Cowboy Hotpot - Historic One Flame Ingenuity

Just back from spending a few days with my father in Norfolk. As tradition demands we were met after our horrible A17 journey with plates of cowboy hotpot. This is a dish of family legend, though it only dates back one generation.

My mother was an infants' school teacher who would rope my father in to help with school trips various. On one brief camping expedition he was volunteered to do the cooking, and faced with limited resources (big pot and big camping stove) came up with the ideal meal for kids, or at least kids 30 or 40 years ago. Ideal in both its name and consistency. He had as ingredients potatoes, onions, corned beef, carrots, and baked beans, plus some stock cubes. The veg were diced very small - say 5mm wide, the corned beef likewise, and the lot simmered briefly in not a great deal of stock before the beans were added to warm through.

Kids are picky, especially away from home, but my father overcame all such thoughts by dubbing it when asked 'Cowboy Hotpot'. The reflected glamour and adventure of the food, surely cooked over open fires in the Badlands by John Wayne and James Stewart, saw it eaten - with spoons - to the last morsel. And the moist, almost sloppy consistency is great for kids too, they tend to hate dry foodstuffs.

Since then it has more often than not been made with fresh beef rather than corned. What would Randolph Scott have said?

What name for the plateful would have the same effect today? Sadly the horrific 'Celebrity Stew' springs to mind.

Cuisine Lancastrienne

One post leads to another.

Black Puddings

Today I found the dried peas needed for proper Lancashire pea soup with ham hock, so Saturday's main meal is sorted. The tall box of bullet peas and soaking tablet brings back memories of childhood food - I still make it according to the instructions given to me by my late mother, duly written in a personal cookbook to keep in perpetuity.

Andy Holt's Chili Bomb Black Puds

Lancashire has some other wonderful dishes worth guarding from extinction: proper hotpot, made with stewing beef cut into very small pieces, good spuds, and onions, and little else - carrots an extravagance; lob scouse; the simple onions cooked in milk then enriched with grated cheese - I facetiously called this Lancashire Fondue in an earlier piece, though I also wanted to imply that with a sexy name it would get made more; and Bury (and Haslingden) black pudding.

Black Pudding Fancies

Black pudding well made - ideally IMHO by Andrew Holt of The Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company - is a delicacy. I had the privilege of travelling to Mortagne-au-Perche with Andrew three years back, to attend what is effectively the world black pudding championship. Mortagne is nicknamed Boudinville (Black Pudding Town), its love for the stuff proven by finding it on pizzas in a local trattoria. At the contest - Austrian German, Italian, Belgian, Dutch, Irish and of course French entrants vied for various prizes, Andrew taking a couple.

Puds awaiting judgement

There were black pudding chocolates, black pudding cakes, puds with lobster, puds in fantastic shapes - witness the various photos in this post.

Chocolate bunny sanguinacho

Black pudding with smoked salmon and lobster

Black Pudding Cake

 But in the end black pudding is a tasty, savoury, rich ingredient, not just something fried for breakfast. People are put off by the fact that blood is the main ingredient, but why this should be off-putting and flesh not is beyond me. I love them.

Cheese enrobed boudin noir pralines

Andy Holt (R)

Somebody should write a history of and guide to the Black Pudding, and another on Lancashire cooking. I'd love to if any publisher ever reads this. I bought The History of Lancashire Cookery by Tom Bridge, an Amazon second-hand bargain - except that even paying 1p and postage this was a waste of money, a litany of appallingly subbed anecdotes and recipes.