A Sprout is Not Just for Christmas

On my hobby horse of food and fashion again. When was the last time you saw the words 'Brussels sprouts' in a restaurant review, or 'swede'? Parsley root (which used to be called simply Hamburg parsley until it became cheffy) perhaps, or pak choi; salsify and scorzonera on occasion. But not those humblest and most flavoursome of veg. The trouble is that with the swede there is not much to do with it beyond the default mash with butter (with or without carrots) and maybe a sprinkle of herbs; and the sprout has such a powerful flavour that it needs something robust as the core of the meal or it will dominate the plate. As lamb shanks are now in the foodie world snobbishly relegated to mere Gastro Pub fodder robust is not too frequently encountered in reviews either.

We had swede and sprouts with the beery beef and mushroom pie last night. They held their own, went well together and with the pie, and made it feel balanced somehow. Stuff fashion.

I like Gastro Pubs btw, the nearest thing we have to a proper bistro culture here; some of what pass for bistros in Britain tending to be so far up themselves they can see out through their own mouths. And you can usually get decent beer in GPs, which totally illogically you can't very often in a brasserie in the UK. The word means brewery. The otherwise brilliant Paul Heathcote had here in Preston what was called for a time a brasserie: the beers were (a few years back but think this is right) Heineken, Budweiser, and maybe Amstel. If his wine list had consisted of Bull's Blood, Liebfraumilch, and Mateus Rose he would have been ridiculed (except by someone who thought it was post-Modernist irony).

Ah! Sugar Sugar

Sugar, especially white sugar, has become one of the pariahs of contemporary food. We have various plant extracts and chemical substitutes offered in place of it; warnings about the damage it does to our teeth and our overall health; chefs finding ways to avoid it. This is very different from the way cooks a few centuries ago looked upon what was then a luxury item. And to me it seems as with so much in life moderation is the key rather than abstinence; and as a natural product I have more confidence in sugar than most alternatives, just as I prefer butter to processed spreads.

This thought came from reading Gervase Markham. I have doubts about his real culinary knowledge. Some of his pronouncements don't make much sense, but he like Elinor Fettiplace regularly used sugar as a spice, to perk up sauces, gravies, to prettify dishes and to correct seasoning generally. It remains a valid and cheap way of improving flavour - sweet after all is one of the basic tastes. Thus a spoon of sugar in a simple spaghetti sauce rounds it out, bringing the flavour of tomatoes to the fore. It doesn't hurt in many beefy or porky stews either.

I'm not advocating sugar butties or loading the stuff into everything as old Gervase seemed to wish, but it is not something we can afford to consign to the outer reaches because of fashion and our fears about obesity.

Do Flavours Become Old?

My bedtime reading currently is Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book. Elizabethan and Jacobean recipes are set out in the original flexible spelling, then explained and commented on by the erudite Hilary Spurling. The seasonality of cooking is one thing that hits you - Mrs Spurling set it out by month - but also the flavours that the cook in those times most leaned on, some of which we use very little today.

Is this a matter of fashion, availability, or does taste evolve in some way perhaps to keep pace with technological change - the fridge and freezer, rapid transport - and the 'new' ingredients that become available?

I like to think I use a wide palette of spices and other flavour enhancers, but some things that were central to old Elinor's culinary world are pretty alien to mine - I wonder who nowadays really uses the cloves they buy, for example? Even in bread sauce I would use nutmeg in place of the overpowering clove. But at least I have a little bottleful in my cupboard whereas rosewater  is absent - I  had a bottle years ago and think it disappeared through a temporal warp vortex, as one day it was gone though I'd hardly used a drop. Rosewater for the Jacobean cook was the stock-cube of today's, which says a great deal about our loss of subtlety.

A myth should be debunked here: spices were probably not then used much if at all to mask meats etc going off, they were far too expensive to waste thus, and those with the money to spend on exotic ingredients would not have been foolish enough to endanger their health with rotting flesh, or desperate enough to have to. Spices were used to produce food that tasted good.

Our contemporary love of nutmeg and mace links us with those times, even moreso perhaps cinnamon. I very occasionally use Orange Flower Water too. Cloves have a flavour that I associate with the cooking of relatives long deceased. But it is not just spices that seem to fade away in cooking. Take raisins: in my Sixties and Seventies childhood they were included in curries, cakes and pies, covered in chocolate as a special treat to be eaten in the cinema, the tough little buggers eaten I'd estimate twice a week. I barely use them now, and have to buy them in specially when needed. Elinor Fettiplace seems to have employed them for every other dish. As my son loathes all dried fruit perhaps they will fade out of the culinary picture entirely when his generation pushes mine away from the hob.

We should not forget such ingredients, so I am going to make an effort to use the occasional clove, hide raisins - one 'receipt' in the book for chicken cooked in mutton broth has raisins (later sieved out) to add depth and sweetness for example - and buy rosewater too. In austerity terms these things should attract the cook for giving loads of taste for very little money - a single clove makes itself known in a big apple pie. More bang for your groat as it were.