Friday, February 18, 2011
Up the pan!
I read in yesterday's 'Guardian' that the 'fine dining' end of gastro pubs are into a whole new form of flannel. The idea is that after you have discussed your requirement for wine and water with the chit from Rumania, you summon the salt pan with whom you can discuss your requirement for salt on and off the table, the salt pan being named for the legendary Mr Pan, the founder of modern salt cuisine, who lived in Harbin during the second half of the 19th century. (For some reason my shiny new PC is inhibiting a paste from Notepad so I am able to include Harbin neither in the native script nor in the authorised transliteration. Maybe a setting in IE 8: I have had problems of a similar nature in hte past when blogging from an Internet cafe. Maybe something to be sorted out with my missold support from BT). I dare say that I shall find on my next visit with Mr Sainsbury that he has devoted maybe half on one side of an aisle to various salts. Not, of course, including Epsom Salts which lives with the medicines rather than with the condiments.
Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.
Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.
And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.
But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.
Not to be outdone, there is a piece in today's DT about how the Chief Medical Officers of Health are foaming at the mouth about all this and are in urgent consultations with the chaps from Fountain Court to see if the 2006 tobacco regulations can easily be extended to salt or whether it is going to be necessarty for the PM to find some time in his busy calendar for a small bit of primary legislation.
Turning to home cuisine, a couple of very satisfactory and simple dishes over the last couple of days. First, a chick pea (from Turkey) stew flavoured with tomato, onion and tenderloin. Simmer chick peas for a couple of hours. Dice onions, tomatoes and pork. Add and simmer for a further couple of hours. Good gear. Second, a sort of Lancashire Hot Pot. This because our freezer contained a pack of stewing lamb from the Sainsbury's basics range, described as slow cook cuts ideal for casseroles. 1.081kg (are the scales used in their butchery department really that accurate?) for £5.39 (even their cash registers do not attempt the third decimal place). Describing the motley collection of lumps as cuts was rather gilding the lilly: off-cuts would be a better term. Off-cuts from one of the other strange offerings in the basics range. So we had fore arm cut off of a shoulder of lamb so that the shoulder is a nice tidy shape, a couple of slices of neck of lamb and quite a lot of crudely chopped lumps of breast of lamb. All rather off putting. However, pressed ahead and browned it all in some dripping. Added some coarsely chopped onion and a little water and simmered for a couple of hours. Added a couple of ounces of red lentils and some more water. Tastefully arrange some sliced peeled potato on top. Simmer for a further 45 minutes and serve with savoy cabbage. Very good it was too, despite the crude butchery and the quantity of linings.
And then to Orwell to finish off 'Coming Up for Air', an excellent book, sourced I think from a stall outside the museum inside Bourne Hall. Mystery how a chap who was born in India and went to Eton knows so much about the lives of children and shopkeepers living in small country towns before the first war and about suburbanites generally between the wars. Vert funny he is about them too. Shades of Sinclair's Babbitt of 2nd February 2009. Also reminds me of reading, many years ago, about how someone from the communist block in the late fifties was amazed how well Orwell captured the tone and (cabbagey) smell of large blocks of municipal flats in his country in the now more famous 1984. Of which, oddly enough, the present book is, in many little ways, a precursor.
But if I was Orwell I might be a little irritated by the biographical blurbs at the beginning of this 1989 Penguion edition. Orwell gets say 4.5 inches while one Dr. Peter Davison gets 1.5 inches. Orwell writes the book while Davison writes 2.5 pages of introduction. An introduction which is mainly focussed on the near 100% absence of semi-colons. Something Orwell apparently took a deep interest in; he was certainly interested in language if all the newspeak in 1984 is anything to go by.
# posted by Jim @ 6:40 AM 
