The Taste of Britain. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

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СКАЧАТЬ the habit of serving it with mustard. ‘Furst set forth the mustard and brawne of boore ye wild swyne,’ instructed the Boke of Nurture in 1460.

      ‘Good bread and good drinke,

      a good fier in the hall,

      brawne, pudding and souse,

      and good mustard withall’

      was Thomas Tusser’s (1573) prescription for a husbandman’s Christmas. Later recipes for brawn sauce made of mustard, sugar and vinegar abound (e.g. Dallas, 1877).

      Brawn originally meant muscle or meat of any description; by the fifteenth century the word was particularly, although not exclusively, associated with the flesh of wild boar. The Tudor physician Thomas Cogan stated that the flesh of wild swine was better for you than any tame animal and that brawn, which is the flesh ‘of a boare long fedde in the stie,’ was difficult of digestion. He counselled that it should be eaten at the start of a meal - advice that seems to have been followed, even if unconsciously, unto the present day (O’Hara May, 1977). Because the word applied exclusively to flesh or muscle meat, it followed that brawn developed the restricted meaning of the boned flesh, fat and skin, as opposed to the whole joint, bone-in. The way such a floppy joint was best dealt with was that it would be collared. It would be rolled up tight, wrapped in cloth and tied round [collared] with tape or string before boiling. Collaring was normally done to sides of pig, rather than hams. In the sixteenth-century accounts of the Star Chamber brawn appears almost monotonously as collars or rounds. Martha Bradley (1756) has instructions on choosing brawn. Her definition of the word was meat that came from an uncastrated boar (not necessarily wild). The best was from a young animal: old boar was too tough and the rind too thick, meat from a sow too soft. Her namesake, Richard Bradley, writing 20 years earlier (1736), disagreed. His brawn was the collared flitches of ‘an old boar, for the older he is, the more horny will the brawn be’. He thought brawn rather insipid; horny was probably a good thing.

      A collar was a convenient package that could be cooked and sliced. The method was also a way of preserving unwieldy and quick-spoiling food, in other words, pickling. Collared meats (and fish) were usually brined and spiced, boiled, pressed and sliced. Brawn came to mean almost exclusively pork cooked in this manner. If the meat was pressed and cooled in its liquor, it would indeed begin to look like the jellied brawn we have today.

      Whereas at the outset brawn applied to most parts of the pig apart from the valuable hams, by the 1800s, in the southern part of England, it had come to mean a dish based on pigs’ heads, collared. This appears under the tide ‘Tonbridge Brawn’ in Eliza Acton (1845). As the head was the boniest (and least vendible) part of the animal, it was a natural candidate for collaring and repackaging, leaving the rest for bacon, ham or roasting joints. A dish that was also common in Georgian recipe books was ‘mock brawn’: a flank of pork rolled around morsels from calves’ feet and pig’s head, cooked, pressed and cooled. Gradually, as brawn was relegated to a dish of the poor and country people who killed their own pigs, the dish was simplified into a highly seasoned, moulded, meat jelly containing small pieces of pork

      Pork cheese, once commonly termed head cheese, is a similar dish made from finely minced meat rather than chopped scraps. In some regions, especially the North, brawn-type dishes are made from beef.

      Brawn is still widely made, and is a profitable by-product of pork butchery. It is a component of salad lunches and still eaten with mustard or strong condiments. Although it may be found in many parts of the country, it is most often sold in the South West, where a number of relics of a once important industry survive, such as Bath chaps, chitterlings and the like.

      TECHNIQUE:

      The meat for brawn, usually pigs’ heads, is cleaned thoroughly and brined for a few hours. It is boiled with seasonings, bones and feet until very well cooked. The mixture is strained, the meat picked off the bones and placed in moulds, the stock reduced and poured over, and the whole allowed to set. Where a colour is given to the brawn, suppliers would once have offered ‘Indian Red’ colouring agent.

      REGION OF PRODUCTION:

      SOUTH WEST ENGLAND.

      Cornish Pasty

      DESCRIPTION:

      A BAKED PASTY WITH MANY DIFFERENT FILLINGS WHICH ARE INVARIABLY RAW WHEN THE PASTY IS MADE UP. THE SHAPE IS A POINTED OVAL, WITH A SEAM OF CRIMPED PASTRY RUNNING THE LENGTH OF THE PASTY ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF THE WAY IN FROM THE EDGE. INDIVIDUAL VERSIONS VARY IN THEIR FORMS; INDUSTRIALLY PRODUCED ONES ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE SEMI-CIRCULAR. A MEAN SIZE MIGHT BE 20CM LONG, 10CM WIDE, AND 4CM DEEP, WEIGHING 330G COLOUR: GOLDEN PASTRY (EGG-WASHED). FLAVOUR: BEEF AND POTATO PREDOMINATE.

      HISTORY:

      A bit of pastry is everything to a Cornish household. I can remember the sense of shock when I visited my up-country in-laws for the first time and neither they nor their five daughters had a rolling pin’ (Merrick, 1990).

      Pasty is an old English word for a pie of venison or other meat baked without a dish (OED). Samuel Pepys consumed great numbers of them, as his diary relates. However, the use of the word declined in a large part of England and the only region where it survives is that stronghold of pastry, the South West, especially Cornwall. Here, the form settled into a fixed type: a pie that was food for the working man and his family. Spicer (1948), collecting regional recipes in the 1940s, remarked that pasties were originally baked on an iron plate set on the hearth, covered with an iron bowl, with ashes and embers heaped around. The Cornish were part of the English highland tradition which used a bakestone and pot-oven rather than the masonry or brick oven of champion country. Under the dialect name fuggan, references to pasties can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century (Wright, 1896-1905), defined as ‘an old Cornish dish… which is a pasty of very thick crust filled with potatoes’.

      Tradition states that such food was the portable midday meal of miners and farm labourers, and that the Cornish will put anything in a pasty - meat, fish, bacon, cheese, vegetables, eggs or, in times of dearth, wild herbs. Potatoes, onions, leeks and turnips are allowed, but carrots are not customary; nor is minced, as opposed to chopped, meat. Fishermen, ideal beneficiaries of the convenience of the pasty, in fact eschew it. It is thought bad luck to bring one on a boat (Merrick, 1990). Pasties were often made too large to consume at a single sitting, and their ingredients were varied according to individual preference. Cooks would therefore mark each pasty with the initials of each intended recipient so that they could take up the relic they left off, and avoid a nasty surprise at the first bite.

      The pasty’s success has been contagious since World War II. There are manufacturers everywhere. This may lead to variations, for example Priddy Oggie, sometimes quoted as a long-standing regional dish, is a pork-filled pasty with a cheese pastry which was invented in the late 1960s in Somerset.

      TECHNIQUE:

      A shortcrust pastry is usual, although some makers prefer something very like puff. This is rolled and cut to a circle 20cm across. A mixture of roughly equal quantities of raw, chopped beef steak and thinly sliced, raw potato, plus half as much chopped onion and turnip is well seasoned with salt and pepper. The filling is placed on one side of the pastry, the edge brushed with egg and excess pastry folded over to enclose it. The edge is crimped to seal, the outside egg-washed. It is baked at 200°C for 20 minutes, then 180°C for 40 more.

      REGION OF PRODUCTION:

      SOUTH СКАЧАТЬ