I’d possibly parboil the carrots briefly beforehand, but the meat really didn't need two full hours cooking.

But heart is something that I’d happily eat again – even if my first experience of holding and preparing this organ were far more tinged with the knowledge of exactly what it was and the job that it had done until a short while before, than I ever feel when coring kidneys.

Such squeamish inclinations are daft though: as a happy omnivore, a nose-to-tail approach is an importantly ethical one.

And even leaving such philosophical considerations aside, there is so much variety – and so many more culinary pleasures to meat than just a prime cut.

Cooking the great British banger – and refs getting it wrong again

After British Food Fortnight, British Cheese Week and Chocolate Week comes British Sausage Week – for which piece of information I have the excellent Matthew Fort to thank.

And is there anything much more British than a good banger?

Well no – but that’s why it can do with a week to boost it: the sausage has been so badly served by mass production, not least as that process adds water to the finished product.

Now at this point, I have a confession to make. Until recently – embarrassingly recently – I just refused to budge from the mass-produced sausage you’d find in any corner shop or supermarket.

Peppa Pig pink and with as little texture as possible – inside or out – this was what a sausage was for me. I just didn’t ‘get’ the better ones.

I don’t really have any strong memories of sausages from childhood. There was my mother’s version of the French dish, sausage and kidney Turbigo – which I now cook, a tad more authentically (in other words, it has real onions) and in my teens, when we visited her mothering St Helens, we’d stop at a local butcher on the way to pick up some tomato sausages for lunch.

We must have had sausages – because I know that the crabapple jelly she’d make from fruit gathered at my grandmother’s was perfect with sausages. Yet I cannot recollect the sausages themselves.

I do remember sausages at college: they would lie there in the morning on the tray in the campus canteen, under light and always rather worryingly suggestive of a row of uncut penises. Or perhaps that was simply the effects of student living on my innocent mind.

For a little added context, this was in the years just following the appearance on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life of the Yorkshire Terrier that could ‘say’ sausages. Titter ye not, Missus!

The thing with sausages, though, is that they're not a quick cook. To get the best out of proper butcher's sausages, you need time.

After The Other Half picked up a pack of venison sausages last weekend, this has proved a big week on the sausage front.

I wasn't completely satisfied with the results of those (the pack did two meals): tasty, but a bit dry. The difficulty, of course, is that lack fat.

On Saturday morning, before a manic day, I sat in bed with a cup of coffeee and browsed various sources for answers.

Delia seems to concentrate on recipes that include sausages, as opposed to basic information about how best to cook them.

I was surprised to discover that as eminent a source as Jane Grigson recommends pricking them before cooking – surely that means losing lots of the juices and fat? Although I seem to remember that my mother pricked them – but then again, I seem to remember that she grilled them. Perhaps we had already moved into a culture of removing fat as much as possible?

But sure enough, Nigel Slater came to the rescue. In Real Cooking, he details the basic method. It's not difficult.

Pop a little fat in a pan – dripping or lard or some oil, but not butter because that would burn, and moist definitely not marg. Pop the sausages in (not pricked!), pop the lid on, turn the heat right down and cook for around 30-40 minutes, turning two or three times.

In other words, you're partially steaming the sausage, but in doing that, also retaining moisture. And because it's a low heat, you don't risk the skins bursting.

The following hours were busy. The Other Half came up to Broadway Market for what was probably my earliest shop there, then we took the bus to Marylebone Station and the train to Wembley to watch the Rugby League double header: Wales v New Zealand, followed by England v Australia.

Suffice it to say that the latter provided some real fireworks – and the referee (who'd only officiated his first professional game earlier this year) dropped a number of clangers. I'm not saying that England would have actually won, but the scoreline could have been rather different from the 20-36 that was on the scoreboard at the end of the 80 minutes.

But then again, Australian coaches could make Alex Ferguson look tame, given their constant whinging and whining about officials and rules. They whinge in advance – just to make sure the officials know how they want the game run.

Still, it's all rather cathartic – and when we got home, I was able to watch the second half of QPR-Manchester City. Unfortunately, we'd booked our Wembley tickets before the football fixture list revealed that the Blues were actually going to be in London on the same day.

It was deeply annoying – but at least we won, albeit after a greater struggle than any other match this term so far.

We're breaking records – and I'm still convinced somebody's going to wake me up any time now, and we'll be in a relegation struggle! In this case, I was convinced that former players Shaun Wright Phillips and Joey Barton were going to come back to haunt us (even though Halloween's been and gone). And indeed, the latter had a strong game – including a hardly unexpected hack at David Silva's legs. Doubtless he tweeted philosophically about it later.

But the difference is right there: Silva's now a City star – not Barton. I still say it was the best bit of football business ever done getting anyone to pay money – let alone nearly £6m – for someone with such a reputation as a thug, on and off the pitch.

Anyway, I was starving but the time we got home. With the rush earlier in the day, I'd had to resort to stadium food. Overpriced and really not very thrilling at all. Chips weren't too bad, but the fried chicken was dry. And why, oh why can't you buy a 'meal' without a vast drink with it?

I found myself missing the pies at Eastlands.

A red onion was peeled and sliced, while a little lard melted in a pan. Then it was left to cook away gently. Shortly afterwards, the sausages – plain butcher's pork – went into another pan, also with a little lard, before being lidded and left on low.

Then it was back to the football with a welcome cup of tea.

I peeled the remainder of some spuds from a bag from the supermarket (yes, I do occasionally shop in supermarkets in midweek) and popped them on to boil. The intention was to put them through the ricer, but the varied sizes from the end of the bag meant that some cooked quicker than others and I was left with a bit of a crumbled mess. It took some draining, so I simply left it as crushed potatoes, which worked perfectly well.

And to finish, a tin of mushy peas – this was becoming a bit of a northern day.

To serve, some of the juices from the sausages dressed the potato, while I opted for a spoon of redcurrant jelly on the side.

The sausages were delightful and the onion was soft and sweet – just starting to crisp a little: as I like it best.

It might have been the end of British Sausage Week, but my sausage education will continue. Watch this space for a first experiment making my own!

A little bit of pork

Late on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the oven having finally condescended to hit the proper temperature – and stay there – a piece of pork was gently laid on the rack of the roasting tray, scored fat thoroughly seasoned, and placed into 220˚C of heat.

It had been bought the previous day on Broadway Market as a rolled, boned joint. But since this was English Food à la Jane Grigson’s book, I’d cut the string that bound it, stretched it out and seasoned it all over – paying particular attention to the boned side. Then it was covered in foil on a plate and popped back into the fridge.

The meat got 20 minutes at that temperature, before it was lowered to 160˚C (or the fan oven equivalent). At just over a kilo in weight, it was due to have another hour cooking.

In the event, after spearing the joint with a skewer after that hour, and finding the juices running pink, I gave it another 15 minutes.

But for that hour, it was accompanied by two Cox apples, skin scored near the top to prevent them from bursting.

In the meantime, a peeled, quartered parsnip was also roasting away in some lard, on the basis (a bit of a guess, this) that since the temperature was on the low side, it would need longer.

Small potatoes had been peeled carefully, then boiled for 20 minutes (they’re so solid, they don’t fall apart), and were then tipped into a small gratin dish with some melted lard and roasted in an oven that had been whacked back to really hot after the meat (and apples) had been taken out to rest.

I had wondered about adding Yorkshire pudding, after The Other Half pointed out that there really is nothing that says it can only be served with beef. But I decided that the temperatures worked against me on that count – 20 minutes resting time was enough to finish the potatoes decently, but wouldn’t be enough for a pud.

In that last stage, sliced leek was sautéed and then steamed, while gravy was made in the roasting dish, with the fat poured away and flour added to the meat residues, before a brief deglaze with white wine and then a little stock.

The parsnip was overdone – my guesswork really hadn’t worked – but that was the only downside. The pork – although the rind hadn’t crackled – was delicious and moist. The leek was a perfect – if clichéd – compliment, and the roasted apples were a really pleasant change from the more usual sauce.

If I’d thought more and planned better, I’d have got some cider in for the gravy. But there you go.

That’s probably the first time I’ve done a roast dinner on successive Sundays – and by the end of it, I was dripping with sweat! This cooking malarkey probably makes you lose weight!

Let's have a bit of a harvest festival

Since we’re in the midst of British Food Fortnight, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do some serious British cooking – and also to consider just what 'British food' means in the 21st century.

Since I did roast beef just over a week ago – and what could be more British than that? – a portion of last Friday evening was given over to the question of what to cook this time around.

It was a football Saturday – and an early start – so there could be no sitting up with a coffee in the morning. The list had to be ready in advance for The Other Half to head to Broadway Market.

Jane Grigson’s English Food is, on such occasions, a fascinating read, with dishes from around the country – many of which you’ve never heard of in the first place and a substantial number of which have probably been all but forgotten.

You see the regional ingredients reflected in recipe after recipe – lamb in Cumbria, for instance, where sheep graze the hills from the rolling Lake District to the bleakness of the utterly inappropriately named Eden Valley.

British Food Fortnight was started, 10 years ago, by two vicars, who wanted to revive the tradition of the harvest festival. I've always relished the ripeness of the season, its fecundity, its sensuality and voluptuousness – and it was one of the parts of the religious year that most appealed too when I was growing up.

The fortnight itself, though, has changed since those early days and come to represent something more, but very much with a sense of the celebration of what we produce on these islands.

It was no surprise, though, to see food writer Matthew Fort tweet that supermarkets weren't supporting it or to read, in a column by Oliver Thring, that a Morrison's, sitting right next door to the orchards of Kent, is selling Chinese apples – although one suspects that even if they’d been selling apples from the garden of England, the fruit would probably have been halfway around the UK and back, such is the crackpottery of the centralised supermarket distribution system.

Living in urban areas, it’s all too easy to forget just what an agricultural heritage we have. The journey north by train is always an enjoyable reminder.

The sky above was as pale blue as my shirt on a beautiful morning. At times, the scenery could have been an almost chocolate box vision of England in the early autumn. Sheep and cattle rested in fields. Green hills rolled gently and an increasing number of the trees were wearing the signs of seasonal change.

Narrow boats dotted the landscape as the canals wound their way between the industrial conurbations, with ribbons of smoke drifting upward from slender chimneys.

There were signs of ploughing: bare soil marked with the patterns of agricultural machinery; stubble elsewhere, spiky in the morning light, like an unshaved chin. The occasional small, square church squatted amid neatly arranged gravestones.

Not that this is the only England visible from the train: there’s the manicured golf course that sits incongruously alongside a vast, belching power station, and cloned, modern rabbit-hutch homes within sight of the tracks too. Depending on the route, there is industrial dereliction: buildings with jagged, broken windows like screaming mouths, as forgotten as the productivity they once housed.

Slag heaps are slowly returning to nature. And at Watford, the journey passes by one of England’s new cathedrals, a vast shopping mall in which to worship the buying of things (except food, usually).

So what about the food?

Well, however many of the dishes from Mrs Grigson’s book might have gone out of fashion, one of the staples of British food remains abidingly popular – the banger.

Not, of course, that a love of sausages is limited to these shores. But unlike our Germanic cousins, for instance, we have managed to reduce the banger to a shadow of what it can be.

Things have improved a little since reluctant producers were dragged kicking and screaming into revealing on packets just what percentage of proper meat was in a sausage – as opposed to the delightfully euphemistic ‘meat derivatives’, which now have to be labeled as such.

But that’s not solved the whole problem.

Industrially made sausages are difficult to brown properly because the sheer scale of the production process means that the machines that make them have to be constantly cooled by water, which finds its way into the finished product along with the listed ingredients.

And that’s another big question – what’s in your mass-produced sausage?

Checking Ocado’s website, even the ingredients list for Daylesford’s ‘organic pork chipolatas’, we find: “Antioxidant: Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid”, plus sugar and sunflower oil.

Then there’s the matter of the right balance of quality meat to fat: yes, you need proper fat and no, sunflower oil does not count.

So there’s more than one reason for buying the best butcher's sausages you can find.

Sausages can be magnificent – but all too often we seem to forget this and treat them as ‘fast food’ in the worst sense of the word; as not being seriously good food that’s worth investing a little time and care in.

So when you’re ready to cook, don’t prick them – you’ll actually lose all those valuable juices that keep the sausage moist.

Heat some fat – lard is brilliant, dripping would be perfect for beef sausages – in a heavy pan and then cook on gently on a low heat, checking frequently. This helps to prevent the skins bursting.

It can easily take 30 minutes, so don’t expect to rush.

There were pork and leek sausages in the fridge when I got back from the football – and I cooked them as described, in the Le Crueset casserole, with a sliced red onion.

On the side – simple boiled spuds and carrot, with good butter. Nothing complicated – but it really doesn’t have to be.

I did, though, have a bit of a revelation the other week, realising that potatoes bought from the organic stall on Broadway Market actually had a different, discernible taste. So too did some new potatoes from the not-quite-organic stall that I’d tried a few days before.

It’s a surprise, because – like so many other people, I suspect – I’ve accepted, over many years, a sense of potato being potato being potato and, generally speaking, just padding. Well, with the exception of Jersey Royals. But I’d certainly never been so conscious of a particular flavour in a maincrop spud.

So the next time I’m on the market, I’ll have to check just what they are.

And in the meantime, I'll contemplate further how to celebrate the joys of the British harvest season.

It's not something to trifle with

It was no trifling matter to whip up dessert on a day of what was really rather old school on the eating front.

We probably all imagine that a trifle is a quick and easy thing to knock up, because let’s face it, most of what we get to eat under such a name is hardly great.

Indeed, if one were suffering a touch of pedantitis, then the mere name ‘trifle’ could be taken to suggest that time and effort is a contradiction in terms when it comes to this famous (infamous?) British pud.

But having once mentioned it to The Other Half, and having my suggestion met with enthusiasm, it dawned that I’d better work out exactly what it was that I had airily declared could be on the menu for New Year's Day.

I picked Jane Grigson’s English Food off the shelf as an obvious place to start. Sure enough, there was a recipe, together with a rant about the worst sort of trifles – 'mean travesties' containing “poor sherry” and “powdered custards” … you get the drift. A woman after my own heart. Although in the interests of chronological accuracy, it's me that's the woman after her heart.

Now trifles are another of those dishes – like Lancashire hot pot or cassoulet – where there are as many different versions as there are people who make it.

There are important questions to be asked about this multi-layered confection:

• will it have jelly;

• will it have booze;

• what sort of booze;

• what sort of fruit and in what form;

• what sort of base?

I vaguely remember my mother making trifle occasionally. I don’t recall any booze, but there was jelly – and I strongly suspect that the custard was from a packet. Or rather, from a tin of Bird’s custard. And the base would be those sponge fingers that, if I'm reading correctly, are what Mrs Grigson refers to as "boudoir biscuits", noting that: "The French have always been more enterprising with boudoir biscuit cakes than we have." Bedroom biscuits? Excuse me while I shut the door before the double entendres gallop in.

But then things got slightly more complicated. It emerged that The Other Half does not believe in boozy trifles – he has even sneakily tried to suggest that booze is to a genuine trifle as inauthentic as booze is to a genuine tiramisu.

I’m having none of that. If I'm going to all this trouble, there's going to be alcohol involved.

The best option seemed to be to make two.

Mrs Grigson’s recipe suggested macaroons for the base. Now, I’ve got a crush on these delightful little things at present and a recipe in Mousieur Roux’s Eggs book has been tempting me. However, that is for raspberry-flavoured delights and as such, isn’t in season.

So when I got into baking mode yesterday afternoon, I added vanilla seeds to the mix instead of dried and powdered raspberry.

Unfortunately, the mixture turned out to be rather more liquid than it should have been (perhaps, in reducing the overall amounts, I’d still added too much egg white – it’s not easy to divide an egg in two).

It started dripping straight through the icing bag as I filled that, and then sort of merged together on the lined baking tray to form a large, irregular splodge.

Fortunately, when you’re planning to use the end result to line the base of a trifle, this doesn’t actually matter too much.

I baked it anyway, let it cool and stashed it away until today, when it was scraped off the baking paper and deposited into large glasses. One portion then had orange juice added to soak the macaroon mixture. The other had Fino sherry.

And so to the custard. Using Mrs Grigson again, I took a whole egg and one yolk and beat that into some flour (she didn’t say what sort, so I plumped for plain), heated single cream, poured that over the egg mixture, poured it all back into the pan and then stirred away in the expectation of a stiffening custard. One was then supposed to add caster sugar to taste.

Impudently, it misbehaved and turned into something more closely resembling lightly scrambled eggs.

I tried again, using cornflour instead of plain flour and taking even more care than before. The outcome was the same.

I walked around the corner and bought more cream. And turned to the goddess of culinary reliability, Delia.

Now Delia’s trifle isn’t to my taste – I am absolutely not including bananas, for instance.

But her custard looked far more sensible, with three yolks, cornflour and 30g of sugar all beaten together and then heated double cream added to that.

It worked. And was duly deposited as carefully as possible into the glasses and allowed to cool.

Next stage – the easiest one: a layer of raspberry jam (good French stuff). Then, for the topping, back to Mrs Grigson, who recommends using Elizabeth David’s ‘everlasting syllabub’.

Now I have no idea whether this syllabub really is ‘everlasting’ and, to be frank, I had no desire for it to everlast. All it had to do was wait around patiently for a few hours before I could dip a spoon into it.

So, sugar, cream and booze. What’s not to like? Well, if you’re The Other Half, the booze bit, obviously. So more orange juice and some grated zest were whipped into cream and sugar and went on top of his trifle. Mine, whipped separately, involved more Fino.

This is fiddlier than making a crème brûlée, for goodness sake! But at last the trifles were ready.

For a first course on this day of old school eating, I’d planned belly pork. I'd been in luck at Borough Market yesterday, getting my hands on one of the last pieces available.

Scored and with salt rubbed into the skin, I peeled some garlic, pulled the leaves off some sage and rosemary, grated some zest from a lemon, added the juice and some olive oil, and pulsed the whole lot together, before spreading it over the meat and then placing that on a rack in my roasting tray, with a little water below.

It went in at 180˚ (my fan oven) for 30 minutes (should have been 20, but no recipe ever accounts for my oven), after which the temperature was reduced to 150˚ and it was left for a further two hours, with occasional checks primarily to go ‘Oooo’ and ‘Ahhh’ and ‘Ummm’.

For the side, there were mashed potatoes and peas. Suitably old school.

Belly pork is one of those dishes that is a slow cook. Somehow, though, I feel that it should be slower than almost every recipe I could find.

Okay, not the nine hours recommended by Heston Blumenthal on the Waitrose website, but more than two and a half hours. I finally found a couple of recipes this afternoon for four hours, but by that time, it was too late for today – I didn’t want to delay eating that much.

I don't know why, but the crackling refused to crackle – perhaps it really does need at least another two hours. I suspect that most recipes have worked it out to around two to two and half hours because, by our modern standards, that's very slow cooking.

Still, it was very tasty – and the trifles afterwards were equally tasty.

But I'll give you all a guess which one Otto decided she should be allowed a taste of. And no, it wasn't the one with orange juice and zest involved.