An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

by Elizabeth David

  1 oz. allspice berries (also known as pimento and Jamaica pepper. To be bought from the same shops as the juniper berries). ½ oz.

  For cooking the beef you will need only water, ½ to 1 lb. of shredded suet, and greaseproof paper or foil. Ask the butcher for the best quality round or silverside beef and explain to him what it is for. He will probably be incredulous but will know how to cut and skewer it.

  First rub the beef all over with the brown sugar and leave it for two days in a glazed earthenware bread crock or bowl. Crush all the spices, with the salt and saltpetre, in a mortar. They should be well broken up but need not be reduced to a powder. With this mixture you rub the beef thoroughly each day for 9 to 14 days according to the size. Gradually, with the salt and sugar, the beef produces a certain amount of its own liquid, and it smells most appetizing. But keep it covered, and in a cool airy place, not in a stuffy kitchen.

  When the time comes to cook the beef, take it from the crock, rinse off any of the spices which are adhering to it, but without sousing the meat in cold water.

  Put it in a big deep pot in which it fits with very little space to spare. Pour in about ½ pint of water. Cover the top of the meat with the shredded suet; this is a great help in keeping the meat moist during cooking. In the old days the pot would now have been covered with a thick crust made from a pound of flour and 2 oz. of lard, but this can be dispensed with – two or three layers of greaseproof paper or foil being used instead, to make sure there is no evaporation of juices. Put the lid on the pot. Bake in a very low oven, gas no. 1, 290°F., for 4 to 5 hours according to the size of the joint. Take it from the oven carefully, for there will be a lot of liquid round the beef. Let it cool, which will take several hours. But before the fat sets, pour off all the liquid and remove the beef to a board. Wrap it in foil or greaseproof paper and put another board or a plate on top, and a 2- to 4-lb. weight. Leave until next day.

  The beef will carve thinly and evenly, and its mellow spicy flavour does seem to convey to us some sort of idea of the food eaten by our forebears. Once cooked, the beef will keep fresh a considerable time. ‘A quarter of a year,’ one cook says. At any rate it will certainly keep 10 to 14 days in an ordinary larder if it is kept wrapped in clean greaseproof paper. Those who feel that all this really is too much of an undertaking will be interested to know that beef spiced according to the same recipe, and ready for cooking, will be on sale at Harrods butchery counter during December.

  GINGER CREAM

  A recipe adapted from a much more elaborate one given by John Simpson; it provides a useful way of using some of the ginger in syrup which one gets given at Christmas time.

  Ingredients are a pint of single cream, 5 to 6 egg yolks, a strip of lemon peel, a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg, 3 or 4 tablespoons of sugar, 2 tablespoons each of the ginger syrup and the ginger itself, finely chopped. Put the spices and lemon peel into the cream and bring it to the boil. Beat the yolks of the eggs very thoroughly with the sugar. Pour the hot cream into the egg mixture, stir well, return to the saucepan and cook gently, as for a custard, until the mixture has thickened. Take the pan from the fire, extract the lemon peel, go on stirring until the cream is cool. Add the syrup and the chopped ginger.

  Leave it in the refrigerator overnight, then, stirring well so that the ginger does not sink to the bottom, pour it into little custard glasses, small wine glasses, or coffee cups. There will be enough to fill 8 glasses.

  If you subtract a quarter pint of cream from the original mixture, adding the same quantity of whipped double cream when the custard is quite cold, and freeze it in the foil-covered ice-trays of the refrigerator (at maximum freezing point) for 2 hours, this makes a very attractive ice cream.

  Vogue, December, 1958

  GOOSE WITH CHESTNUTS AND APPLES

  The chestnuts and apples are prepared like a stuffing, but they don’t go into the goose, they are cooked separately. This is because if you are going to have your goose cold, a stuffing is too fat-soaked from the bird to be attractive, whereas if it is baked separately in a terrine or a pie dish it comes out almost like a pâté and can be cut into nice even slices as an accompaniment, and all you will probably need besides is a big bowl of salad (endive, celery, and beetroot is a good one) and baked potatoes for those who have given up caring about their weight.

  To start on the chestnuts – about 1½ lb. Score them right across on the rounded side, preferably with a broken-off, but still sharp knife which isn’t going to be ruined in the process. Put them in a baking tin, half at a time, and cook them in a moderate oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Take out a few and, to shell and skin them, squeeze each nut in your hand so that the shell bursts. Then it comes off quite easily with the aid of a sharp knife, sometimes bringing the inner skin with it, sometimes not. And if this inner skin will not come away easily, leave it, do not hack at it. When all except these resistant ones are done, put them in a basin and pour boiling water over them. This should succeed in loosening the skins. Put the chestnuts in a saucepan with ½ pint of milk and 4 tablespoons of water and simmer them for about half an hour, or until they are quite soft.

  Meanwhile peel, slice and core 4 sweet apples, and stew them in a little water until they are almost in a purée. Drain the liquid from the chestnuts, break them up roughly but do not mash them. Mix them with the apples, add a ¼ lb. of minced lean veal, 2 finely chopped shallots, 2 tablespoons of parsley, a very little salt, freshly milled pepper, and a well-beaten egg. Turn into a buttered pie dish or terrine, which you put, covered with a buttered paper, into the oven at the same time as the goose, and take out after about 1 ½ hours.

  If you have bought your goose a day or two before you intend to cook it, it will benefit from being well rubbed with coarse salt night and morning, left in a cool larder, and the salt carefully wiped off before cooking. But if the weather is muggy this procedure is not advisable. Most Christmas birds have been killed a good deal in advance and once out of the poulterers’ cold rooms are best cooked as soon as possible, unless your refrigerator is large enough to hold them.

  Put the goose on a rack in the largest baking tin which will get into the oven, because a lot of fat runs out of the bird while cooking. Cover it with an oiled paper or foil, and bake it 2 ½ to 3 hours for a goose weighing about 8 lb. drawn and dressed (13 to 14 lb. gross weight). During the final half hour turn the heat very low and remove the paper so that the skin turns golden.

  The fat from the bird should be separated from the juices and poured off into a bowl, for it is very valuable for frying; the juices can be mixed with wine-flavoured stock from the giblets to make a sauce for the goose.

  House and Garden, December 1958

  Welsh Doubles

  ‘My aim’, wrote Lady Llanover in her Good Cookery, published in 1867, ‘has been to preserve or restore all the good old habits of my country, and utterly repudiate all immoral introductions which ruin the health as well as imperil the soul—’

  Lady Llanover’s country was South Wales, her particularly beloved part of it the estate of Llanover near Abergavenny in the county of Monmouthshire. It was at Llanover that, as Augusta Waddington, she was born and brought up. In 1823, as the twenty-year-old bride of young Benjamin Hall, M.P. for Newport, it was close by her girlhood home that she and her husband settled. It was at Llanover that she spent the greater part of a lifetime which spanned the entire nineteenth century, from 1802 to 1896.

  Formidably industrious, endowed with a high sense of duty towards her dependants and her husband’s constituents, Augusta Hall devoted also immense energy to the study of Welsh traditions and agriculture, to local folklore, music, literature, husbandry, cookery, and housekeeping.

  After the death of her husband, created Baron Llanover as a reward for his labours as Commissioner of Works (it was during his term of office in the eighteen-fifties that the Westminster clock tower was completed. It is to Benjamin Hall that Big Ben owes its nickname) Lady Llanover evidently settled down to the writing of her co
okery book. We can take it that everything she set down was first-hand, noted from direct observation and practical experience. When she gives recipes for rice bread, barley cakes, leek and plum broth, chicken and leek pie with cream, Welsh salt duck, Gwent short cakes (made of a dough shortened with sheep’s-milk cream in preference to butter) her authority is indisputable, her recipes always fully, if sometimes rather confusingly, described.

  It is fortunate for us that Lady Llanover recorded such recipes–as she recorded, in the water colours1 for which her name is chiefly remembered, the now extinct regional costumes of South Wales – for they do not appear in other published works, and but for Good Cookery might well be entirely forgotten.

  We hear a lot these days of a renaissance of English cooking. As far as restaurants are concerned does this really amount to much more than the obvious? A syllabub (wrongly presented) here, an authentic smoked haddock (price 35 s. éd. a portion) there, aren’t going very far toward the re-creation of a tradition.

  Among national recipes which could, and should, be rescued from oblivion many are to be prised out of forgotten cookery books. One of the most interesting and successful, for example, of Lady Llanover’s Welsh recipes is for a duck salted for three days and cooked in a double boiling pan.

  Of this utensil, known as a ‘double’, Lady Llanover gives drawings and a detailed description. It was a large double boiling pan, one fitting inside the other, the inner one light and made of tin, the outer of heavy iron and one inch larger in circumference. Both were fitted with covers and the whole contrivance could be used for oven cooking as well as for boiling.

  Although Lady Llanover implies that ‘doubles’ (the term reminds me of Sir Kenelm Digby’s ‘dubble ones are the Best’ when he prescribes violets in a recipe for metheglin), known in Wales as ffwrn fach, were commonplace in Welsh kitchens, one suspects that her own had been made to her particular specifications, probably by the local blacksmith. Her kitchen was equipped with both oval and round doubles. In them many of her dishes were cooked. Veal was oven-baked in the outer one, rabbits and chickens were jugged in the ‘double’, pickled beef was baked in it, tongues simmered in the same way as the salt duck. Maintaining throughout her book that one of the cardinal points of good cooking is the retention and concentration of all natural savours and juices rather than enrichment or sophistication by the extraneous addition of butter, cream and stock, Lady Llanover rejected the eternally-simmering stock-urn so dear to her contemporaries. ‘I don’t possess one’, she says of a stock-pot, ‘and if I did I would not use it.’ To a generation brought up to believe that all kitchen virtue resided in the liquor produced from the stock-pot, Lady Llanover, although perfectly right, was proclaiming herself something of a heretic. In her repudiation of the marvels of Victorian progress and the products of what she called ‘mechanical talent’ she was also reactionary. Or was she a visionary? To those of us who today yearn increasingly for authenticity and natural food, she appears sometimes to be writing of the 1960s rather than of the 1860s.

  Lady Llanover, by Mornewick, reproduced by kind permission of the Warden of Llandovery College. Photograph by W. R. Peregrine, Cawdor Studio, Llandeilo, Dyfed.

  Many of the recipes in Good Cookery’, now a very scarce book, are buried in the main part of Lady Llanover’s text. This is written, not with entire success, in the form of a dialogue between two fictitious characters of whom one, the Hermit of St Gover, is Lady Llanover’s own mouthpiece. His foil is the Traveller, a Candide-like innocent from London, introduced for the purpose of making naïve assertions to be seized upon by the Ancient and demolished as evidence of the folly and ignorance to be expected of those exposed to life in the metropolis.

  From this tract for the times, the accounts, quoted below, of the author’s own Welsh cheese made from a mixture of ewe’s and cow’s milk are of particular interest. The Welsh salt duck and the toasted cheese recipes come from the appendix of straightforward recipes which occupies the final fifth of Lady Llanover’s four-hundred-and-eighty-page volume.

  WELSH SALT DUCK

  ‘For a common sized duck, a quarter of a pound of salt to be well rubbed and re-rubbed, and turned on a dish every day for three days, then wash all the salt off clean, put it in a “double” with half a pint of water to the pound, and let it simmer steadily for two hours. Salt boiled duck with white onion sauce, is much better than roast duck.’

  Lady Llanover’s white onion sauce, although an unusually mild one, made on a basis of milk and water in which onions have been boiled, rather than with the onions themselves, seems to me not quite appropriate with duck. This point apart, the salt duck formula is one I have been using for many years. I find it better as well as simpler than any other known duck recipe. Far more subtle than the eternal duck with orange, it has, curiously, affinities with Chinese duck cookery. The pre-salting of the bird produces, as promised by Lady Llanover, a very fine-flavoured duck. Even for a plain roast duck, a day’s salting works an immense improvement.

  For the cooking of the duck my own method of improvising a ‘double’ is to place the duck, as directed by Lady Llanover, in water in a deep oval baking pan. This is placed in a large baking tin also containing water. Very steady, slow oven cooking – 2 hours at gas no. 2, 310°F. – gives better results than simmering on top of the stove. If, during the final half-hour of cooking, the duck is left uncovered the skin will be baked to a nice golden crispness; and my own inclination is to let the bird cool in its cooking liquid, eat it cold, and serve with it nothing but the simplest of salads. In the summer, crisp Webb’s lettuce is best, in the winter a bowl of honeydew melon cut into cubes and seasoned with nothing more exotic than a few drops of lemon juice and a sprinkling of fine sugar.

  When I wrote of this recipe many years ago in the Sunday Times, an old lady of my acquaintance who had spent her early married life at Llandaff near Cardiff told me that she remembered Welsh salt duck very vividly and said that she had eaten it more than once at the house of neighbours. Another correspondent, however, wrote demanding to know upon what authority I had based my statement that the dish was of Welsh origin. This lady was herself Welsh, but came from North Wales, and in a further letter said she had never heard of Lady Llanover, nor of her book, nor of her paintings.

  Was Welsh salt duck entirely a dish of South Wales? Was it preserved from oblivion by Lady Llanover? Does anyone still cook it?

  One last point should, I think, be made. It is sad, but necessary, to say that mass-market frozen ducklings will not do for the salting method. They are flabby-fleshed, immature (one can’t help wondering whether Lady Llanover would not have put them into the category of ‘immoral introductions’) and lacking in savour. The old recipe of the Principality demands a fully grown, fat, well-fed bird weighing, with head and giblets, not one ounce under six pounds and preferably rather more.

  SHORT CAKES OF GWENT AND MORGANWG

  ‘One pound of flour, three ounces of currants well picked and washed, a little sugar (and spice if liked); mix into a thick batter with one pint of sheep’s-milk cream, butter the tin of a Dutch oven and drop it in and bake before the fire. Care must be taken in turning; it can be cut in any shape. Cream of cow’s milk may be used but sheep’s-milk cream is best for these cakes.’

  The Welsh name of these short cakes is teisen frau Gwent a Morganwg. Of sheep’s-milk cream, and sheep’s-milk cheese, there is much talk and a good deal of interesting detail in Good Cookery. That the milking of ewes was little practised in England in the late nineteenth century although well-understood in parts of Wales is clear from the words Lady Lianover puts into the Traveller’s mouth:

  ‘I confess that when the Hermit first told me that his best cheese owed its superiority to the addition of sheep’s milk, I thought he was jesting; and although I saw the ewes being milked, and admired the Arcadian scene, I supposed, in my ignorance, that the milk was to feed the calves. But I am now fully aware that the milk of that valuable animal [the Welsh sheep], when mingl
ed with that of the cow, produces cheese which is not only excellent to eat new, but, when old, is more like Parmesan than anything else I ever tasted.

  ‘His lambs were sold when I was with him, about the beginning of July, at three to four months old. The ewes were then milked for three months. They were twenty-four in number, and they gave on an average twenty-four quarts a day. The proportions for cheese were one quart of ewe’s milk to five quarts of cow’s milk. Six quarts of ewe’s milk to thirty quarts of cow’s milk made a cheese, weighing from twelve to fourteen pounds, of a most superior quality, with the sharpness so much admired in Parmesan.’

  According to Lady Lianover, the authentic Welsh toasted cheese was made with this part ewe’s milk, part cow’s milk cheese. Given that the only Welsh cheese now on the market is so-called Caerphilly made in the cheese factories of the West country, it is not easy to see how we could revive anything like an authentic version of the recipe given by Lady Lianover. Some people swear by Double Gloucester for toasted cheese. I prefer Lancashire. At any rate it is interesting to know how the dish was prepared a century ago:

  WELSH TOASTED CHEESE

  ‘Welsh toasted cheese, and the melted cheese of England are as different in the mode of preparation as the cheese itself. Cut a slice of the real Welsh cheese made of sheep’s and cow’s milk, toast it at the fire on both sides, but not so much as to drop: toast a piece of bread, less than a quarter of an inch thick, to be quite crisp, and spread it very thinly with fresh cold butter on one side (it must not be saturated with butter) and lay the toasted cheese upon the bread and serve immediately upon a very hot plate.’

  Finally, a jam recipe which is worth a trial: