Richard Turner’s traditional rib roast
Serves 6
fore rib of beef 1, at least 2kg in weight
beef dripping
Remove the meat from the fridge a couple of hours before cooking. Season the surface evenly, then sear the joint all over in a hot pan with a generous tablespoon of beef dripping. Place the ribs, fat side upwards, on a rack in a shallow roasting pan. Roast at 180C/gas mark 4 allowing 40 minutes per kilo for medium-rare or 45 for medium. Remove the roast when a meat thermometer registers 57C for medium-rare or 60C for medium and allow to rest in a warm place for at least 20 minutes (by which time the internal temperature will have risen by a couple of degrees).
For the horseradish sauce
Mix 100g of peeled and grated fresh horseradish into 250ml sour cream and season with Maldon salt and freshly ground black pepper.
For the Yorkshire puddings
Makes 6
eggs 200ml, beaten
semi-skimmed milk 200ml
plain flour 200g
beef dripping
Start the Yorkshire batter the night before. (It gives the starch cells time to thicken which will give you a lighter, smoother batter.)
Pour the beaten eggs, milk and salt into a medium-sized bowl, then add plain flour by the spoonful, whisking constantly so you create a smooth batter (or whizz together in a food processor). Once all the ingredients are mixed, cover the bowl with clingfilm and refrigerate overnight.
Once your beef has roasted and is resting on the side, turn up the oven to 220C/gas mark 7. Put a dollop of beef dripping at the bottom of each hollow in a Yorkshire pudding or muffin tin and place over a high heat on the hob. Fill the holes just over halfway up with batter. The secret to great Yorkshire puds is cold batter crashing into intensely hot beef dripping. It should look alarmingly volcanic with lots of crackling and voluminous batter turning into pillowy puddings.
Place the trays of puddings in the oven for 15-20 minutes until golden, turning them over towards the end so the bottoms crisp up.
Serve the rib roast with the Yorkshire puddings and horseradish sauce along with roast potatoes and plenty of gravy.
From Hawksmoor at Home by Huw Gott, Will Beckett, Richard Turner (Preface, £25). Click here to buy a copy for £20 from Guardian Bookshop
Jeremy Lee’s Cullen Skink
Theodora Fitzgibbon’s cullen skink was one of the first soups I learned to cook in Scotland. It’s an example of good cooking, simple, brilliant and a wonderful flavour.
Serves 3-4
large smoked haddock 1, preferably Finnan, about 900g
onion 1 medium, sliced
milk 850ml
butter 2 tbsp
cooked mashed potato about 225g
salt and pepper
Put the haddock in a shallow pan, skin side down, with just enough cold water to cover it, bring to the boil, then simmer for 4 minutes. Turn the fish, and with a small slice take off the skin, add the sliced onion, cover, and simmer very gently for about 10 minutes. Take the fish out and remove all the bones, then put them back in the stock and simmer again for about 20 minutes, then strain. Put the stock and the milk in a saucepan, add the filleted fish, bring to boiling point, then add enough mashed potato to make it creamy and the consistency you like. Add the butter in very small pieces, and season. The last of the butter should hardly melt, but run in little yellow rivulets through the soup-stew. Serve with triangles of dry toast.
Jeremy Lee is head chef at Quo Vadis, London; quovadissoho.co.uk
Elizabeth David’s crumpets
To go back to 1937 and Walter Banfield’s Manna, the following paragraph struck me as particularly relevant: “Provided suitable flour is used, these honeycomby, labyrinthine structures are fairly simple to make. The idea that crumpets are difficult is not uncommon because if flour unsuitable for the process is used grotesque, unfair creations result. That is, one either makes good crumpets or very bad ones.”
Until I learned from Mr Banfield’s book how a professional dough or batter for crumpets is – or was – made, my own efforts certainly came into the category of “very bad ones”. Either the batter was much too liquid and ran out from under the hoops, or it was too stiff, and although fairly easily cooked on the griddle the resulting crumpets didn’t have the characteristic “honeycomby, labyrinthe” structure – they were what bakers call “blind”.
Now, using a batter very similar to the muffin dough, but much more liquid – note: the first is a dough, the second is a batter – and adding, at the stirring-down stage, a little extra warm water in which a small quantity of bicarbonate of soda has been dissolved, the mixture works out just about right. The bicarbonate hint is given by Mr Banfield and also by John Kirkland.
So for 450g of flour, preferably half and half strong plain and ordinary household, allow 15g of yeast, 440-575ml of water and milk mixed, 1 tablespoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar, 2 tablespoons of oil. For the second mixing: ½ teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, just over 150ml of warm water. For greasing the griddle and the rings, a scrap of oil or butter.
Warm the flour in an earthenware bowl in a low oven for 5 minutes.
Warm the oil, milk, water and sugar to blood heat. Use a little of this to cream the yeast.
Mix the salt with the warmed flour, stir in the yeast, pour in the liquid, stir the batter very well and vigorously – see Walter Banfield’s memorable hint about attacking it with “vivacious turbulence” – until it is smooth and elastic. Cover the bowl, leave the batter to rise at room temperature until the whole surface is a mass of bubbles and the mixture looks as if it were about to break. This will take 1½ to 2 hours.
Forestall the natural falling of the batter by beating it down yourself with a wooden spoon.
Dissolve the bicarbonate in the warm water and stir it into the batter.
Cover the bowl and leave the batter to recover, for about 30 minutes.
This time put it in a rather warmer place, unless you need to delay the cooking of the crumpets, in which case use cold water for dissolving the bicarbonate and remove the bowl of batter to a cool place
To cook the crumpets, grease the griddle very lightly, and have the rings ready (modern crumpet rings are 4 inches in diameter and ½ inch deep), also very lightly greased.
Put four rings on the griddle, pour enough batter into each to come almost to the top. Let them cook very gently until the top surfaces have formed a skin, which will take 7-10 minutes. By this time also there should be a mass of tiny holes. If the holes haven’t appeared, the batter is too thick. Add more warm water or milk before cooking the next batch.
Once the crumpets have set it is easy to slip the rings off, and flip the crumpets over. They will need only 3 minutes more cooking; crumpets are supposed to be rather pallid and flabby-looking but very holey on the top surface, pale gold and smooth on the underside.
Keep the cooked crumpets warm in a folded cloth, or in a covered dish in the oven, while the rest are cooked.
The quantities given will make eight to ten crumpets, 4 inches in diameter and about ¾ inch thick. Because of the shallow rings it is scarcely possible to make them rise higher.
I find crumpets edible only when freshly cooked, warm and soaked in plenty of butter. Toasting makes them tough and alters the whole structure. I think it is preferable to reheat them in a covered dish in the oven, with butter. When all is said – perhaps too much has been said – and done, crumpets are only yeast pancakes confined to rings and so made thick and of a uniform size.
From English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David (Grub Street, £14.99). Click here to buy a copy for £11.99 from Guardian Bookshop
Tom Kerridge’s pork pie with piccalilli
Serves 16
boneless pork shoulder 1kg, skinned and diced
smoked streaky bacon 250g in one piece, diced
pork belly 250g, skinned and minced
sage leaves 3 tbsp, chopped
thyme leaves 2 tbsp
cayenne pepper 1 tsp
ground mace 1 tsp
cracked black pepper 1 tsp
cracked white pepper 1 tsp
salt 1 tsp
eggs 2, beaten with a splash of double cream
For the glaze
ham stock or chicken stock 300ml
gelatine 3 leaves
For the hot-water crust pastry
plain white flour 550g, plus extra for rolling
salt 1½ tsp
butter 100g, cubed
lard 100g, cubed, plus extra for greasing the tin
water 200ml
eggs 2, beaten
For the piccalilli
French beans 150g, topped and tailed and cut into 1cm dice
shallots 4, finely chopped
small onions 2, finely chopped
cauliflower ½ large head, broken into small florets
cucumber 1 small, deseeded and cut into 1cm dice
sea salt flakes 3 tbsp
white wine vinegar 300ml
malt vinegar 125ml
dried chilli flakes ¼ tsp
caster sugar 350g
English mustard powder 2 tbsp
ground turmeric 2 tbsp
cornflour 1½ tbsp
At least 24 hours in advance, start the piccalilli. Mix the French beans, shallots, onions, cauliflower, cucumber and sea salt together in a large non-metallic bowl. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave to stand at room temperature for 24 hours.
Meanwhile, put the white wine vinegar, malt vinegar and chilli flakes in a saucepan over a high heat and bring to the boil. Remove the pan from the heat and leave mix on one side to cool.
After the vegetables have stood for 24 hours, rinse well to remove the salt, then return them to the washed bowl. Combine the caster sugar, mustard powder, turmeric and cornflour in a bowl. Stir in a little of the vinegar mixture until smooth, then add this thin paste to the remaining vinegar in the pan.
Bring to just below the boil, stirring, until it thickens slightly. Pour it over the vegetables and blend together well. Leave to one side to cool completely.
To make the hot-water crust pastry, mix the flour and salt in a large bowl and make a well in the centre. Melt the butter and lard with the water in a saucepan over a medium heat. Pour this melted fat and the eggs into the well and mix with a wooden spoon to form a dough. Knead the dough around the bowl until it is smooth and silky.
Cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave the dough to rest for 1 hour, or until the dough becomes elastic.
Meanwhile, make the filling. Mix the pork shoulder, bacon, pork belly, sage and thyme leaves, cayenne, mace, the black and white peppers and the salt together in a large bowl. Leave to one side until needed.
Preheat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Generously grease a deep 25cm springform cake tin with lard.
Cut off one-quarter of the dough, wrap in clingfilm and leave to one side to use later for the pie lid.
Roll the remaining dough out on a lightly floured surface into a 45cm circle about 1cm thick. Drape the pastry over the rolling pin and unroll it over the pan, then gently ease it down into the pan. Press it down on to the base, but leave the overhang.
Fill the pastry case with the filling, pressing it down against the base and side. Roll out the remaining pastry into a 25cm circle 1cm thick. Place it on top of the pie. Dampen the underneath edge and press to seal with the overhang. Use a fork to crimp all around the edge, then cut a steam hole in the centre.
Place the pie on a baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes. Reduce the heat to 160C/gas mark 3 and bake for a further 1¼ hours. Remove the pie from the oven and brush the pastry with the egg glaze, then return it to the oven and bake for a further 15 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown and the juices run clear when you stick a skewer into the filling. Transfer the pie to a wire rack and leave to cool completely.
When the pie is cool, warm the stock in a saucepan over a medium heat. Don’t let it boil. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for about 5 minutes until softened. Squeeze out the water, then add them to the warm stock and stir until the gelatine has dissolved. Pour the stock in to the pie through the steam hole, then leave the gelatine to cool and set. Serve the pie cut into wedges with the piccalilli.
From Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food by Tom Kerridge (Absolute Press, £20). Click here to buy a copy for £16 from Guardian Bookshop
Fergus Henderson’s Welsh rarebit
Makes four pieces
butter a knob
flour 1 tbsp
English mustard powder 1 tsp
cayenne pepper ½ tsp
Guinness 200ml
Worcestershire sauce a very long splash
mature strong cheddar 450g, grated
toast 4 pieces
Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour, and let the mixture cook until it smells biscuity but is not browning. Add the mustard powder and cayenne pepper then stir in the Guinness and Worcestershire sauce, then gently melt in the cheese. When it’s all of one consistency remove from the heat, pour out into a shallow container, and allow to set.
Spread on toast 1cm thick and place under the grill. Eat when bubbling golden brown. This makes a splendid savoury at the end of your meal, washed down with a glass of port, or a steadying snack.
From The Complete Nose to Tail by Fergus Henderson (Bloomsbury, £30). Click here to buy a copy for £24 from Guardian Bookshop
