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I told my social media followers that my Christmas recipe this year was going to be roast turkey and I said that I would also provide the recipes for two sides. I provided four options: roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, bread sauce and cranberry sauce/jelly. Roast potatoes received the most votes so here we go.[1]
I believe that the roast potatoes are almost as important as the roast meat, perhaps more important. Whether it’s the Christmas dinner or the weekly Sunday roast, if you mess up the roasties, everyone will be sad, and there’s a good chance you’ll be forever shunned by friends and family.
So I provide you with my method. It’s tried and tested and I reckon foolproof! Don’t worry about precise weights/volumes of ingredients or sizes of roasting trays; this recipe is most adaptable so use what you have. What is important, however, is the type of potato used and the fat or oil in which they are cooked.
The potatoes must be of the floury type: Maris Piper, King Edward and Albert Bartlett varieties are easy to find in the supermarkets, but for me the supreme variety of spud when it comes to roasting is the Alouette. It’s technically a waxy potato, but when roasted the centre is like the creamiest mashed potato. It’s not widely available in supermarkets, but keep a look out at greengrocers and farmers’ markets; you will not be sorry should you happen upon some and buy a kilo or two. I bought mine from Unicorn in Manchester.
Next, we need good fat or oil. I used approximately equal amounts of lard and rapeseed oil. All solid animal fats are good: beef dripping, goose fat and duck fat are great alternatives – they all have high smoking points and make for a crisp potato. As for plant-based oils, you must avoid olive oils completely and go for high smoke point ones like rapeseed, groundnut or sunflower. Avoid the solid, white vegan fats, they are bad for you and the environment. You don’t have to go half and half either, you can use all oil or all animal fat: I vary it depending on what oils and fats I have in the store cupboard/fridge.
Anyway, let’s get to it.
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Make sure to use a deep roasting tin and that it is big enough to fit all of the potatoes in a single layer. Notice too there are no herbs thrown in, but if you want to add some be my guest.
If making roasties for the Christmas dinner, you can slide the tray of oil or fat into the oven as soon as the turkey comes out.
Good, floury potatoes, peeled
Salt
Plant-based oils and/or solid animal fats
Preheat your oven to 190°C (if you followed my turkey recipe, the oven will already be at this temperature). Add enough oil or fat to the tin so that it comes to a depth of between 0.5 to 0.75 centimetres. Slide it into the oven to get nice and hot.
Cut your potatoes into good-sized pieces[2] making cuts at angles so that there are sharp, angular pieces: the pointier, the crispier; the crispier the better.
Get a large pot of water that had been liberally dosed with salt boiling and add the potatoes. Cover and bring back to a boil, and once boiling again, set a timer for 6 minutes.
When the time is up, strain the cooking water and allow the potatoes to steam dry for a few minutes, then place them back in the pan, cover the lid and give them a good shake to fluff up the edges (wear oven gloves, don’t get a steam burn). Leave the lid off the spuds again so that they can steam a little longer. You can do this stage well in advance if you like – even the previous day.
Gingerly remove the roasting tin and place the potatoes in the oil, spacing them out in a single layer. Use a pair of tongs to help. Slide the roasting tin back into the oven. After 15 minutes turn them over, and keep turning them every 15 minutes or so until crisp on the outside and cooked through the centre. It will take around an hour.
Using tongs, place in a warmed serving dish or bowl and serve.
Notes
[1] Sprouts came second – recipe coming very soon.
[2] I’m not going to dictate to you what a good size is; it’s all down to personal preference, but as a guide, medium potatoes get cut into quarters or sixths, and larger ones into eighths.
This blog post complements the recent episode of The British Food History Podcast called Turkey with Tom Copas.
If you feel inspired to order a Copas turkey, you need to get your order in by 16 December to avoid disappointment.
In the episode, we discussed the best way to roast turkey and we concluded that as long as you baste the bird and calculate the cooking time properly, it will be delicious. Tom even says that there’s no need to cover the turkey with bacon. While I agree with him, I do like the crispy bacon and the delicious, perfectly seasoned juices that come from the roasting turkey. My way of roasting turkey is very similar to how I cook a chicken.
What we didn’t discuss is the giblets! Please don’t waste them, they can be turned into lovely rich gravy when combined with the roasting juices. It’s important to get the giblet stock on about 45 minutes before the turkey goes in the oven (or you could prepare it in advance).
If you want to stuff the turkey, I suggest you stuff the neck only because an empty cavity means quicker cooking and a more succulent turkey.
Right, let’s get to it.
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You don’t have to use bacon if you don’t want to, but butter is essential. It adds richness, helps the bird keep moist and gives the skin a lovely deep brown colour.
1 free-range turkey
250 g salted butter, softened
Freshly ground black pepper
Around 14 rashers of dry-cured streaky bacon (optional)
Stuffing (optional)
Halved or quartered carrots and parsnips (optional; see recipe)
As soon as you get up on Christmas morning, take the turkey out of the fridge, untruss it, and when it’s time to cook the turkey, preheat your oven to 190°C.
Sit the turkey on a board, legs facing towards you, then make a tear in the skin where the breast starts and lift the skin away from the breast. Don’t rush – you don’t want to tear the skin. Put half the butter between the skin and breast and massage it as far back as possible. If you are using stuffing, add this under the skin too and tuck the flap of neck skin underneath. If there’s not much neck skin, don’t worry, it can be secured with a skewer.
Smear the rest of the butter over the outside of the turkey and season with plenty of black pepper, then lay the bacon over, overlapping each rasher only slightly.
Weigh the prepared turkey and calculate the cooking time: 30 minutes per kilo. A 4.5 kilo turkey will take 2 ½ hours. If cooking for more than 3 hours, cover the legs with foil.
Sit the turkey in its roasting tin, place it in the oven, and leave it for a good 45 minutes before doing anything at all. At the 45-minute mark baste the turkey with any juices; make sure to tip any juices in the cavity into the roasting tin.
Baste every 20 minutes or so. When the bacon is very crispy, remove it and set aside.
If you like you can add some carrots and parsnips, peeled and halved or quartered to braise in the juices. It’s best to do this when there are 90 minutes to go – don’t forget to turn the veg over each time you braise.
When the time is up, you can test with a digital probe: 68°C is the temperature you are looking for. Take the turkey, place it on a carving board and cover with foil. It will happily rest for one to two hours.
When it’s time to carve, remove the legs and separate them into thighs and drumsticks. For the breast, I find the easiest way is to remove one side completely and then slice it thickly. These can be arranged on a warm serving plate, surrounded by the crisp bacon. Only cut into the second breast if the first one goes (it keeps better that way for leftover feasts).
Don’t waste or fear the giblets! The giblets are the heart, neck, gizzard and liver.[1] Use your vegetable trimmings from the veg to make the stock: though avoid brassicas like sprouts.
For the stock:
Heart, gizzard and neck
A knob of butter
Leek greens, carrot peelings, and some celery trimmings, or 2 outer stems of celery
2 cloves of garlic, lightly crushed
Herbs: bay leaves, parsley stalks, rosemary or thyme sprig tied with string
175 ml white wine
Cold water
For the gravy
Giblet stock
Pan of turkey juices
1 tbs cornflour
To make the stock, first cut up the giblets into quarters.
In a saucepan, heat the butter until foaming, add the giblets and fry over a medium-high heat until brown – about 5 minutes. Now add the vegetable trimmings, garlic and herbs and wilt them. Cook until they have picked up a tinge of brown, then add the wine. Stir and scrape any nice burnt bits from the bottom. Add water to just cover the contents, put a lid on and bring to a simmer and cook for around 3 hours, then strain through a sieve into a clean pan (or into a tub if you’re making it in advance).
When it’s time to make the gravy, get the stock nice and hot. When the turkey is cooked and is resting on its board, pour the hot stock into the roasting tin and scrape off all the nice treacly burnt bits, then tip the whole thing back into your saucepan. Skim away most of the buttery juices.[2] Bring to a simmer and then add the cornflour which has been first slaked in a little cold water. Stir and simmer unlidded for 10 minutes.
Check the seasoning, though usually I find that the bacon and the salted butter from roasting the turkey have done it for me. Pour the gravy into a jug. You can pass it through a sieve, but I never do. Easy!
[1] Use the liver for the stuffing, or fry it and eat it on toast. You could devil it – recipe for devilling livers can be found here.
[2] But don’t throw the fat away, it can be used for frying vegetables for sauces or soup.
Hello there folks. A very quick post just to let you all know that I am giving two free talks this December.
The first is taking place at Manchester Central Library at 6pm on 5 December and is entitled The History of Pies & Puddings. Because it’s December I shall be looking at some festive examples but also a few other favourites. There will also be some of the library’s antiquarian cookery books to view as part of it. Book your spot here.
The second is a free Zoom talk on 17 December at 7pm (GMT) called The Philosophy of Puddings where I will look at the history of this very British food in the kitchen and in our culture. Will any of your favourites be mentioned? Book your spot here.
There are new events cropping up all of the time so make sure that you check the Upcoming Events tab regularly.
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!
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Wine, Cyder, Negus, Purl,[1] and Porter;
Are liquors for any Courtier.
The Free-Mason’s Calendar, 1776[2]
Merry Christmas everyone! It’s time for my annual boozy Christmas drink, and this year’s is so good, you can even give it to the kids; if you take Mrs Beeton’s advice (I advise against it, but what do I know). It is called negus; the ingredients are simple, and you are almost guaranteed to have them this time of year: wine, sugar, citrus fruit, spices. Easy.
Its origin lies with the English officer class of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, who got into the very sensible habit of watering down their wine to avoid getting too drunk of an evening. They still wanted something to drink though. It is named after Colonel Francis Negus (1660-1732), ‘a well-connected gentleman’, who, aside from being a noted member of the officer class, was also an MP, and a talented horse rider and hunter, so-much-so he was given the position of Master of the Horse and Warden of Windsor Forest. Quite the chap it would seem. The earliest description known comes in the form of a handwritten note in a 1725 edition of Tacitus’s works. It said: ‘After a morning’s walk, half a pint of white wine, made and hot and sweetened a little, is recond very good. – Col. Negus, a gentn. of tast, advises it, I have heard say.’[3] Initially it was a heated mixture of white wine and water, sugar and then some citrus juice, sometimes lemons, or sweet or Seville oranges, and it hasn’t really changed that much.
Its low alcohol made it especially good for the infirm or chronically ill. One Dr William Buchan in his 1797 book, prescribes claret negus for those with ‘Slow or Nervous Fever’, what we would call depression today.[4] In the book Oxford Nightcaps (1827), the author tells us that a doctor friend of his, a certain Doctor Willich, thinks ‘Negus is one of the innocent and wholesome species of drink especially if Seville oranges be added’. He also recommends lemons, cinnamon, cloves and all-spice. And calves’ foot jelly, which was thought very nourishing to those who couldn’t digest anything too rich or challenging.
Into the mid-19th century, negus settled down as a drink to be enjoyed by everyone, the wine most often used now being port (a drink which had been made popular since the Napoleonic Wars). It is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). When the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to show him the wonderful parties put on by his old boss, the kind and caring, Mr Fezziwig: ‘There were dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.’[5] What a sight they would have been!
So inoffensive was negus that it became a popular drink with kids, with Mrs Beeton informing us in 1861 that ‘[a]s this beverage is more usually drunk at children’s parties than at any other, the wine need not be very old or expensive for the purpose.’ Her proportions are 1 pint of port to every quart of water, plus a quarter of a pound of sugar, zest and juice of one lemon and some grated nutmeg. She adds: ‘Allow 1 pint of wine, with the ingredients in proportion, for a party of 9 or 10 children.’[6]
It’s essentially a weak version of my favourite hot-booze drink, smoking bishop, but child-friendly. Hm. I suppose it’s one way to get them to sleep on Christmas Eve night!
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Use whatever wine you prefer and your favourite citrus fruit. I went with port and a clementine and added some nutmeg and cinnamon. I must say it was very drinkable.
I’ve metricated the volumes, but the rule of thumb here is 1 part wine to 2 parts water, and you can sweeten the mixture to your taste.
Makes 1.3 litres:
400 ml wine (port, claret or white wine)
Zest and juice of 1 citrus fruit (lemon, sweet orange, Seville orange, clementine, etc)
Spices: ¼ freshly grated nutmeg, a snapped cinnamon stick, a teaspoon of cracked allspice berries or bruised cloves; choose your favourites.
800 ml boiling water
100 to 120 g caster sugar.
Heat the wine slowly with the zest and juice of your chosen fruit, and the spices until scalding hot (but not boiling). Add the hot water, then add sugar to taste. Pass through a sieve into a punch bowl or jug. To serve, ladle into beakers or cups.
One final note before I go: in Jerry Thomas and Christian Shultz’s How to Mix Drinks (1862), there is a very interesting-sounding soda negus recipe. The wine is warmed up with sugar and spices, then left to cool, then soda is added before serving.[7] Worth a try I think!
Notes
[1] Purl was an ale that had been infused with wormwood. Sounds full-on. Potential future Christmas booze post.
[2] Anon. (1776) The Free-Mason’s Calendar: or, an Almanac for the Year of Christ 1776.
[3] Wondrich, D. (2021) The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails. Edited by D. Wondrich and N. Rothbaum. Oxford University Press.
[4] Buchan, W. (1797) Domestic Medicine, Or, A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases, by Regimen and Simple Medicines. Edited by I. Cathrall. Richard Folwell.
[5] Dickens, C. (2010) A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings. Penguin Classics.
[6] Beeton, I. (1861) The Book of Household Management. Lightning Source.
[7] Thomas, J. and Schultz, C. (1862) How to Mix Drinks, Or, The Bon-vivant’s Companion. Dick & Fitzgerald.
Filed under Britain, Christmas, Eighteenth Century, Festivals, food, General, history, Recipes, The Victorians, Uncategorized
This post complements the 2023 Christmas special of The British Food History Podcast called ‘Mince Pies’:
As promised on this year’s Christmas episode of the podcast, all about mince pies, here is my pastry recipe and method for making the shaped-mince pies in E. Kidder’s Receipts of Pastry and Cookery. It was originally published in 1721, but I used the 1740 edition of the book (here’s a link to the document). If you go to the end of the book, you will see lots of different minced pie templates, just like the ones below. The idea was that you rolled out your pastry and cut a shape out, then made pastry walls, filled them with mincemeat, placed on lid on top and baked it. Really beautiful, but fiddly-looking shapes, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I felt a little nervous making them, so let me at this point, say a massive thank you to Ivan Day for the advice he gave me on shaping these pies. Ivan has an excellent blog with a fascinating article about mince pies (click this link to read it).
In the Christmas episode, I considered making some of the pie designs in Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (first published in 1660), but I found Edward’s designs much easier to extrapolate into three-dimensional pies! However, here are a few from May’s book to give you an idea of the sorts of minced pies he was making:
The first thing you need to do is get organised with your templates. I simply took screenshots of the book, printed them out and cut them out. You can make them any size you like. My shapes were around 10cm wide, and I went for the ones that looked the easiest!
Then you need the correct tools for the job. I have collected over the years various pastry tools, both antique and modern. The wheels are called jiggers, which are used for cutting pastry. The antique ones usually come with a crimping tool attached, and these are used to fuse two pieces of pastry. The one I own with what looks like a flat pair of tweezers was particularly helpful for the pies I made here. I used a paring knife to cut out the shapes – the jiggers weren’t appropriate for these smaller pies.
Jiggers do come in handy for cutting out the pastry walls – essentially strips of pastry – I have a tool that’s made up of 5 jiggers on one expandable frame so you can cut several strips of the same thickness in one go.
That’s the tools of the trade, but now let’s look at our ingredients: we need mincemeat (I used the lamb mincemeat, recipe here) but you can use any you like.[1] Then we need some pastry that is mouldable (we don’t want the walls collapsing in the oven!) yet edible.
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I came up with the following recipe, based on one given by Jane Grigson in English Food.[2] It’s very good for moulding, but not particularly delicious, I made a few changes and I think it’s pretty good. It is simple to make, and this was enough for 8 to 10 pies, depending upon how large your templates are (you could, of course, make one large one!)
500 g plain flour
125 g salted butter, diced
125 g lard, diced
75 ml hot water
2 tbs icing sugar
First, rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Put the lard in a saucepan and pour the hot water over it. Heat gently, but be careful – you don’t want it to boil and splutter. Stir in the icing sugar and when it is dissolved, make a well in the centre of the flour-butter mixture and pour into it three-quarters of the hot liquid. Cut the liquid in with a knife, then pour the remaining hot liquid to pour over any dry patches that remain. Once all of the water has been added, give the pastry a knead (leave it to cool a little if you need to). It should be smooth, pliable and waxy. Cover with cling film and allow to cool completely, but do not refrigerate.
Now you can roll out a third of the pastry thinly – aim for the thickness of a pound coin, 2 to 3 millimetres – and cut out your bases. Now roll out another third into a long strip, long enough to go around the perimeter of your shapes. To do this, use a piece of string to trace around the shape. When the appropriate length, use a ruler to cut your strips at your desired thickness. I went for 2 cm, but I could have gone thicker than that, I think.
Now the fiddly bit: brush the edges of the bases with plain water and glue the sides on. Use your finger and thumb to pinch them together, and then crimp them with a crimper tool if you have one. Repeat with all of your shapes and place in the fridge for a few hours to firm up. When firm, roll out the final third of the pastry and cut out your lids.
Fill your pies with your chosen mincemeat, brush the rims of your pies with water and fix on the lids in the same way as you did the bases. Make a steam hole and place back in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up again. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 200°C.
If you like, brush your pies with an egg wash before you bake them for 25 minutes, or until a good golden-brown colour. If you are making large pies, turn the heat down to 175°C and cook longer: you should see or hear the filling bubbling, telling you it is ready!
Notes:
[1] Though it is best to use a low-sugar recipe, not a gloopy one from the supermarket shelves. I recommend Jane Grigson’s orange mincemeat or Mrs Beeton’s traditional mincemeat.
[2] See Oldbury Gooseberry Tarts on the other blog.
Filed under baking, Britain, cooking, Eighteenth Century, food, General, history, Recipes, Teatime, Uncategorized
This post complements the 2023 Christmas special of The British Food History Podcast called ‘Mince Pies’:
I have written several times about mince pies and mincemeat over the years on the blog. There are my two go-to mincemeat recipes: Jane Grigson’s Orange mincemeat, and Mrs Beeton’s traditional mincemeat, along with instructions on how to make small, individual mince pies. This year, however, I wanted to make an old-fashioned sweet lamb pie, once eaten in Westmorland in the Northwest of England, a defunct county now making up parts of Cumbria and North Yorkshire. It was one of the last areas of the country to carry on putting meat in its mincemeat mixtures.[1] Like all mince pies of the past, they were not eaten only at Christmas, but much of the year, though because of the dried fruit content, they were associated with wintertime.
I was first introduced to this pie by Jane Grigson, and I made it many moons ago, for the Neil Cooks Grigson blog, I really liked it and have been meaning to revisit it.[2] These pies were not of the small individual type, but large plate pies, baked in a pie plate made of earthenware, tin or enamel.[3]
I’ve based the recipe on hers, but I did make some changes inspired by other recipes found on the Foods of England Project website.[4] The mincemeat isn’t cooked, but because of the booze and sugar content, it keeps very well. Don’t be put off by the meat content, it makes the filling succulent – and you can taste it, but this blurring of sweet and savoury is most delicious, something I have come to embrace after so many years of making historical British food.
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This makes around 2 ¼ litres of well-packed filling, but I do intend to make two large pies at least and lots of smaller ones, so scale down if need be. It keeps for months if left somewhere dark, dry and cool; and remember mince pies are for life, not just for Christmas.
500 g lean lamb
200 g lamb or beef suet, membrane and sinew removed (packet stuff is acceptable if fresh is unavailable)
350 g apples, peeled and cored
120 g almonds
250 g each currants, raisins and sultanas
300 g soft, dark brown sugar
100 g chopped candied peel
Juice and zest of 2 oranges
120 ml dark rum
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp each ground mace and cinnamon
½ freshly grated nutmeg
To make a truly ‘minced’ meat, you need to chop the meat, suet, apples and almonds quite finely. (You can, of course, use minced lamb, slivered almonds and grated apple and suet).
Mix everything together in a large bowl and pack tightly into sterilised jars.[5] Leave to mature for at least a week before using.
These pies were made on pie plates, but you can make them in any flan or pie tin you like. For my 26 cm diameter pie plate I used the following amounts, though the pastry was quite thin, so you may want to proportion things up in line with perhaps 360 g flour. I will leave it to you to judge size and thinness. There are instructions on how to make small, individual mince pies here.
300 g plain flour
150 g butter, or 75 g each butter and lard
75 g caster or icing sugar
80-100 ml cold water
Egg wash: 1 egg beaten with ½ tsp salt
Dice the fat and rub into the flour until breadcrumbs are formed (or use the flat beater on a machine, set to slow), then add the sugar, mix, and add the water slowly mixing and stirring. Bring everything together to form a firm dough. You might not need all of the water. Knead briefly to smooth the dough, cover and then leave to rest in the fridge for around 30 minutes.
Roll out two-thirds of the dough into a round, lift and lay it over the plate neatly. Prick the base with a fork. Spoon the filling in. Again, go with your gut – do you want a thin amount or loads? I added enough to come up to the lip of my plate.
Roll the remaining third of the pastry out into a round. As it rests, wash the rim of the pie plate and place the lid on top, securing it with a crimping tool or fork prongs or with your thumb or forefinger. Cut a steam hole and brush with egg. You can sprinkle a little sugar over the top if you fancy.
Place in the fridge to firm up and preheat the oven to 200°C. When the oven has come up to heat, slide the pie onto the centre shelf and cook for around 35 minutes, or until a good golden-brown colour and you can see the filling bubble through the steam hole.
Best eaten warm with thick cream, or rum butter.
[1] Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999) The Taste of Britain. Devon: Harper Press.
[2] Read the original post here: http://neilcooksgrigson.com/2014/01/02/388-sweet-lamb-pie-from-westmorland/
[3] Grigson, J. (1992) English Food. Third Edit. Penguin.
[4] Hughes, G., ‘North Country Sweet Pie’, The Foods of England Project. http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/northcountrysweetpie.htm
[5] To sterilise jars, heat them in the oven for 25 minutes at 120°C. Any rubber seals – or lids with rubber seals, can be sterilised in very hot water.
Christmas isn’t too far away and the chances are you are probably already discussing what meats you will be roasting on the big day. Well, I am going to stick my neck out and suggest venison. Game used to be a very important part of the Christmas feasting, especially in the countryside, making an excellent centrepiece to the day’s feasting.
Regular readers will know that I love cooking with game, but it has been a while since I cooked some up for the blog. I got the opportunity to cook a nice haunch of venison because I was sent some from Farm Wilder to try out, and my gosh it was good. Apart from the meat being tender and delicious, the deer that make their venison are culled as an important part of land management in Southwest England. Without any natural predators, their numbers are increasing and pretty as they may be, they are very damaging to woodland habitats – in short, they are a menace![1]
For more information about Farm Wilder and their venison, click this link.
The important thing when buying a roasting joint is to buy as large a one as possible; large joints always roast juicier and more evenly. Bear in mind that any excess venison can be chopped and made into a hunter’s pie – essentially a shepherd’s pie but with lamb swapped for venison. I’ve suggested a 2 kg haunch but don’t worry if yours is a different weight, I have included a formula for calculating the roasting time in the method. The haunch is the equivalent of beef topside, but I think it is a much superior joint in both tenderness and flavour.
Venison is best marinated before cooking; it adds a complexity of flavour to the meat and makes it even more tender. Many recipes go into great detail about how this should be done using cooked marinades, but I think the best is also the simplest: red wine, red wine vinegar, olive oil and some herbs and spices.
Folk also make a big deal about the meat drying out in cooking (venison being a very lean meat) and there are – again – complex methods to keep the meat moist: larding it with needles or tying sheets of pork backfat or skin around it. These work, but I have found that smearing the joint with plenty of butter and covering it all with smoked streaky bacon works perfectly, adding more depth of flavour; and you get to eat some crispy bacon with your dinner.
I chose to serve my venison with potatoes and parsnips roasted in duck fat, Brussels sprouts, gravy and a fruit jelly: redcurrant is the easiest to get hold of from the shops, but quince or medlar jelly can be used too.
Serves 8:
2 kg haunch of venison
½ bottle red wine
125 ml red wine vinegar
125 ml olive oil
Around one dozen black peppercorns and juniper berries
A bunch of herbs: e.g., rosemary, thyme, marjoram or winter savoury sprigs, 3 or 4 fresh bay leaves
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
2 sticks celery, trimmed and sliced
1 leek or onion, trimmed and sliced
75 g salted butter, softened
Salt and pepper
6 to 8 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
2 tbs of redcurrant, quince or medlar jelly
2 or 3 tsp cornflour
500 ml beef stock
The day before you want to cook the venison, place it in a tub only slightly larger than the joint itself along with the wine, vinegar and olive oil. Lightly crush the spices, tie the herbs with some string and add those too. Make sure the venison is covered – or mostly covered – by the wine mixture then cover and refrigerate. Turn the meat once or twice if it is not completely submerged.
Next day, take the tub out of the fridge a few hours before you want to cook the meat, so it can come up to room temperature. Preheat your oven to 225°C. Calculate your cooking time: for rare meat roast for 15 mins per 500 g of meat plus 15 minutes; for medium 18 mins per 500 g plus 15 minutes.[2]
Now prepare the meat. Spread your vegetables in the centre of the tray and place the venison on top. Dab it dry with some kitchen paper then smear the top with the butter, season well with salt and pepper, then cover the top with the bacon, making sure each rasher overlaps the next slightly.
Ladle around half of the marinade into the tin and slide the meat into the oven. Roast for 15 minutes and then turn the heat down to 180°C. Baste the venison every 15 to 20 minutes or so, adding more marinade if it starts to dry up.
For the last 15 minutes of the cooking time, turn the heat back up to 225°C, remove the bacon, give the meat one more baste, and let it crisp up at the edges. Take the tin out, remove the meat to a board or dish and cover with kitchen foil. It will sit very happily there as you roast your potatoes and cook your veg.
Now make the gravy. Strain the contents of the tin into a jug and spoon or pour a couple of tablespoons (approximately) of the buttery olive oil layer into a saucepan. Discard the rest of the fat. Put the pan over a medium heat and stir in 2 teaspoons of cornflour. Once incorporated, cook for a minute before adding the juices. Mix to blend, before adding the beef stock, mix again and then add the remaining marinade. Cook for 10 minutes, then add the jelly and season with salt and pepper. If the gravy isn’t as thick as you’d like, slake another teaspoon of cornflour in a little cold water and stir it in. When ready, strain into a warm jug.
Remove the outer mesh covering the joint, slice and serve with the gravy, the crisp bacon rashers and extra jelly on the side.
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Notes:
[1] It is for this reason that I consider venison a vegan-friendly food: we’d have to cull them whether we ate meat or not, so we may as well.
[2] If you like your meat well done, I can’t help you.
As promised, and carrying on from my last post, here is my recipe for the traditional yeast leavened black bun (Scotch bun). I must say I was really surprised with how well it turned out: it was enriched with so much stuff and was so huge, I thought the poor little yeast cells wouldn’t be able to do their job. I was wrong, but it did take two days to do two provings required before baking.
The white dough is essentially a sweet brioche made without eggs. When it was time to knock it back after its first rising, I was encouraged by the network of small yeasty bubbles that had formed inside the dough.
The bun was huge and made quite the centrepiece (though if you wanted to reduce the quantities and make a smaller one, go ahead). The cake inside was deliciously moist, and the brioche dough wonderfully buttery and thin and in such contrast with the treacle-black centre.
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It may have been big, but it kept well and was perfectly delicious well over a week after baking.
For the basic dough:
450 g plain white flour
450 g strong white bread flour
160 g caster sugar
10 g dried fast-action yeast
20 g salt
160 g softened butter
400 ml hand-hot full-fat milk
A smidge of flavourless oil
For the centre:
750 g basic dough
100 ml black treacle
400 g currants
400 g raisins
100 g candied peel
100 g slivered almonds
1 tsp mixed spice
½ tsp each ground cinnamon and allspice
2 eggs, plus 1 more for glazing
Butter for greasing
Granulated sugar
Two days before you want to bake your black bun, in the evening, make the basic dough. This is best done with an electric mixer, however don’t let me stop you attempting this by hand. Mix the dry ingredients – flours, yeast, sugar and salt – in your mixing bowl, make a well and add the butter and milk. Mix slowly with a dough hook until everything is mixed together, then turn the speed up a little and knead until smooth. Because it’s a low-gluten mixture and there’s all of that butter and sugar, it won’t be very elastic, but when it’s really smooth, you are done. It should take 8 to 10 minutes.
Paint the inside of a bowl with oil, then bundle up the sticky dough as best you can and cover with cling film. Leave to prove until around double in size. This took 18 hours: I use a low amount of yeast on purpose that the yeast ferments slowly. It may take less time for you if you used more yeast, and if your home is warmer than mine.
Knock back the dough and place 750 g of the dough in your food mixer, then add the treacle, dried fruits, candied peel, almonds, spices and eggs. Mix with a flat beater for a couple of minutes until everything looks smooth and like a Christmas cake batter. Set aside.
Take the remaining dough, form into a ball, place on a floured work surface and roll out into a large circle 32-35 cm in diameter. Make sure your pin is floured too; this will prevent sticking. With slightly wet hands, scoop the dark sticky dough and pop it in the centre of your circle. Now gather the dough so that the centre is completely covered – rather like a giant Eccles cake.
Cut away bits of the dough that have bunched up too much and glue any edges with a thin coat of beaten egg. Don’t worry if it looks a bit messy. Turn the bun over and flatten it with your hands, smoothing away any bulging bits to make a nice round shape.
Now liberally grease a 25 cm flan ring with butter and place on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper and then dusted with flour, and place the bun in the centre. Press the bun or lightly roll it with your rolling pin so that is just a centimetre off from touching the edge. Paint the top with egg and scatter over a little granulated sugar, then stab holes in the top with a thin, pointed knife right down to its base – this keeps it flat as it rises. Cover with a large plastic bag[1] and allow to prove until it has grown large enough to fill the ring. For me, this took 12 hours.
Preheat your oven to 175°C and place a heatproof tin on the bottom of the oven. When it’s time to bake the bun boil the kettle, then open the oven and slide your bun onto the middle shelf, gingerly slide the tin out enough so that you can pour in the hot water, slide it back in and close the door.
Bake at this temperature for an hour, then turn the heat down to 140°C and bake for a further 2½ hours. If the top is getting too brown, cover it with some kitchen foil.
Remove from the oven, and slide onto a cooling rack. Remove the ring when the bun is just warm.
The black bun will keep for weeks in an airtight box or tub. It is delicious eaten with sharp cheese.
Notes:
[1] I find a supermarket ‘bag for life’ is best for this task. I have one that I use only for proving things like this. Turn it over and turn up the edges, as you would your trousers to make it a sturdy shape and hey presto!
Before we begin: a big thank you to Scots chef and food writer Sue Lawrence for helping me out with the research for this post.
It has become a Christmas tradition of mine to ask my Twitter followers to select by Christmas post for me by way of a poll. I like to include both obvious and obscure options and was very pleased this year to see roast turkey receive no votes all (though I suppose I’ll have to write about it at some point!), and the most obscure on the list – the black bun – win out with 46% of the votes.[1]
The black bun – sometimes called a Scotch bun – is a Scottish speciality that has changed in shape and constitution through the years, but is today a type of fruit cake baked in a loaf tin lined with shortcrust pastry. It is then covered with more pastry, egg washed and baked. The cake was often made black with the addition of black treacle; Sue Lawrence says of these very rich black buns, ‘the malevolent appearance of the black inner of its shiny golden pastry case might be off-putting to some black bun virgins.’ It might come as no surprise that the bun ‘is almost invariably served with a dram of whiskey.’[2]
It is traditional to eat black buns at Hogmanay, the Scots new year festival. Food writer and chef and Sue Lawrence writes evocatively of childhood experiences of the Hogmanay celebration:
‘As I grew up, Hogmanay…was always a time for friends and fun. Friends and neighbours would get together to have a drink and the traditional shortbread (often eaten with cheese), sultana cake, black bun and such delights as ginger and blackcurrant cordial.’[3]
For many Scots Hogmanay, was – and is – more important than Christmas Day is the Christmastide calendar. The black bun is actually the Scots’ Twelfth Cake, but the food and the party was, according to F. Marion McNeill, ‘transferred to Hogmanay after the banning of Christmas and its subsidiary festival, Uphaelieday or Twelfth Night, by the Reformers.’ Christmas Day saw a similar treatment, hence the importance of Hogmanay over other days.[4]
It’s worth mentioning that the black bun wasn’t eaten throughout Scotland: in the Highlands and islands the clootie dumpling was eaten instead.[5] I talk about the clootie dumpling and other Hogmanay foods and traditions with Ulster-Scots chef Paula McIntyre in a new episode of The British Food History Podcast published on 28 December 2022:
You may be wondering why it is called a bun. Well. If you look at older recipes, you’ll see that it was using an enriched white bread dough, a proportion of which is mixed with all of those ingredients one might expect in a Twelfth/Christmas cake: currants, raisins (sultanas are avoided because of their paler colour), candied peel, etc. The mixture was then wrapped in the remaining dough, proved and baked. They were huge and ‘graced many a festive table in the big houses of Scotland over the centuries’, one recipe, provided by Sue Lawrence, used 15 pounds (6.8 kilos) of flour!
I first heard of the black bun, not in a Scottish cookery book as one might expect but in Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery.[6] She described it as ‘a remarkable confection’, and it is one of the few British, but not English, recipes included in the volume. Indeed, as I found out whilst researching this post, black buns were sold by Edinburgh bakers and sent as gifts all across the British Isles; so it was, at a time, well-known outside of Scotland. Because her book is on yeast cookery, Elizabeth only includes older recipes that use yeast as a leavening agent. She provides several recipes from several sources, and it is interesting to see how the bun became richer and fruitier as time went on. Black buns grew to be so enriched that it became almost impossible to leaven them using yeast, luckily this happened around the same time chemical raising agents were commercially available. At first the chemically-leavened buns were made with bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk – just like a soda bread – but over time, it became more like a regular fruit cake.[7] The pastry initially used was a huff paste – a pastry somewhere between a hot water pastry and a shortcrust. At first it wasn’t eaten, the paste simply protecting the interior, however as time went on, the pastry was swapped for a richer, more buttery shortcrust.[8]
The black bun also gets a special mention in another classic book of English food, Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England,[9] where it is described as a pastry-lined cake. Interestingly, in this book, there is a rare illustration showing the variety of shapes in which the black buns were made:
There are many fantastic recipes for the cake/pastry sort of black bun; Sue Lawrence has one in her forthcoming Scottish Baking Book, and there is one is F. Marion McNeill’s wonderful The Scot’s Kitchen[10] too, so I thought I’d give the yeast-leavened one a go.
I read through a few recipes and based mine on a recipe by Florence Jack, provided by Ms. David in her book. What I liked about it was that it seemed very black: loads of currants and raisins as well as added treacle. I did tone some of the ingredients down because it seemed to me that it enriched it simply wouldn’t rise.
I’ll let you know how I got on in the next post….
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Notes:
[1] The other two options were Brussels sprouts and buche de Noel which attained 21% and 33% of the votes respectively.
[2] Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999) The Taste of Britain. Devon: Harper Press.
[3] Lawrence, S. (2003) Sue Lawrence’s Scottish Kitchen. Headline.
[4] McNeill, F. M. (1968) The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore & Recipes. 2nd edn. Blackie & Son Limited.
[5] Mason, L. and Brown, C. (1999)
[6] David, E. (1977) English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Grub Street.
[7] Hartley, D. (1954) Food in England. Little, Brown & Company.
[8] McNeill, F. M. (1968)
[9] Hartley, D. (1954)
[10] McNeill, F. M. (1968)
British Food: A History 