The Greasy Spoon

Jellied Eels Revisited

I first wrote about Jellied Eels back in 2007, when we had a look at Tubby Isaac's famous East End eel stall. I still have mixed feelings about jellied eels. I want to like 'em, and indeed, I'm almost at the point of becoming an aficinado, but if the truth be told, given half the chance, I'd sooner plump for a decent oyster on the shell, or a lovely cut of smoked eel with horseradish sauce.

Back in the good old days, eels were the staple diet of the London poor. The Thames Estuary is full of the critters, and as the Thames is now so much cleaner than it was say, forty years ago, eels are coming back in force.

I suspect the best way to enjoy jellied eels is to cook them yourself.  A few months ago, I had a bowl of jellied eels as a first course (from memory, think it was at Jack's Place in Battersea); and I don't remember them being especially good (not that I want to denigrate Jack's in any way; a splendid institution and long may it thrive!).

I've trawled through several very old-fashioned Mrs Beeton type cook-books on your behalf, and come up with a definitive recipe:

First, catch some eels. Chop them into 2 inch thick pieces, and plunge them into a large pan of boiling water with a generous dash of sea salt. Take them off the boil, and let them stand for five minutes.

Next, take a pan or dish, and throw in the eels. Pour in a pint of water (so that the eels are covered), and add three tablespoons of malt vinegar, a squeeze of lemon juice, some thinly sliced onions, carrots and celery, a bayleaf, a few peppercorns, sea salt, chopped parsley, and nutmeg.

Bring to the boil, reduce and simmer for twenty minutes, until the eels are tender. Remove the cooked eels and place them in a deep serving dish or bowl.  Strain the 'liquor' over the eels, and when cool, bung it into the 'fridge.  Eels are naturally gelatinous, so the liquid should set.  If it doesn't, be prepared to add some liquid gelatine to the mix.  According to one book, the chopped parsley gives "the jelly the traditional hint of green, like the sea".  What a nice idea.

Serve the jellied eels with chili vinegar.

Image via Wikipedia

The Bay Leaf

Every Christmas, instead of the usual Nordic fir tree, my parents used to bring our bijou Bay Tree indoors and decorate it. Slightly weird behaviour- and I'm not sure why they did it; but there is no doubt that the tree looked the part, and as we were not aware of what we were missing out on, it became an integral part of our family Christmas. Ignorance is bliss.

I use bay leaves quite a bit in cooking; who doesn't?  The Bay Leaf is the aromatic leaf of the Bay Laurel (Laurus nobilis). It originated in Asia Minor, and spread to the warm Mediterranean countries, where it became a symbol of honour in the Ancient World. As with many other herbs, it was also considered to have magical properties.

It has a flowery, aromatic scent and is, of course, wonderful to add that je ne sais quois to stocks, soups and stews such as the Marseille bouillabaisse. It's also an essential ingredient in the bouquet garni, which as I am sure you know is a sprig of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, traditionally with leek leaves, but more often or not these days, a piece of string.

Image via Wikipedia

Chicken Kiev

Last night I made an almost perfect Chicken Kiev. It's not especially difficult to make, but my previous attempt ended in failure, with a burnt outside, and a raw inside. Not good.

Some of you out there in cyberspace think that Chicken Kiev is a classic Ukranian dish- perhaps. More promising is the information provided by Alasdair Scott Sutherland's fascinating book The Spaghetti Tree, Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution, which reckons that the Kiev (albeit without the garlic) was initially brought over by some Polish restauranteurs after The War, and then re-invented and italianised by the trendy La Trattoria Terrazza during the 1960's.

Franco and Mario added grated parmesan and garlic to the dish, and this undoubtably gives it a je ne sais quois. Here's how to make my definitive version:

First make the butter mixture. This is just salted butter mashed up in a bowl with lots of chopped parsley, some lemon juice, a few shakes of Tabasco, some freshly grated parmesan cheese, a decent dollop of crushed garlic, and freshly milled black pepper. Fashion the butter into a quenelle shape with a spoon, and let it stiffen up in the 'fridge.

Next, get hold of a chicken breast, and take a good look at it. There should be an extra bit of meat (almost forming a flap) on the side. Run a sharp knife along the edge and remove this, so that you end you with two pieces of chicken meat.

Beat them flat with a kitchen mallet, and then season them with sea salt and black pepper. Brush with a beaten egg, and lightly dust with seasoned flour. Put the quenelle of garlicky butter onto the larger bit of chicken. Place the smaller piece on top, and try and pinch the two pieces of chicken together, so that the butter is sealed inside. Wrap up the finished effort tightly in some cling film, and shove it into the 'fridge.  This should help it stick together. Then you can roll the chicken in the seasoned flour, and then brush it with the beaten egg. 

Finally, dip the Kiev into seasoned breadcrumbs, making sure that the chicken is well covered. Deep fry in oil, until the breadcrumbs turn golden brown. Make sure that they don't burn. It should take about five minutes.

I'm not completely sure what shape the Kiev should be. If you follow my method, there's a tendency for the Kiev to end up a turd-like sausage shape. I've got a hunch that it might look better if it's in a round, or at least a kidney or tear-drop shape. I'll leave that one up to you; it's going to taste the same isn't it?

Image via Wikipedia

Kippers

For Saturday breakfast, I had a lonely boil-in-the-bag kipper. A few days before, The Girl had been pulled over by the Police; apparently in a sneaky scooter trap just outside Buckingham Palace, and was having to retake her scooter driving test.

The kippers were surprisingly good, and it occurred to me that this is another traditional food that has fallen in popularity.

Kippers are salted herring that have been split and then cold smoked. According to wikipedia (probably best read out in a fusty "Mr Kipling Makes Exceedingly Good Cakes" sort of voice): 

"The English philologist and ethnographer Walter William Skeat derives the word from the Old English kippian, to spawn. The origin of the word has various parallels, such as Icelandic kippa which means 'to pull, snatch', and the German word kippen which means 'to tilt, to incline'. Similarly, the English kipe denotes a basket to catch fish. Another theory traces the word kipper to the kip, or small beak, the male salmon deveop during the breeding season."

Etcetera, etcetera. I'm sure you all knew that back to front. My dear old Grandma used to make a sort of kipper butter or, I suppose, pâté, for spreading on toast at picnics. She simmered some boil in the bag kippers in water until they were cooked, and then mashed them up with creamed unsalted butter, a dash of Worcester Sauce and the juices from the bag. She then seasoned the kipper butter with salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice, and served them in ramekin dishes with a garnish of lemon and parsley.

To Be or Not to Be?

I've got mixed feelings about all this 'organic" malarkey. The Girl is far greener than I am, and has persuaded me to recycle properly- something which I had spectacularly failed to do in the past.  And one side of me knows that she's right, as you will find from my previous posts urging you to buy organic food. But there's another side of me, alas, which remains sceptical.

Recently, I saw poor old Rick Stein humiliated on television when he was asked to pick out an organic, free-range chicken at a blind tasting. He thought about it long and hard, and then chose the mass-produced, battery chicken. Now, I'm not in any way supporting battery farming- as amongst other things, I think it's unnecessarily cruel; but there was a part of me which leapt into the air with smug glee when this happened.

I've also noticed a tendency (in London at least) for Greens to be found lurking amongst the- how can I put it- richer, chattering classes. A few years ago, I was invited down to a friend's idyllic weekend retreat. We were banned from travelling in more than one car ('to save the environment'), and I think from memory, urged to share a bath. By the end of the weekend, I was having dark fantasies, not surprisingly about the shared baths, but about backing the double exhaust of a V8 engined Bristol 411 onto her organic Elizabethan herb garden.

If you live in London, you will have seen the extraordinary G-Wiz. This is one cute little deathtrap of a car, manufactured in India, and powered exclusively by electricity.  I was tempted to get one- you plug them into the mains, and you don't have to pay the Mayor's Congestion Charge. But - and it's a huge but- I am told on good authority that you have to buy a replacement battery every  few years- which costs in the region of £3000, is decidely toxic, and consequently not green at all.

It's harder to be green if you don't earn much money, have a family to look after, and are currently finding things tough. Surely, it's going to be the least of your priorities in that sort of situation, right?  But proper home-cooked food is another thing in itself, and it doesn't cost much at all to rustle up say, a healthy and delicious parsnip soup, a creamy mushroom risotto, or a rib-sticking Toad in the Hole. I'm with Jamie on this one...

The Post Office Tower Restaurant

I never managed to get to The Post Office Tower Restaurant: as children we had begged to be taken there, but when the grand day finally came, the IRA detonated a bomb- closing the restaurant, and it never re-opened. 

The restaurant, apparently, survives and I wonder if the empty salon still echoes to the ghosts of suave International Men of Mystery and their Dolly Bird dates, revolving at a constant 360 degrees until thy kingdom come?

Construction on the Post Office Tower was begun in 1961, and at the time, it was the tallest building in London. It's easy to forget what a symbol of modernity it was at that time, and the iconic image cropped up time and time again in films, on posters, on television, and in books and magazines. The revolving restaurant was located on the 36th floor, and opened in 1966.

The restaurant was leased to Sir Billy Butlin, who managed the operation until terrorism closed it down in 1971. And what was on the menu I hear you ask? 

Les Hor D'Oeuvres: Le Melon Frappé, L'Avocado au Fruits de Mer (that's just avocado with prawns), La Terrine de Truite Fumée (sounds dodgy); Les Poissions: Le Homard Newburg, Les Filets de Sole Bonne Femme, Les Entrees: Les Medallions de Filet de Boeuf Sautées au Beurre Noir, Le Châteaubriand, Sauce Béarnaise- etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

In other words lots of flambéing at the table, chilled glasses of grapefruit juice, domed silver chafing dishes, and fawning waiters in maroon mess jackets. Hasn't the world changed since then?

Photographs: http://www.butlinsmemories.com/other/postofficetower/index.htm

Philadelphia Dreaming

One of the fascinations of old cookery books is the way they reflect the social history of their time.  A few years ago I came across a copy of The Philadelphia Cookbook of Town and Country, written by a certain Mrs Anna Wetherill Reed, and published by Barrow & Co. of New York in 1940.

The American East Coast in 1940!  This was the pre-war world of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in George Cukor's Bringing Up Baby- or, at least, as imagined by Hollywood film producers in Los Angeles, and later reinvented by Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart: a world of clipped, almost English accents, foxhunting, tail-gate picnics, drystone walls, Bloody Marys, gymkhanas, rambling clapboard houses, cosy family Christmases, Dry Martini cocktails, expensive cars and luxury household gadgets.  And it was, if I may make so bold Master Copperfield, a pretty darn good place to be - as long as you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or even perhaps, a silver plated spoon.

In The Philadelphia Cookbook, Mrs Wetherill Reed gives us useful suggestions for "Supper After the Opera", "A Colonial Dinner on Washington's Birthday", "A Formal Dinner for a Debutante", "Luncheon Before the Spring Races", "Luncheon on the Terrace After Swimming", "Dinner for a Well-to-do Bachelor Uncle", and slightly bizarrely, a "Gay Nineties Dinner for Grandma on Mother's Day".  I'm sure you're getting the drift, if not already crooking your little finger.

But slightly surprisingly, there are masses of practical recipes in there that you could easily make today without raising an eyebrow. So often old cook books fail miserably in this area; especially for some reason if they were published in the early 1970's, and written by a one Mr. Vincent Price. Picked at random (and in no particular order) we have: Hell Fire Stew (that's really devilled Navarin of Lamb with Worcestershire sauce), Veal and Ham Pie  (recipe kindly provided by The Philadephia Club), Mushroom Filling for Wild Duck, Maryland Mint Julep, Welsh Rabbit a la Yale Club, Dandelion Salad and Frizzled Beef a la King (recipe most kindly provided by The Cosmopolitan Club).

I quite liked the look of Jellied Essence of Tomato. First, you soak a leaf of gelatine in cold water. Next you heat up strained tomato juice, clarified chicken stock, a piece of lemon rind and the juice of half an onion. You add the dissolved gelatine, and stir it around, until it is well mixed in. Finally, you strain it, season with salt and  a dash of cayenne pepper, turn it into a wet mould, and chill.

Okay, it's a trifle weird, I admit- but don't you think it might be a good base for something slightly more up to date and of greater interest? I would definitely use a clear and delicious tomato consommé (tomato pulp and a bit of sea-salt placed in a sieve, and left to drain overnight in the 'fridge), go a bit easy on the gelatine (to avoid the rubber effect) and get rid of the onion juice (what on earth was that all about?).

Instead of turning it into moulds, I suggest it would look better in ramekin dishes, and I think it definitely needs something juicy suspended in it.  Crayfish Tails?  They would work very well with the slightly spicy tomato.  Maybe it needs to be slightly spicier? What about a dash of Tabasco?  Does anyone out there in cyberspace have any bright ideas? This could be the birth of a famous new dish...

Ragù Bolognese

This in-between period between Christmas and the New Year is always a bit weird. You're still got the holiday spirit, but have, more than likely, returned to the Kafkaesque slog of the Blacking Factory. Here in The Big Smoke, it's cold and frosty, and I'm in the mood for some hearty, warming food. An authentic Ragù Bolognese would be just the ticket.

I'm not talking about that awful tinned stuff; that thin, processed sauce you boiled up in your student days. No, I'm writing about the authentic, slowly cooked, rich and dark sauce, served in Bologna with lasagne verdi.  It's okay, of course, to serve it with any type of pasta, I'm not that fussy. Here's one way of making it:

Chop up some onions and fry them in a mixture of butter and oil in your favourite pan. When the onions are soft, add some crushed garlic. Add a diced carrot and some thinly sliced celery. Chop up some streaky bacon, and fry this with the onions, garlic, carrot and celery. So far so good. Transfer the onions, garlic, bacon, carrot and celery to your casserole dish.

Now start frying some minced pork in the frying pan. Use the oil and butter left over from the onions and bacon. If you need to, add a bit more butter or oil to stop the pork burning. Here's a useful tip: rather than stirring the mince around, it's a better idea to let it brown in lumps. If you stir it about, you run the risk that the meat will start to poach, rather than fry.

Transfer the pork to the casserole. Fry some minced beef, and transfer to the casserole. Next, chop up some chicken livers into small pieces, fry them very briefly, and transfer them to the casserole pot.

Tip in a tin of plum tomatoes, a good dollop of tomato purée, and half a bottle of red wine (though strangely, white wine is probably more authentic). Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and some finely chopped basil. Cook the ragù on the lowest heat you can manage, for up to four hours.  You will need to check the ragù now and again, to make sure it doesn't burn.  

According to the great Elizabeth David in her seminal work, Italian Food: "some Bolognese cooks add at least 1 cupful of cream or milk to the sauce, which makes it smoother".  Who am I to argue with that?

At the sign of The White Hart

This photograph made me laugh. It looks like a Mock Tudor pub, but it's actually a Southern Railway Tavern Car, circa 1947. They called it "At the Sign of the White Hart", the idea being that you could enjoy a pewter tankard of bitter, (or presumably a slice of gammon with pineapple) as you steamed through the Surrey countryside towards Waterloo or Victoria.

The gel at the front looks a bit like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. She's got her foot foward like a Harrod's model. I bet my bottom dollar the chap at the back (missing only a manly pipe clenched between his teeth) is a bogus Wing Commander and drives an MG.

I would love to know what the waiter is serving up through the hatch. Steak and Kidney pie? A grapefruit half, garnished with a glacé cherry? Dover Sole?

Wassail

I've noticed that quite a few readers of The Greasy Spoon have been searching for wassail on the internet. As I'm feeling in a helpful mood, I'm revisiting a post that I wrote last year on the subject. I've also added a nice interactive link to a quirky short film I've found, explaining the wassail tradition in Herefordshire, England. Please take note of my own recipe for Mulled Cider.  It's so utterly preferable to the ubiquitous Mulled Wine. I can't stress that enough. Here's the article:

Wassail is a traditional mulled punch, drunk at Christmas-time in the Northern and Germanic countries. Very Nordic. Wassailing can either mean the singing of carols (at Christmas, the serfs would wassail the Lord and Lady of the Manor), or, as in Gloucestershire, and other western counties, the wassailing of an apple tree- to ensure a good harvest, and drive away the evil spirits. This is done on Twelfth Night. I reckon that The Wicker Man was closer to the bone than many people realise. 

Anyway, although I realise that the chances of wassailing an apple tree in down town Vancouver are practically zero, I'm going to give you my recipe for my very own wassail, otherwise known as Mulled Cider. I prefer it to Mulled Wine, I really do. The problem with the wine version, is that many people get it wrong. Very wrong. They chuck in a bottle of plonk, boil it up, and then add all sorts of other dodgy ingredients, including vodka; and the result is an over-acidic, pungent brew which can leave you with a god-awful hangover. 

Mulled Cider is "different", smoother- and in my opinion delicious. There are no rules; but to get the best results, I suggest that you keep it simple. In a large pan, I pour in a decent dryish West Country or Norman organic cider. Try and avoid the cheaper, sweeter, fizzy stuff. Next, I cut an orange in half, and add that. Do the same with a lemon. Now it's time for the spices. A cinnamon stick, a few cloves, nutmeg, and a kernel of ginger would work well. Taste it! If it's too dry, add a bit of brown sugar. Start warming it up. You do not want to boil it. Keep it simmering at just below boiling point. If you boil it, all the alcohol will vapourise away- and you want your party to go with a swing, don't you? If you're going to serve it in glass mugs, make sure that you put a silver spoon in the mug first. This will prevent the glass from shattering. 

If you've got time, decorate the wassail with Lamb's Wool. This is just peeled apple simmered in cider until it goes woolly, and "explodes"; once that's done, you can float the pulp on top of the mulled cider.