Birmingham Food - An Old Bloke's Perspective: CSons On The Green

Come Sunday morning, the temperature in Ludlow had moderated somewhat but there was equally a degree of humidity in the morning air. This was the final day of the Ludlow Food Festival and there was a day packed with activities ahead.

The first event on the main stage was a double act of Neil Crouch of CSons on the Green and Mark Harris of the Pheasant Inn ar and Tally Ho at Church Stretton. This was 40 minute session of worthwhile culinary bandinage and was followed by a pleasing demonstration of the cooking of lamb rack by Louisa Ellis, now a private chef based in Nottingham, who had been a finalist in the 2017 series of Masterchef The Professionals and had one the Christmas Masterchef competition with an Asian-based meal of Wagyu beef, spiced shrimp emulsion, tempura enoki and Szechuan spiced potato and Lime yogurt mousse with a mango and yuzu centre, lemon granita, compressed mango and pineapple and ginger crumb.

I had been looking forward to a demonstration by Chris Simpson of Pensons but he was unable to attend and so I headed for lunch and joined the long queue at the Beefy Boys stall feeling that I must continue my brief foray into burgers after my experience earlier in the week at Simpsons. The heavens opened and torrential rain gushed on to the castle grounds. Fortunately, though never a Boy Scout, I was prepared and had brought an umbrella with me and so managed to avoid a drenching while queuing for my The Beefy Boy. This was a burger, cooked to my liking, with bacon and cheese and mayonnaise, the latter of which rendered much of the bread soggy and not pleasant. It was tasty for sure but reinforced my doubts about the pleasures of street food. Time perhaps to take another break from burgers.

I ate my burger, sheltered from the deluge, in the main demonstration tent listening to a talk on Indian cuisine and then moved on to the highlight of the day which was the talk given by Dr Neil Buttery, chef and historian, on the life and works of Elizabeth Raffald, a remarkable Yorkshire woman, who, as Dr Buttery pointed out, did more to establish traditional English cuisine than the rather more famous Mrs Beeton who seems to have plagiarised, as did many others, the work of Mrs Raffald.

This was a fascinating and revelationary talk, nicely delivered by Buttery and at the end, I was delighted to add Dr Buttery’s book, author-signed, to my culinary library.

There was one more demonstration to attend before I departed the castle grounds for another year - that by Andrew Tabberner, Head Chef and Co-owner of the Gaerwen Arms, which had unfortunately recently burned down and it was impressive to hear him talk of his plans to bounce back from this misfortune.

Back to Fishmore Hall for dinner in the ‘bistro’ and a wonderful & memorable dish, served as a starter, of smoked trout rillette with avocado, cucumber and trout roe. This was a lovely dish for summer, or even an Indian summer, being refreshing, cool, fresh, light. I thought it was delightful.

I little expected to be eating another burger that evening but I surprised myself when I chose to do so and this time it was a buttermilk and paprika marinaded fried chicken - tasty though I should have liked the coating to be a little crispier - with an equally tasty red pepper and onion relish, chipotle mayonnaise and little gem lettuce plus some excellent chips and a less exciting collection of leaves which I suppose are necessary but rarely give me any pleasure wherever I encounter them.

For dessert I enjoyed the light and pleasing rhubarb posset with poached rhubarb and ginger crumble and ice cream. This was a pleasing, unpretentious meal and it gave me a lot of pleasure. And with it, my visit to the Ludlow Food Festival drew to a close for another year.

There’s a lot of fuss about Digbeth Dining Club’s street food experience but I remain to be convinced. I’ve had some reasonably enjoyable stuff, one or two near-gems but also one or two stinkers. I recall with a shiver down my back a particularly unpleasant but expensive hot dog with a skin around it that was impenetrable particularly when attacked with the useless plastic knife supplied by the vendor and on another occasion an unspeakably hyperchillified sauce which destroyed every taste bud in my mouth for several days, which had been poured on what professed to be a superior hot dog but which clearly was not.

The theme here therefore is street food specialising in the hot dog. I have always loved hot dogs. They need only to be very simple - edible sausage with sweet chopped fried onions on a pleasant white bread roll sometimes, but not necessarily, with an appealing condiment. I don’t need a two foot long jumbo sausage served on an even longer unpleasantly doughy bread roll; a normal sized sausage is all that is needed.

There are many stories about the origins of the hot dog. The sausage used in the hot dog, so Wikipedia tells me, was popular in 19th century Germany and was so named because the meat in some of the sausages at the time was so bad that it was thought to have been just that - dog (I cover up Lucy The Labrador’s ears as I read this through).And apparently it sometimes was. The pork sausage - the Frankfurter - so named, as we all know, because Frankfurt was its birthplace, goes back to as long ago as the 13th century when the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II distributed them to the locals whenever he held street processions (our politicians may get a useful tip here on how to conjure up some extra votes when they hold political meetings). It is claimed that Frankfurters were being eaten in America in the 1880s but a German immigrant, one Herr Anton Feuchtwanger sold them in St Louis in the early 20th century lending white gloves to the purchasers so that they could hold them without burning their fingers. This was not a profit-making business because the sausage eaters failed to return the gloves to Herr Feuchtwanger and so Frau Feuchtwanger suggested that he serve the sausage wrapped in some milk bread which clearly was non-returnable. Hence was born the hot dog. There are several other claims to being the originator of the Hot Dog in America but it is not the question I really want answered.

I should like to know when the sausage sandwich became a reality in our green and pleasant land on this side of the Atlantic which gives rise to a gastronomic conundrum - which came first the sausage sandwich or the hot dog?

I can always remember the existence of the hot dog from my earliest days whereas the burger was something new in my childhood appearing in the form of the Birdseye beef burger at some time in the 1960s. Obviously I was behind the times because Lyon’s Corner Houses had obtained a license to use the US Wimpy brand in its cafés in 1954 with the first Wimpy Bar being opened in Lyon’s Corner House in Coventry Street in London that same year as a separate fast food section. The success of the innovation was rapid and Wimpy restaurants were being opened before long which served beefburgers only. So after Wimpy came Birds Eye. I have not yet tracked down the date when the first Wimpy Bar in Birmingham first opened and how soon after 1954 the city became home to what was for some years the place to eat a burger.

But I wander. It is the Hot Dog and not the burger that is of concern here. The sausage is an object dating back into ancient Middle Eastern history or so Wikipedia informs us. In England the word itself dates back to the 15th century though Shakespeare sadly does not mention King Henry V guzzling on a sausage sandwich before riding off to fight the battle of Agincourt nor does Richard III cry out, “A sausage! A sausage! My kingdom for a sausage!” as he fights the Battle of Bosworth on his way to ending up under a Leicester car park. One can only guess that the sausage sandwich itself probably came into existence shortly after the invention by John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, of the sandwich proper (either slices of salt beef between two slices of toasted bread or slices of roast beef between slices of bread) which meant that he could continue gambling without having to pause to eat a formal meal. The sandwich was invented sometime between 1718 (the year of Montagu’s birth and so probably not before 1738) and 1765 when the Frenchman Pierre-Jean Grosley visited London for a year or so and mentioned in an account of his visit the sandwich that was all the rage there.

John Montagu 4th Earl of Sandwich.

Once the sausage sandwich became established, whenever that was, Englishmen continued to eat it with, I’m sure, great pleasure though when they added tomato sauce - ketchup - or brown sauce as condiments to reduce the effects of the fat in the sausage I can not say. But when did the US variant of the sausage sandwich - the Hot Dog - find its special niche on this side of the Atlantic? I suspect we may again be able to pin down a reasonably likely date of 11 June 1938 when during a visit to The United States, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were entertained to a lunch at Top Cottage in Hyde Park in New York where Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Frankish Roosevelt, regaled their guests with a menu of ‘American dishes’ including Hot Dogs. It is alleged that Queen Elizabeth, unfamiliar either with a sausage in a bread roll or perhaps just unfamiliar with a sausage per se, was rather taken aback and tried to eat the dog with a knife and fork which any civilised person would have done of course but the King consumed the treat and this was reported back on newsreels to the public back home and doubtless this was the birth of the era which saw the English eating hot dogs which is why I as a child of the 1950s was perfectly familiar with the Hot Dog as an edible concept at a very early stage of my life.

The British monarchy’s first encounter with a Hot Dog, 1938.

Which brings us back, finally, to Ludlow. In previous blogs (see Blogs 33 and 82) I have mentioned CSons on the Green at Dinham weir which has not had a happy year having to shut for a short time early in the year with the severe flooding that affected Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire and then having to close again because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But CSons, like so many other food establishments, has held on and fought back and is now selling food as takeaways to large numbers of people on the Green who eat it while enjoying the lovely location and the now gently flowing river, including the C Dog, CSons own version of the Hot Dog that so perplexed Queen Elizabeth over 80 years ago.

As Hot Dogs go, the C Dog was spectacularly good even if I did drop bits of it down my clothes as I had my own private hot dog party shared only with Lucy The Labrador. I dislike intensely the unhappy flavour and texture of the classic boiled frankfurter but am a devoted fan of the great English sausage so for me the delicious Gloucester Old Spot sausage used in the very fine C Dog coupled by the glorious sweet buttered onions and a perfectly judged mustard and wondrous beetroot ketchup on a lovely brioche was a joy to behold and consume.

So good was it that dog and man returned the next day to consume another but unfortunately became sidetracked and instead chose another type of sausage - Beef kofta - longhorn beef served with CSons’ hummus and pickles on a wrap (for which one had to pay an extra £1.50 which seemed somewhat excessive) and a pile of dull mixed leaves. The inside of the kofta was very dry and cloying in the mouth, the leaves largely went uneaten and the whole was a mess with the sloppy hummus doing its best to moisten the kofta and counter the shockingly hot chilli sauce which had been employed inside the wrap to ensure that the whole was inedible. If only I’d had another C Dog instead.

Despite the unfortunate kofta experience CSons in its beautiful location is a wonderful spot to visit for a snack at present and it will be interesting to see how it fares when it’s small main dining area and terrace are able to be reopened.