An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  Ingredients are 4 oz. of chicken livers (frozen livers are perfectly adequate); 3 oz. of butter; a tablespoon of brandy; seasonings.

  Frozen chicken livers are already cleaned, so if they are being used the only preliminary required is the thawing-out process. If you have bought fresh livers, put them in a bowl of tepid, slightly salted water and leave them for about a couple of hours. Then look at each one very carefully, removing any yellowish pieces, which may give the finished dish a bitter taste.

  Heat 1 oz. of butter in a small heavy frying pan. In this cook the livers for about 5 minutes, turning them over constantly. The outsides should be browned but not toughened, the insides should remain pink but not raw. Take them from the pan with a perforated spoon and transfer them to a mortar or the liquidizer goblet.

  To the buttery juices in the pan add the brandy and let it sizzle for a few seconds. Pour it over the chicken livers. Add a teaspoon of salt, and a sprinkling of milled pepper. Put in the remaining 2 oz. of butter, softened but not melted. Pound or whizz the whole mixture to a very smooth paste. Taste for seasoning. Press into a little china, glass or glazed earthenware pot or terrine and smooth down the top. Cover, and chill in the refrigerator. Serve with hot crisp dry toast.

  If to be made in larger quantities and stored, seal the little pots with a layer of clarified butter, melted and poured over the chilled paste.

  Rum (white, for preference) makes a sound alternative to the brandy in this recipe. Surprisingly, perhaps, gin is also very successful.

  N.B. Since this dish is a very rich one, I sometimes add to the chicken livers an equal quantity of blanched, poached pickled pork (not bacon) or failing pickled pork, a piece of fresh belly of pork, salted overnight, then gently poached for about 30 minutes. Add the cooked pork, cut in small pieces to the chicken livers in the blender.

  POTTED GAME

  Grouse ‘potted whole, stowed singly into pots with clarified butter poured over’ as described by Professor Saintsbury1 (the old boy didn’t miss much) are infinitely enticing, exceedingly extravagant with butter and not very practical for these days, but you can make one young cooked grouse or partridge go a very long way by the simple method of chopping the flesh, freed from all skin and sinew with about one quarter of its weight in mild, rather fat, cooked ham. You then put the chopped grouse and ham in the electric blender with 4 tablespoons of clarified butter to every ½ lb. of the mixture. Add salt if necessary, a few grains of cayenne, a few drops of lemon juice. Reduce the mixture to a paste or purée. Pack it in to small straight-sided china, glazed earthenware or glass pots. Put these into the refrigerator until the meat is very cold and firm. Then seal the pots with a layer of just-melted clarified butter.

  Potted game is most delicious and delicate with hot thin crisp brown toast for tea or as a first course at lunch.

  It goes without saying that old birds can, equally, be used for potting, but they are much less delicate, need very long slow and thorough cooking, a larger proportion of fat ham (or pickled pork but not smoked bacon), and must be carefully drained of their cooking juices before they are prepared for chopping and pounding, otherwise sediment seeps through, collects at the bottom of the little jars and causes mould.

  RILLETTES OR POTTED PORK IN THE FRENCH MANNER

  This very famous charcutiers’ or pork butchers’ speciality is native to Southern Brittany, Anjou and Touraine. It could be described as the French equivalent of our potted meat – although it is very different in texture and taste.

  2 lb. of a cheap and fat cut of pork such as neck or belly; 1 lb. of back pork fat; salt; 1 clove of garlic; 2 or 3 sprigs of dried wild thyme on the stalk; a couple of bay leaves; freshly milled black pepper.

  Ask your butcher to remove the rind and the bones from the piece of pork meat (the bones can be added to stock and the rind will enrich a beef dish for the next course) and if he will, to cut the back pork fat into cubes.

  Rub the meat with salt (about a couple of tablespoonsful) and let it stand overnight or at least a few hours before cutting it into 1 ½-inch thick strips – along the grooves left by the bones. Put these strips, and the fat, into an earthenware or other oven dish. In the centre put the crushed clove of garlic, the bay leaf and twig of thyme; mill a little black pepper over the meat and add about half a pint of cold water. Cover the pot. Place it in a very cool oven, gas no. 1, 290°F., and leave for about 4 hours.

  Now place a sieve over a big bowl. Turn meat and fat out into the sieve, so that all the liquid drips through. With two forks, pull apart the meat and fat (which should be soft as butter) so that the rillettes are shredded rather than in a paste/Pack the rillettes lightly into a glazed earthenware or stoneware jar of about ¾ pint capacity (or into two or three smaller jars). Taste for seasoning. Pour over the rillettes (taking care to leave the sediment) enough strained fat to fill the jar. Cool, cover and store in the refrigerator until needed.

  Rillettes should be soft enough to spoon out, so remember to remove the jar several hours before dinner. Serve with bread or toast, with or without butter, as you please.

  Potted Fish and Fish Pastes

  POTTED SALMON

  Any woman who has salmon-fishing relations or friends will appreciate the point of this dish. Evolved at a time when salmon was comparatively cheap, and before the days of the tin and the refrigerated larder, potted salmon provided one method (pickling in wine and vinegar, salting, drying, kippering and smoking were others) of preserving surplus fish. Even today there will be readers who will be glad to know of a formula for dealing with a salmon or a piece of one received as a present, too big to be consumed immediately and likely to prove wearisome if eaten cold day after day.

  For this recipe, evolved from instructions given in Elizabeth Raffald’s Experienced English Housekeeper (an admirable book first published in 1769) all you need, apart from fresh salmon, are seasonings of salt, freshly milled white pepper, nutmeg, fresh butter and clarified butter.

  Cut the salmon into thinnish steaks, arrange them in one layer in a well-buttered baking dish, sprinkle them with salt and seasonings, add about 1 oz. of fresh butter, cut in pieces, for every pound of salmon, cover the dish with buttered paper and a lid, and put to cook in the centre of a moderately heated oven, gas no. 3, 330°F. In 45 to 50 minutes – a little more or less according to the thickness of the steaks – the salmon will be cooked. Lift the steaks, very carefully, on to a wide sieve, colander, or wire grid placed over a dish so that the cooking butter drains away.

  Pack the salmon steaks into a wide dish or pot with the skin side showing. The dish or pot should be filled to capacity without being so crammed that the fish comes higher than the rim of the pot. I make my potted salmon in a shallow round white pot decorated on the outside with coloured fish. It is one of the old dishes especially made for potted char, the freshwater fish once a celebrated delicacy of the Cumberland lake district. Cover with a piece of oiled foil or greaseproof paper and a board, or the base of one of the removable-base tart or cake tins now to be found in many kitchen utensil shops, to fit exactly inside the dish. Weight the board. Next day pour in clarified butter to cover the salmon and seal it completely.

  Serve potted salmon in its own dish with a cucumber or green salad and perhaps jacket potatoes. A good luncheon or supper dish – and very decorative looking when cut at the table, into the cross-slices of which Elizabeth Raffald notes that ‘the skin makes them look ribbed’.

  SALMON PASTE

  A more ordinary version of potted salmon can be made using cooked salmon and clarified butter in similar proportions and the same manner as for potted tongue (page 221). A salmon steak weighing about 7 oz. will make a pot of salmon paste ample for four people, so it is a quite economical proposition.

  POTTED CRAB

  Extract all the meat from a freshly boiled crab weighing about 2 lb. Keep the creamy brown body meat separate from the flaked white claw meat. Season both with salt, freshly milled pepper, mace or nutmeg, cayenne, lemon juice.
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  Pack claw and body meat in alternate layers in small fire-proof pots. Press down closely. Pour in melted butter just to cover the meat.

  Stand the pots in a baking tin of water, cook uncovered on the bottom shelf of a very low oven, gas no. 2, 310°F., for 25 to 30 minutes.

  When cold, seal with clarified butter. Serve well chilled.

  Potted crab is very rich in flavour as well as in content, and is best appreciated quite on its own, perhaps as a midday dish served only with crisp dry toast, to be followed by a simple lettuce salad or freshly cooked green beans or purple-sprouting broccoli eaten when barely cold, with an oil and lemon dressing.

  Those who find crab indigestible may be interested in the advice proffered by Merle’s Domestic Dictionary and Household Manual of 1842, to the effect that after eating fresh crab it is always advisable to take ‘a very small quantity of good French brandy, mixed with its own bulk of water’.

  POTTED LOBSTER

  Make in the same way as potted crab. Meg Dods (The Cook’s and Housewife’s Manual, 1826) instructs that if this is to be kept as a cold relish the white meat and the coral and spawn should be packed ‘in a regular manner, in layers, or alternate pieces, so that when sliced it may have that marbled appearance, that look of mosaic work which so commends the taste of the cook’.

  SMOKED HADDOCK PASTE

  Smoked haddock on the bone or in fillets, fresh butter, cayenne pepper, lemon.

  Pour boiling water over the fish, cover it, leave 10 minutes. Pour off the water, skin and flake the fish. (Taste it at this stage. If it is very salty, pour a second lot of boiling water over it.) Weigh it. Mash it or purée it in the blender with an equal quantity of fresh unsalted butter. Season with plenty of lemon juice and a very little cayenne. No salt. Press into pots, cover, and store in the refrigerator.

  I do not advise frozen haddock fillets for this paste. The false flavours of dye and chemical smoke are all too perceptible in the finished product.

  There are restaurateurs and cookery journalists who like to call confections such as haddock and kipper paste by the name of pâté. I find this comical and also misleading.

  KIPPER PASTE

  As for smoked haddock. Smoked trout, mackerel and smoked cod’s roe paste (not to be confused with the Greek taramasalata in which the cod’s roe is mixed with olive oil and garlic) are also made in the same way, except that the boiling water treatment is superfluous.

  SARDINE BUTTER

  For this wonderfully simple little delicacy the sole requirements are good quality sardines in oil, fresh butter, lemon, and cayenne pepper. No clarified butter seal is necessary.

  Drain off the oil. Skin and bone the sardines. To each large sardine allow a scant ounce of butter, ½oz. if the sardines are small. Mix butter and sardines very thoroughly, mashing them with a fork until you have a smooth paste. Season with a few drops of lemon juice and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper.

  Pack the sardine butter into small pots, cover, store in the refrigerator, serve well chilled, with thin, crisp brown toast.

  SMOKED SALMON BUTTER

  Make this in the same way as sardine butter, using the same proportions of fish and butter. It is an excellent way of turning a second-grade smoked salmon, i.e. imported Canadian or Norwegian, or a few slices cut from the end of a side (sometimes sold cheaply by fishmongers and delicatessen merchants) into a real delicacy. If possible, use unsalted or only very slightly salted butter. A good deal of lemon juice will be needed.

  For a first course for four, 6 oz. each of salmon and butter is a plentiful allowance.

  Have lemons and a pepper mill on the table and toast as for sardine butter.

  TUNNY FISH BUTTER

  Same again. But pick your brand of tunny carefully. It isn’t worth wasting butter or work on coarse dark tunny. About the best English-packed brand is Epicure. The Portuguese Nice is better.

  COD’S ROE PASTE IN THE GREEK MANNER

  Cheap, easy, made in advance, an admirable standby. What you can do with a two-ounce jar of smoked cod’s roe, a few spoonfuls of oil and a potato is quite a revelation to many people.

  For a 2-oz. jar of smoked cod’s roe the other ingredients are about 4 tablespoons of olive oil, a medium sized potato, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and water; and, optionally, a clove of garlic.

  An hour or two before you are going to make the paste, or the evening before if it’s more convenient, turn the contents of the jar into a bowl, break it up, and put about 3 tablespoons of cold water with it. This softens it and makes it much easier to work. Drain off the water before starting work on the making of the dish.

  Pound the garlic and mash it with the cod’s roe until the paste is quite smooth before gradually adding 3 tablespoons of the oil. Boil the potato without salt, mash it smooth with the rest of the oil, combine the two mixtures, stir again until quite free from lumps, add the juice of half a lemon and a scrap of cayenne pepper. Pack the mixture into little pots or jars. Serve chilled with hot dry toast. Enough for four.

  This little dish, or a similar one, is now listed on the menus of scores of Cypriot-Greek taverns and London bistros under the name of taramasalata. It is indeed very much akin to the famous Greek speciality, except that true taramasalata is made from a cod’s roe much more salty, more pungent, and less smoked than our own. There is also a great deal more garlic in the Greek version, and very often bread instead of potato is used as a softening agent.

  Booklet published by Elizabeth David, 1968

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  English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes first appeared in article form in the April 1965 issue of Nova. Rearranged, revised and slightly augmented, the original article was turned into a booklet in 1968, price 2/9. I did not choose to reprint it, but the material has been freely drawn on by others, sometimes in all but word for word form. The recipes, I was happy to notice, rapidly found favour with restaurateurs. That was as it should have been. I am pleased to have the opportunity of reprinting the material from the original booklet here. It may be found useful to a new generation of cooks, professional and amateur.

  1. Of these machines by far the most effective for potted meats, as also for raw pâté ingredients, is the recently introduced French Moulinette Automatic Chopper. This device does the job of chopping and pounding without emulsifying the ingredients or squeezing out their juices.

  1. In one of the Fur, Feather and Fin series of volumes published in the 1890s by Longmans, Green.

  Syllabubs and Fruit Fools

  Syllabub

  It was Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s wedding day. His half-brother had been called in to act as best man in place of his real brother who had vanished to Spain. At the celebration breakfast there were syllabubs. Herbert was beguiled by the biblical rhythm of the name. ‘And Sillabub, the son of Sillabub reigned in his stead,’ he intoned. His stepbrother, half-scandalized and wholly impressed by Herbert’s levity, never forgot the episode. He had been ten years old at the time of Herbert’s wedding; his name was Max Beerbohm; the story is recounted in Lord David Cecil’s Max, A Biography;1 the date was 1882, and sillabub,2 added Max, was then his favourite dish.

  Max Beerbohm’s generation must have been the last to which the delicious syllabub was a familiar childhood treat. Already for nearly a century the syllabub had been keeping company with the trifle, and in due course the trifle came to reign in the syllabub’s stead; and before long the party pudding of the English was not any more the fragile whip of cream contained in a little glass, concealing within its innocent white froth a powerful alcoholic punch, but a built-up confection of sponge fingers and ratafias soaked in wine and brandy, spread with jam, clothed in an egg-and-cream custard, topped with a syllabub and strewn with little coloured comfits. Came 1846, the year that Mr Alfred Bird brought forth custard powder; and Mr Bird’s brain-child grew and grew until all the land was covered with custard made with custard powder and the Trifle had become custard’s favourite resting-place. The wine and lemon-flavoured cream whip or sylla
bub which had crowned the Trifle had begun to disappear. Sponge cake left over from millions of nursery teas usurped the place of sponge fingers and the little bitter almond macaroons called ratafias. Kitchen sherry replaced Rhenish and Madeira and Lisbon wines. Brandy was banished. The little coloured comfits – sugar-coated coriander seeds and caraways – bright as tiny tiddlywinks, went into a decline and in their stead reigned candied angelica and nicely varnished glacé cherries.

  Now seeking means to combat the Chemicals Age, we look to our forbears for help. We find that the syllabub can replace the synthetic ice cream which replaced the trifle which replaced the syllabub in the first place. The ingredients of a syllabub, we find, are simple and sumptuous. The skill demanded for its confection is minimal, the presentation is basic and elegant. Swiftly, now, before the deep-freezers, the dehydrators and the emulsifiers take the syllabub away from us and return it transformed and forever despoiled, let us discover how it was made in its heyday and what we can do to recapture something of its pristine charm.

  In the beginning then, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were three kinds of syllabub. There was the syllabub mixed in a punch bowl on a basis of cider or ale and sometimes both, sweetened with sugar and spiced with cinnamon or nutmeg. Into the bowl the milkmaid milked the cow so that the new warm milk fell in a foam and froth on to the cider. The contents of the bowl were left undisturbed for an hour or two, by which time a kind of honeycombed curd had formed on the top, leaving alcoholic whey underneath. Sometimes, on top of the milk curd, a layer of thick fresh cream was poured. This syllabub was more a drink than a whip, a diversion for country parties and rustic festivals.