Mainly Concerning Food
It has been a quiet month here in North East Derbyshire. Some visits by me to other English towns, some visits to us by family and friends, some reading, some cooking, some gardening, some gainful employment, some leisure time. One thing that has been completely absent has been rush. As I get older the word urgent has become an infrequent visitor to my thoughts. On some days it has been cold enough to light a fire and some days it hasn’t. But the fire is so nice to sit by that I light it anyway. It’s a family tradition. We come from folk who have known hard times but folk who kept the fire well stoked. Whatever season you visited a cousin, auntie, grandma in this family, you’d be offered cake and a seat in the chimney corner. We continue the tradition. Modern fires don’t use a lot of fuel and they give off a lot of heat. I’m looking forward to winter.
This is a favourite. Unbeatable as a quick snack, a budget meal and a tasty treat; but also scores high on nutrition, sustainability and gastronomy. It’s the humble but very delicious sardines on toast. Can be made using a toaster but, like toasted cheese, is better using a grill. Toast the bread fully on one side and partially on the other. Butter (real butter please) and spread a couple of tinned sardines straight from the can. I prefer the ones in tomato sauce for this recipe. Sprinkle a few drops of tabasco sauce and return under the grill for a minute or two to finish. It’s one of those meals that don’t tempt until you’ve made it and then it is irresistible. What’s for tea? Sardines on toast. Can’t we have something better than that? Here you go. Any chance of some more?
The East Midlands hasn’t yet developed a strong reputation as a food capital. Some supposed lesser counties have become associated with fine food shops and innovative restaurants. Shropshire is now known for good eating as is Cumbria. But we do have the same supermarkets (for better or worse) as the well-heeled areas and we have a few gems of our own. Some brilliant farm shops and a local charcuterie and smoke house in Bolsover that trades under the name of Jaquest. This is a piece of smoked cod that is absolutely full of flavour. The firm is discretely sited and run by a modest man and wife team who pick up gold, silver and bronze medals for their products from food fairs around the country. This is as good as you’ll get anywhere in England and you’ll enjoy the experience of shopping with them. They are lovely people and to top things off, it’s superb value for money.
Their bacon is a treat. Several different cures. I usually choose the standard cure which gives you a flavour and texture from the past. No un-foodlike slimy white oozings from these rashers as they cook. This is the real stuff. It has so little in common with the pre-packed product that comes off the supermarket shelves (even the supposed dry cure) that it seems incredible that we give it the same name. The taste of bacon like this, cured by strictly traditional methods on a small scale by people who care about food, is what gave bacon its reputation. That rubbery, squirmy stuff inserted into a pappy bun, at all too many sandwich shops, isn’t bacon. It’s a horribly processed meat that we have learnt to tolerate. And we shouldn’t. This is like comparing a true stilton to Dairylea. Even the rind cooks perfectly and adds crunch and depth of flavour to the sandwich or the breakfast.
Jaquest also do a smoked Holoumi cheese. A single slice added to the nearly made bacon sandwich and then melted under the grill before eating turns a treat into a feast. 
There are as many different recipes for kedgeree as there are bogus recipes for Paella. It comes from the Raj and is obviously a dish prepared for people who are used to having servants and others to do for them. A real hotch-potch of ingredients. It all ends up in one dish but there is a lot of washing up with a kedgeree. I like Britain but its Imperial past isn’t an aspect that I feel any pride in. My recipe is the one I was brought up on. If any of my family made it to India it was as foot soldiers. Neither side of my family ever sat at the top table (on my mother’s side many were in service…my father’s side consists of miners, steel men and factory workers). My mothers favourite flavouring for fish and rice was parsley. I enjoy spicy kedgerees but given my druthers I’d always select this combination of Basmati rice, hard boiled eggs, poached smoked haddock (Jaquest), lots of black pepper and handfuls of chopped parsley. Serve with brown bread and butter. One of the great legacies of British imperialism is the wonderful multi-culutural society that parts of the country have become. My life has been enormously enhanced by this multi-culturalism.
Never had a fig until I was married with children. Only once had a pomegranate. We were told to use a pin to pick out the seeds. It took far too long and we lost interest. If you cut them in half and gently beat the outside with the back of a large knife the seeds fall out very easily. Suddenly the pomegranate is available in large numbers and low prices in most supermarkets. Visually stunning, as fresh as a morning meadow and apparently very good for you. To use the current stock phrase; what’s not to like?
I love bagels. Here the unusual combination of good cream cheese, capers and thin slices of venison salami (Jaquest gold medal winner, judged best salami in Britain). The salami is far too flavoured to over-indulge. It needs complimentary ideas and this works perfectly. I enjoyed these and then had two more!
This black pudding was delicious and I cannot remember who made it. It came from a supermarket and I deliberately kept the card container somewhere safe so I’d know to buy it again. I found a very safe place and hope to find it one day. Black pudding has become the both ends of the spectrum and nothing in the middle food. You’ll find it on the poshest menus and you’ll find it in working class greasy spoon cafés but you won’t often see it in the centre field.
Smoked rib of beef. I forget the exact name of the cut. Smoked to order by Jaquest, this isn’t easy to come by. I was lucky. Very lucky, this is a superb product. I simply took the proprietors advice and roasted it very slowly for 10 hours. I love cooking that fills the house with good smells. This was exceptional.
It produced several meals. At first the richest flavoured roast beef I can remember eating for a long time. Here served English style with new potatoes, carrots and kale. The gravy from the roasting pan was unbelievable. Fabulous on its own but once I added a little English mustard it sang to the four corners of my mouth.
I’m not a great multi-tasker. I do like the golden filigree on the bottom and edges of my fried eggs but I have to confess that I rather over-did these fellows. It made no difference. I call this a Morland breakfast because this is what Nicholas Jenkins and Hugh Morland had on a memorable occasion in A Dance to the Music of Time (one of the truly great sequences of novels written in English). Every time I have this most simple of breakfasts I’m reminded of so many things from my own past as well as that fabulous book.
Cold slices of smoked roast beef. Or roast smoked beef. Either way they made the most delicious sandwiches with some horseradish (T) and mustard (me).
I have a slight regret that I stopped drinking beer at the same time as the craft beer movement really took off. The regrets are minor. I’m happy with the improvement in the British banger over the same period. I have mixed feelings about middle class people with no experience setting up companies with the words artisan and provender in the titles. But I’m happy to eat a good sausage wherever it comes from.
The finest of many fine dishes to come from that £21 piece of beef. The bones were stocked for a number of hours and the stock made into a beef broth. Lots of the cold cuts plus onions, carrots and kale all supplemented with classic soup mix ingredients like yellow split peas, red lentils and pearl barley. This could have been made my my mother, my grandmother or my great grandmother…and that is the sort of food I like the best.
Another tasty breakfast and a morning with the newspapers.
As the only member of the family who likes seafood I suffer a feast or famine regime. Long periods of going without and then finding I have to eat enough for four or five. Mussels are sold in bags of about a kilogram in Britain. This moules mariniere meant I didn’t have to eat again that day.
Four oysters. Some pepper, some freshly squeezed lime. Another working class staple that has made its way up the food hierarchies.
I began this post with tinned sardines and now add a few fresh sardines. I head and gut them and fry them for a minute of two on each side and serve with bread and butter. Every bit as delicious as the earlier dish and just as east to make. (Both attract the attention of two cats and a sheep dog. I’m afraid there wasn’t enough to go round.
Perhaps I spoke too soon. Maybe this was the piéce de resistance of the smoked beef. There are many ways of attaining the depth of flavour that separates the really good chilli from the ordinary. With this beef it didn’t matter. The depth of flavour was there. Quite simply this was the best chilli I’ve ever tasted. Far too good to serve in any other way.
Remarkable how much a sprinkle of lime and a dollop of soured cream adds to the dish. Do you use the word dollop in Australia, New Zealand and America?
No month is complete without a simple steak dinner. It’s what I dreamed of as a boy and now measure out my happiness with.
A simple cake baked by T for a school baking festival. Wonderful balance between the flavours of the different elements.
How I plan to spend the winter. I travel a lot less in the darker months. I mostly work from home these days and once I’ve lit a fire I rarely move more than a few yards. Books, food, dog walks and music. Travel can wait until the days start to lengthen again.
Mind you. A family trip to York included breakfast at Bettys with David and Melissa made a very special treat.
And ice-cream in a York ice-cream parlour.
I wasn’t part of the big family trip to Harry Potter World. Jolly and I stayed at home and read a travel book by the fire. Before they set off I put in my biggest ever stint at the pancake pans. 2 pounds of flour, a dozen eggs made two large mixing bowls of batter and two pans going non stop for over half an hour. All our children with their partners filled the dining room with good cheer. It felt very quiet when they’d gone.
Re-reading Two Degrees West was like watching a re-run of either of the programmes. He had set himself the task of walking a line on a map and I couldn’t help asking, Why? To what purpose?
First things first. It is an impressive walk. If someone from down your street had done it then I think you’d be fully justified in popping a tenner in their charity collection tin.
The problem with a wide readership is that you either have to take your readers into the specialism and make them work, as Stephen Hawking did with A Brief History of Time or you water down your thesis. Crane goes for mass appeal (no doubt encouraged by the people at Penguin). Lacking true substance, it uses the exact same ingredients as Ready Steady Cook and Time Team. Manipulated tension and bonding to a central contrivance. We are asked accept that walking the 2nd meridian is important and difficult. In reality it is neither. He anticipates great problems and shares them. How can a man with a rucksack get across a large reservoir? How will he cross a motorway? The danger is fake and the outcome is almost bathos. He has pre-arranged with a boat club member to sail him across the Derwent Reservoir and there is a large farm tunnel under the M62. In terms of a recreational walk it is a tough old wander but in terms of serious geographical and physical challenge it is small potatoes.
When he can’t find anything to write about we get little guide-book histories that romanticise the past. Smugglers are loveable rogues who rob from the rich, grouse moors preserve species and ancient ways of life and people learn to know their place. He makes occasional reference to other writers all from the distant past (Byng, Leland, Cobbett, Fiennes). We get snippets of what they had to say but little is revealed. It feels like someone with a reading list claiming to be well-read.
We don’t learn very much about the history and geography of England and it certainly doesn’t capture a snapshot of the summer of 1997. The death of Diana gets a few mentions, he visits Longbridge and sees a production line at the, soon to be bought, robbed and shut down, Rover car plant. He gets a lot of help from his over-bearing father, various friends, including the runner Christopher Brasher (who gets introduced and largely ignored in the text), and especially the military.
Crane went on to find a certain celebrity as one of the presenters of “Coast”, a series which made a slow journey around the British Isles revealing what was there. It was more thinned down specialist stuff for the wider market with each episode divided between several presenters. Enjoyable, attractive television that we watch and then forget. It owed as much to television planners as it did to academics. It has gone the way of Ready Steady Cook and Time Team. Remembered fondly until you come to watch it again. 
Two Degrees West is not a bad book if you like a little well-mannered escapism. If you want well told anecdotes and incisive historical document it probably isn’t for you. If, however, your need is for detailed information on the dates, costs, materials, and method of building the network of the little concrete towers called triangulation points, then this is the book you’ve been waiting for.
There was a birthday last month. We gathered to celebrate T’s anniversary and a family gathering will often involve a trifle. It goes back to when the children were very small. Trifle was a special occasion treat for a while in the seventies. It’s gone out of fashion. People tried to fancy it up – often with the addition of alcohol – usually sherry – but this doesn’t help. Sponge, fruit, good custard and whipped cream are all delightful ingredients in themselves. They don’t need jazzing up. I’m not a fan of adding alcohol to food. There is a real skill in knowing which alcohol, how much and what blend. Most of us don’t have this skill. I don’t drink alcohol these days- no longer like the taste – not sure that I ever did. I never much cared for sherry which is the drink that has ruined many an inoffensive trifle. By all means have a glass of sherry with your trifle. It’s like the English ‘artisan’ (translates as a middle class person who has decided they can set themselves up as a food producer) cheesemakers putting apricots and cranberries into the cheese. No!!! A hundred times no! Serve the cheese with anything you like but don’t incorporate it into the cheese. And don’t put alcohol into trifles. If you don’t like trifles without alcohol have a different pudding. (My blog; my prejudices!)
This was intended to be a fancy checkerboard cake but I couldn’t find the icing bags needed to create the pattern so I thought I’d attempt my own record for the highest Victoria sponge. The photograph doesn’t have anything to allow you to gauge the scale but take it from me, that is a big plate it is standing on. It was T’s birthday and a fun cake seemed to be in order. I’ve also just had a new cooker installed and sponge cakes are an excellent way of getting a feel of cooking times (every cooker is different). The jam is my own home made plum jam. The cream is shop bought double cream whipped.
Having been carried away by the delights of sour dough I have been a little negligent with yeast based bread. The day I made this loaf was hot and humid. The dough had been double proved and the loaves into the oven within 3 hours. The same process can take twice as long in the winter. In my new found love of sourdough I’d forgotten how nice this bread can taste. And it is perfect for sandwiches. Many restaurants and tearooms, including some very good ones, use sliced bread for sandwiches because it is impossible to cut fresh bread thin enough. (Paul Hollywood) Some leave the proper loaves until they are a day old. With well baked home made bread you can cut the bread as thin or thick as you like as soon as it has cooled to room temperature.
Uncle Bernard (sadly no longer with us) loved what he called comfort food. We all have our own definitions of comfort food. Fish pie is the epitome of it to me. It fills the kitchen with warm, safe, nostalgic smell, it evokes kind memories, is the sort of food you can eat on a tray in front of the telly in your dressing gown, and it’s so dashed tasty. This is as simple as fish pie gets. Cod fillets, parsley sauce and good mashed potato. I love frozen peas with many things but they fit the comfort food label perfectly. I felt a whole lot better after a portion (or two) and I wasn’t even ill before I began.
We’ve had another wonderful late summer. The sun was a long time coming this year but it is in no rush to leave. We’ve had a lot of meals in the garden this September. I really enjoyed this bowl of chilli con carne made with three different sorts of beans and good cubes of beef cut from a piece of topside and stewed slowly. A few tortillas and a dollop or two of Turkish yoghurt; and lots of late season sun. Blooming marvellous!
A plate of happiness. This was my platter for the rugby league challenge cup final. In previous years I’ve enjoyed hotdogs or burgers or a packet of crisps (chips) or a plate of chocolate biscuits to enjoy this essential part of Simon’s sporting calendar. Fruit, bread, cheese, cold meats and a cracking match between Warrington and Hull with the Humberside team sealing it with a breath-taking match-saving tackle in the last minute. Perfection!
Figs were things we never saw as children. The occasional mention in Bible stories at school and a place in an oft-used figure of speech “don’t give a fig” meaning “don’t care” “not bothered”. I was a parent before I cut open my first fig and saw this delightful sight. As good to look at as to eat and a real treat to do either. Here served with a Yorkshire curd tart. The sweet tartness of the fig off setting the creamy stodge (not often used as a compliment but very much so in this case) of the tart.
The bread is mine but everything else is from the deli counter. Do they do Scotch eggs in other parts of the world? Some people have passed unkind comments on the Scottish diet and perhaps this way of serving the humble egg says a great deal about Hibernian attitudes to food. Take a perfectly innocent egg and give it a thick jacket of sausage meat, roll this in breadcrumbs and deep fry it! If you make these yourself with good quality sausage meat they are wonderful. Occasionally you can buy a good one. More often than not they are a victory of hope over expectation.
Can’t remember whether this was breakfast of tea. The cups of coffee suggest it was the first meal of the day. Nice to see two coffee pots, a fresh pineapple and a jar of home made chutney in the background. I’m less impressed with the packet of pre-sliced cheese.
Comfort food part two. Spaghetti Bolognese as taught to us by our (English) mums. This was the first dish we (as a nation) learned when pasta first became readily available (in blue sugar paper packages in the early 60s) We’ve adapted it slightly and serve it with good Parmesan cheese these days, but it is otherwise unchanged from the way mother served it to a hungry family of nine.
I’ve featured quite a few cooked breakfasts in these blogs over the years. You are actually far more likely to find this on the Johnson breakfast table. I love fruit however it comes, and can think of no better accompaniment than yoghurt.
The simplest and perhaps the tastiest of the pasta dishes. Spaghetti Carbonara. Ten minutes well spent of anybody’s time. Beaten eggs added at the last minute and cooked in the residual heat of the pasta and sauce as it is stirred to thicken.
These innocent looking little treats should come with a health warning. Any actor needing to bulk up for a part would manage it in a month on croissants. They look light and fluffy, are oh so easy to eat, and the weight just piles on. A treat is a treat though. They are far too good to cut out all together. Impossible to manage on just one!
Home made vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries.
A writer’s lunch. A whole Camembert, a small French loaf and a few grapes.
In between jobs that have to be done I’m trying to find a couple of hours a day to practice the array of musical instruments I have surrounded myself with. In the foreground a fish finger sandwich. In the background, Worcestershire sauce, ukulele tutor, selection of picks and a harmonica.
Home made scones with my own gooseberry and apricot jams. These scones are my effort. I usually leave it to the current Mrs J and she does a much better job.
Not a vintage year for produce but we had plenty of broad beans, gooseberries, black and white currants, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers.
Home grown tomatoes (and chilli) on toast with bacon.
My snack tray for the Australian Rugby League Grand final. Cronulla just beating Melbourne while I eat crisps, mini salamis and apples.
No month is complete without steak. Yellow fat is almost always a sign of quality beef. This tasted superb.
Good mushrooms on good toast. What more do you want?
The greatest snack food of them all. Toasted cheese!
When we were young and courting I made steak with corn cobs and baked potato for T on her birthday. The tradition was in need of revival. 35 years on it is still just about my favourite meal.
Home made chicken soup.
Rack of lamb.
Ernest Hemingway’s favourite breakfast. Eggs sunny side up with fried potatoes.
Lime Street station is a big glass curve over a dozen stone arches with an old inter-city sign giving the impression that the railways, round here, still belong to the people. Behind the station towers the gothic pile of part of John Moores University and across the road is St Georges Hall. You’re in Liverpool la! These are proper buildings. There isn’t anywhere in England, outside London, with such an array of world class buildings. If you’ve been reading the publicity from the anti-Liverpool brigade (and there is one) you wouldn’t be expecting this, or maybe you’d think it was one glorious square with miles of squalor all around. No this is Liverpool. One of the great cities, not just of Britain, but of the world.
It doesn’t feel like Manchester or Leeds or Birmingham. If anywhere, and you ignore the lack of towering skyscrapers, it feels more like New York than another British city. There’s a working class grandeur to the place. This is a city built from the streets upwards. It’s a city of much greatness, many celebrities in the true sense of the word and huge success but the real heroes of Liverpool are the people you pass in the streets. This is a town where to be ordinary is to be extraordinary and often celebrated as such.
It has suffered. It has suffered terribly. Every powerhouse town and city that generated the wealth of the nation, put it in a place of greatness on the world map, has been sucked dry and left to fend for itself. If you were looking for a rational explanation for the irrational vote the British people made to leave the European Community, it is one rooted in the dissatisfaction of the working class communities that unloaded the ships, made the steel, dug the coal, wove the cloth and turned the lathes of the factories, mills, mines and docks. One by one their industries were closed down and nothing was put in their place. Nothing of note. A sweatshop distribution warehouse in the heart of a mining community where conditions are comparable (by a House of Commons committee) with a Victorian workhouse, a call centre in the heart of Merseyside where the lack of stimulation in your work is matched by the lack of pound notes in your wage packet. The working people saw London and the South East, and the educated bastards getting richer from Europe but they saw very little of it themselves. The vote may have been a case of ‘if we’re not getting it then neither are you’ spite; but it is understandable under these terms.
The Adelphi seems as old and grand as Liverpool. Inside its a Britannia hotel. This means that has seen better days. Britannia seem to be buying large hotels that had once sparkled but have become the end destination of cheap coach holidays. Hotels where the temptation is to stack your plate high at the self-serve buffets before realising that you’ve got to eat it. The chain then does its best to raise the standard while being shackled by its own budget prices. There is a shabby grandeur to the place that I like. I also like the courteous staff who let me drop off my bag, point me towards the spa and gymnasium (spa for me) and generally make my stay as nice as they can.
It’s standing room only down at the conference centre as shadow chancellor John McDonnell holds forth on the economy and how he’d borrow to invest in a huge programme of council house building. The press have spent a year rubbishing every aspect of the current Labour leadership but I’ve yet to find anyone who disagrees strongly with any of their policies. There is a huge lack of affordable housing in the country. The rental sector has been hijacked by corporate capital and has become very expensive. House prices are now way out of the range of anybody on a standard income and a previous government sold off the bulk of the council houses at below market rates. The plan to build half a million new houses for long term rent from local authorities smacks of common sense to many but of socialism gone mad to the press. By socialism gone mad they mean it harks back to the policies of the Attlee government from after the second world war. They built hundreds of thousands of council houses and gave millions of people their first decent place to live at a fair rent. Houses with bathrooms and gardens for the families of those who had fought the war. The Attlee government also nationalised the railways and coal mines and gave workers in those industries their first security of employment as well as the people of Britain ownership of these vital national assets. And of course they gave us the National Health Service where every citizen could receive first class medical treatment regardless of their ability to pay. I like John McDonnell. He isn’t the usual professional PR trained politician who sounds good and sways with the wind of public opinion. He has a few principles and he isn’t afraid to show them.
He’s received surprisingly well and the journalists outside the hall struggle to pooh pooh what he has said. I wander off through the conference complex until I find the large room where education is on the agenda. My memory of fringe meetings is of smoke (my last time at conference was in the late seventies when everybody smoked) and bustle and voices raised in indignant and righteous grievance. It wasn’t like that here. A union official was chairing a debate on aid to overseas education budget. Guest speakers held forth to a sleepy bunch widely dispersed around the tables of a big room. Among the speakers was Stephen Twigg. I hadn’t seen him since election night in 1997 when, as part of Tony Blair’s landslide victory, he defeated the then loathed Tory heir apparent, Michael Portillo in what became known as the Portillo moment. People asked each other if they stayed up for Portillo, meaning, were they still watching TV as his result was announced at about 2.30 a.m.. This particular poll didn’t only see the end of Portillo’s political career but also announced the end of 18 years of Conservative rule. Twigg had been a fresh faced, smiling victor that night while the seasoned politician behind him looked greasy and woebegone. Time has played them differently. Portillo has re-invented himself as the face of travel programmes on British television, while Twigg looked far older than the 19 years that time had allotted. The fresh faced hopefulness of 1997 had disappeared. His appearance wasn’t a good advert for a career in Westminster and he didn’t have very much to say about overseas education.
