Two seasons, two days, two dishes

For all that the sun has had his hat on several times this last week, the evenings are pulling in and the air is cooling.

It is an inescapable fact that autumn is on the way. And it seems that the record-breakingly wet summer, combined with the late burst of sun and heat, could conspire to produce a spectacularly colourful season.

But while we have a while to wait before we see whether that technicolour explosion actually transpires, an itch has started for seasonal comforts on the plate.

And the weekend gone provided opportunities and encouragements to straddle two seasons in just two days and two meals.

With tomatoes both ripe and ripening, a meal was needed that allowed them to take centre stage.

A pomodoro seemed to be the perfect casting solution.

But there was a complication, since doing a traditional tomato sauce requires far more tomatoes than I had.

There seemed to be one sensible way to deal with this.

So, for two, for a main course:

Take a medium onion and chop finely. Sweat gently in olive oil. Add some finely chopped garlic and continue to cook gently.

Chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes – in just their own juice.

Let that cook gently for a while.

Check the seasoning.

Add the fresh tomatoes – mine were all small enough that they didn’t need cutting, let alone skinning.

Continue to cook gently until the skins have just split.

Serve over pasta.

Adding the whole tomatoes at the end freshens up the sauce and adds a different bit of texture.

It also allowed the chance to really appreciate the baby orange plums, which were light and sweet as anything. It’s almost a shock to the system to taste such tomatoey sweetness in the UK – and it was most welcome.

For Sunday, I’d decided to go down the slow, slow route.

So on Saturday evening, I sliced carrot and celery, cut some rump into large, bite-size pieces and popped everything in a bowl with a bottle and a bit of red wine, plus thyme, bay and juniper berries.

And it stayed like that until late Sunday morning.

The most fiddly part of the job that follows is draining everything – keep the marinade – and then drying the meat. But it’s worth taking a bit of time to make sure it is all dry.

Then take a cut clove of garlic and smear it around your casserole. Add a good knob of lard and melt.

Add the meat – in batches if necessary – and brown.

In the meantime, in a large pan, pop some diced, smoked streaky bacon, and cook gently until the fat is coming out of the meat.

At that point, add a couple of chopped onions and two or three cloves of garlic, and continue to cook gently until the onion and garlic start taking on a hint of gold.

Add a sliced carrot and a peeled, diced potato, plus two large tomatoes, skinned and chopped, and let it all cook gently for a minute or two.

Now add the marinade. Bring it to a boil and let it bubble and reduce a bit for five to 10 minutes.

Decant all of this into the casserole with the meat, and add further thyme and bay (and anything other herbs you fancy, for that matter).

At this point, I popped in a handful of dried mushrooms too. Then everything was brought back to a simmer, the pot was covered with foil and lidded, and placed into an oven that had been preheated to 120˚C, where it sat happily for around seven hours.

In essence, this is a daube. Strictly speaking, that means a particular type of cooking pot, but it’s come to mean a slow-cooked dish, of a style that’s particularly linked with the south west of France.

Previous experience had suggested that two or even four hours was not long enough to ensure that the gravy/sauce was sweet and the meat so tender that you could cut it with a spoon.

The majority of the recipe is from Elisabeth Luard, who suggests, in European Peasant Cookery, “four hours at least”.

I deviated from her recipe by adding the vegetables and herbs to the overnight marinade – and by adding the dried mushrooms later.

One of the joys of now having pretty much (as far as I know) every English-language book about cookery from the area is that you start being able to learn little details.

The dried mushrooms are popular in Foix in the mountains – we spent a couple of nights there last year. They also use white wine instead of red there, according to Paula Wolfert in The Cooking of South West France, but I decided to just take the mushroom aspect of that regional derivation.

We’d spent much of Sunday gardening and had trimmed a lot of herbs right back to encourage bushier growth. So when I put on some rice to serve with the daube, The Other Half suggested adding some of the mint he’d trimmed. To that I therefore added a finely-chopped orange chilli from the garden.

On Monday, it was simply a question of reheating gently for an hour and then serving with heaps of buttery puréed potato.

For yesterday, there was little meat left, but a very meaty and flavoursome gravy/sauce.

I chucked in a tin of chopped tomatoes, some halved, peeled spuds and some halved chestnut mushrooms, and gave it around an hour. And it did delightfully.

All of which also means four days of pretty easy cooking – and perfectly good eating. And what more can you ask for?

Time for a spot of Flemish cookery

There’s nothing like a bit of inspiration from your travels, and so just over a week after getting back home from Brugges, I decided to try my hand at making that classic Flemish beef dish, a Vlaamse Stoverij.

I consulted my large French cookery book, which I knew had a recipe for a carbonade – and then the internet. After browsing a while, I discovered that, originally, many people would have padded the beef content out with either liver or kidney.

And then, in the middle of a US cookery forum, I unearthed an absolute gem from 2008.

The poster was one 61-year-old Rudolf from Ghent – or Gent, to give it its proper Flemish spelling. And sure enough, his lengthy post contains comments about how people outside Flemish Belgium substitute French names and words for Flemish ones – be that for places or culinary creations.

And then he went on to give a recipe for the Gent Stoverij, as taught to him by his grandmother (a Gent mill worker), plus some historical context.

It was a dish intended to use up offal, plus stale beer and bread.

Rudolf stipulates that the beef should have some fat and not be veal. In his recipe, it should be beef liver too. He also makes a point of saying that the bread should be “real bread, not Wonderbread”). And he suggests allowing for “a gallon” of beer.

So on Saturday, I bought a white loaf from one of the artisanal bakers on Broadway Market.

I picked up some beautifully marbled casseroling beef from Richard and, having borne in mind the first article, my knowledge of the effect of the cut on a dish like this and my own preferences, two pig’s kidneys from Matthew (nobody had any beef kidney).

Then, being lucky, I managed to track down four small bottles of Leffe, a blonde Belgian beer.

And so, adapting a little, off we went.

Small cubes of meat are essential for Rudolf – “1x1x1 inch”, he says, although “smaller is even better”. Mine was pre-diced – and a perfectly good size. I halved the kidneys and cored them. Since The Other Half doesn’t like offal, such larger pieces meant that it would be easier to serve.

Sauté the meats and a sliced onion in butter (“NOT oil”).

Pop into an iron pot. Make sure you add all the scrapings from the pan you’ve sautéed them in.

Take two slices of bread and spread them liberally on both sides with mustard. I used a bit of Dijon.

Place these on top of the meat. Add beer. Lots of it, so that the contents are covered. Add a couple of bay leaves and a sprig of thyme.

Bring to the boil, then turn the heat right down, cover and cook for around four hours.

Rudolf says that, in effect, you can’t overcook this – but you do need to stir occasionally, as it can get stuck to the bottom of your dish.

If you need to add beer to keep the level up – do so.

At this point, taste and then season. You can add diced potato to the dish for the last half hour if you want.

And that is pretty much that.

My variations meant adding some sliced carrot and celery to the onion and meats at the start. I didn’t use quite as much beer as Rudolf would have, but there was some of my own defrosted chicken stock in the fridge that needed using up, so that went into the pot in the spirit of it being a dish designed to avoid waste.

And I cooked small jacket potatoes to go with it instead of putting potato in the stew itself.

The beef was wonderfully flaky and the sauce rich and sweet and thick – the bread thickens it very well indeed). The long, slow cook really does the business in allowing the flavour to fully develop and removing the last shred of bitterness from the beer.

I should have stirred more often and more vigorously – fortunately The Other Half was on washing-up duty – and that might have darkened the dish to the deep brown that is so characteristic. But otherwise I was really pleased with it.

For Rudolf, this was a dish to avoid waste, which his working-class grandmother would cook. It was, he notes, popular with the textile workers of Gent at the end of the 19th and into the 20 centuries.

Which brought to mind Lancashire hot pot. And indeed, the earlier article I’d found, which said that some people would use kidney or liver in their Vlaamse stoverij was reminiscent too.

In Lancashire, the mill workers who most famously made this dish (to be slow-cooked in the baker’s oven while they were at work) might have added other ingredients, such as oysters.

Such variation is one of the hallmarks of ‘peasant cuisine’ – and this is a perfect example of that; it’s a culinary gem. The undoubted authenticity of the recipe and its context gave my own cooking and eating extra pleasure.

And just like a Lancashire hot pot, this will most certainly be done again.

• You can read all Rudolf's comments here, together with the initial forum post and other comments.

Frugal food that's fit for an emperor

With everyone watching the pennies, the question of ‘frugal food’ has reared its head, and launched almost as many articles as Helen of Troy launched ships.

But ‘frugal food’ is hardly a new idea – and it doesn’t just refer to cost, but to culinary simplicity too.

And not only that, but it doesn't mean ignoring flavour either – there’s no way that it would get any mention here if it did!

So bearing all this in mind, a perfect example of frugal food is that classic of Italian cuisine, minestrone.

It’s believed that the origins of minestrone predate the Roman Empire, while the Roman army is said to have marched on minestrone and pasta e ceci (a sort of beans and pasta).

Marcus Apicius's ancient cookbook De Re Coquinaria described polus, which was a Roman soup dating back to 30AD and made from faro (a wheat-based food), chickpeas and broad beans, with onions, garlic, lard, and greens thrown in.

Just as with the cassoulet I was exploring at the weekend, there is no one recipe for minestrone – no right or wrong way to make it. Much depends on seasonality and even what’s in the cupboard or fridge, which of course makes it idea frugal food, since it’s the perfect way to use up leftovers.

The only real certainty is the beans – and they should, ideally, be borlotti (or Roman) beans.

Minestrone alla Genovese is a version that’s typical of Liguria, and contains a greater use of herbs than other versions, plus pesto.

And this is the one I decided to use as my own guide, using The Food of Italy.

The first attempt was chock full of taste – but The Other Half was not overwhelmed because he has decided that he would prefer something that was not as chunky and had more broth going on in the bowl.

So, bearing in mind that a quiet life is worth making a certain number of adjustments for, I tried again today.

Whatever you’re going to put in your minestrone, the sofritto is crucial.

This is how any minestrone begins.

Chop an onion and garlic. In the meantime, melt around 40g of lard in a big, heavy pan. What you want to do is cook the vegetables, plus a couple of chopped leaves of sage and some pancetta very gently in the fat for at least 10 minutes. They need to be well softened, but most certainly not browned.

Once that's done, add a couple of medium-sized potatoes - peeled but not cut up - plus sliced carrot and celery, and cook for a further five minutes.

Add a good squeeze of tomato purée, a tinned of chopped tomatoes and some chopped basil leaves - be generous with the freshly ground black pepper, and then add stock and bring gently to the boil.

Turn the heat down, cover and cook for two hours, stirring a couple of times. The big test is when the potatoes have started collapsing on their own and can easily be crushed into the soup.

Test the seasoning.

Then add your rinsed borlotti beans - if from a tin; otherwise, add soaked beans with the tomatoes.

Now at this point, I added a sliced courgette, plus some broken pasta - spaghetti is ideal, but it could be anything, frankly. Keep the broken pasta from the bottom of a bag and save to chuck into a minestrone. And then carry on cooking until the pasta and green vegetables are cooked through.

Serve with a dollop of pesto – which gives it a lovely zing – and some grated parmesan.

According to Janet Clarkson's Soup: A Global History, various texts refer to something called 'Italian wedding soup', but something has got rather confused in the translation.

No such soup has ever existed. But one of the words for soup in Italian is minestra (zuppa is the other). Thin - or 'little' - soup is minestrina and thick - or 'big' - soup is minestrone. When ingredients in a soup are happily combined, they're referred to as maritati or 'married'.

It's not difficult to see where the mistake occurred.

But it's also easy to see why this classic soup is such a fine example of 'frugal food'. Forget the tinned version - it's a travesty. Cooked freshly, this is food fit for a Roman emperor. And given the number of ingredients, there'll be no stinging on portions - mine has done enough for lunch for The Other Half and me tomorrow.

And if all that wasn't enough to get you excited, it's healthy too!

A spot of midweek cheating

As I mentioned the other day, I was quite ready to cheat a little on my first attempt to make pie. It was only on reading the ingredients of a ready-made pack of pastry that I decided to do otherwise.

But late last week, although I got back to Broadway Market quite early after work, the butcher was closed. My plan for sausages went out of the window – and I certainly wasn’t tempted to revert to my old habit of buying rubbish, mass-produced ones.

Wandering into a general store to buy a couple of odds and ends, and musing over what to put on the menu, the germ of an idea formed.

I picked up some smoked Mattesson’s sausage (not bad on the ingredients front) and two tins of mushy peas. I midweek cheat was in mind.

Back at home, I peeled and chopped a large carrot, a parsnip, the remainder of the swede we’d had with the pie and a hefty potato. All these were then boiled together until nearly cooked.

After being thoroughly drained, they went into a larger pan with the mushy peas. Some boiling water was added and stirred in very carefully to thin down the peas. The sausage was sliced and added, with chopped parsley going in just before it was finished.

This was heated through very gently with the lid on – and then, hey presto!

This was a seriously easy midweek version of the Dutch classic, Erwtensoep, which I’ve been cooking for some years (there are also very similar versions in German cooking, in the UK of course and pretty much throughout northern Europe).

The full version takes some time (restaurant version pictures above, with smoked bacon on rye bread to accompany) – not least because you have to soak the peas for two hours before cooking everything at one go, very slowly.

The proper version also used more than one kind of meat, but in this circumstance, the smoked sausage was enough. My original recipe would have included celeriac and not parsnip and swede. But using those root vegetables together hardly defied culinary logic.

And the parsley, added just near the end, lends a nice little zing to the finished dish.

This was an easy way to use up some veg – and make something hearty, comforting and decently nutritious, and all in quite short order.

Midweek cheating can work!

So what's the new peasant cuisine?

First – I’m sorry that this wasn’t the “tomorrow” that was promised on Sunday, but a nasty cold is to blame for laying me too low to do much of anything – let alone think!

But this is an appropriate day for this second article, since there’s a Panorama investigation into supermarkets on BBC1 at 9pm this evening.

Anyway …

I don’t have any concrete memory of the word ‘peasant’ until the time, in my late teens, when we lived in Lancaster and my mother would use it derisively of an elderly Polish couple who lived next door.

Which is all the more ironic because, as my knowledge of such matters increases, it’s easy to see that her own choice of husband comes from something little removed from the peasantry: a family that had a little bungalow in rural, rural Cornwall (there was a village squire – I kid you not), with no electricity, no hot running water (I actually remember sitting in an old tin bath in front of the fire) and in the rambling garden, chickens and rabbits for food.

My paternal grandfather was also a road mender (his wife an occasional barmaid) who was so short-sighted that the limits of his service in WWII was the Home Guard: he was a very quiet man, but always laughed at Dad’s Army relishing how true it apparently was.

I have no memories of my maternal grandmother’s cooking, but I assume it was basic.

But if we’re using Elisabeth Luard’s definition of peasant cuisine, therefore including working class dishes where there has been no peasantry for centuries, then what is the ‘peasant cuisine’ of today?

For working people, the choice of food is primarily governed by time.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a trained cook – and she’d continued to undertake further training and get qualifications throughout her working life, not resting on her laurels – who was made redundant from the old people’s home in which she worked when the council decided to sell it to a private developer.

She was in her 50s. She struggled to get any sort of a job – and ended up doing three cleaning jobs just to make ends meet. Her husband – who had retired from the fire service after a serious accident – was struggling on as a school caretaker, in the fairly certain knowledge that he will end up in a wheelchair.

She actually enjoys cooking, but is frequently so exhausted when she gets home at night that a take-away is all she’s capable of organising before dozing off on the sofa. And besides, it’s often so late in the evening that her husband has already had his own meal.

Where is the quality of life in this? Is this really the apotheosis of a supposedly civilised society in the 21st century?

Perversely, we now seem to be moving into an era where those people who could be described as the ‘working poor’ are vilified and blamed for their own condition.

The ‘logic’ appears to work something like this:

‘If you’re on a low income, get the training/education to get a better-paid job’.

Obviously this means that:

• there are no shortage of such jobs (as my interviewee, mentioned above, who had continued to get improve her CV, discovered);

• anyone in a job with low wages deserves to be there and to be on low pay (and, concomitantly, with a crap standard of living/quality of life).

The latter rather ignores the point that the overwhelming majority of jobs are not acts of charity: they exist because there is work that needs to be done. So someone will always have to do it. In which case, they are saying that someone will always deserve to have a shitty standard of living/quality of life.

Again – and this demands to be repeated: do we live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be?

And if it is the former, then why? Who or what is the work that dominates our lives for?

To clarify a point slightly (and I feel I shouldn’t have to make this, but it’s best to do so for fear of any misunderstanding): I do not mean that every worker gets the same pay, right across the spectrum of jobs.

But let’s put it another way: in the UK at present, the median wage is around £21K. Sound a lot?

Okay. The average cost of a house is £246,387. Now, in the days before the chronic housing shortage and the boom in prices that inevitably followed (and the banks deciding to offer increasingly dangerous mortgages to people who were desperate to get a home), it was considered sensible to have a mortgage that was no more than three times your annual household income.

So, to buy a property at the current average price, you’d need a joint (or single) income of over £82K. Or to put it another way, that median wage, applied to a sensible mortgage, would get you a property of £63K.

Most women – certainly in the UK – have little choice these days about whether they want to work or stay at home after having a child. The sort of financial realities sketched out above make it Hobson’s Choice.

So it could be argued that we need fast food and convenience food to help sustain the economy as it currently exists.

This is actually something that Stewart Lee Allen touches on in In the Devil’s Garden. Personally, I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, preferring instead to apply Occam’s Razor whenever possible. And the idea that, in effect, government has ‘encouraged’ a culinary culture of supermarkets, ready meals, take-aways etc, as a way of those time-short workers feeding themselves and their families, is not one I like or feel comfortable with.

But the reality in the UK is that, for many, many people, their food ‘choices’ are now limited what they can pile into the trolley, and then into the car and then into the freezer at the weekend.

It is, in this ‘post-industrial’ landscape, quite handy when people will apparently happily spend money on mass-produced rubbish, from Lancashire hot pots that require pectin to ‘beers’ that are full of chemicals; just as it’s handy that many people have come to believe that quality of life is measured in terms of how much they can buy.

It would be more than a little awkward if that were not the case.

Yet we have increasing obesity – particularly in childhood – with the concomitant diseases that go with it. And there’s no connection to the diet that people are increasingly consuming?

Decreasing numbers of families sit and eat together, but spread out around a home, in front of the telly or the computer etc, with their own food. And there are plenty of commentators who apparently think we have increasing family breakdown and an inability amongst young people in particular to learn social skills and relate to people outside their own peer group.

We have town centres that have become no-go areas for families and older people at nights and weekends, when young people in particular (with a lack of social skills – so they find it difficult to comprehend why there is anything wrong with their being as noisy as they want, regardless of where they are and anyone else) arrive for a night’s drinking in industrialised drinking establishments.

When you think of it like this, it’s easy to see why no real changes are attempted.

And it’s easier to build more and more supermarkets, and encourage people to believe that ready-meals and junk food are cheaper than real food, than it is to deal with the equation of low pay and a high cost of living that forces many people to take two or three jobs at the same time.

Or of dealing with the whole question of quality of life and work-life balance.

Do we really live to work? Or do we work to live? Which should it be? When you look at the political decisions made in the UK over the last 30 or so years, primarily that of moving us to a ‘post-industrial’ economy, you can see, for such a post-industrial economy to work, what the answer has to be (for ‘them’, at least).

Against this background, how odd that Lancashire hot pot is something that you might (if lucky) find in a gastro pub now – although such an approach is considerably later than the French taking their peasant cuisine and moving it into the restaurant … think duck confit, for instance.

The new ‘peasant cuisine’ in the UK is either fast and take-away food or over-packaged, pre-made, ‘ready’ meals – supposedly cheap but not really, but which offer people ‘convenience’ and big business ever increasing profits, at the same time as destroying town centres and communities, and aspects of our culture.

One is left with a question: we’ve been on this path for some years – but where does it lead?

The time for peasant cuisine is now

A couple of days ago, a copy of European Peasant Cookery by Elisabeth Luard landed on my doormat, courtesy of m’friend George.

Peasant cuisine has provided the roots of what we now think of as rather posher food; dishes that we choose when we dine out, spending good money in smart restaurants.

But of course the UK hasn’t had a peasantry for centuries, since Enclosure and the deliberate de-forestation of the country, which were carried out with the intention of driving people off the land and into the industrialising urban areas.

Which doesn’t mean that Luard neglects the UK. She includes, for instance, Lancashire hot pot, as well as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Welsh cawl, Scotch broth and many more.

In other words, traditional dishes of the British working class.

As it happens, she doesn’t include a recipe for pea and ham soup – which I decided would be perfect fodder for the weekend, for a number of reasons.

Both The Other Half and I, along with assorted colleagues at work, have come down with coughs and colds. In my case, yesterday afternoon I coughed so much that it felt as though a herd of baby elephants had stampeded across my torso. And back again.

But we’re also in the middle of another ‘cold snap’. With snow already lying thinly on the ground overnight, yesterday began with a gentle flurry of the white stuff drifting down. As I shopped, however, it turned into the closest thing I’ve seen to a blizzard since living on the edge of the Pennines over 30 years ago. The Other Half, looking out from the comfort of our living room, donned outer clothing and headed up to find and help me. Most welcome it was too.

A week earlier, I’d seen that the Longwood Butchers van on Broadway Market had ham shanks for £4. And in the intervening days, I’d found an old family recipe that, a long time ago, I’d faithfully and neatly copied onto the back of one of my father’s used orders of service, then folded away and popped into a notebook.

Now I’ve cooked Erwtensoep, the Dutch version, before, but never the English version, and now seemed the perfect moment to break that culinary duck. As it happens, I altered it a bit. But then again, there are no absolutes for cooking such dishes – simply as many different versions as there are people who have cooked them.

I soaked the ham for a couple of hours, together with a box of quick-soak peas.

Then it was into the pot with everything and water to cover. Well, not quite. Given the size of pots I have, plus the size of the ham itself, that would have meant a lot of water and probably nowhere near enough peas. So I lidded the pot and allowed the top of the meat to start off by steaming, turning it occasionally.

It needs to be cooked gently anyway or the peas will stick to the bottom of the pan and make a dreadful mess.

After a couple of hours, I added sliced carrot and parsnip. The recipe had said a grated carrot, but this was what I felt in the mood for.

It had another long, slow cook, so that the veg were pretty much broken down. And then we had big bowls of the stuff.

Hearty and warm and hardly unhealthy.

And you remember the price of the ham? £4. One 250g packet of Batchelors Quick Soak Dried Peas was a whopping 35p. I’m afraid I cannot recall the cost of two carrots and two parsnips or the water. But we'd barely be looking at a fiver in total.

We both had a good bowl last night. We have also had a good bowl tonight (the colds are not leaving us feeling ambitious, from a culinary point of view) and anyway, as might be expected, it had actually improved with keeping.

There’s still enough left for lunch tomorrow.

This is not expensive food. It is good food; it is real food. But it is not expensive food.

Out of interest, four 400g cans of Heinz pea and ham soup from Tesco are currently on offer for £3 (usual price 82p per can). Mind, for that money, you’re actually getting:

“Water, Split Green Peas (21%), Peas (5%), Potatoes, Reformed Ham (3%, Pork (72%, Water, Whey Powder (from Milk), Salt, Emulsifiers – Tri, Poly and Diphosphates, Dextrose, Preservative – Sodium Nitrite), Onions, Carrots, Cornflour, Modified Cornflour, Celery, Salt, Flavourings (contain Wheat, Barley), Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Cream, Dried Skimmed Milk, Spice, Colour – Beta-carotene, Stabiliser – Polyphosphates and Sodium Phosphates.”

Damn. My recipe missed out most of those. But trust me, a can of soup like that is not a substantial meal – no, not even at one can per person. I had a can of Baxter’s pea and ham soup earlier this month during my previous chill/cold – these colds seem to have induced a bout of nostalgia – so I do speak with the benefit of recent experience.

Now, I’m lucky in that I have easy access to a butcher who will do things like suddenly have ham shank available – and for a damned decent price.

Most people are not so lucky: in that same post about Lancashire hot pot, I mentioned that Tesco itself, for all it has bemoaned the slow demise of classic English dishes, was also one of a number of supermarket chains that have helped to create a rate of local butchers dying out of rate of 23 a month (survey, reported in the Telegraph in 2008). Few people are as lucky as I am to have the choice.

Extending the research a bit, I did another little search on the Tesco site. I came up with the following result:

“We did not find any products to match 'ham shank'.”

Somehow, I’m not surprised. Nor, incidentally and in the interests of fairness, does Waitrose. Or Asda. Sainsbury's translates 'ham shank' into 'lamb shank'. I'm not registered with Morrison's and cannot check.

Carrying on with the research, I found that Tesco’s basic “Lancashire Hotpot” is £2.90 for 450g. So, that’d be around £11.60 for a family of four.

The list of ingredients is more complex than anything that Luard or my book of Lancashire recipes comes close to:

“Marinated Lamb (28%), Potato, Carrot, Onion, Water, Vegetable Juices From Concentrate, Lamb Stock, Vegetable Oil, Cornflour, Wheat Flour, Tomato Purée, Garlic Purée, Salt, Pepper, Rosemary, Marinated Lamb contains, New Zealand Lamb, Water, Cornflour, Tomato Purée, Salt. Potato contains, Potato, Vegetable Oil. Vegetable Juices From Concentrate contains, Carrot, Celeriac, Lettuce, Beetroot, Spinach, Parsley. Lamb Stock contains, Lamb Stock, Yeast Extract, Sugar, Salt, Cornflour, Onion, Rosemary, Thyme.”

Those of a nervous disposition may wish to look away now, because I am on the verge of a ‘what-the-fuck!?!?’ moment.

Actually, the hell with it. Let’s have some fun. Tesco also sell an own-brand “Finest" hot pot ("Finest" is that chain's top range). Again, this is 450g, but this time it retails for £4.25 per serving (so, £17 for the proverbial four-person family).

Let’s have a little look what all that extra moolah gets us:

“Potato (38%), Lamb (36%), Carrot, Celery, Onion, White Wine (3.5%), Leek, Vegetable Oil, Lamb Stock, Cornflour, Redcurrant Jelly, Chicken Stock, Wheat Flour, Yeast Extract, Gelling Agent, Salt, Thyme, Rosemary, Black Pepper, Barley Malt Extract. Lamb Stock contains, Lamb, Salt, Sugar, Cornflour, Onion Concentrate, Rosemary Oil, Thyme Oil. Redcurrant Jelly contains, Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Redcurrant Juice, Sugar, Gelling Agent. Chicken Stock contains, Chicken, Sugar, Water, Salt, Cornflour, Onion Concentrate, Chicken Fat. Yeast Extract contains, Yeast Extract, Salt. Gelling Agent, Pectin.”

Hey … look at that! More potato than in the cheap version – in fact, more potato than there is lamb (although there is more lamb than in the cheapo one)! No tomato purée, but loads of lovely cornflour and pectin. Pectin? What on Earth is pectin doing in a bloody hotpot – pectin is what occurs naturally in fruits and what is used to set jams. And who puts sugar in a stock?

Next time I make a Lanky hot pot, I’ll make a note, to the very last penny, of what it costs. But I make you a promise now: it will not come even close to £4.25 per serving. And it will have good meat and good kidneys in it. And it will be rather bigger servings than the amount mentioned above (which is only 50g more than a tin of soup).

And tomorrow, if you’re not bored to tears already, I’ll attempt to explore what I am coming to believe ‘peasant cuisine’ means in the UK today.