History

Vanity Fair has an excerpt of Anne de Courcy’s biography of Antony Armstrong-Jones, Snowdon, in its February 2009 issue:

Britain thrilled to the 1960 wedding of Queen Elizabeth’s glamorous younger sister, Princess Margaret, and debonair photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones (soon to become Earl of Snowdon), the first commoner in four centuries to marry a king’s daughter. But while it seemed the 29-year-old Margaret had finally recovered from her heartbreak over Captain Peter Townsend, many close to the newlyweds saw trouble ahead.”

Read more here.

Jonathan at Anglotopia.net has an embedded link of Queen’s 2008 Christmas message. If you’d like to see some candids of Prince Harry and some old video of wee Prince Charles, do check it out.  But for those of you who like things short and sweet, I offer a shorter version, above.

The BBC has a good overview of the history of the Queen’s Christmas message. Wow, £100,000 to produce … in the words of Jeff Spicoli, “Righteous bucks!”

Giving new meaning to the phrase “doing time,” a calendar depicting some of England’s most notorious prisons is a surprise holiday bestseller, according to the Guardian. Developed by a courier named Kevin Beresford, the calendar includes color pictures of Wormword Scrubs, Long Lartin, and my personal favorite as a Smiths’ fan, Strangeways, although now its proper name is HMP Manchester.

Beresford created another calendar a few years ago: a pictorial of England’s famous roundabouts. I think this guy’s crazily brilliant. I’d love to find either one of these calendars under my tree next week.

When I was in London a few weeks ago, I fell madly, rapturously in love with an orange and almond mincemeat being sampled at Neal’s Yard Dairy in the Borough Market. I had planned to run back there after lunch, but after hours wandering the market and my brain dulled by a heavy meal, I completely forgot my errand. No worries: I’m a professional recipe developer, so I thought it would be fun to recreate this most delicious food memory.

When I was a kid, I have to admit I was seriously revolted by mincemeat. My great aunt always made a mincemeat pie for Christmas dinner, and it looked and smelled disgusting. Plus, the word mincemeat itself turned my stomach as I imagined chewy, gristly bits of meat chunked up with squishy raisins and doused with booze, all baked up in a pie crust. Back in the old days (like in the 1500s, smartasses, not the 1970s) cooks did include bits of meat in mincemeat because liquor, vinegar, and fermenting fruits helped preserve it — the technique was a great way to stretch the food dollar/pound, so to speak. These days, the only thing meaty in mincemeat is suet, which is the fat from around the cow’s kidneys. In the UK, you can purchase vegetarian suet; here in the U.S. I’ve never found it, and I’m not sure I want to because I’m positive it’s filled with all sorts of nasty, unpronounceable chemicals.

So if you want to make mincemeat here in the colonies, you’ll need to have some suet at the ready.

You can find suet in the meat aisle of most grocery stores. Grocers usually keep it near the chicken livers and ham hocks; it is also a seasonal ingredient, meaning it’s easier to find in the winter months. Not only do cooks use suet for mincemeat, animal lovers use suet to make bird food cakes for songbirds. Normally I buy organic suet from my butcher, but he didn’t have any — so it was off to Stop & Shop:

(Vegetarians/Vegans may want to stop reading.) What recipes don’t tell you is suet has to be prepared before you use it. You can’t just chop it up and throw it into your dish. Once you get the plastic off, you’ll see that not only is suet fatty, but it contains blood, connective tissue, and other nasty little bits that I certainly don’t want to eat. Do you? No, I didn’t think so. What you have to do now is render the fat so these unpleasant bits can be removed. Here’s how I do it.

First I chop the suet up a bit so that it can fit through the shredder attachment on my KitchenAid stand mixer. You want to get the fat shredded as finely as possible so it melts quickly, and a shredder makes short work of this. (Tip: freeze your small pieces of suet for a few minutes so that they don’t gob up your attachments.)

Here’s the suet going through the shredder:

I had a little over 2 lbs of suet here and once shredded, it filled up a 5-qt. mixing bowl. I set a 7-qt. enamel cast iron pot over low heat, added 1/4 cup water to the bottom, then added the shredded fat:

I let this cook/render down for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. When you’re working with fat and fire, it’s never a good idea to leave the kitchen, so keep a close eye on it. Don’t be tempted to turn up the heat to make the fat melt faster — low and slow is the way to go. Eventually, the solid fat will render down completely and you’ll be left with clear liquid fat with bits of brown stuff in it. That brown stuff is the blood, connective tissue, and other grizzlies you don’t want to eat. Now it’s time to sieve it out. I line my conical fine-mesh sieve with cheesecloth and set it over a clean soup pot:

Then I ladle the fat into the sieve. Be careful — that fat is hot!

Et voila, lovely pure suet. Um, not quite. You’ll see that this clear liquid is starting to firm up. What I do is let it cool down a bit, then melt it over a low flame and re-sieve with clean cheesecloth to make sure every impurity is removed.

The purified suet gets poured into a container once cooled, labeled, then stored in the fridge. It looks like this when it’s done:

It has no smell at all, at least none I can discern with my sensitive schnozz. It also becomes quite hard when refrigerated, but when it’s added to mincemeat, it’ll melt into the base, giving it a rich flavor and mouthfeel – no meaty flavor at all. If you want to make mincemeat at home, don’t be tempted to try Crisco — it’ll just turn your recipe into a greasy mess.

OK, next up — orange and almond mincemeat. At least my fair approximation of what I tasted at Neal’s Yard Dairy last week.

We’re hearing a lot about Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food (not yet available in the U.S.), but did you know that one of England’s most beloved of food writers worked in the actual Ministry during WWII? Her name is Marguerite Patten and she’s something of a national treasure in England. I own several of her cookbooks (she’s written 170!), including a particular favorite, The Basic Basics Jams, Preserves and Chutneys. I want to know how to roast a joint of beef, turn out the best Yorkshire puddings, or simply make a classic English meal, Patten’s who I turn to.

I wasn’t sure if Patten was still alive, but an interview with her appeared in today’s Telegraph. She’s 93 and still cooking, as well as making television appearances. I love that she loves crabapple jelly with her game (crabapple jelly is my favorite confiture to make in the fall) and that her favorite gadget is an ice cream maker … it’s mine too.

I arrived around 7:30 a.m. at Heathrow with very little sleep, thanks to the woman behind me who coughed the entire flight and when she wasn’t coughing, kicked my seat. But I grit my teeth and bore it, for I knew when the plane landed, I’d be in Anglophile Heaven a/k/a London.

We had a funny, loquacious driver who whisked us to our hotel, the InterContinental Park Lane, in no time flat, even though many of the streets in central London were closed off to traffic. That’s because today was the Queen’s Speech at the opening of Parliament; she traditionally travels by carriage, attended by her horse guards, which we got a quick glimpse of before they headed off to Buckingham Palace (and, by the way, I can see from my hotel room window!) on their way to the houses of Parliament.

So after a casual breakfast where we met our other travel companions, we took a short siesta, then headed off for a light lunch and spa treatment. I got a massage, which I sorely needed — my right shoulder is in knots. I figured after this, I’d fall on face with exhaustion, but it actually revived me, and I headed off for a long walk down Piccadilly, where I did some shopping at Fortnum & Mason and Waterstones, before doing some holiday window gazing in the Burlington Arcade, and more shopping on Regent Street. Now I’m back in my hotel room, getting ready for dinner (Theo Randall! Very excited!!) and then an early bedtime.

Ok, some general comments:

* I’m pretty sure I saw Judy Dench walking outside our hotel this afternoon. (ETA: confirmed by hotel manager that she, along with Nigella Lawson, were here today for some charity event.) And one of our travel companions told us Ralph Fiennes had drinks at the bar downstairs last time she was here. I’m a married woman and all, but boy did that bit of gossip/news set my pulse on fire.

* Twice today I was mistaken for a Brit, once by a British Red Cross volunteer, who looked really surprised when I said, “I’d love to sign your petition but I’m an American” and added, “But I’m flattered you took me for a native.” She laughed and said, “You *do* look like a native.” (I left my fanny pack and baseball cap at home. Shucks.) The other was a Brit asking me how to find some shop around Saville Row. He apologized for bothering me when I told him I was a tourist.

*Oh yes, the apologies. It’s so hard getting used to saying “sorry” for “excuse me.”

*People speak so quietly here — and it’s a blessed relief. The stores are quiet, even when they’re packed. I don’t even mind people who walk while talking on their mobiles because you can’t hear them. The only thing is, I’m constantly saying, “Sorry?” to hotel staff and people; I tend to stand farther away as I expect to have my ears blasted off.

Dinner at Theo Randall was lovely. I can’t go into too much detail — need to save it for work — but afterwards he came out to say hello afterwards. I had smoked eel for a starter, then a pasta with shaved white truffles for my main. My favorite dishes were in dessert (of course) — a pannacotta rich with vanilla, and my most favorite, a refreshing clementine sorbet. I could have eaten a couple bowls of it alone.

Tomorrow I’ll take some pics. We’re supposed to get a bit of snow on Thursday, which should be interesting.

Thanks to an article in this weekend’s Los Angeles Times, I just learned that the U.S. Embassy is leaving its digs in London’s posh Grosvenor Square (one of my favorite Grateful Dead lines: “As I was walking around Grosvenor Square/not a chill to the winter but a nip to the air”) for a more secure compound to be built on the other side of the Thames.

The wrong side, according to some.

The article provides an interesting look at the rivalry between the tony north and the down-and-out south, a rivalry I was only slightly aware of. Due to my bizarre interest in epidemiology as a kid, I knew the southern side of the river was where plague victims were carted off to be buried, but I didn’t know that a cultural and social divide exists today. It sort of reminds me of that friendly rivalry between residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and now Brooklyn, like south London, is this hipster cool place to live.

As the article points out, the view from the new American embassy will be hard to beat — but leaving all those years of history at Grosvenor Square is sad.

I read about Sarah Lyall’s The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British on Bethanne Patrick’s Book Maven blog a few weeks ago, and immediately knew I had to read this book. The night I purchased it, I brought it to bed to read. Within a few minutes, I was laughing so hard my son begged to know what was so funny. I couldn’t explain it to him, as it involved a joke about hemorrhoids and the British penchant for euphemism.

Some background on Lyall: she’s a reporter for The New York Times who was sent to London in the 90s to report on the British. (Nice job, eh?) While there, she met then married an Englishman, so she has something of a unique perspective on British/American relations.

Lyall’s a fine writer with a good eye for detail; it’s clear she’s done her reporting for this book (hanging out at Parliament, running around London with a man who wears gold lamé underpants) and she does a terrific job weaving threads of history, literature, and politics into her stories. Another thing I liked about the Anglo Files is that Lyall doesn’t fall into that trap of disparaging her American roots or making fun of those quaint British folks in their queues — likewise, she doesn’t pit one culture against the other culture. This is much a book about the British view of the world as it is what it means to be an American standing in the midst of that world.

There were chapters in this book that made it worth the price of admission, such as one about Brits and their attitudes toward sex, and another at the end of the book, an analysis of the British stiff upper lip and if it’s going soft (to wit: the mass outpouring of emotion after Princess Diana’s death). I also loved the chapter about the reform of the House of Lords. If you’re fascinated with the British class system and how it works, then there’s a lot in this book that’ll scratch your itch. There’s even a discussion of why Brits love to use the C word.

Other chapters I skimmed or skipped altogether, such as the one about cricket. If cricket is boring to watch, which is Lyall’s initial claim, it’s even more boring to read about. The book is loaded with footnotes, too. I’ve noticed some reviewers complain they’re too distracting, but I thought they added a lighthearted touch.

The Anglo Files is a book I highly recommend to other Anglophiles.

My site stats show me that I’m getting lots and lots of visitors to my site from the UK. Too funny! So this post is a PSA for Boston tourism.

When our family goes into Boston for the day (we live about 25 miles northwest of the city), we inevitably run into a lot of British tourists. It seems to be a popular destination for Britons, especially during the summer months. In yesterday’s Boston Globe, there was a story about the living history performers who lead tours along the city’s Freedom Trail. It sounds like fun, something I’d be tempted to do even though I’ve walked that trail dozens of times. If you’ve never walked the 2.5-mile trail, I urge you to do so. There’s just so much history to see — plus, it gets you through some cool neighborhoods like Charlestown and the North End (cannoli!). Just don’t do it on a hot August afternoon. The trail can be brutal when it’s over 90 degrees.

I like how this one trail guide teases the British tourists. It reminds me of the time, years ago, I took a tour of Hampton Court in July and the living history guide there had great fun with me, going so far to chide me when I refused to bow to an imaginary king and walk backwards out of the throne room.

“You know you could have been hanged for that?” he asked.

“Well today of all days I’m certainly not bowing and scraping to your king,” I scoffed. He thought about it for a minute then burst out laughing.

It was July 4th.