The Taste of Britain. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
FLAVOUR: DELICATE, SWEET, MILD.
HISTORY:
The Bradenham Ham Company of Wiltshire produced hams according to a recipe dated 1781 (Simon, 1960). The recipe is thought to be named for the last Lord Bradenham. It emanated from Bradenham in Buckinghamshire. The secret is in the immersion in molasses and spices, resulting in a sweet-tasting meat. Recipes for treacle-cured hams appeared in domestic cookery books at this time, and the developing West India trade provided molasses a-plenty. The hams were hung and matured for a longer period than other, less exclusive products. In the novel A Rebours (1884), the decadent hero visits an English restaurant in Paris, passing at the entrance a counter displaying ‘hams the mellow brown of old violins’.
The curing method and the trademark of a flying horse were the exclusive property of the Bradenham Ham Co. which was awarded a Royal Warrant in 1888. In 1897 the Wiltshire Bacon Company took over Bradenham Ham but continued to produce at Chippenham in Wiltshire. When that company closed in its turn, production was moved to Yorkshire. Similar recipes are used by other curers; Brunham, made in Wiltshire, is one example.
TECHNIQUE:
The legs, cut from bacon pigs, must carry a specified level of fat otherwise they become dry; they are long-cut, giving a rounded shape. Curing begins in dry salt with saltpetre and sugar but, after an unspecified time, the hams are removed and placed in a marinade of molasses and spices, after which they are hung to mature. The process from fresh meat to fully matured ham takes 5-6 months.
REGION OF PRODUCTION:
SOUTH WEST ENGLAND, WILTSHIRE.
Brawn
DESCRIPTION:
SMALL PIECES OF BRINED PORK, USUALLY FROM THE HEAD AND SHOULDER, SET IN A JELLY. IN APPEARANCE, IT IS A TRANSLUCENT, PALE GOLD-BROWN WITH PIECES OF PALE MEAT AND SOMETIMES CHOPPED HERBS; THE MEAT IS BRINED AND FINELY SHREDDED FOR SOME VERSIONS, GIVING AN OPAQUE, PINK APPEARANCE; IN THE NORTH-EAST, BRAWN IS COLOURED A BRIGHT ORANGE-RED. BRAWN SHOULD BE HIGHLY FLAVOURED; SAGE AND BLACK PEPPER ARE FAVOURITE SEASONINGS.
HISTORY:
One element of the history of brawn is constant right down to the present day and this is not the composition of the dish itself but the habit of serving it with mustard. ‘Furst set forth the mustard and brawne of boore ye wild swyne,’ instructed the Boke of Nurture in 1460.
‘Good bread and good drinke,
a good fier in the hall,
brawne, pudding and souse,
and good mustard withall’
was Thomas Tusser’s (1573) prescription for a husbandman’s Christmas. Later recipes for brawn sauce made of mustard, sugar and vinegar abound (e.g. Dallas, 1877).
Brawn originally meant muscle or meat of any description; by the fifteenth century the word was particularly, although not exclusively, associated with the flesh of wild boar. The Tudor physician Thomas Cogan stated that the flesh of wild swine was better for you than any tame animal and that brawn, which is the flesh ‘of a boare long fedde in the stie,’ was difficult of digestion. He counselled that it should be eaten at the start of a meal - advice that seems to have been followed, even if unconsciously, unto the present day (O’Hara May, 1977). Because the word applied exclusively to flesh or muscle meat, it followed that brawn developed the restricted meaning of the boned flesh, fat and skin, as opposed to the whole joint, bone-in. The way such a floppy joint was best dealt with was that it would be collared. It would be rolled up tight, wrapped in cloth and tied round [collared] with tape or string before boiling. Collaring was normally done to sides of pig, rather than hams. In the sixteenth-century accounts of the Star Chamber brawn appears almost monotonously as collars or rounds. Martha Bradley (1756) has instructions on choosing brawn. Her definition of the word was meat that came from an uncastrated boar (not necessarily wild). The best was from a young animal: old boar was too tough and the rind too thick, meat from a sow too soft. Her namesake, Richard Bradley, writing 20 years earlier (1736), disagreed. His brawn was the collared flitches of ‘an old boar, for the older he is, the more horny will the brawn be’. He thought brawn rather insipid; horny was probably a good thing.
A collar was a convenient package that could be cooked and sliced. The method was also a way of preserving unwieldy and quick-spoiling food, in other words, pickling. Collared meats (and fish) were usually brined and spiced, boiled, pressed and sliced. Brawn came to mean almost exclusively pork cooked in this manner. If the meat was pressed and cooled in its liquor, it would indeed begin to look like the jellied brawn we have today.
Whereas at the outset brawn applied to most parts of the pig apart from the valuable hams, by the 1800s, in the southern part of England, it had come to mean a dish based on pigs’ heads, collared. This appears under the tide ‘Tonbridge Brawn’ in Eliza Acton (1845). As the head was the boniest (and least vendible) part of the animal, it was a natural candidate for collaring and repackaging, leaving the rest for bacon, ham or roasting joints. A dish that was also common in Georgian recipe books was ‘mock brawn’: a flank of pork rolled around morsels from calves’ feet and pig’s head, cooked, pressed and cooled. Gradually, as brawn was relegated to a dish of the poor and country people who killed their own pigs, the dish was simplified into a highly seasoned, moulded, meat jelly containing small pieces of pork
Pork cheese, once commonly termed head cheese, is a similar dish made from finely minced meat rather than chopped scraps. In some regions, especially the North, brawn-type dishes are made from beef.
Brawn is still widely made, and is a profitable by-product of pork butchery. It is a component of salad lunches and still eaten with mustard or strong condiments. Although it may be found in many parts of the country, it is most often sold in the South West, where a number of relics of a once important industry survive, such as Bath chaps, chitterlings and the like.
TECHNIQUE:
The meat for brawn, usually pigs’ heads, is cleaned thoroughly and brined for a few hours. It is boiled with seasonings, bones and feet until very well cooked. The mixture is strained, the meat picked off the bones and placed in moulds, the stock reduced and poured over, and the whole allowed to set. Where a colour is given to the brawn, suppliers would once have offered ‘Indian Red’ colouring agent.
REGION OF PRODUCTION:
SOUTH WEST ENGLAND.
Cornish Pasty
DESCRIPTION:
A BAKED PASTY WITH MANY DIFFERENT FILLINGS WHICH ARE INVARIABLY RAW WHEN THE PASTY IS MADE UP. THE SHAPE IS A POINTED OVAL, WITH A SEAM OF CRIMPED PASTRY RUNNING THE LENGTH OF THE PASTY ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF THE WAY IN FROM THE EDGE. INDIVIDUAL VERSIONS VARY IN THEIR FORMS; INDUSTRIALLY PRODUCED ONES ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE SEMI-CIRCULAR. A MEAN SIZE MIGHT BE 20CM LONG, 10CM WIDE, AND 4CM DEEP, WEIGHING 330G COLOUR: GOLDEN PASTRY (EGG-WASHED). FLAVOUR: BEEF AND POTATO PREDOMINATE.
HISTORY:
A bit of pastry is everything to a Cornish household. I can remember the sense of shock when I visited my up-country in-laws for the first time and neither they nor their five daughters had a rolling pin’ (Merrick, 1990).
Pasty is an old English word for a pie of venison or other meat baked without a dish (OED). Samuel Pepys consumed great numbers of them, as his diary relates. However, the use of the word declined in a large part of England and the only region where it survives is that stronghold of pastry, the South West, especially Cornwall. Here, the form settled into a fixed type: a pie that was food for the working man and his family. Spicer (1948), collecting regional recipes in the 1940s, remarked that pasties were originally baked on an iron plate set on the hearth, covered with an iron bowl, with