Not so Much Soup as Miracle Cure

With Sternest Critic somewhat poorly over the weekend Sunday lunch was made with his delicate stomach in mind. Chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin; the Chinese swear by ginger for the upset tum; and noodles are one of the great comfort foods. Thus our lunch was chosen for its healing qualities as much as culinary.

That said, the stock was delicious, simmered for two hours with the pan packed with chicken joints, veg, ginger, star anise and dried chilli, the veg including two whole garlic bulbs (not cloves, bulbs - some of the last of our home grown) to try to purge the blood, or something. It wasn't just him comforted with the dish. Making stock is therapeutic for me. It can be rushed - grating the veg is one way to push things along - but if time allows shouldn't be.

Taking time means the scum from the meat can be cleared before the veg etc are added. Do that and much of the fat is removed too. A clear and flavoursome stock is a mini-joy.

More than any other cuisine that I have come across, Spanish food delights in the consome (still can't do accents). It makes a great light starter before their heavy main courses and even salads that tend to be far chunkier than we are used to. We went for the heavy and the light in one dish, the stock almost a background to a load of noodles, though as they are bland and the stock was pretty powerful, we lost nothing in terms of taste by it. And the boy was fit enough to face roast chicken in the evening, and go to school today.

It was economic too, the chicken - one thigh and two drumsticks cost £1.50 (it wasn't exactly a consome in the end, as I tried the meat and it had enough flavour to make it worthy of inclusion); the veg - three carrots, one onion, two garlic bulbs, chunk of ginger, three sticks of celery - maybe £1.25; and the three nests of fine noodles 40p. Allowing a generous 25p for dried chilli, two star anise and half a dozen peppercorns makes a total for a substantial dish and a miracle cure of £3.40.

A Whole Ham for the Hambone?

Though Ruth said I was being foolish to do so, I went early to Aldi to buy - on the day they were to be in store - one of their Serrano hams advertised at £49.99 with knife, stand and sharpening steel. For some reason (it being sold cheaper on the internet apparently) it was actually £39.99. Not surprisingly perhaps the one I got at 8:30 was the last then in stock, the store having opened at 8:00.

The ham weighs 6.5kg, so quite a bit to go at over the Christmas break. It will make life easy when we have friends and neighbours (who generally are friends anyway) over. I'm looking forward to the meat, but having a hambone with which to make stock is a massive bonus. For the next few days I'll be thinking of recipes for the scraps and the mis-shapes too as we try to cut see-through slices. Omelette, pizza, risotto, tiny cubes in paella...

As per a previous post, however, the simplicity of the thing appeals hugely too. Any of us fancying a snack or a quick starter will be able - with a bit of practice - to dig in. It does take practice, as we found pre-Joe when I brought a whole cured ham back from France, nestled among the wine that filled the boot at the end of every continental business trip by car. We had no long thin knife then, and so every other slice was too thick, chewed determinedly or cut up and used in stews etc. 

Cooking with the stuff is not, though, the real point of it. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity again: ham, bread, wine, salad, talk. And more ham. That's the point.

Why Turkey?

Like Santa Claus I have been making my Christmas list, though mine is concerned with stuff I need to get for our family celebrations. Top of that list is a turkey crown. Not a whole turkey, and certainly not a giant turkey that needs to have its legs removed if it is to fit in the oven (Pilkington family in Gorleston circa 1972). I go for a crown as we don't like turkey enough to face the revisits for a whole week after the big day. So why do I then buy turkey at all?

Tradition comes into it of course. We had turkey as kids, so it wouldn't feel like Christmas without it. But goose is far more traditional in the historic sense (happily, with two of my magazine articles currently in print on that topic, ker and indeed ching). In the USA a big ham is the done thing, turkey there being reserved for Thanksgiving (for those creeps trying to make it a British event, drop it please).

Maybe as happened with the move from goose in the late 19th century we will evolve away from turkey. We in this household also tend to have a small sirloin joint, done so the centre is still red raw. Other foods have come in as rather oxymoronic new traditions during my lifetime: panetone, panforte, and Stollen cake to name but three.

Happy those like us who don't have to endure real austerity at Christmas. But to go full circle, a whole turkey can be an austerity boon: sarnies, broth, curry, risotto, gratin, more sarnies, fricassee, stir fry, rissoles (so much nicer if called by another name - turkey cakes perhaps), soup... A freezer full of saved meat means it doesn't have to be an endurance course but can be spread over months. Almost makes me want to buy a big bird. Almost.

What's in a Name?

In a previous post I wrote about how cheese and onions, a favourite of my parents (when money was tight I now guess), would have been more popular with foodies if it went by a fancier name. The same thing occurred to me last night when we had a variation on steak and onions.

Good braising steak (from the excellent Stuart and Caroline Lawson of Cockerham) was simmered in a low oven for three hours, the accompanying onions cooking down to a caramelly jam. The whole mushrooms (stalks removed) on top added to the ham stock juices to make, when thickened with cornflour an hour before the finish, something that deserved to be mopped up with bread and was. The stovies served with it added another savoury layer. 

It was delicious, the flavour deep and brown and sweet. But how many foodies would seek out or cook something so simple, just three principal ingredients? In France, where their peasant cooking is still the basis for many meals, the majority would. Here, not many, though if it had been called Boeuf Lyonnaise (the inhabitants of that fine city love their onions) maybe a few more. 

We have happily gone beyond our monomania about French cuisine, and now depending on the way the wind blows tend to bow before Spanish, Mexican, Morrocan, Egyptian, Japanese...  It's great to bring in new dishes and ingredients, but sad if yet again we denigrate British classics. Which do not, however, include Brown Windsor Soup or Coronation Chicken. 

Feast, Cost and Value

I try to shop wisely, which is not necessarily to say cheaply. If cheap means tasteless, or past its best, or downright nasty, it's a waste of money. Last week I bought a 3kg ham for £12.50, quite an outlay but an absolute bargain:

Sunday lunch - the ham simmered with vegetables and herbs, plenty of thick slices in leek and cheese sauce.
Monday to Wednesday - an equally thick slice or two at breakfast for my son, who likes nothing better.
Monday lunch - ham in my sandwich.
Monday evening - some of the stock and about 250g of cubed meat used in a main course minestrone.
Tuesday lunch - a slice for my lunch with some cheese and pickles.
Tuesday evening - turkey salmi made with more of the stock enriched with Parmesan.

There is still enough for a sandwich this lunchtime and some end bits and scraps that will be added to a salad of some sort, or maybe saved to go on one of our Thursday pizzas, and more than enough stock for another soup.

The initial cooking took 160 minutes, actually more as I brought the ham to the simmer slowly and skimmed off the scum, so it was an investment in time. But the flavours that seeped into the meat made it easy to face so many times; such stock is a boon for any cook; and subsequent uses meant just minutes of prep, if that.

I saw an ad for KFC the other night. Family Feast (TM!) - 10 bits of sad chicken, various 'sides' that largely seemed to consist of the vaguely named 'fries' (are they potato or corn starch?), plus a few beans and some cobettes (what a vile word), and a bottle of fizzy drink. It cost significantly more than that ham.

Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity

I am re-reading Walden. Not a Scandinavian bloodfest (though like many my age I always suspected something deeply wrong about the Muppet Swedish chef) but Thoreau's account of and musings on his time spent in a cabin a mile or so away from his home-town.

Something in that struck a particular chord with me - his calculations about the food he grew and ate. As mentioned some time back in this blog, I am keeping a record of expenditure on and estimated value of food grown in our garden and allotment. Thoreau's was calculated to the nearest half cent, somewhat improbably. But what hit home from that information was how simply he lived - growing rye, potatoes, a little beet and so on, plus catching the occasional 'mess' of fish in Walden Pond, and a dish of purslane picked from the land on which he was squatting.

His calculations were as much concerned with how little time it took to earn or through his own labour to grow enough to live on, happy as he was to survive on a basic diet. The time left allowed him to think.

The title of this post is perhaps the most famous quotation from his book, a line I read last night that immediately made me think of the exact opposite that so many will be living through this Christmas.

We won't be having an austere Christmas in any sense, but I do intend to keep things simple. The traditional British turkey assault course on Christmas Day naturally, but otherwise keeping to the sufficient and unadulterated: an air dried ham that can be picked at for weeks (Aldi advertising a Serrano ham for £49.99 I think) kept in the cold of our conservatory; a cliche but still wonderful, Stilton and Port of an evening to stretch the time and conversation at the dinner table; my own bread; plenty of fruit; simple salads quickly made.

Thoreau was most contented when alone, feeling solitude facilitated his thinking. I love the company of my family and our friends (real friends, not FaceBook ones or similarly vague acquaintances). Talk - notoriously cheap I'm glad to say - with them over the table is a real luxury, and unlike Thoreau I feel such company engenders thought, which just as it was for him is another luxury for me.