Fire & Knives

Meals are made memorable when they involve moments of great emotion. A first date, an important decision or a pregnancy announced and the menu pretty much burns into the cortex. For me, the earliest and most profoundly etched is associated with a series of moments of abject terror on consecutive Saturdays in the early seventies.

Most people of a certain age recall hiding behind the sofa or burying their face in cushions when the scariest bits of Dr Who came on. For me this was never an option. No matter what horrific trial Davros was about to visit on the Doctor and his fetching assistant, no piece of upholstery could come between my mouth and my plate.

We used to spend Saturday evenings with my maternal grandparents. Mum and Dad never really got round to introducing their parents so Saturday evenings were spent with Ron and Edna and the genteel pleasures of BBC Light Entertainment while Sundays were spent with Dad's parents, a groaningly vast lunch and 'The Football'.

I find it almost automatic to write 'Edna was a great cook' in fact, by modern criteria, she probably wasn't. What she could do, though, was deliver food with such loving warmth that anything seemed brilliant. There was one particular dish, the distracting fascination of which made me the only child in my class able to face the Weirdigans with such preternatural sang froid. It was everything that my ten-year old heart and palate could desire on a single plate.

Corned beef

'Corn', in its old English usage, means ‘grains’ and, in this case refers to large salt grains used in the pickling process. If you order corned beef in the States, you'll still end up with delicious slices of brined and boiled beef, sometimes served cold with sauerkraut, mustard and pickles. What we refer to as Corned beef - the stuff in the odd tapering tins with the fallible key has a strange and noble history.

It was native Americans who introduced the settlers to ‘Pemmican’: salted and air dried meat, beaten in a mortar, mixed with fat and dried fruit and preserved in skins or bladders; it was the only thing that got them through terrible winters or sea voyages. Pemmican was carried to the Antarctic by Scott and on the early Everest expeditions. Later, the invention of canning made corned or 'Bully' beef the staple of the military diet. I'm not sure if Nan knew any of this but, having brought up a family through rationing, she probably knew it as a good value source of meat that didn't require cooking and was reassuringly upmarket from SPAM.

For the ten-year-old gourmet, corned beef had to be served carefully. Like any beef it needed to be served à point. For this reason it was kept refrigerated until the last moment so there was no danger of the fat content becoming jelly-like or runny (the technical term for this was ‘All yucky’). This was such a culinary transgression that corned beef that had been allowed to chambré would have to be recycled in hash as it could never be satisfactorily re-chilled. It also had to be sliced to around five millimetres so each piece maintained dimensional integrity yet still crumbled when invited by the application of the fork.

God! I was an obnoxious child.

Chips with Worcestershire Sauce

What else can be written about the chip? I could bang on about blanching, fat temperatures and the tragic disappearance of beef tallow from our lives but, for Nan, chip manufacture was in the blood. No, I’m not referring to abnormally high levels of circulating serum cholesterol or blood lipids oxidising to arterial plaques. I mean her Mum ran a chip shop.

From a tiny chip pan on the Baby Belling she produced basket after basket of crisp, blonde, hand-cut chips. How she was able to is still the most enduring mystery of cooking. In a domestic kitchen without a proper fryer, the entire process of deep fat frying seems a suicidal endeavour. What kind of irresponsible maniac would willingly heat a gallon of grease to just below flash-point… in a small pan …over a naked flame… inside their house? I’d sooner let my daughter juggle the knives.

I use the less frightening method (attributed to Heston Blumenthal) of cutting inch thick chips, parboiling them almost to collapse then shallow frying the sides. They taste great and look terrific but my cowardice is total. Nan could not only make better chips with her old pot and a bag of Maris Pipers but, to my mind, she did so with the panache and insane courage of a small, wrinkled Red Adair.

I've no idea where the Worcestershire sauce on chips thing came from. I know my Grandfather used to keep it in the house for his 'Prairie Oyster' - two raw eggs in a glass with a shot of Lea & Perrin’s - which he used to down in a single repellent gulp to my fascinated disgust. To drink something like that without alcohol or large side bet seems even now, weird beyond logic.

At least this meant that Worcestershire sauce was always around and, though I dimly recall some infantile experimentation with ketchup and brown sauce, it's been the foil for my chips ever since.

Worcestershire sauce contains hints of soy, nam pla, tamarind, salt and vinegar and hot chillies; a bastard mix of every cuisine we ever colonised and probably, therefore, politically incorrect in ways we’ve yet to discover. It's also umami in a bottle and elevates the chip from a cheap source of guilt to a near religious experience. I feel no compunction whatever in whispering to you like some comic book crack dealer "just try it… you know you want to".

Mushy Peas

“…Two main varieties are cultivated: a starchy, smooth coated one that gives us dried and split peas, and a wrinkly type with a higher sugar content, which is usually eaten immature as a green vegetable.” (McGee on Food and Cooking).

Let me be honest here and admit that I abhor the frozen pea. Pitifully jejune in its unformed state, the frozen pea is a membranous sac containing pea-flavoured juice and perhaps ambition. I’ve never eaten unborn gazelle poached in its mother’s milk so frozen peas are the one remaining food that leave me authentically queasy. Left in the pod and allowed to develop the pea becomes the seed it was supposed to be; its chlorophyll-laden cotyledons a little trust fund of energy for the plant to come. Above all, the character of the legume has changed from effete vegetable to stout starch. The British have always known this. You can’t make ‘pease puddinge’ out of petit pois.

The key word to look out for here is ‘marrowfat’. Marrowfat peas have been allowed to reach maturity and then dry on the vine. They need only to be soaked and boiled to reform into a nutritious, warming porridge. To expedite this process they used to be packed with an enormous horse-pill of bicarbonate of soda, which, Nan swore, served to retain the healthy green colour during the long boiling. In fact, the bicarb just persuaded the peas to yield form, shape or individuality quicker. Several reputable companies also undertook this process, packing the results into cans for the convenience of Nans everywhere.

As small boys are not hot on veg, the Marrowfat pea is a powerful negotiation tool. The green colour and reassuring name mean that, for the purposes of argument with Mum, they can be regarded as veg whereas – and here, I feel, Nan was a covert ally - they’re really a carbohydrate podge. If people had known what Atkins was, this most happily duplicitous of vegetables would have driven them to howling madness.

Of course, I’m a grown up now and I don’t watch Dr. Who, even in an ironic way. The last time I was in a supermarket, I looked for corned beef. Where there had once been yards of Armour, Victoria Cross, Prince’s and Fray Bentos, upright and resolute like a rank of Tommies on the firestep, there was a huge fixture of modern quasi-meats – Baco-bits, soya mince, vegebanger mix and TVP. Right at the bottom, on a shelf where it would embarrass no one; where only someone desperately seeking bargains or bent double with age would find it, was the corned beef. I think it was imported from China and it looked like dogfood.

Nigella Lawson has a terribly witty recipe for mushy peas that involves pulsing petit pois, poached with garlic into a light but intense green coulis. Nan say’s she retired her chip pot years ago. I’d like to think it was an act of protest by an original domestic goddess.