149. 17 May - What Happened Next.

 

Under Clee Hill 

  So the day of liberation arrived - 17 May 2021 - and once more we could dine in restaurants in the warm indoors and stay in hotels. And so to Ludlow and the lovely Fishmore Hall (see Blog 126) and a light lunch. In Blog 75 I outlined my plan to make 2020 my Year of The Ploughman’s Lunch which was soon thwarted by a creature so small that you wouldn’t know it existed apart from the havoc it wrought. So what better than to start the new era off than with a ‘Fine dining’ Ploughman’s lunch at a slightly unnerving price of £15 (‘large’ ploughman’s lunches cost £20;- certainly fine dining prices)?

 

 Putting the price aside, this certainly was a fine ploughman’s lunch and the size was just perfect for my appetite (I certainly did not need the £20 version). The plate was made up of, according to the menu, honey roast ham (pleasingly tasty), (delicious, soft, creamy) Worcester hop, ale and mustard cheese (highly recommended), salted radish (with the mildest of radish flavours, perhaps a little more subtle than it needed to be), pickles (gherkin and deliciously sweet onion with a delightfully sweet chutney), a (vaguely exotic-sounding but by now too familiar)  green salad (rocket, lamb’s lettuce and lolla rossa) and (pleasurable) warm bread. A pleasing dish eaten in the lovely setting of Fishmore Hall and so well worth paying for, though I think I would palpitate at paying £20 for a ploughman’s lunch if I had chosen the larger version.

  When evening came I opted to eat from the ‘bistro’ menu. I went straight to the main course of baked cod, chorizo, butter beans, courgette, tomato and olive. A triumphantly tasty Basque-style dish very suited to the bistro concept. I fear the fish was somewhat over cooked (but still infinitely preferable to a limp, anaemic refugee from a sous vide water bath) and the two thin slices of chorizo were burnt but the flavour was very enjoyable nonetheless and I thoroughly enjoyed the accompanying vegetables, particularly the butter beans) I could not help thinking that the chorizo might have been better presented chopped into little chunks with some bite to them and the paprika oil seeping out from it. The dish cost £14.

  Being a man who only likes a very light dessert I chose coconut panna cotta with mango, toasted coconut and basil sorbet at £6.95p. This was an absolute delight and a real pleasure to eat with the basil sorbet standing out in particular as something to remember. I shall have that dish again before the week is out, that’s for sure.

  The following morning, after a sturdy breakfast in the Fishmore Hall Conservatory restaurant, the dog and I marched off to Ludlow town. Down to Dinmore weir and a coffee sitting out at CSons accompanied by three labneh doughnuts which given their size and the fact that I had only recently eaten A Full English brought on an overindulgence panic which I rapidly solved by eating one there and, à L’Americaine, had the other two parcelled up to take away and eat later. Waste not want not, as my dear old Gran would have said. I had not really expected quite such a large helping - three people could have easily shared it. My initial impression was that the doughnuts themselves were not particularly tasty but with a delicious syrup cut through with perfectly cooked sweet rhubarb poured over them, and given the chance to soak up some of the syrup, their flavour matured and evolved. Well worth trying but only if you have fasted for two days or are staging a modern day version of the feeding of the 5000.

CSons’ huge dish of labneh doughnuts (minus the one I’d already eaten) soaked in syrup with rhubarb.

  Afterwards I took the opportunity to take a peak at the recently Michelin-plated French restaurant and cafe, French Pantry in Tower Street, with the hope of making a lunch reservation for some time but found that it was not due to reopen till 21 May and I could not find an on-line reservations site. That will therefore have to wait till our next trip to Ludlow.

  The French Pantry was reopened not long before the first lockdown, with monumental bad timing by the new owner, chef Olivier Bossut and his wife Lynette. The restaurant had been closed for a while and Bossut had previously been chef there as well as having also worked at Elliot’s at Dinham. Despite its short existence after its rebirth it was awarded a Michelin Plate in the 2021 awards. Michelin stated that, “Classification - Simple restaurant. Francophiles should head to this little piece of France on a town centre side street. The laid-back interior ticks all the bistro boxes - think checked tablecloths, studded banquettes and a classic French menu of boldly flavoured dishes such as French onion soup, snails, cassoulet and tarte Tatin”. Hmmm.....how much does ‘classic French cuisine’ really appeal in this era of ‘modern British’ cooking. I hope soon to find out. Obviously it appeals to Michelin but is that just its eternal French cuisine bias?

  And so to dinner at Forelles at Fishmore Hall. I have reported dining there several times before and so this is just a short update. I thoroughly enjoyed the little morsel of a fish croquette which started off the meal and then a delightful Camembert tartlet, the pastry of which was very pleasing and then there was the usual bread with its accompanying enjoyable marmite butter and, to me at least, the far less agreeable seaweed variant. For the starter I had quail which was a sort of 2 layered terrine of pleasant quail meat with a chervil-flavoured mousse, leek which was incidental to the dish I think and a confit egg yolk on what I took to be shreds of leek-enclosed confit quail leg which had been cooked into small pieces of very chewy material which offered no pleasure at all. Not one of the restaurant’s greatest successes in my modest opinion, I’m afraid. It did look pretty however.

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 The main course was in a different league and largely a very good dish. This was very nicely cooked piece of halibut with various extras largely based on red peppers including an enjoyable quenelle of quinoa given flavour by its combination with red peppers, little pickled micro-pepper which tingled one’s tongue for a couple of seconds, an avocado purée and a happily, sharply startling lemon gel topped by a fine crispy fish skin (if one is a fan of crispy fish skin). The meal could have ended with a chocolate dessert, a crème caramel, the restaurant’s long established and delicious baked Alaska (which I’ve eaten several times before and felt that this time I might give a rest) or 5 cheeses with accompaniments (which is like a meal in itself) but I did not feel I could choose any of them (what I secretly wanted was another helping of the previous evening’s Bistro menu coconut panna cotta). So my meal ended there as I drained off my glass of excellent New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc which had paired very nicely with the halibut.

Another post-lockdown Shropshire big sky

  

The weather was clement on our third day and the dog had a happy swim in the river Teme and we then returned to Fishmore Hall for a snooze and then a bask in the beautiful sun on a sweet English spring afternoon, quaffing the Maître d’hotel’s margarita cocktail, good in itself, and then pre-dinner his special version of an Old fashioned which ditches bourbon and replaces it with a spiced rum and is to be highly recommended. To the Bistro, three pleasing little ham hock croquettes to start, though they may have benefitted from a little more seasoning, accompanied by a very acceptable and unaggresive piccalilli and to follow a fine Bistro dish made up of a plump chicken breast with pleasurably salty pancetta, enjoyable lyonnaise potatoes, accurately cooked green beans and a sauce which looked inadequate in amount at first sight but which proved to be spot on. An excellent and satisfying dish. Afterwards I could not resist returning for a second indulgence in the above mentioned coconut panna cotta which was even more delicious than I recall it being two nights previous. This combination of flavours and textures makes this dish just about my favourite dessert of recent years - since I first tasted Glynn Purnell’s 10-10-10 Egg surprise - as light as you would wish at the end of a satisfying meal. I would fly from China to indulge myself in it again - with its fabulous basil ice cream - but fortunately I don’t live that far away. Advice to chef - always keep this dessert on the menu and do not change it except perhaps by increasing the amount of basil sorbet a little just to indulge the diner even more.

  

Since the coconut panna cotta is only featured on the bistro menu and life without it was becoming unliveable I opted to dine the following evening in the bistro. I had the delicious Herefordshire sirloin cooked exactly as I requested, tender as butter, with big, fat chips, tomato, mushroom (not as delightfully buttery as the last time I had the dish), leaves (for which, by nature, I have little desire but fine if you like the metal taste of rocket, the more tolerable lamb’s lettuce and the dullness of others) and, after an attempt not to have it, Béarnaise sauce which was pleasant with its tolerable degree of tarragonicity but hardly necessary given that the meat tasted so good that it required nothing to give it extra support. I blame Carême, or perhaps Escoffier or both plus numerous other Gallic chefs of the latter part of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th. Because the quality of French produce was poor they had to dress it up with various sauces to make it edible and subsequently they imported their inventions to England to bring novelty to the increasingly snobbish, well-heeled middle classes and the aristocratic, even though the quality of English produce available to them was head and tails above the French peasant ingredients that French chefs needed to disguise in their own backyard. And we still have the stuff; steak eaters, which I usually am not, have these wretched sauces - peppercorn or Béarnaise or whatever - dangled before them at extra cost (but included in the cost of the Fishmore Hall bistro steak) though the steak is quite exquisite without them.

  And the evening finished happily with a dish of coconut panna cotta with the sublime basil sorbet cut through with the bite of mango purée and with a quite adequate amount of texture being provided by the toasted coconut. I fancied a glass of Benedictine, sipped with coffee and a satisfying meal came to an end.

  And the next day, the dog and I were Birmingham-bound, ready to explore the glamour of the newly reopened Grand Hotel of which more .....

75. Pondering The Ploughman’s.

  The Ploughman’s lunch. Served on a board in a 15th century pub which is dog friendly so that there’s a black labrador sitting in the hearth (fire unlit, it’s a relatively warm day for January). The photograph of it is so pretty and colourful it could be some artist’s still life effort.

  Much is written about the ploughman’s lunch. It’s an English and, so they say, recently invented little pleasure that conjures up pastoral music, think Vaughan Williams (my music knowledge is weak but Vaughan Williams sounds like the right sort of name for this occasion). Though they also say the English rural working man, including ploughmen, would have been eating it back in medieval times, well the cheese and bread bit anyway. They say that though the cheese and bread reality had existed for centuries someone clever in the ‘Cheese Bureau’ (yes, really) put it together in the late 1950s to promote the sale of English cheese after the end of rationing and it was felt that calling it something catchy like ‘Ploughman’s lunch’ would rekindle the flame of English cheese consumption.

   The Milk Marketing Board really got things moving in the early 1960s with its Ploughman’s Lunch promotion and I remember my very first, and what seemed wondrous, Ploughman’s lunch consumed outside the Old Hare and Hounds at the Lickey Hills not far from where I lived as a boy (and still do) with my father somewhere around 1962 or 63. To accompany it he drank half a pint of mild and I quenched my thirst with Vimto. Our discovery of the Ploughman’s lunch, albeit in so modest a form that it would be more easily recognised by a medieval agricultural labourer than a modern day pub luncher, set us on a road of father-son bonding over a weekly home-made Ploughman’s whilst watching the weekly episode of The High Chaperral on Saturday-evening BBC television. The Old Hare and Hounds Ploughman’s, which we copied, was simply a wonderfully crusty roll of bread with butter, tasty Cheddar cheese and rings of hot but sweet Spanish onion. Hmmm .... the sheer joy of delicious simplicity.

  Which brings me back to the 15th century (more specifically 1470) dog-friendly pub mentioned above where the subject of the Ploughman’s Lunch cropped up - the Old Thatch Tavern in Stratford-upon-Avon (the dog and I were passing a couple of lazy days in this gem of a West Midlands towns). Wanting a light lunch as I was going to dinner at The Woodsman (see Blog 57) in the evening I scanned the menu and was overcome by an overwhelming Ploughman’s Lunch desire. And what a magnificent piece of work was set before me - 2 good-sized wedges of what I took to be fine Red Leicester, an array of pickles (a pleasant Branston, a really rather good pickled egg but a brutally astringent large, halved pickled onion which had an unsweetened acidity rendering it beyond edibility and which could quite happily have been substituted by some sweet little silverskin pickled onions), a sadly near-flavourless mini-pork pie, a pretty little salad wherein lay the necessary slivers of red onion, the surprising but picturesque little bunch of grapes and what really made this a fine Ploughman's - two thick cuts of splendid ham as tasty a ham as one might ever encounter on the road of food pleasure.

  It was a great pleasure to sit in these ancient and cosy surroundings and eat this generally tasty version of a dish that the Stratford labourers might have been eating when this inn was first built and if a tastier pork pie could be found - I like a pork pie rendered more vigorous with the hit of pepperiness - and the aggressive pickled onion could be substituted then this would be an even grander Ploughman’s Lunch.

  As an afterthought I recall that the Ploughman’s Lunch is one of the few foods or dishes to gives its name to the title of a movie (others I can think of are Disney’s Ratatouille and Woody Allen’s Bananas). A movie of the 1980s by Richard Eyre was named after the dish and proved to be one of the great movies of that decade reflecting perfectly the England of the era of Margaret Thatcher.

  As a further afterthought I’ve decided that I’m going to make 2020 my Year Of The West Midlands Ploughman’s Lunch and have resolved to eat a Ploughman’s Lunch in any establishment in which I’m eating which is offering the dish and which looks like something fine is going to be served up to me. To compare I shall, unusually, give ratings so to start off I give the Old Thatch Tavern Ploughman’s a 7 out of 10 which is a pretty good score, just let down by the pork pie and the vaguely rebarbative pickled onion but strongly boosted by the delicious ham and the very pretty picture it makes when first served.