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!

Let's hear it for the 'shrooms

Last week’s trip to Lina Stores in Soho produced, amongst other things, a bag of dried porcini, the like of which I have never previously known.

Dried mushrooms have become a store cupboard staple in recent years, but none that I have ever purchased in a supermarket have come close to the aroma of these.

I have an idea in my mind of mushrooms as autumnal food, but with the knowledge of having such superior ingredients around in mind, I decided that Tuesday should be a risotto night.

But the aim was to make this mushroom risotto just a little bit special.

So, stock was defrosted as usual and then warmed up with a handful of the new porcini.

Finely chopped shallot, celery and garlic were softened in olive oil, to be joined by Arborio rice.

A glug of white wine followed. Once that was absorbed, the process of adding the now-hot stock, ladle by ladle, began.

In the meantime, organic chestnut mushrooms were sweated down in a tiny amount of olive oil. White wine and lemon juice were added – just a little.

Everything was tasted and seasoned where necessary.

When the rice had absorbed the maximum stock (along with the rehydrated porcini by this time), the chestnut mushrooms were strained and added.

And then the denouement: I’d found a small roll of white truffle butter in the fridge that I’d bought before Easter and then forgotten. So instead of either the classic butter and Parmesan or my own usual crème fraïche, I took the pan off the heat and stirred some through.

And that was not bad at all.

I have, as it happens, just recently got a book on this glorious rice dish – Risotto! Risotto! by Valentina Harris. It’s not so much a question of needing the basics as being curious about all the differently flavoured risottos that she includes recipes for.

That was the result of a browse around Amazon leading me to this out-of-print books, which was available from a private seller.

In the meantime, on the basis of searches and purchases, Amazon seems to have decided that my core interests in terms of reading matter are currently politics/economics, Manchester City, food and Italy.

In terms of the latter, it seems that an interest in Italian food also translates into wanting to read umpteen books about the Cosa Nostra. I don’t.

Still, Amazon more than has its uses. It could be argued that this is a situation where ‘economies of scale’ works rather nicely – and certainly in a way that counters most chain booksellers these days.

Since Amazon can allow the reader to access hundreds of thousands of titles, rather than the more limited numbers in a bookshop – a number that is further limited by most chain bookshops (and other book retailers, such as supermarkets) only opting for the most obvious big sellers – you can end up finding things that you had no idea existed.

I don’t actually like the Amazon search engine much, because you seem to get so many results on an search, but the recommendation programme does produce some nice things.

The latest such discovery is a pair of books by Guardian food writer Matthew Fort, about his travels around Italy and Sicily (the latter a book on its own) on a Vespa. They apparently combine travel, food and history.

Now Fort is not some 20-something feeling all rebellious on his trendy wheels, so I expect something a bit different. I’m looking forward to them.

Getting pie eyed about detail

In his first Food for Fort answers to foodie questions column of the new year, Guardian columnist Matthew Fort was presented with the following query by a reader: “I make lots of stews like boeuf bourguignon, but never sear the meat first; I just add it to the pot. Is it really necessary to sear the meat?”

“Necessary, as in will the dish be an utter failure if you don’t?" he began in response.

“Probably not. Necessary, as in will the searing add another layer of flavour? Yes. The searing causes caramelisation, which adds sweetness and fruitiness and the Maillard reaction. I checked the recipe in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, as close to a divine text as you can get, which adds the flour after browning the meat. I think boeuf bourguignon deserves that attention to detail.”

That is precisely why reading stuff about food is worthwhile. It’s those technical things that, otherwise, you don’t know.

Personally, I’d have seared meat if a recipe calls for it – and boeuf bourguignon is certainly not on the limited list of dishes that I can whip up with reference to the written word.

But I would have done so without really comprehending what the process was intended to achieve. Caramelisation is easy enough to understand, but as for “the Maillard reaction”, I had to check out Wikipedia for an explanation.

Yet once you know that, even if you can’t quite get your head around the actual chemistry, it gives you a reason for the searing – and that helps you understand exactly what is required.

The Fort answer also encouraged me to look up the book that he had described as being “a divine text”. It was written by Julia Child and published in 1961.

Having trained at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and gone on to study privately with a number of chefs, Child wanted to introduce audiences in her native US to French cuisine. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the result. She went on to become a hugely important figure in US culinary life.

According to Wikipedia, her “use of ingredients like butter and cream has been questioned by food critics and modern-day nutritionists.

“She addressed these criticisms throughout her career, predicting that a ‘fanatical fear of food’ would take over the country’s dining habits, and that focusing too much on nutrition takes the pleasure from enjoying food.

“In a 1990 interview, Child said, ‘Everybody is overreacting. If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy in the United States. Fortunately, the French don’t suffer from the same hysteria we do. We should enjoy food and have fun. It is one of the simplest and nicest pleasures in life.”

All that butter and cream and enjoyment of food sent her to her grave at the age of 91.

We seem to be between editions of the book – books, actually: there are two volumes –so I haven’t ordered them yet. I have, however, got hold of Julie & Julia, a recent film based on her life and career, and the attempt by a blogger to cook all of the recipes in the book in a year. I might watch it over the weekend.

In the meantime, wondering what to cook for last night’s dinner, I had pulled out a packet of frozen mince before pottering off to work, and left it thaw out.

What I’d decided to do was a cottage pie. Nothing ambitious in that, you say. And quite right you’d be.

But what I wanted to attempt was to pay a little more attention to detail when cooking it – and see if that made any difference.

First up – chop an onion and soften it in olive oil. Nothing different here.

Add the mince – after turning up the heat a bit. Although I’m not as bad as I used to be, I can still be a bit tentative about heat when cooking. But having caramelisation in my mind as the desired outcome helped and I made sure I’d got the pan and oil far hotter than in my previous efforts at cooking mince.

After browning the meat – and the noise and smell tell you it’s cooking differently – I sprinkled a heaped teaspoon of plain flour on the meat, stirred that around to cook through and then deglazed with a little red wine that was conveniently lying around. These were two of my new ‘details’.

Next up, a little celery salt and some diced carrot (these two, with the onion, seemed to represent the vital flavours of a mirepoix that’s the base of so much), a squeeze of tomato purée, a shot of Lea & Perrins (which I cannot remember buying but which I had discovered when clearing a cupboard before Christmas), a small glug of sherry vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar, salt and pepper and some beef stock.

I’d have added stock previously, with the carrot and possibly a little Magi, plus the seasoning. The others mentioned here were more of the evening’s ‘details’.

Now the other thing that had struck me as I’d started thinking about the dish in this way was the question of peas. There’s nothing wrong with frozen peas and I have usually just chucked a few straight out of the freezer into the cooking meat mix.

But hang on, if you do that, you’re adding water and you’re also lowering the temperature of what’s cooking, because you’re putting in something that’s effectively ice.

So I decanted a few peas into a saucepan of boiling water, gave them a minute and then drained them well before adding them to the mix.

Whack the lid on, turn the heat right down and leave it all to cook for around half an hour.

When I came back to it, I decided that I wanted to make it a little thicker. Helpfully, I had some beurre manié in a bit of foil in the fridge from something I’d done last week. It was easy to stir some in, little by little, until I was satisfied with the consistency.

Then it was all decanted into a dish and left to cool while The Other Half, the cats and I got on with putting Christmas back in to assorted boxes.

Next stage: peel, cut up and cook some potatoes. Easy. Then, with my nice new potato ricer, purée the potato, add butter, double cream and seasoning, and spread on to the cooled meat mix. Mark it with a fork and dot with more butter.

Shove into an oven that’s been preheated to 200˚C and leave for around 25 minutes, until the potato is beginning to brown at the edges.

As it happens, I also took account of something I’d read on a forum about fan ovens – that you need to give them longer to pre-heat because they fluctuate quite wildly for a while after you put them on, before the temperature stabilises. Sure enough, I noticed the little indicator light going on and off and on again quite a few times before I was ready to put the finished dish in.

The result was really pleasing. Certainly more flavour than my previous efforts with the same culinary staple.

Cottage pie is hardly haute cuisine, but made properly, it’s good and enjoyable fodder. It isn’t particularly quick to cook, but I think that the extra attention to those few little details really boosted the finished dish.

And hopefully, the technical lesson of caramelisation and Maillard reaction will have stuck and, next time I need to sear meat, I really will sear it and not just vaguely let it near some moderate heat.