138. Great British Menu Central Region Final - Feel The Heat.

 

  

 It was not really difficult to predict correctly the eventual winner of the 2021 Great British Menu Central Region Final given the general run of things over the past 2 days of broadcasts. It was a clear victory for Stuart Collins over Sabrina Gidda though his fine looking main course ‘Dissected Maps’ again came in for criticism as not being thrilling enough to take its place as a banquet dish. Both Waldorf and Statler, on the other hand, were ecstatic about his fish course, “Singularity” which really did look spectacular, and awarded it 10 points.

  Sabrina Gidda worked exceptionally hard and her main course, “Everything goes with brown sauce” (Matthew Fort revealed himself to be a great brown sauce enthusiast) was received with enthusiasm by all four judges. But in the end it was not surprising to hear Andi Oliver announce that the Central chef going forward to the Finals was to be Stuart Collins. I admired Sabrina Gidda’s gracious reaction to her defeat which must have been very painful given that this had been the third time she had entered the competition.

  There was much fawning by the permanent judges over Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, who was the guest judge and who chatted on in an increasingly irritating fashion that made me grateful that it was unlikely that I would ever move in circles where I would have to sit by her and listen to her for a whole dinner party. Even worse was the new judge, Rachael Khoo, who said nothing of value and might as well have not been there thus saving the BBC licence payer a few thousand pounds in the fee paid to her. Oliver Peyton and Matthew Fort were in good form and Andi Oliver presented the programme faultlessly (memories of last series’ Scottish comedienne presenter now fade pleasingly into the distance). 

  So good luck to Stuart Collins, Shropshire and the West Midlands.

137. Great British Menu 2021 Central Region Part Deux.

 

  The Main course and Dessert course (not to mention Pre-dessert) heat of the Central Region in the BBC’s Great British Menu which was broadcast on 25 March and which was contested with passion and pride for the region and ended with Stuart Collins of Docket No.33 in Whitchurch and Sabrina Gidda, originally from Wolverhampton but working in London, going through to the region final. Gidda beat Liam Dillon of The Boat Inn near Lichfield by a single point but as it was her third attempt, and the programme makers seem to dislike potentially humiliating a chef by turning them into a three time loser, the outcome of this particular heat was perhaps not particularly surprising. What was clear was that Collins goes into the final as clear favourite.

  Continuing the theme of celebrating British innovators and inventors, Liam Dillon produced a main course using Cannock Chase venison in what at least looked like a rather alluring Wellington calling the dish “Oh no my deer” for which he scored 7 points. The dish celebrated the Nobel Award winning great British scientist Dorothy Hodgkin whose work with crystallography advanced medical knowledge significantly. Surprisingly, I think, Dillon did not make his own pastry and that surely must have counted against him.

  Sabrina Gidda’s main course was titled “Everything goes with brown sauce” and celebrated the invention by Frederick Gibson Garton in Basford in Nottingham of brown sauce and it’s one time production at the HP Sauce factory in Aston in Birmingham till it was egregiously stolen away. The dish was based on a masala tenderloin of pork with an additional Black Country faggot and Gidda substituted brown sauce as an ingredient for whenever she would have used tamarind. One of the most enjoyable outcomes of the idea was that when, during the course of the programme, Gidda asked the other chefs if they would have brown sauce or tomato ketchup with their breakfast and Collins suggested that he would choose to have ketchup with bacon and brown sauce with sausages, a choice which Dillon endorsed. An interesting question for any chef with a chef’s taste and I’m not clear what the logic behind the choice is but Gidda looked somewhat shocked at the answers and clearly thinks brown sauce would have been the correct choice for both. I agree entirely with her, I have never been a fan of tomato ketchup, and head straight for the brown sauce bottle though I shun HP Sauce (all the more reason to do so now it’s not made locally) and instead opt for Branson Fruity Sauce, a condiment of great pleasure, which is not being as disloyal to the West Midlands as one may think as it is made in Branston in Staffordshire. So that’s alright then. Gidda scored 9 points for her main course.

  Collins’ main course was “Dissected Maps” which celebrated John Spilsbury of Worcestershire who invented the jigsaw 200 years ago. The dish was aimed at highlighting superb Midlands produce cooked to perfection and was centred on rose veal raised in Uttoxeter in Staffordshire using prime cut and shin. The flavours were heightened by an onion and beer purée. The whole was served on a jigsaw made up of some of the counties of the West Midlands with each part of the overall dish placed on the county where the ingredient had originated. It received 8 points and was described as “well-executed” but lacked a little in the excitement that one might expect to be served at the banquet though if served in his restaurant it would have been wonderful.

  The pre-dessert course was actually won by Liam Dillon with an amusing little offering “The Jigsaw” also referring to Spilsbury’s invention and then on to the dessert course itself.

 Liam Dillon commemorated Dr Samuel Johnson - the producer of a great English dictionary - who hailed from Lichfield with a dish titled “How do you spell that?”. It was a lovely-looking dessert - a layered cake with the first layer being a coffee-soaked sponge, then chocolate ganache though Dillon hesitated to use the French word “ganache” as Dr Johnson had disliked the French so much, white chocolate mousse, another layer of ganache tactfully called “chocolate glaze”, topped by edible “texts” from Johnson’s dictionary and tuiles. The dish was eventually awarded 7 points.

  Stuart Collins’ dessert was another layered chocolate cake named “Radcliffe Road” which commemorated the first tarmac-surfaced road in the world - Radcliffe Road in Nottingham, tarmac having been patented in 1902  by Edgar Hooley, a Welshman who was a surveyor in Nottinghamshire. The cake included in its layers Earl Grey jelly and a chocolate and nougatine mousse.  At the judging the dish was awarded 9 points.

  Sabrina Gidda’s dessert commemorated Birmingham-based chemist Alfred Bird’s invention in 1837 of artificial egg which he was moved to do because his wife had an allergy to egg. Subsequently his invention was used in the manufacture of custard in Birmingham for many years. The dessert was made up of an egg-free custard tart, the base of which was egg-free shortcrust pastry served with an egg-free custard ice cream. In the judging Lisa Goodwin Allen felt that the ice cream was too rich with a powdery aftertaste and she said that the icecream, “wasn’t pleasant” with the dish requiring “more refinement”. She awarded the dish 6 points but this gave Gidda one point more than Dillon in the final overall score so she and Collins were put forward to the regional finals. Exciting or what? By the way I’ve made a reservation at Docket No. 33 for later in the year, Boris permitting.

136. Central Region Starts Off 2021 Great British Menu.

 

At last some good sense seems to have entered into the brains of the BBC’s Great British Menu (GBM) production team. The series which recommenced last night was fronted by the very sensible and informed Andi Oliver instead of a silly comedienne who caused persistent irritation thoughout the last series and the new series also benefitted from starting off with the Central region heats even though 2 of the chefs did not work in either the Midlands or East Anglia as well having Lisa Goodwin Allen as guest chef-judge twinned with Simon Rogan for the fish course because of her shellfish allergy. The theme of this year’s series is British innovators.

  The four competing chefs were detailed in Blog 133 and I have to admit that I was backing the two chefs who are working here in the West Midlands rather than those who were based in London. It always looked as though London-based Shannon Johnson was doomed to be the first chef to be eliminated from the competition with her amuse bouche being judged to be rather less satisfactory than the others and by the end of the programme she was on her way out. The future doesn’t look too promising for London-based Sabrina Gidda either though the judges often seem to have an unspoken rule that any chef having a third attempt to reach the regional finals will not be humiliated by being booted out without an opportunity to lay their fayre before Waldorf and Statler and whichever female is occupying the third judge’s chair this particular series. We shall see.

 

 

  

At this stage it looks very much as though Stuart Collins of Docket No. 33 in Whitchurch in Shropshire has his place booked in the regional final and I hope that Liam Dillon - good to hear someone speaking with a fine Staffordshire accent - from the The Boat Inn in Lichfield will be joining him. For his starter Collins prepared a dish which commemorated Elsie Widdowson who worked on providing a nutritious diet on the ingredients available in wartime Britain, the dish being named Take it with a grain of salt - pork cheek, smoked bacon, fresh apple, roasted apple purée, pickled apple served on a bed of choucroute (sauerkraut, fermented cabbage) with pork airbag (crispy dehydrated pork skin - posh scratchings which served as the “grain of salt”. The dish was well-received and scored 8. For his fish course Collins prepared a dish called Singularity which commemorated Stephen Hawkins’ theory of blackholes and this was made up of beetroot and fennel-cured trout served on taramasalata with golden and candy beetroot with nasturtium leaves and 2 types of caviar under a black coral tuile. A wonderful looking dish and singularly successful being awarded 9 points. Collins was well in the lead.

  Liam Dillon’s creations were a starter named Flick the kettle on which commemorated the unsung Birmingham hero, Arthur L Large, who developed the element in electric kettles which revolutionised how we make a cup of tea or coffee. The dish was made up of beef sirloin and onion broth, bone marrow and bread and butter pudding with a sharp herby emulsion of various salad vegetables with garden vegetables to give it added texture. The broth was served, appropriately, in a kettle. The starter tied with Collins’ 8 points. Dillon’s fish course, The Apple (celebrating Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity) was served up in a hollowed out apple and made up of whole Dorset crab with the brown meat used for an emulsion, a dashi made from kelp, tuna flakes, soy and mirin, lingonberries and pickled elderberries served with lavosh crackers hung from miniature apple trees. A visually remarkable dish but awarded only 7 points.

  True enough, at the end of the programme Johnson was eliminated and the main course and dessert lay ahead for the next programme. Stuart Collins was 2 points ahead but, as they say, there was still everything to play for.

135. Tough Cookies Fifteen Years On.

 

A sort of lockdown continues and England is dormant. Well, I’m pretty dormant at any rate. The dog and I go for our daily walk across the local fields mainly but the spring is about as delicious as a plate of mange touts. In Bristol, hopeless and useless white middle class young people from comfortably off homes think they’re entitled to riot and break a few policemen’s bones and set fire to police stations whilst spreading the virus around each other in the hope they’ll all get a good dose of Long COVID which will give them an excuse for whining away their days for months on end instead of doing something useful. They may be needed when hospitality eventually rises from its long sleep to replace all the young Europeans who have been the backbone of the industry for so long and who have now headed back to their homes on the continent in the wake of the pandemic. To be honest the hospitality industry can do without these useless middle class British youths who have rarely any idea of how to talk to people and who have no sense of duty and service. Harsh? Well, it’s based on my experience of seeing some of them dealing with guests in hotels where they show little respect, even disdain, for the guests unfortunate enough to come up against them in the hope of receiving good service at their hands.

 Which brings me to a different era but in terms of years not all that long ago. Unable to dine out I have resorted to catching up on my reading about the history of dining out in Britain. A key book is that published in 2005 by a former editor of the AA Guide and someone who worked in the restaurant industry, Simon Wright. The book, titled aptly Tough Cookies, is made up of two aspects - firstly it gave Wright the opportunity to unburden himself of what he perceived to have been a fairly traumatic event in his own life which was centred around the events leading to his resignation as editor of the AA Guide and secondly, and far more importantly, it details and sets out four long interviews with accomplished chefs of that period who had made it to the top in the white heat of 1990s and early 21st century restaurant scene - Gordon Ramsay, who’d spent much of his later childhood and youth in Stratford-upon-Avon, Marcus Waring, Heston Blumenthal and honorary West Midlander, Shaun Hill. 

  The candid interviews tell the reader of the importance for the emergence of British cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s of Le Gavroche, Marco Pierre White, the sheer determination and ambition which lifted white working class young men to the peak of their profession (no rioting for trendy causes for them), and the way modern British gastronomy can be traced back to almost a single common ancestor. These were men with drive and initiative who made the grade through hard work and a determination to achieve perfection in their art and craft in order to achieve their own personal goals. It’s an exciting little book full of illuminating and pleasing anecdotes.

 

 For us here in the West Midlands, Shaun Hill is the key character. The book was written in the closing months of his days in Ludlow when he was master of his own historic restaurant in the town, The Merchant’s House. I had heard some of the anecdotes recounted in the book when Hill gave a cooking demonstration at the Ludlow Food Festival in 2017 (Blog 12) but the chapter devoted to him tells the story of how he arrived at Ludlow and his Michelin star in a career which seems a little less aggressive and uncertain than that of the other characters in the book but still has that essential element to deliver to his customers food of the highest quality as the common theme.

  

After the book was published Hill joined Wright at the Hay Book Festival of 2005 and the hour long interview is still available to listen to in the archives of the Festival’s website. The anecdotes in the book are restated but it’s interesting listening to them and it’s a well-passed hour listening to Wright conversing with Shaun Hill. Of course Hill is still producing his own take on excellent food in the Welsh part of the West Midlands at Abergavenny in Monmouthshire (down the railway line from Ludlow) at his own Michelin-starred The Walnut Tree which I really must visit while I’ve got the chance. 

  At the 2017 Ludlow Festival Hill’s book Salt Is Essential was for sale and I bought a signed copy. The subtitle is And Other Things I have Learned From 50 Years At The Stove and while the book is mainly a collection of recipes the opening few pages convey some of Hill’s culinary philosophy which more chef’s would benefit from imbibing - “Creative thinking is a bad idea if you know nothing”, “Confidence comes with experience and the understanding of what is central to a dish and what is peripheral” and “It is as unwise to attempt Gordon Ramsay’s or Raymond Blanc’s signatures at an early stage in your cooking career, as it is to rewire the house or rebuild your car and just a diagram to follow”.

  

  For those interested in the history of British cuisine and how gastronomy developed here in these latter years, a read of Tough Cookies is an illuminating pleasure if not a must.