45. The Pies Are The Future.

 

  Even the 'experts' are sounding a little weary when Fine Dining is mentioned, though they wouldn't admit it. So, a question I've asked in earlier Blogs this year, where is dining out going in England and in the context of this Blog, in Birmingham, in the foreseeable future?

  The multi-delicatessen owner, former pastry chef and food writer, Yotam Ottolenghi, speaking on Radio 4's immaculate Broadcasting House programme this morning, broached the subject. He identified the tasty possibilities of more fermented food dishes, open-fire cooking, the more interesting use of vegetables being especially enthusiastic for the ugly old celeriac and those great British traditions ... pies.

  He spoke with great pleasure of what is currently on offer at executive chef Calum Franklin's Holborn Dining Rooms in London. Another pastry chef himself Franklin has made the restaurant a pie mecca and the focal point of what is on offer there. There is a pie room as well as a dedicated Gin Bar with 500 different gins and 30 tonics for sale which makes the place sound like the sort of place Heaven probably looks like. I think I could enjoy an eternity of finely crafted pies and endless gin interspersed with little snoozes to allow for a little digestion to take place.

 In an interview recently published Franklin sounds almost a little surprised that he might have up to 5 different people working on a particular pie which may go some way to explaining the rather breathtaking prices:- curried mutton pie with mango salsa - £22, steak and kidney pudding for which my yearning is slightly subdued by the £22 price tag and hand raised pork pie also for £22 for which I hope I would get a rather large slice. The dishes look sublime but the London prices do not.

  Wouldn't it be marvellous if an exciting and imaginative young chef could steal a leaf out of the book of the Holborn Dining Rooms here in Birmingham and put aside chilly fish and meat just extracted from a water bath and not looking all that nice either and give us something new? Of course that talented person would need plenty of financial support and hopefully would not charge London restaurant prices but that turn in the road could be near with a bit of good luck for Brummie food lovers. And maybe we too will have an earthly gastronomic paradise in our city. A paradise full of pies and gin.

44. Turkey Cold Cuts.

  The Christmas feasting is slowly drawing to a close and if I wasn't seeing the Festival out in an ancient Warwickshire hotel in the town where Shakespeare was born there would be much to do with the leftovers (traditionally we always had a cockerel for Christmas Day in the time, now unimaginable to those who tell us that they know about food and were born after the mid-1960s, when chicken was a treat and not so common, relatively expensive and hopelessly tasty as few chickens can manage to be in these present times) freshly roasted and served with roast pork and everything else you could want, then cold cuts on Boxing Day and chicken and stuffing sandwiches in the evening and then probably a chicken stew on the day after Boxing Day, or perhaps chicken rissoles, before the family came to know curry. With the coming of curry turkey had already replaced cockerel as the Christmas main element and so the second day after Christmas was a turkey curry day and nothing was wasted (various family cats and dogs saw to that).

  The use of the word cockerel is important here and my mother liked to stress that this was no ordinary bird but was as magnificent as could be afforded and not some inadequate clucking creature scooped up from the farmyard. And the Christmas tea times were also not to be taken lightly, there was freshly baked ham and magnificent pork pies sent by a friend in Grantham (there was always a tense couple of days while the pies were awaited lest they did not arrive). Grannie White did all the Christmas baking - weeks before she had had numerous Christmas puddings boiling away and the mince pies and savoury pastries all came from her kitchen as did the Christmas cake. And not a cookbook in sight nor the need to read what a food critic had to say.

  So, as I began, with the Christmas feasting drawing to a close what lies ahead in 2019? Well, for me I expect my first gastronomic excursion to be a visit to Alex' Claridge's Nocturnal Animals sited in the same building as Adam Stokes' first pop up restaurant in Bennett's Hill until he moved to Waterloo Street. I shall especially look forward to finding out what the restaurant's real name is. Is it The Wilderness at Nocturnal Animals or is it just Nocturnal Animals? No doubt all will become clear.

  Sadly I can't bear visiting twee but scruffy little Moseley with its population of wealthy upper middle class remoaner liberal/socialist/Momentumist elitist coffee bar denizens so it involves a lot of mental struggle on my part to even contemplate visiting one of Birmingham's trendiest one Michelin star restaurants which is located in this near-inner city suburb by which of course I mean Carter's of Moseley. Brad Carter's menus of recent months have embraced the Japanese/far eastern fusion fad which so many other trendy chefs have found their ways to and I would like to go to see what he's making of this oriental intrusion on British cuisine but so far have not managed to summon up the mental vigour to find my way to Moseley. However, just before Christmas he held a one-night-only collaboration with the Original Patty Men at his restaurant where, improbably, the dishes on the menu were burgers. One dreads to think what the vegans of Moseley must have thought about such carryings on in the area. For an instance, when I saw that this was happening, I contemplated dropping temporarily at least my revulsion at the thought of visiting Moseley and setting out to give the burger night a try. But I was unable to rise to the occasion principally because I'm not a great burger fan and certainly not to a degree where I'm prepared to pay £30 for one nor am I keen on being faced with a brioche with an anatomically undisguised soft shell crab seemingly crawling out from it. I'll leave all that sort of stuff to the Corbynists of Moseley. The non-vegan ones that is.

43. Christmas In Stratford.

  At Christmas the dog and I go away and spend three nights or so at a 17th century hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon. I usually manage to reserve my favourite room which shows its age beautifully and is made up of two rooms - a sitting area divided from the sleeping area by an ancient arch constructed from hoary beams - and if a room in an aged hotel ought to have a ghost this is it but neither the dog nor I have ever become aware of sharing the room with someone else when we have slept there.

  The hotel is no more than a couple of minutes walk from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre which is useful for going to see the Boxing Day evening performance of the Christmas play - this year it's a wonderful production of David Edgar's recent version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's also no effort to walk down to the riverside for a lovely long walk with my canine best friend or to walk up to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare and some of his family are buried, for the midnight service on Christmas Eve to celebrate the arrival of the Baby Jesus on the midnight clear.

  As part of the Christmas package all meals are provided including the Christmas turkey, which remembering Scrooge, may or may not be The Prize Turkey. Alas it would not be true to say that this year it was the prize turkey since the hotel's chef had severely overcooked it and the end result was that it challenged the definition of edibilty somewhat. But I did eat most of it and what did not find its way into my alimentary system was wrapped up in a Christmas cracker and was gratefully accepted and rapidly consumed, as most things are, by Lucy The Labrador.

  The restaurant that is all the rage at the moment in Stratford is, as detailed in a previous blog, Salt. In the 2019 Michelin Guide, it was awarded its first star and professional critics generally are in raptures about it. My trips to Stratford have not given me the time to dine there for a long time though my visits to the restaurant soon after it first opened were very enjoyable (see Blog 35) but it means that I can not say how deserved is the current praise heaped on Salt. However while walking Lucy The Labrador in Stratford's Old Town I was able to take a peek at Salt's current menu.

  There's no denying that it's an interesting menu and chef Paul Foster has injected a few elements into it which qualify to be included in the Trendy Ingredient(s) of The Week series.

  Firstly, Miso, the traditional Japanese seasoning produced by fermenting soy beans with salt and koji (second trendy ingredient of the week - filamentous fungus used in Chinese and eastern cuisine) and perhaps rice, barley or seaweed. In Foster's menu miso is part of a dish which combines poached halibut, smoked eel (two more ingredients very high in the chef popularity charts at the moment) and seaweed (to be found in just about every restaurant at the moment).

  Next we have Crispy chicken skin (in a dish of carrot cooked in chicken fat, Crispy chicken skin and pickled carrot) which with Crispy fish skin is de rigour in any menu in restaurants which see themselves as being at the cutting edge.

  But most notable in Foster's depicted menu is Otterburn mangalitza which is a new one on me, the admission of which is, I acknowledge, a demonstration of my provincial ignorance and state of out-of-touchness; what Giles Coren has famously labelled my 'One eyeness'. What, we all ask, is Mangalitza? It's not a pasta, or Italian cheese or rustic European salad made from mangoes or even a mango pizza but, improbably, a Hungarian breed of domestic pig which looks like a cross between a sheep and a pig and which looks very appealing and more worthy of being a pet than a plate of food. Wikipedia tells us that the Mangalitza was developed in the mid 19th century by crossing old Hungarian pig breeds with wild boar and that the only British breed of pig with a coat of curly hair is the now extinct Baston or Lincolnshire Curly Coat. The meat of the Mangalitza is fatty but it is particularly useful for providing a sausage base.

  Paul Foster's dish is Otterburn Mangalitza, soured cabbage (hence recalling the pig's central European origins) with black shallot purée. I should love to try the dish but I fear that I would constantly visualise the creature's appealing face with every mouthful I fed myself.