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.
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