Before refrigeration was invented fish would go off really quickly.  Those lucky enough to live on the coast could eat that day’s catch.  Those inland had to eat meat and two veg.  And then one day salt (conveniently from the sea) was found to preserve fish.  Not only that, it preserved fish and allowed it to develop its flavour.  Salt cod (morue in French) was born, would last for ever and could be exported inland and overseas.

Salting food extracts the moisture which in combination with bacteria leads to spoilage.  So salted food, in this case cod, needs rehydrating to soften it, reduce the salt content and make it edible.

The drier and saltier the cod the more soaking it needs.  I soaked my piece here (bought from Garcia) for 18 hours and changed the water 4 or 5 times.  Salt cod in London can be found wherever there are Spaniards, Portuguese or West Indians living in any number.  So, the northern end of Notting Hill is good as is Brixton.  Otherwise, it’s difficult to find.  The French adore it and every fishmonger in France worth his salt will have it on sale.  It’s a gift to mongers because it’s practically the only fish that won’t go off.  In Portugal they even have shops that won’t sell anything else.  And in the Caribbean the daily white rum aperitif is usually accompanied by salt cod fritters (ti punch & accras de morue on the French islands).

The Portuguese have hundreds of recipes for bacalhau (bacalao in Spanish) but the French just have the one,  brandade de morue.  Brandade comes from an old verb “to beat” and once the rehydrated fish has been poached for a few minutes in milk and or olive oil it is skinned, deboned and beaten into an emulsion, often with added potato.

It’s not a dish for those who like mild flavours.  As the fish has been aged it has quite a strong flavour  in  a similar way that meat goes high when it has been hung.  When I poach the fish I add whole garlic cloves and pepper.  I use the poaching liquor to mash the boiled potatoes.  The fish is much easier to skin and debone when it’s still warm; if you do this when it has cooled down it really sticks to your fingers (after all, the first glues were made from boiled fish).  A sprinkling of parsley at the end is all it needs though this is my embellishment; brandade in even the smartest Parisian brasseries usually comes in an earthenware crock and looks like, well, mash.

As brandade is quite strong it’s a challenge to match with wine.  Here, we started off with my favourite foodie beer (Meantime India Pale Ale) which copes with any strong food that is thrown at it (the style was invented for curry).  And as brandade is salty it’s good to have something thirst quenching.  We continued with old fashioned white Rioja (Marqués de Murrieta Gran Reserva 1998), aged for 32 months in cask and with the guts and acidity to cope.  I had leftovers the next day with another old fashioned Rioja, but this time a Tondonia rosado 1997 from López de Heredia, aged 4 years in barrel.  It’s not often one comes across a 13 year old rosé wine that is still drinkable but again lengthy barrel ageing makes these wines pretty indestructible and gives them an almost sherryish, big oxidised flavour that allows them to cope with extremes of salt, savouriness and spice.

I sometimes make brandade without potato and spread it on bruschetta.  In this case, I would probably serve a Fino Sherry or Manzanilla Pasada.

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On Easter Sunday we thought we’d vary the usual lamb dish and go for mutton.  We’d spotted some the day before at the excellent Snape Maltings Farmers’ Market.  Mutton is basically older lamb, ie sheep, and so has more flavour though is less tender.  It is technically at least 2 years old, lamb being under 1 and hogget in between the two.  The advice from the farmer was to roast it at a lower temperature and a little longer than for lamb.

The cut we bought was from the top of the leg.  I put it in a roasting pan and laid some anchovy fillets underneath and used the olive oil from the jar to smear over the meat.  I poured a bottle of red wine into the bottom of the pan and roasted the joint in a fan assisted oven for a couple of hours at about 150′C.

After allowing the joint to rest with the oven switched off the meat turned out to be really succulent and tasty without being too high and sheepy.  I boiled down the remaining wine in the pan to make a thin sauce having added some thyme and rosemary from the garden.  The anchovies added some umami body and richness to this sauce but absolutely no hint of fishiness.  I served the mutton with flageolet beans, the traditional accompaniment to lamb in France.  Mashed potatoes would have been more British I guess.  And capers too.

As I wasn’t sure how sheepy the mutton was going to be I’d prepared two different wines, one stronger and gamier than the other.

In the end we had the Rioja Imperial Reserva, rather than the Lebanese chateau Musar, which is my usual wild game wine; it was perfect, its tannins and acidity cutting through the richness and its marked oaky flavour echoing the herbs (and perhaps fancifully, the bottle of Rioja that went into the sauce).  It was more than a match for the mutton.   Young lamb is the traditional accompaniment to ancient old Rioja in northern Spain (and to claret, especially Pauillac, in Aquitaine).  Whilst young lamb is an excellent foil for these wines, allowing them to show at their best, I think that a vigorous, younger wine like this 2001 is best partnered with the stronger taste of mutton.

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The line up

I spent most of last week helping judge wines for the International Wine Challenge and by the end felt just a tad wined out.  Tasting wine all day sounds like some people’s dream pastime or job.  But the main part of a wine taster’s remit is to separate the wheat from the chaff and necessarily involves tasting young, often unattractively undeveloped wine and assess their future development.  This means having to taste a lot of acidic whites and tannic reds and eventually even the most seasoned palate gives up and wants a break, or a beer… and food, which in the end, is the point of most wine.

Barmaid for a night

So, thoughts turned to beer and food which reminded me of this fun blind beer tasting I did with friends in France.  Fittingly, the host was my old boss from Quality Control days at a UK wine shipper and he too likes to take a break from wine and sink some beer.  And besides, being in rural France meant that we couldn’t just pop into a local supermarket and expect to find any decent wine to drink anyway.  Tim’s wife Andrea acted as barmaid, invigilator (no peeking at the labels!) and black pudding fryer and we got stuck in.

Dinner

As in professional wine tastings we tasted the beers blind to avoid any potential bias.  One of the labels had claimed to be la bière la plus forte du monde and this might have made it a favourite, or least favourite, depending on one’s predilection for alcohol.  And one bottle (the Faro) was so pretty it reminded me a bit of Perrier Jouët’s expensive handpainted Belle Epoque vintage Champagne bottles.  The elaborate packaging of Faro ended up being very much style over substance.

blind line up

After deliberating, cogitating and digesting we couldn’t choose a winner though some beers were more appetising than others and some were more for sipping on their own and others were good with food.  Interestingly, when the boudin noir had been devoured we turned to panettone and chocolate cake which provided good matches for some of the stronger, sweeter styles.

No. 1 The first turned out to be Chimay Brune (red label, 7% alc) which had a frothy head and brown colour, a fine mousse, was savoury but lacking a little in acidity.  It gave off whiffs of sweetcorn.

No. 2 Faro Lambic (4.2%) had no head, a pale brown colour, a sweet, cidery, almost vinegary character and lacked body after the Chimay.  This had the character of Gueuze from Brussels which is made “spontaneously” from wild yeasts.  An acquired taste.

No. 3 Pauwels Kwak (8.4%).  This had a more savoury, malty character and a distinct whiff of Fairy Liquid.   On returning to this beer it lacked complexity and ended up being too sweet.  However, with the chocolate cake it became much more interesting and was redolent of almond essence.

No. 4 Leffe (9%) had an attractive caramel, burnt toffee, plummy nose and palate with hints of fortified wine (Banyuls) and Christmas cake.  Indeed, this beer later on made a good accompaniment to Panettone.  The high alcohol gave the beer body without making it unbalanced.

No. 5 Bush (12%) had a similarly sweet character and hints of liquorice.  In spite of its wine like alcoholic strength it tasted relatively balanced.

No. 6 Duvel (8.5%) had a frothy head and a pale yellow colour, a fine mousse and the least sweet, most savoury character of the whole line up.  I actually spotted this as Duvel which is a bit of a one-off style of beer.  It sometimes reminds me of saucisson à l’ail (garlic sausage, if that isn’t too fanciful).

No. 7 Chimay Triple (8%, yellow label) had a very solid froth and a cloudy, orangey colour.  It had an orange zesty nose, dryish palate with a slight sweet and sour tang on the finish.

No. 8 Leffe Blonde (6.6%) had little head, oxidised fruit on the nose and palate and was almost grapey.  It developed an overripe lychee character in the glass.  It proved a hit afterwards with some Thornton’s chocolate cake.

No. 9 Chimay (9%, blue label) had a solid head and brown colour.  It had very little scent or flavour and tasted alcoholic.  This beer was dull and clumsy.

No. 10 Belzebuth (13%) had no head and a golden brown colour.  It initially smelled maltily English ale-like but as it warmed up became peachily interesting.  The 13% alcohol was pretty evident though and underlined the beer’s excessive sweetness.

Fried dinner

With the body, sweetness and bite of some of these beers it would have been interesting to experiment with some cheeses to accompany them (indeed, the Trappist monks at Chimay make cheese by the same name).  But the success of the two cakes was a pleasant surprise.  The beers were all served at the same temperature (initially an overly cold 2′C) and became progressively more interesting as they warmed up a bit.  However, it would be sensible to heed the label’s serving temperature recommendation for each beer as they all have their own character.  For example, for the heavy Chimay Brune it is suggested that 10-12′C is a good temperature (therefore that of an ideal cellar) whereas for the lighter, sour Faro Lambic, 5′C is suggested (’fridge temperature).  Most quality Belgian beers also have their dedicated glasses and these should bring out the best in the beers’ sometimes complex aromas.

and finally, desert

Finally, these beers are refermented in the bottle (just like Perrier Jouët Belle Epoque Champagne) and so have a very fine, natural bubble.  This makes them refreshing, even at high alcohol levels, but they are not overtly gassy like ordinary canned or bottled beers which have been carbonated.  The expression to look out for on a (francophone) label is haute fermentation meaning ‘top fermented’ (basse fermentation or, rather inelegantly, ‘bottom fermented’ suggests a lager type beer) and something along the lines of refermentée en bouteille.  Unlike with Champagne however, the spent yeasts after this secondary in-bottle fermentation are not removed from the beer which is why many of them possess a (harmless) sediment.  I usually keep these beers standing and use the sediment in cooking.

This post was first published on http://www.patrickcarpenter.blogspot.com/ and has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author. We seriously love his stuff. He is both a real foody and a serious wine geek. just like us!

The proper package!

It was the 150th birthday of fish and chips the other day and I was in Aldeburgh on the North Sea coast and decided to mark the occasion with the bag of “rock ‘n’ chips” shown above. As an insititution, fish and chips was voted in a recent poll as Britain’s most loved (knocking the Queen into second place).

Britain’s first fish and chip shop opened in London in 1860. It is not clear exactly how and when the battered fish first met the deep fried potato but historians interested in that sort of thing often cite Jews in the east end of London selling (cold) fried fish in the street as a precursor. There was also a tradition of potatoes as street food but these were baked and not fried.

Manchester and Leeds make claims for inventing fish and chips as we know it today and indeed fish and chips is arguably more popular up north than down south. Many Scots would claim fish and chips as the Scottish national dish, rivalling haggis (though in Scotland you ask for a “fish supper” when ordering fish and chips, and haddock is more common than cod).

In spite of concerns over dwindling fish stocks and the consequent escalating price of fish, there are still over 10,000 shops in Britain selling affordable, takeaway meals to people from all walks of life. My lunch cost just under a fiver and included the fluorescent green mushy peas, the scarlet ketchup, copious amounts of salt (which helps the fish batter stay crisp though the chips remain resolutely soft) and lashings of malt vinegar.
Deep frying fish makes eminent sense as the batter protects the flesh from overcooking and drying out. My rock eel was really juicy as was Abi’s piece of haddock. Some people leave the batter but we couldn’t resist the salty, fatty crunch contrasting with the moist fish flesh within and the unmistakeable taste of beef fat.

To drink, something sharp and fizzy is good to cut through all that stodge: I think a traditional India Pale Ale is good (there is an excellent one made at the nearby Grain Brewery) or sparkling wine, if not actually Champagne. Crisp, zesty Sauvignon Blanc would work too (from the Loire Valley or South Africa). And if eating fish and chips in the south of Spain (at the Codfather in Nerja perhaps) a dry Sherry or Montilla would be perfect.

This post has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author. We seriously love his stuff. He is both a real foody and a serious wine geek. just like us!

moules marinières

A rule of thumb I have when looking at a fishmonger’s slab is, if the fish look a bit sad and dull and not very fresh, I go for the mussels; at least you know that they’re alive and therefore fresh (unless they’re dead of course).  In the picture below I am reacting to the fish man’s question on how many kilos I want; I never know what to say but am showing him the rough quantity I want using my hands.  I think this equated to 2 kg, so good for 2 people (and at only £6, a cheap treat).

How much?

Mussels are widely grown all around the Kingdom’s coasts and yet I don’t think we eat enough of them.  Perhaps if they weren’t such good value we might not take them for granted and could treat them with a little more reverence.  These came from Brancaster in Norfolk.

A drop of cream is always good to add to moules marinières if you have any but it is optional.  On the recent Master Chef competition on television the judge John Torode marked down the contestants who had added cream and said “it’s just wrong!”  Well, his French pronunciation is not only “just wrong”, it’s downright painful to hear.  But, we’ll let him off if he allows us to occasionally add cream to “moolz”.

Moules Marinières & Muscadet

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Wine and food matching never excites as much debate as when the food in question is cheese.  It is true that a corner of mousetrap or a wedge of supermarket Brie will take the rough edges off a glass of plonky red but great cheese deserves decent wine and the most pleasurable combination will often be with a white

The French especially have a tendency to serve their best red wines with the cheese and many a fragile mature red Burgundy or thin oldClaret is laid waste by a board groaning and reeking with impossibly strong, runny, salty, acidic cheeses of which there are hundreds in France.  Far better really to serve just one cheese in perfect condition and match it with the appropriate wine.  And if in doubt about whichwine then sometimes local goes with local.  In this case,  Munstercheese from Alsace matched with white Alsatian Gewürztraminer.

This post has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author. We seriously love his stuff. He is both a real foody and a serious wine geek. just like us!

The Dock Kitchen

I heard on the grape vine that Thomasina Miers was helping out at a one off Mexican dinner at the pop-up restaurant Dock Kitchen.  She is something of an authority on the food of Mexico having cooked her way around the country and she now owns three restaurants in London (all called Wahaca).  So I put myself on the waiting list as I’d read that food in Mexico is as regionally diverse as it is in Italy, it’s spicily interesting due to the vast range of chillies grown there and well, I wanted to be shown that authentic Mexican has nothing whatsover to do with the vile gloop that is Tex Mex.

Dock Kitchen is run by the Moveable Kitchen Company which previously specialised in popping up at odd locations all over London but now seems to be settling more permanently into this site overlooking the canal at the unsmart end of Ladbroke Grove (W10 rather than W11 for postcode snobs).  The front of house staff are sweet and polite and appear to be friends giving a hand rather than the pros the River Café trained owner chefs must be. The kitchen is open plan and very calm.  A set menu with everyone eating the same thing at the same time is easier to achieve than the multiple orders a normal restaurant copes with but the phlegm in the kitchen was noticeable.  It’s a shame then that, given the relative lack of pressure, time was not afforded for a little introductory talk about Mexican cuisine especially as no written menus were available and the waiting staff were not drilled in the naming of dishes or ingredients.

Deconstructed After Eight?

We kicked off with what looked like a deconstructed, molecular After Eight but turned out to be (Tommi kindly sent me the menu a couple of days later) blue tortilla chips (quite brown actually) and octopus swimming in lime juice & chilli water (”Agua Chile”).  This very sour northern Sinaloan recipe was a real palate sharpener and I realised that I was going to be drinking the beer I’d brought rather than the southern French red wine which was completely floored (a Costières de Nîmes from Nicolas).  The very hoppy old fashioned India Pale Ale (from Meantime Brewery) coped deliciously with this assault (the restaurant doesn’t yet have a license so is BYO; hopefully it will one day list this classic, full-bodied IPA).

Fideus with crab, caper & sweet chipotle sauce

After those palate fireworks, we had this soothing dish of vermicelli pasta, white crab meat, coriander, and smoked Jalapeno pepper sauce (according to the waitress but Chipotle according to Tommi’s notes).  You needed to take quite a mouthful of crab to notice it (perhaps brown meat would have been better than white) and the chilli was quite strong, tasting as it did of a smokey wurst, but overall an interesting, enjoyable dish,  and ‘cooling’ after the first course. The dish is called “Fideus” and comes from Veracruz on the east coast (whence certain Mediterranean influences like olives & capers).

Pork shoulder Achiote

Next came slow cooked pork shoulder with achiote spice served with greens in crème fraîche and habanero salsa (from the Yucatan peninsula via a farm in Kent).  This was tender and tasty pork some of which had crispily caught on the sides of the pan.  The greens were a little underwhelming but we learned later that in Mexico they would be pepped up with chillies.  Perhaps the yellow chilli salsa was supposed to be mixed in with the veg. We were served some doughy tortillas; I’m not sure what these are for but Abi suggested I put bits of pork, greens and salsa into one and roll it up.  I remonstrated that this reminded me of a Tex Mex sarnie (fajita?) but I did it anyway so as not to offend her.

Tommi's truffles

The India Pale Ale was so delicious that I forgot to snap the orange “nieve” ice which was like a grown up orange squash made with orange and tequila.  There followed these chocolate truffles.  One was almost savoury, its cocoa content in inverse proportion to its sugar content.  The other packed a really hot chilli punch; how nice not to end a meal on a sweet note whilst eating chocolate.

This post has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author. We seriously love his stuff. He is both a real foody and a serious wine geek. just like us!

One of the huge benefits of living on the coast in a place like Aldeburgh (in fact, the main benefit) is having a fisherman like Dean Fryer on your doorstep selling that day’s catch.  Normally, when he catches lobsters in his pots he boils them and sells them pink and ready to devour cold with, say, mayonnaise.  If you catch him early (or phone him the day before) he’ll have a lobster live for you which is what you want if you want to grill or fry and benefit from a secret ingredient within.

To kill Larry humanely you chill him down gradually in the ‘fridge (with a damp cloth over him) and then when he’s pretty still you put him in the freezer to send him into a coma.  A couple of hours later when he’s completely still you can cut him in half. He might wriggle a bit but that’s just his overdeveloped nervous system whose sensibility is in inverse proportion to the size of his brain.  It doesn’t hurt.

The secret ingredient you don’t really notice (or might not eat) if you buy your lobster cooked and which is ignored also by most restaurants who use live lobsters is the tomalley which is the liver (above).  It is absolutely delicious just briefly fried in butter and spread on toast but a top chef like Anton Mosimann will be using it to enrich a complicated sauce to accompany the lobster.  On cooking it goes from a beige colour to green.  It doesn’t taste remotely fishy.  It’s a kind of foie gras from the sea.  Or for those of you who don’t eat foie gras, perhaps it’s similar to calf’s brains.  I must say I did feel a little like Hannibal Lecter when scooping out the wobbly organ above.

Curiously, even lobster suppliers tend to ignore this delicacy.  Once the tomalley has been removed the lobster is ready to grill.  The inedible “dead men’s fingers” or gills can be taken out now though it’s probably easier to do this when the lobster is cooked.  Now is the time for the cook to have a break, prewarm the grill, make some toast, open the wine, spread the fried tomalley on the toast and test the wine.  By the time this is done the grill is hot enough to place Larry cut in half under the grill with a knob of butter on each half.  He only needs about 10 minutes when he’ll have gone from jet black to a beautiful orangey pink.  He doesn’t need seasoning because he’s naturally pretty salty.  This gives the chef the time to appreciate the wine and decide whether the temperature is correct and whether the wine needs decanting to aerate it a bit if it’s a bit too young.

Larry weighing in at about 1 1/2 pounds was a bit too high for my grill so I ended up frying him.

The tail meat is normally most highly prized by fans but I actually prefer the claw which is juicier and less firm.  But for me the real treat is the shell and crunching on the crunchy bits which have slightly caught under the grill or in the frying pan.  These bits are really sweet and exotic tasting, almost like a piece of pork crackling.  The best bits are the eyes.

If just boiling a crustacean I prefer crab because I like the brown meat which has more taste and in a crab is more plentiful (and more easily accessible) than the white.  However, a grilled, or fried, lobster (or for that matter, langoustine) is the king and the reaction of dry heat (plus butter) against shell produces an incredible, complex sweetness which begs to be tempered by the very finest white wine.  The usual choice would be Burgundy but why not young, very cold Sauternes (especially if the shellfish is accompanied by a creamy sauce flavoured with saffron)?

In my case, I couldn’t stretch to the finest Burgundy though this Mâcon Cruzilles 1999 from DomaineGuillot Broux did its best to impersonate something grand from the Côte d’Or with its smoky, nutty nose and buttery, rich albeit crisp palate.

A perk for the greedy chef is to mop the pan with a piece of bread.  The combination of caramelised shell juice and brown butter is the stuff made of (sweet) dreams.  Just make sure you use unsalted butter, preferably French.  Salted burns too easily.  And don’t throw the empty shell away….. save for stock to make bisque or risotto.

This post has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Patrick is one of our favourite food bloggers. He is both a real foody and a serious wine geek. just like us!