Bass and Charrington merged.

I wanted to show you this half pint glass. Its squat little stem is unusual, almost dainty (though plenty would see it as fussy and kitsch). Its recent arrival from eBay is the result of an urge I have to hoard memorabilia related to Bass' brewery whom my Dad worked for. Charrington, London brewers, merged with Bass in 1967. This glass pre-dates that, coming, I think, from the early sixties though I can't be certain. You can imagine it foaming with Toby Light Ale or even a new-fangled lager on a bar, anywhere, from Stepney to the Strand as a piano plinks away in the background. Laaaaverly! Right now, it's holding a drop of the tinned version of Draught Bass ale. I like the symmetry of a retro drink to accompany England turning back the clock in dominating the old enemy at Lord's.

Aussies panned

As I thrill to our dominance of the 2nd test at Lord's, my support for England is expressing itself in a celebration of the wonderful British potato.

So as Flintoff's been pounding in from the pavilion end, I've been pounding potatoes from the kitchen end of the house, in unison. I love the various breads, scones and pancakes you can make from the potato. This weekend, I've made a couple of differing batches of what I call 'Tattie Scones" or potato cakes. Yesterday's mix was a bit wetter, more like a pancake batter. I also used half flour, half fine oatmeal (instead of just flour) with the potato. The texture of the resultant cakes were similar to an Irish Boxtie pancake, quite puffy and moist.

Today's lot were a hybrid of a simple Celtic tattie scone and the pan-cooked version of Boxtie. Grated raw potato is squeezed out, the residual water discarded but the starch conserved; about the same amount of boiled potato is mashed, nice and dry. About the same weight again of plain flour is mixed with the 2 potatoes. Some salt (a fair bit - most recipes don't specify enough), a lump of butter and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda are added. Fold it all together and knead briefly into a rollable dough. I dry fried the circular cakes of the dough in my little steel pan (see picture) which is now so well seasoned, it has entered a new level of usefulness and has been promoted from a dry spice toasting utensil to a front line, multi-purpose operator. 

Faggots update.

Here's how those caul-wrapped wonders looked after cooking. How I wish for your benefit, to see them on screen was to taste them. Quite marvellously savoury. As an aside, it's always satisfying when an onion gravy, constructed with care and then poured round the faggots in the tray, reduces down to a state of sweet unctuousness.

The roadmap to flavour.

I'm enjoying a fair bit of time in the kitchen of late. It's given me the opportunity to tinker with a few recipes. Take these faggots on the right. The white wiggly patterns on their surface that look like a page from a Bartholomew's map is caul. Caul is a delicate lattice of fat from the pig's stomach - and the route to tasty faggots. These were made using pig heart, liver and belly pork (about equal amounts of the heart and liver and a little less belly pork) as well as onion and breadcrumbs. They're seasoned with mace and white peppercorns ground with an allspice berry or two plus sage and thyme.  I served some faggots made from lamb offal as part of a buffet at a London pub the other day. They all went and quickly but I thought they didn't quite have that earthy, savoury tang that the best faggots have. Hence I'm trying a few these for comparison. These'll be browned in the oven then baked slowly surrounded by onion gravy. I'll let you know how I get on. 

Those oatcakes I mentioned.

Here's how a couple of the oatcakes looked filled, rolled and grilled with some Leicester and onion. That's the view of the cut parts when sliced across into two. If you buy an oatcake from one of the oatcake shops in the Potteries, you'll normally end up with one out of a microwave which rapidly heats the filling to dangerous levels whilst reducing the texture of the oatcake to a state of limpness. I fill and roll them then whack them under the grill until the upper side starts to crisp a little. The contrast between the crisp and the yieldingly chewy remainder is highly pleasing.

Oatcakes, Pale Ale and yeast: just part of my culture

       The first few words of a letter or any communication are the most important we're always told. Fluff them and you've lost your reader. So starting a blog feels a little daunting. Perhaps my way of ducking the issue is to start in the middle. In a geographical sense anyway. Staffordshire actually.  

       Firmly landlocked and known, mainly, for the industries of The Potteries and parts of The Black Country, it's some way down the list of England's green and pleasant locations demanded by the tourism industry - despite being perfectly green and pleasant. I've got my own judging criteria though. Staffordshire makes my tastebuds dance (probably a Morris dance) and gives me a personal, warm glow of gustatory anticipation. (I have a Pavlovian reaction to most place-names, good or bad, based on their ability to do nice things for my taste buds and belly.) It's the county most associated with two of my favourite little nuggets of Britain at its tasty, traditional best: The Staffordshire Oatcake and Worthington White Shield, the bottled pale ale from Burton-upon-Trent. Both these yeasty survivors of times past help provide that special glow whenever Staffordshire comes up. And both are top of mind just now in the Barbarrick kitchen. I'm just making up a new batch of oatcake batter. I fancy having a stack of them to hand over the next few days to fill and grill with some decent Leicester, Gloucester or Cheddar and a bit of raw onion. I'm not making Worthington White Shield of course. I'm just making one disappear.

      A word about the oatcake might be in order. The name can provoke thoughts of those oatmeal biscuits of Scottish provenance that tend to pop up alongside more patriotic cheeseboards. The Staffordshire Oatcake (which is actually common in north Staffs, south Cheshire and parts of Derbyshire) isn't a biscuit. It's a leavened oatmeal flatbread. A British 'wrap' from 200 years before the term wrap entered the fast food lexicon, if you like. I could tell you the oatcake is "a sort of crepe" or even, "a bit like a chapatti" - but I won't. Apart from needlessly blurring the perfectly formed identities of other countries' own foods, it's depressing how often I have to allude to a foreign food to describe (often to someone from south-eastern England), one of the regional foods of their own country. But don't get me going down that avenue just now. 

          Back to the oatcake batter. I'll not drone on too long about the intricacies of getting the right consistency which, along with the heat of the griddle or pan, governs the batter's ability to spread and therefore, the all-important thickness of the final oatcake. Which itself, governs your ability to roll the oatcake around its filling. On White Shield, I will drone on to the effect that this beer has narrowly survived some seismic changes to the brewing landscape in the last 20 odd years including, being turfed out of its Burton home to be brewed elsewhere. But it's actually on superb form again. White Shield, now brewed under the care of Steve Wellington at its original site on former Bass premises in Burton, is a link with the great names of Burton's brewing heyday; it's the 21st century version of Bass' and Worthington's 'India' pale ales that made the makers famous. It's also one of those rare beers that retains a quantity of yeast in the bottle and so continues to mature as nature, and William Worthington, intended. There, I said I'd drone on.

            Now it's time to steady myself, take a sip of my yeasty, nutty Worthington, marvel at its remarkable full-bodied mouthfeel with it's creamy, natural effervescence. (I'm not reading that from a brochure by the way...) Then I'll be ready to dip my elbow in the oatcake batter and be sure the temperature's right for the yeast therein to work its own miracle.