Roast Beef Rides Again

One of the supermarkets has been running a campaign - actually a rather laudable one - showing people that a roast will do more than the Sunday lunch for which it was bought. Roast chicken is an austerity staple, as a decent bird will give you the roast, a curry/risotto/wrap/sandwiches, and broth or at least stock made with the carcase. Beef is no slouch on the second coming front either.

Tonight we will be having one of my takes on leftover topside, and almost as importantly on the gravy that graced it. We ate this a fortnight back and it was enough of a hit for there to be requests for it to be repeated with the excellent beef (Henry Rowntree's superb Aberdeen Angus, and no he doesn't sponsor me, it's just that even a teenager notices the difference) remaining after we feasted post the England - Wales match.

The gravy (ultra-garlicky as I roasted a whole head with the beef, and squidged the soft contents into the meat juices) will be flavoured with smoked paprika, a chilli chopped very finely, Worcestershire sauce, some ground cumin, cayenne, and plenty of pepper. The beef, chopped into 5mm dice, is mixed with its gravy and a tin of Heinz beans, and the resulting mass used to fill wraps that fill a 300mm x 200mm cast iron dish perfectly. Atop this goes a sauce made with tinned toms cooked with a chopped onion and flavoured like the filling, with loads of grated cheese - cheddar and Parmesan - on top.

Cooked in a 180C oven for 30 - 40 minutes (when the cheese is browning it's ready, though I tend to warm the Le Creuset cast-iron dish over a low flame first to speed things up and ensure it is piping hot inside as well as out-) it has the added benefit of looking rather lovely.

The result is filling, rich in vegetables, and tastes good. But then in our family lore most things taste good with Parmesan. And it doesn't need a £1 packet of ready-mix fajita magic dust to give it a Tex-Mex touch.

I'll try to remember to take a photo or two.

Gravy - Artform and Austerity Weapon

At first blush there is nothing austere about a rolled rib of beef joint that cost £25. And very delicious it was too. But the gravy that accompanied it is another matter.

Our national inferiority complex about food has, happily, been weakened over the last two or three decades. We still tend to think though of e.g. French sauces as things of artistic beauty, and dismiss gravy as very basic and unworthy of consideration. Nonsense, a well made gravy is a joy. It lifts the potatoes that go with a roast, and moistens the meat if it needs that treatment. Given the basis is what you scrape off the roasting dish it gladdens the austerity heart too.

I cheat a bit, using a tsp of Bovril to add extra meatiness. Yesterday's version had a cm of white wine left from the previous day to loosen the thickened juices and de-glaze the dish, then some vegetable water, and included a finely chopped shallot for some texture. For me, though the meat was very good (farm shop, a proper mature brown not pink), the gravy and mash were the best bit of the meal.

Later in the week I'm going to do bangers and mash. Again a gravy will make the thing moist and interesting, and as it will be onion gravy an extra vegetable will be smuggled in - my onion gravy involves very slow melting of four or five finely chopped onions until they start to caramelise. It takes a good 25 minutes or more, but it's worth the wait. Thickened thereafter with plain flour, then made into a luscious liquid with potato water and that magical tsp of Bovril added to give extra flavour, it's not far off very thick French onion soup by the end.

Six fat 'taste the difference' sausages from Sainsbury's cost £2 the other day; spuds for the mash maybe 50p; onions 25p; with in all likelihood peas and steamed carrots for more veg the lot will come to at most £3.25 for three of us. Which makes £25 for the beef joint a little less painful (though it must be said the leftover meat will make hot beef sandwiches tonight - my own bread, some lettuce and cucumber piled on top, thin raw onion rings, and a knife full of mustard). And just one slice saved for another day will make a starter of lentil and beef salad with gherkin and raw onion chopped in, so the £25 does stretch to three meals).

One Pot Two Dishes - One Flame Rides Again

My son, aka Sternest Critic, has some quirky dislikes. One is that he likes meat that is stewed (let's face it he likes meat), but hates it to come with the liquid in which it cooked. A neat solution to this enjoyed last week was a version of the French Pot au Feu, where the liquid is served as a soup before the rest makes it to table as a main course. Two courses, one pot.

It helped the soup part that the dish was made with stock prepared previously using free bones from the butcher (I've taken to doing this when buying a load of meat, and never get any hassle) and another from the freezer, the penultimate bit of our Serrano ham bone. Those had cooked with some veg and other flavour enhancers, so the stock itself would have done as a soup (some more in fact did at the weekend, with mushrooms, noodles and star anise). But after it had in addition been the cooking medium for chuck steak and shin, with more veg, it was excellent - served without any thickening, likewise sans meat and veg, it was a really really good beef consome.

The original stock benefited btw from a beetroot being one of the vegetables, giving an earthy depth, but more importantly a fine colour.

The solid components were tasty enough, the beef not needing a knife to cut it, but not in the same league as the soup.

I've been trying to think of similar two-dishes-one-pot stuff, with little success. The only one that sprang to mind could in fact be a threefor, doing a similar stew for the soup and solids, but cooking a sweet dumpling or several in with the savoury bits. To modern eyes that may seem odd, but to cooks of centuries past (including the last one) with limited cooking equipment it made sense, and our contemporary separation of sweet and savoury would seem weird to medieval cooks in particular, but even our grandmothers (for those of us in the third decade of our thirties) were not averse to such things.

I have made apple dumplings in this way to eat as pudding, the edge with its meaty tang not putting anyone off devouring them.

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. 

Due to Overwhelming Demand

A flood of comment, singular, asking for the recipe for the brisket mentioned in the previous post. As with so much of what I cook it's more method than measurements.

First have one bloody big piece of brisket, ours was just shy of 6lb, ready at room temperature. If I had been confident of my butcher locating flat-rib I'd have used that in place of brisket. Prepare a dry rub with a nice finely ground blend of spices, my own preference the other night being a tsp of peppercorns, a tbsp of coriander seeds,  two tbsp of cumin seeds, two whole star anise (anises?), a tsp of sea salt, three cloves and a tsp of piment de Jamaique as we say in Preston, or allspice if you prefer, and a tbsp of palm sugar. Rub this all over the beef as erotically as possible in the circumstances.

In a chicken brick or similar closed pot big enough (derr) to take the joint put some slices of carrot and onion in the bottom to keep the meet raised slightly, plus a few cloves of garlic. Pour in so as not to wash the meat clean of dry rub (derr again) enough boiling water to touch the bottom of the brisket, put the lid on and put into the oven preheated to about 180C, then immediately turn the temperature down to 120C and leave for about eight hours - it could actually have stood another two at least.

The end result is, or should be, easy to pull apart, the crust beautifully blackened by the spices rather than the heat.

Drain the excess juices off every two or three hours, but leave enough in to maintain the steaming-roast effect. After resting the meat for at least 25 minutes serve pulled into shreds with BBQ sauce or if you have time a reduction (how trendy) of the juices tweaked to your taste.

To be eaten in wraps or flat-breads with sauce, fried onions, dill pickles, red cabbage, friends and beer. Although as Malcolm Bradbury so astutely pointed out eating people is wrong.

One Flame Cooking Super Rapido

Last night a combination of poorly child and electrical work meant I couldn't get to the kitchen till late, or late for us. Something rapid was thus required, and thanks to the rich stock from slow cooking a flat-rib of beef this was no prob. Stock skimmed of fat was heated through in a pan to which I added a drained tin of bamboo shoots, the few remaining bits of beef cut small, and two sheets of noodles (from a pack bought ages ago in local Chinese supermarket - bargain). Flavoured with soy sauce and five-spice powder and a brutally crushed garlic clove to give it a bit of depth it was ready in five minutes.

As the stock was rich and delicious so was the soup, which in a way was posh pot-noodle. If I'd had any in the freezer I'd have added sweetcorn for more fibre, but hadn't so didn't. Don't care, it was still really good.

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.

Great British Pie II - Mushrooms are the New Meat

I'm defrosting some stewing beef that will be the basis of a pie tonight - my prediction for the food trend of 2013 is indeed the return of the Great British Pie big time, though they will be largely homemade as chef-restaurateurs will not be keen to make something that involves substance more than style. And the effete and fashion conscious crowd that writes restaurant reviews for the Sundays would probably pan them if they did serve something filling and tasty instead of chi-chi platters acceptable to anorexics.

I had to dash to Sainsbury's for some emergency Olbas Oil for my wife, currently suffering with woman-flu, and they had no decent stewing beef in - quelle surprise - to bulk out what I had already, so I opted to buy some mushrooms which weight-for-weight are a fraction of the cost, and will provide a nice difference in textures.

A digression. As with men not being able to multi-task, man-flu is a myth - my last illness was in fact Spanish flu with a touch of Ebola, Malaria, and SARS [whatever happened to SARS btw?] that I was lucky to survive. I nearly had to go to the doctor, that's how serious it was.

The pie tonight may well be cooked in Adnams Tally Ho, though that will be a sacrifice. We decided rather belatedly to do the dry January thing (after a convivial evening on Friday 4th, and a slight rise in weight over Christmas), so that's the closest I'm going to get to a beer for three weeks.

Along with Olbas Oil I picked up some flowers btw, which are probably about as effective.

Christmas Future - Sanity and Austerity

This is not the refrain of the middle-aged grump that Christmas starts earlier every year. Though it appears to do so - Miracle on 34th Street (the original, not the inferior Richard Attenborough version) currently on Film 4 while November is far from over. But as we seem to clutch on to Christmas as some sort of lifestyle lifeboat I was wondering what is to this generation what the giant turkey was to my mother's.


In the Seventies there was a mania at Christmas for having the biggest turkey as some sort of status symbol. Mad. People regularly found their ovens too small to cook the damn things, and had to remove the legs for cooking separately, mothers forced to rise before dawn to start the cooking if it was to have any chance of being eaten before nightfall. Turkey risotto, sandwiches, broth, curry, rissoles and cold cuts followed the big day's feast seemingly endlessly. Ad nauseam for sure.


I guess that the goose, rather a return to the 19th century perhaps, has become the contemporary equivalent - I must admit that I've never cooked a whole one, only a leg and a breast bought on different occasions (at Lidl btw). Two years ago I did a small sirloin, and have heard that it - or a rib of beef - is gaining in popularity. The pheasant has been mentioned in dispatches for the Christmas board, which seems more a nod to snobbery than enjoyment - I have never had one roasted in either domestic or commercial circumstances that was worth the effort of eating, however many slices of fatty bacon are wrapped over it. Dry and tough is invariably the rule that way; braised or stewed is another matter. The three/four/five bird roast is another option growing in favour. Never having tried this I can't comment on how they turn out.


Of course there are turkeys and turkeys - there's a world of  difference between a frozen battery-reared jobbie and a Kelly Bronze, for instance. The latter is expensive but worth it for a special occasion, which December 25th surely is.With austerity pushing cooks towards economy it's unlikely the behemoth bird will make a comeback.

My own prediction for Christmas future is the increasing importance of the stuffing, sausages, and other accompaniments meaty and vegetable. They show care and generosity (of time and effort). For us, though we remain in funds, I think the smallest turkey crown I can find and either a small beef joint or a goose breast again will feature. And possibly for variety, if I can get the timings right, a frozen pack of four quails that is already in the freezer (Lidl again), the antithesis of the titanic turkey of Christmas past.

Austerity Fillet Steak?

Fillet steak is far from my favourite cut - rump which has texture and flavour aplenty (and is at the cheaper edge of the scale) would get that accolade. But when I saw the fillet tails (the bit where the fillet tapers to thinness) at the excellent butchery at Tebay Services for just £12.90/kg I couldn't resist. The two pieces for £7.53 were a bargain, the slenderer and part of the fatter one made into beefburgers last night with a few breadcrumbs to bulk the meat out, an onion for flavour, and an egg to bind it all together. They were really excellent. The bulk of the fatter piece was sliced into three small but thick-as-my-thumb steaks that will form the luxurious protein component of a midweek meal. I have never seen fillet tails at a supermarket, yet another reason to favour the independent butcher using all of the carcass.

Meat counters for me can be a work of art, the meat - cuts, signs of being properly hung - and the way it is presented both requiring great care. Compare this one at Tebay with the sad stuff you find at too many supermarkets - though there are honourable exceptions like Booth's.

I went to the butcher's seeking beef short-ribs, another bargain cut. There were none this time, but I was more than pleased at my purchase. For someone who cooks from scratch the supermarket butcher is all too often disappointing - not necessarily in the quality, though it pains me to see the cheapest chicken which, pale and stringy, promises nothing for the eater. It is the variety that gets me, or lack thereof. What happens to the bony bits with so much flavour? The toughies that need slow-cooking?

To be fair to the supermarkets, who are great at reacting to demand and at regularly testing our wants, it is probably the Great British Public that is either content with a few simple choices, or incapable of dealing with  much beyond steaks, chops, and roasts. That's sad.