File this one under “utter fabrications told to you by older sibling and believed for too long”. I must have been very young when my sister (15 months my senior) informed me that I should be wary of eating my grandmother’s suet dumplings because suet was the gooey material supporting bovine eye-balls. Quite where she got this idea from, I’m not sure, but she seemed to believe it and, as a credulous juvenile, so did I. And so convinced was I, that until some brief research yesterday proved her to have been telling porkies, I had held it up as truth for the intervening 25 years or so. Why I found her a credible source about this I have no idea – she’s been a vegetarian since the age of 12, and an extremely picky eater before that.

Suet is, in fact, raw beef fat that is typically from around the animals’ kidney or loin area, and while that may not be a much less appetizing prospect than eye-socket, it certainly helps explain why it should be used in the preparation of a traditional British dumpling. It’s basically a firm kind of lard that melts perfectly at the relatively low temperatures found on top of a stew, which is where a British dumpling is typically found.

American readers will be forgiven for commonly associating dumplings only with Chinese restaurants, or at the outside, with Russian or Polish cuisine, but in the northern reaches of Britain, suet dumplings are, or, at least, were a frequent sight floating on top of a thick stew during the winter. And indeed, suet dumplings do look and taste a bit like their Chinese counterparts – slightly chewy and definitely filling, except that they’re much less uniform in shape and are not wrapped in pasta, the filling is the dumpling, basically. Suet as an ingredient though, is not confined to the creation of floaters, it’s also used in the recipe for other traditional British favorites as spotted dick, pastry, Christmas pudding and mincemeat, demonstrating remarkable flexibility as a fat and flavoring.

Suet is also commonly used throughout the Caribbean in the preparation of patties, particularly in Jamaica, and I think that this is the reason for it appearing on the shelves of our local supermarket, as not far from us resides a large and vibrant Caribbean community.

We’ll definitely be exploring some patty recipes with suet in the near future (a $2 package goes a long way), but for the time being, please consider searching out some suet and making yourself a good old British dinner this weekend. It’s on oft-repeated maxim among survival experts that icy temperatures can best be braved when you’re core is fired with plenty of firm beef fat. I’m not kidding.

Chicken & Root Vegetable Stew with Herbed Suet Dumplings (serves 4-6)

Ingredients

• 4 bone-in chicken breasts, or (preferably) 6-8 bone-in chicken thighs
• 1 large yellow onion, roughly sliced
• 1 large leek, cut into 1 inch chunks
• 3 large carrots, cut into 1 inch chunks
• 2 parsnips, cut into 1 inch chunks
• 4 medium potatoes, cut into eighths, or 2 inch chunks
• 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 bouquet garni (store bought, or wrap parsley, bay and thyme in the green part of a leek and secure with string)
• pinch of hot pepper flakes
• 2oz (50 grams) dry white wine
• 3 tsp olive oil
• 2-3 pints (1-1. liters) chicken stock (depending on size of pot you’re using)
• 2oz (50 grams) plain flour
• salt and black pepper

For the dumplings:

• 4.5oz (125 grams) plus a bit more, plain flour
• 2oz (50 grams) grated or very finely diced fresh suet
• 2-3oz (50-75 grams) water
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp chopped parsley

Recipe

• Heat oil in large heavy casserole or dutch oven to medium.
• Dust chicken pieces with flour and sprinkle with salt and pepper and place in pot. Allow to brown well on all sides – about ten minutes.
• Remove chicken and add onions, carrots, potatoes, parsnips and leeks. Sweat until lightly browned, about 6 minutes.
• Add garlic and hot pepper, and cook for a further 2 minutes, or until garlic softens and perfumes room.
• Deglaze pot with white wine or 2oz of the stock. Make sure all the caramelized chicken juices come up before adding remaining stock (or enough to cover contents) and bouquet garni.
• Cover and allow to simmer for around 40 minutes.
• In a bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, chopped suet and parsley. Mix well.
• Add half of your water and stir. If dumpling mixture is too dry add more, but you’re looking for a dough that’s nicely sticky and elastic, not too damp.
• Then using two tablespoons, make quennelles with dough and removing the pot lid, gently plop them into simmering stew. Alternatively, flour your hands well and make squash-ball size dumplings and drop them in.
• Then, re-cover stew and allow to simmer for another 10-15 minutes.
• Serve in a bowl and allow to stick to your ribs. Repeat with second helpings.

Get your head out of your bums – I know what you were thinking when you read that title. We bought our Kitchen Aid meat grinder and sausage maker attachment months ago and since then we’ve been excited, yet kind of nervous, to try it out. I figured grinding meat would be easy, but making homemade sausages was going to be time consuming and, well, it was! Maybe it was because we had enough ground meat and fat to make the world’s biggest sausage? We ended up making enough sausages for 20 meals. Regardless of the time it took to make 25-35 sausages, I have absolutely no regrets. Using any type of new kitchen gadget takes a bit of time to get used to. When I started rolling my own pasta, it took about 5 or 6 times to really get it right. Now, I have no qualms making homemade pasta for a quick, weeknight meal. Will I be making homemade sausages for a quick, weeknight meal? Hell to the no. But will I make 35 sausages over the course of a lazy weekend in order to have enough for many, many future meals? Absolutely YES. I may not be as excellent with curing (guanciale, lardo, duck prociutto, etc) as our friend cookblog or as fabulous with all things meat and fish as Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, but I now feel confident in grinding and blending pig fat, various bits of pork and veal with some seasonings and stuffing them into hog casings.

Which brings me to hog casings. Yes, hog casings. You all do realize that most of the sausage you eat is stuffed into a layer of a pig’s intestine called submucosa? The submucosa is made of mainly collagen which makes it perfect for being a delicate (and flavor-free), thin and flexible parcel to hold ground meat. You can also buy artificial casings, but why go there unless you have to? For us, finding natural hog casings proved to be a bit difficult, only because many butchers need you to ask for some on a day that they are stuffing sausage or when their order comes in. But many butchers should have plenty on hand to either sell you or, in our case, give you for free. They’ll often look at you, eyes widened, with a “BRAVO!” look as though they are very proud that someone is actually making sausages at home.

When the fourth butcher we went to finally had some casings to give us, he quickly bundled some up, handed them to me and said, “There ya go, it’s on us! You know what do to with them, right?” All of a sudden, over-confident Amy came over me and replied, without hesitation, “Oh, totally… thanks so much!”. I felt too proud to admit I had no freaking clue what to do. I walked home with my casings, palms sweating, heart beating fast hoping that I was ready for this new challenge.

Just a few tips that I learned with some research and with my first sausage-making experience:

• Don’t let your over-confidence/pride take over. Just talk to your butcher about what to do! Don’t be like me…
• If you decide to be like me, then make sure you wash your casings and run some water through to clean them. Ask your butcher if they are already cleaned – this could save you a bit of time.
• Have some lubrication (I used melted butter) ready to put on the sausage nozzle. You need to be able to slide your hog casings on to the nozzle very easily and they are delicate.
• Have a partner to help you. Someone needs to feed that ground meat through the processor and someone needs to “catch” the meat in the casings. I can’t imagine being able to make sausages without someone helping.
• Keep your ground meat/fat/spices mixture very, very cold. If it is too warm, the machine will melt the fat even more. This will make it much more difficult to stuff into the meat grinder and will make the sausage stuffing process much slower. I even put mine in the freezer for a half hour so that it was super cold.
• Have fun. Don’t forget to make a few fun penis jokes here and there and maybe slap your (preferably male) partner with some newly filled sausages on the butt! It’s fun to make snausages!

We used the brilliant Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn recipe for brats from their book Charcuterie. We paired this with the delicious sweet and sour German side dish, Rohtkol made with red cabbage and apples. It was a comforting meal and really showcased the sausage. We can’t wait to make more sausages in the future!

CLASSIC BRATWURST WITH ROTKOHL (German Red Cabbage) – Adapted from Charcuterie

Bratwurst Ingredients (**feel free to cut this recipe in half as it makes about 5 pounds of sausage):

• 3 pounds boneless pork shoulder/butt, diced
• 1 pound boneless veal shoulder, diced
• 1 pound pork fat back (if all you can find is salted, wipe as much salt off as you can and leave out at least half of the added salt in the next step), diced
• 3 tablespoons kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons white pepper
• 2 teaspoons ground caraway seed
• 2 teaspoons ground mustard powder
• 4 teaspoons garlic powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ginger powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons fresh grated nutmeg
• 2 cold beaten eggs
• 1 cup cold heavy cream
• 10 feet of clean, soaked hog casings

Recipe for the bratwurst:

1. Toss your diced pork, veal and fat together. Using a meat grinder, grind all of it up together.
2. Combine all the ingredients with the ground meat/fat mixture. Use your hands or your (even easier) kitchen aid mixer to do so. It should be a bit sticky. Test a bit of the meat by cooking it in a pan to check for seasonings. Adjust if necessary. When perfect, chill in a bowl in the fridge for a long time, or put in the freezer for a half hour to ensure it is VERY cold for sausage stuffing.
3. Add the sausage attachment to your mixture and put some lube (butter) on the nozzle. Slide the hog casing on to the sausage nozzle until there is only a 2-inch piece hanging on the end. Tie a knot in the end piece of the hog casing.
4. Turn your Kitchen Aid on a medium speed and start stuffing your very cold Brat mixture into the sausage maker and watch your hog casings fill up! Using your hand “work” the casings so they don’t get over-filled as they can burst. Ever six to twelve inches (depending on how big you want your brats), twist the hog casing into links. Continue stuffing until meat mixture is gone.
5. Cook links in a hot pan or roast in an oven until brown and cooked all the way through. Serve with some good mustard on top of Rohtkohl (see below for recipe).

Ingredients for Rotkohl:

• 1 head of red cabbage, thinly shredded
• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 large apple, peeled and chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 6 rashes of bacon, cut into pieces
• 1/2 cup cider or red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon ground caraway seed
• 3 cloves
• 1 cup beef stock
• 3 tablespoons sugar (brown or white)
• 1 tablespoon whole-grain or dijon mustard
• salt and pepper to taste

Recipe for Rotkohl

1. In a heavy-bottomed pan or dutch oven, cook bacon until fat is rendered and bacon is cooked. Remove the bacon but leave fat in the pan.
2. Add the garlic, onions and apples and allow to cook in the fat for a few minutes until they get some color. After 3 minutes or so, add the shredded cabbage and stir to mix everything together. Allow the cabbage to cook down a bit – about 4-5 minutes.
3. Add all the other ingredients (add only half of the beef stock), along with the reserved bacon and stir. Bring to a boil, then lower to medium-low to simmer with the lid on. Check after 30 minutes of cooking to see if more liquid is needed. If so, add some more beef stock. Stir. Cover again and cook for a total of 1 to 1 1/2 hours (depending on how crunchy/soft you want your cabbage). Beware of the 3 cloves – if you can find them to pick them out before serving that would be good.

Have you ever eaten something so fabulous, so lucious, so decadent that you almost felt the need to run to confession (to confess your indulgent food “sins”), say three Hail Mary’s (that’s for you Catholics out there) and pray really hard that you can zip your jeans up again? Ok, a bit exaggerated, but looking back, this is a bit how my first real taste of lardo made me feel.

Now many of you may be scratching your head wondering, “Lardo? Wait, did she mean to write that? Maybe she mean Lardons? Surely she’s not talking about Lard?” Well, kids, hold on to your Spanx-controlled muffin-top, I am talking about lard. But lardo ain’t just any old lard… it’s special lard. Very, very, very special lard.

In our few trips to Italy over the past couple of years, lardo graced our palates a few times, but only in very small quantites (as it should!). The first time we ate it – in Modena, Italy – we were, sadly, so fiercely hungover that we couldn’t really appreciate it. However, this saved us from eating what was an obscene amount of it – slathered in thin ribbons over a beautiful 12 inch thin-crust pizza and topped with the town’s famous aged balsamic.

Apologies for the awful, 1970s plate. I’m blaming the in-laws.

Pearly-white inside and darker and grainy at the edges, lardo, which is basically salt-cured pig fat flavored with rosemary (and occasionally other herbs), is made throughout Italy, though the most famous – lardo di Colonata – is produced only in Colonata, a small, isolated Tuscan town, where the pigs are fed on a steady diet of acorns to better flavor their fat.

In some areas of northern Italy, lardo is used as the cooking fat in which soffrito is sauteed in the preparation of a sugo or ragu, but like other salume, it is often eaten in thin, bite-sized pieces and allowed to melt on the tongue, before being washed down with an effervescent white wine. Which is how, if you can find yourself some, you should try it for the first time. Yes, that’s right, cured pigs’ fat straight-up. No crackers, no bread, no olives. Just fat and your tongue in perfect harmony. It really does melt.

It’s unlikely that we ate lardo di Colonata that day, as the real thing is almost as expensive as the most highly-prized prosciutto, but what we had was still beautifully perfumed of bacon & rosemary, and incredibly rich & luscious tasting, and probably quite pricey in its own right. With the crackle of the pizza crust underneath and the honey sweetness of an ancient balsamic, it was one of the most texturally amazing things I’ve ever put in my mouth, sober, drunk or hungover.

Occasionally, in the intervening year, we’ve complained of a lack of lardo in our lives, but we were completely shocked to find it at a local specialty foods store over the summer – and it was cheap too! They had about half a pound left, and we bought the whole thing, fearing that we might not find it ever again outside of Italy. Fortunately, because it’s cured, it has a good long shelf-life, so we’re taking it easy to make sure we don’t drop dead from cholesterol-related disease before we’re done eating it.

I think we need to do more research into recipes that call for lardo, because apart from taking it neat, so far we’ve only recreated that decadent pizza from Modena. There’s a recipe below, but the sad thing is, if you don’t have any lardo or anywhere that sells it, and you don’t have a 25 year old balsamic vinegar to top it with, that recipe might not be much use. Still, you can aspire to collect these ingredients, and trust me, when you find them, make this pizza and you’ll be glad you waited for it. It might be the most incredible pizza that ever passes your lips.

Lardo Pizza with Wilted Radicchio & Onion

For an absolutely tried & tested, nailed-on recipe for the perfect thin-crust pizza dough read this previous post: Remembering Italy with Thin-Crust Pizza. To get the finest aged balsamic vinegar available in North American delivered to your door, click here, or if you don’t want to buy the good stuff, you can reduce the ordinary kind in a saucepan until consistency resembles molasses.

Unfortunately, Italian lardo is not exported to America. The American Department of Agriculture wants it heated to 156 F (69 C) before it is sold to consumers, but at that point, the fat would start melting, and it would no longer be lardo. However, we found some domestically produced lardo completely by chance in a local store, so you may get lucky somewhere along the line. And while it is widely thought that Italian lardo is greatly superior to any made domestically because it is aged for so much longer, we found US lardo to be very acceptable indeed. Your best bet if you don’t have any awesome gourmet food stores nearby, and this may be even trickier, is to get friendly with your local organic hog farmer and have him save you some back fat from best fed pig on his farm, then cure your own pig fat! Why not? Good luck!

Ingredients & Recipe

1lb fresh pizza dough

1/2 head of radicchio di Chioggia (regular round, red radicchio), shredded finely

1/2 spanish (yellow) onion, finely sliced

2tbsp good olive oil

1 pinch kosher salt

- Sweat radicchio and onion until soft and decorate your pizza with it.

- Then, place thinly-sliced lardo on top and fire pizza in the oven. Remove and dress immediately with balsamic vinegar.

- Savor every mouthful.

Note: prepare for a very long read or click here to skip forward to the recipe.

In the same way that there is probably some truth in the Chinese claim to have invented the noodle that became the ubiquitous Italian pasta, the origins of the archetypical British dish of fish n’chips seems to stem from Sephardic Jewish and French Protestant immigrants to the UK. In the mid-18th century, fishing trawlers became large enough to catch significant numbers of North Sea bottom-feeding white fish and domestic railroads expanded so that much of the UK began to have cheap and regular access to this fresh bounty. Also at this time, the potato-cooking skills of French Hugenot immigrants and the fish-frying traditions of Southern European Jews came together in what was to be a lasting and wildly popular marriage.

The French fry had been invented years earlier when the poor had first ventured to cook this new world tuber - originally only thought good enough for animal feed – and these techniques have continued to be refined to this day. Jews immigrating to the UK and other areas of Northern Europe having been expelled from Portugal and Spain brought matza (matzo, matzoh, matsah,) with them, which they knew to be an excellent coating for fish when ground or crumbed. Combining these two techniques with the endemic British passion for beer and deep-frying, resulted in one of the most famous exports from the British Isles since limey sailors began spreading a horrifying variety of VDs in port cities the world over. 

Today’s fish n’chips (depending on where you go) still closely resemble the original ideas found in Portuguese fried fish dishes pescado frito, in which strips of fish are dunked in a light batter of water, matzo flour and salt, then rolled in crumbed matzo before deep-frying in a cauldron of hot oil. In fact, the Portuguese are sometimes credited with having introduced this technique to Japan where it developed into the extremely delicious tempura style. In the UK, beer was often added in place of water to the flour (typically plain flour nowadays, rather than matzo) and salt, with the resulting batter being richer, but somehow lighter, frothier and more golden colored.

The British habit of “chipping” potatoes into larger batons than the continental Europeans, and now the Americans, and only frying them once, appears to just be a local habit. Some have suggested that the UK picked up on an early potato-cooking technique and kept it while the more culinarily-advanced French and Belgians continued to experiment with thinner-cut potatoes and double-frying, so that they perfected the golden and crunchy frites of today. I prefer to think of the British technique to be based not on ignorance, but on textural appreciation. For why have a crispy deep-fried fish and pair it with something else crispy? Why not pair it with something softer and more unctious?

My Life with Fish n’Chips

Anyway, fish n’chips became incredibly popular in the UK and its colonies around the world, with the chip shop still a fixture on virtually every town’s high street in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. For much of my youth, growing up in provincial England, it was one of only two choices for cheap, take-away/out food – the other being the uniformly foul and greasy hole that was the Golden Lantern Chinese take-out, so fish n’chips played an important role in our Friday night social traditions. After choir practice at our local church, we’d often hit the chip shop for a “slap-up” dinner of cod & chips with mushy peas, and bread & scrape (sliced white bread with lard), all washed down with our weekly soda allowance – a can of Lilt (a pineapple and grapefruit flavored soda).

Mr. Chips, the snappily-titled chip shop in my Cheshire town was universally known as just “the chippy” and, correspondingly - demonstrating some terribly enlightened feelings towards the town’s tiny, but most obvious, ethnic population - the Golden Lantern, was referred to as “the Chinky”. Subsequently, this ordinary little town has gentrified virtually beyond recognition, with all manner of ethnic restaurants elbowing aside these two bastions of atherosclerosis. However, echoes of these former times can still be heard in local parlance. Sadly, the Golden Lantern is gone, replaced by Slow Boat and Treasure Village, which now, demonstrating how times have changed for the better, are referred to as “the Chinese”; Mughli, an Indian restaurant, is either ”the curry house” or “the Indian”, and Est! Est! Est! is “the Italian”.

Fish n’chip restaurants still play a significant role in British gastronomic and cultural life. As with many countries, the UK has recently undergone a revolution in its food traditions, returning to basics and local ingredients and striving for sustainability. This has led to a re-evaluation and revival of many traditional dishes, including the hugely devalued fish n’chips. With North Sea cod stocks (like cod almost everywhere) having crashed due to overfishing, some traditions have had to change, and now other white fish are used including hake, halibut and haddock in its place, but the typical methods of beer and matzo batter, quality malt vinegar, fine sea salt and first-class British potatoes cooked in beef tallow (beef lard) are emerging again, much to my delight.

We’re heading to London to visit my new nephew in a couple of weeks, and will be hitting up arguably the finest chip shop in the capital, Fryer’s Delight in Holborn, which you will be the first to hear about right here in these pages. To date though, the best fish n’chips I ever had was at a very dodgy-looking chippy in Fleetwood, Lancashire (NW England, about 1.5hrs north of Manchester). Overlooking the grey and miserable-looking Irish Sea, I ate perfectly fried, golden cod, soft and salty chips and deliciously thick marrowfat mushy peas. It was a glorious, all-English experience.

But don’t think that fish n’chips only comes with mushies – oh no, variations abound in dressings. While the traditional is the simple sea salt and malt vinegar with a side of tartar sauce and M.P’s, others include, parsley sauce, brown gravy, curry sauce, garlic sauce, piccalilli, mayonnaise, Henderson’s relish, Worcestershire sauce, pea wet or pea’s water (liquid strained from peas during the creation of mushy peas) which is often free, baked beans, cheese or cheese curds, coleslaw, ketchup, chilli sauce, thousand island dressing, salad cream, chip spice, brown sauce, and summer savory (turkey stuffing & gravy), to name but a few.

Ever striving for the traditional in our take on the dish, we went with a pale ale batter, beautiful Atlantic cod (yes, i know it’s unsustainable, but our fishmonger doesn’t sell haddock or hake) thick cut chips, homemade mushy peas, homemade tartar sauce and, perhaps excessively, homemade curry sauce – my wife being a huge fan of dipping sauces. In fact, all of them are fiendishly easy to make, but as with most simple dishes, the key is high quality ingredients. Old potatoes and a shitty piece of fish even when perfectly fried will still taste like a turd. Similarly, beautifully fresh potatoes and cod fried in rancid old oil will be a disaster. Make sure you buy everything as fresh as possible. Fresh potatoes have very few “eyes” and yield a nice sheen of liquid when peeled, and fresh cod or haddock (hake is fine also) will have wonderfully shiny skin and nice firm flesh. If it’s already flaky and soft do not buy it, instead sharply reprimand your fishmonger for having the temerity to sell such tat.

Fish n’Chips with Mushy Peas, + Tartar and Curry Sauces (serves 2-3)