Pan of Panza, hock and hope

Hock said the label. Bacon hock. On special. I picked out the biggest. You could have brained a burglar with it. It was most of a hog’s leg. And only five bucks. A limb for so little. Reader, I bought it. Back home I went to Delia, my only cook book, a gift 30 years ago, called How to Cook Everything. It’s fatter than I am; 500 pages of Anglo-Saxon culinary caution.

There’s the odd nervous nod to the exotic but the most common ingredients are no and nonsense. The index is a tenth of the book. I looked up hock. Nothing. I was on my own.

But you are never on your own. These days the internet attends you, like a creepy valet. I wish it didn’t. I got through the first half of my life without it, and it was the better half. But still, ‘‘hock recipe’’ I typed. Two nanoseconds later the internet said, ‘‘hock and pea risotto’’.

I made a risotto years ago. How it turned out I can’t remember. Perhaps not well since I never made another. But hope is the signature trait of homo sapiens. This risotto would rock like a cradle in a gale.

I had to boil the hock into submission, boil it till the flesh fell from the bone. A huge pan, a gallon of water, bay leaves and a slug of every spice I’d got. Three hours I boiled it, three connective-tissue-melting hours, the kitchen windows steamed to opacity and the whole house redolent of salted meat.

I plucked it from the cauldron with tongs and dropped it steaming on the bench. Removing the great thick skin was like peeling the trench coat from a dead soldier. The flesh beneath was the colour of cooked rhubarb, and flaked like cod. The dog came shambling into the kitchen and lay down, patient as a vulture.

Another pan. Oil, butter, onions. I love how cooked onions disappear. They’re the Lord Lucan of vegetables.

Into the vanishing onions went a double fistful of the right rice for risotto, swirled in the pan till every grain glistened like a body builder. Then the stock. Any stock, said the recipe. I used the hock stock, the rich remnants of the starting gallon, hot and spicy.

The nub of a risotto is constant stirring. If the rice falls still, it burns. After 15 minutes my forearm was engorged with lactic acid and the rice with hock stock. The whole was a creamy slurry, an unset meaty cement. Pea time.

I could write a paean to the frozen pea. It was the first vegetable I learned to cook and the only one that has never let me down. Fresh peas are rarely right. You get a thimble of peas from a bushel of pods, and they’re either too small to be worth it or too big to be nice.

But the frozen pea is always nice. It is Mr Wattie bettering God. It needs only brief heat and abundant butter. For all my adult life the frozen pea has been the Sancho Panza of my kitchen – faithful, dependable, good.

Off the heat came the risotto. Into the risotto went peas, parmesan and the purplish meat. A quick stir and then I pronged a forkful. This is the moment when words fail many food writers. ‘‘Yummy’’, they say, or ‘‘to die for’’.

But words won’t fail me. The thing was revolting. I binned the lot and went for a curry.

But nothing’s all waste. The dog got the hock bone and there was five bucks of pleasure in his pleasure.