beef

Ox heart stuffed with kale, bacon and mushrooms

14th February 2016 by Regula 14 Comments

The meat of the heart is eaten quite commonly in Peru, but it might surprise some of you that for centuries is was also eaten in England. Beef heart is so unpopular I get mine from a local farm for as little as £3. That is great value for a huge piece of meat. I asked a couple of butchers, some in Belgium and also Borough Market. Beef heart is the kind of cut that doesn’t get sold and that is such a shame.

The flavour and texture of beef heart is like that of a good beefy steak because beef heart is a muscle just like steak is. I find beef heart great in any way it is cooked because it has so much flavour and it is very tender. In Peru they make kebab style roasted beef heart, in England beef heart was usually stuffed with a forcemeat.

A couple of years ago I found a recipe for a stuffed beef heart in Elizabeth Raffald’s book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769):

Wash a large beast’s heart clean and cut off the deaf ears, and stuff it with forcemeat as you do a hare, lay a caul of veal, or a paper over the top, to keep in the stuffing, roast it either in a cradle spit or hanging one, it will take an hour and a half before a good fire; baste it with red wine; when roasted take the wine out of the dripping pan and skim off the fat, and add a glass more of wine; when it is hot put in some lumps of red currant-jelly and pour it in the dish; serve it up and send in red currant-jelly cut in slices on a saucer.

The recipe was copied later by M. Radcliffe in her A Modern System of Domestic Cookery: Or, The Housekeeper’s Guide (1823) and it was also published in a later edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy – A new Edition (1803). The recipe dit not appear in the first edition of 1747. Copying recipes from other cooks was common practice in those days and they were often copied word for word, making it easy to determine their source.

To make this dish slightly lighter I opted to stuff the heart with a duxelles, which is a mixture made with mushrooms, bacon and in this case kale or cavolo nero. If I had caul – a thin lace-like membrane which surrounds the stomach internal organs of some animals – like Raffald suggested, I would have used it as it keeps in the stuffing in nicely and tidy. But if you can not obtain it, some creative string-work will do the trick just fine.
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Alexis Soyer’s Oxtail Soup with simple suet dumplings

9th March 2015 by Regula 6 Comments

19th century Victorian England saw a rapid growth of population and urbanisation stimulated by the Industrial Revolution. The elite became more wealthy and the poor became poorer. Eliza Acton noted in her book published in 1845, that soups or pottage was hardly eaten by the English. The poor didn’t have means to heat up the dish that had sustained them for centuries, and often they didn’t even have access to the ingredients to make a soup. This was an era of slum housing, starvation and disease.

Alexis Soyer, who was chef at the prestigious Reform Club and regarded by many as Britain’s first celebrity chef, saw the horrendous poverty of the lower class and took it upon him to do something about it. He invented a soup kitchen and went to Ireland to give out his ‘famine soup’ during the Great Irish Famine in 1847. During his time in Ireland he wrote ‘Soyer’s Charitable Cookery’ and gave the proceeds of the book to various charities.

His book, ‘A Shilling Cookery for the People’ was a recipe book for ordinary people who could not afford the modern kitchen utensils or large amounts of ingredients.

In it he writes about how he goes around London and sees the poor attempt to cook but can’t quite manage because of a lack of knowledge. He takes it upon him to teach an old lady to cook an ox cheek in her one precious pot, over a coal fire. The old lady learns and is surprised to find out that the ox cheek is tender and that there is even enough liquid to make a soup from it. After tasting it and approving it, she said she would teach her neighbours how to do it. Soyer, possibly very pleased about this, said to her that if she would do that, he would sent more recipes for her to learn and teach to her neighbours.

Of course the old lady was illiterate and Soyer realising that he might have sent a useless bit of paper to her, went to see her and found ‘six elderly matrons and an old man holding council together’, trying to make out Soyer’s writings. He then read the recipes to them.

Of soup he says that he finds it is no wonder that people have abandoned this dish as the recipes in most cookery books are complicated and expensive. Many contemporary cookery writers like Mrs Beeton made notes on how to cook economically but showed their ignorance by not grasping the fact that most lower class families were lucky to have some kind of roof over their heads, so a kitchen or fire would most probably been a luxury they could only dream of.

Soyer saw that knowledge was the next big in the poor being able to feed themselves and had the dream of opening a school to teach the poor how to cook. On this notion he remarked “Some of the money spent on our new palace prisons would be much better employed for this purpose.”

As my local farm doesn’t offer ox cheek – although they probably would if I asked – I made Soyer’s oxtail soup instead. I had been saving these oxtails – which are always sold out at the farm so quite precious – for a special occasion. Since I finished the first part of my book, I thought, let’s get out the Oxtail! That’s how it is with meat you buy straight from the farm, you treat it with the utmost respect and it becomes so much more valuable.

I had Soyer on my mind, because this week there is a fabulous lecture about him at the Guildhall Library in London. Sadly because of the book deadline I couldn’t spear a day to head over to London to attend this lecture, but at least I have now eaten his oxtail soup.

To make this into a main dish for your supper, you can add dumplings, I give you here the recipes as adapted from Soyer’s book The Modern Housewife or Menagerie.

Oxtail soup with dumplings

Some might find this soup bland, this might be so for our modern palate, this dish is not laden with salt – sweet – spicy like we are so used to today. Give it a go, and try to taste. It really is lovely to have these pure flavours. And then after you’ve tasted it, make it again and use white wine instead of water.

1 oxtail
1 carrot
1 turnip
3 medium sized onions
1 stalk of celery
2 bay leaf
a few sprigs of thyme
a few sprigs of parsley
600ml water
1tsp of peppercorns, or about 15 corns
1tsp salt

Preheat your oven to 140°C

Cut up your vegetables in dice of around the same size; no smaller than 0,5 cm.

Add a generous know of butter to a cast iron pan and melt.

Add the vegetables, and glaze for flavour, then take them out

Add another knob of butter, wait until it is melted and gently brown the two sides of the oxtail, when the juices are starting to stick to the pan, add the vegetables and then add about 600 ml water to deglaze the pan and drown the oxtail. Make sure the meat is completely covered in water.

Now add the pepper, salt and herbs and bring to a boil, uncovered.

When the water boils, put on the lid and place in the oven for 3-4 hours, or until the meat falls from the bone and the fat is nearly all melted away.

When ready to eat, strain the soup, pull the meat off the bone and keep aside.

Now make your garnish for the soup, or use the soup as it is, without straining it – I prefer this as I like to just use the soup as it is with flavoursome mushy veg. I don’t like to throw this away.

Garnish (optional)

1 carrot
1 stalk of celery
1 leek
1 turnip

Cut all these vegetables in small dice of about 0,5 cm.

Put them in a pot and pour over the strained soup, simmer for as long as it takes to cook the vegetables but make sure you don’t reduce them to a mush.

Just before serving:

Place your pulled oxtail meat in a saucepan, add some of the soup and heat up.

Serve your soup with some of the pulled oxtail in each plate.

To make this a main meal

Plain Suet Dumplings (makes 8-10)

220 g plain white flour
110 g shredded suet
0,5 tsp salt, the same of pepper
150-180 ml water
optional: a tsp of thyme leaves or parsley cut finely

Combine the flour, the suet and the salt and pepper – and herbs if you are using them – in a bowl.

Make a well and start adding the water in small portions to make sure you don’t use too much and the dough gets sticky. You might need all the water, you might need less than the 18ml

Use a blunt knife to do this so your hands don’t get covered in sticky dough.

When the dough comes together you can use your hands to knead it into a stiff paste.

Roll into ping-pong ball sized dumplings and place on a tray.

When your meat is at its last 45 minutes of stewing, add the dumplings and allow them to stew together with the meat.

Serve together.

Enjoy

George, the Dragon and the Cottage pie

23rd April 2014 by Regula 5 Comments

Wishing you all a happy Saint George’s Day with these humble cottage pies. I’ve been mostly working on my book, stuck with my nose in research and absolutely loving it but in the evening I long for great simple food with pure flavours. This pie is just that, with the best spuds you can find for your mash, decent flavoursome beef and a layer of moist spinach, this is a treat for me. I just wrap it in a towel and relax with a beer and a movie.

Today will be marked by celebrations with a lot of beer in most parts of Britain, often started by a good old pub meal that very likely will consist of a hearty pie.

Saint George’s day is the National Day for England although it is not an national holiday in Britain. As you will know, he is the patron saint of England and he is nearly always depicted slaying a dragon.

The origins of George and the dragon are quite obscure, like so many legends are. The earliest written source of Saint George in Britain can be found in the works of Bede, a monk from Northumbria who lived around the end of the 7th century.

It is not a saints day unique to Britain however, the feast of Saint George is celebrated throughout Christian and Protestant countries and all around the 23th of april, the date on which he would have been martyred.

Of George nothing is certainly known, it is most widely accepted that he was a Roman soldier from Palestine who lived in the late 3rd century AD.

Born as Georgios, Greek for ‘worker of the land’ he became an imperial guard to the emperor Diocletian, but when Diocletian issued a decree that every Christian soldier should be arrested, George renounced his emperors ruling. He declared himself openly to be Christian and refused to convert to the old Roman gods. Diocletian tortured and later decapitated George for his refusal.

No doubt you will all have been waiting for the dragon slaying moment in this story but unfortunately I will have to disappoint you as there are no dragons in this tale.

The tale of Saint George and the dragon dates from a much later legend during Medieval times. Here the story of George would have been Eastern in origin and brought back from the Crusades. Before the Middle ages George was depicted as a soldier but around the 11th century that changed to the now more popular dragon scene. The first written source is believed to be a 11th century Georgian text that can be found quoted in the book The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition.

Then the tale of George and the dragon appears in the Legenda sanctorum or Golden legend, a collection of hagiographies (stories of the Saints) by Jacobus de Voragine. This book of which there were over a thousand of manuscripts in the 13th century was very popular and was one of the first books that were printed in the English language when printing was invented around 1450.

Jacobus de Voragine tells the tale of the place Silene in Lybya where a dragon lived that terrorised the countryside. To appease the dragon, the people would bring it sacrifices in the form of sheep and also children who were chosen by lottery. One day the daughter of the king was chosen in the lottery and he offered all his wealth to save her. The people refused and the maiden was sent to the dragon dressed in a wedding gown. Then a man named George passed the lake where the dragon lived and saw the princess in distress. He charged towards the dragon with his lance and wounded the beast, he then bound him and took him to the village with the princess he had saved from it. The villagers all in fear of the approach of the dragon were then given the choice. Become a Christian and George promised to slay the dragon there before them. They all converted and George slew the dragon.

There are other similar versions of this tale, as there are with so many legends and from the 15th century on we find a large amount of illustrations, paintings and stained glass windows illustrating Saint George slaying the dragon to save the maiden throughout the world.

Legends are usually there to tell the oldest tale in the book, good and evil, right and wrong.

What really happened and if it happened at all is not important anymore, it is what you do with it and how you interpret it.

My days of being religious have long been gone, but I still like to hear the stories, and I like to try and trace their origins.

What better way to celebrate than having a meal together, these cottage pies are easy and can be made well in advance and popped in the freezer until you need them.

Cottage pie has a long history, it has always been about using up leftover meat to create a new and filling meal.
So what are you up to today?

Cottage pie

What do you need (serves 2 with leftovers for 1 portion)

400 g beef mince, from chuck steak
1 large chestnut mushroom or a white one
1 stalk of celery
1 small carrot
1 clove of garlic
a knob of butter to fry the meat and veg
1 small tin of tomato puree 50-70 gr (concentrate of tomato)
1 glass of red wine or stout beer like guinness – 250 ml
2 teaspoons of Worcester sauce
300 ml of beef or vegetable stock (I use an organic vegetable stock cube)
Salt and pepper to taste
A few handfuls of fresh spinach (you can use from your freezer too)
Potato mash, you need 4 large spuds or use leftover if you have some
Add 4 teaspoons of grated cheddar cheese
2 individual trays, or one larger one. Small pie pans work well. (14×19)

Method

Cook your spuds and make your mash with milk, butter, nutmeg and salt. If you like to make it richer, add an egg yolk too. You need a silky smooth mash which is slightly wetter than you’d eat it normally as it dries a bit in the oven.

Chop all the vegetables and add to a heavy based casserole, glaze a little over a medium flame and then add the meat. Brown the meat and add the tomato puree, stir well to combine evenly
When the tomato starts to caramelise – which means stick to the bottom of the pan, pour in the wine or beer. Stir to loosen up the meat and veg.
Let the booze evaporate, it takes about a minute, and it will be reduced a lot. If you don’t want to use alcohol, use water or stock

Now pour in the garlic, stock, and the Worcester sauce and put on the lid, leave for 30 minutes but check on it frequently so it doesn’t burn to the base. You may leave it longer too, it is merely for the flavours to develop.

Use boiling water from the kettle and blanch your spinach, drain and add a cube of butter, you may omit this but butter does taste so very well.

Preheat your oven to 180°C

Place your spinach in your chosen baking tray or trays, season with pepper.
When the meat is ready, transfer it to you tray or trays.

Now make the mash layer by scooping blobs of potato on the meat, then spread out.
You can pipe this mash, but who has the time to pipe mash on a weekday??

Place into the oven under the gril for about 10-15 minutes or until your mash has some color. It depends really on what you like, lightly coloured or not.

Serve with a beer, or wine if you like.
Put the rest in the freezer, we usually have some leftovers. These pies freeze very well, just defrost in your fridge overnight when planning to use.

Enjoy

You might also enjoy
Beef and Oyster pie
Watercress and trout pie
Sussex Stewed steak

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Poverty and oysters … Beef, stout and oyster pie

4th March 2013 by Regula 10 Comments

As Dickens’ Sam Weller remarks in the Pickwick papers:

‘Poverty and oysters always seem to go together’.

Oysters have been savoured in Britain since Roman times. Shells have been found at many archaeological sites, with the Roman fort and Amphitheatre in Richborough as the most symbolically important one, and stretching as far north as Hadrian’s and the Antonine walls. Before the Romans came, the Britons regarded shellfish as something to eat when there was no fish or meat to be had. The little molluscs weren’t sought after until the Romans started to farm them and even export them live to Rome, where they were considered a delicacy.

When the Romans withdrew and the Saxons invaded in the 5th century, so a rich culinary culture disappeared, which included the oyster farming. It would take centuries for the oyster to become popular again and the first recorded appearance is to be found in a 14th century cookery manuscript by the Master Chef of King Richard II.

Throughout
the Medieval period the church imposed a number of days where one
should eat fish rather than meat. In fact, for a third of the year,
eating meat was forbidden. Therefore the mixing of fish and meat in
dishes only became popular later in the 16th century and an early 17th
century cookbook gives the recipe for roasting mutton with oysters.

By the end of the 18th century the industry had become highly regulated and although oysters had been the delight of the rich for a very long time, industrialisation cheapened them, making oysters one of the staples of the diet of the poor.

Beef
and oyster pie is a classic Victorian dish; it was the food of the
poor, and the poorer you were the more oysters you would put in your
pie. Oysters were plenty, the smaller ones sold as fast food on the
streets of London or pickled to keep, while the bigger ones were put in
stews and pies to make up for the deficiency of meat. It was a cheap
source of protein.

Oysters were also a typical food to be found
in public houses, where they were most commonly served with a pint of
stout. Stout beers were popular because of their strong flavour, higher
alcohol content, longer shelf life and because they were cheaper than
other beers. The claims of Stout being a nutritious drink made the
pairing with oysters the perfect cheap meal for the working class on
their way home with their wages.

Demand for oysters was high,
with as many as 80 million oysters a year being transported from
Whitstable’s nutrient-rich waters to London’s Billingsgate Market alone.
In the middle of the 19th century the natural oyster beds became
exhausted in England. As the oyster beds further declined, what had
previously been the food of the poor became a delicacy for the upper
classes once again.

This pie is wonderfully succulent; once a poor man’s dinner, it now graces our tables with elegance. The beef, oyster and stout or porter beer are a perfect pairing together with a rich suet crust – just like your nan used to make but let’s kick it up a notch and put some effort into the decoration of the pie! It’s fun to let your children have a go with the leftover pastry; you will have leftover with this recipe. Keep in the freezer until needed, defrost the evening before in your fridge.
This recipe works just as good as a stew, feeding 4 hungry mouths.

What do you need
For the stew

1 large carrot, quartered and cut into 2 cm long pieces
3 medium onions
500 g chuck of beef, diced
flour to dust the meat
1 pint of stout, Guinness or porter beer
1 teaspoon of mushroom ketchup (if you don’t have it, leave it out or use 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar)
2 bay leaf
thyme
pepper and salt to season
water
6 oysters, cleaned.

For the pastry

300g plain white flour
100g unsalted butter
100g Atora shredded suet
a generous pinch of salt
125 ml icecold water
1 egg, beaten

Method
for the stew – filling

Preheat your oven to 160C
Add the carrots and onion to a cast iron casserole and color them over a medium fire.
Dust the meat with the flour and add it to the vegetables.
Immediately pour in the stout, mushroom vinegar and herbs.
If the meat isn’t completely covered in liquid, add some water or extra stout until it’s just covered.
Bring to the boil without putting on the lid.
When boiling, put on the lid and place in a lower part of the oven for 3-3,5 hours.
It depends on the animal used, the quality of the meat and how lean it is to know when the meat will be done. Check on it regularly so you don’t end up with dry meat. The meat is done when it is about to fall apart.

for the pastry lid
Combine the flour, butter, suet and salt in a large mixing bowl and use your fingers to rub the butter into the flour. Keep on doing this until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Pour in the water and start pressing the liquid into the breadcrumb-like mixture. Be gentle as you must be careful not to overwork the dough.
When you have created a rough dough, wrap it in cling film and let it rest in the fridge for an hour or more. You can prepare the pastry the day before if you’re feeling organized.
Preheat your oven to 180C
Ladle the stew into your shallow pie dish and place the oysters neatly so everyone will find some in his plate.
Use the beaten egg to eggwash the edges of the piedish.
Take your pastry out of the fridge and place it on a floured work surface. Now roll out the pastry about 1 cm thick and make sure it’s larger than your pie dish.
Now carefully pick up the pastry and place it over the pie dish. Trim off the edges of the pastry so you get a nice lid. Now crimp the edges by using your thumb or a fork so the pastry lid is closed tightly.
Decorate the pie lid if you like and eggwash generously before putting into the oven on one of the lower parts.
The pie should be nice and golden after 40-45 minutes.Serve with peas and carrots because you got to have peas and carrots with pie …

You might also like
Sussex stewed steak >
Jo’s Hotpot >
Chicken & taragon pie >

Sussex Stewed Steak on a wet winters day

13th January 2013 by Regula 24 Comments

Eight in the morning, a wet winters day in the Sussex countryside. The sun is rising over the marshes and fields but the pink glow is quickly washed away by grey clouds of rain …
I walk trough a typical crooked path where the tops of the ancient trees lean towards each other creating an archway over the road, nature’s chapel.
Blissfully relaxed I listen to the bustling sound of busy birds in the hedges. Holding my breath, counting robins, coal tits and wrens. They don’t even seem to notice or care that I’m standing there.
Then it quiets down, the moment has passed and I walk on.

When I am at home but I have lots and lots to do during the day and not enough time to prepare a lovely meal, a Sussex Stewed steak is my dish of choice.
It really is the easiest dish you can imagine and it comes out of the oven as a warming meal with elegant flavors to enjoy with guests or just for your own family with plenty of leftovers for the next day. The Stout, port and mushroom sauce used, create a mahogany sauce with a deep flavour sometimes – depending on which Stout you use- you find some chocolate notes, and however a humble dish it turns out to be a feast for the palate every time.

For this dish you should use the chuck of beef, an economical cut of meat that has a deep flavour after slowly cooking it for a few hours. It is one of my favourite cuts of meat, it doesn’t cost the earth so I go for the best quality meat I can find. I buy grass fed Black Angus but I would love to try it with Sussex Longhorn beef one day. I suspect the Sussex Longhorn or the Sussex Red, will have been the kind of breed used for this dish decades ago.

I couldn’t find when the recipe first came to be but it is has been cooked in Sussex and beyond by generations of women. The most famous of women connected to this dish must be Elizabeth David who featured her recipe for the Sussex Stewed steak in her book Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen.
All the recipes I found were all very similar, did they all originate from David’s recipe or is this a far older recipe. Why is it called Sussex Stewed Steak? Is it because David gave the dish its name while she was living is Sussex? Or is it named after the breed used to cook this dish, the Sussex Longhorn or Red … Jane Grigson features her version of the dish in her book ‘English food‘, although similar it explains more how to prepare this recipe.
I cooked four different -although all very similar- recipes over the months, and this is the one I feel is the best, adapted from David’s and Grigson’s recipe.

David as well as Grigson suggests to serve the Sussex stewed steak with mashed potatoes and large field mushrooms. After trying a few other vegetable sides and potatoes, I agree the ladies are of course right.
The Sussex Stewed steak indeed pairs wonderfully with creamy mashed potatoes and sauteed mushrooms.

Sussex stewed steak

What do you need

1 kg of chuck steak in one piece
Flour to dust the meat with
1 large onion, sliced in rings
half a cup of stout
half a cup of port
2 tablespoons of mushroom ketchup*
freshly ground black pepper

To serve
Mashed potatoes, nice and creamy
sauteed mushrooms, a large variety.

* You can buy Mushroom Ketchup from Budgens, if you can’t find it you can substitute it with red wine vinegar.

Method

Preheat your oven to 160° celsius
Dust the meat with the flour and place in a baking dish that is just a little larger than the meat. If your meat has some fat, place in the dish with the fatty side down.
Place the onion rings around the meat and a few on top.
Pour in the Stout, port and mushroom ketchup, you might think it is not enough liquid but don’t add any more than instructed. Trust me.
Season with freshly ground pepper
Cover the dish with tin foil
Put in the lower part of the oven for 3 hours then take off the tin foil leaving just a bit behind to only cover the top part of the meat. If your meat had a fatty side, turn it around now with the fat facing up this keeps the meat from drying out.
Let simmer in the oven for another hour, this gives the sauce a chance of thickening slightly as you will see it is very runny, it will also color the onions.

Enjoy with a good pint of Stout, Porter or Ale!

You might also like:
Jo’s Lamb Hotpot >

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