144. Fire And Food On A Cold Evening At Craft.

 

 

 And so at last the era of not going out to dine draws to a close. The most recently introduced rules in the gradually decaying age of the ‘lockdown’ have eased once more to enable groups of six to gather outside to break bread with each other and resume where we all left off in our personal relationships. We may again see the faces of old friends up close (but of course not too close) and not via the always irritating (can you hear me? You need to unmute ...) Zoom virtual call, Thank The Wee Donkey.

  The management of Craft Dining Rooms played a blinder those many months ago by introducing their outside dining pods which have enabled the COVIDly insecure to meet up in groups of four in the latter part of last year and again since the most recent rule changes and gone one step further by introducing a table for six sans murs with a little heater on it called rather exotically The Firepit around which six people may gather. With all the pods booked a friend summoned me a few weeks ago to meet with old acquaintances at Craft around the Firepit for our first post-lockdown meal together, all doubly vaccinated and brimming with happy anticipation. And so we did on a mistimed particularly cold evening in the dying embers of April. A bucket of embers, dying or not, would have been quite helpful on this particular evening given the bone-penetrating chilliness of the temperature as we sat on the cusp of May. But we were supplied with blankets with which to envelop ourselves should hypothermia set in and there was the tiny flame burning away on the table which put out more light than heat and which supplemented the warmth of the generally good spirits of my co-diners and myself. But I still wasn’t clear where a ‘Pit’ came into the equation.

  Gin was welcome and the menu announced a three course meal (or two if one wished) with a reasonable number of choices (four for each course) and how wonderful it was not to be faced with a Tasting menu, a concept which really should have been the first fatal victim of that virus along with horrors such as sous vide food warming (one can hardly call it ‘cooking’ ) and other gastronomic perversions of recent decades. What we wanted and what we were expecting was good, beautifully cooked food in sensible amounts. And we were not disappointed.

 

  No bread, no amuses bouches, no flim flam, just straight into a really rather delicious little starter of pea soup - not any pea soup I might say - with a good solid and tasty piece of haddock forming a central island crowned with my favourite greens pleasures, pea shoots, and with them some perfectly cooked peas. This was very good. A little cold perhaps but given the outdoor location and ambient temperature, a perfectly understandable and mild imperfection. 

  

For the main course, I stuck with fish and was glad to have done so as a splendid dish of beautiful roast cod with wickedly enjoyably crispy cod croquettes and taste bud-delighting salt and vinegar potato ‘crisps’, a  pea purée and a little blanket of crunchy pickles on top. This was a clever dish and the fish was cooked to perfection. It was one of those dishes you could feed me every day for a long time before I would feel it necessary to ask for a change of menu. What joy.

 

The dessert was fine, nothing mesmerising but pleasurable, rice pudding with well-flavoured hay ice cream. No complaints. The lot which made for a happy evening despite the chill air (though warmed by good company and delightful food) cost a very reasonable £40 plus drinks and service.

  

So as the pandemic seems to be dying away in this Blessed Plot of England set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house, a fortress built by Nature for herself against infection .... I (brimming with antibodies) feel optimistic about that date, less than three weeks away when Craft and our other great restaurants can once more throw open their welcoming doors to this Happy breed of men and feed them the pleasures which they have in store. I’ve done it all over the past twelve months - isolated, distanced, ordered on line, mourned the sight of empty restaurants (some, but not so many round here, closed for good), had a Zoom birthday party, had cook-at-homes which proved I was never meant even to finish off fine dining dishes let alone cook them from scratch, and now eaten fine food in a sort of glorified if chilly picnic. This has been another era in the story of the food of this city and the region.

  I suppose it is worth noting that although the City Council is generally supremely incompetent and lazy, it has girded its loins in a minor way to provide rather amateurish-looking pavement shelters near bars and restaurants in some roads around the city centre including Waterloo Street near Adam’s (though I don’t see its customers being provided with their Michelin-starred dinners under the roofs of these constructions). As the spring advances these shelters may come into their own though they do rather spoil the overall appearance of that particular street with its fine buildings which have managed to survive the ill-intentions and depredations of various and multiple councils and countless mad architects over the years.

T

143. Day By Day, Lockdown’s End Approaches.

Nice packaging.

 

As the days slip away towards the reopening of restaurants, my anticipation grows ever more consuming. You might say I have a consuming anticipation to consume. The weather is really very soothing, warm, sunny, blue-skyed. It’s a sort of gastronomic purgatory with the culinary gates of heaven being oiled so that all we forgiven sinners can flood through them as they swing wide open. No more cook-at-homes, which were one of the circles of hell. No more food boxes delivered to my door which recalled the food parcel gifts generous American sent to English acquaintances during World War II.

  The final stretch. Sitting outside hostelries and cafès glugging coffee and perhaps a pastry. The date of Renaissance is creeping ever closer. But purgatory has a few more weeks to run. Next week I am off for dinner at Craft Dining Room’s outdoor Firepit to celebrate a friend’s birthday and that will be, for me, the first Act of The Apostles. Indoor restaurant dining will recommence not long after that.

   Life is resuming - last week lunch outside at the home of the same friend who reminded me of a true pleasure by feeding me with a Charlie Bigson’s exquisite lasagne, his wife being away on grandchild childcare duties and so not available to render up one of her own equally exquisite lasagnes. How pleasing it was to be reminded of this brand which had drifted outside the increasingly limited boundaries of my memory - there’s a pandemic going on, people are falling down like flies, Boris says you’ve got to stay at home and avoid all human contact (but mercifully the company of dogs is not forbidden) and there you are, there’s something great out there and you’ve forgotten all about it. But this memory of pleasure has now been returned to my locker of happy knowledge and in consequence I have just consumed a plate of Bigson’s chicken jalfrazi, nicely heated up/cooked in the oven in its charming little wooden boxes. The rice was perfect and the chicken was spot on in its spiciness and riven with a delicious butteriness. Having had my memory restored I am now fated to be utterly dedicated in my pursuit of Charlie Bigson meals in these dying embers of this ‘lockdown’. Very good value, wonderfully edible and so much easier than messing around with posh restaurant cook-at-home boxes.

  Meanwhile this year’s Great British Menu travels on its journey around all the regions. This week’s ‘North-east’ heat features four chefs none of whom actually work in the north-east (two of course work in London, one in the Midlands and the other at Winteringham Fields in north-east Lincolnshire (and no, north-east Lincolnshire is not in north-east England unless you have a disordered sense of geography)). What is worse is that it is wholly predictable - every week - as to which chefs will be eliminated at the end of Day 1 and Day 2; it’s almost as though they’ve been selected as cannon-fodder to be blown to metaphorical pieces to make way for the two more prestigious chefs to battle it out in front of Waldorf and Statler and the third judge whose presence remains as superfluous as when she first appeared though no-one actually noticed that she had. Andi Oliver’s commanding presence combining empathy and knowledge is all that makes it worthwhile for the first two nights of the week till W and S turn up.

  Tomorrow is St George’s Day. And Shakespeare’s birthday. And the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Perhaps I should have a celebratory pie (or should it be a pithivier? - no, definitely a pie).

The eating of a very special pie in Titus Andronicus.

142. A Spring Afternoon With Giles Coren.

 It’s a fine sunny mid-spring Sunday afternoon. I’ve exhausted the dog with a walk over Cofton Common (look it up) along a human-free public footpath, Upper Bittell Reservoir looking like a grand lake, in the distance, to my left the not-too-far off Cotswolds and straight ahead the close-by Lickeys where Tolkein’s and his fiancée used to meet each other (and if you can see behind them) the two-humped  Malverns.

  The perfectly warm sun made lunch in my rather old-fashioned garden (more neglected than it deserves but with camellias still in gay blossom, the fruit trees in flower and the first of the bluebells making everything as Tory as it should be) the only acceptable option. There’s a robin tweeting harmoniously in one of the damson trees and the dog is dozing comfortably despite a rival barking a few gardens away. 

  Lunch is not what Sunday lunch should be - a finely crafted Tanqueray Seville orange gin with Mediterranean tonic  and microwaveable Sainsbury’s Singapore noodles. This is not an easy dish to prepare - do not trust the instructions, if you microwave the meat and prawns for anywhere near the time the manufacturers tell you to do then nothing but unhappiness results. Prawns of the consistency of bullets may be acceptable to the dog, a labrador who will eat anything whether or not it is unspeakable, but no human could derive pleasure from them, nor for that matter from the desiccated chicken and duck which results from following the instructions.

  So, lounging in the sun, who to sit round your garden table with? Today it was Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic and television presenter (though he has acknowledged openly as a middle-aged white man he is unlikely to ever be employed by the BBC again). Coren, who annoyed so many people in 2015 (Blog 6) by announcing his dislike of eating in any English restaurant outside London, wrote a splendid book published in 2012 by Hodder and Stoughton titled How to Eat Out Lessons From A Life Lived Mostly In Restaurants which I have enjoyed before and now returned to. Perhaps it was the Seville orange gin which enhanced the pleasure of reading the opening chapters over lunch. It also had something to do with his reminiscences of his earliest love - Chinese restaurants - and the fact that I was consuming a faux Asian dish at the same time but I enjoyed a few guffaws and kept wishing that society had not taken a turn to ensure that Coren’s book, with its hilarious pokes at all sorts of foreigners, would surely not be taken up by a publisher today, almost 10 years on.

  His foody memoirs are a delight this second time around. There’s a sentimentality mixed up with an honest telling of how eating out was then and at earlier times. For those relatively new to dining out this is an education. My own tale goes back a further generation when children rarely ate out with their parents and it made me slow to observe what was going on in restaurants of which Coren twenty years later was all too aware. But our food experience of the 1950s and 60s when British food is said to have dived to the lowest depths it could is worth knowing about if only to appreciate what we have now. I can not however but feel a little envious of Coren and his earliest experiences which were unimaginable to children of one generation before. He was so aware as a child of his visits to restaurants and what was going on in them you know he was destined to be a food critic. Now if only I’d been born 20 years later. But as a dining companion, if only in print, it has been a tasty lunch eaten on a fine spring afternoon enhanced by his tales.

140. Carter’s Of Moseley Not Eaten In Moseley.

 

 

 

Having moaned a lot about Moseley (see previous Blog), I have to recognise that one of Birmingham’s leading fine dining restaurants is located in the shabby chic (to be polite) suburb. I hate going to Moseley and so therefore I have not visited Carter’s of Moseley anywhere near as many times as I should have done. Well, to be honest I’ve lunched there just the one time (see Blog 5).

  But the ongoing but hopefully now passing pandemic has given us all chance to renew acquaintance with some of these Birmingham Glory names if only by ordering an eat at home meal from some of them. And so my attention was taken by a digital missive from Carter’s, whimsical and humorous I thought, and I ordered a restaurant kit from them which promised to help me relive the nineties - which now I think about it was something I didn’t particularly want to do as it was a period of sustained professional hard work and pressure - with a crispy pancake and smiley face potato fried potatoes and ‘Techno slaw’. A strange action for me to take you might think as crispy pancakes had never appealed to me when they were in vogue and I had never eaten one but I was there ready to give this funky little menu a go.

  It all arrived in an enormous box with more packing than ingredients and the menu and cooking instructions were presented on a colourful sheet well worth keeping and framing as an item of art from this very odd era. I thought that having so very few ingredients promised an easy time ahead.

  The preparation of this meal helped me to understand that a) I do not have the makings of a chef and b) why I like to go out to eat and not work in the kitchen except on a few of my old faithful dishes which I make when I have the patience to do so. This meal involved using an inordinate number of dishes and plates all of which needed washing up at the end of it all (no, I don’t have a kitchen porter) and while everything on paper was exceedingly simple I just about ruined everything. And I really ought to have known better than, no matter how funky it promised to be, ordering a meal which consisted entirely of fried food apart from the coleslaw. True, the coleslaw was edible and vaguely pleasant but I made a complete hash of the smiley face potatoes (well none ended up with smiley faces, let’s put it that way) though I fried them reasonably well. I broke the crispy pancake while coating it with polenta and I almost certainly overcooked it with the result being dry and the beef cheek cubes turning out hard and rubbery. I ate the food with little enjoyment - well, none actually - and I resolved that this would be my last eat at home meal (except of course for takeaways from the local Bangladeshi restaurant and fish and chips - excellent cod by the way - from the local ‘chippie’ which arrive fully cooked and just in need of plating up and nothing more).

  This resolution is made possible by the knowledge that restaurants will soon be fully open again and I have a large number of reservations made and in my diary. Surely no-one wants to endure the pain involved in preparing and then clearing up after these meals when all that pain is taken away by settling into a comfortable chair at a table in a beloved restaurant where welcoming familiar faces flatter you and schmooze you and do what they can to make you enjoy a culinary pleasure with someone else to do the washing up. There’s a lot of talk that restaurants will continue to offer these dine at home services once they open fully but I think the public will want to go back to the full service and not to endure all the drudgery that accompanies preparing a meal and that the demand for eat at home services from smart restaurants will soon fall away.

Beef cheek and ogleshield pancake, smiley potatoes and techno
 slaw but not as Brad Carter intended it.

What it should have looked like:-

141. Can You Tell Your Pie From Your Pithivier?

Kings Norton Farmers’ Market 2019 pre-pandemic

 

 I attended recently the rather unlikely Farmer’s market on Kings Norton Green in my own south western part of the city. I say “unlikely” because present-day Kings Norton is rather unlikely itself being as it is a great swathe of various estates of modern-housing dating from the 1940s onwards with, at its centre a green dating back to medieval times beside a 13th century church and other ancient buildings including the Saracen’s Head inn and The Old Grammar School, also medieval and where the local Tory MP, a well-nourished young man whose critics have named him Big Dinners after he supported the government’s plan not to provide free lunches to schoolchildren during half-term holidays (see Blog 129), has his constituency office. 

The Old Grammar School where you’ll find Big Dinners

 

 Kings Norton Green itself is the location of a minor Civil War battle - the Battle of Kings Norton - in which, on 17 October 1642, royalist forces under Prince Rupert of The Rhine, marching to link up with a force led by King Charles I, ran into a Parliamentary force led by Lord Willoughby and, in short, Rupert’s lot received a sound beating with fifty of the Royalists being killed and buried in an unmarked grave in Kings Norton parish churchyard. As the battle is said to have been fought on The Green we must conclude that where men once fought and died, those with a little more to spend on food now buy cakes, charcuterie, samosas, organic vegetables and dainty pies.

  The market is still a somewhat sorry sight, pretty in its location but still relatively diminished in its number of stalls as the pandemic peters out in the area. There used to be a stall which sold fabulous Banbury cakes, another which offered delicious chutneys for sale and years ago, the Halfpenny Green vineyard used to sell its Penny Black and Mercia wines at the Kings Norton market. Hopefully it will not be long before the market discovers a new spring in its step. Hopefully it won’t be long before we all discover a new spring in our step. So where am I heading with this?

  Well, I did discover a new stall at the most recent market - that of Rourke’s pie makers who have a shop in Kings Heath. And pretty little pies they looked too. There were pies with slightly exotic flavours on sale - you know what I mean, the inevitable chorizo, balti chicken, the necessary vegan options such as spicy ‘Middle Eastern’ beetroot - but there were also good solid English pies - steak and ale, ham hock and lamb and mint. I opted for the latter two, it was a cold spring morning with flecks of snow in the air and it seemed right to be taking home good solid comforting English fayre on this particular spring morn.

 

 So how have I got on to this subject? After 3 weeks of the BBC’s current series of The Great British Menu, including the London and South-East regional final judge’s round, the broadcast of which was postponed by 24 hours due to death of the Duke of Edinburgh, some trends are becoming clear. One of the most pleasing is the rarity of the appearances of a water bath so far, and the consequential paucity of dishes cooked sous vide. 

  However I have noticed the increasing number of pithiviers turning up as elements of some dishes. Chefs are becoming pithivier-mad. Not pie-eyed but consumed by pithivier hysteria. In my reading I discover that to the French at least, the pithivier can be a controversial subject. Pithiviers, named after, it appears,  the town of Pithiviers in the département of Loiret, are classically round, domed pastries with a rich almond cream filling. The puff pastry (pâte feuilleté) is glazed and decorated with curving lines which some, rather inaccurately to me, describe as ‘spirals’. The pastries are said to date from the 17th century when puff pastry was invented though the use of almond paste dates back to the Romans. Three types of pithivier have evolved - Pithiviers feuilletés, classic pastries filled with almond cream, Pithiviers fondant, with icing and glacy fruit and Pithiviers salé (dirty pithiviers - sounds good to me), savoury filled with poultry or game birds or pork and vegetables). 

  The Pithiviers feuilletés are a bone of contention being similar as they are to Galettes des rois, frangipane-filled pastries, glazed and patterned once more with swirls but with the addition of a fava bean hidden inside, served at Epiphany, the finder of the bean being nominated as Lord of Misrule for the day (well, that was the case in the past, nowadays there are far too many Lords of Misrule to need a fava bean to pick one out). In the south of France the galette becomes the Gateau Parisienne, to add to the confusion. Aficionados in France will argue whether or not the pastry is a pithivier or a galette des rois, the French always have the right priorities when it comes to issues to be debated.

  Anyway, chefs here in The Midlands now must decide when their pies are their pithiviers and when and when not to stick a fava bean in their pastries. No amount of swirling patterns is going to justify this pithivier outbreak.

    So as far as Kings Norton market is concerned the question is clearly not whether Big Dinners ate all the pies but whether or not he consumed all the pithiviers. Not to be confused with galette des rois of course. Hopefully he saves that for Twelfth Night.

139. Street Food In Birmingham. Goodbye Digbeth, Hello Hockley. Goodbye Beefburgers, Hello Venisonburgers.

   I think I have made it clear before that I haven’t been caught up in the lemming-like plunge from cliffs into a sea of expensive, often somewhat unpleasant street food served on nasty cardboard trays that has become inexplicably popular in this city. Much of it just isn’t very nice. There are a couple of recent developments in this aspect of Birmingham dining that are worth mentioning here.

  Firstly Digbeth Dining Club is no more or at least not in the form in which those who like that sort of thing (mostly aged under 40 who have lead a life of whining and who are now prone to long-COVID) have come to know it. It has been based in Lower Trinity Street since it began almost ten years ago in venues such as Mama Roux’s and Spotlight but as the triumph of the government’s vaccination campaign enables the hospitality industry to be reborn imminently the DDC has revealed that it will open a new venue in the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley. DDC does say however that it is looking for its own venue in Digbeth, the charms of which remain lost on me to this day, and that the venue will be, “a place where we can grow, develop, champion independence and incubate the best food traders, musicians, DJs (I don’t think they’re referring to dinner jackets), artists and makers that the region has to offer”. So that’s alright then. The new location in Hockley will be in Great Hampton Street and it is said that the “Hockley Social Club will still feature a line-up of street food and DJs in a 10,000 square feet space” (really you’d think that cool street food-consuming dudes would have converted to metric measurements by now).

  Meanwhile Birmingham’s appalling City Council which is dominated by a Labour Party locked in perpetual civil war between the Corbynistas and Starmer’s Limp Left faction, which in itself does not give much hope for good governance, and made up of a lot of worthless inner city councillors who make no contribution to the progress of the city apart from claiming their £18000 annual ‘expenses’ (they’ve just voted themselves a substantial rise again) and anything else they can get their hands on along with councillors representing privileged members of the wealthy, self-satisfied left leaning-middle class who have swarmed in places like Moseley and Harborne, has taken it on itself to withhold licenses from long established street-traders unless the traders introduce an “innovative approach”to what they offer for sale. 

  In reply the traders have taken the council to court accusing it of wanting to “gentrify” the city centre which one expects is just the vision that the denizens of Moseley and Harborne and their council representatives probably do hope to see happen. In court the lawyer representing the Council was forced to deny that the Council wished to replace current stalls selling beefburgers with those selling chai lattes and Tibetan curries (I had to look up what a Tibetan curry is and had to conclude that it most certainly has a home in Moseley). The lawyer for the Council, one Jonathan Manning, said that an “innovative approach is what the council is looking for”. He continued that traders were not required to sell “something that no-one has ever heard of, that no-one knew existed” (not Tibetan curry then obviously). “if you are burger van (an interesting piece of transformation in itself) you can still innovate within the burger market by selling goods that are perhaps more diverse than you were previously selling,. An example could be perhaps a vegetarian line or a different kind of meat - one could have a venison burger”. Such drivel. Frankly I find most burgers to be pretty unpleasant but I do support the traders who have worked in this city through all sorts of weather over many years and resent the assault on them by those who represent the Tibetan curry-eaters who live in their million pound houses in Moseley and such suburbs. If they want a venison burger then you are bound to find one in B13 or B15 and you can wash it down with an over-priced  Côtes de Rhône at the same time.

What is a Tibetan curry? Well nothing special I wouldn’t think though it is said to be less oily than Indian curries and have a “cleaner, healthier feel” (that figures, I’m surprised Birmingham City Council has not already made it de rigeur in all Birmingham restaurants). Recipes on the internet seem to centre on bright yellow potato curries and while genuine Tibetans (I’m not sure how many there are in Moseley or Harborne) use a yerma peppercorn in their’s, western recipe variants seem to feature a lot of fenugreek. So now we know. I wonder how soon it will be before Birmingham city centre is full of Tibetan curry stalls and if one will find its way to the Hockley Social Club (actually to give myself an easy time I often make a potato curry and like to use a lot of fenugreek so I think I have been several years ahead of the denizens of Moseley on that one). However I haven’t yet made myself a venison burger.