Pigs' feet, ripe cheese and a radish… Guess who's a galloping gourmet
IN my teens, gourmandizing and scoffing epicurean meals was an everyday occurrence… Ha BLOODY ha!
In my family's coal-pit terrace cottage it was not unusual to sit down to a meal of offal, tripe and unrecognisable odds and sods.
That fifty years later 'TV' chefs began extolling such 'spare' bits as high quality grub and making a fortune out of their 'discoveries' just isn't funny.
The Roux brothers were leaders in the offal field; they made the idea of dining on tripe and onions very much 'in' with celebrity diners.
Comparatively, it had been a survival must for us 'starvation level' folk during the war years. We lived on offal; red meat - beef, pork and mutton - was rationed to a meagre thimbleful per person.
Ration card allocations were weighed in ounces not pounds!
Dandelions were our main salad staple; an extra special treat was the early morning picked big chunky horse mushrooms gleefully gleaned from where shire-horses grazed.
That these dinner plate size mushrooms were delightedly plucked from dollops of horse manure mattered not!
The nearest thing we sampled to steak was animals' innards. Such delicacies as honeycomb tripe, cow heel bits, chitterlings and sundry offal were un-rationed but only after having stood in a queue to obtain.
Believe it or not, the offal selection was varied and surprisingly tasty. Pigs' trotters, chewy chunks of cow heel, intestinal chitterlings and blanched tripe with choices of 'thick seam' and 'honeycomb' variations were our regular sustenance.
That's what I mean about eating well even though we'd never heard the word 'gourmet'. Such delights as fillet steak, pâté, goose livers and caviar were unheard of.
Most of the produce we consumed was not exactly kosher but it was nourishing.
With garnish of tinned baked beans and dried peas, anything edible from 'allotment' cow cabbage and mangolds to sheep’s innards and other beast entrails we scoffed.
Umpteen years later and I still enjoy the same sort of rustic, basic grub.
Black pudding, pork dripping, scrag end, giblets and all manner of other stuff which came from the guts of farm animals kept me happy enough then and I've never lost my appetite for them. I don't need them tarting up either.
Regularly some TV channel 'celeb' chef will extol the virtues of belly pork, lamb shanks and pigs face, prepared and presented in ways that render such food indistinguishable.
Recently a scraggy chicken smashed open and flattened then inundated with herbs and spices before being twice cooked was one super-chefs dream meal.
The effort necessary in preparation and production far outweighed the result which looked fancy but tasted ugh! I know because my other half followed the daft recipe and I had to suffer the results.
I like experimenting but I don't need some TV berk to lead the way.
My own version of steak tartar (which I share with a feral cat) does not resemble any twee restaurant recipe although it begins in the same way.
I buy a couple of hundred grams of minced beef, mash an egg yolk into it, dowse it with hot sauce and that is where the similarity ends.
No two steak tartars on my menu are the same; I am an exponent of the trial and error method.
I mix, dabble and taste to such a degree that by the time I have added the final incongruous ingredient, there's hardly any 'picada' left!
Soy sauce, Yorkshire relish, Colman's mustard plus a mixture of dried herbs and spices find their way into the concoction merrily.
I can't be bothered with capers so I use black and red olive chippings and dip in throughout the procedure.
As the mixture matures, the cat's whiskers begin to vibrate and eventually he does a yowling flyer through the dining room window well before my masterpiece is complete.
Whilst enjoying this epicurean delight, I lubricate with whatever red plonk has been left open from the day before.
That it's usually a young Ribera del Duero or Toro is because these inexpensive tipples keep the local supermarket in business and my wallet comfy.
It just takes a few olive bread sticks, a bit of fruit and a nibble of Cabrales to round off my concoction. With the odd tangy radish thrown in, it might look nothing special but I enjoy it.
Whether the cat agrees I'm not sure… for some reason that escapes me, he's done a runner and been on a walkabout for the past couple of days.