Thought for Food
Too Much Zeal
By ELIZABETH DAVID
SOME nine years ago, when I was contributing cookery articles to liar- per's Bazaar, I wrote a piece tlealing with the adaptation, to the cir- cumstances of the time, of recipes from old English cookery books.
One of the recipes which caught my fancy was for a dish called Beef-a-la-royal described in the thirteenth edition of W. H. Henderson's Housekeeper's Instructor or 11w Universal Family Cook 1805. Briefly, Henderson's ingredients were a boned brisket of beef larded with fat bacon, chopped parsley, oysters and spices. The joint was to be dredged with flour, covered with a pint of wine, 'sent to the oven,' and cooked for three hours.
In those days of rationing it would have'been a waste of time asking a butcher for any cut as specific as brisket of beef. Beef was divided approximately into three categories: stewing beef, frying beef (which was properly speaking braising meat) and grilling beef (idem, more often than not). However, a 2-1b. hunk of frying meat looked quite pleasing for the purpose-if not very royal. Now, how many oysters? To make any impact, I supposed hardly less than a dozen. At 12s. 6d. or so this seemed an unjustifiable extrava- gance. (The cheap and delicious little Cornish oysters which Mac Fisheries now sell at 5s. a dozen were not then on the market, although you could send to Falmouth for a sack of them and then carry them round to your fishmonger and pay him to open them for you.) Ha! In my store cupboard was a tin of oysters sent by an American friend and never sampled. Into my piece of beef they went, along with the fat bacon and the parsley. Henderson did not specify any particular kind of wine, but in many of the recipes of the period some kind of sweet or dessert wine was used, so I cooked the beef in Cypriot Commandaria which besides being sweet and rich was exceedingly cheap. (It still is: about 6s. 6d. a bottle; and for cooking has the advantage over a table wine that it will keep for months after it has been opened.) The resulting dish was interesting enough to put into my artide and to cook again every so often; it provided a sound way of dealing with those unidentifiable hunks of meat, and the tinned oysters gave the dish an odd and attractive little flavour.
Some years later, preparing beef-a-la-royal to serve cold for a party, and wanting to do things in a properly princely manner, I bought a couple of dozen fresh Cornish oysters and larded them into a six-pound • piece of boned and rolled brisket (a cut which is uncommonly good value when you need to cook a large enough piece. A small cut is liable to prove too fat to be economical. If you need only 2 to 3 lb., hen best buy a piece of topside, leg, or the cheaper chuck steak from the neck; and for that quantity a half- pint of wine is ample; after browning the floured meat in butter and adding the heated wine, three hours in a tightly-closed pot in a very moderate oven is the correct timing).
Not one of my guests on the evening of my party gave the faintest indication that they had noticed my luxury touch to the beef. Indeed, why should they have? The fact was that the fresh oysters had disintegrated and become part of the meat without leaving any apparent trace of flavour in the beef or in the sauce. Large coarse oysters might have had a better effect than deli- cate little Cornish ones, but the real paint is that although Henderson does not mention the fact in his recipe, in his day pickled oysters from a small barrel or a stone jar were a fairly common house- hold preserve. Vinegar, wine, spices, herbs and salt went into the pickling mixture, and like pickled walnuts, mushrooms, anchovies and home-bottled sauces, preserved oysters must have been used as a flavouring far more commonly than fresh ones. Tinned oysters in a pickle or brine are, like today's tinned anchovies and tunny fish, direct descendants of the old preserved product from the barrel. They have little taste of oysters*, but give a subtle, indefinable tang and flavour to a slow- cooked meat dish.
A millionairish mood can easily account for one's party cooking not coming oft quite as well as it does on ordinary days. The addition of what proves an excess of cream or wine to a chicken or fish dish, the buying of a prime cut of meat when a cheap one is more suitable for the recipe to be used, are common booby-traps; then one 'comes across so-called special occasion recipes in which lamb kidney instead of that of the ox is advised for a steak and kidney pudding, which as anyone can see is a dish devised to tenderise and at the same time enclose the goodness and juices of second-quality meat. It is the very coarseness of ox kidney which adds something to the flavour of the pudding; lamb's kidneys, delicious as a quickly cooked dish in their own right, give out very little to help meat which is so lengthily cooked. And it was after the sad affair of the fresh oysters and the beef-a-la-royal that to me light dawned on another puzzling aspect of a steak and kidney pudding. Why do people add oysters, which take about one minute to cook, to a pudding which is boiled for a minimum of four hours? I have seen a recipe from Simpsons', in the Strand, in which a dozen oysters are added after the pudding is cooked and cut. That is certainly one up on boiling the little creatures to disappearing point. All the same, my own belief is that originally the oysters used in meat puddings and pies were pickled ones.
Readers who have asked about the dried fennel stalks over which red and grey mullet and sea bass are grilled by Provençal cooks will be interested to know that bundles of these stalks can be bought in London. Roche, of 14 Old Compton Street, Soho, WI, have added them to their imports of wild thyme and other aromatics from Provence. Roche's charge 2s. 6d. a bundle for these fennel stalks; three or four of them placed under the fish to be grilled are enough to give out an unimaginable aromatic scent as cooking proceeds. Then, if you choose to set the fennel ablaze by pouring ignited armagnac, cognac or whisky over it when the fish is done, that is one time when nobody will think that the bonfire technique is just for showing off.
*Tinned clams, American, Chinese or Italian, can also be used with success.
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