Recipes

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.

A Brit for all Americans: Alistair Cooke — The 100th anniversary of his birth was last Thursday and the Independent’s Sarah Chuchwell remembers the iconic Masterpiece Theatre host. (The Independent)

Delia Smith on pumpkin pie — It’s Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., and what’s Thanksgiving without a little pumpkin pie? But please, Delia, a store-bought pastry shell? Tsk, Tsk. I’ll let you off the hook since you’re British and the recipe’s supposed to be quick. (Telegraph)

Spend Christmas in London — Take advantage of the weak £ in the capital city this winter with these 25 tips. (Telegraph)

How to get British television worldwide — Jonathan over at Anglotopia has a two-part article on how to get British shows on your telly, even if you don’t have BBC America (which, of course, doesn’t offer every British show, but at least gives you a taste).

The 28th Great Christmas Pudding Race — If you’re in London on December 6, you can watch contestants run an obstacle course around Covent Garden Market while holding trays of Christmas pudding. Yeah, only in England. (The money raised goes to charity, though.)

In the mid 1990s, I worked with a British art director who, when she found out I was an Indian food addict, would pop her head into my office a couple times a week and ask, “Up for a curry today?” After the first few times she did this, I inquired about her sentence construction; she explained to me that in England, you don’t say, “Let’s go out for Indian food.” It’s “Let’s go out for a curry.” (There’s that indefinite article again.)

There was this Bangladeshi-owned place across the street where the two brothers who owned it wouldn’t bother taking our orders. Within ten minutes of sitting down, there’d be a vindaloo in front of my co-worker, a more mildly sauced plate of shrimp in front of me and we’d feed. Ah, to weigh 120 lbs. again ….

Yet another reason why I love Britain. Americans aren’t crazy about Indian food like the British, whose bonds with the Indian subcontinent are complicated and deep. Indian cuisine in America is still rather exotic fare, although here in Boston 1. It’s not terribly exotic, due to the large numbers of Indians living here and 2. It’s a cosmopolitan area, not just in the literal sense, but in its sensibilities. This said, never would any of my solidly middle-class neighbors here call the local Indian joint for takeout curry as a comparable British family would. No, the call would go to a Chinese restaurant if they were feeling adventuresome, and to Papa John’s on most other nights.

Thus why my brows perked up at this blog post on the Guardian’s website yesterday asking readers, “What makes a good curry?” after reporting that government finance ministers attempted to work out a bailout plan for the country over an Indian meal. American politicians would never try to solve its economic woes over a plate a curry like the British would. I’m trying to imagine what foodstuffs our politicians would import into Washingtonian conference rooms, and all I’m coming up with are the florid pink and orange boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and bad coffee.

What do you look for in a curry? Here’s one of my favorites: a coconut-based black-eyed pea curry I make all the time. It also happens to be economical: American politicians take note.

If you can still find it on the newsstand, you might want to pick up the September 2008 issue of the BBC’s GoodFood magazine (the UK edition), which runs about $8.99 here in the U.S. It’s marked “best of British” and throughout are recipes celebrating English fare. One reason why I bought this particular issue is for the Cornish pasties recipe on page 96. My husband loves them, so in the next few weeks I’ll test this recipe for him. The recipe in my old King Arthur baking book has never turned out well.

There’s also a risotto-making workshop in here. I’ll confess … I’m a total cheat when it comes to risotto: I use a pressure cooker. And don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise, but Italian grandmothers make their risottos in pressure cookers, too. I will not be bullied or swayed here.

The recipe I chose was the butternut squash and sage risotto on page 53. I followed the directions almost to the T, except for the pressure cooker bit, and substituted homemade chicken stock for the vegetable stock. Our au pair, who wasn’t too enthusiastic about eating squash, ended up having three servings. Oliver, of course, wouldn’t touch it … too yellow, plus those green bits on the top? Eww, the horror, the horror.