Mustard

Let me begin with the villains. First, so-called French mustard which I say is so-called because I doubt it has ever been anywhere near France. Brown, slimy and sweet-tasting, it will often be brought to the table in a pub following a request for "French mustard".

Then there is the sweet American mustard. Just about acceptable on a bad hotdog if one wishes to eat one.

Next, pointlessly flavoured mustard. Whisky-flavoured mustard or, even worse, truffle-flavoured. A waste of good ingredients, one strong flavour overpowering the other.

An exception to the rule against flavoured mustard is, in my view, tarragon mustard. Beautifully green and flavoursome.

Although I find English mustard far too fiery, I will give it cupboard room because some of my friends insist upon it as their mustard of choice and also because the powdered version works well for the purposes of dusting a joint of beef before cooking it. And I quite enjoy the ritual of making the mustard up with a teaspoon of powder and a teaspoon of water.

Wholegrain mustard is another matter: it is splendid exotic-tasting stuff and I like the way the mustard seeds dissolve in the mouth. My mother once cut her hand trying to force open one of those large grey jars of Pommeroy mustard which end up as pen holders or useful pots to put things in.

But best of all, and most versatile, is straightforward Dijon mustard. Milder and tastier than English, it is what I tend to eat with a sausage or roast beef. It also works well in a vinaigrette. Yum.

Grandfather's barbecue chicken

Black on the outside contrasting with the white breast, in a sticky, salty-sweet sauce, wrapped in foil and served with rice, stained with the sauce: not a dish my mother particularly liked.

Although I am fairly confident he took it from Delia's Complete Cookery Course, I failed when I attempted to reproduce it as he had made it.

More butter

Butter, like milk, is one of the earliest foodstuffs to enter anyone's consciousness.

"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"

wrote A A Milne.

Laura Ingalls Wilder describes her mother's strawberry mould into which the butter would go; apparently, it was white in winter, but "Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty" so she would add carrot juice to turn it yellow. Curious.

I also remember a marvellous book called the Giant Jam Sandwich in which a town was plagued with wasps and eventually the citizens made a gigantic jam sandwich, using spades to spread the butter and jam and eventually trapping the wasps in the middle of the sandwich by dropping the second slice on to it. Splat!

Butter, of course, has many different consistencies. How is one expected to spread it when it comes straight from the fridge? To scrape little chunks off and placing them strategically around the slice of bread is so unsatisfactory and contrary to the principle in How Green was my valley that butter should always be spread "tidily". Putting it in the microwave never quite works: unless one is very very careful, it ends with the butter seeping into a pool.

Italian and Spanish ham

I have already mentioned what must be the most well-known of the dried jams: Parma ham. San Daniele ham is less ubiquitous but, in my opinion, as splendid. Returning for a moment to Parma, I discovered there something called Culatello, which is similar to Parma ham but aged in a bladder. I ate it in Parma accompanied by a doughnut like bread called gnoccho fritto into which you were supposed to stuff the meat. In passing, I note that the English, encouraged by supermarkets attempting to make something sound more exotic, often refer to cured Italian ham as prosciutto which is correct but incomplete. Prosciutto is merely the Italian for ham which could equally well be cured or cooked.

Second to Italian cured hams, in my view, come Spanish. Serrano ham is lovely but best of all is the Iberico ham which melts in the mouth. I recall visiting the Goods Shed near Canterbury West station which used to be, as you might expect, the goods shed, but which is now a food market and a restaurant. I asked for some Iberico ham to have as a snack on the way back on the train. I blenched when the stallholder gave me the price - about £12.00. I resolved not to scoff the ham on the train but to have it on white china with a glass of white wine.

Jambon de Bayonne is not a ham I recall ever having eaten although it has the distinction of being mentioned in an early English novel - Tom Jones. It reminds me of the rhyme which begins:

Who signed Magna Carta? King John.

Where do bayonets come from? Bayonne.

I will write more about French cured ham in another piece.

 

Gingerbread house

Hansel and Gretel has, as long as I can remember, been one of my favourite stories. It is the gingerbread cottage that is, as far as I know, the unique component in that fairy tale. A Judge I used to appear before reminded me of the inhabitant of the gingerbread cottage. "Good morning", this benign-looking old lady would coo to everyone as we walked in. The moment we had all sat down, it was as though the cage had descended on Hansel's head...

Once upon a time, my mother suggested making a house of sweets similar to that in Hansel and Gretel...or I begged her to do so. I must have been aged about five. We were staying at Granny's house and walked to the local newsagent's, Fayne's, where my mother bought the ingredients. A photograph of the work in progress appears below. The roof was made of milk chocolate. The windows were glacier mints. Initially, she put a stick of "Rainbow Rock" in the garden but then removed it (I suspect for aesthetic reasons) and allowed me eat it. I do not recall whether we ever got round to eating the rest of the house...

German ham

"They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam,
And slices of delicious ham."

I have long thought that the ham in Hillaire Belloc's Jim would have been “kasseler rippenspeer” which I first ate as a child in South London. The first and only time I have eaten it in Germany was in Aachen. I later discovered that a butcher called Cassel who lived and worked in Berlin in the nineteenth century invented the "Kasseler"  process. After smoking a large loin of pork, he then placed it in brine, drawing moisture out of the meat and preventing the bacteria from spreading. Not only did it preserve the meat but it gave it a distinctive taste. It is unlike other dried hams, such as Parma ham or Serrano ham, I think because it still contains more moisture than those kinds.

Caviar

I once ate caviar for breakfast in Mahabilapuram, India, courtesy of a Dutchman and a Canadian who had bought it the day before from a party of Russians: there was a limit to the amount of hard currency they could export and, to supplement the feeble amount they were allowed to bring, they also brought vodka and best Beluga caviar which they sold for a pittance. The tin needed finishing and so I did my best to polish off as much of the grey pearls as I could. With freshly-squeezed lime juice on top, it was a memorable and tasty breakfast. But I must confess that I much prefer taramasalata. As a contrast to the salty caviar, I finished with some Bombay Toast.