by Tom Stobart
Typically, the Iberian pig is killed in autumn and the hams are put in salt, without saltpetre, for 8-10 days. They are sometimes brined for three weeks, but it is important that the hams are not over-salted. They are then scrubbed clean and hung in the rafters through the winter. When the weather starts to warm up in May, the hams begin to sweat (cups are hung underneath to catch the drips) and they are allowed to do so for 7-10 days, after which they are moved to cool cellars (where the stink of ripening ham becomes overpowering) to be ready for eating in autumn that is, a year after they were first salted. Most famous jamón serrano is from Jabugo (Huelva) and Montánchez (Cáceres), where the air is pure and good for drying, but close runners are Trévelez (Granada), Sotoserrano and Candelario (Salamanca). Although Spanish raw ham is liable to be tough (being from well exercised pigs), its flavour is very fine.
Embuchado de lomo. Cured pork loin, enclosed in a skin like a sausage, and preserved in a bath of olive oil. An excellent and expensive Spanish speciality.
Other Hams
Belgian. Belgian hams are excellent and jambon d’Ardennes has an international reputation.
Pragerschinken. In spite of its German name, this ham comes from Czechoslovakia. The hams are salted and brined for several months before being smoked over beech sawdust and matured in cool cellars. Pragerschinken is often cooked whole and served hot, and is considered by many to be the finest ham for serving hot, just as York ham is the finest cooked ham for serving cold. (Soak it for 6-24 hours and cook it about 30 minutes per kg or 15 minutes per lb.)
[Ham – French: jambon German: Schinken Italian: prosciutto Spanish: jamón]
HAND. In pork butchery, the front leg and adjacent meat.
HANGING. When an animal is freshly killed, the muscles are soft and relaxed, but after an hour or so (as every reader of detective stories knows) rigor mortis sets in and the muscles become hard. Animals eaten completely fresh are usually tender, but are likely to be tasteless. With rigor, the flesh becomes tough; later, after a variable time (depending on temperature and other factors), the rigor passes off. The flesh starts once more to become tender. This tenderizing process is due to autolysis by enzymes in the meat, not to bacterial decomposition, although that will later play a part. At the same time, as the meat becomes tenderer, it gains in flavour and eventually becomes ‘gamey’. The cycle is very obvious in a fish, which passes through the changes quickly. A mackerel, to take an example, is flexible when landed but soon becomes stiff. Pick one up by the tail in the fish market. If it sticks out horizontally and is nice and stiff, then it is fresh enough and good to eat. But if it flops, rigor mortis has already passed off, and the mackerel when opened will be found to have started deteriorating. Fish is usually eaten fresh, although skate may be better slightly hung. The length of time a mammal or bird should be hung for best tenderness and taste is very variable – getting it right is a matter of judgement and experience.
Only a few definite instructions can be given. Meat should always be hung in a dry, cool, airy place, away from a wall, and kept entirely clear of *flies. ln many cases, butcher’s meat has not been hung long enough when you buy it, but it would be inadvisable, if only for economic reasons, to hang small cuts of, say, *beef after you have bought them. The length of time that game is hung is discussed under individual entries. Long-hung meat very often gets a mould growing on it, but this is harmless and is cut off before the piece is prepared. Indeed meat can be stinking high and full of maggots, as long as it is to be cooked. The main problem over really high game is not that it is bad to eat when cooked but that it is likely to be very unpleasant for the cook who has to prepare it. The danger of food *poisoning lies in meats that have been left lying around after they have been cooked. Certain peoples, like the Turkana tribe in northern Kenya, are used to eating really rotten meat. They will eat it when it smells so bad that other people feel sick; they even eat vultures on occasion. Because the Turkana have iron constitutions, which have adapted over the centuries to their diet, they are able to eat putrid meat raw without apparent harm – which would not be wise for the rest of us.
HARE. See rabbit and hare.
HARENG SAUR. See herring.
HARICOT. See kidney bean.
HARISSA. A very hot chilli-based mixture of spices used in North African cooking, with couscous and so on. It can contain up to twenty spices and might be likened to a curry powder or garam masala, though it tastes nothing like either. Harissa can be bought in specialist shops and formulae are often secret. It is also available as a paste in small cans. You can use a pinch of cayenne or some chilli if harissa is not available. Paula Wolfert in her Moroccan Cuisine (Grub Street 1998) suggests another chilli-based preparation, Indonesian sambal oelek, as a substitute. Her recipe for harissa is as follows:
Harissa
Cover 30 g (1 oz) dried red chillies with hot water. Soak for 1 hour, then drain and cut into small pieces. Make into a purée by pounding in a mortar or grinding in an electric spice mill with 1 clove garlic and 2 teaspoons caraway seeds (or 1 teaspoon caraway seeds plus ½ teaspoon each ground cumin and coriander seeds). Sprinkle with a little salt before spooning the purée into a clean jar and covering it with a layer of olive oil. Covered tightly and refrigerated, this harissa keeps for 2-3 months.
HARUSAME. See noodles.
HASLET or harslet is the edible innards – the pluck – usually of a pig, or these parts prepared and spiced in the caul and cooked as a sort of jumbo *faggot which can be sliced and eaten cold. More refined (which does not mean better) versions replace the innards with pork meat and rusk.
HAWTHORN. See rowan.
HAZEL NUT, cob nut, filbert or Barcelona nut. There are a dozen species of wild hazel found in the temperate woods of Europe, Asia and America. The trees bear nuts of varying sizes and excellence which were no doubt eaten by our ancestors even before Homo sapiens became human. Apart from the familiar hazel nuts, there are good species of local importance in China and Japan, as well as hazels in Tibet and the Himalayas which have the nuts in strange prickly clusters.
The cultivated nuts we know are derived from Corylus avellana (the cob, which grows wild in Britain), C. maxima (the filbert, a larger nut from warmer southern Europe and countries bordering the Mediterranean) and C. colurna (the Turkish hazel, which overlaps the filbert in the Middle East, especially in Turkey). It need not bother us that the first two are sometimes claimed to be mere varieties of the same species. You can tell the difference between cobs and filberts when the nuts are growing (in the filbert the husk completely covers the nut and extends beyond it, while in the cob it does not – you can usually see the nut peeping out), but it is almost impossible to tell them apart when they are shelled or even in the shell. The Kentish cob, which is grown in Kent, is not a cob but a filbert.
The most important producers of hazel nuts are Italy, Spain, Turkey and France. In Italy, hazel is grown particularly in Campania (around Naples), Liguria, Piedmont and Sicily, as well as everywhere in the hilly regions of the Apennines. In Spain, hazel nuts come especially from the Catalan provinces of Tarragona, Barcelona (hence Barcelona nuts) and Gerona, but also from Asturias and Galicia in the north-west. Spain makes the most original use of nuts in its regional cooking. Turkish nuts tend to be cheaper and smaller than the good Italian and Spanish nuts, but are excellent nonetheless. Going under names like Messina cobs and Trebizond nuts, they are much grown, especially on the lower slopes of the mountains fringing the southern shores of the Black Sea – not far from Trebizond, in fact. France has large quantities of hazels from Brittany and around Le Mans, in the Vendee south of Nantes, in parts of the south and the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Portugal, Greece, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco also grow hazels in quantity. Other countries tend to produce them only for local consumption. In North America, little use is made of varieties of the largest indigenous hazel (Carylus americana), but European varieties are grown in Oregon. They do not do well in the eastern states.
In Germany
, immature hazel nuts are sometimes preserved in brine or used in salads. Very young, fresh hazels are delicious. These are local specialities. Ripe nuts in the shell for dessert purposes keep well and are usually of the larger varieties. Hazels with very dark, almost mahogany-coloured shells have been kiln-dried. For most cooking, nuts can be bought ready shelled or even ground into a flour because shelled hazels, like almonds, keep better than most nuts and do not go rancid so rapidly.
Although hazels have been in use for so long (they were certainly collected and stored in the Bronze Age), in most countries they seem primarily to have been eaten as fresh nuts and not used in the cooking. When they are, it is usually in cakes and sweet dishes. They are especially popular in the confectioner’s creations of Switzerland and Austria (in which they are often mixed with almonds), less so in France and Italy, though they appear in some versions of torrone (Italian nougat) and in gianduia, a hazel nut spread from Turin. From Italy, one should mention torta alle nocciole and the many versions of torrone. Indeed, many people seem to prefer them to almonds in cakes as they are more easily digested and have a lovely texture and flavour. Although the French have beurre de noisette (lightly roasted hazel nuts pounded with butter used as a garnish for hors d’oeuvre), it is only in Spain that the full possibilities of the hazel nut in savoury dishes have been realized, as in the Castilian higado a la molinera (liver cooked with onion, white wine and pounded hazel nuts) or the famous salsa romesco from Tarragona, which is used with fish or vegetables, or especially in a calcotada (a feast of spring onions grilled over vine clippings).
To remove the husk from the freshly-picked nuts, leave them in a layer about 25 cm (10 in) deep for a day or so until the nuts separate from the husk. Dry the nuts in a cool oven or in the sun for better keeping and store them in sawdust or sand.
To blanch and remove the inner skins, pour a kettle of boiling water over the shelled nuts. Let them stand for six minutes and remove the skins with the aid of a knife. Dry.
Higado a Ia molinera
Cut 500 g (1 lb) liver, preferably calf’s, in pieces and coat it in flour. Fry the pieces in hot oil until they are just cooked and put them aside to keep warm. Bruise 2 cloves of garlic, put them in the hot oil, add a chopped onion and cook until they are golden. Return the cooked liver. Add a little flour to thicken the juice (plus a dash of water if needed), a handful of chopped, roasted hazel nuts and a handful of parsley. Adjust the seasoning with pepper, salt and a squeeze of lemon juice, if necessary, before serving.
Salsa romesco
There are many versions of this sauce, and a competition is held in Tarragona to establish who is the current Master of Romesco. Correctly the *sweet peppers in the sauce should be the highly-flavoured Romesco peppers grown in the locality and not available elsewhere in Spain. A reasonable alternative are ñoras or any other variety of dried, sweet pepper, but not chillies, which would make the sauce hot. Almonds are sometimes used as an alternative to hazel nuts.
Take 3 medium-sized ripe tomatoes; roast 1 tomato whole and keep the other 2 raw. Peel and remove the seeds from all the tomatoes and chop them roughly.
Roast one large clove of garlic in its skin on a hot iron pan (in Spain they use the stove top).When it is soft, skin it and add it to another unroasted clove. Roasting the tomato and garlic gives greater depth of flavour.
Fry a slice of bread without crust in a little oil until it is golden. Add the 2 dried ñoras with seeds and stalk removed and fry a little. Pound 12 roasted hazel nuts and all the other ingredients to a paste, and add 250 ml (8 fl oz) oil. Adjust the seasoning with about 1 tablespoon vinegar, salt, pepper and a little chilli if necessary, and balance with either a little more vinegar or with a trace of sugar. Use the sauce cold on vegetables or fish. It can be made in a blender, which produces a more emulsified texture.
[Hazel nut – French: noisette German: Haselnuss Italian: nocciola Spanish: avellana]
HEAD CHEESE. See brawn.
HEART, unlike most other offal, is made up largely of muscle, and very hard-working muscle at that, as it has spent the animal’s entire life pumping away, circulating the blood around the body. Not surprisingly, it is inclined to be tough. The most tender (and tasteless) is calf’s heart, which it is possible to grill or fry gently, but heart in general benefits from long, slow, moist cooking. Small lambs’ hearts are usually stuffed and served whole, while large, tough ox heart is best cut in slices and stewed. All heart needs to be prepared for cooking by washing in water and removing fat, arteries, veins and any remaining clots of blood.
[Heart – French: coeur German: Herz Italian: cuore Spanish: corazón]
HEMLOCK. See spruce.
HERB PATIENCE. See sorrel.
HERBS. Essentially, in the context of cooking, a herb is a plant with aromatic leaves used as a flavouring. In the past, when the range of foodstuffs was narrow, and the quality probably poor, herbs were of enormous importance in the kitchen; they were also the basis of medicine. Indeed, many of the herbs used as flavourings were originally brought into use medicinally – some even for magical reasons.
In Elizabethan times, the herb garden was a most elaborate affair. At the opposite end of the scale, earlier in this century, herbs were reduced in Britain to mint (in bottled mint sauce and jelly), sage (dried in ready-mixed stuffing) and thyme (also dried in ready-mixed stuffing). Parsley was used only for decoration and an occasional bay leaf would be seen in the more advanced kitchens. Cookery books continued to mention chervil, tarragon and burnet, but who could get them? For years, virtually no one. But the use of herbs is coming back, partly because of greatly improved modern methods of drying (and even of deep freezing), partly because people have hybridized a greater interest in cooking with the realization that the days when British food was ‘so good it would be a shame to mess it up’ are long over. They have learned from gifted romantics like Elizabeth David that herbs – even garlic – are a part of the delicious and economical country cooking of Europe, and that if the greengrocer is not interested there is always the possibility of a box of earth on the kitchen window-sill. So now once more we find people with bay leaves and thyme, fresh marjoram and basil, chives and tarragon, mint and even lovage. The next lesson to learn is not to mix them all together, in delight.
There are no rules laying down which herb must be used with what dish, but certain herbs or combinations of herbs are used in particular national or local styles of cooking. For instance, French cooking uses bay, thyme and parsley in the bouquet garni, and chervil and tarragon are popular. In Italy, rosemary, sage, oregano and basil occur alone or in various combinations. Chives and dill are more commonly used in northern or eastern European cooking. To cook in regional style you must select the right palate of flavourings.
[Herbs – French: fines herbes German: Kräuter Italian: erbe Spanish: hierbas]
HERRING (Ciupea harengus) is one of the group (including the sprat, sardine and pilchard) which have been possibly the most important of all fish, both for human consumption and, dried, for animal feed and oil. The herring shoaling off the coast of Britain were caught from Shetland down to East Anglia on the east coast and from the Minch to the Isle of Man on the west coast. As the shoals appeared at different times of the year on the fishing grounds, it was presumed that the same herring which were off Shetland in May slowly moved round the coast – June to August off Peterhead and Fraserburgh, August to September off Yorkshire and October to December off East Anglia. They were actually separate lots of herring which matured and spawned at different times of the year. The herring found off the Yorkshire coast and in the Clyde estuary are smaller than the others. Stocks, which once seemed inexhaustible are now so depleted by over-fishing that such extreme measures as a total ban on East Coast herring fishing have become necessary to allow the fish population to recover.
Before World War II, the herring was looked upon as a poor man’s food – in 1928 they were offered wholesale at 6 kg (14 lb) for a penny. Until 1939, they were hawked
from barrows in the street for six a penny. Nowadays you would be lucky to get three for a pound. Fresh herrings are delicious, full of flavour, oily and rich. They are perhaps best cooked in simple, traditional ways, either slashed and grilled, or rolled in oatmeal and fried. A fresh herring can be boned by removing the head and gut, and massaging the flesh for a couple of minutes. Then grip the exposed top of the vertebrae and pull. The herring will be turned inside out. Break off the bone near the tail end and turn the herring back, skin side out. The open cavity is ready for stuffing, and the fish is practically bone-free, apart from the very fine floating rib bones which are left in. The *roes are often packed and sold separately as a by-product of the kipper industry. Before refrigeration, the catching of herring in glut quantity when the shoals arrived off the coast, led to the use of many preserving methods, such as salting, smoking and pickling. The products have become a part of tradition and are now made for their own sake rather than from necessity.
Whenever possible, use fresh herrings and bloaters the day you buy them. Otherwise, store them in a closed container in the refrigerator for as short a time as possible. Kippers will keep for one or two days after purchase, but the sooner they are eaten the better they taste. If they are to be stored, keep them in an airy place in a container lined with greaseproof paper.
Baltic herring. There are herrings in the Baltic, a small species (Opisthonema oginum). In France, the name Bismarck herring was changed to Baltic after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when Bismarck was naturally not very popular.
Bismarck herring. Boned herring fillets marinated in vinegar (or vinegar and white wine), with onion and spices ranging from red peppers to juniper berries. To prepare them, soak fresh herring fillets in vinegar for 6 hours, then pack them into jars in layers, between each of which is a sprinkle of salt, sliced onion, a pinch of chilli and a few juniper berries. Leave 24 hours and they are ready for eating.