How to: Rice Paper, Marshmallows, Pork Pie
I just love technique. Seems to me it’s close to the center of cuisine. So here are three things you might try.
Here’s the always informative Dorie Greenspan on rice paper. I’d always wondered how those thin papery pancakes and so on were made. Now I know.
And Joe Pastry on marshmallows. Go on. Have a go. Just in time for Thanksgiving.
And Ken Albala on pork pie. No recipe here, just a record of his efforts. Ken remarks that this is like a country pate.
Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. One of the problems English cooking has is the down home name it gives to its dishes. Pate en croute sounds exotic and appealing, pork pie ordinary. They’re the same thing, folks.
And go for the free form. It’s lots of fun. Pork pie, game pie (even in Mexico we can get venison), all those great English cold raised pies are just wonderful to take to a party.
In the gratuitous advice department, the crust needs to be thicker and not too much lard. And no you don’t roll it, you kind of squidge it out and up. Ken, you’re a potter, think of moving clay. Lovely, lovely stuff.
One interesting thing about the Melton Mowbray type pork pie is that there seems to be very little evidence of it before the 1850’s. Plenty of pork pie recipes, but nothing like the “classic”.
The pork pie looks delicious though a bit filling. One might have to become a farmer or something to work off those calories.
For all things pork-y I always turn to Jane Grigson. There are more current books out on porky things but I still like Jane’s take on them. Interesting – in her Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery stuck in with all the Terrine de Porc et de Gibiers and the Gateaus a la Berrichonnes is the simply named ‘Raised Pork Pie’. The way she starts to detail the recipe is perfect:
“Deal with the jelly first”. Perfect.
But this past week I went to a used booksale and came out with (among other things) a book titled ‘English Cooking – A New Approach’. It’s by Rupert Croft-Cooke, published in 1960. The frontspage has a handwritten inscription in writing not-too-pushy but solemnly elegant: ‘God Save the Queen’. The inscribers signature and date (1962) is underneath this formal phrase.
Rupert (hopefully I will be forgiven by those who forgive these things for having the temerity to use his first name without previous introduction!) puts his recipe for Pork Pie in with the chapter on Meat Puddings and Pies where an interesting Parsley Pie also sits along with the fabulous Eel Pie which I someday must make. This chapter follows along nicely after the chapter on The Joint.
Rupert claims that the last words of William Pitt the Younger were “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat pies” . . . not the more commonly stated ‘My country! Oh my country!’ He also discusses the habit of Frenchifying the names of pies, saying that “I am glad they are untranslatable and only Isabella Beeton with her idiotic passion for giving the French name in brackets after the English has talked of ‘Pouding de Boueuf et de Rognon’ while even she is defeated by dumplings and toad-in-the-hole. (Why not Crapaud-dans-le-Trou?)”
He goes on for some time on this subject. There are many more etc’s than recipes – he allows one single simple paragraph for the pork pie recipe. But that’s okay.
I can’t wait to read this book.
Adam, Should we start a new club? It would be called “The Not-So-Old Club.”
And Karen, that’s an English cookbook I have never heard of, so I wait to hear more. But I agree about Jane Grigson on pork. And on many other things. She is my top favorite English cookery author, at least of that generation.
This is an interesting book in more ways than one, Rachel.
It’s not ‘just’ or even ‘really’ a cookbook, though there are lots of recipes written in informal style rather than standard current cookbook format.
The author is of the age of Elizabeth David and Grigson and MFK Fisher (well, Clementine Paddleford too if it comes to that but I’m not quite sure that it really does) – but rather than being a food-focused writer – (the quote below is from Guide to the Rupert Croft Papers which is at http://nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu/findaid/ark:/80444/xv04789)
Rupert Croft-Cooke was born June 30, 1903 in Edenbridge, Kent, and was educated at Tonbridge School and Wellington College. He began teaching when he was seventeen. He went to Paris that year as a private tutor, then spent two years in Buenos Aires, where besides teaching English he founded and edited the journal La Estrella. In 1925 he returned to London and pursued a career as a free-lance journalist and writer. Soon after, he opened a bookshop in Rochester, Kent, and took up the antiquarian book trade. At the same time he also entered the field of broadcasting, giving a series of radio talks on psychology. In 1930 he went abroad again, spending a year in Germany, writing, and later lecturing in English in Switzerland and Spain. He joined the British Army in 1940 and saw service in Africa and India. After his discharge in 1946 he returned to writing and produced several works reflecting his military experience. He became the book critic for The Sketch in 1947, a position he held until 1953. He died June 10, 1979.
One of the most prolific writers for the British mass market in the 20th century, Croft-Cooke produced countless magazine and journal articles and more than 125 books–everything from co-books to political commentary, from books about circuses to steamy romances. His greatest success, however, came in the genre of detective fiction; he published nearly thirty detective novels, mysteries and thrillers.
This book is a – well, as it’s Sunday morning and I’m lazy let me just quote again, this time from the book cover:
Except for a minor effort of Norman Douglas’s, this is perhaps the first time that a professional writer has done a book about food.* Expert cooks have become lucid writers but not vice versa. [ . . .] He feels that English food has been belittled, most of all by the English themselves, (etc etc)
It appears that he’s written several other books focusing on food. I’ve got to get them! :)
Without checking the dates, my guess is that he wrote this book extolling the virtues of Good British Food at just about the same time that Elizabeth David was writing her books introducing the idea of Foreign Food is Fabulous (grab some garlic) to the reading public.
It’s not that often one comes across a published defense of British food as it stood at that time, I don’t think. Though I could have just missed a category of wonderful literature in my readings, of course.
*This statement I have to wonder about. Of course it’s a blurb for a book, but I’d like to follow this thought further also.
Thanks Karen. After my initial swoon over Elizabeth David, I realized that she knew nothing about British food–her family did not cook, then she went to boarding school. You will fire me up to publish something on why the dreadful reputation of British food! I can’t imagine how I missed Rupert Croft-Cooke. And what an impeccably English career he has.
I hope you seize the moment of being fired up about it and do write it, Rachel. That would be fun to read.
Croft-Cooke seems to be outside the usual for sure. I’ll post about the book after I finally get to reading it! :)
The best thing I liked about Elizabeth David (as a novice cook/reader a long time ago) was her romanticism (misplaced? ha ha ha) (well it so often is) – and also her form of casual recipe-writing. As an intuitive cook, I appreciated that form so much more than the more scientific definitive statement that is a standardized recipe. I appreciate standardized recipes as management tools, but other than that rather detest them.
To be fair to David, there was a lot more to her then just post-war sunshine food. Her “English Bread and Yeast Cookery” is still one of the best records of English foods and her involvement with Prospect Books also promoted English foods. A complex individual with multiple interests.
Yes, the Salt Spices and Aromatics book was incredible also.