Day 251: Food For Thought

Tags

blogging, Dorothy L Sayers, drafting, Fortunes of Whitby, kippers, Oscar Wilde, strawberry jam, strawberry sponge cake, Taylor and Colledge, Tesco, William Blake

Thinking Aloud and Chewing Things Over

I have a great fancy for kippers. PC Eagles and Sergeant Lumley* are tucking into them while pursuing their quarry across London. I like books with food in them and Dorothy L Sayers can put on a decent spread when she puts her mind to it. I’m incredibly auto suggestive. Once I’ve got the idea of kippers in my mind, it sticks. There is only one way out of dilemma number one of the weekend.

There is a problem though. A good kipper is one of the finest eating experiences that it is possible to have. Good kippers are hard to come by and anything that isn’t a good kipper tends to fall a long way short of the ideal. In my experience the place to go is Fortunes in Whitby. I can almost guarantee that even a dedicated hater of kippers would like these. They are cured in the most traditional of ways and are superb.

If I want kippers this weekend, I have to make do with the local Tesco, and that is a thing I am loathe to do. But the craving is strong. She looks across from her important conversation with the women behind the delicatessen. “Do ye want serving?”

“Can I have a couple of kippers please?”

“Whole ones?”

“Yes please.”

There are kippers laid out on the display. They look fine. She goes to her fridge and seems to be shielding her selection with her back. When I get them home they are very much the kippers you wouldn’t put on display. Is there anything pleasant about that shop? I should have insisted on the ones I wanted, but to do so would have been to have pointed out her shortcomings as a purveyor of food. I suppose that is what I am doing here.

I grill them and serve them with brown bread and butter. They are alright. I hadn’t had a weeklong craving that was really looking for an “alright” experience. Note to self. Use Tesco if you have to. But, only if you really have to. The difference between what I got and what I would have got if I’d driven through the night to Whitby would have been worth the drive. And I’ve never been scowled at by the staff at Fortunes.

My week has been a funny one. Reading, writing, feeding (obviously) and long, long walks with Jolly as I try to come to grips with something that has grown from a quandary to a dilemma in the space of a few days. The declared aim of the blog is to produce a post every day for a year. The purpose of this is to demonstrate (to myself) the discipline to tie myself to the desk and work, and (hopefully) to improve as a writer by the simple process of practice. It would be both vainglorious and inaccurate (two things I would like to think I am largely without) to say that I have achieved my aims. I haven’t. If the target is 365 posts and I’ve only done 250 then, clearly, I have fallen some way short. I’d like to think I have improved but am still so far from where I’d like to be that this ambition can also be marked unfulfilled.

Here-in lies the rub. I may or may not be improving but I am certainly becoming more aware of where I need to improve. I need to draft. My journey around Scotland, Ireland and Wales is just beginning the process of redrafting (and very little of the original has survived from the first few chapters). The blog is very much what can be churned out in the couple of hours of each day that I have dedicated to it. My dilemma is whether or not I am still happy to have un-drafted work published. I know that fellow bloggers are aware that most of what we post is not polished to the nth degree and the feed back I have had has been very supportive.

I’ve seriously considered moving on to producing a single, polished piece each week. There are plusses and minuses. Doing the blog the way I am doing it has given me a complete commentary of a bicycle journey I made a couple of years ago and the start of an account of one I made nearly thirty years ago. Without doing it this way, the chances are high, that I would never have written these. I want (and those close to me want as well) for me to finish my 1987 tour diary. I’ve sub-titled this piece thinking aloud, but in reality most of the thinking has been done on dog walks taken either as a two or a three. I’ve concluded that I do need to move my writing into the back shed and withdraw from blogging for a while to allow me to draft, re-draft and better draft. (The word ‘quite’ is a painful one to bear). But first I’m going to complete the task I began. I’m going to return to Scotland tomorrow and if I finish that before the end of August then I’ve been researching the history and urban geography of 26 towns in the East Midlands to be my Alphabet of towns that sometimes get over-looked. The ‘last post’ will sound on August 31st. (Forgive the indulgence of blogging about a blog. The dilemma has weighed heavy on me for a number of days now.)

When facing a dilemma I find it a very good idea to eat cake. There are good strawberries to be had at the moment and on Sunday night we decide that making a sponge cake to go with them is too easy a task not to do. It’s an exercise in speed so the sponge is made using the all in one method. 6oz self raising flour, 6 oz caster sugar, 6 oz soft margarine and 3 eggs are beaten together with a generous dribble of Taylor and Colledge organic vanilla bean paste. (Who says we don’t do product placement?) Sometimes it needs a drop of milk to take it to the consistency that feels right (experience is the best judge of this) and sometimes it doesn’t. Into two greased and lined sandwich tins and into the oven at 160c for twenty minutes (until the sponge bounces back to a gentle prod).

Once it has cooled it gets almost half a jar of homemade strawberry jam and a generous layer of whipped cream and some quartered strawberries. More cream on the top and some of the better looking fruit (is there an ugly strawberry?) and tea is served. I have two slices and sneak a third at bedtime.

The cream came in very useful in knocking some peppers, chilli, onion, cherry tomatoes, garlic and the last of the smoked salmon into a spaghetti dish to rank with the best. There is a lot of thick cream in this sauce and it tasted wonderful.

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Pasta always has the advantage of an easy to re-heat lunch for the following day. I come from a big family. I always make too much. You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. I think William Blake said that. Nothing succeeds like Excess. Oscar Wilde said that!

I’m supposed to be doing “No Meat in May”. I’ve been very good on resolutions recently. But, I’ve been in a funny mood all week. The sort of mood that would make a drinker seek out a cold one or a glass of red. I don’t have that option. At times like this I have ‘buffer zone’ foods. Things I don’t always allow myself but which can feel like a great big treat when I’m a bit down. I’m in Buxton for the May Day Fair on bank holiday Monday. It’s a chance to see my long lost cousin for the second time in a month (the second time in a lifetime as well. I didn’t know I had this cousin until this year and I’m delighted to have found such a nice cousin). She is busy on her WI stall for much of the day so I get myself a rather good breakfast from a local café.

On Wednesday I realise that the breakfast wasn’t a lapse but a falling off the horse. I make myself a steak sandwich and thoroughly enjoy it. I add mustard and nothing else to what you see above.

And when Charlie comes round for tea on Thursday we have a yearning for slices of cold ham. (By we I mean Charlie and I. T has kept to the No Meat in May diet).

The highpoint of the week is seeing good rhubarb in Aldi for very little money and making a rhubarb crumble for the three of us. There is an important question as to which is the best crumble. Apple, gooseberry, rhubarb, lots of others. The answer is simple. It is which ever one you are eating at the time. The crumble is one of the things that makes certain that even difficult weeks are enjoyable.

 

*Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers

 

 

Day 245: D’Ye Ken John Peel?

Tags

Cycle tour of England, Evelyn Waugh, fox hunting, John Peel Huntsman, Kirby Moor, Melvyn Bragg, Oscar Wilde, the lake district, Tolstoy, Troutbeck, William Wordsworth

A Journey into Scotland … Part 12

Along the A66 from Threlkeld is one of the most redolent place names in the whole of lakeland: Troutbeck. In the early seventies a young Melvyn Bragg did a BBC piece on the village and harped heavily on its links with legendary huntsman, John Peel. My mother was at her withering best in her condemnation of the aspirant fount of arts and culture, and native of Cumbria. “He may have a bouffant hairpiece and trouble with his adenoids, but he doesn’t know his lake district.” Poor old Melvyn was walking up a valley a few miles to the north east of Ambleside. He was in the wrong Troutbeck.

I am a huge admirer of Melvyn Bragg but I cannot see him on the telly or listen to him on the wireless without hearing my mother’s rebuke. She did enjoy giving  out a bloody nose and gained extra relish if the object of her verbal punches was an educated fellow. She loved learning but she wasn’t always so enamoured of the learned. She had a fine mind and a legitimate resentment of those who had been spoon fed the education she herself was denied.

Poor Melvyn isn’t the only one. There are a couple of inns in the other place that advertise a John Peel feature or two in order to bring in the trippers. Funny how hunting associations can capture the imagination of tourists. A horn, a red coat (pink for pedants), a stirrup cup, a Melton Mowbray pork pie. So few people hunt, so many find it the most disagreeable of pastimes. The few huntsmen, as in professionals, I have known are not the loveliest of people to look at. The rosy glow of their cheeks is seldom purely induced by the bracing morning air and a gallop over the fields of England. The stirrup cup has its part to play as does an air of righteous indignation.

Literature is no stranger to running with the pack and there is some fine writing given over to “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Oscar Wilde is in the minority. Most pens have been sharpened in favour of this countryside pursuit.

Tolstoy breaks away from the political background and the familial difficulties in War and Peace to give us a couple of the greatest hunting scenes. Though hunting in this book is often a device to bring out discord. Nicolai hopes to prove his manhood by bringing down a wolf. His borzoi almost achieves it but before the kill other dogs, belonging to rivals, appear and finish the wolf off and take the glory. The events lead into some of the most lyrical scenes in the book; scenes where the great writer introduced the ‘ordinary people’ of Russia as subjects of great literature. Meanwhile back in the Lake District, William Wordsworth was doing the same thing. Not many heroic odes about the victories over Napoleon in Wordsworth’s complete works. His heroes are leech gatherers, shepherds and in more than one instant; huntsmen.

His most famous is old Simon Lee who rode the hounds in Cardigan and made the valleys echo with his halloo, but who has now been left unlooked after by the lord he served and scratches out a bare and impoverished living, “the poorest of the poor”, from a scrap of unproductive land. One day while walking near, the poet comes across the once hail and hearty huntsman cutting feebly at a root with a mattock. Offering assistance, the narrator cuts the root with a single blow. The old huntsman’s gratitude brings tears to the eyes.

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.

It is the same with me. I can cope with unkindness quite well and absorb it as I witness the petty cruelties of the world but little unlooked for acts of kindness are liable to make me cry.

Photo credit The Daily Telegraph

Evelyn Waugh finds room for hunting scenes in both Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, in which a death in the hunt is the driving point of the storyline. And it isn’t the death of the fox.

It perhaps isn’t surprising that children’s literature, with its great legacy of pony books should be full of fox hunting. K M Peyton’s Flambards series are centred in the world of fox hunting and whole chapters are given over to the intricacies of the chase. The faults of the sport are brushed aside against the sheer adrenalin filled, blood vessel bursting energy of the chase. The Belstone Fox leads the reader to see it all from the perspective of the prey in order to open out discursive skills and liberal attitudes in the young.

None comes close to matching the place of John Peel though as the nation’s favourite huntsman. There seems nothing particularly of note about Peel. He wasn’t a particularly successful huntsman. He rode to his own pack of hounds until he found himself in considerable debt. He was known to drink himself blind after the event which may or may not have contributed to his financial problems. He was dedicated to the sport and even when horseless would join in the pursuit on foot. Known in Westmoreland as “Chasing the Ace”.

The song that made him famous was taught to us at junior school. A good galloping rhythm always helped and a little improvised syncopation; thirty unbroken male voices thundering for the leaps. We had no real idea what we were singing about but we liked the song. It was written during his lifetime. The tune is stolen from a Scottish folk tune and the Cumbrian dialect words show just how close this part of the north of England is to the Scottish border. D’ye ken John Peel? is dialect for Do you know John Peel?. We thought we were singing Dear Ken John Peel. The double barrelled forename was relatively unknown to us back then. We didn’t have so many Candice-Maries and Sharon Louise’s in those days. We thought of him as a sort of English John Paul Jones.

From Troutbeck I turn off the busy dual carriageway and find the quiet backroad I’d been looking for. It is to all intents and purposes the border of the lake district. To my left the vast bulk of the less impressive side of Blencathra rises and beyond that you can make out the rounded peak of Skiddaw. To my right the rough pasturage and rolling ground of Westmoreland stretch out towards the distant Pennine chain. This is true hunting countryside. Just over the brow is Greystoke, real place but fictional home to Tarzan himself. This is my kind of beauty. Bleak, Octoberish, browns and greys and lonesome. I see rabbits and a couple of hare. I see more ravens than I have ever seen before. They are almost spooky sentinels. If I am unsure of what they are by sight where distance on such a huge landscape can make telling size tricky, their voices give them away, croaking the fateful entrance of Simon into the valley.

The Troutbeck near Ambleside is every bit as beautiful as this one; perhaps more so. It certainly draws in more visitors and many a flagon of ale has been pulled from a pump with a huntsman on. This is countryside to gallop a horse in. This is more wild and free. There’s a little less fell and a whole lot more sky. At the end of this stretch is Caldbeck where the famous huntsman lies buried. Anti blood sorts protestors desecrated the grave in the 1970s. Hunting has now been banned. Occasionally a strange alliance of misshapen, squawky people decend on the capital to say that hunting is actually good for foxes and that townsfolk don’t understand the true ways of the country. The farmer who lived near us as children used to cry as he saw crates of gormless, hand fed pheasants released onto Kirby Moor just so they could be shot by huntsmen; most of whom donned their tweeds and deer stalker hats and came up from their nice houses in Barrow and Lancaster and Preston in order to blast them out of the sky.

I’ve been outside the argument for quite a while. We used to play John Peel as a march in the town brass band. It doesn’t take many notes to start the blood stirring. It’s a good tune.

Day 181: It’s Not Dear If You Like It

Tags

Aldi, goose, goose liver paté, Morrison's breakfast, Oscar Wilde, toasted cheese, venison stew, Vickers shipyard

Venison Stew, Roast Goose: the Game of Shopping at Aldi

My father worked at Vickers in Barrow during the sixties. It wasn’t a place for fancy gourmand lifestyles. Lunch was potted meat sandwiches wrapped in a tidy greaseproof paper packet, tea was shepherd’s pie. Friday might mean fish and chips and a pint or two of Hartley’s XB at the Old Friends.

But there was one man in the works for whom Friday was too special a day to celebrate down the pub. Friday meant a jaunt to the game merchant and would often mean a roast pheasant, a pigeon pie or a jugged hare. One day the shipbuilders are discussing their plans for the weekend and it emerged that our man had got a haunch of venison.

“Venison!” exclaimed one, “But, isn’t that rather expensive?”

Our man nodded sagely and said some of the wisest words I’ve heard. “It isn’t expensive if you like it.”

The story gets re-told and the obvious pun is put in place which gave us a long running family joke and gives me the title of today’s post.

“Venison, that’s very dear!”

“It’s not dear if you like it!”

It’s another angle on the much quoted line about knowing the difference between price and value. My father was also rather fond of this one and was able to apply it, with great accuracy, well beyond its original distinction between cynic and sentimentalist.

I put the whole quotation in as the kernel is so often taken from the nut that it’s nice to see them all together.

“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”

From Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde

I know the market price of venison. Aldi were selling it for less than £6 a kilo during the winter and it has been waiting in the freezer next to a £10 goose. Lent is a couple of weeks away and, as I don’t eat meat during the fast, I have to start clearing out the cold cupboards.

There is little I like more than venison stew. It is as easy to make as a beef stew, has a little more flavour and the meat is so tender that it is a pleasure to savour. No melting on the tongue metaphors in this post. It isn’t how I eat.

It takes up most of the first part of the week and after dining out of restaurant fryers rather more than I would like last week, it is good, wholesome, tasty food. To quote Nephew Fred from Dickens’ Christmas Carol

 “I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say God bless it!”

I need good food this week and venison stew provides at least three good meals worth. There is something delightfully old fashioned about enjoying what is left over the next day and the day after.

On day one it is a simple stew served with potatoes and green beans.

One day two we add some dumplings and the treat becomes a feast.

Leeks are the perfect winter vegetable. Dumplings must be a contender for the food that adds the most to a meal for the least amount of effort.

On the third day I finish off the stew free from the distraction of vegetables. I’m sure the stew, enjoyed by toad when selling his (someone else’s) horse in Wind in the Willows, must have tasted a bit like this.

There are some concessions to lax eating. I spend a lot of time working in my office this week and the office come equipped with a grill. So not only do I finally re-start my research on children’s literature, but I also eat an awful lot of toasted cheese. I have it my favourite way; grated cheddar on shop bought sliced bread. I have missed it. Jolly comes to the office with me and sits expectantly. She gets rewarded with the crusts and a decent walk for every ten pages of notes.

On Thursday the week has its highlight. I get to spend the morning with Charlie. His school’s half term is a week behind everyone else’s. We go for a swim that would have been better if the eight pensioners, we were sharing the pool with, hadn’t found a way of completely gridlocking it. You have the choice of blindly swimming through them without giving a chuff or being polite and letting other people go first. Polite people come last in Derbyshire pools.

A haircut and a long chat over a Morrison’s breakfast brought is up to date with how we plan to spend the next few months. We discuss education, sport, writing projects and travel. And then we talk about getting a ball and kicking tee and taking advantage of the sports fields just behind his house.

The second half of the week revolves around a goose.

The liver is chopped small, fried with finely chopped onion in plenty of butter and later orange juice and then blended with more melted butter, cream and pepper and poured into a mini mixing bowl where it is topped with slices of orange and a little more melted butter to seal.

Goose is a fatty bird. I collect this for future roast potatoes. I’m not over impressed with roasting the bird whole. It doesn’t carve well in this way. I feel best results can be obtained by jointing the bird. The carcass provides plenty of stock and a delicious broth. I had thought of curing one of the breasts in the style that was very popular with the Italian Jewish population in the nineteenth century. In the end I pan fry one breast to be served with potatoes and ratatouille. This counteracts the fattiness very nicely. The goose is delicious but the ratatouille is nicer.

  

The soup is simple. Onion, carrot and celery sweated in a pan and then add two pints of goose stock and a goodly handful of dried peas, lentils and pearl barley. It cooks away quietly for the rest of the afternoon and is perfect with or without bread at supper time. 

The other breast becomes a spicy Indian dish to celebrate Friday. Goose on Friday. That’s rather expensive isn’t it?

It’s not dear if you like it.