Food & Drink
Gardener’s Cottage co-owner and award-winning chef Dale Mailley explains why he was keen to put mutton on the menu at his new restaurant
Dale Mailley of Gardener’s Cottage cooks with mutton, plus Rose Murray Brown’s favourite wines from Alsace
We opened Quay Commons last summer in Leith and it’s a really great space for me as a chef to practise all the things I love most about food. We’re open through the day as a cafe and every Thursday, Friday and Saturday we keep our doors open for an ever-changing dinner menu of handmade fresh pasta, local cheeses and housemade charcuterie. As we are also a bakery, we can make sourdough bread and pastries not just to sell in Quay Commons, but for our sister restaurant, the Gardener’s Cottage, and a growing number of local businesses. It’s such a joy to be able to spend time baking the traditional way, and our head baker Dominic is dedicated to producing really excellent, and very tasty, produce.
We also have a busy kitchen where we butcher whole animals and large cuts of meat for lunch in the cafe and for our menus at Gardener’s Cottage.
I feel very privileged to have the chance to teach our chefs the dying art of seam butchery, then allow them the creative freedom to turn the meat into amazing dishes like handraised pork pies, homemade black pudding and slow-braised hogget neck tagliatelle.
Very often simple is best with meat and we love to share unusual cuts with our guests. We enjoy practising the traditional ways of preserving meat by making our own bacon, cured roe deer, duck pastrami and potted pig’s head. Our daily ploughman’s lunch always features home-cured meats, pork pies and of course our award-winning sourdough.
The recipes I’m sharing are the types of dishes we serve at Quay Commons, and ones I love to eat. I hope you do too.
Wild ramsons pasta bow-ties with cockles and clams
Being only a stone’s throw away from Welch’s fishmongers, we can get our hands on some of the best freshlylanded Scottish shellfish available. Dried wild ramson flour gives this pasta dish a striking green colour and the bow-ties (farfalle in Italian) work well as little vessels for the sweet clam juices.
This dish does require some forward planning as you will need to forage for a small bunch of wild ramsons (though do a little research before eating any wild foods). Farmers’ markets can also can be a reliable source of ramsons.
Serves four as a main course 125g egg yolk 14ml olive oil (and an extra glug) 30ml milk 220g flour 7g of ramsons (or half a teaspoon of squid ink) and a few extra stalks, chopped 150g clams 150g cockles 1 tbsp or so of chopped parsley a splash of white wine to cook the shellfish some hard goats’ cheese (like Bonnet) as garnish a few stalks of fresh, wild ramsons, chopped
1 Clams and cockles can contain sand, so best to wash them thoroughly. Place them in a bowl in the sink and allow cold water to run over them for 30 to 40 minutes.
2 To dry the 7g of ramsons to make flour, place them on a baking tray in the oven at 60C/gas Mark ¼ (or less) for 4 to 5 hours. Then crush them into a powder. If you’re not using ramsons, half a teaspoon of squid ink will give you a lovely colour, though you may need to add a little more flour to the pasta mix.
3 To make the pasta, combine the eggs, milk and 14ml of olive oil in a bowl.
4 Mix the ramson flour and plain flour and place on your workbench, making a small well, and slowly add the wet ingredients, combining until it’s a smooth dough. Cover with clingfilm and refrigerate for a few hours.
5 Using a pasta machine, roll the pasta into sheets at the second thinnest setting. With a fluted pasta wheel, cut the pasta into strips about 5cm long and 3cm wide. Pinch the pasta in the middle to achieve the bow-tie shape.
6 Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and cook the pasta for one minute. Remove and place in a bowl.
7 Steam the cockles and clams in a hot pan with a splash of white wine until they open fully, then add a glug of olive oil, the cooked pasta, some chopped parsley and the chopped fresh ramsons. Remove from the heat and serve. I like to finish my pasta dish with a little grated Bonnet goats’ cheese and some fresh parsley.
Mutton pie with root vegetable salad
You will require a 9.5cm x 15cm pie dolly for this recipe to achieve the traditional hand-raised look. We purchase whole mutton carcass direct from a lovely organic farm in Perthshire run by the Grierson family. Mutton is one of my favourite meats: it has an intense flavour, great marbling and in my humble opinion is even better than lamb. I like to serve my pie with a root vegetable salad.
Makes two pies
500g self-raising flour 250g suet 1⅓ tsp salt 15g baking powder 1 egg (plus some egg wash for the pie) 2 tsp milk cold water to mix 450g mutton mince ⅓ tsp ground mace ⅓ tsp ground nutmeg 1 tsp chopped thyme ⅓ tsp white pepper 1 carrot ¼ red cabbage 1 beetroot ⅓ celeriac 5 tsp rapeseed oil 3 tsp cider vinegar 1 tsp caster sugar a small bunch of parsley, mint and coriander, chopped
1 For the pie pastry: mix the flour, suet, 1 teaspoon of salt, baking powder, egg and milk and add just enough water to make a dough. Cover in a bowl and rest for a few hours.
2 For the filling: combine the mutton, mace, nutmeg, ⅓ teaspoon of salt, thyme and white pepper in a bowl and refrigerate.
3 Making the pie is simple. Dust the pie dolly with flour and mould the pastry up from the base until the dolly is covered (including the base) remembering to reserve some pastry for the top. Remove the dolly and fill the pastry with the pie mix. Place on a pastry lid and crimp to finish. Cut a little lamb shape from the pastry and put on top, if you want. Brush with egg wash and cook in an oven on a medium heat for around 40 minutes.
4 To make the root vegetable salad, chop all the peeled roots into thin strips and season.
5 To make the dressing, combine the rapeseed oil, cider vinegar and caster sugar. When ready to serve, toss the vegetables in the dressing and add the parsley, mint and coriander if desired. You can add some toasted seeds or diced chilli too if you like.
Quay Commons milk flan with Yorkshire rhubarb poached in Aelder Wild Elderberry Elixir
Milk flan is such a great sweet treat. This dish is comfort food at its best and adding the Aelder liqueur and rhubarb gives it an air of elegance that can elevate a very plain tart into something special. Forced rhubarb from Yorkshire is no substitute for the real deal that’s starting to poke through the hard soil in Scotland, however it gives us a taste of what’s to come from our gardens in a few months’ time. With nothing but stored apples and pears all winter, rhubarb brightens up my day when it appears at the vegetable market in February.
Makes one flan
125g unsalted butter, softened 215g caster sugar 170g plain flour 380ml full fat milk 380ml water 4 eggs (plus one additional yolk) 60g custard powder a few sticks of rhubarb a good glug of Aelder
1 To poach the rhubarb, cut into thumb-size chunks then place in a baking tray and add a good glug of Aelder. Cover with tin foil and cook on a medium heat for 10 minutes. Allow the rhubarb to cool in its juices. Reserve the juices to serve with the flan.
2 To make the flan case, heat the softened butter with 5g of the sugar until smooth and creamy. Slowly add 30ml of the milk and then the egg yolk. Add the flour slowly until the dough is combined and refrigerate for a few hours.
3 Line a nine-inch shallow flan tin with greaseproof paper. Roll out the dough and line the tin. Refrigerate for three hours.
4 To make the filling, bring the milk and water to a boil in a saucepan over a low heat.
5 Combine the four eggs, 210g of sugar and custard powder and mix well. Add the warm milk and water mixture and beat together until smooth.
6 Return the custard mix to a clean pan and heat gently over a medium heat, stirring continuously for five minutes or until it coats a spoon. Remove the pan from the heat and place in a bowl filled with ice to cool as fast as possible.
7 Preheat your oven to 170C/gas Mark 3½. Pour the cooled flan mix in to the lined flan tin, and bake in the oven for one hour. Allow the flan to cool before serving. Serve with a few sticks of rhubarb and the Aelder cooking juices.