Fancy a bit of skirt?

Learning which cuts come from where is useful.

Slow cooking is a subject that regular readers will be aware that I return on a, well, regular basis.

And it reared its head again this weekend.

There I was, at Andy’s Wild Game stall on Broadway Market on Saturday, chatting with the young lass who staffs it these days, and we got talking about things to do with various ingredients. As you do.

It was a conversation that began with talk of roasting meats. It turned out that both of us check times and temperatures and weights quite religiously before even turning the oven on.

But when it comes to the slower style of cooking, the in-the-pot variety, we also shared a similar approach, albeit rather a different one.

‘Stick it in some liquid; set the temperature low and leave it for a minimum of four hours’, might actually be the most basic version of what we both agreed would work. Or leave it even longer, if you can.

We mused on how terrified authors or publishers seem of listing real slow-cooking times. As if cooking something for five hours instead of two is somehow intimidating.

Funnily enough, first thing yesterday morning, I’d been sat in bed, with notebook, pen, cookery books and hot drink, as is my wont.

The book under scrutiny was Richard Corrigan’s The Clatter of Forks and Spoons. And in these pages, he describes cooking a shoulder of lamb for eight hours – after a three-day marinade.

‘Wow,’ I thought while reading it. ‘I want to try that’.

That’s for another day though, so we’ll return to it in the coming weeks.

This one saw me pick up some skirt from Matthew: a cut that is full of flavour, it absolutely demands a slow cook. It’s also cheap, by comparison with other cuts.

There’s an enormous pleasure to cooking this way too, when you don’t need to refer to a book or a specific recipe.

The beef was cut into big bite-size pieces and browned in butter and olive oil, before being decanted into a cast iron pot.

Next up, two onions, sliced, three sticks of celery and a couple of carrots, softened in more butter and oil.

Then a couple of heaped dessertspoons of plain flour – I never measure – cook through for a minute, and then deglaze with ale (a bottle left over from my birthday party last month.

When you’ve stirred in enough that it’s not thickening any more, add to the pot with the meat and stir everything together.

Add a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves, a shot of Worcester Sauce, a glug of HP sauce, a splodge of ketchup and a serious grinding of black pepper, and then cover with foil and lid, and set in the oven at 140˚C (fan).

And then go away and do something else with the afternoon.

Corrigan makes the point in his book that some people in the UK and Ireland don’t see casseroled dishes as ‘sophisticated’, whereas the French, he notes, are rightly proud of their daubes and other one-pot dishes.

Not only that, but whereas it’s easy to find regional one-pot dishes sold in restaurants in France – the cassoulet is just one such example, while boeuf à la gardiane is another.

Where do you go to find a Lancashire hotpot? Yet such a dish is considered highly enough by the French that it features as a single entry in Larousse Gastronomique.

It does raise the question of what we actually mean by sophistication – certainly in terms of food – and with that there is a whiff of snobbery and also, perhaps, an ignorance that has developed from the widespread disconnect with our own culinary heritage.

But back to today.

Out of interest, I checked what one of my favourite books on French cookery listed for the cooking time of a carbonnade. Two and a half to three hours – “or until the meat is tender”.

I took the pot out to give it a stir on two hours – it would have been nowhere near ready to eat.

But on five and a half hours, with jacket potatoes to accompany, the ale was transformed into a thick, sweet gravy, and the meat was flaking.

Not only is this such an easy way to cook, the results are deeply comforting and sating. And with the temperature outside dropping, it was most certainly food to warm body and soul. 

Christmas on a plate

As freezing fog descended to shroud even London in shivering winter, the plate in front of me announced, loud and clear, that the festive season is upon us.

The red of venison tartare, the green of Douglas fir and the white of buttercream – Rudolph, wintery forests and snow. It was, as The Other Half put it, “Christmas on a plate”.

After the business of trying my first oyster a few weeks ago, primarily to ensure that I could safely consume some at my birthday dinner, I changed my mind.

After all, an oyster is – in effect – an oyster is an oyster. And I can let them carry the taste of the sea down my throat pretty much any time. But what I wanted on this occasion was to experience the food of Richard Corrigan.

The Michelin-starred Irishman has won Great British Menu on three occasions, and is an ambassador for the Slow Food Movement; in other words, seasonal produce, as locally-sourced as possible, is at the heart of his food philosophy.

What does all that look like on the plate – and more to the point, what does it taste like?

Well, it can be rather surprising. Having discovered that a G&T really benefits from a slice of cucumber, we then found ourselves with a slender dish of deep-fried olives as an amuse-bouche, which stunned us both by being a delight.

Venison tartare.

But then it was on to that venison tartare. Lightly spiced – not spice that suggested the east though, but the north and mulled wine – it was gloriously moist and melted in the mouth. A thin slice of air-light toasted bread added texture.

The quenelle of buttercream was as light as it was rich, while the green oil, infused with the fresh scent of the forest, was a shock – but a welcome one.

Taken together, it was at once complex and simple: a taste of the wintery forest on a crisp night beneath a sparkling sky. And yes, that really was an image that entered my head almost instantly.

The Other Half had picked duck egg and smoked hake: he noted that the egg was perhaps a fraction overcooked, but that it was wonderful to taste, and was followed in his case by a ballotine of wild boar, with curls of crisp crackling and quince on the side, and which had him rhapsodising.

My venison was followed by steamed hake.

The fish was perfectly cooked – firm and yet flakingly moist at the same time – and sat on a bed of sea grass that had a totally unexpected taste (and very pleasant, I might add).

On top of the fish itself were ribbons of salted cucumber – delicate yet crunchy all at once – and above that, a tiny piece of fish in a wafer-light batter, crowned with a garnish of cress. Dotted around, a brunoise of carrot, tender and sweet and, on the side, an oyster velouté with caviar.

Hake – with layers. And texture. And taste.

Goodness; hidden layers of surprises: myriad combinations of flavours and textures. An absolute delight.

And how did we ‘forget’ hake? I remember it vaguely from childhood, yet you rarely see it in shops these days. And the taste is such that it’s little wonder that chefs have been talking it up in recent years.

As a side order, we shared a portion of crushed carrot and swede with pepper and tiny pieces of perfectly crisp bacon.

For dessert, The Other Half opted for a rich chocolate tart with salted caramel ice cream. I selected plums in Marsala, served with a madeline – actually more like a wedge of dense, ginger cake – and a delicate scoop of a lightly-spiced ice cream.

Christmas in a bowl.

There followed coffee and petits four – tiny chocolate treats and slices of a miniature, but utterly perfect lemon tart that was anything but miniature when it came to flavour, packing a massive citrus punch.

And then, just as we leaned back and exhaled slowly and with pleasure, a small cake, topped with two candles, arrived at the table, on a slate that was inscribed, in cream, with the words: ‘Happy Birthday’.

Layers of chocolate, covered in more chocolate and topped with a quenelle of rich chocolate mousse, it was a complete surprise – and an absolute delight.

Now regular readers of this blog will know that, no matter how difficult to believe it might be, I have a very small capacity for food.

But I had, on this occasion, managed to put away, in their entirety, three complete courses – the portion sizes were absolutely perfect for me.

In that situation, there was no chance that I could eat all (or half) of that extra – and oh so special – cake. I did do my best, though.

To drink, we’d chosen a Bourgueil La Coudraye 2010 from the Loire Valley, which was a light enough red to drink alongside the fish – as well as the meat and game.

A very special birthday cake.

Corrigan’s Mayfair is a lovely setting: a low-ceilinged room that is at once classy but yet not remotely intimidating, and with beautiful light. To borrow a phrase from one of my favourite films, Victor/Victoria, the restrooms are almost a religious experience.

And the staff are a delight: at once highly attentive and helpful, but also entirely unobtrusive.

A short while after that cake arrived, we exchanged the warmth of the restaurant for the cold night air, only to discover that the nearby fair in Hyde Park was shrouded by dense mist.

With the waddle of utter stuffedness we made our way around the corner until we were in a condition to hail a taxi home.

But, oh my goodness – what a meal, what a meal.

If anyone suggests to you that expensive restaurants really don’t give you anything much more over far cheaper ones – well, don’t listen to them.

Because at Corrigan’s Mayfair, you get massive culinary bang for your buck with inventive cooking and sublime food.

Did I make that clear? This is utterly divine use of the very best ingredients. It is an art – and don’t let’s pretend otherwise.

And those candles? As I blew them out, I could only wish to dine more often so magnificently and, indeed, to return to Corrigan’s itself.

The world's my oyster

Oysters: top –rock; bottom – native.

There are times that we seem to be so scared of random dangers that we allow ourselves – or others – not to experience life fully.

Risk can be rewarding.

But we live in a society where companies tell us that we need to buy antibacterial agents to clean every surface – and then other antibacterial agents to clean our hands, and then still more antibacterial products to clean the surfaces that we touched while reaching to wash our hands with those other antibacterial products.

And different companies (or possibly the same ones) also tell us to buy yogurt drinks to put bacteria back into our bodies.

Presumably, they don’t all waste money on developing, producing and then marketing these products – there is a market for them.

So it’s the old chicken and egg question as to which came first: the fear – or the products that milk that fear.

Not that fear is restricted to what we buy in the shops: it’s also part of what people talk about when they condemn the ’elf ‘n’ safety culture.

Health and safety itself isn’t a problem – people dying or becoming ill because of their work, for instance, is something that any sane person would want to avoid.

The problem, however, is in the culture that uses health and safety as an excuse for not doing something – whether because the person or organisation/company concerned can’t be arsed, or because of a fear of litigation.

And of course fear can also be perfectly healthy and sane – if it’s a block on our doing something genuinely dangerous.

But there is a sense in today’s UK that we seem to be afraid of our own shadows sometimes – in spite of reality. Whether we like the idea of empire or not, Britain punched massively above its weight in creating one – and it didn’t do it on the basis of fear.

Yet today, people are so scared of child abuse, for instance, that they cocoon their children – despite ‘stranger danger’ being so, so, so much less rare than abuse in the home or by trusted, known individuals, they ‘prefer’ to be educated by sensationalist headlines than by facts.

Or there’s the fear-related behaviour mentioned at the top of this piece, whereby people buy those products (presumably) because they don’t understand that natural ones are better or that there is a strengthening of antibiotic resistance that may be at least partly caused by the rise in use of antibacterials in everything from liquid soaps to chopping boards.

On the latter, in Bad Food Britain, Joanna Blythman cites a 1994 study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which showed that bacteria spreads more quickly on plastic chopping boards than on wood.

There’s a reason that beech is the idea wood for a chopping board – it has natural ‘antibacterial’ properties.

Yet even some councils still try to insist that food outlets use plastic chopping boards instead of wooden ones.

But many of us are affected by some form of fear – and I’m far from being an exception to that.

Back in the dim and distant past, I could eat mussels. I quite liked them too, even though this was my pre-foodie days.

However, after two successive incidents, where I was violently ill after eating them, I was rather put off.

Yet later, when I’d become really interested in and in love with real food, I found myself regretting that I had never tasted oysters – and never would.

That thought nagged away for years. I discussed it with Vikki, my Broadway Market fishmonger, who suggested that oysters in general are cleaner than mussels, and that farmed ones would be pretty safe.

This point was mulled.

A month or two ago, I realised that a supplement I’m taking has a warning about not being suitable for anyone with a shellfish allergy – but I can take it with no problem.

So in August, in Collioure, I decided to test this out: I planned to eat one – or more – at a lunchtime. The time was important, so that if I was going to be sick, it would not happen suddenly, when I was in bed in the middle of the night.

But that plan never came to fruition.

Then, with my birthday hoving into view – and it’s a big one – I settled on Corrigan’s of Mayfair for the celebratory dinner. Looking at the menu, The Other Half commented that there was a certain emphasis on oysters.

Okay, not as much as Richard Corrigan’s Bentley’s, which is famous for them; but yes, I had noticed it.

While in one sense having a first taste of something so decadent as an oyster on my half century would have been quite a wonderful way to mark it, I didn’t want to risk having the runs in the middle of the night of my birthday.

There were options. There’s a stall that does them on Broadway Market these days. There’s also a small, independent coffee chop/café just off Columbia Road that does them too on a Sunday morning on a rickety wooden table.

And yesterday, when we pottered down there to go Christmas decoration hunting, I resolved to hunt a new taste experience too.

The very first ever taste.

In the event, I had two. One was a native – rounder and flatter shell – with just a squeeze of fresh lemon. The second was a rock oyster – more of a tear shape, and with the characteristic craggy shell – served with a hint of shallot vinaigrette.

It seems that some people don’t take to them instantly – like tobacco or alcohol, it takes time. I loved them straight away.

My god: they were wonderful. A clear, crisp, fresh taste of the sea.

I wanted more but decided not to risk it.

Yet was that going to be my one and only taste of them?

The afternoon ticked by. I was acutely conscious of every single tiny rumble or comment from my gut.

Please, please be okay.

It was.

I can eat oysters again – and perhaps other shellfish too.

Funnily enough, I mentioned it to a group of colleagues today: the one who I’d discussed it with before – a fellow foodie – was delighted for me, but still (a tad ironically) described it as “shellfish roulette”.

Others almost shivered and expressed the view that what I’d done was far too much of a risk.

See what I mean about fear running your life?

But this isn’t the end of this story.

Way back when I was living on my own in the north west of England, in my twenties, I went for close on a decade without going on holiday.

After moving south for work, and lodging for 18 months with my parents – who were then in Reading, from where I commuted daily to London to sell books to office workers – they dragged me away for a frankly rather strained fortnight in Torquay.

Why no holidays?

Well, I’ve always said that it was the lack of money. And to a large extent, that’s very true. I was (mostly) working, but I was always on very low pay.

But I was also frightened.

From travel agents I got brochures – for skiing trips and for summers in Ibiza. I took them home and spent hours looking at them. They seemed to be filled with young people – just like me – having a good time.

But I was scared. Oh, I was shy and really rather gauche when it came to dealing with my own peers. Very serious, I never knew how to party.

And so I never went any further than gazing longingly at the glossy pages: and then setting them quietly to one side and tying to forget them; only to repeat the exercise with each new season.

A decade ago, I finally went through an adolescence. Better late than never. The cutting free: the fledging – god alone knows how The Other Half put up with it.

Hanging over me ever since, though, has been this fear and this memory of avoiding adventure, of avoiding travel. And I’ve wanted to correct it for a long time.

Next year, I am going to exactly that.

It might not be exotic (whatever that means), but I will travel, outside the UK, on my own.

There are already some plans in place. I’m exhilarated – but nervous at the same time.

But I will do it.

We have one life – and we really shouldn’t waste any of the opportunities that we have. And if we grasp the nettle of our fear later in that life rather than early, then that has to be better than never at all.

Risk can be rewarding.

Yes?

Watch this space.